The Human Layer
The Human Layer is a podcast for those who refuse to be optimized, for the builders and breakers at the intersection of emergent technology, political resistance, and the fight for a positive-sum future.
The Human Layer
When Money Flows, Builders Thrive
What happens when funding flows like water instead of coming in unpredictable floods? Graven from FlowState and SuperFluid joins us to explore how streaming money mechanisms could transform open source funding, creator support, and community resilience.
The traditional grant ecosystem, while valuable, forces creators into marketing sprints that break concentration and reward those who can flood the zone with content. "I can't be successful in that environment," Graven admits, speaking to the challenge many builders face when their focus is creation rather than promotion.
Streaming creates an implicit contract between supporter and creator – not just recognizing past work, but betting on future value creation. This shift from transactional to relational funding mirrors the evolution from packaged software to SaaS: continuous revenue creates better planning, incentive alignment, and ultimately more value on both sides of the equation.
As we navigate increasing systemic instability, our conversation expands to examine how communities might weather chaos through local connection while maintaining broader coherence. We explore the potential for AI to bridge ancient wisdom traditions with modern challenges, while acknowledging we're walking a precarious edge with emergent technology.
This episode captures a moment of reckoning in Web3 and beyond – where we've gotten ahead of ourselves with global visions and must now ground our work in human-scale relationships, even as we build infrastructure for a radically different future. Join us for this bourbon-fueled exploration of myth-making on the edge of transformation.
Hello everyone, thank you for joining us for an episode of the Human Layer, where we are just going to riff today and we have myself, crystal and co-host Taylor are here, and then we also have Graven, who's in the house. So I'm going to let you do your own introduction, so I don't butcher it.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, earlier I talked about not having a potted intro. I don't know what I do, but I work on a project called FlowState.
Speaker 2:It's in the Web3 space. My lineage through the crypto, like my crypto career, has all been in open source funding, open source building, and it's culminated now to a co-op called FlowState. We were building with streaming money and trying to figure out better ways to get money where it's needed to make the most impact, and so we started with some funky math ideas with streaming, quadratic funding and maybe moving a little more practical these days to meet users where they're at and just go embrace streaming as it is in a more natural, less mathy way nice, I like that the, the flow.
Speaker 2:It's both a human thing, but also can be a money thing yeah, as we were like messing around like the, the idea with streaming and um as as a light. For five, six years we've been going from grant program to grant program and that breaks your concentration right, you can't concentrate, you can't do deep work if you're like where am I going to get the money to pay the bills? Streaming is a continuous source of funding and so the idea the name Flow State made sense, because we're trying to keep builders in a flow state so that they can actually make the breakthroughs that they are dreaming of. But if they don't have the funding or don't have the time to focus on those deep research questions, they're not going to make it.
Speaker 3:I've come to appreciate why having this North Star matters so much, and I guess I hadn't fully put together. And I guess I hadn't fully put together. It'd be cool for you to at some point realize that marriage actually of like this idea of a flow state, which is much more. You know there's interesting cognitive science behind exactly what that means and some folks have touched it and understand it. Whether it's through like sport or surfing, I certainly get there through like skiing. There's other ways to like dissolve time and get into those sorts of states of feeling like you're just in motion with whatever the work is. But to like have that paired with a funding mechanism, those things probably could feed off each other. It's a cool north startup to I assume you're aiming at, which is like can those things be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that influences each other?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you find a flow state in some sort of environment that's conducive to it. It doesn't necessarily have to be like perfectly quiet or anything like that, but like it is about the environment and you finding that resonance with it. And so, yeah, funding is just one part of the environment that you're building in, that you're creating in, and so now it's kind of we're working on that brand. It's maybe a little superficial but deeper level. That is what we're going for, and it's not all about funding. We're trying to create a culture of supporting and like finding the right way to collaborate. We're structured as a co-op, so all of those pieces are there, but it's a little jumbled and we're still figuring out how to get it all together and hopefully we can find those bits of flow state and then be able to replicate that for ourselves and others more over time.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to the challenges of the grant ecosystem, because I love everything that exists in the impact side for the grant systems, but you identified something that we struggle with at JournoDAO, which was the grant cadence. And I love the Gitcoin rounds, but they also become very quickly a high school click and it's all about the noise and the noise and who will engage with that noise, which I know. We're evolving past that. But what do you see like? How can your protocol and your business help address that issue and create that stability so people can tap into the grant rounds because they are necessary and they do have a really good purpose. So how can they tap into that but also have that stability behind them?
Speaker 2:so they're not constantly dancing between sourcing mechanisms. Yeah, I, we grew up around gitcoin grants and it's. I wouldn't be here building if it wasn't for that, and so, um, but I also feel extremely lucky. We came in early and, uh, there was less noise, there was enough funding to be able to support us and we could do that on a quarterly cadence and it was great. And as it was successful, of course it gets replicated. Other people want to do it and that's great. Like more public goods funding. How could that be a bad thing? But it ends up splintering attention and you end up like, even just this last quarter, we went from a giveth grant round to a gitcoin grant round, back to back, and I'm not much of a marketer anyways, um, I did, I, I have trouble broadcasting, um, and I just doing it now, so yeah well you tricked me with some whiskey and uh, whatever, so hopefully I press record I just, but personally I just like I I'm not, I can't be successful in that environment.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, we try to start building for ourselves and solving a problem that I think is not just about us. Right, I think people feel it. The Internet is all about getting that flood in the zone and, like you see it in all sorts of like arenas and public goods funding, it's about flooding the zone, putting it out as much content as possible so you can tweak it whatever, or just indiscriminately put it out there, because you increase your chances and it creates a negative externality of people's attention. And so you have these huge grant rounds, multiple grant rounds, and people stop paying attention to, like, what they're actually funding. You might get a DM and just be like, yeah, okay, how can I not give you a dollar, but I'm not going to flood people's DMS. I just can't do that, and so I.
Speaker 2:The way I think about it is like we need to communicate, we need to get our message out there, we need to be listening to people, not just in our own whole, like building stuff, but I just feel like it's instead of forcing that into a two week sprint where it's like it's a battle royale for attention.
Speaker 2:Giving it space to breathe is a good starting point, and so streaming mechanisms are always on. You can meet people where they're at. Hopefully people go, use your app and in the public goods funding, they could use your app and then they see, okay, well, now I need to remember to go back and donate to you in a GitClaim round three months from now. Like ain't going to happen and so, yeah, just like being able to push to the edges, be able to spread these times out, communicate on your own cadence, get in front of people as much as you can, but not in a constrained environment. I ultimately think like again, just trying to create the environment for these ideas, to to explore these ideas, and hopefully we can get the right sort of balance Ultimately. Like having events and having a reason to like a funding drive sort of thing like traditional nonprofits will accept your money anytime, right, but then they'll do a funding drive to get some extra attention during this period, and I think that nice balance of both is is really what we're shooting for.
Speaker 3:Yeah it. It certainly seems like it lowers the barrier to entry, which is, like I think, part of what is a challenge for any of this work. I mean, gitcoin did a good job, I think, of allowing and, through just the magic of quadratic, anything but funding is like demonstration of you know a dollar. Things that don't mean a lot to a lot of people, um, allowing that to you know have visibility as mattering for you know, whatever projects or people that you're actually invested in or that you care about. To me, it's just a natural extension of that. Where it's you know whatever projects or people that you're actually invested in or that you care about. To me, it's just a natural extension of that. Where it's you know you can open a stream and, like this can happen in a very low risk. It doesn't need to be hundreds or thousands of dollars. Where it's like everything's on the line, it's like no, this is good testing ground. Let us figure out whether you know this relationship, whether it's just you know one-to-one, a B2B sort of environment, or a broader, more complex. I'm curious how this maps into journalism We've been talking a lot about, like JournalDAO and some of this, the work we've been doing around knowledge gardens.
Speaker 3:Like what does it mean to build an ecosystem that is functionally driven by a substrate of streaming value? Uh, you know, to me that just opens a lot more door. It's it's still hard because even talking about it sounds for a lot of people like sorcery. I'm like, well, what are you talking about? Like we, we just don't have the current mental models that, like make money in real time, flowing like water, mean anything to anybody, but in time, like it's super exciting. Like to me that opened so many doors to just lower the barrier. I'm, if there was a simple one or two click I can commit a dollar, whatever it is, per month, very low risk. I would do that across all kinds of projects or people that I'm currently invested in or that I respect.
Speaker 2:We're just in motion to actually make that real and easy for people to see why that is a different incentive mechanism that doesn't currently exist. There's two analogies that I use a lot and that other parts of the internet have gone through the evolution. Software used to be sold in packaged software. You'd pay a big chunk up front and then you'd get the thing and then you'd have to a couple years later or whatever the cycle is you buy it again. Businesses have pretty much gotten rid of that model and the SaaS model is superior in the traditional startup world because one, the predictability and the alignment of incentives.
Speaker 2:When someone there's implicit or explicit kind of contract being made when they're paying you that you are going to reinvest that to build a better product continuously and I want to bring that to public goods A one-time donation is kind of paying you for what you've done in the past Great job, whether marketing, or like you got my DMs or you built something cool, great. When you're committing to something that is going forward like a financial outlay, they're betting on you to make good on that in the future too and I think that that's. That's healthy. It's a higher bar probably for making that $1, $1 a month is a higher bar than $1 once, not even talking about, like the conceptual of people actually understanding streams. It's financially a bigger commitment to do that, but ultimately I think I would trade off a little bit. In businesses, venture capitalists the most capitalistic people on earth traded off revenue right now for continuous revenue in the future, because it's better for planning, it's better for incentive alignment and ultimately it's it creates more value on both sides of the equation long term.
Speaker 1:I feel like that's kind of what we're getting into here, partially. What you said with the knowledge gardens and then what you just said is we're creating these connections of human value and value exchange and then we're putting a token stream or a streaming device into that, but we're also streaming information and knowledge and co-creation. So once these mechanisms begin to catch on on the hyperlocal level and then grow, then we can begin to remove some of the language barriers, because you're seeing the information flow over here. You're like oh hey, here's a stream that goes along with it to support that information. So the more that people can begin to grok what it is we're doing with all of this stuff and make it accessible just conceptually, then we're able to get more people on board.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so like open source software, we don't deliver PRs like every second Right, and so there's like there's a little bit of a disconnect in timing. But with, like, what you're talking about is like access to data or those sorts of things, that immediate feedback loop is great and can really help. Like people, like you said, grok that intuitively, like because I open a stream, I get access. As soon as I turn off the stream, I lose access, and so hopefully, yeah, we can spread that and hopefully get people to grok the longer feedback cycle and the investment in open source software or longer cycle goods too.
Speaker 3:I hate what Elon has done. Every time I hear that word, but it's still the right word. It is the right word.
Speaker 1:I had this conversation today actually with my friend about where grok comes from and I'm like I can't believe he hijacked that because it's such a good word.
Speaker 3:It really does explain it, but yeah the uh, I'm, it's a, it's a weird, I'm doing this in real time.
Speaker 3:So hold on, uh, it feels like a very short term, like streaming.
Speaker 3:Um, feels like it's mapping to uh, a more web 2 style immediate attention grab sort of. It's got this immediacy that I think is maybe part of just the narrative work to be done is like, and I only, having spent time and understanding flow state and knowing Graven, I'm like it's a much longer view actually like building that as sort of infrastructure or like streaming as a protocol is, is actually the opposite of short-term thinking. But I think the natural inclination is like oh, so you want like attention and value to be this like atomic, granular, every you know moment, every second, which I think is only feeding part of the you know issue of like uh, algorithmic driven attention economy. So I don't know if you want to think on a riff on that, but I'm like I know it to be actually the opposite of that. But I think the natural uh sort of connection into that sort of thinking is like oh, you're thinking very short term yeah, streams are immediate, but they're continuous and I guess continuous isn't.
Speaker 2:Uh, this is, it's the opposite of discrete, right, and I think, if, I guess, if you zoom, zoom in close enough, everything that was continuous gets quantized or atomized, it's like becomes discrete. But we don't, I guess. Yeah, I'm not trying to emphasize the here and now. I look at streams as more about the future. It does like when you start a stream, it is an immediate impact, but the goal is for it to be relational and less transactional. We talked a little bit about that earlier.
Speaker 1:Like when you do something, once it's transactional and that can be immediate too, but continuous and streaming is relational because it's it's that artifact stays live and the connection between the value exchange is continuously moving in between you just touched on something too, like the infinite game and I feel like this is something we are terrible at in our industry is looking at not so much in the impact side I think the impact side has that long-term vision but on the infraside it's so short term and it's partially because of the vc money, like we talked about earlier. Everything is that short-term game like what? What is going to get us to the token, what's going to get us to that flip of the money so that VCs can pull, get their exit liquidity and exit the whole thing.
Speaker 3:But what we're talking about is On to their next AI project.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and maybe hopefully they can marry the two. But like the infinite game, and that is something that has a long-term vision and the entryway is transactional, but then it becomes relational and then we're talking about this perpetual cultivation of relationship, basically through these different mechanisms that we're using in our tech space, and I feel like it's a great opportunity to bring in one of the current events with content as a coin and like that short term gain, like I get it. We've got to exit some of these things, we got to get some of these apps and protocols out there and get the buzz around it. But when you coin every single thing, it just dilutes and then you lose that relational connection. There's no connection between me and this random thing that keeps flying at me because it's a coin, it's being traded, it's being sniped or whatever. But this is something completely different. Like. This is a long-term relationship. It starts as an immediate transaction, but then you're using it to maintain the human connection between your technology and the person you're serving yeah, and that's almost on the internet.
Speaker 2:that's like baked in and um things getting commoditized, dilution, like that's what creates the opportunity for the big centralized players to say don't worry about finding the good stuff, we'll do it for you, we'll make your life super simple, we'll just hit autoplay and we'll deal with it.
Speaker 2:And for this service, we'll insert something that serves us but not you. And that's the deal with the devil that's been made continuously on the internet and that's that's my problem. Like I'm coining everything. They say they want to do it for creators, but you're just, you're just blasting out like indiscriminately and creating more and more content and uh, they've even said that that's like part of the goal and I don't understand how they think that that won't end up inserting the opportunity for someone to become an intermediary and monetize that, whether it's directly traders in this case, like people sniping coins and doing all that sort of stuff. Like people have tried to do microtransactions. If you want to pay creators, you would say, okay, do microtransactions. Then that hasn't worked and it's not due to lack of like rails of financial. It's like people don't want to think that way and so they end up offloading that to someone else.
Speaker 1:that'll figure it out and it'll play out exactly that way and in my that that's my take on it I feel like we give up so much sovereignty to these centralized entities to try to get mass adoption that we lose the reason as to why most of us are here, which is the sovereignty, which is that independence that all this technology represents. And it's a double-edged sword, because I've worked for one of these centralized entities and they do have a lot of resources and they're able to make a lot of change happen and move technology forward in some instances, but at the same time we're just recreating the system we all tried to leave. So if we don't, if we aren't mindful and push back when those narratives rise up, or if we, I mean really it's a great opportunity to slide a better narrative into the ecosystem when those centralized entities swoop in it's the era of Trojan horses.
Speaker 3:I've been sticking to that which I just still believe like this is the time when those that have done a lot of work in this industry which is a broad, I feel like in some ways I'm the outsider kind of looking in, but it's, we've got a, we've got a important window Maybe that's five years, certainly within the current sort of U?
Speaker 3:S context in this administration to like figure out when is time to really push, go on the uh, because it is chaotic, because there is a lot of collapse, because everyone's feeling this like angst of uncertainty and like you can either kind of fold or put your head in the sand or, like you know, discount ai, all that's. Unfortunately, I think a lot of folks are feeling like that's the the only sort of um response, but I think there's a lot of people we're seeing that are like ready to figure out what's the trojan horse, the thing I know that it matters, that I can put down into the base source code level of like what's the new substrate that we can like establish that is truly like unbreakable. You know and and there is some, you know reality that's why we all love Web3 is like there is something interesting about immutability, and you know the permissionless nature of like building durability into the source code.
Speaker 1:And I feel like we're at the point too which is ironic, that we are at that point where we all envisioned this tech being used in collapse, when systemic things fall apart, this technology. Technology can rise up here we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're ready, we got it but it also involves like working on the local level, so like ethereum localism. That whole movement is huge because when systems do collapse, you're going to go to your community gathering places, you're going to have those conversations in coffee shops and at farmers markets and then you've got to bring everybody around you with you and if you don't have a bridge for them to understand what the fuck you're doing, you're not going to be able to bring them with you. And it's fascinating to me to watch our ecosystem fight for its own identity right now, because we've got systemic collapse going on and we're supposed to be able to push our tech into that vacuum. But if we can't get on the same page as to why this tech matters and keep it sovereign and keep it independent, then we're not going to be able to push it through. Or maybe we will, in rebellion of that centralization, and just do it on the local level as much as we can.
Speaker 2:yeah, We've clearly gotten ahead of ourselves many, many times and I'm excited for tonight and was inspired by all the stuff at GFEL, boulder and the lineage before then, and I think it's a disorienting time, like being on the Internet, like what is true, what is fake, and I think there's like at the ground level, the things that are in your life.
Speaker 2:When you touch the hot stove, you know like you can't be, like no, that's not hot, like you can't. It's very, very real and community focused. Things are, I think, more like the hot stove. It's not theoretical, like you see the things it's affecting you. It's like you get a solid feedback loop on truth and so hopefully, that can be a fruitful area for us and, as we like got ahead of ourselves and thinking these global things and it's just gonna be easy and we're because it's so bad, it's better, we can see it. Of course, this is, is what it's going to be, um, and hopefully, yeah, bottoms up through localism and like real use cases that actually, like people can't deny and can't get swept up in narratives that ultimately don't serve like the values that we're really here for.
Speaker 1:And that also creates an immune system for narrative capture. I feel like that is a big thing, especially on the impact side, with so many um, you know folks in power that appropriate narratives for their own centralized, whatever greed-driven agendas, and I feel like that's another thing we really need to be mindful of. Is you know how we allow or what we do when people appropriate the narratives of impact? Yeah, yeah, that's a big, that's a juicy one, that's a whole season actually coming up soon it's a shill coming soon tm right to be determined no, I, I think the uh, yeah, it's the.
Speaker 3:It's funny. The vacuum that seems to exist is like what has created this um come to jesus moment for a lot of folks of like it wasn't strategically planned so much as like now we're in this reactive mode. Anybody in the it doesn't need to be web three or crypto as the sort of solution. A lot of the impact communities, anyone that's like invested in what does it look like to build a better, a better world, is like that. The the vacuum is now very obvious and felt, and so it's like forcing a lot of people to come to terms with. We're feeling conflict, even internally in communities, in a. I'm hopeful that it's like in a good way, because that's you know, we didn't, we didn't deal with our shit until now. It's like hold on, aren't we the solution? And now it's like, yeah, it's time to be the solution, you know. And so it's like reverting back to that local, cosmo, local, you know, grounds, bottoms, up, community driven, like it's just, it's interesting.
Speaker 3:You know it's easy now, looking back, to be like, of course, that's where we're at, that makes sense, that that's where we'd land. But you know, a few years ago, you know, that's not where I would have been. I would have been like no, clearly this stuff will continue to matter and we're going to make global change and it's going to be. You know, you, you have it's an. It's easy, the sort of utopian vision is easy to slide into, but now we're in the space of coming back to ground truth and having to I mean, that's where this podcast and a lot of this work came from was like no, we gotta gotta rethink things a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's other modes and for a community and an individual to have resiliency, they have to be able to compost that negative aspect. Like when something happens in a community it can either fracture it If you've got friction and you don't deal with it, the flames can burn the community down or the community can compost it and become stronger because of it and we do it as individuals and we need to figure out a way to do that collectively in our communities or else they're not going to be able to withstand this whole transition phase that we're accelerating into.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the composting mechanism? I don't. That's not clear yet.
Speaker 1:No, it's not.
Speaker 3:Streaming, funding. There's all these elements that I actually think do represent whatever that. As that happens, we've got this. Yeah, the soil does seem like it's fertile in a way that can be the you know, the base to grow whatever that next evolution of humanity is. But I don't because of AI, because we've got these layers now that are like it's really hard to understand, like when you distill that into this new soil. If we stick with the metaphor like I don't know, it's still hard for me to see what those things distill into, cause it's combined with a lot of shit that doesn't feel right, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, composting is a process, right it like it's, it happens over time, not to like get back into streaming, but like times.
Speaker 3:That's all that makes it work.
Speaker 2:But building good processes is really hard when there's like a lot of dynamic factors and we've just kind of been in a a time where there's obviously crypto is changing, ai is changing, politics are changing, the internet is reaching different levels. It's like maybe this is excusing it, but it's just like there's a lot of dynamic factors at play. So it is very hard to have like a good process that actually produces the results you want and so like we're trying failing. That's also why I believe in open source software and working in open, so that we don't have to repeat the same mistakes, because it's really hard to do this stuff and to get people working together at different scales and across different ideas. And so, yeah, not to make excuses, but yeah, it's been a weird time, it'll continue to be a weird time, so can't take it as an excuse because it's going to continue and need to get better somehow in the face of that.
Speaker 1:And I feel like the composting, too, is going to be different for every community. So a local impact community is going to have different resources or a different vibe, so they're going to deal with conflict differently, and so once they go through one conflict, they can create a playbook and say, hey, here's what we dealt with in our community. This was a situation. Make it yours for the next one, just like an open source protocol, like make the stack different for the next community.
Speaker 1:Infer communities, like dev communities, which are the ones that I specialize in, are very, very different than impact communities. Dev communities are very focused, they're very targeted. Their conflicts are extremely different than an open impact community. Their conflicts are going to have all kinds of dynamics. So you're going to need community builders that have a background in restorative justice and then the opposite of restorative justice and be able to understand the nuances of humanity so they can say, alright, here's an issue. Let's pull this issue out and see is it just this person or is it the whole community? Is this something we can transform into a guidebook to not do it again, or is this something we need to address because we've done it wrong and we haven't supported this person that's come into our community. So every community is going to have its own playbook, and they're going to build it in real time, in chaos, which to me, is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time as like a humanist.
Speaker 1:It's just like you can't make that shit up, hence the bourbon.
Speaker 3:And what's the? That's in some ways terrifying to see the reversion back to the tribal nature of humans, right, like it shouldn't surprise anyone that that seems like what's kind of happening. Everyone's sort of reverting back into whatever their safe zone is Red and blue makes it unfortunately, way too easy. But like it's, how do you support this is a question I don't have any sense of. Like what it looks like to do this well, but like, how do you support that? Because I think it's actually really healthy in some ways.
Speaker 3:Like people are finding what is my grounding? Who are the people? What are the things I want to do? How am I spending my time?
Speaker 3:But if that's it, then it's like, yeah, we end up in this very wild, fractured, you know, unfortunately, the internet now is here and doing this at scale to a lot of people.
Speaker 3:But like, how do you do that, alongside building the connective tissue that creates some cohesion, enough cohesion and coherence between what would feel like completely disparate communities, so that it's like, hey, we are still all trying to build a better world and the earth matters, you know, um, I, there's a tension that I don't totally know the answer to like, because I I find myself reverting into. I've said this as I've gotten older, I'm just like I definitely have like curated my people into a very small, because it's like, yeah, as your time gets finite, you have more reason to be like I'd rather hang and chat with Graven and Crystal on any day than hear the typical noise. So I don't know, it has to be both, I guess. I mean we can't neglect the connective tissue. This is what Web3 ultimately and we know crypto can represent is to create that structure that unifies across boundaries but allows people to be who they want to be.
Speaker 1:We talked about this at JournoDAO two years ago at eDenver, because we're a tiny DAO and there's about six of us at the core you're with us now and we decided to just kind of run it like the mafia. I'm like we don't really do governance because we're lazy and we're just gonna like mafia rules because we're tiny, so we can say it's a family affair. But we decided to do pods. So like you and I are doing a pod right now, basically, and Keith and Spencer are doing a tech pod and they're building the tech infra that we want to see in the world, and so you have these little pods of people that really resonate, like you just said.
Speaker 1:Like we just sit down and talk for hours and just jam together and then you plug into a mothership which would be like a g-file or something bigger. So you're you're ephemeral in these larger communities, but you have a presence when you go in with your pod or with multiple pods. But then you can pull back out and get into that intimate container where real work happens. And, being in this space for so long and being through multiple cycles of DAOs, I don't know how anybody in a DAO gets anything done. I mean governance to me and we've got governance specialists in JournoDAO and I love that it exists, but it's extremely complex Like democracy is complex so we can get more done with the three of us here and then plug into something that's a bigger reach and bigger network effect and then try to navigate it that way. I feel like that is more like natural.
Speaker 3:It's finding the cadence of what the, and that's probably just going to depend on the community and what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I don't know what that cadence looks like. I guess right now.
Speaker 1:I think it's different for everybody and the mission, like we can plug into this mission over here because it resonates, I'm not going to plug into this mission over here because there's no connection there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, fractal designs are great. That's how you scale. Like you can't just throw a hundred million peers into like some and expect it to be not extremely messy, right. And so, yeah, you find your, your, your people, but you acknowledge that, like you're, you're like hopefully finding complimentary people, not just totally like-minded you obviously need to share like some sort of strong. There needs to be a basis for you to have that deep trust and then hopefully you can scale that through like I don't know, some sort of fractal design and like some sort of cadence of reconnecting and separating and, yeah, biomimicry and like following things that nature and like that has worked to create whatever this is that we're in and the complexity that like we are like, yeah, we could. We should learn from that and try to try to use those yeah, that's.
Speaker 3:that's the core of the tension probably is that humans have only ever operated in, you know, even even the dunbar number style 100 people or so, like that came quite a ways later, like it's usually family unit style, that's, you know, more or less built into our, our wetware that we're all operating on, and so now we've just like hyper, over the course of you know, a few generations, you know, sped into this very uncomfortable reality now where we're all trying to figure out what are the systems to allow my, the things I ultimately know at a ground truth in my own brain, and like how I operate, that is, you know, thousands, millennia old, to map into, like me, being part of a, you know, a global collective. Yeah, it doesn't, doesn't feel right and I think it's like how do we I mean, we're starting to find AI being this really interesting, you know, know, terrifying, but like perfect solution in some ways to actually be the mediator and build those bridges. But it's, we're in, we're in weird, uncomfortable times, I think because of that, yeah, and also introducing.
Speaker 1:Like you, you tapped into something that we're working with which is bringing in ancient wisdom from like thousands of years old, bringing it in through an AI model and asking it to apply it to this specific context.
Speaker 1:And then what does that look like? And then you're able to dance with the knowledge of thousands of years and then multiple people because everyone's putting in something into this LLM and then you can bring something out and then extract something that is useful for a community. If you get really specific in your prompting and how you use it and I feel like that is going to be once we get over the fear factor of AI I feel like that is going to be a tool we're going to have to lean into in our communities. It's like how can I access the wisdom of water keepers in an area like this and then the wisdom of tantric yogis in an area across the world from 2, 2000 years ago and then apply it to the power dynamic that I'm dealing with in XYZ? And then what does that look like for both myself and the people around me? And then the LLMs can really dance with it now.
Speaker 3:They couldn't even a few months ago, but now they can actually bring it in and give you a starting point, and then you take it out of the computer and put it into real life and see where you end up I was like wild times, because right now it's, it's, we're reaching out to allow that to happen, but I, you know we're not far from that then being uh, prescribed or sort of mandated, injected in, and maybe in good ways, right like someone who doesn't know that that exists, that that base of knowledge, that ancient wisdom actually exists as an and a pre-existing aligned knowledge garden that, like, does fit your current problem or plight. Like that, to me, is like yeah, like let it go both directions. That should be injected into certain situations, but that then opens weird doors to you know who's in control. At that point Do you lose agency and privacy and all the rest, when it's like you're no longer the one dictating when that information matters?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like we walk on a razor's edge in emergent tech. We do it in crypto all the time and we have like we want our technology on the crypto side to be a dominant force and to bring down a central bank. We're like what does that actually look like when you bring down the central banking system? It looks like a fucking shit show. Same with AI and wisdom and sacred traditions. It could go very badly. It's walking a razor's edge constantly and knowing or trying to know when you've stepped over the edge, but I don't know, Spicy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're here for it. That's all we can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not going away. That's the story of humans is basically figuring out new shit that they don't know how to really control. But the cat's out of the bag and you can't really do anything different than ride that edge and hopefully don't fall too hard and be able to get back up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's weird to be the Oppenenheimer moment. You know it's a great, it's a good movie because it does, I think, really like bring forward that. What is what are, what is the mental state? There was a lot of people that had to like very honestly contend with like what are we creating? And we're certainly right there again yeah, and it's like guarded in this.
Speaker 3:You know it's very different when you have kinetic energy. I know what it means for a bomb to like obliterate a city. Yeah, it's very different when it's like you're playing god, but you're um, you're just putting a lot of compute into training data that outputs algorithms that are, but it's affecting way more people, not to say Nagasaki. That's a lot of people, but it's not a lot of people. When you look at open AI, yeah, the ease of replication.
Speaker 2:Right, it's different this time, because people always say it's different this time or not, but I guess, yeah, something that's kinetic and we were quote unquote lucky that it was so hard to enrich the materials that are required to make bombs. Well, unfortunately, like there's enough knowledge out there, and obviously like chips, and like we saw a mini version of it with DeepSeek and that was partially like overblown, but like we're talking about information and bits and I don't think you can put a lid on it, even if you wanted to. And so that's where I think, like, like some of the safety stuff obviously got off the rails and there's political factors there, but I'm not like a whole on whole accelerationist Like I. I think riding the edge is what we're trying to accomplish, because, yeah, but there's no getting off the ride.
Speaker 1:That part that's like your favorite. By the ticket. I mean, we are, we, we. We have off the ride that part.
Speaker 3:That's like your favorite part. Buy the ticket. I mean, we have bought the ticket, we are on the ride. Yeah, definitely, myth-making on the edge is, at least for me, like yeah, it's fun, it's energizing, it keeps you know perspective. I don't know.
Speaker 1:But it's energizing, it keeps, you know, perspective. I don't know, but it's. It's not easy. I feel like it's also necessary, for in those instances where the line does get crossed, you do need a cushion to to hold people when it goes too far. And myth making is one of those things, because our myths are being shattered now. So, in the absence of a myth that makes sense to everyday people, you have to create a story that people can adhere to to get through the chaos of now and towards whatever's coming tomorrow. And that is where a myth really has value, and we don't we're not good at pillows.
Speaker 1:No, we're not.
Speaker 3:We're just lands on spikes.
Speaker 2:I'm like well, that's not fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that feels like a good stopping point. Is there anything else that we are feeling called to add to the conversation?
Speaker 3:No, we've got another hour ahead of us with the future of Web3. Here we're on site and this conversation will bleed into what it means to, I think, connect all of these ideas into local realities, politicians or otherwise that are on the ground, actually like dealing with very human factors. Yeah, so glad, glad to do this and to have graven.
Speaker 2:You are a voice of reason always I appreciate it, yeah, appreciate what you all you're doing and, uh, yeah, looking forward to tonight where, um, some really smart people coming from different backgrounds, and I'm looking forward to just kind of sitting in the back row and absorbing information rather than talking.
Speaker 3:Yes, exactly the sponges are real. I can appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Same Awesome. Thank you, Raven.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thanks Cool.
