What can we learn from Natural Systems? with Shuya Gong

Transcript

foreign [Music] podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it is published every Tuesday and Thursday if you want to learn more visit our website at greenpill.network where you can download the Greenhill book for free join the Discord or become a member of your local greenpill.network chapter my guest today is shoya gong shoya is a futurist with a background in mechanical engineering and Venture design she is currently a course lecturer and Innovation fellow at Harvard School of Engineering was a design director at Ido in interaction

and Technology design and has worked with Fortune 50 companies on their emerging emerging technology strategies she's been researching the shift from competitive edges to collaborative advantage in organizations since she joined ido's collab back in 2015 and did their first exploration around blockchain which I is passionate about Ventures that practice regenerative design and we've been working together through my work at Super modular for the last months almost a year now and uh through that relationship we've been learning a lot about biomimicry basically this idea of what can we learn from natural systems and embed them into the web 3 based protocols that we're

building How do organisms in nature relate to their ecosystems but how does web 3 relate to the ecosystem that it's in and what are the ways that you can leverage the knowledge and wisdom that comes from nature in the millions of years of evolution that have come out of Nature and put that design that into your digital systems so I just think that shoya is a polymath I mean she's just skilled across all these different areas and has a a lot of experience in a lot of different types of ways of thinking and it's in that cross-pollination between understanding natural systems and um and in digital systems that the beauty of this this episode I think comes out so we are talking about what can we learn from natural systems as we

build our web 3 systems and I think that you're going to enjoy this episode 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 hey show you what's up hello hello excited to be on here long time listener yeah I'm really excited to chat I mean you and I have been nerding out about bio mimicry and protocols and a lot of different things over the years and I'm really excited to put that all into a podcast episode so I'll Tee It Off with uh what have you been up to and what's most interesting and present for you right now I am super excited to be settling back into Oakland after a little bit of travels just came back from Nairobi with the state department and a bunch of like amazing East African women who are all founders of agribusiness and like regenerative agriculture um Ventures and from a chair that got

sent off to Arthur Conan Doyle's estate Lisbon with the house of beautiful business where I got to just like create some furniture that regrows its Upholstery and has mushrooms incorporated into it so lots of lots of good like artistic expressions of natural systems um and then just kicked off the affiliate researcher section of Summer of protocols so my brain's super into Super into light protocol space and what that has to do and how that relates with natural systems and and what we might learn there I feel like a lot of our nerding out has been around protocols uh which is the theme you mentioned and then regeneration obviously is a huge part of green pill and um biomimicry so which thread should we pull

oh my god um let's do can we do regeneration first because I feel like that's kind of where that's where we started that's where it starts and ends yeah let's go yeah yeah okay so um I feel like my little Deep dive into regenerative systems actually started in like kind of a funny space uh with dating apps which is which is if you've spent time in designing them um and I just had this like intense need to go into what is a system architecture of dating apps in these like weird algorithms that are incentivized in like kind of a funky way to get people to meet each other and then like live their lives together um and I remember the first sort of like

Spidey senses of like something is a little bit weird here I wonder what is going on uh when looking at the incentive structures behind dating apps and kind of trying to figure out like what are the incentives that are here that push people to like coordinate in very various ways to like meet up and and do a thing um and was struck by just how paradoxical it felt um and started to wonder how these like paradoxical business models would map to other places and spaces um and how it changed this like translation and experience of humans between cyber physical spaces so cyber physical in the sense that you're having part of your experience in like a

cyberspace and then moving that into a bit more of a physical space um and so as I started to dig into these incentive models I thought it was just weird that um the subscription model or the incentive model was to make sure that you kept coming back and so for the centralized platform they never really had a reason to uh help you like reach your objective which I think for some people on dating partner for Life done off the apps forever and that's the selling point for a lot of these algorithms and the part that bothered me the most about it I think was that it never tethered or connected you to like the local places that people actually end up meeting

um and this was so much of our conversations around public goods which is like how do you help Revitalize local communities and regenerate um and with regenerative Design This like very important question I feel like always like what are you regenerating where are you regenerating and who is it being regenerated for and it always bothered me a little bit there was this disconnect between um where people would meet in these cyberspaces and then where they'd actually meet up in these physical spaces and it started me off on this past and this question of like how do you connect the physicality of um the local spaces that you spend time in and you spend time with with these like centralized platforms and organizations are like pretty untethered to um the places that they start to effect

and the people that they started to coordinate and move in certain ways um so that's how it kind of started and I was like I don't I don't really know where this journey would end up taking me um until I was reading um a Zine that was dropped by Nathan Schneider couple of years back ago on exit to community and there was just a sort of like magical moment of like all the pieces clicking together of like oh I wonder how you would resign redesign not just dating us but redesign most of our apps and services to embrace this model of um being more local exiting two communities on the ground and start to adopt more regenerative practices and models and so

there was a lock in like existing typical um economics theory on what regenerative design or regenerative economics really would be and would like um and so of course you start referencing back to the longest running regenerative game that has ever existed which is biology and natural systems and reproduction reproduction and things going on for millennia so let me play that back real quick um and you know this is maybe the one of the sub tweets that you didn't catch if you're a listener is that I used to run it on my dating website in my 20s uh that's where I learned to run marketplaces and I learned a lot of lessons and did a lot of things wrong that baked into Bitcoin um

um so uh so basically the the problem with dating apps is that if you're a manager of a dating app then you've got a fiduciary uh duty to your shareholders to maximize shareholder value and the way you do that is one of the ways that you could do that is that well if your business model is a subscription service then you want people to keep coming back you don't want them to partner off and go off of the platform so uh these apps aren't really designed around like deep partnering they're they're more designed to keep you hooked on them and exploring an endless inventory uh I'm using air quotes around inventory because we're talking about people of novelty uh and then a second question is that they don't actually translate really well into physical meeting places in local communities and um there's a lot of

other side quests around the dating app stuff and maybe I'll do an episode on it one day but um the uh it seems like exit to community is kind of an interesting Paradigm slash model um what if you could take your investors and make your users into your investors like close that Loop of I've got my investors on one side of me and my users on the other side and have to extract in the users in order to do the end get make the investors happy and exit to community makes it so your community of users is the people who own the app which creates a cycle uh through like a virtuous cycle that you could Spin and align at least for me this is where it lands it aligns the network a little bit more in in a closed loop and that's when you can start thinking about

regeneration and what's actually good for the community and the local spaces and uh Nathan Schneider has been pioneering that through I guess the meme is exit to community and platform cooperatives so how does that connect back for you I think yeah spot on I think that what that ends up um pushing forwards is like it results in more relational uh interactions like you are trying to do something where there's a long-term commitment to either relationships or to a sense of place or to businesses that exist um and the mechanisms to do that are interestingly not enough I think a new design pattern that's starting to emerge in some of the newer it's not just dating apps and services but anything that that's meant to be more of a social

media or social network where it's less about like here's an addictive and dopamine driven interaction set but rather hear something that wants to pull you in doesn't necessarily call up your attention all of the time everywhere whenever you are available um but is much more around like how do we get you to connect and coordinate with the things that you were looking for and desire in a cyberspace because it's easier and cheaper to do that but then moving you into a physical space or move you into a set of interactions that are a little bit um longer term or are about developing something that isn't so fast and ready and notification driven um but more around like topics and things that are longitude and all and maybe take a few years or are just on a

different time scale one of the analogies I like to use here is that like if our current social media environment or a lot of our digital systems they're like high fructose corn syrup where you get like a really like a jolt but then you have a crash once you realize it it's not fulfilling we've been Doom scrolling too long and then like you know what if we could build information systems that feel more like whole grains or raw fruits and vegetables and um you know things that are a little bit more nutritious um there were people there will be people who will continue to eat the high fructose corn syrup but then they'll get a stomach ache and that'll be the natural thing that pulls them over to the to the so I don't know this is this is another sort of parallel I mean all

bottles are wrong but some are useful this feels like a useful way of talking about our information systems how can we build more nutritious Information Systems I think also the nuance and the nutritional systems just to like go on the standard for a hot second is that the high fructose corn syrup thing is a uh like almost a more dangerous thing because when you are taking in this high fructose corn syrup you're like oh there's I'm having like a pineapple flavor of this or like I'm having a strawberry flavor of this or like I'm having a blue raspberry flavor of this but it's all still high fructose corn syrup where like if you were eating the actual fruit you would be getting different nutrients from it um and so this this like intoxication of like I am getting a variety of diets or I am getting a variety of different

kinds of social connections um is a way that I think we trick our brains into thinking that we have that variety but in certain cases like in the nutritional value of it isn't necessarily there um but I think that that like high fructose corn Syria metaphor kind of tracks in the sense that there is not just the outcome and the frost like the product that people are consuming that makes them feel a little bit off or a little bit like oh I need to go for the whole brain version but the process in which all of those things are created gets us to similar outcomes time and time and time again and that's been sort of my maybe obsession over the years is trying to unpack and understand like the methods that we have to design these

products and the teams that we build and the ways that we create our organizations that end up creating these things that shape Our Lives how do those process processes and methods and organizational structures actually mean to change so that like the very very Upstream moment of even having the idea of I want to make something that changes and shifts our reality starts to look different and whether that's like a different profile of founder or different makeup of teams or just a different process or design um I think that that's like one of the most exciting things about web3 about crypto about internet um is that there is room in space in this like window to experiment with how do you put organizations together how do

you incentivize people to come and work together um how do you start to change like expectations and design patterns because there is this moment of newness and this moment of introducing something new that it makes sense to also have different processes and methods together I'm curious we've spent enough time talking about the anti-patterns and we can start to talk about the patterns and how we can use protocol Falls in biomimicry in order to solve some of these problems I mean I don't know if this needs any context outside of me just going into like here are my favorite things in nature and how they start to show up in like organizational design and ways that you can start to think about um running your running your team or running your creative process but this was really put together when I was doing

an exploration on like what is the intersection between climate change and web3 of which there are many and of where there is like a focus and a loci around um refi and um what all of the all the good folks are doing in the in the region space in general um but this framework was kind of just a just to give a little bit of grounding around if we are able um as product designers as token designers as people who can create these new economic structures and systems if we are able to set up new incentives those new incentives should start to shift and change behaviors and get people to make decisions differently and with those Behavior changes we should be

able to observe either Collective action that's like geared towards the direction that we would like to see more positive outcomes for the world or it starts to nudge it and push it into Collective action that's like a little bit strange like behaviors that we didn't expect that maybe create more tension and conflict in negative ways and so if it does that negative behavior change you go back to the step of how do you change Behavior or incentivize that behavior or different ways to create Collective action or if those are being incentivized in healthy ways um the bringing of a community together starts to create new incentives that emerge all on their own that aren't necessarily Financial or things that people can even intentionally design and this all came from this very fascinating

case study of a farmer who realized that he was losing a lot of um like water and a natural river that it was going through this land and was going to drop like several million dollars on trying to clear the forest bring in tractors and like heavy construction equipment and like build a dam out of concrete and other materials to keep this water and um until he had a friend who was super into like beavers and was like hey I think you can just get beavers to show up and like do the damn work itself and not have to go through the process of construction and like clear cutting this forest and the really really really fascinating piece of this is that in order to get these beavers in

um to get them to build the Downs where you want to these Sciences discover that beavers don't actually need water to start building dams what they're actually really annoyed by is the sound of running water and when there are sounds of running water happening wherever they just start building dams to try and cover it and try and block the runoff from happening um and so this remote just put in these like tape recorders of pounds of running water where strategically you need a dance we built and these beavers came in and she's built all around it and I say if they get saved on the scale of like 12 million dollars or something of just making and preserving that section of forest and not having to bring any construction equipment and so it started to make me think about how we might

shift the design Paradigm in this phrase on this provocation of like how might we to how my nature like there are some problems that nature is really really good at solving and really really good at coordinating just by a fact of it having been around for for a very very long time and figured some things out about National ecosystems and so I started just noticing things um that were patterns that were happening in natural systems that in many different ways connected to organizations that we see in digital spaces um so I'm going to just go through some of these like emblematic mascots that I find really compelling and inspiring um and as any come to mind like oh yeah

that's a that's a case in web 3 that we saw and matches that yeah I'm excited to do it and I'll just inject the context and maybe repeat for The Listener that the reason we're going from how might we through how my nature when how might we ask and how my nature Dux uh is because natural systems have evolved over millions of years and they have it in Native intelligence of what works and what doesn't because of that and there's also just I mean if you try to quantify the value of the biomass on Earth there's just a ton of potential energy in in that in a lot of value in there so it's maybe one of the most natural uh I use the word the definition in the in the explanation the it's one of the most natural places to

find inspiration for how we can Design Systems that uh cooperate with each other and and also are really powerful so that's what kind of inspired me about doing this episode with you about biomimicry how my nature Dux studying nature can be a great way of of building beautiful systems so yeah let's Dive In right okay so the first one is uh shout out to my my dad's Farm um radishes is our first mascot of what we can learn from natural systems and radishes do this amazing thing throughout the seasons where they either grow up or down depending on conditions so in the summer time um if you've planted radishes there's like so much sunlight there's a lot of warmth there's a lot of photosynthesis

going on and so these radishes will grow a lot of radish tops which are great for salads um but not a lot of bottoms um and that's just because all of their energy is going towards growing these leaves um and having the amount of sunlight to do proper amount I suppose so very very straight talk in the summer season but when you're going towards like a fall or winter season of harvest for radishes they start to get these like really fat bottoms it's like very very juicy actual radishes and roots that people like to eat and use for storage throughout the winter months and that's just because there's less strong sunlight and on materials to do photosynthesis in the fall and winter seasons but but the soil has built up more nutrients over over the seasons and over time to be able to

bring that nutrient and water sink into the bottom of the radish and so though like take away from our radish mascot is just how do you adapt to conditions like when times are tests for your organization the way that it was built do you have a backup mechanism that you can sort of flow into the still capture value in a slightly different but still related way um and I think that that's something that for like web through companies in particular as we go through Barren bull markets when crypto Adventures like what is your backup mechanism um so that you can flow between two different states of productivity at any one time yeah that's actually what came up for me is I mean having been a multi-cycle entrepreneur in this space the Bears are just like so long and so resource deprived you have to be a

cockroach you have to be unkillable um but the bull markets are kind of this weird hype cycle attention reflexive cycle thing that feeds off of itself where you have to um be able to capture the narrative and capture the vibe and all that kind of stuff so um the radishes I think uh growing and getting these like Club bottoms feels like the summer time and to me that reminds me of like the bull markets um whereas like growing upside down uh feels more like the winter condition in in the crypto market for me and the whole thing is like if you're if you're built around a mechanism can that mechanism um evolve from Capital scarcity to Capital abundance and back again and how does it oscillate between those two uh is what that brings up for me it also

makes me think about like how do you pair things in your proverbial Garden like not to be distracted away from the things that you're building but can you either partner or Bridge with another another mechanism that's actually didn't do the opposite of you and so like when your conditions are optimal for your growth you're you know growing radish tops that we want to call it but the partner pairing that you have is actually doing the opposite thing so you're always able to bridge in between the two depending on resource and conditions and um create those create those like I mean we'll talk about lichens in a little bit but create those like very very strong not parasitic but just mutually beneficial um setups that you're able to always be maximizing conditions no matter what

they are yeah that's an interesting point uh partnering with a complimentary mechanism is a pattern that we see in nature in many different ways but especially in important in in like oscillating between different conditions it creates an anti-fragility that's profound I think number two because we get through all of them um of our mascots to learn from is the lobster and I'll I love this fun bags with a lobster in that they're just they're conditionally Immortal which there's a whole category of species and organisms that are conditionally Immortal which is like you never die or need to die as long as you do one very important thing in the life cycle of yourself and for lobsters it is molting

um and if a lobster stays for too long in its own shell it will die inside of it because it doesn't have the residual energy to one like break out of its existing shell and have that moment of vulnerability to like grow and harden a new shell around itself to then be able to do the same process again and again and again um and so when a lobster stays too long in its Old Shell because it's comfortable it's like kind of nice to just not have to exert the energy or resources to break apart what used to be and change and go through a phase of being extremely soft and able to be eaten um you get stuck and you die and that's actually the only time that lobsters really ever have to take um to take Jess as the option they could

just keep going forever and ever and ever um and so does it take for me and also you know from a multi-cycle perspective knowing when to change and knowing when to shift your game I think is is the big takeaway from your Lobster as a mascot how do you actually know when the time to exert that extra amount of energy and resources to mult out of your old show and like take a moment of being vulnerable um and pardon your outer layer until you are able to do the whole process over again so yeah it's sort of interesting the thing that came up to me which isn't specifically web3 specific is sometimes when I feel like I stay within my comfort zone that that I'm like not growing but when I go outside of my

comfort zone then I'm growing into something new and um maybe there's some sort of metaphor towards towards the molting there but uh I'm not thinking of any specific like web 3 uh web3 examples I think every time there's a new hype cycle to be honest not that it is the right thing to move to the next hype cycle to the next to the next every time but I do think that in those phases where we saw like nfts and icos and tcrs and Dows and all every new alphabet soup recipe that drops like whenever those things happen I think there is always a moment for any organization to consider like do we try and adapt and um move on to the next thing or do we

stay in the thing that we're very good at or open up on what we're able to be compatible or interoperable with on to to be able to bridge to the next amazing that's coming out because I think there will always be new stuff coming out on the horizon um and the trick is actually known like is this is this my molting season or do I actually have enough um of a runway in power to wait until the next one and and see what is a good fit okay next up in our curation is mosque very very humble's fall species I just have to interject before we go into this one that um so uh I since just Affiliated from Bitcoin leadership and they're off doing their own thing but um they recently went through a Rebrand and

I find it uh quite hilarious that uh they decided to take lychen and Moss and the fungal Kingdom as an inspiration for the brand and so if you go to getcoin.com the whole brand is based around like mycelial networks and coordination and stuff like that so I'm excited to explore all the and like the goal is that Bitcoin being a mycelial network that uh transfers resources from app to app through quadratic funding was like kind of the vision there but um I just wanted to interject that this is the one that I'm most giddy for uh just because of knowing that story I mean the mycelial thing is is one of the one of the like famous and best case studies I think that uh Hatake I'm not saying that

Darwin was wrong by any meanings but one of the case studies of Truth points that maybe it's not about competition as survival of the fittest but actually about collaboration as survival and fitness but we don't return that later at the end that is funny doesn't just mean like physical strength but it means like agility and ability to cooperate maybe in this in this context but yes let's stop taking side quests let's go deep on the uh yeah okay so Moss um reason why moths were bringing up as a another mascot for what organizations can learn is that um loss caused the second largest mass extinction um ever in our history of extinctions and unfortunately the largest one is

maybe looking like the the one that we're in right now but that is a existential crisis for later um but the reason why I love this one is that Moss essentially came to us um the theory goes on a space Rock so it might as well be uh aliens among us and what it did was it converted um it did such a good job at sucking in um carbon dioxide and putting out an immense amount of oxygen because it was very good at just growing at the list rating is a very small organism it was very simple um that it totally trained transformed the entire container of the atmosphere that we were in and made it so oxygen rich and that a lot of the life forms that depended on a carbon dioxide heavy

atmosphere just like collapsed um and so that's why we don't have like gigantic cockroaches the size of rhinoceroses running around anymore um because these exoskeletons really needed carbon dioxide Rich environments to survive um and so with moss the lesson that I really took away from these beautiful tiny little organisms is that uh they may seem insignificant in this in the size that they have individually on their own but the way that they scaled up and just covered a lot of different surfaces and the way they transformed the atmosphere did something so important that it created a systemic shift that happened over hundreds if not hundreds of

thousands of years and that was a slow but complete Revolution the way that life existed on this planet um and so small container changes but when you change that container everything else around it starts to shift and so when people talk about high impact I think that there is a difference between like acute high impact and like we're going to make all this change happen within a month all at the same time and be very urgent about it it compared to like a chronic change over time where all of a sudden everything literally the air that you're breathing in now is something that's different and that change in our non-totally natural system based language you may just be thinking about culture change like once you change the

culture and once you change the environment that something exists saying that's saying that you're trying to have an impact on we're trying to change and shift um so it takes on yeah it sort of brings to mind um you know there's this this sort of like Trope that the only constant is change um but I think that when I look at natural systems and the equilibriums that they that they reach are sometimes stable for uh weeks or months or years and sometimes tens of years and then you get this punctuated equilibrium where something some Tipping Point is reached and then the whole ecosystem starts evolving in a different direction because of some sort of breakthrough and you know what what you said about moss kind of reminds me of that punctuated

equilibrium moment and um these ecosystems evolve together and and one ecos in one strand of DNA one organism is just part of this larger dance with the ecosystem and it starts to get complex for me at that point other than deriving from that that being able to cooperate and interoperate with the rest of the ecosystem is an evolutionary Advantage I'm not sure what else to draw uh to draw from that other than maybe just going with the flow because the only constant is change what does that bring up for you I mean I think it's true that the only constant is change I think I think that if we take that only constant is change thing to Art it means that your constants can also change in Sunset like the way that we've

measured success for organizations um and businesses has largely been like profit Revenue how much money are you making but I think that when you have introduced this like new mechanism where you can design your own currency and your own measure of value you start to be able to introduce like different new things that may have before not been noticed as something significant more important but as those things hold up and as we're talking about it and engaging with it those new forms of value actually now make the new currencies of how things get done or how people get incentivized to do things and so the only constant is change but also that you can change your constants when you get enough people on board is Shifting that all at once um which is okay this kind of nicely

flows into our next mascot um which is a study about ants um a hand the big discovery that someone did and I'm like slightly concerned that someone figured out how to do this experimentally right um because it's it's a little it's a little gruesome if we have we have ant fans in the in the listener audience um this one is a tragic one for all of y'all um but scientists are really interested in understanding like how do ants figure out how to get back home so like if they're going away from us they're getting open tree resources take that home like how do you know when you're there and um they realize that ants actually measure distance by counting steps and they're not doing it by the way that humans might measure

constants in like miles or meters or however we do it but by counting the number of steps that they've taken and so the way that they found this out is like a little hooked up where they took some ants and added stilts on legs of some of them and they cut off the legs once well that's masochistic but for science I understand yeah for science so things we do for science um and then left some with normal lights and then they realize and calculated that like the legs that had or the ants that had still split over shoot their distance and the ants that had their legs shortened would undershoot and so ants really are measuring the sense by counting steps and what I take away from that one and related to our our concept of changing our constants is that

sometimes you need to change the way that you're measuring and measure by relative metrics instead of measuring by the standard metrics that we know and assume to be just the most important ones um because they think that measurement is always political um and whatever you do decide to measure is already a statement of what you find valuable I think the entirety Webster being an experiment and a project in changing the ways that we are able to value and transact value um this is just a reminder of throughout the ages animals and organisms have not necessarily thoroughly been adhering to human metrics but they have their own relative ones for how to get ethnal the example that comes to mind for me when I think about the Anton stilts or having

uh shorter legs is uh being someone who transacts or holds a large amount of their wealth in crypto during Ebola or bear Market the bull market feels like being on stilts and then the bear Market feels like having your legs cut off um but you know those like I I primarily hold Ethan of course I have some governance tokens of some projects I'm involved in and it feels like the the length of the stilts or or like the cutting off like the the large caps don't go up and down all that much but like the longer till governance tokens are like you either have really long stilts or you have really really short legs um so that's where that's where it resonates with me but um yeah it's sort of interesting to to think about well your your economic weight in the digital

ecosystem the ethereum ecosystem stays relatively the same but in the physical world it's that Arbitrage between USD and in that currency where where things get really like fun house fun house mirror e yeah I'm sure I mean the thing about stilts that's kind of funny is that like it gets you farther but you are a little bit more wobbly when you are when you are there and so how do you um how do you calculate that distance and like know when to once Austin want to take a woman take a short in yourself yeah I'll show you one more and then start moving towards wrapping up yeah let's do it all right this one we're moving into salad land um cabbage brussels sprouts Kohlrabi kale broccoli and cauliflower they're

actually all the same plant they've just been selected for like different characteristics of traits um and so you know cabbage was selected for like their terminal buds um and to be able to have those leaves um broccoli was selected for the flowers and the stems to be more meaty and fleshy um cauliflowers for the uh obviously the flower clusters um to get you and so I think the thing that this reminds me of is just the importance of interoperability and actually like a sharing of core values and genetic code in many ways amongst different organizations in web3 and I think it's easy to want to run towards and go ahead and say like oh everybody's doing this

like let's all go do this thing um but actually remembering that what you are able to have in an ecosystem and in building trust inside of that ecosystem amongst different players is that if you share the core values um at the base of at the base level um keeping it remixable is actually a really amazing thing and it kind of It kind of reiterates and goes back to our original braddish Point um of how do you how do you find your partners um in your ecosystem where everybody's sort of building something different because you're selecting for different let's call it interfaces that show up that are irresistible to different people for different reasons um but that infrastructure and that core DNA that you're all sharing that keeps you able to work with

um and collaborate with different projects really easily is is quite important to keep that balance I'm thinking of this uh graphic where uh cabbage and kale and broccoli and cauliflower all come from the same plant and for me the evolution of natural suction over time and the Divergence of the plants I guess DNA or the way they express themselves the most natural analog and digital systems that I can think about analog and digital systems that's funny um is uh is forking so basically you know all the I think about the evolutionary evolutionary tree of nature but then it also reminds me of um there's this evolutionary tree of Linux which has been a software system that's been evolving for 30 years and you have

red hat and Ubuntu and Fedora and all the different flavors of Linux that have happened from all the forking and the remixing of them and what's interesting is like they differ you in you know kale and cabbage and cauliflower uh fill different biological niches but the different linuxes fit different um economic niches or Market niches or technological niches and the way they evolve from each other but they share the same common ancestry I think um is really is really quite beautiful and um you know it makes me wonder if like if how how these things are going to evolve or change in the future um now that we have forkability and uh token and economic coordination and all

that kind of stuff it feels like it's going to get accelerating in faster and weirder from here on out I think that the other part of it just zooming out and thinking about like what is the medicine that we learn about natural systems and how we build organized organizations and products that mimic them is that there's also this like maybe quite radical and like difficult to accept truths of regeneration or natural systems like also have death and Decay and like Extinction of species in them um and a good Gardener or a farmer also knows like when to start to trim stuff away um and I think that's something when I compare like a web 2 or just like a non-web three way of building

organizations and in a way that web 2 organizations can Thrive and and start to think about longevity as an entire Market or industry is that if we look at companies that have been around for a very long time and want to be around for a while we might compare those to annuals um things that are really only supposed to bloom once and be very healthy and vibrant in specific conditions and the problem was growing too many annuals is that one it's just expensive to keep all of those conditions the same and Stables throughout many seasons and cycles of change whether that changes from culture or economic situations or political situations but also that because annuals like to thrive and stay in bloom in a specific environment you actually only

end up with like one kind of organization that does well it's an organization that's like profitable in all the same ways or has the same business model versus the same instructor incentive model whereas if we were to move and shift towards a model of thinking about an ecosystem as perennials that go through various cycles and seasons and experience Winters and look like not so much is going on um there's a bit of a radical acceptance of like sometimes organizations need to go dormant for a little period of time or we need to just accept that it's not going to look vibrant and Luscious all of the time and perhaps that's okay and maybe that's actually the beauty of regenerative design or the beauty of

being able to have multi-cycle organizations and businesses that survive and thrive because the idea and the concept of the product and the service maybe doesn't have to stay so stagnant and so stable in the form that we would expect it to be in a non-led through or web 2 environment and that adaptation and resiliency and ability to change and bring like the people and talent and the ideas that have worked throughout the years along with it is actually the most like beautiful part of this experiment what we're learning about businesses today one of my former co-workers Kevin Olson who works at gitcoin has been on the podcast a couple times uh we were just talking about I think it was six months ago about how

everyone always talks about oh nature this they sure that we stick inspiration from nature and and then Kevin like really like like breaks reporting like takes a big left turn and he's like but Nature's like chaotic and it's always consuming itself and eating itself all the time and it you know the the death of an organism is obviously really sad but it's the resources going back to the Earth and being recycled into the ecosystem that's like kind of beautiful from a systemic level and there's the same thing with markets where when a firm dies all of the uh capital and and like human resources that are in it you go and be allocated to other things and there's something beautiful about that but there's also something very powerful I think in accepting that when you

design your systems that like maybe they don't need to live forever um another theme when I was at metacamp this year we talked a lot about dowels that are designed to only last for a little while and it's been down and I I kind of made the radical um the the radical analogy that a quadratic funding round is like a pop-up dowel like you accept applications for a week you crowdfund for two weeks and then you do the matching pool then the spin thing spins down so it's like an ephemeral pop-up dial that exists only for a moment in time and then it can come spin up in the future and that that resembles like the emergence and destruction of the of the universe to only try to do it for a couple of times instead of trying to build something that needs to last in

perpetuity like you know ethereum being world war three proof and so I don't know it's just like a different set of constraints that really makes my mind go go crazy in a lot of ways yeah I think it's great I mean something I've been thinking about a lot is like the mythical creatures of the The Menagerie of mystical creatures of how we think about different categorizations of um businesses or organizations right and like the unicorn has been the one that I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs and Founders try to chase after of like oh like we want a unicorn we live forever and like be so big and make a billion dollars but I think that the other like mystical creatures that we maybe don't talk about so much that belong in this Menage array is like there are dragons

um there are these like very large very old maybe hordes of treasures and we make make all those investors and I mean that in a very good way um of like you are a dragon that's able to stay around for a long time and distribute your treasure and keep growing to it but I think that the one that like people don't talk a lot about that I want to start talking more about which is the mythological like yin yang to a dragon which would be a phoenix um and Phoenix's are supposed to grow and have beautiful feathers and then spontaneously combust and die into the ashes and then re-emerge into something more beautiful and so I think that like so think about pop-ups as prototypes or to think about your projects or your businesses as things that are allowed to

gracefully have an end point and maybe even be designed to have an endpoint is actually quite nice it's it's no longer necessarily a panic and a scramble to the end into the finish of like pretending to try and keep something going on for longer than it needs to go um but rather a very graceful Decline and when you've built in relationships and collaborations over time I think it's a really nice and elegant way of saying like there's something that isn't working here here are all those things that are really really valuable that we've learned here are the things that we'd like to absorb into other projects or other things that will keep on going and then this particular chapter has found a time to close and here are the plans to respawn and re-sprout and grow again

after the team takes a nice long vacation for a little bit of time I mean there's there's some analogies in how markets work in how startups work in the chaotic destruction there in evolution and how ecosystems work but like the thing I'll say is that web 3 is like like 10 years old ethereum is like seven and you know like post maker down post safe uh like post get coin that's like this like three years of evolution in one market cycle and and I will say that nature has had um hundreds of millions of years in order to reach a stable equilibrium in which uh things are evolving and or at least as stable of an equilibrium you can reach and I think the web 3 is still on it kind of it's like chaotic prior

primordial soup uh kind of environment that means that the spin Downs are not always graceful I mean look at FTX and UST right we're not talking about things that anyone expected we're talking about overnight 40 million dollars uh of value collapsing and so as the ecosystem matures I'm looking forward to the point in which um there's more patterns to study in in how these ecosystems evolve with each other and it's a little bit less like early Earth it's more like you know uh more like more like present day Earth where you can benefit from uh the lived experience of millions of years of evolution yeah I mean protocols right like I think that that's every time something large and catastrophic and maybe not an Extinction event but

something that is a little bit jarring like that happens like I think the interesting thing is figuring out like all right what have we what what have we learned from that what are the protocols that we want to take away from that and then make sure that they exist in their next time something similar to this comes around um because I think that that's what Nature has really like done since the beginning of time like there are species and entire civilizations that may have been forgotten but something in there something in their genetic code or something in their cultural code um that was an evolutionary Advantage for whatever reason still exists as embodied protocols or as cultural artifacts that we bring up time and time again well I'm really I feel like we're just getting to like the meat right now but we are running out of time so

um you know I'm wondering if there's anything I didn't ask that you want to say um or anywhere where you think there's little nuggets of of uh of information that are really interesting within this wide design space that you've been studying for years of protocols and biomimicry and regeneration and natural systems I think I'm fascinated by this like not just in the web 3 world but at business and uh how how we make things happen in our current reality at large this shift from having competitive edges um to help collaborative advantage and how those collaborative advantages actually show up now as competitive edges for new organizations um I think that that's one topic and then the other one just on this like natural systems

um metaphor that we've been on in this this winding conversation that we've had is I really wonder what starts to happen if we were to look at Technologies crypto blockchain web Siri included um also just as like cultural artifacts so in the same way that bees dance and birds sing to like communicate and coordinate the survival of their species and various resources like I do wonder what happens if we were to look at our Technologies as cultural artifacts as well and just have a little bit of like play and fun with it as well um and so what does it look like if we were think about protocols and algorithms as songs and dances of humans um and what starts to happen when we

treat them with the same kind of like creative development process um and room to experiment and like acceptance of failure as we do the way that we look at song and dance in society and culture as well yeah but you're you're kind of getting into like venkatesh Rao uh summer of protocols type thing uh territory where everything that can be encoded into a rule set is a protocol uh eye contact is a protocol handshakes are a protocol fist bumps are a protocol square dancing is a protocol and what I like about that is that it takes me a it takes me out of these deep like technical protocols like TCP improve of stake and everything like that and into something that I can actually

uh this really experience in my real life but it also takes me out of this like capitalism warping everything and like protocols being a means towards uh the profit motive and just brings me into my everyday life where you do things for their own uh for their own sake or at least before Instagram we used to do things before their own stake now we do them to to post them on social media but um yeah just this idea of doing things for their own sake and the art that comes along with that I think is um a good headspace to occupy particularly when you're in a long bear market and you just like you need to maintain some mental sanity and and uh have the utility the zoada V of uh just having some fun in in starting with that to get through it I also think just on the last Point here

is that like a lot of the a lot of the complicated alphabet soup of our technological infrastructure is infrastructure and infrastructure tends to be invisible for a good reason because it's complicated and not so many people can understand it or unpack it and so something that I think I'll ask as a question or as like a send-off point is like if we have this infrastructure that maybe needs to be a little bit more invisible for the million to billion numbers of people to engage with it what are the irresistible interfaces that actually people really want to touch and really want to get to know whether it is square dancing or it is a handshake or it is something else but the plumbing and the infrastructure that exists in web3 is being built in uh

a bear Market I think is something that starts to become really really interesting going towards a bull market when you start to create these interfaces that again become easy to comprehend and cohesive and interactive and engaging for perhaps a non-technical audience and so that play and that constant coming up and down between invisible infrastructure and irresistible interfaces as I think something that I also take away from this is like what are the things that are fun what are the things that people want to touch what are the things that people like want it in birth and hug in this world um and how does the infrastructure that we're currently building start to support those things for anyone out there who's listened to a fantastic fungi that Netflix documentary it kind

of makes this profound point that you know the mushrooms that you see are only part of the organism they're more of like the fruit of the organism and the real guts of the organism are underground this mycelial network that's transferring resources between the mushrooms and all the plants and everything like that um and um and um you know it it kind of reminds me of like the mycelial networks the infrastructure which actually delivers a lot of value in in I don't think Forest could exist without it but it's it's only the mushrooms that you actually see and can grasp and um the fact that there's a symbiosis between them just makes me think how many things in our economic system do we not see that are just the plumbing that we take for granted all all the time and what would have happened if our if our forefathers

of our ancestors had not made those investments in the infrastructure um there's there's something interesting to contemplate there as we're trying to build out a whole new open source economic system yeah I mean what it looks like is kind of anybody's game right now I think that that's what's exciting about it is we don't really have to be stuck to these shiny flat rectangles if we don't want to um and what are the more ergonomic ways to actually interact with those New Economic infrastructures that are open source that anyone could mix and build on top of so I don't know I'm kind of looking forward to like things that are a little bit squishier like this this this very hard uh type of machines that we have to interact with our economic systems I

think are fine for this like first experiment in economics that we've been living through but I think for this next chapter like I really want to see stuff that squishes give me some give me some soft interfaces well I think it's a beautiful place to end it and um you know I really I've had a lot of fun peeking out on this stuff with you and I hope the audience enjoyed the enjoys the episode too I hope that you're touching grass as you're listening to this because this is an episode about nature and um show you really good to have you on thank you absolutely thanks so much see you later all right peace love foreign [Music] we just heard from shoyagong really

excited about this episode because I think we've got a lot to learn from nature and I think that shoya has been studying this for a long time and what a fun episode thank you for listening to the greenpill.network podcast again we're trying to feature the people who are building this coordination Network Society of hackers streamers and doers we're using crypto to build regenerative digital systems in the world and I think that shoya and the work that she's done studying nature is wow such a powerful Paradigm for thinking about web3 systems if you value the work that we're doing on this podcast then I ask you to please make an offering to our algorithmic overlords Please Subscribe rate and review please gratify us with likes and

sharing this episode with all of your friends and followers they're the source of our powers at least until we rewrite social media algorithms for the public good Please Subscribe rate review and share peace and love see you next time