S4. - Ep. 15 Microsolidarity W/ Richard Bartlett

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network 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 sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of about 10 episodes every couple months this season is lean me in capital allocation machines in what ways can we do more precise scalable Democratic Capital allocation at scale what are the coolest experiments how do we build cryptoeconomic systems that pract rce new ways of doing weird Capital allocation at the frontier these are the themes of green pill season 4 lean mean Capital allocation machines Our Guest today is a capital allocator and also a community leader his name is

Richard Bartlett he is uh a co-founder of the tech Co-op lumio Community Building Network micro solidarity and also does non-h hierarchal management consultancy at the hum he is a director of social impact collective at inspire so I wanted to have Richard on the episode because I think he's really a unique thinker at the intersection of local community and how do we create belonging and participation in local communities um have followed him on Twitter for a while and met him a couple times in person and I think that he's just got this really interesting way of cultivating community that I think is something that we can learn a lot from in Dows and so we spent most of the episode talking about micro solidarity

and Richard's views on building community and then the second half of the episode get a little bit into ways that that interweaves with how we might do Capital allocation in an onchain world so this was a fun episode and I think you're going to enjoy the conversation with Richard hey Richard how's it going I'm very excited to be here very excited to have you um I've looked up to you for a long time I think you're doing some really amazing work maybe we'll start with what is micro solidarity and what is exciting about it for you micros solidarity is a community building framework essentially it's like a way of thinking about building Community um like why would you do such a thing and

how would you do it it's a collection of practices and patterns and ways of thinking that I've collected from practical experience and from traveling around and meeting lots of other community organizers and and identifying like what are the essential patterns that you really need to get right if you're going to enable a more communal way of living in working together and it's exciting to me because I've seen in my own life like in the Story of My Life how the high points of my life sort of reflect those moments when I have a strong sense of belonging and a strong sense of like meaningful work or purpose or like making a contribution to something and the low points in my life are when those things are absent and I

think of micros solidarity as like a I'm an engineer by training so it's sort of like a a a somewhat mechanistic way to produce belonging and purpose and um I think a lot of people need that I think a lot of people are suffering for a lack of those things and it's exciting to like yeah design social infrastructure that enables more people to access belonging and purpose you know it's interesting to hear the word solidarity and belonging and could you could you sort of compare and contrast those two words and how they relate to each other in in in your work so I didn't know know what solidarity meant until I kind of accidentally became an activist during the Occupy Wall Street movement I was

living in New Zealand at the time but occupy took off there like it did in lots of parts of the world and after I'd been participating in the movement for a few weeks I got really interested in you know doing the local thing in our um city Square in Wellington and New Zealand and then at night time getting online and connecting to all the camps around the world and hearing about their stories and and sort of exchanging news and so on and a few weeks into the movement I remember watching a live stream of a pretty brutal police uh repressive moment where they were arresting a lot of people and it was the first time that I really remember feeling an extraordinarily intense kind of sense of empathy watching these

protesters getting beaten up by the police and kind of feeling it as if it was if not me getting beaten up it was like my my little brother or something you know like really close just this really intense emotional connection as a sort of like borderline autistic engineering nerd type I'm not used to having really strong emotions like that and so it was this very gripping like holy moly I really have such a strong sense of identification with these people that to me is what's solidarity is the sense of like my identity kind of spilling out and including yours and vice versa like we are part of something the thing that we're part of is more important almost than I my individual identity so that's the solidarity thing this this thing of yeah being a part of something belonging is very similar I guess it's a slightly more um it's a a

less politically loaded term it's more about yeah my my sense of participation in a larger hole usually it's for a lot of people in up until this last few years belonging has been really attached to place and in the last you know decade or so suddenly we're in this moment where while a lot of people are kind of place independent you know they're traveling a lot and they still need they still have these like basic fundamental mammal needs to belong and so we're like learning can we can we stitch together a sense of belonging even if we don't if we're not attached to a to a solitary stable place so yeah I I think that word that belonging word really is where a lot of my research and my interest is is just like people need it how do we get it what works what doesn't yeah I mean I

think it's so important to articulate that as we move from physical communities which 99.99% of humanity has been place-based communities to these digital communities and one of the things I'm really interested in in having a thread be through this episode is how do we take the work on what works in local communities solidarity belonging deep empathy with the with each other and transpose it into the Dow world or is that a totally insane thing to to even do and and yes so I think a through line between the episode will be how do we take belonging and and solidarity and bring it into the digital world and and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that or maybe

provocations for the Dow community based off of your work in in uh in local communities yeah sure I mean up until 2020 all of my work was face to face you know we're doing a lot of workshops and Retreats and like getting people into Gatherings and and and I was very face tof face Centric I was just like you got to get together there's this thing that can only happen locally that you can't do online and like I still kind of believe that to a degree but the the lockdown and this that whole pandemic experience the like zoomify of everything really updated my expectations about what what's possible to achieve in a digital environment like yeah just really deeply surprised basically about

how much sense of connection you can establish uh without having the physical contact and I think that comes from like if you if you're trying to do it in like an accelerated way if you're trying to establish deep bonds quickly then you can design we call social process design so it's like if you think about how someone would come into like a um well I did the um the kernel program right like a cohort based course you're part of a big group and there's a a beginning and a middle and an end and the social process is like what kind of information are we giving people at what time what are the sort of prompts for participation how are we encouraging people to meet each other and what kind of you know there's there's the kind of like you're constantly nudging people and as a designer you can steer a little

bit about the likely outcomes you obviously you're not controlling everyone's conversation but you're kind of pushing them in a certain direction and kind of Blown Away by how much you know we for example we would run a workshop that might be four 90 minute sessions over the course of two weeks and at the end of that you'd have people who were strangers saying I've never felt more connected to people in my life you know I found my tribe um this has been one of the most meaningful experiences I've ever had and that those sorts of very glowing reports I think are coming from basically having a yeah the social process design head on this facilitation head like how do we cre sorry this was a a digital this was a zoom call they were not physically in

room together Zoom call that makes it all the more impressive yeah yeah it's kind of like mind-blowing that we can achieve that the physical on the other hand we are mammals you know and and the vast majority of our evolutionary history is embodied in person face Toof face encounter uh most of our history we didn't have language we didn't have these like symbolic rational cognition computers on our heads we were were just animals as part of the web of instinct going about our emergent weird smooshy life like all the other animals and that sort of animal domain that mamalian part of our history doesn't really translate into the digital realm you know we we kind of leave all of that stuff behind

the the like I don't know that how it feels to be how you smell or like how tall you are and and these kind of things don't transmit in a digital environment and they really important they're really important to our experience of like just being in the world and yes I can I can engineer a set of conversations online that create like pretty cool experiences for people but there are kinds of experiences you can only have face to face that will leave a deeper impression on someone you know on their soul basically uh that's Irreplaceable that you you just like yeah really sustainable organizations for example I think they all have to have at least some kind of face to face

Peak experience once or twice a year you know there's got to be some kind of renewal of that like oh I remember you you're an animal and so and I and like we trust each other and you smell good yeah that's amazing and uh you know I know people who work for Dallas that will do yearly Retreats with other contributors and those are expensive but I think the amount of trust that you build in those weeks is more than the whole year on Zoom probably in in some ways exactly and it's the most natural way to build trust you know it's like to have a meal with someone to go for a walk in the forest think it just happens organically whereas if you're reduced to only working in the digital realm you kind of have to put some pretty substantial engineering into to produce

that trust well any other lessons for the for the Dow space or provocations or or things that that people who are building digital movements the green pill audience should should know about the big provocation with micro solidarity you know it's micro solidarity not not just regular solidarity so I mentioned I was involved with occupying and and like had my phase as being a pretty Rowdy activist and in that activist world you know you have this anti- capitalist vision and this utopian ideal about how things could be differently I mean frankly kind of got disillusioned to an extent when I met the the cognitive dissonance between here's the story we're telling about the future that we want to create and here's the present reality of the way that we

treat each other and the sort of like the challenge of working with people it turns out it's hard to work with people and it's hard to maintain like a shared project with any degree of Harmony and efficiency you know it's easy to say we shouldn't have capitalism or we shouldn't have police or we you know like the government sucks or it's it's kind of easy to criticize and and identify legitimate criticisms with lots of things that are going wrong in the world but it turns out it's actually like quite challenging to prototype an alternative and to make a case of like we should be doing things more in this way you know do getting into that positive frame of mind and so that's something that I have admired I think in the pro-social domain of the crypto world and and it's it's still my

provocation to you all as well is like if you've got a radical vision for how the world could be organized differently prove it at a small scale like it's if you get a bunch of neres together with a whiteboard and you smoke a joint and you say how should Society be organized you can come up with some really cool diagrams and like you can imagine a lot of things that have that could be different but if you give them you know $10,000 and you say you've got to make a community garden this year um that's when you really get to test those ideas and see if people know how to collaborate and how to how to how to create coherence and how to navigate conflict and so on and that to me is much more credible is the like the lived experience of doing at a small scale

that that builds the case for a large scale transformative Vision great so if you want to if you've got a proposition for how the world should be different prove it at a small scale this actually reminds me of John Hillis from Cabin has this quote that there's a bunch of people who want to start Network States but they've never hosted a dinner party I thought that was really quite a meme and it sort of makes a similar point to the one you're making that was my quote Oh oh I'm so sorry we popularize it conference so I I think that that's such a profound I think that we we just like in in crypto we had this this sort of meme in 2017 everyone was designing these billion dollar crypto economic networks where you just like the whole

thought was if you take a human and you put a token into it out you get an action and it just totally didn't turn out to be true and I'm wondering if it if it's sort of related to this point about how we're more motivated by intrinsic things and emotionally than we are IR rational economic incentives and proving it out at a small scale sort of can help you accommodate yeah yeah anything anything to other well just that when you actually try something for real a real prototype with real people what happens is your priorities change you know when you when you're when you're just dreaming in the imaginary on the Whiteboard you think like ah I've got to really get the financial incentives right or something like that and then when you actually start organizing people and doing stuff together you realize that oh turns out

this particular group of people doesn't really care about the money at all and what they care about is how cool is our merch or you know that just people's you you discover the actual complexity of what real people are like and that they have different values than the the oversimplified person that you imagine in your head does and that all of your idealistic but simplistic ideas about human behavior turn out to be much less complex than the the real the reality which is highly detailed I'm curious to pull the thread of micro solidarity a little bit more what's really exciting to you in the micro solidarity movement and what else what else should we explore with respect to micro solidarity what's exciting about it for me is the way that it is the network is growing in the way that feels very it's

like gradual and I'm not pushing it it's emerging but it feels very organic it feels like growing a garden or something you know like there's just gradually more and more people learning some of the tools and practices and the language and the ways of working of micros solidarity and then and then they kind of step in and take responsibility so like watching that process unfold that people are I think a lot of people come because they they have some sense like oh yeah I this belonging and purpose stuff sounds good I need more of that in my life it would be useful to have a bit of Works ways of thinking but it would be useful to have some companionship you know be it' be good to spend time with other like-minded people that are committed to like creating a more meaningful life for themselves so

people come in and they get some skills and then they get that sense of companionship and that encouragement like oh there's a bunch of us we're all doing it together and they are more they leave like more like resourced or more more capable to organize community in their local space and then some percentage of them say man this network's amazing I really want to contribute to it they step in like oh I can run the you know we run a um sort of introductory online course a couple of times a year and like different volunteers from the network and now stepping up to run that for example or we're doing a big summer camp one in the US and one in Europe the summer and it's like different volunteers for the network are stepping up to organize that and that to me feels like oh it just

feels super wholesome to be honest you know and and it's one of the great things that you've seen in web 3 as well is is the sense of like people get inspired they take initiative they find a place where they can contribute and say this is mine I'm going to do this and I'm looking for collaborators in that that sense that you don't have to wait for permission and you can just like follow your creative impulse that's really exciting I've got to my notes here that uh one of the core theories that you need to grasp about micro solidarity is that groups of different sizes are good at different things I'm wondering if we can pinch and zoom on that a little bit what's the smallest scale group that you usually start with and and how how big do these groups of belonging get yeah good question maybe

it sounds abstract or or mundane or something to say that groups of different sides are good for different things but I really want to seems profound to me I think good good I think people if you're an organizer like if you're really thinking about how to um create economic structures or solve coordination problems and things like that you really need to understand the ways that the groups of different siid are good for different things so like one group that is useful to think about is how big is a group that can hold a single conversation where everyone has shared State of Mind like I can imagine what you're thinking you can imagine what I'm thinking the other conversation participants can all have this like shared mind where everyone is engaged and no one's like zoning out on their

phone how big is that number because that determines the limit of what you can a how much coordination you can achieve with without any like formal structures and as far as I can tell it's it's really small it's like four five six people and at that scale you can become like a some kind of like super organism you know like the best like the real the sickest team or like the most like thrilling conversation that you had late night after a conference it's usually with these like really small groups where you kind of get inside each other's reality and you can each have your you're like the Avengers you know you've each got your superpower and it adds up to this coherent hole that

that's what in in the micros solidarity language we call that a crew and part of the theory is that one of the highest leverage points for having a good life and being able to make some useful contributions to the world is whether or not you've got your crew and if you've got your crew you can kind of do everything and you can solve any problem and if you don't have a crew then you're in a really fragile state and you might do well for a minute but you're not going to be very resilient so it's a big focus on like we just need people to find their crew and we need to go through like this sort of informal dating process for people to find their crew and then the next order of scale is when you start thinking about the Dunbar numbers the one that the dunar number

that most people are familiar with is 150 and this is like broad Strokes you know I don't mind if it's 120 or 210 it doesn't really matter but there's a sort of there's a number where everyone in the group without any kind of artificial constructs without a spreadsheet without a ledger they can all have a rough sense of who owes who what who's a member in good standing who's you know kind of like not really pulling their weight like there's a there's a group size where everyone can kind of just we have the organic Hardware to keep track of that stuff intuitively and if you're organizing it at less than that scale you don't need really elaborate policies and rules and checks and balances and governance and so on

but if you're organizing beyond that scale then you're going to need to start putting in more of these Prosthetics more of this artificial architecture to be able to to be able to hold state so these kind of things is think if you don't have a grip if what I call the scale literacy like if you don't have a grip on on what these different sizes of groups are good at um you wind up with very confused thinking you know you you take what would be a good what are some principles for a uh designing a currency or some kind of metag governance protocol that works for a billion people okay good that has nothing to say about how we should structure our conferences or our you know small Gatherings and things like that like they're they're really different domains and and yeah I see some sloppy thinking about like oh

we want a trustless protocol for for dealing with currency okay but that doesn't mean I want a trustless for how do I collaborate with you so just to restate what you what you said the the levels of scale Within These communities are are self and then I I see on your website you've got a level called partnership and then crew and then congregation and then the one above that is a crowd and um a congregation can contain a crew which can contain many selves and so it's sort of like a fractal layer of thinking about these things and um you know I think for me it's just interesting to think up and down the stack about the ways that you create belonging in a partnership might be different from a crowd and you know the takeaway for for me as someone who's

designing Capital allocation mechanisms and and ideally Dows is that the the scale that you have to coordinate as you go from a crew to a congregation to a crowd is going to evolve and there's going to be some sort of like Prosthetics that you're going to have to put in as you scale to to sort of to sort of manage that scale you think it's completely different at each stage or does it just sort of evolve as you're organically adding more people I think like my mental model it kind of extends really really large to include the entire Cosmos and really really small to include like some atopic particles and so like if you think about your body is composed you've got like molecules and then cells and then tissues organs and then systems and then you've got a body

and then those bodies get together and they form human groups and they get larger and larger and then eventually you get sort of like all beings or like all sentient life or just like all of existence you know you've got this like fractal that goes infinitely large and infinitely small um tissues are different from cells and and cells are different from organs and organs are different from bodies but they're all interacting with each other they're all mutually entangled with each other and the boundaries between them are not clean and straightforward and in the same way I think the this is maybe we get a little philosophical but my sense of like what an individual is it's like quite blurry in the same way that the distinction between a tissue and an organ is kind of blurry like yes you can see they've got

different functions and they've got different architecture but they they're kind of inseparable in a way so that that yeah moderately trippy way of thinking about an individual as being composed it's like basically it's a collective like every individual is a collective and is like composing collectives larger than itself there's a way of like being a harmonious participant in a collective and there's a that's the pro-social way you know and then there's a way of like making a mess and not cleaning up after yourself and being a free rider and polluting the ecosystem and that this idea of you can be pro-social or you can be antisocial like that applies as an individual and as a community and as an organization

and and and my hope with micros solidarity is by zooming down to the small scale we can focus on like how do I be a pro-social member of a collective at a really really tiny scale what's asked of me like what kind of skills what kind of values what kind of character development do I need to have and that might inform the organizations that we build and the societies that we build but if I can't prove it if I'm not a like good friend and like a decent collaborator at the scale of 10 or 20 people what business have I got to have opinions about how Society should be done differently yeah so what I heard there is that there's sort of like this holonic structure all the way down from a single part particle to atoms to molecules pieces of cells cells tissues

organs and then you get into people families communities what you would call Crews and congregations State country planet and then you're getting up to Star systems all the way up to the universe and there's sort of like this this holarchy which is many holons many levels of scale that are all embedded within each other and that they sort of contain each other and but the metaphors break as you go up and down the scale structure and there's also this inter interesting Dynamic of a dualism between the individual and the collective and the private and the commons and at some levels there might be centralization at some levels there might be decentralization mutualism elitism or like the dualisms that we're playing with up and down the stack and so you know I think it's first off like this

episode's mostly about micro solidarity and the part of the stack that's between one human and a congregation but it's interesting to have a theory of of the entire whole Archy from from a particle all the way up to the universe and and so you're you're kind of blowing my mind a little bit by by by thinking about that but I I can't even form this into a question where should we go from here uh um maybe maybe a useful point to get a little bit zoomed in on is there's a chapter on the microsol website where I've I've kind of written up a bunch of theory a bunch of essays like this is kind of how I think about the world and one of them I zoom in on you named it partnership so the difference between partnership and domination and that I I am trying to hold like a big tent I

really don't want to prescribe what people's politics should be but that you've got to sort of have some boundaries you got to have some sense of like what are our values here like who are we actually pulling together and the the sort of biggest tent that I've subscribed to that I feel really committed to and that I'm yeah feel sufficiently inclusive and sufficiently exclusive is this whole framing around partnership versus domination so this is language that I've borrowed from ran eisa who's a pretty rad theorist and there's links to her on the website but domination is basically in the in the crypto world it's often just um isomorphic with centralization so domination is like coercive use of force it's censorship it's like might makes right it's the person who has the most

weapons is the one who calls the shots um and we see it at the micro scale about how two people interact with each other and how I can try and assert dominance over you up to the international scale about how different countries treat each other and then the converse of that is what we call the partnership mode which is where like people are different but our difference is a resource like a source of hybrid Vigor like an opportunity to learn from each other and to to exchange based on our different strengths and like at its best you see this kind of partnership Paradigm playing out in the marketplace where people are are doing this kind of like free exchange and free association and it's like hey how interesting that we're all different and

we can be peacefully different and instead of like trying to make this ranking of who's the most best most important strongest most violent most domineering one we can instead of operate in that ranking mode we can be in a linking mode where we just look at all of our different traits and like find interesting combinations and build networks so that is kind of the project of micro solidarity is like as people who have mostly been operating in the domination Paradigm like most families are structured that way most schools most economic systems most institutions are operating in a domination Paradigm where there's like a small group of super empowered people that kind of call the shots for everybody else like how do we transition out of that and into partnership where like everyone's respected everyone's important they're

all different but they they've got some kind of fundamental dignity fundamental entitlement to their their sentience and their freedom and and their gifts and so on so like that's partly a psychological project it's partly a cultural project it's partly an economic project it's partly like how do we design our organizations that that's the game that I'm up to and and I I name it here because in the broad Church of crypto it feels like there's like multiple competing strands of like political narrative and that's one that I really want to propose to people like are you up for are we on the same page here are you are you kind of like yeah let's not do domination let's not do cotion and let's do partnership because if you are that's kind of like that's a that's a big church that I want to be part of

yeah I I'm curious to hear from you like how does that Land Based on on your knowledge of the ecosystem like is that the game we're playing well I mean I think trying to make a generalization about crypto is like it's like trying to talk about the internet like I don't know are we talking about my bank's website or we talking about like Twitter like um and even within Twitter there's there's fractals out there so it's it's hard to reason about uh crypto as a whole but within the Dow space and within people who work on pro-social crypto which was you know how I defined the the green pill audience I think that there's sort of a pull towards partnership over domination and that's partially a political philosophy but I also think that creative people like Developers and artists work better in a partnership Paradigm than they do in a

domination Paradigm and you know it gets complicated because when you're paying someone a sixf figure salary like on some levels like I'm paying you like please do what I ask but um on on another on another level there's more of like a partnership in the best sort of relationships there where we're each putting in I I think you you made an analogy of like the Avengers where everyone's bringing their one superpow to the table and they combined they're a super team so um uh yeah so tldr it's impossible to reason about crypto as a whole because it's too wide of an aperture but I think within pro-social crypto and within Dows there's a consensus that partnership is what we're trying to achieve and I think that micro solidarity is an interesting way of thinking and skill set for achieving that how's that that's cool that's cool

so then if if that's what we're doing I think that has all these implications about how do we run a meeting you know like how is where does decision making come from like who has power all those sorts of things that's that's a big part of what we're doing with micros solidarity is trying to work out like if that's the destination we're trying to get to in Practical terms how do we Implement that with a small group um and and and my hope is that like that we're playing a role in the ecosystem where like you said we're focused on the smaller scale and then there's other people out there that are protocol engineers and they can really think about how does that how do those small components add up to something of of magnificent enormous scale um and and can we have some kind of Integrity

across all those scales so like my nice lovely friend ly group of workers at this 15 person scale are participating in something of 50 million you know like a 50 million person coordination that has some kind of coherence or Integrity of values across all of that like that's that's sort of my aspiration and my invitation to the the engineers out there yeah I mean I think it's beautiful what what you're creating um I think my guess and to everything that you said and and this is also just my way of working in the theme of of this season of green pill which before we were recording I was telling you this season of green pill is all about Capital allocation and what way can we do more scalable precise Democratic transparent uncorruptable Capital allocation now that we have blockchains and you know I

think most people think about oh we're going to replace the Global Currency and they think about the high-scale things but taking your prompt we should make it work at a smaller scale I'm wondering how we move from domination and partnership a domination to partnership in Dows and you know I think the examp I even said in my example like you know when it when you're paying someone six figures and it feels like you're not getting anything back there's a tendency like should I fire this person that's a form of domination but like I think for us to ultimately move to partnership we're going to have to move away from the boss employee model and into some sort of like more peer-to-peer Capital allocation in order to make these things work and maybe blockchains will enable New Primitives to do that I don't know

if you're familiar with cordin tape and the way that they do gift circles as a way of doing compensation I think that's a really interesting peer-to-peer partnership way of of doing compensation but then there's another level up the holarchy where it's like well are the organizations they're doing coordinate are they successful in market and able to win in Market therefore they can pay people enough to to you know pay their mortgage and and stuff like that so um the thing that I would add to everything that you said um to to to boil down everything I just said into a reductionist uh query back to you is how do we add Capital allocation to mro solidarity and what are the coolest ways we can do partnership Centric Capital allocation yeah that's that's that is a really juicy question just based on my own

experience of like building organizations and startups and like trying to get stuff off the ground and I am basically in this position now where it does seem like the easy way to get something off the ground is for it to start reasonably centralized you know where you have some kind of creative some kind of creative author that's that's that's got a vision for how they want this thing to to look and maybe it's one person maybe it's a small group of of people that have a really like tight coherent Vision about what this thing should be and that as you go through that early phase of like trying to understand what should this product be and and who should our Market be and like you're making all these these highly significant decisions it does seem like keeping that in a relatively

small group seems to be the efficient path for like navigating that really intense period of making decisions really significant decisions really rapidly but then once things have started to stabilize a little and you've got some sense of like oh there's a thing here like there is a role for this uh there's there's a niche you know there's we're playing a role in the secet system then I think it makes sense to gradually enroll people so that you are you might start with this like boss and employee kind of role but that over the course of like oh we've found something a bit like product Market fit and we've been getting to know each other and we've established that we actually do have common values and common ground and we have shared purpose and ideally then you can be enroll people into a position

that's more like co-ownership that's kind of the model that makes sense to me and that means as the project matures the authority and the power is decentralized and therefore the capital allocation the decisions about who's getting paid what like that this is what we do in in the organizations that I've built is like you you bring someone in because they've got a specific skill they need to deliver on a specific objective and they do the thing and then as they get more like let me say like morally invested like as as their identity sort of like becomes fused with this Collective you notice time and time and again that someone their whole attitude changes from thinking about their personal you know like what I want

to contribute and what I want to gain as a result and they kind of mature into we would call it like from I to we they start thinking about the whole system they think like oh I mean it's nice that I get paid six figures but look at the budget man we're going to run out of money like we need to make some changes here you know they they start to take on the like sense of collective responsibility and that to me feels like a very organic and and like a natural unfolding of people's maturity that they start thinking in these Collective terms so that that approach is what's worked in the small companies that I've built is is that gradually enroll people into a state of Co ownership and then just basically we share the responsibility we're all adults here we have all access

to the same information and we you know like for example with my startup lumio there was a point where we had a bunch of funding and so we employed a bunch of people and then the funding dried up and because we were operating as co-owners rather than as a couple of owners and then a bunch of employees we made that decision collectively like what are we going to do that we can't we won't be able to keep paying these employment contracts in the next quarter we just negotiated as a group where everyone was equally responsible for what we're going to do and the decision at that meeting was we all agreed we're going to cancel our employment contracts today while we've still got money in the bank and then tomorrow we're going to elect a subgroup that that's going to figure out what the next steps are and that sense

of like Mutual investment in each other's you know real material needs and like what's the best thing for the project and and how can we do the best with what we've got like doing that as a group to me is like so much more I don't know like wholesome or or it just felt good to do that compared to like if I was the boss and I was firing people and deciding this this doesn't this doesn't feel right and so yeah the hypothesis is if we can I mean we're learning how to do this if we can learn how to do this in our small organizations then yeah maybe it does start to add up into something of a of a more substantive nature that it's not just a marginal sort of like Freaks and gigs on the edges doing these weird

experiments um what I think I admire a lot about you Richard is how you're eating your own dog food I mean this company lumio that you that you founded the fact that you have sort of gone through and puted these practi is in place and and have been through some really tough times and and and worked through them because of that culture you've created I think it's it's it's really cool like I love talking to theorists I love talking to people who do stuff in practice but the people who can connect the a prior Theory and the empirical stuff is um it's rare so so thank you for that um and then the second thing I wanted to say is I just wanted to reflect back that uh I have an experience of trying to decentralize a uh organization uh the project I founded getcoin when went from being a company

to being a DA in 20 2021 and wow what a what a chaotic process it was not only trying to rebuild our product to be decentralized but the governance I think we were just didn't know what we were in for at all and um you know we tried to do it at the scale of I think there was something like 40 to 60 contributors to getcoin that the getcoin D and we had a lot of real troubles in 2021 working together figuring out ways there was there's a legacy of sort of the hierarchical company of which I was the CEO and um and you know my co-founders and that relationship had had been stressful at some points and it was hard to reset in

a decentralized way to each other I I think that there was like Thoms that developed around the ways the capital flowed and then people weren't sharing context and they weren't working together and so I just want to you know be honest about that experience to the audience and to you but also what I admire to you is that you started small and you had a culture that was that was sort of already pre-baked when you hit that that funding moment and it see it seems like it really worked in a way that was less chaotic than the gitcoin example was to me and and the thing I want to reflect back to you from the gitcoin example was that I think that one thing that I didn't anticipate was like there's not only the relationship of a power uh relationship of dominance and partnership but it's also context

who has context for what and are they sharing that freely and and in a world where we are employing software Engineers or designers sometimes a one little juicy bit of context is the difference between a project being successful or or being a failure and so yeah I mean what do you think about uh information asymmetry in context hoarding and and how do you solve for that in your in your organizations yep that is that is a critical piece of the whole power infrastructure is who knows what and um the moments where I have kind of deviated from my values and being a little manipulative it's always been by just managing who knows what you know can kind of do an image manipulation

where you just tell certain people a certain thing and then oh look they're voting this way or that's that's yeah yeah it's a really potent thing and when you're trying to enroll more people and and you're genu you have this genuine urge to distribute responsibility and decision- making and power like you also have to distribute that context or us they won't use that power wisely and it turns out that's incredibly difficult that's been something that has been kind of humbling for me is to realize like some people are more able to hold a huge amount of complexity and information and understand how all the components relate to each other and the sort of second order effects of how those interactions play out over time like that that is a real skill to be able to hold that and when you're a

founder or when you have a particular yeah set of skills you might take that for granted about like oh it's obvious this this thing connects to this thing and then this has you know um but it is actually really difficult for someone else to to inhabit that mental model that's so self evident to you um and I think the the best solution we've found to that well there's kind of two things one from a more like information theory side of things is just think you need to summarize you need to take this infinite complexity and like somehow find a way to pack it down into like a lower dimensional object and the way to do that practically is through Rhythm so that means like okay in a in a busy organization there's going to be infinite number of things that you could

possibly be aware of but how do we like use people's time and energy efficiently is okay at Friday you know at 4 P.M there's an update and it's got the snapshot headlines of all the important things that happened that week and it takes you three minutes and you're going to go and read on the Discord and it's like I can scan through and get the thing that's important to me and ignore the rest like synchronizing people's attention in that way and using that like weekly pulse or monthly pulse or whatever it is like that is the best solution we' found for the chaos of like trying to keep people up to speed with context this like rhythmic approach to digesting information and then the other aspect of it that I wanted to highlight is it's kind of about creating more Founders so that means I mentioned in

the micr solidarity Network we run these online courses and I helped to build the first iteration and then on the third iteration we got other people building it and running it themselves and like I get out of the way and that way they get to have the embodied experience of what is it like to lead one of these programs and they really start to pick up all the details which you can't transmit in a document or a newsletter or a you know a Wiki or anything like that so like really finding opportunities to throw people in the deep end and have the lived experience of what is it like to run something and to to have some kind of staged process of like okay you've run a course or you've run two courses now you can run a retreat like having a developmental pathway that's kind of

laid out in in a linear sequence that makes it a lot more digestible rather than going from Z to one well uh I me I've got more questions and I'd love to keep exploring the design space with you but we're running out of time um I'll ask you the the final question that I ask all my guests which is if you are maximally successful how does the world change in let's call it 10 years from now so take us 10 years into the future 2034 uh what does your work look like and and what kind of change have you had on the world that's a happy question um I think if I'm maximally successful there is many more people who know they they know what their work is in the world and they

know who their people are so this thing that I'm seeing at the moment with a lot of people feeling really lonely and isolated a lot of people feeling like they're working on meaningless like that that's a kind of like weird thing that happened in the past you know it's like wow that was so awkward at this at the beginning of the century that everyone was lost and didn't know what they were doing and now how good everyone has like got their own virtual Village and they know what their role and what their contribution is and they're like um we kind of solved that Pro we solved the we we we found the cure for loneliness you know we found the cure for Meaningful work like that to me would be the the good state that we get to and my and the sort of like

the dot dot dot of what happens after that to me is that we have a much more we in our societies we have much more capacity for pluralism that people are much more able to like tolerate difference and just be excited about that weirdo that lives down the street that's got a different set of values of you than you because you're not threatened by them it's not like you have to somehow undermine them to like look after your own identity like you're you're firmly embedded in your own culture and you you can celebrate the other people down the street that are embedded in theirs and that we've got yeah Much More Much More capacity for holding the pluralistic diversity of what real human beings are like and then what does my work look like in practice I mean we're just started the process of fundraising

to buy a retreat Center so in 10 years um there's a network of retreat centers and Community hubs and like small um kind of micro co-living spaces where people get to drop in and get that embodied experience of what is it like to live in the partnership Paradigm what is it like to be around a bunch of responsible adults who know how to have fun and like take care of each other you can already see glimmers of this you know if you're if you're lucky and you're in the Frontiers you can kind of see this at the edges but that this is much more normalized that maybe you you you leave leave high school or something and you're like I don't know what to do well you go and you drop into one of these hubs and you spend three months there and you you get really inspired

and challenged and you you get in touch with what's important to you and you get lots of good contexts and you're like ah I know what I'm going to do yeah is this too reductionist I feel like you're like a belonging maximalist you're trying to create more belonging for more people um I'm I'm cautious about maxing on anything because I think if you belong if you go too hard on belonging you wind up with fascism so that's why I'm always like there's all these like counter veiling forces so it's like belonging and pluralism you know like the kind of belonging that enables everyone to have their differences like that kind of belonging yes meaning maxst maybe yeah so if there's a 2 by two Matrix where one axis is belonging versus loneliness and the other is domination to partnership you're like a partnership

based belonging well you said you don't like the word maximalist so fill in the blank there but I'm in that quadrant what uh is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say nothing comes to mind just that it's exciting talking about stuff and and knowing the context that you're coming from and being like yeah let's do it together like I'm excited about the community organizing stuff and knowing there's people out there building yeah new institutions and new technologies it's like yeah let's let's each play our part in The Avengers yeah it's very thrilling uh it's very scary but it's also very exciting to be on the frontier and part of the reason I started this podcast was to give access to the people that I have access to to as as many people as possible there's so many people working on creating more of

a pro social future at the frontier and I think the more that we know about each other and support each other the more successful we'll be so hopeing to play a small part and admire you a lot Richard thanks for agreeing to do this podcast hey thanks so much and um let me do a sort of partly an offer and partly a plug which is I really love I really really love uh helping people debug their weird collaboration challenges and like how come my Dow doesn't work and like how do we do governance um so if you go to my website debs.com you can book me for advice and if you can't pay then we'll do it for free and that's fine because it's enjoyable amazing yeah check out uh Richard's website at riches.com and we'll also have a link to micros solidarity. CC which is I got

some really good stuff on it as well yeah thanks again for agreeing to do this it's my pleasure thanks for having me you just heard from Richard Bartlett I'm really excited about micro solidarity thanks again for listening to the green pill. network podcast again this podcast features the people who are building coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world like Richard Bartlett like micro solidarity if you enjoyed this episode then you can collect it on chain go to pods. Media to find all episodes and to start collecting thank you to Sky wtf. and MMA on chain. eth along with paul. eth for being the top collectors in the last

week or so really appreciate your support of the green pill movement while you're here might as well make an Al offering to our algorithmic overlords Please Subscribe rate and review please gratify us with likes and sharing this episode it really helps to build the green pill movement peace and love I will see you next time thanks again