The Village that Accidentally Slayed Moloch with Victor Rortvedt

Transcript

foreign [Music] podcast if you're just joining us we're building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers who are focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and is published every Tuesday and Thursday if you want to learn more visit our website at greenpill.network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local greenpill.network chapter my guest today is Victor Victor is an ethereum and web3 dap developer and former attorney he works with metacartel Ventures which is a crypto native Community investment firm supporting early stage

decentralized Ventures and has helped launch Hydra Ventures which is the first fund backing investment Dallas operating as a dow itself hydro adventures mission is to prove proliferate Community First investing across web 3. that's Victor's bio but we're actually not talking about any of that stuff today we are talking about a story that Victor told at metacamp this year are entitled The Village that actually accidentally slayed the moloch so if you've been a listener of this podcast for a few episodes you know that molok is the god of coordination failure why can't humans why can't why can't humans coordinate why can't they solve coordination failures well the answer is well look in in web 3 lore and in this episode we talk about how ritual technology can be

used to slay molok so basically how do we build more cooperation across social distance how do we build more pro-social cultures well the answer is ritual technology according to this story that Victor told on the beach in Costa Rica when I was with him and I think that uh really inspired a bunch of web 3 builders that were down there with him and after that uh after that story I asked him would you come on the podcast and would you tell it to the Greenfield audience because I think that there's there's something neat about ritual technology and the way these well you'll have to listen to the story but I think you're going to enjoy it Valley Dao is an open Global Collective working to finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology Technologies to protect the future of our planet

research and progress into synthetic biology is critically constrained by the world of nation-state regulations and bureaucracy from middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this Valley Dow does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk World of Tomorrow a reality today so join Valley Dao right now and save the planet at valleydow.bio what's up Victor how you doing hey man good how are you things are good for the most part um so when we were at metacamp this year

you told this really amazing story entitled the tribe that slayed Molech and I'm wondering if you could tell it to the green pill listeners right now yeah sure thanks for the opportunity um this is a story that I found from something outside of crypto reading and found it really compelling and it kind of gave me some thoughts about communities and what keeps them together and how coordination Works um and so what I've kind of like subtitled this this story is uh the village that accidentally played Malik um and it's actually something from the mid 19th century in a sepik region of New Guinea which is like a mountainous Highlander region and I came across this story in a book called the weirdest

people in the world by Joseph Heinrich excellent book by the way uh but it really uh triggered a lot of things about um thinking about how communities work and how sometimes we are not aware of the things that actually hold us together there are ways we can kind of stumble into better forms of you know community and flying Malik um but I guess maybe could I today ask you for uh the tldr on what Malik is just so we set this up I'm sure your listeners are probably already familiar but that way I can I can point back to you on who we're fighting Yeah so basically the idea of Malik comes from a blog post by slate star codex in I believe 2014 2015 uh basically talking about coordination failure so basically

if you've got a group of humans who want to coordinate towards an outcome and they uh suffer from they aren't able to achieve that outcome then it's a coordination failure and uh specifically interesting type of coordination failure is multi-polar traps where each agent has their own selfish incentive to pursue one outcome but as a group they would all prefer another outcome so for example nuclear proliferation each city-state nation state has a rational incentive to secure their own security with nuclear weapons but if the end result is that everyone has nuclear weapons in his arm to the teeth in the in the world is really close to being blown up in many places then that is is a a coordination failure in the frame of

slate star codex meditations on the look um a more approachable example would be every agent having agent I'm using agent as like humans but maybe AIS one day uh has a rational economic need to consume carbon in order to achieve their own economic needs to feed their family to advance their career I've just flew to ECC over the summer in order to get to Paris and doing that uh we're all putting carbon into the atmosphere um and no rational economic actor would want to live on a planet that is going to be heated up and venusified so that's an example of a coordination failure so once you sort of see multi-polar traps you start to see them everywhere and um coordination failure is the whole idea

behind the Slate star codex our blog post is is basically that uh like instead of thinking about this is in this extremely rationalist Game Theory way where you have to teach people about Game Theory and multiplayer traps let's just call it a demon like let's just make it like a Marvel Avengers style like bad guy out of it like molok is like Thanos like molec wants to uh cause humans to not coordinate because it's it's it's uh Malik is like a demon god of coordination failure so it's basically taking the frame of coordination failure and bringing it from like this rationalist economic Game Theory frame and giving it more of like a a Marvel Avengers type frame something that anyone or anyone who understands like

the story of like the God and the devil can can understand the frame of coordination failure how did I do any pushback on that or anything to add no it's ideal I mean I think that's that's a great framing too to think about it as kind of a malevolent presence I think of it almost as like a inverse chimney Cricket right that Whispers in everybody's ear defect before they screw you right it's this notion of looking out for yourself over the the needs of the community um yeah so it's a Perpetual problem uh throughout all of human society and one of the key aspects of it that's relevant for our story is that Malik's power grows with the scale of the community with the size of the group so it's you know if you have a small team like a family or a startup with just a few

members in it uh it's a lot easier to hold each other accountable to behave uh you know in the interest of the collective because everybody's looking out for each other your interests are aligned but as you grow bigger and bigger to bigger companies and you know civilizations and Nations it's much harder to to agree to cooperate there's a lot more anonymity that people can sort of like dip out and and defect essentially uh for their own personal benefit and so what we have in this story is a village called ilihita now in this region of of New Guinea you have a lot of these hunter-gatherer tribes and they're organized by a couple of similar principles they're basically patrilineal Clans which are basically one sort of uh single uh male dominated line and there'll be maybe 40 to 100 people

that'll be in one of these Clans and these Clans tend to sort of unite to form Villages so there's usually several of these plans that create these Villages that have all of the upside of the shared security and shared uh you know hunting and and food security and basically like communal communal Vibes um and then you also have this notion of uh ritual markets where people are you know doing things like having a crop infertility rituals they're doing uh military campaign uh blessings and rituals and these things are kind of how the society is organized so you have these sin uh centripetal forces that are kind of holding the community together but those only go so far and typically what uh British anthropologists found in the 19th century when they first started

visiting this region and kind of logging what these Villages looked like and how they were you know kind of designed is that there was kind of a stable population cap around 300 people and you could go higher than this but typically that would tend to fracture shortly thereafter and people would Fork off and leave and so there was this kind of natural natural the wrong word there but basically like a a persistent population cap it's it's somewhat related to what we think of with the dunbar's number of the thighs of undergatherer communities and the number of people you kind of keep uh good reputational tabs on and and have them know you and so they observed this in the mid uh uh 19th century another wave of kind of anthropological interest came back to

the same region at the beginning of the 20th century and they found that there was one Village that looked quite different that all the other Villages basically had the same basic uh setup and had the 300 person population ceiling more or less but one Village had scaled to about 2500 members so it wasn't a small increase it was about a 10x increase on the the maximum population size and according to to the the Anthropologist that saw it then this had actually been stable for a couple of decades um they didn't find out what had happened or why it had happened at the time but a uh it's probably just by the name of Donald Tucson in the 60s having seen these reports said you know what I want to find out what happened here like what was the the secret to this uh one

Community illegita being able to scale well beyond this 300 person population and so he started talking to the elders there and asking them like you know was there some great leader that proposed some new change and none of them could really say who had you know orchestrated this but they did tell a story of how it happened that just wasn't actually designed to happen but it happened in a way uh that was almost accidental and so the story of this kind of it's important to understand again the the opposite of the centripetal forces right or the centrifugal forces that are forcing these Clans apart and causing them to to not be able to go above 300 members and you just want to think about these things are kind of alliances of uh

Mutual benefit and that a certain uh level of stress will cause them to leave there's essentially like seams running through each one of these Villages along the patrilineal Clans and that with enough force on them they will rip apart and this clan will go off and start their own village or or bond with another Village somewhere and essentially say you know Fork you on leaving and so the things that cause those uh sort of tear apart moments are are some of the things that we're quite familiar with so a lot of um beefs that like stemmed from adultery that stemmed from theft that stem from disrespect these are all things that were very uh familiar with in modern society but a fourth category that actually was was probably the main reason for a lot of

these Clans leaving seems a little bit integrated to us it was sorcery allegations and so it's important to understand how this society and this culture understood what that was and how it created this massive kind of molec uh effect on these communities that kept them from being able to grow and coordinate Beyond a certain size and so sorcery allegations are based on the notion that there are no accidental deaths if you live in this region and you have people that are in the prime of their life either you know they're they're having kids and they're doing great crop cultivation uh on the female side or or their great hunters or great warriors uh on the male side if one of these people died eyes the society essentially has a paranoid

style of uh detecting who you know what's going on here and their first question is the same one that Lennon asked and the dude as well asked which is who benefits from this person's death and if it was somebody that was in the prime of their life that was very valuable to the community somebody else was essentially the person behind them somebody was probably jealous of that and so these immediately whenever somebody would die from things like a snake bite where they fell off a cliff where they ate something that just wasn't right these are things that we in our sort of you know cosmology of the world are completely comfortable with understanding as accidental deaths and that's you know something that we all understand is either up to the individual to protect themselves from you know stumbling into one of these

untimely deaths or it's it's just simple bad luck sometimes people get struck by light and that's that right not so amongst this epic it's always something where somebody else benefits and so they had an incentive to essentially put a hex on this person to curse them to get the snake to to you know bite them or follow the cliff or whatever it is so these sorcery allegations were massive massive uh Rift generating events that would cause everybody to go into this like toxic mentality of Suspicion and accusations and a sense that you either need to take retributive violence against the clan that you suspect was the one that actually you know caused the hex and caused your family member to die or you guys leave and so sorcery allegations are an important thing to

understand about how these societies function and part of what kept that 300 person population cap on these on these Villages so now here we go we got 2500 people we've got doll chosen in the 1960s who still sees now another half century later that they're at about the same level so still 10x over everybody else and the rest of the communities were all uh about the same and I should also add that they didn't examine like was there some sort of resource benefit was there like some amazing crop that was there or natural defense or um something that would actually take explain the the greater population size and there was there was no special access to you know a crop or hunting grounds or protection from other tribes or whatever so they essentially ruled

all those out and they found that it was essentially something they were doing culturally so Donald choosing gets in there starts asking these Elders what happened and then the story emerges that at the end of the 19th century after they had seen that ilikita was one of these Villages that had about 300 people in the mid 19th century but by the end of the uh 19th century this uh aggressive tribe uh or group called the Avalon maybe a couple hundred miles away from where ilyita was started essentially this like campaign of Ruthless aggression and they started conquering and taking over other Villages nearby and so they were you know creating a lot of Destruction and people were getting scared of them they were getting a bad reputation and uh the refugees from these Villages that

survived Abalone uh salts you know were starting to trickle out and away from the Abalone and they were making their way to illah and so it was kind of this like slow burning fire that was coming towards Eliza but they knew they had a little bit of time before it would get there based on the distance and the number of villages in between and so the ilahita elders were saying okay we need to know our enemy we need to understand what are these guys doing that's causing them to be much more aggressive and militarily successful and for them it was a matter of of what rituals are they performing that are so successful because again in the society rituals were very deeply intertwined with um the way that military campaigns function and another thing I should add too is that the way that rituals were

essentially owned you could think of them almost like IP or think of them almost like productivity apps that people would use and there was a more of a fluid Market in these things so you know there would often be you could go over and see the next Village has got a great crop Harvest and you think oh well what technology what IP were they using to get that great crop Harvest let's copy that and so then that Village would update their crop uh you know uh ritual dance or whatever it was that that led to what they thought was the the positive outcome and so there's this kind of fluid market for rituals and it's very much like fluid but they are essentially owned by a patrilineal clan so as Patrick would make a claim to say we

have the best access to uh the supply of good ritual outcomes basically we can talk to the gods that control crop fertility better than anybody else and so you let us do that and we'll be in charge of it and then we'll get good crop parts right so this also created a huge uh cleavage Point Within These Villages because if there was some sort of beef between a clan that owned the crop ritual fertility or crop ritual you know responsibility and the other clans the uh one that owned the crop ritual could say you know Fork you were leaving and they could take their IP with them and so this was a huge you know strain on the The Villages and it also put a lot more weight on the importance of it

and they kind of also could blame people if the crops failed one year you'd go to that uh family and say what's wrong with you guys you're terrible at your job uh or crops fail right so you have these like constant uh Clan based cleavages that are happening because of who owns the the ritual responsibilities so now we learn more about the Avalon how are they doing things and the ilihita elders essentially say we are going to Fight Fire with Fire we are going to essentially try to adopt whatever they're doing so that we don't you know get walled up by this in the same way that these other Villages are so they're asking all of these refugees that are coming in over a period of months and years even like what are they doing tell us about what you've seen some of them were held prisoners some of them you

know surveilled it some of them were in these Villages for a while and so they were getting essentially like a second candid cow from the Avalon of what they were doing uh and it's essentially a game of telephone right so you've got people passing along and perhaps misinterpreting things perhaps guessing at things and it gets to the illah elders and they essentially make a couple of uh or three pretty serious like copy uh paste errors and what the Avalon were doing they were trying to essentially just make a perfect copy so that they'd be able to Fight Fire with Fire uh but what they ended up doing was making three really like fortunate accident mistakes in the copying pasta of the Abalone ritual technology and these things ended up having a really

significant effect on the coordination power within uh within the LH all right so let me go through the first one was essentially they got the org chart uh design raw so the Avalon did things differently from some of the other regions in the septic area including galahita as far as like the responsibility uh orc charts for these rituals and what they would do was say oh we're going to actually take somebody from you know a couple of second cousins from this generation and then a grand niece over here and these people are going to be the ones that are going to be responsible for you know the crop ritual let's say and it got mistranslated into essentially saying we're ticking people from all the Clans

and putting them in charge of crop rituals so essentially what you're doing is you're taking what in the Avalon was like siled family UH responsibilities for rituals and it was all over it was crisscrossing all through it and essentially expanding it to all of the different communities that are inside and all the Clans that are inside this Village and crisscrossing across so you're stitching together then responsibility across let's say all middle-aged you know like uh women that are you know the second born or something like that in their family and they're the ones responsible for the crap ritual and so all of a sudden now you've got people meeting in cohorts inside of the um of the village that are not just uh staying within their patrilineal Clans they are starting to

form bonds they're starting to trust each other across patrilineal Clans and this effect starts to you know change the way that the town and the village kind of like thinks of itself and who's responsible another kind of related uh copy paste error the second one that they made that's incredibly effective on their coordination power is this notion of uh essentially abstracting the gods up a layer so in the sepic region in the ilihiza beforehand they had this notion that the the gods were out there there were a bunch of them that all related to crops and so it was a petrolino clan had the best accident that had the route to it the Avalon actually had a God that was that was related to one

of their patrilineal glands so they essentially said like this God is let's say the Rockefeller God and it's from the Rockefeller family and only Rockefellers are able to access this God and Rockefeller is actually the the one true God above all gods when it comes to things like military campaign so if you want a successful military campaign you must go to Rockefeller the God and the rockefeller's family is the one that has that Mainline access to it doesn't have any Rockefellers in their community so they hear about the Rockefeller God and they just think the Rockefeller is the God above all gods and and so that is something that now you have abstracted up a layer of responsibility for how this Village fares to something that is like across

all the families something that everybody can access so they have bigger Gods now the gods are Village level Gods instead of being basically uh forkable by the patrilineal clan that had responsibility for them and so it reduces the upside to forking and leaping because you're not taking something valuable with you um that you can then go and sell on the open market of rituals and so it kind of creates cohesion on that front but the the more important effect that it had was that it created a better scapegoat for sorcery allegations so now all of a sudden instead of the um allegations fly whenever there's an untimely death of somebody that's you know in the prime of their life where the first question and the only relative question is who

benefits it's a paranoid race to excuse each other and figure out like who you know did the dastardly sorcery and or witchcraft to kill this person in their Prime they will say oh shame that Tony got gored to death by a boar the other day I guess we should have done a better job on the uh hunting safety ritual that was going to protect our Hunters when they were out we need to work together as a as a village on that because the hunting safety God was was displeased the way that we performed that ritual and so allowed Tony to get gored by that or or cause Tony ignored by that or um so we need to work harder at that all together so you've essentially

abstracted a scapegoat that's responsible for bad things happening away from the sort of human level where it's a sorcerer it's witchcraft it's dastardly uh Intrigue and all the attendant negative effects on community that that has and it goes up a level and it's somebody that can't be actually appeased or killed it is a permanent uh scapegoat above and beyond what humans are able to to address and so the only response is we just need to appease this uh this you know Village level God better in the future and so this is a massive massive uh upgrade in their sort of the reduction in the centrifugal force of sorcery allegations and so you don't have these like races to figure out who benefits

and who must have done it because you all know who done it it's the the god that's responsible for these things and the response is not to try to go after that God because you can't because you're people it's to figure out how best to appease that guy going forward and again because the org charts have been all mixed up and everybody across the village is responsible for those rituals the blame doesn't fall on one clan or one person it falls across that tier and so you might be really pissed off at all of the second born women or whoever was that is responsible for that particular ritual but it's not the kind of thing that would pull a village apart at the patrilineal theme lines that were so so prevalent before and so you have this like really powerful scapegoat mechanism so there's

this this philosopher Renee Gerard who talks a lot about how uh societies build up all of this aggression intention over time and they need stress relief for it they need a scapegoat to direct that negative energy to and if they don't have one they tear each other apart they've gone you know going to Civil War um essentially the forking that you've seen in these in these communities leaving is one way that can happen or oftentimes you look at like the Salem Witch Trials you focus it all on a human sorcerer or which in this case and say that's the reason that our crops are failing that's the reason that this bad thing happened and so we're going to direct all of this violent energy at an actual human being and take their life um in order to sort of resolve this this community uh tension and aggression and

so here you have a way of fulfilling the scapegoat mechanism that's the thing you can't just ignore it you can't say we're not going to have a scapegoat but you're doing it in a way that doesn't actually cause the level of human violence and uh and destruction that that traditional scapegoating of actual people uh would would cause so that's the second of the of the three copy paste errors that the ilihita elders made when they were trying to copy the Avalon uh ritual Tech the third thing they did was that they um were thinking about when they've heard about what the Avalon's right of manhood uh system was so this is essentially Rites of Passage from young boys into becoming essentially like decision

making Executives within the tribe so the people that can actually uh make decisions about whether to go to war uh when to go on Hunting parties who to go to war against how to respond to X and Y and Z external threats these are the people that make those decisions and there was a process in in the ilahita where they had kind of a two-stage process that involved you know one particular uh part of you know this and then another um and then what they heard was that the Avalon had a four stage uh right of of Passage to manhood and so they actually really liked their original uh rights of Passage here so what they ended up doing was append only they added all four of the phases that the Avalon were using to

the two phases that they were using and because these Rites of Passage were supposed to happen at different time like difference you know years or Seasons it would it would stretch out the amount of time it would take to actually graduate and make it to you know being a decision-making Elder so because they did this uh append only of the Rites of Passage for for young men to become decision makers in the village what you now have is instead of 16 year olds roughly being decision makers in the tribe and the village you now have 22 year olds the ones that are making those decisions and you could think about like the level of uh stupidness the level of aggression testosterone-driven decision making that 16 year olds you know would use to

decide how do we respond to some sort of threat it's probably not uh that wise in general whereas if you push that back you're dampening the stupid Agro energy that young teen boys have into something that's a little bit more um you know uh thoughtful and has seen more of the world and so these are the people that are the decision maker so by doing this append only uh system they essentially are reducing bad decision making within their tribe as it comes to essentially Foreign Affairs when it comes to attacking others responding to any kind of threat with violence first uh and doing really dumb things that end up creating more of a cycle of violence and putting a threat on the commute so uh it's also important to think about

too like the the thing about the org chart is really important for the the men in the uh Village as well because when you now have before the the copy paste errors you had essentially every petrolino Clan ran their own writes a passage for their boys so it would be essentially like you know within a clan there'd be three or four people that would reach a certain level and they would go out and the elders uh or the their uncles or whatever would take them into the woods one night and have them go through a crazy like right of Terror where essentially like imagine Blair Witch Project crazy spooky sounds and people running at you in the night and like throwing flaming things at you and scaring the absolute out of you uh but going through that together is an incredibly

strong bonding experience it's very much the same mechanism that you know we think of when we think of the Band of Brothers phenomenon for Warfare right like when you were in a foxhole with somebody and your lives are at risk or at least you feel that your life is a risk you connect to the people that are there at an incredibly strong level and so this was happening and these these Bonds were being formed but before the copy paste errors try to copy the Avalon this was just happening within so you were getting really close to your second cousin but you warped getting closer to anybody else in the village that you weren't directly related to because the org chart now said the rights of Passage are happening across the tribe all of a sudden you know people that don't know each other as well that didn't grow up

in the same Metrolina Clan are being put together through these things and they're forming bonds that are incredibly valuable because then that means if there is an actual threat they have an incredible uh willingness to help each other whereas if you knew that you know this other side of the village was being attacked and you were being asked to come defend it you could think to yourself well those guys are kind of jerks I didn't like the way that they dissed me on whatever you know like ball game we were playing the other day I'll leave them burn and you know we'll affect our own home there right whereas if you have this Band of Brothers mentality you don't even think you go and you protect them and that creates overall security for the entire Village because outside attackers cannot then pick people off they don't they know

then that there's going to be essentially a communal response and all of their military might is going to be marshaled you know to protect each other and so that that aspect of the right of passage for the boys uh was incredibly valued people in the org chart uh mix up and then you have the aspect of their dampened aggression by the fact they don't even reach decision making Authority each other a fair bit older um this is a huge huge impact on the problems that were caused by essentially uh you know overly aggressive uh testosterone fueled young people that don't give a about their neighbors right like that was the the problem that caused all kinds of other uh cleavages from society those things are

drastically damping but so to recap we have these three copy based errors this is not what the Avalon was doing they got it wrong on these Trends they were playing telephone and they misunderstood what was happening they mixed up the org chart for responsibilities for rituals and made everybody in the village essentially at a certain uh characteristic responsible so that knits people together across patrilineal line much tighter than it ever happened before then you have the gods being abstracted up a layer to this level that is beyond any kind of human scapegoating this reduces the allegations of sorcery that we're tearing the communities apart and basically again these are about reducing strains instead of creating new you know like affirmative technologies

that bind people together and then the third thing is that they appended only the rights passage that made that process a lot longer such that the decision makers were older and presumably slightly wiser than they were before um and so this is all accidental this was not some genius you know like Central planner in the ilahita that says oh I understand how coordination power works I understand Malik I understand mechanism design I'm going to put this all into place it was literally a happy accident that was designed to respond to an existential threat and so I think there's a lot of really exciting uh Notions about this that are they're somewhat um optimistic for for crypto because of the fact that we have all of these kind of experiments of communities happening all the time and people are trying to copy things from each other

and sometimes they get it exactly right and you can just you know look at the discourse Forum or whatever and sometimes people get it wrong and sometimes people innovate and when they we see each other's failures but we're doing something pretty similar in the sense of these are essentially like coordination rituals and how do they work and what can we learn from others about how they work I times all ticks is one person to copy it incorrectly and potentially upgrade the the way that the coordination works there um to be able to scale things to the point where trust layers and the bond layers and the centripetal forces holding communities together are stronger than they were before and so you slay Malik by doing this you are able to exist in harmony with with other diverse

folks in a way that really hadn't been done uh before and and it really is kind of a I think a North star for thinking about how do we keep building these communities towards something that actually holds us together and allows more and more people to function cooperatively without this sort of like uh forking you know effect of Malik that pulls people away and says it's better for me to defect um so I love this story of ilikita I'm very pleased to have an opportunity to tell it here on Greenfield but yeah what's your reaction what do you how do you react to that story Kevin you want to talk about it yeah well the first thing it just kind of brings up memories of being on a beach in Costa Rica with you and there's the worm glow of the

sunshine and and the beach and everything but um I think there's also sort of like the worm glow of of this this nice sort of neat can like story about human evolution and ritual technology and and forking and merging but in in a much more like meat space Direction which I just think is is really fun and and and kind of profound um on a couple different on a couple different levels but um you know I guess what it brings up for me is what if you know what if the copy and paste errors are maladaptive instead of instead of actually positively adaptive you know I guess I I know enough about the evolution of DNA to know that Evolutions kind of happen through these

random mutations but there's this natural selection effect that causes most mutations are probably like you know cancerous or negative or or not positively adapted it's Evolution that upregulates the mutations that are actually adaptive so you know if we're just gonna have copy and paste errors in these mutations how can we select the more pro-social ones pro-environmental ones Pro coordination ones that are actually going to be advantaged instead of the cancerous ones yeah no that's a great point of course you don't want to sort of be sacrificing all of these communities to just random chance and asking them to just throw out random you know mutations on their on their policies and things like that to see one that might work uh because that's obviously like detrimental to those communities many of which will

fail uh but I think one of the key things about about this is the notion of what are what are rituals doing right like so we in our modern in our modern sort of ability scientifically minded we think of rituals as like this clean integrated goofy thing that is obviously not working it's obvious that if you guys do a a toroless version of a dance around a fire to promote crop fertility or crop uh growth that adding Twirls it's not having any effect on how well those crops grow right like if you decide you know you import this new version of the ritual and here we do these extra Twirls in it we know that's not what's happening but that's a little bit um misleading because rituals are not actually about what they say they're

about they're not actually directly affecting the things and we know that and probably the people back then knew that in some sense as well too but they understood that something else was happening and that was the pro-social bonds right with the rights of Terror that the the young boys were going on like that's what's actually happening it's not because they were you know the way that somebody was spooking them the woods was so good it's it's in some ways like I remember seeing Blair Witch Project and being scared uh out of my you know wits for it but I was actually very tightly uh bonded to the other people that I saw that movie with great obviously a very uh lightweight version of this um but also the the notion of dancing together being together in the same physical space and doing a similar dance so there

has been some research on this from um from a uh brain neuropathy perspective it shows that we had these things called mirror neurons that when we see people doing things and we're doing the same things it starts to like break down the separation that we have between the egos of the individuals and you start to you know get into a communal spirit and so this is actually like why those rituals around fires and dances that are coordinated that tend to really have a massive effect on making people feel like they're part of a larger community and so I guess like the way to answer your question is to say that we can be evolving these these organizations for Pro uh ritual uh ends right like that we want to do more things together knowing

what we know about how rituals work and so this is really I think benefiting IRL events it's benefiting our suggesting that we should do more IRL events but also then try to invent ways that we can do things on the internet that aren't just like having productive meetings but like having rituals together because these are the things that actually do create Community bonds that like persist Beyond because I think one of the key things I've you know learned or observed in the last sort of cycle from the bear of the 2018-2019 through the the bull 2020 2021 and then back now is that nobody's actually sticking around or doing things for any period of time based on what homo economic and carrots and sticks that are like oh I can only do you know I can do maybe the Mev Bots

are the people that are sticking around and pushing through are people that actually usually are finding communities and like building with other people and like you know sharing ideas and pushing out new ideas to each other and Building Things uh collectively and that is that you know human Bond thing is the thing that's actually underlying it so in the same way that like you know in some levels like D5 protocols that are just thinking of people as chair and stick you know manipulators um homo economicus and sort of you know the popular term uh are wrong and the ones that are right are the ones that recognize that it's about the the community it's about The Vibes it's about the the reason that you're wanting to spend time with other people there um so try to figure out ways to innovate uh and and mutate but always towards the

pro uh social side of it more rituals more togetherness more um ability to see each other as similar across differences yeah and that's you know people who've listened to the podcast a few times will know that every time I talk to Glenn Weil we're always talking about cooperation across distance what are the ways we could build mechanisms that regulate cooperation across distance and I think it's interesting to think about that in a tribe or in a family or in an organization that cooperation across social distance is the foundation of pro-social uh Behavior so um I think that's a neat takeaway as well well I'm wondering if there's any takeaways for for people who are running crypto projects who are in the space that that you want to pull out um and otherwise I think we're in a good

place to wrap yeah no I think uh just just go forward and and have rituals together is the the tldr on that beautiful well thanks for coming on the green pill pod Victor so much Kevin take care [Music] already you just heard from Victor rorbet I'm excited about the this episode because this story about bailajita and ritual technology is one that I think is becoming part of web3 lore at least in the regen web 3 circles that I hang out with hey I hang out in and uh that's why I wanted to share it

with you Greenfield listener so thanks again for listening to this this podcast the greenpill.network podcast we are featuring the people who are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hacker streamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world I think Victor and this story about the tribe that accidentally slayed moloch is a great example of that um if you value our work please remember to subscribe rate in review as you're closing onto this episode and thanks again for listening to the Greenfield pod see you next time