Metacrisis.xyz with Stephen Reid

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation on the Pod today I've got Steven Reed who is a facilitator coach and Ruby python developer that is working with me on some of the meta crisis stuff that we've been doing on this podcast so to catch you up we've done a few episodes with a philosopher thinker from the consilience project named Daniel schmachtenberger that has been thinking about this thing called The Meta crisis which is like the crisis underneath all crises AI alignment bioterrorism nuclear disarmament climate change biodiversity collapse this thinker Daniel schrockenberger that we've been working with thinks that there's one crisis that underlies all of those crises if we can look at the

generator functions of existential risk what are the ways in which we might solve them so basically we've done three episodes with Daniel on the podcast about the meta crisis about ways that you could address The Meta crisis and then we launched this thing called metacrisis Dao about two or three months ago on the green pill podcast so metacrisdao.com has been a forum in which thinkers who care about the metacritis system want to try to solve it can um can connect with each other and hopefully launch Dao's or web3 projects that are addressing the meta crisis from there so a place for greater combinations of strength and intelligence to come together other and work on the most important problems of our day is the idea but people kept

asking us hey when governance when token because it's called meta crisis Dao and so uh Stephen and I are doing this episode to highlight the oh well well first we're going to rename metacrisdao.com to metacrisis.xyz there will be forum.medicrisis.xyz where people can connect and then there'll also be wiki.minacrisis.xyz where people can build knowledge graphs and accumulate Knowledge from there so first note uh renaming metacrisdow.com to metacrisis.xyz to make it clear no token no governance structure other people can launch dials and tokens and governance structures but that's not something that Stephen and I are doing and then we spend the rest of the episode focusing on the prompts that Daniel has given us

about how we might address The Meta crisis with web3 which is the cool work that I would like to focus on um when we do fund the work coming out of metacrisis.xyz in an upcoming quadratic funding round with Git coin Alpha leak we're gonna be doing a quadratic funding round for the meta crisis then um that's the stuff that I'm going to be funding so basically how do we red team in Blue Team how web3 Technologies relate to the meta crisis how could web 3 tech make various aspects of the meta crisis worse and how could web 3 tech make various aspects of the meta crisis addressed so that's what we're spending this episode on a few administrative updates about the metacris.xyz community and then also

talking about these prompts from Daniel and some of the work that Steven has done on them so Stephen is just a polymath he's so smart he's so genuine in his wanting to solve this problem so I've been really enjoying working with him on the metacrisis.xyz project and I think that you're really going to enjoy this episode so before we get into the episode with Steve and I just want to say I will be doing a handful of episodes about metacrisis stuff with people who have been studying it in and out of web3 so if you have a suggestion for someone that I should have on podcast please DM me uh I'm twitter.comwaki and um Steven will just be the first of many that we talk about the meta crisis with so without further Ado I give you Steven Reed enjoy coordination

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for-profit company glow is a non-profit that donates 100 of all yields from the globe Reserve to give directly's basic income program give directly is a charity that gives people money no strings attached to people living in poverty and is a charity that vitalik has previously donated to and supported in the past with glow you can reduce poverty just by holding a stable coin glow is launching in early 2023 and you can join the waitlist at glodollar.org greenpill that's Gro dollar dot org slash green pill Hey Stephen how you doing hey I'm great thanks Kevin how are you pretty good really excited to talk about all things meta crisis metacrisis Dao metacrisis XYZ with you so maybe you

could tee us off by giving us a little bit of the history here yeah sure thing so of course you have these three fantastic conversations with Daniel schmachtenberger between July last year and January this year uh on the meta crisis second one was on super structures and the third one was talking about the idea of a meta crisis Dao and uh the the key suggestion of Daniel at the end of that third conversation was the idea of of red teaming and green teaming web3 Technologies as they relate to the meta crisis so red teaming how could web pre-tech actually make various aspects of the metacris it's worse and green teaming how could web free Tech actually ameliorate make better various

aspects of the meta crisis so uh you threw the Forum up about metacrisdale.com so people that have tuned into those episodes could start exploring those questions and the Forum has been Super Active we've had over 200 users registered served over 10 000 views across the various posts more than 400 posts at this point I think and a whole bunch of video calls so yeah definitely some momentum there yeah it's been fun and so for the listeners benefit uh this episode will make more sense to you if you go back and you listen to those previous episodes we'll have a link to those in the show notes the uh The Meta crisis again you should listen to the episodes but uh basically

it's this idea that climate change biodiversity clubs AI alignment um and a lot of different coordination failures are all have underlying Dynamics to them that are similar and the underlying Dynamic according to this philosopher and thinker Daniel schrockenberger we've had on the podcast three times now is that uh human activity leads to coordination failure humans uncoordinated create catastrophes um and the example here is like with climate change through our uncoordinated activity we externalize carbon to the environment which creates this self-terminating effect where climate change will be a threat to life on Earth so the answer to that in most human societies is to regulate it um but the problem with regulation is

once you've given the government of the ability to regulate on top of you on one thing then you give them the ability to regulate everything around you and so that uh human activity attractor is dystopias so the first attractor of human activity like game theoretic attractor is coordination failure the second uh attractor is dystopia and so how can we find a third attractor away in which we can coordinate with each other but with limited governance scope and decentralized coordination is is kind of the idea behind the meta crisis I'm really reducing it down uh a lot of different concepts from Daniel but you and you should go listen to the the previous three episodes with Daniel and

so so yeah the the three episodes with Daniel were defining the meta crisis ways that we could address The Meta crisis and then the third episode was about metacrisis Dao which was a community that that uh a forum that was launched that where where people that are web3 enthusiasts or just meta crisis enthusiasts could talk to each other about ways that we could address The Meta crisis with web 3. so there's been an explosion of activity there and it's really kind of fun to participate into but uh I think we maybe misnamed it a little bit or at least I'd misnamed it because it's called meta crisis Dao and it's not really a Dao it's kind of a place where future Dallas that address The Meta crisis could be conceived of

and and generated and so I think we're gonna consider changing the name to metacrisis.xyz it'll be the meta crisis forum and that'll make it more clear to people that we don't plan to introduce governance into this community so uh yeah Stephen hopefully I covered that correctly anything anything you want to add there that was a great summary yeah and um it the Forum very much has been a kind of like meeting place for people interested in the internet intersection of meta crisis and web 3 uh it having the idea that it might have a token or governance has been a little bit distressed acting unnecessarily distracting so yeah I think that that changing the name will just help to settle that

so I mean I believe in I I believe that if people show up and they have a great idea for something that could address The Meta crisis and they want to launch their own Dao or their own thing that has a token or an nft or something like that then they're more than welcome to but uh each of you you and I are uh busy with other projects and have no plans to launch another I'm busy enough with like participating in in uh all things super modular and all of our alumni like Bitcoin and so we had no plans to make it into a dial and so this this rename from metacrisdow.com to metacrisis.xyz is just meant to reflect that kind of like ungoverned structure to it nice I'll also I mentioned at this point there is a Wiki uh there's currently a

wiki.ment to crisisdell.com but we'll be at wiki.ment to crisis.xyz which is uh generated based on all the transcripts of podcasts of Daniel from actonberger and and a few others um we use some some Nifty AI technology to like pull out all of the kind of key Concepts and key phrases and generate definitions for those and backlink those I'm using like timestamp time stamped links to all the places where Daniel talks about those Concepts so uh yeah check out that Wiki if you want to kind of get up to speed with some of this content quickly foreign yep so we've got the metacrisis uh dot XYZ Wiki and we've got the Forum which

is a place where people can connect we've also got a telegram channel in which people are are going back and forth and what has been the most interesting activity that you've seen in the last month or two out of this community Stephen well I'm still really excited to get to grips with Daniel's original promise original suggestions this this red teaming green teaming activity and uh yeah a group has started coming together around that kind of like content working group it's been called so far uh and I think it's to do that research properly certainly requires um you know an amount of of skill and commitment and and time um but we're starting to see uh some

interesting things come of that uh for myself I've been mainly thinking about the intersection of um of bioterrorism and the uncensorable quality of blockchains and then various aspects of web3 and nuclear disarmament but there's uh there's a whole bunch of of uh stuff going on on the Forum uh not Beyond simply that that red teaming and green teaming another couple of threads that I saw recently and appreciated was took uh dystopian and utopian fiction uh on on this this in the same area of talking about how could web3 kind of create a utopian future

um uh in relation to meta crisis factors um so not not approaching so much from a research expensive but uh yeah a fictional one and I think that certainly has its place as well yeah yeah I think that you and I have kind of been involved a lot of these discussions and uh we're both kind of feeling like okay let's not worry about governance structures for this meta crisis Dao thing we don't even know what it is let's instead really study the meta crisis Daniel likes just say um a problem well understood or there's a quote that came up in one of the episodes a problem well understood is is half addressed and so you know if we can imagine speculative Futures and we can do research on red teaming various

aspects of how web3 could could contribute to the meta crisis that's at least where my interests kind of kind of lie and that's not to say that you know someone else could launch a governance structure for for something that does that also but for me just showing up and having the conversation and doing the research and posting it on the Forum has been the most interesting thing that has come out of the uh out of the conversation so far yeah for sure and um just a a call out to to talented researchers that are like you know really interested in getting their teeth into some of these topics I've I I've personally found it really feeling really interesting to really devote some time to thinking carefully about the intersection of some of these factors and yeah there's there's a uh

just a a lot there a lot a lot of curiosity and satisfaction to be happy yeah totally um and it looks like we may be funding some of that work in the near future uh we'll be launching a uh tentatively I I've got a ink the deal or whatever the the digital version of inking deals is uh with Git coin but uh the idea is to run a Bitcoin grants round for metacrisis.xyz and to fund some of the researchers that are showing up and adding value to this to this public good which is understanding The Meta crisis so um for the listeners who are familiar with Bitcoin grants it's now a protocol based way of doing quadratic funding a

uh crowdfunding campaign for different communities in web 3 and we're going to be demoing it dog fooding it with metacrisis.xyz if they decide to accept us into the April rounds so news on that will be coming up we've got uh We've Got Talent we've got momentum and this will be adding some uh tokens to the mix and I think that that'll be really interesting for sure there's definitely been a real excitement about the possibility of a massive crisis qf round on the Forum and yeah good point to say that as far as I understand um super modular is is is open to co-sponsors for that that round so if you're an organization that understands the the importance on of the meta crisis

and the potential for web 3 to address some of those problems um then I imagine Kevin would be interested in having a chat with regards to possible like co-sponsorship of that and qf around over the coming months for sure yeah I mean get Quinn's Mission has always been about public goods and funding what matters uh to me the meta crisis matters I want uh I want to solve some of these under underlying generator Dynamics or at least address these underlying generator dynamics of the meta crisis and so uh it felt like a really big opportunity to take the work that get coins been doing and to point it at one of the biggest problems or most meta problems of our age and it's certainly been heading in that direction like there's already been a climate solution or several climate Solutions rounds and this feels like a natural

progression in a way um as the web 3 Community kind of wakes up to the fact with the the insight and assistance of people like Daniel that uh the yeah the climate crisis is just one example of coordination failure we're at large there are others uh the promise of web 3 in a way is to actually get to that deeper layer to actually solve those the coordination problems underlying a whole class of of different existential threats of which climate change is just one so um yeah it feels like a very sensible direction to have for me yeah yeah I'm pretty excited about it and hope to see other people show up in in funds that work so um with those announcements out of the

way uh metacrisdale.com is now metacrisis.xyz and that we're going to be doing a quadratic funding round for metacrisis.xyz maybe we could focus the rest of the episode on the most interesting prompts from Daniel and what the latest thinking is on some of them yeah sure thing so I would boil down Daniel's prompts to to really too at least that there are two that relate to research um one which I've called already this this idea of red teaming how could web free Tech actually make various aspects of the metacris worse which is of course not something that web 3 folks generally like to think about you know we want to think yeah this is awesome and this is going to make the world better but Daniel really impressed upon us like you have you have to think these things

through even if you think you're doing something good even if you think the tech is awesome there are all kinds of unexpected consequences that um uh where yeah that really uh can can deal with a bit of careful thought and uh and the end but the and also the idea of green teaming that the part which web through folks are kind of happier to think about how how what are the parts of the meta crisis where web3 could actually really make things better and I mean this feels important to me partly because for me sometimes web 3 seems like a solution looking for a problem we build all this radtek and this code and but we're like arguably we're

solving like relatively trivial matters whereas if uh web3 folks maybe just understood there are some like some serious uh you know problems that that people are working on out there right now for example bioterrorism and nuclear disarmament and so on like how would it be to actually the web free folks to think oh yeah we could actually make a difference to some of these these these critical threats in society and just uh yeah just like raising our raising the stakes a bit like kind of like you know raising our Ambitions a bit in terms of the the kinds of problems that web3 is setting out to tackle um yeah totally um yeah I have these the blog post about the prompts from Daniel up on my screen

so I'll just I'll just read out how I perceive them and then maybe we can unfrow them together so um you know red team the out of web threes of effects on the meta crisis what are all the possible negative externalities psychosocially or technologically what are the first order effects of web3 Technologies and working for protocols second order third order Etc the other prompts that I have here is uh by vertical topic area existential risk weaponized drones grid fragility biodiversity collapse Etc does web3 enable solutions that are not currently existing what are the hardest problems out there and is there anything this technology enables and then the third one I have here is by horizontal areas so things like generator functions can

we address perverse incentives writ large commoning writ large internalizing externalities turning theories of trade-offs into synergistic satisfiers so those are the prompts that uh that I've got written from that episode with Daniel and where I would like to focus you know I'm only one node in this network um but in many ways one of the the OG knows that's where I would like to focus a lot of the discussions and um that's where I'll be contributing my cut my quadratic funding contributions towards in this upcoming quadratic funding rounds and just to say how um how all two descriptions that map so I I roll your second and third points into the idea of green teaming but yeah you can kind of Green Team more on the

the the the the horizontals or the kind of you know General problem areas of the meta crisis or on the specific or so-called vertical problems of the meta crisis but it has it has a similar flavor of hap yeah how can web3 Tech actually help here yeah totally so yeah the reductionist I guess way of having these prompts are what are the ways in which web3 technology can help address The Meta crisis whether in vertical or horizontal topic area um and then the red team is in what ways doesn't make it worse and so thinking adversarially and optimistically we can we can kind of boil everything else in the episode Down into those two categories yeah so so one of the things that we've done on the meta crisis Forum

um is do a kind of uh first pass of red teaming and green teaming using a fantastic uh plug-in at GPT for sheets so yeah we we created a sheet where we had all of the uh the the different uh or different web free Technologies as the rows of this sheet ranging from like quite abstract ones things like simply decentralization and immutability to very specific things like quadratic voting and joke race and holographic consensus on those are the rows of the sheet and then the columns were all of the different uh uh meta crisis problems if you like so again ranging from like

very abstract ones from perverse incentives and multi-polar traps to very specific things like biosecurity and nuclear weapons so with it with this with this 2D grid of of web3 tech and metacrisis problems uh we then created two two sheets one one red team sheet and one and one green team Sheet where on one of the sheets we're saying how does that intersection of like that of any two of those things how does the web 3 tech make that thing worse and on the other sheet it's saying take that intersection of any you know any web 3 Tech with any meta crisis issue how can weapons actually make that thing better and um I I it was it you know it's as we know GPT Source you know isn't uh isn't

always on the market probably probably like 50 of that sheet was garbage but like the other 50 was actually quite helpful just in stimulating the imagination and the task as I see it from now it's kind of let's take those uh take those AI generated prompts as a starting point but then we need like talented human researchers to go and do a deep dive on on those topics and um so the two topics that so far that I've I've done a deep dive on as I mentioned one was bioterrorism and the other was nuclear disarmament yeah amazing so we're going breath first um and then we can go depth first from there and how we Traverse this problem space so should we is there anything else to say about the depth first stuff

or should we dive into the go deep on one of them um well just to say like um if I I'm sure there is more that can be done at that um that yeah a wide perspective um so if it might be that some folks feel really passionate about that kind of um you know using AI for example to help us try to get some insight of this problem um at the the broadest uh levels so yeah if people if people have those kind of skills or interests then absolutely get involved in in metacris.xyz yeah yeah I just think in the way that Daniel framed his prompt by talking about vertical topic area and then also horizontal area to me almost lends itself to just like oh there's a

taxonomy here and if someone really wanted to own the creation of that taxonomy then I think that that would be massively valuable work to the whole to the whole initiative it's like it's almost like you know in Zelda or or a video game where you find the map and then you always know where you are on the mini map from there if someone wanted to take that breadth first work and run with it that would be a grant that I would support in the upcoming yeah and Justice I think we've got you know plenty of the raw materials that uh I would particularly point to the the metacris with the XYZ Wiki where a whole lot of kind of analysis is done of of Daniel's podcast appearances and yeah kinds of problems that he he's spoken about in the past and uh from the web

three side a site that I found really useful was uh it's uh let me remember so it's on the super modular Society is the um oh what's going on here okay the the coordination mechanisms uh mini site of the super modular site um this has I think 50 or so um different coordination mechanisms that many of which he spoke about in the episode with Griff green so that would be another great episode for folks to listen to actually if they're interested in getting involved in this um by the time you've listened to Griff and Kevin talk about like this whole box if possible with three um you know solution Tech and you've heard Daniel speak about the problem landscape it's yeah it's a case okay like whether these things meet and how

can we actually uh yeah employ that conservative of making the meta crisis uh less bad yeah we will put a link to that Resource as well in the show notes that's supermodular.xyz slash coordination Dash mechanisms just a little taxonomy of different coordination mechanisms that exist out there yeah nice okay so well yeah shall we dive a little bit deeper into into one or a couple of these uh the topics I mentioned there yeah let's do it which one should we start with um well um since it's an example that Daniel mentioned has mentioned a few times um let's go with the research on on bioterrorism tabletop DNA printers and uncensorable blockchains and what Daniel has said on a couple of occasions of

like it could be really bad if uh someone puts pathogenic DNA on an uncensorable blockchain in the era of tabletop DNA printers that is to say DNA printers where you can kind of just download genetic code of the internet and like kind of you know plug it into this machine and it just let prints offer copies of a virus or something like this like that obviously sounds like uh like it would be could be really bad news yeah um so if you might notice interject there um one thing that I didn't cover in my reject reductionist definition of the meta crisis at the top um is the existential the compounding

existential risk coming out of technology so you know uh with the if the meta crisis a thousand years ago the the worst that we'd be able to do is is kind of shoot swords it or uh use swords or uh bows and arrows to kill each other um you know ten thousand years ago it was maybe sticks and stones and um but as you start to get more towards modern day you get cannons you get tanks you get nuclear arms um and then you get tabletop DNA printers and AIS that everyone has and so how do you control the coordination failure um for nuclear arms is is different if if six countries across the world have nukes versus everyone in the world has a nuke in their pocket it and so that's

kind of like one of the generator dynamics of existential risk is the idea the compounding destruction capacity that everyday people could have and like just statistically if you've got 300 million people in a country one of them is going to be crazy enough to want to blow everyone else up and and how do you regulate that capacity so that's one of the generator Dynamics underneath the meta crisis I just wanted to say that as we're talking about tabletop DNA printers um that that's the dynamic that Daniel I think is like most interested in not to speak for him but um for my perception yeah that that there is a shift happening as I understand it I mean I don't consider myself an expert in this area by any means that where up until now it's been

there's been a relatively small number of labs um that are actually capable of like synthesizing pathogenic you know bugs at scale and that's been quite expensive to do and we're transitioning to an area in an era sorry where it's it's very easy and it's very cheap for anyone to do that so whereas previously it might have been okay to to kind of um just um you know regulate keep an eye on on a handful of labs it's now becoming a much more challenging problem um but the the specific specific research question that I was interested in is is do uh does the uncensorable quality of blockchains make this problem worse so I'm not sure as I'm what I'm

not trying to do is to say that oh this isn't a problem like I think it it is it's I think it is a problem um uh but from the research that I did I uh I came to kind of came to the conclusion that blockchains don't make this problem any worse and the the reason for that um uh that is that there is already a huge amount of pathogenic DNA uh and genetic code sequences out there available on the clear net now uh I I didn't I didn't realize this myself I don't know to what extent um you know Daniel realizes sir has done research on this but it's it's very straightforward to find say the um like kind of genetic code for a dead

virus like Ebola through just you know minutes of of Googling and uh so uh this uh the the availability of pathogenic genetic code is already so widespread on the clear net I cannot personally see a scenario where like um it it being also now available on blockchains would make the problem any worse um this I guess it's possible to indigenous indigenous a scenario where governments uh instruct everyone that's hosting a pathogenic DNA on the clinic to like take those sites down and to like remove that genetic code from from

the clinic uh and and then it maybe will become a more interesting question about whether that code is available becomes available on on blockchains but for as long as it is is is is is so widely available and through other means I I can't see it being an issue um being on blockchains as well um that so that which led me to think that the the level at which probably we're going to need to tackle this for the time being is on the uh the availability of the DNA printers themselves and doing our best to actually uh regulate access to those in the way that many countries in the world at least have very strong regulations on

on firearms um but uh yeah it was it was a super interesting uh topic to dive into for a day yeah yeah it's sort of kind of uh uh I mean it could be it's it's its whole own episode of maybe not the green pill podcast because we're more focused on on web3 and and um and regen stuff but uh you know what what are the existential the the new technologies that will be in the hands of everyone uh by the year I don't know let's call it 2050 and and how do we deal with the fact that there's tabletop DNA printers or an AI in your pocket that's a thousand times smarter than you

that's negotiating with other AIS and um I I think it's quite interesting so anything else to say about that that that study uh no I think not other than um I was kind of in some sense pleasantly surprised in that example because it said you know it can sound scary like what if pathogenic DNA gets on the blockchain and actually with a bit of thought you realize well you know in this this case at least it doesn't sound like uh it doesn't seem so scary at all you know after a bit of research but I expect we'll be surprised in various ways from people doing this research thoroughly you know sometimes it will turn out uh the conclusion will be oh actually I don't think this is a

serious problem as we thought and other times we'll do the research and very probably be like oh this is a much bigger problem than we thought but you know we're not we know we're not going to know until we have like um you know teams of people actually doing high quality research on the intersection of all these topics but um yeah we can maybe turn to the um to the other uh topic area that I was considering which is nuclear disarmament yeah that sounds great yeah just just very briefly to start with the first I was interested in doing research but on the particular intersection of zero knowledge proofs and nuclear disarmament and um there there is some interesting stuff out there it has nothing to do with web 3 and blockchains though actually it's actually um uh uh there's a there is a type of physical zero knowledge proof

um uh using like physical cryptographic foils um that uh that doesn't sound very interesting um uh that not so much related to um to blockchains um I might think I should take a little step back actually and just and probably just for psycho listeners just like outline the the the three key areas or three challenges in nuclear disarmament so um the the first is is determining how many nuclear warheads um a country has uh the the second is confirming the authenticity of of uh actual the decommissioning process when

a country says oh we've just we've just disarmed we've just destroyed 100 nukes how do you know they have actually just they've destroyed actual nukes and not just props or models or some other kind of weapon or bomb and the third problem is establishing confidence that countries don't have secret nuclear weapon production facilities so um yeah this this uh this physical zero knowledge proof research that I just mentioned is in connection with the second of those physicists have found a very clever way to uh for a country to to prove that it has disarmed an actual nuclear bomb without giving away any information about the insides of the the

nuclear bombing stuff which is typically highly classified information that you don't want like the other team to to see so um yeah I thought I mean this I thought that was interesting just because of course there is a there's a ton of really good research being done on zero knowledge proofs uh in the in the web 3 world right now and quite possibly some of that will go on to inform research and researchers in in other areas in this case physicists you know working on this topic of nuclear disarmament so just uh relevant so far as there could be like positive spillover effects from from the research that that is happening in web read space but but the the area where um that is a bit more closely related to to web3 itself is the idea of a global

radiation monitoring Network so folks may have heard of of helium this uh this this uh blockchain project that invites people to install uh iot and 5G hotspots in in their homes and workplaces and so on and to create this like Global mesh Network for for 5G and iot people then accessing the the network are paying to do that and which ultimately helps to to support this open price so that's how people are actually running these hotspots are are rewarded so um uh so what if instead of of a network a Global Network of hotspots we had a

Global Network of of monitors um so and in this case we'll be talking about radiation monitors and I understand the tech is becoming quite sophisticated here that these some of these monitors are capable of of detecting very very small amounts of radiation um and this could potentially help with the um well certainly the third of the three problems of nuclear disarmament that I mentioned it could help to uh if uh it it could help to determine whether there were secret nuclear facilities if nuclear materials being transported around potentially this decentralized network of radiation sensors would would pick up some some signal and if that

information was was available uh to uh on a blockchain for the uh for other countries to to observe they would have reason to think hey this this country isn't it has some secret facility or isn't isn't telling us the the truth um so there uh this is uh the there's a chat called Linden Burford um who co-founded an organization called The Path Collective that are doing some really good thinking around this topic and uh and from some of the stuff that lyndon's written on this topic I I realize that this or discovered that there's a couple of projects that are relevant to this there's one called safecast.org which is

um uh trying to create this this network of a decentralized network of radiation monitors and has nothing to do with blockchains but they they have these kind of handheld radiation detectors that you can actually kind of obtain from them but that that the part of the tech exists and on the other side there's a project called Planet watch which which is which is blockchain based um it's currently not monitoring radiation it's currently monitoring air quality but yeah the component parts for for something like this actually do already exists so we may very well uh see a kind of uh helium for nuclear disarmament some kind of like a decentralized network of radiation

um monitoring and particular potentially air quality and other things pop up over the coming years yeah it's really quite fascinating I mean just to to work backwards from first principles about why nuclear disarmament Armament verification is is hard um and and and why in a centralized regime it's hard is is that um these regimes often don't want to like let you go into their Tech or like deeply inspect them and so working around that by creating a decentralized network of helium style nodes that can just look for radiation in the environment around them and and now that you've taken me from just helium uh and and distributed Broadband or network access

uh to air quality monitoring to radiation monitoring I'm realizing oh my gosh uh distributed networks in which we all have nodes in which we're monitoring the environment around us could be a pattern or a scaffolding for many different types of decentralized coordination in the future that I've probably just never even never even thought of that seems like there's a lot of opportunity there yeah yeah I think so I think there's a couple of things come to mind like um one is that this is uh this is a Hot Topic you know it's uh that unfortunately climate change is just you know just one of our ecological concerns right now but we are pushing ecological limits in a whole range of different ways uh and and in in some sometimes in

quite in an acute way so I forget where exactly that where where this train crash happened um recently in the United States that resulted in this uh this spilling of huge amounts of toxic substances and it seems like there was some evidence of a cover-up there or like that people were trying to kind of like keep it as quiet as as possible so that's exactly the kind of situation where a decentralized network of of environmental monitors could really show its worth and the other thing is coming to mind is just uh I I I'm personally excited to to start thinking about um or to return to thinking about

blockchains uh that don't applications of blockchain Technology they don't necessarily have anything to do with tokens and I mean sure sure like tokens uh are often extremely useful um but uh that yeah I I have a I have some sense that we've um we've come become a little bit blinded by yeah a whole bunch of like really cool stuff just a kind of one more basic layer of censorship resistance and zero knowledge proofs and so on that actually could be really useful and could form uh yeah like a important part of the kind of regen refi movement going forwards totally I would say tokens are uh

necessary but not sufficient in this future so they're they're a building block but I think there's an over emphasis on them because they're the things that you can measure but uh yeah totally I agree nice okay well that yeah that gives you a summary of the of some of the kind of topics that we've been thinking about and metacritis is doubt so I I imagine people your listeners that are familiar with three you know we'll see that this is this is a little bit different you know like there are you don't see that much and we have three space about bioterrorism or nuclear disarmament but um yeah let's say before you know we're trying to always try to raise the Ambitions of the web free space and just so at the very least you know it you know like it isn't just about making as

much money as possible making number go up like there are some like really critical problems to humanity that potentially uh the word free community could uh really help to solve here so um yeah yeah and get so yeah jump into metacres.xyz or the wiki there um your you'll be able to get up to speed with a whole uh class of interesting problems many of which Daniel is speaking about spoken about at length yeah this reminds me of a post that I posted a couple days that went somewhat viral uh it was a a holy man on a hill preaching to his his uh his disciples and uh the holy man says I give you the power to solve climate change AI alignment and other

coordination failures and the audience is just like when token when Moon uh it was one of my more successful ship posts in the last week and I think it's a good criticism of uh yeah I I saw that I appreciated it um and I it's it's it's actually exciting to me that um uh to think that we that in many ways we are we are so early and like and to take the perspective that actually the future of this technology might have um you know much less to do with tokens or might involve like in using tokens in a very different way to how we're used to thinking about it at the moment

someone else that seems to be doing some really good thinking around this is is Chase Chapman that I think has been on the greenpool um pod yeah yeah um and yeah also seems to kind of just be going back to First principles and saying like hey like hey look why are we here and like can we can we get more creative about how the fundamental technology underlying all of um this this work can be deployed yeah yeah well um I'm really excited about this work I'm I'm glad to be ushering it forward and I'm thankful to you Steven for being a co-conspirator in that um I guess in summary for me uh metacrisdao.com is becoming metacritis forum.metacrisis.xyz and also Wiki dot metacrisis.xyz there will be a quadratic

funding round probably in the next month or two to reward people who are doing work around Daniel's prompts we just did a couple great examples of the kind of analysis that that could be useful there and I hope that stimulates some some ideas and discussion in The Meta crisis.xyz Community from here anything I didn't ask that you want to say Stephen I think we pretty much covered it but um just to say thank you Kevin for um for really engaging with Daniel's work I've actually been familiar with with Daniel's thinking for some years now um but before I really kind of entered the web 3 space and it's just been incredibly exciting to me and I know for

a number of other people to see these worlds coming together with just the beginning but yeah I feel like there's a lot of potential here yeah it's really exciting for me I follow Daniel's work for years before I uh had the cones to email him and Pitch him on doing something together but um you know I just I just really hope that web3 can fulfill This Promise of being a coordination substrate for the world and you know not not only being that substrate but being a regenerative one um so you know being reliable being number go up but not just Financial number up for the few but like spiritual Capital intellectual Capital Safety uh increasing over time and um there's a lot of things to piece together but I feel like each each

episode we do in each little nugget of intellectual Capital that we generate is is one piece of the puzzle and hopefully over the next couple years the efforts will just compound if we can just stimulate the right movement so that's that's what I'm here for um does that bring up anything for you I feel like that that we're opening up a whole other afterwards the episode but but yeah does that bring anything up for you yeah yeah for sure I mean um that's that's we we resonate on with these perspectives and yeah um and I see it's uh still a minority but certainly like you know growing part of the community I could say especially since the bear Market in a way which kind of you know yeah a whole bunch of people off there's

some like those are the that are stuck around um you know are are happy to talk about those different forms of capital that you mentioned and to to think of um and thinking in different ways about what the success of this technology and what this industry would would look like um Beyond simply economic success and um yeah I'm here for it yeah same all right well thanks for everything Stephen see you on uh better crisis.xyz see you then [Music]