Hello everybody.
Welcome to Sandel podcast number 23.
23 episodes into this thing.
And today we have a bit of a different episode going on this time around.
It's going to be with a Davivi, so known as David.
The three is silent.
And Davivi is from the city Dau.
It's another Dau and I'm starting kind of a mini series called Lessons from Dau's,
other Dau's.
We're going to bring in Apecoin, Dau's, but today is Davivi.
And I heard Davivi speak a few Saturdays ago on Bulls on the Block.
And Davivi came on and spoke a bit about how whoever moves first and gets the rules right
for Dau's will become one of the mainstays.
Whoever gets it right will become more of the permanent party within the Dau's.
And those who get it wrong will fall by the wayside, sort of become a history lesson,
that sort of thing.
And this was during BOTB and during the Apecoin Dau hour.
And what really struck me was Davivi's, the way he approached it.
It was very much a collaborative, hey, let's try and figure this out and also take lessons
learned from what I've seen.
And you'll hear he has a very, very experienced background, both academically, philosophically,
and experientially.
So Davivi, great to have you.
Thank you and welcome on the show.
Thanks very much.
Thanks for having me.
Great to be here.
So Davivi, first time he is on the show and also it might be the first time he's ever
even heard of us.
So for Sandal podcast, we are a podcast about the Sandbox Dau, educational news updates
and all the developments therein.
The scope of the talk for today is a meet and greet between Davivi and myself and the
stream.
And also it's a learning opportunity for us to learn about his experience and all the
things that we can apply to the Sandbox Dau as we live, learn and grow being so new.
A disclaimer, we do not represent Sandbox Game or the Sandbox Foundation, which is the
Dau.
We are not your financial or legal advisors and nothing we say should be taken as financial
or legal advice.
That's true for me for both the Sandbox Game and the Sandbox Foundation.
Davivi, do you represent Citidao or any other entities other than yourself?
I do not.
And I got to start by telling you some bad news.
Citidao is over.
Really?
Yep.
About three months ago, we collectively decided to return all of the funds in the treasury
to our citizens.
So we liquidated all funds.
We had taken a snapshot before we announced this so that nobody could surreptitiously
go buy a bunch of our NFTs and then exchange them.
And then we airdropped the treasury to everybody.
Huh.
You know, in my research, I did not stumble across that one.
So shame on me for missing that rather large nugget.
But let's look into that.
I definitely put that on the list then.
All right.
Cool.
Good to know.
So that's our disclaimer then and Davivi's as well.
And scoreboard.
So there's one SIP, one Sandbox Improvement Proposal up for voting right now.
The Crafting the NFT Drops by Crypto Diplo.
We just interviewed him a few days ago.
So check that out if you want to learn more about his SIP and where you stand yourself
on the details.
And then there's two SIPs that are going up for vote next week.
One of them is mine for the Windows resizing resolution options for the end game portion
of Sandbox.
The other one is Metaverse and Disability by Meta Futura.
And I'm trying to schedule an interview with them next week.
Sandbox style checkbook.
So of the 15.5 million sand that we have budgeted, we have spent 2.3 million.
So 15% of the budget has been spoken for or of the 12 SIPs that have been voted on thus
far.
And SandboxDialBase.ai we're still clocking in at 211,000 token holders, 1,800 wallet
voters.
And as of yesterday, delegations are now online.
So there is an application forum post and the SandboxDial.
So if you would like to be a delegate, a delegate being pretty much a center point of many different
wallets that have trusted them, the delegate to vote.
And when the delegate votes, it automatically has all the other delegates voted for in the
same for the same vote.
And that's about all I know about delegations.
So if you are interested in that sort of thing, there is a post that you should read on the
forum.
And that will bring us to the introductions.
So my name is Lanzer.
I am the Sandow podcast host and also president of MetaWorlds.
MetaWorlds we've published some experiences on Sandbox as well as we write proposals for
the SandboxDial.
Written five so far and I'm in this because I love it.
It's the perfect intersection of business, community and gaming.
And I'm all about all those things.
And the DAO is the perfect intersection where that occurs.
Divivi, if you wouldn't mind, where you come from and a few details about your story.
Sure.
Hey, everybody.
My name is David or you can call me Divivi.
I'm oh, where to start?
Well, I'm from New York, the suburbs, not to get anybody confused.
And I studied Chinese when I was an undergrad, mostly the culture, Daoism.
I like the philosophy Daoism and the language.
I went abroad for a little while.
I came back.
I went to law school.
I'm a lawyer.
I'm licensed in New York.
I specialize in contract law and in Asian Pacific focused on China law, practiced a
little bit in New York, worked for legal aid for a while outside New York and then in New
York did some corporate stuff.
Then I moved to China where I lived for 15 years.
And in China, for the entirety of that time, I was a professor of law.
First eight years at a British university, second seven years at a Chinese university
teaching business law.
I also taught organizational behavior.
And then in the last five or six years, I taught management and HR.
And during the evenings, my passion, in addition to teaching was I ran improvisational theater
groups in Chinese.
So I started the first Chinese improv group in China.
I ended up being the, I mean, I did this for a decade.
I was the creative director of the largest English language group in the whole country
and the largest Chinese language group in the whole country.
Won a big reality TV show, worked with tons of movies, TV.
I mean, at first on camera.
And then after that, working at TV stations in their creative writing departments as the
only foreigner.
I taught required classes in Chinese at the Shanghai theater academy, which was the number
two school in the country, kind of the star maker school.
And so my, now the reason I bring that up and the reason that's kind of relevant to
my story is my focus in all of that was how do you take a group of people who don't know
each other and create a community of trust fast?
Like how does trust get built through honesty and integrity and you know, their exercises
you can do and you know, it's that ties back into the Dow space because as I was studying
that I ended up getting stuck in America, which is where I am now in January, 2020.
I came home for two weeks to visit my family.
COVID hit.
I couldn't get back to China.
So I accepted a fellowship to get a master's in Chinese focused on improvisational theater.
And while I was studying that I was already into the blockchain space in around 2017.
I got in because I was very interested in the disruptive power of Bitcoin for remittances
as someone who lived abroad.
And then that got me into Raven coin, particularly in the idea of fractionalizing real life assets
because I knew so many artists in China doing theater.
I also do a lot of music and poetry and stuff like that.
I knew all these Chinese artists who were very poor, but extremely knowledgeable about
things like Jade or calligraphy, things that are very high worth.
And so they would sometimes point things out to me and say, Hey, you see that in this flea
market or store that's worth a lot of money, but they didn't have the money to buy anything.
And I learned about Raven coin and was like, this is the future of asset ownership is to
fractionalize it.
So anyway, I was already into that space, the blockchain space. And while I was studying
Taoism and theater here in America, getting a master's, I became very interested in the
metaverse.
And by metaverse, you know, we can get into it.
Like what do we mean by metaverse?
But just this idea of a shared common space that is sort of created by humans and we put
bodies in that space.
And how could that space be used to create areas of trust, social infrastructure, interconnectedness,
agency, all of the things that I feel people more and more lack.
So I met a professor who was very interested in that also.
And then he offered to be my advisor if I went for a PhD.
So I did.
I got a second master's just recently in sort of metaverse sociology.
And now I'm third year PhD in that.
So three more years and I'll have my PhD in that.
And then we'll see what happens.
What country I end up in.
Wow.
So you're a PhD candidate for studying in metaverse sociology?
Correct.
Okay.
So you you're from New York suburbs, you practice law and you are a licensed lawyer and specifically
you said contract law that I hear.
Yes.
That's funny.
I'm a contract negotiator and I've been negotiating contracts and writing contracts for the past
13 years.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Not licensed lawyer, but on the business end of all that.
Like contract clauses that the lawyers make sure are worded correctly.
Right on.
So you studied Chinese and then you lived in China for 15 years where you did you participated
or you led improv theater?
Yes.
You like you led a troupe of improv theater.
Yes.
So I had I guess three three groups going on.
There was a an English language group that I had gotten involved in and they did kind
of what's called short form.
People might be familiar with like whose line is it anyway?
That type of show.
I don't love that stuff, but you know it's it's gamey a little.
I like what's called long form, which is you get one word from the audience and there are
various ways to start it, but typically one word from the audience and then you create
about an hour long performance, a play.
It might have three acts, multiple characters.
It has themes and conflict and a climax and you know it's meant to be like sort of one
theater, like an hour long play.
It's just all impromptu and one of the things I loved in China, one of the reasons I love
doing in Chinese more than English is comedy in China is very different than comedy in
America.
I mean laughter is universal, but in China there's no history of something like Monty
Python or Saturday Night Live or any of that stuff.
And so when I taught improvisation to Chinese people, they had no notion that it was meant
to be funny.
There was no idea that I never said you're trying to make jokes.
I just said we're making it up on the spot.
And so you know for people who don't know if you watch Chinese television compared to
American television, for example, American television often is very fantastical.
So look at something like a soap opera.
You'll have these character connections that are absolutely bizarre.
These twin died but was in a coma and came back and then somebody else had triplets and
just one of them was adopted at birth and then came back and they found each other and
fell in love and got divorced and just these really atypical stories.
Or we have shows that take place in space or where people have superpowers or things
like that.
China didn't have any of that.
The average soap opera was about like a young person who was starting out work and their
tensions with their stepmother.
They're just very quotidian, very realistic day to day kind of experiences.
And so when I started teaching improv, I would say, you know, okay, you two people here,
I'll give you a situation.
Your two best friends, you're waiting online to see a movie go and they would just have
a conversation about the like there would be nothing weird about it at all.
And I was like, I love this.
This is fantastic.
This is way more interesting.
So my goal with that always and this is where it gets a little my story gets a little esoteric
because I always studied Daoism and loved Daoist philosophy.
And that's kind of what got me to study Chinese in the first place was in improvisation.
I would always tell the actors, you know, if there's two people in a scene, there's
really three.
It's you, your partner and the Dao and the Dao is this energy.
It's this force and it wants one thing.
Just wants us to play with it.
The spirit of life, the energy of life.
It is playful.
Life is playful and it wants us to play with it.
And if we do, it will give us in return beauty.
That's what it provides.
Beauty takes on many shapes and forms.
And so when we create something beautiful, we know it because it's beautiful.
And the other thing I would tell them is when people buy a ticket to watch our show, what
they're paying for is the opportunity to watch a group of people trust each other.
That's it.
Trust is beautiful.
Hard to develop.
It's fragile and yet it can transcend lifetimes.
It is incredibly important.
It is something that stays with people forever.
The bonds that we form with other humans.
And I believe they don't, you know, most people who have that level of trust, it's because
they knew somebody for decades.
And you see people at their best and their worst moments and you get to be with them
and empathize and be compassionate and share a lifetime with people to really grow to trust
them.
Well, I believe in improv.
We can kind of truncate that experience and develop trust fast.
And trust is beautiful.
You don't need to know somebody for 10 years to trust them.
You just need to learn to trust them.
And so I developed a lot of exercises.
I also used some traditional exercises as a sort of academic.
I used a lot of social psychology and things like that to make sure I could, sorry, I have
to plug in my computer, to make sure I could develop trust.
And what I would tell the actors is, you know, it just doesn't matter if people think this
is funny or even if they think it's interesting.
What matters is do we trust each other?
That's the only thing that's ever mattered.
And it continues to be the only thing that matters.
And that really informs my work in the blockchain space.
You know, because I truly believe, and I wouldn't say it's the only thing that matters.
Ask a person who's homeless of trust is the only thing that matters.
You know, but in terms of something like Maslow's hierarchy, you know, if you're familiar with
it, it's these levels of things all humans need despite whatever culture they're from.
Obviously, we need physiological things.
We need water and air and food and shelter.
We need these things to survive.
And beyond that, we need safety.
If you're living in a war-torn country and you're walking dangerous streets in the inner
city, wherever you are, if you're in a dangerous situation, if you have enough money to live
to pay this month's rent, but not next month's rent, like we need stability and safety.
Beyond that, we need social life, which doesn't even necessarily mean friends.
Maslow called it belongingness.
We need to belong to something.
You know, you look at a Dow like City Dow, people would buy an NFT and through the act
of purchasing the NFT, you're a citizen.
I actually own a space in sandbox.
I bought it a long, long time ago.
If we're talking about the sandbox metaverse, which I believe we're talking about, we are.
So you're Samus Fulton, all right.
I own an extra large piece of land.
I bought it.
You know, I bought a piece of Decentraland sandbox, Crypto Voxels, which I believe now
is just called Voxels because I believe in community.
I believe in the difference between a space and a place.
A space is just an area.
You know, it could be an area that we humans have created with ones and zeros and it's
digital space.
It could be physical space.
It could be, I think, environmental space.
But something that's a place has some meaning to it.
And with theater, I always would talk to the actors and say, you know, we start out on
this stage.
This stage is just an empty piece of, it's just a space.
It has no place to it yet.
What we want to develop is trust, integrity, honor, love, compassion, these core principles.
And then what we create together is a place.
It might be a place of drama.
It might be a place of tragedy, but it's a place where things happen and emotions affect.
You know, I'm really interested in the idea of affect and what that means because affect
to some people means emotion.
And to other people, it means an effective experience is something that is, I'm forgetting
the word right now.
It's like foam.
It is something where you, to use a philosophy word, it's rhizomatic.
You familiar with that?
Do you know what I mean?
Like a tree is, a tree is central.
It has roots on the bottom.
Typically it grows upwards and then there are branches.
A rhizome is a kind of plant like a weed or ivy, where when you look at ivy that's covering
a house, there's no starting point.
There's no bottom and top.
There's just lots of different little nodes all connected together in strange patterns,
maybe fractal patterns.
And that's how I see connections, right?
I don't think a dow can be built like a tree where you get some money, you start with the
roots, you build the foundation.
And then from that you get the branches.
I think that's how centralized governments are built.
But I don't really think that's how communities function.
And so a lot of my feelings about what blockchains could be, what the metaverse could be, what
dows could be, are if we can take a space, like City Dow, I believe became a place, a
place where people would go to speak to each other about their troubles, especially their
troubles affording to buy a house, because that's what City Dow was focused on.
How do we fractionalize real estate?
Now as a lawyer, I was working with other lawyers.
There was one guy on our team who was absolutely brilliant.
Because I'm not, you know, I am a law teacher and I love it, but I am not a brilliant attorney.
And this guy was.
And he had figured out a way that we could use leases and licenses because we can't fractionalize
real estate.
It's against the law.
It'd be a security to give everybody one acre or half an acre.
But what we could do is City Dow owns 10 acres and we give everybody a license or lease to
make certain use of an acre or half an acre.
That's fine because you don't own it.
We can even separate the bundle of rights that is property.
So anyway, we got into that in City Dow.
We did a lot of fascinating stuff.
We went to East Denver, did a fantastic shared experience with Pizza Dow.
I love Pizza Dow.
And you familiar?
Pizza Dow is amazing.
I just heard them yesterday.
I think it was.
You should get snacks.
Why not on this podcast?
Yeah, on Mondays.
Yeah, get snacks.
Pizza Dow is unbelievable because they do what they say, which is pizza.
Everybody gets pizza.
They've spent like a million dollars on pizza.
And here's, this is important, only supporting local.
No Domino's or Papa John's local pizzerias.
And the reasoning is, yeah, the reasoning is just like I'm talking about, pizzerias
are third spaces.
They're not work and they're not home.
And as a society, especially in America, we're losing our third spaces, our bowling alleys,
our barber shops, our local bars, our local mom and pop bookstores, our coffee shops,
the places that are not corporate culture, but are actually local centers of political
activism and discussion and generative connections.
We're losing that.
And I think the metaverse has the opportunity to help rebuild some of that.
I'm a very strong believer in IRL connections, but we live in reality.
The metaverse is unbelievable.
It's global.
And while we have to be careful, I believe not to recreate some of the discrimination
of the oppressive systems in the past, you know, if you get in the metaverse, you can
be an avatar, which means no one knows if you're black or white or tall or short or
gay or straight, old, young, American, you know, Iranian, and nobody knows anything about
you.
You can just be a dragon or a robot or a Hello Kitty doll or whatever.
But how we treat each other still matters.
We make judgments.
We have biases.
A lot of it's subconscious or unconscious.
A lot of it's conscious.
And we need to be careful not to recreate systems of oppression in new spaces.
The way, you know, some of the centralized spaces like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
all of those have sometimes recreated these systems of oppression.
And so I think that's a very important part of the metaverse too, in terms of that second
level of Maslow.
You don't get to the third level if you don't have safety.
You don't get to belongingness.
Not really.
We need to feel safe around each other.
And then we can learn to belong.
And then after that, we can get some self-esteem, which is, I think, really, I mean, I'm not
talking about the final level actualization.
I'm just talking about self-esteem because, you know, there's two kinds of esteem.
There's internal and external.
It's pretty easy to buy self-esteem, get a trophy wife or husband, get some Rolexes,
get a Lambo.
People will look up to you.
But the internal self-esteem, that's the hard one.
And I think the Dows have an opportunity to really help build that.
I think that's what we need to focus on.
Sorry.
So you've been you've been SanFam for how long?
When did you first own your first land?
God, three years ago.
OK.
SanFam since 2021.
All right.
And before we get off too much from your background, there is something that I dug out that I wanted
to test your memory on.
And so are you are you seeing my able to see my screen?
Slide 10.
You're looking at the slides.
Let's see that slide 10.
Yes.
So I have I have I found a picture and it's blurred out.
So there's progressive levels of blurring that I'm going to remove.
I want you to tell me what this picture is from.
And we'll see if we'll see how fast you get it.
All right.
So here's here it is.
Totally, totally blurred out.
Is one layer removed?
Not yet.
I know.
Here's the next one.
Oh, I'm.
No.
OK, I need one more level.
I mean, I think that's an improv show, but I'm not sure.
And there I think is the last.
Oh, no, that was last one.
That I mean, it looks to me like it's a performance.
My group went to a festival in the Philippines, I think the Manila Improv.
You already said it in the course of our discussion.
I didn't expect you to say it.
Oh, well, I don't know if it's not maybe East Denver.
This is East Denver.
OK, 20, 22.
I blurred it out so that the faces weren't quite so I don't want to.
I remember.
Yes.
There was a panel, a panel discussant there.
I didn't know those people that well then.
But yeah, no, I remember that.
Yeah.
Anyways, I thought it was kind of fascinating as I was digging into some research and I
saw this video, this picture from Twitter to two years ago, three years ago.
And yeah, I just thought it would be an opportunity.
That was great.
We did a we did a harbinger tax experiment.
We was a guy named Membranes.
So harbinger taxes, I'll give you the real short, dirty rundown.
It was a guy named Arnold Harbinger and he was an economist.
And what he was frustrated with is if you look around a big city, you see lots of empty
lots where we need housing.
We need a public park, a library, a community garden, something.
But it's just an empty lot.
Why?
Because whoever owns it, whatever company or rich people own it, I use I know I'll use
the word rich people broadly, but whoever owns it, they're holding out for 10 X their
profits, right?
They're not going to sell it for two X or three X.
So it just sits there vacant, vacant lots all over our cities.
They're an eyesore.
They actually do lead to increased crime and broken window syndrome and things like that.
But much more importantly, they're just underutilized.
And so because the people live there.
And so Harbinger had this idea, what if we're not trying to uproot capitalism, but what
if some things are always for sale?
Always.
Now that changes the whole nature of ownership.
Imagine that you buy a piece of land and that land is always for sale.
Now you declare the value.
You lands are buy a piece of land.
It's an empty lot.
You declare the value and you're going to pay taxes on that.
So if the land is actually worth $1 million, if you declare the value to be $500,000, well,
then you're going to pay a lot less taxes, but it's always for sale.
I'm going to bid more than that.
You declared it 500.
I'll buy it for 550 and you can't stop me.
So if you want to keep it, why don't you declare the value 3 million?
Well, now nobody's going to buy it because that's not a good deal for anybody else.
You think it's going to go up in value a lot over the years.
So you're willing to pay, but you're going to have to pay the taxes on that 3 million.
And it's going to be a lot like 50% tax.
Where does the money go to a Dow?
Now when Harberger created this idea, Dow's didn't exist, of course.
So he had this idea that you would have a local community of people who would get this
tax money, not the centralized government, and they would use it for their neighborhood
to build whatever it is they want in their neighborhood.
So if you want to keep your vacant lot holding out for a 10 X, fine, go ahead, but you're
going to pay that money to the community so that they can use it to improve their community.
And so the idea would be at ETHember.
Yes.
So we did it as a blockchain based proof of concept with this guy named Membranes, who
was a big part of CitiDow.
Now Membranes is in ApecoinDow doing something.
I know Membranes.
I highly recommend working with him and talking with him.
So Membranes is a close friend and we had worked together.
You rented a digital billboard truck.
So it drives around.
It has a digital billboard on the side.
And what we said is rather than having people rent that, it's always available on an app
on your phone based in the blockchain.
So Web3 app, you connect your Ethereum wallet.
We decided to use Polygon, I believe, to keep the gas transaction fees very low.
And what ended up happening is exactly what we hoped.
You had one Dow, I forget which Dow, had bid, let's say, $5 to put up their ad.
Somebody else thought, well, hey, this is great advertising at ETH Denver.
It's worth more than $5.
So they bid $10.
They put up their ad.
Somebody else bid $11.
They put up their ad.
So it becomes a constant auction.
But here's the thing.
If I bid $11 and you want the space, you bid $15, okay, you get it.
Now you get to declare the new value.
So you can declare it at $1 again.
You know, it doesn't have to keep going up.
It's what you think it's worth.
Okay.
Once you have access to the asset, which in this case is a billboard and Harbinger's idea
was land, you now decide and you had to pay taxes on it.
The taxes came out of your wallet.
They were per minute.
You could see it on our, on the Web3 counter, MeanBrainz and his partner, BossDragon, who's
a genius coder, are famous now for they've made the trend, the treasury dashboard for
Apecoin and for a bunch of other DAOs.
So they're very good at making treasury dashboards with real time data coming from forget if
it's a deep DAO or snapshot or all these different places that gets scraped and uploaded.
So we had this board, this digital billboard that was constantly for auction for three
days was amazing.
Hundreds and hundreds of real transactions on the blockchain.
Every one of them recorded great proof of concept for the idea that a community, because
you can't do this with a whole country, but a small community.
And you want to know one of the best places to try it.
We talked with people who are Native Americans who have sovereign land.
They can do whatever they want with land ownership, their land.
It doesn't belong to America.
So you, there are groups where you can really create a proof of concept that you can have
land.
You can do it in Wyoming and it's a challenge, but you know, you can have a piece of land
where it's constantly for sale.
Some of the challenges with that are the incentive to build on the land.
You know, if you're going to build something on the land, obviously you're going to value
the land higher once it's built.
And so you have to think about it's a balance of taxes versus value, but it's a very interesting
potential for web three in the future.
And this is an old idea from the sixties, but we wanted to, one of our, the guys on
our team, a guy named Scott is a PhD economist.
And so we're working with him on this.
Okay.
A lot of different places we could go.
So let's go to the next metaverse.
You mentioned the beginning, you get into what the definition was.
When I listened to your Dow, the metaverse podcasts with, I can't remember the gentleman's
name right now.
It was web three with me.
Right.
So when you did that, about 20 minutes, 23 minutes in you, you define the metaverse as
being a collection of technologies.
Sure.
Do you still hold that to be your definition of metaverse?
You would be far greater detail, but you started off with the metaverse as a collection of
technologies.
And sure, so short answer, yes.
Kind of longer answer.
I think when we talk about the metaverse, there are two pathways to discuss it.
One is more practical and one is more philosophical.
So in terms of a practical method, if we are not talking philosophy, what is the metaverse?
It is a collection of technologies.
One of the technologies is data storage.
You simply can't create this much data.
Look at something like Decentraland or Sandbox.
All of the graphics, the interfaces, all of that takes a lot of data storage, hopefully
decentralized data storage so that it's not all stored on an Amazon web server.
And we all call it web three when it's on AWS.
It also requires some sort of virtual interface.
Now, typically we think of that as an Oculus or Apple glasses or whatever the meta ray
bands, whatever they're coming out with, something visual where you can see it.
We're not at the point yet where we have something proprioceptive, haptics, gloves, something
you could put on your shoulders.
There's a great example of this.
People think about something very both futuristic and dystopian like Ready Player One, where
that's a world we don't quite live in yet or something from William Gibson, some sort
of cyber world where people are, you know, or I think it's an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie
or something where people are like laying on a bed and nobody functions in real life.
And we're all just in this dream world.
That's not really the metaverse I see.
But the metaverse I see is proprioceptive.
What I mean by that is, right now, we experience our body in space.
I can touch my nose without any real difficulty because my fingers, I have a sense of my space.
I know the distance from here to my nose.
I just know.
I don't know how I know, but my brain understands where things are spatially.
And I have a sense of existing in this three dimensional space.
Now if this was the metaverse, if this was just a really highly rendered video that you
were looking at, and this was not just a background, but a 3D interactive background, and I was
a photorealistic avatar, how would I know how far I need to walk before I hit that brick
wall or how close this microphone really is to me?
Maybe it's just an, you know, like how do I know where things are in space?
That's a feeling of your body and other objects and distances.
And that's a very hard thing to replicate in the metaverse.
But what we've discovered is, I shouldn't say we, what scholars and scientists have
discovered is you don't need that.
Just like in a game, you just render what's in front of you.
You don't need to render the whole world.
You just render what you're looking at.
So you don't need nearly the amount of space or memory that we would imagine.
And to visualize yourself in space, you know, there's a funny old experiment people used
to do where you have a person sitting on a table and they put one hand on the table and
over here is a rubber arm.
They put their hand behind their back.
So one arm is real, one arm is rubber.
You ever seen this?
And they'll take a feather and stroke both arms.
Obviously, one arm, you feel the feather, the other arm, you don't because it's a fake
arm.
Then they take a hammer and hit the rubber arm and people react with pain because your
brain through mirror neurons, if it's stroking both arms with a feather and you feel it on
one, your brain just assumes you feel it on both.
It's why people who lose a limb have phantom limb syndrome because we have mirror neurons
that reflect these ideas.
So the point is they did experiments in the metaverse where they would have somebody put
on glasses, an Oculus.
You could see a photorealistic version of yourself in the metaverse.
And then in the metaverse, you see someone tickling your back with a feather.
And in real life, someone tickles your back with a feather and you start to identify with
the avatar.
You don't just see it.
You start to feel it.
You could then have wind blow your avatar's hair and you can start to feel it because
our brains are incredible, but they're very easy to fool.
It's why if you put on an Oculus right now and watch a roller coaster, you'll get a lot
of people get sick.
Your brain doesn't know it's not real.
So to really get pathway is the technology and all the things that come with it.
Sorry, I said that was the first pathway.
You said there are two pathways.
We're all practical because this is the technologies.
There's the data storage technologies.
There's the visual technology.
There's the haptic technology.
There is the technology of the Internet of Things, making sure that every single thing
can have its own address.
And I'm not a coder, so there's so much technology that I can't speak to very well.
But there's just this giant bundle of, I mean, look at the graphics technology that's needed
to make things photorealistic.
Sandbox is the best of them, in my opinion.
Decentraland and Voxels are both very kind of low resolution and sandbox is amazing.
But that takes a lot of computing power.
There's a lot of stuff.
It's not going to run on a laptop that isn't very strong.
So all of these are a bundle of technologies and the metaverse is simply that.
Now, what we do with it is different.
If you think about speaking of laptops, when the laptop first came out, people looked at
it as a joke because all the software that had been written up to that time was written
for these giant mega massive computers.
There was no use for a laptop.
But the laptop was a disruptive device because people started creating technology to use
on a pre-existing device.
It's the same idea as far as I'm concerned.
We create the metaverse, and then we figure out what to do with it.
That's all the practical direction.
I see, by the way, that we're coming up on an hour and because I just love to talk, I
don't know if we're getting anywhere in this conversation, but...
We're starting to.
What's the second pathway?
Philosophical.
So here, let's get into Taoism for a moment.
Taoism says being comes from non-being.
And non-being and being are both part of the Tao.
The Tao says there's a difference between li and chi.
Chi is the underlying essence.
The Japanese would call ki or chi is this life force, you know, is our chi.
It's what makes us alive, what makes this bunch of atoms and molecules and cells and
all of these inner parts alive.
What I think in America, some people might call a soul.
Chi is a much more expansive concept than that, because chi is like, if you think of
Tai Chi, you know, Tai Chi is that slow movement, the exercise, that's an energy generation.
You know, that's chi, the underlying substance of the universe.
And then there's li, which is form, like the li of a table.
A table, you can think of this in a platonic way too with Plato.
Plato talked about the true shapes of things, like the true idea, the idea of a table.
There is no table in reality that will ever be as ideal as the perfect table, because
table isn't a thing, it's an idea.
Man is an idea, microphone is an idea.
These are all just ideas.
And then we make imperfect versions of them in our world.
And li is a very similar idea in Chinese, that there are these ideas we have of a table
or a person, and the chi is what gives them force.
So you think of the metaverse as the way I would describe it from a philosophical direction.
I would say it's not created, it always existed, we just found it.
You think of, think about the 1500s in the New World when they were exploring, when Cortez,
you know, was exploring in the 1400s.
There were a lot of countries that had ships that could go very far.
So why didn't they find the New World in 1300?
Because they lacked navigation.
They lacked a magnetic compass, they lacked certain tools, and they lacked certain technologies.
What they didn't, they didn't lack the ships.
They lacked the technology to use the ships.
What we are doing now, I believe, is discovering new land that we didn't know was there.
It exists, it's always existed, we just had to access it.
It is infinite.
It can be inhabited.
And think about what happened when people, especially from the global north, or the first
world, as they would have called it in the past, think about what happened when people
from the global north found, discovered, colonized the New World.
Think about how that changed the economy of the world, the creation of America, the horrible
colonial and imperialist experiences that happened throughout the world, but the expansive
technology, the cultural exchange, every development of the industrial revolution, just everything
was a product of discovering the New World.
So that's what we're doing now.
We're discovering the next New World.
We don't, we're just beginning to learn how to get there.
We don't know how to populate it yet.
We don't know how to live there.
We don't even know what to do there.
We don't know what it'll be like.
But there was a sociologist in the mid 1800s named Ferdinand Tonys, German guy, and he
was working at the same time as traditional sociologists, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and he
had this idea called Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.
And what he believed is he was watching Germany and watching industrialization.
He was watching these cities grow.
And he felt this cold, faceless city where you get all these people coming together for
money and they just don't really know each other anymore.
And it becomes very transactional.
And it's very easy to have one person at the top who controls a big business and they
don't really know their employees anymore and it's easy to cut corners and it's easy
to try to give people less money.
I mean, do you think Jeff Bezos knows the name of his employees?
Like it becomes so easy to be faceless.
And he called that Gesellschaft.
And he felt that at some point in the future, the distant future, we would have to come
full circle back to the village, back to the Gemeinschaft, the small community of trust
where we do know each other.
We do have accountability, responsibility, where we are decentralized, where we have
some polycentric government.
Maybe we do have a government that does certain things for everybody, but we also need to
have these local governments that really have a say and we all need to be involved and civically
involved.
And that's the Gemeinschaft.
And that's what I believe the Dow is.
It is the technological return to the village that Tony has talked about.
So pathway one would be the technology.
Pathway two is that we didn't create it.
We found it and it's the return to the village community.
It's a space that we can turn.
It's a space that always existed that we have discovered.
Look, plenty of people are going to think this is nonsense and, you know, and look at
well maybe I'm not defending this is just my opinion.
I think life is more beautiful this way.
And so it's a space.
Undoubtedly it's a space and I think we can make it into a place.
And in that place, I think what we need are decentralized communities.
Okay, and so now that we've finished, we discovered what the metaverse is.
I feel like everybody owns up a pretty significant debt, right?
BOTB, I mentioned earlier when we first, when I first got on to your introduction and BOTB
back in August, you said that whichever DAO chooses to move in the trajectory of refining
academic knowledge is the one who will have the seat at the table in the future.
And to me that is, that's a powerful statement.
I found myself agreeing with that.
Whoever refines that academic knowledge, who can facilitate their entry into the broader
community at large, talking the Web2 community, just the broader internet community has found
a way to plug into the flow that already exists in our world.
Whereas right now we're insulated.
We have our own language, we have our own way of doing business, take some effort to
get involved.
Once you're in then second nature, but it can take a bit of time to make that switch.
But whoever refines the academic knowledge will help facilitate their ability to stay
within, let's call it, you said see at the table, but I would say it makes, it keeps
them competitive among everyone else.
What I'd want to define here more carefully is the idea of what do I mean by academic
knowledge?
Because I'm saying whoever has X wins the game.
Whoever has X has a seat at the table.
Okay, then what's X?
Because obviously I'm, in my opinion, that's very important.
It's what wins the game.
So I called it academic knowledge.
And I should preface this by saying a lot of people in Web3 do not like that term because
this is, Web3 to me, the ethos is very disruptive.
And I believe that one of my favorite projects right now is Kleros, which seeks to disrupt
the civil law system.
And I've worked with them.
I had a podcast with them.
I don't know if you happen to find that, but a podcast with, I believe it was Membranes
and the head of coding for Kleros.
They disrupt civil law, which is absolutely amazing.
And they're doing an amazing job.
And I see an unbelievably bright future for Kleros.
There's a lot of things to be disrupted.
Pharmaceuticals, the insurance industry, there are DAOs that do insurance.
You know, there's a lot of disruption in the Web3 space.
So to say something like academic knowledge, that just conjures up ivory tower, images
of pedigrees, PhDs, overpaid professors, neoliberals, you know, all of this ideology of privilege.
Most people don't get to go to college, let alone to have the opportunity to get a
master's or a PhD, it is such a privileged thing speaking in the global space.
You know, and right now the people who have that privilege for the most part are people
in the global north, you know, America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England, France, Spain,
you know, all these kind of Germany, all these places.
But what I really mean by academic knowledge is I mean legitimacy.
And to me, the key word is legitimacy.
You know, I mentioned that there's sort of three levels of DAOs, historically speaking.
To me, DAOs began, you know, as early as 2014, probably, but 2016, 2017, that's when you
began to get DAOs.
Anybody could be a DAO.
It just didn't mean anything.
But that's when you started to get in like 2019, you got some legislation in Wyoming,
it started to sort of mean something.
And, you know, then you got the second wave of DAOs where some of them went bankrupt,
but you had some big ones.
You have bankless DAO.
BDAO was pretty legit.
Lex DAO, the DAO of lawyers, Cabin DAO, the DAO of people meeting together and innovating.
You started to have some real DAOs that were so, ah, they is a huge DAO.
You know, some DAOs that were really significant.
Optimism now.
I think we're in phase two, and I think that's going to last for a while.
And we're going to figure out now which DAOs do something, which DAOs create community,
which DAOs are entrepreneurial, which DAOs are public.
I mean, look at Gitcoin, wonderful example of a DAO that does something.
Which DAOs to me get into phase three has to do with legitimacy.
You cannot fundamentally, as someone who is a professor of human resource management,
you can't have a DAO where it's not possible to reprimand anybody, where somebody can get
a grant of money, and then they have no accountability.
They submit a proposal, they get $100,000 and hey, let's really hope that they spend
it well.
That's not, no legitimate business runs that way.
And if you're giving people a grant of money and there's no way to claw back the funds,
there's no accountability, there's no responsibility, except most DAOs would say like, well, every
month you got to write a report on what you did.
Well, you know, track GPT can write a great report on what I pretend I did.
That lacks legitimacy.
Real businesses don't run that way.
I mean, as a business law professor for a lot of years.
So there are things that the DAO speaks truly lacks from a business perspective.
What we need to do is study DAOs.
You know, a good example is I'm now very involved in APECOINDAO.
APECOINDAO like many DAOs is sort of a plutocracy, which is to say it's one coin, one vote.
So if you buy 6 million coins, you have 6 million votes.
I, David, have four coins.
So I have four votes.
If you have 6 million votes and I have four votes, I'm sorry, but I'd hardly call that
a democratic government.
I mean, it's a government by the rich.
That's all it is.
And that's called a plutocracy.
And many DAOs are plutocratic.
Well, that's when we're talking about legitimacy, that's not really going to work to have.
Then it's fine.
You just have a DAO of a few very, very rich people and everybody else hoping the price
of the coin goes up.
That's not really what the point of a DAO is.
Now in DAOs, we don't even have the technology to really do proof of humanity yet.
We're getting close with WorldCoin and things like that, but nobody wants to get their eyeballs
scanned.
So we're still a little while off from having real proof of humanity, which means you can't
do a Sybil attack and just open 10 wallets and say you're 10 people.
Gitcoin passport is one sort of method of identifying yourself.
But you know, the point of this is, what's the point of this?
Am I even talking about here?
So the point is that to get to the third level, the legitimacy, who do you need to be taken
seriously by?
Who needs to take you seriously to have what I call a seat at the table?
And I don't mean this in a bad way.
The answer is not crypto degens.
The answer is not people who want a Lambo or want price go up.
It's things like the United Nations.
They take you seriously.
You have a seat at the table.
You don't need most of countries in the United Nations have a population of less than 10
million people.
And their treasuries, so to speak, their country treasuries are not in the many trillions of
dollars like DOWs can compete.
We are not far off from a Dow.
If you have a Dow with a with 2 million people and a treasury, Apecoin used to have $3 billion.
You have a you have a you have a Dow of a couple hundred thousand people, 500,000 people
and $10 billion.
You don't think countries are going to take you seriously.
That's real money and power and a lot of people.
And you have countries out there like Estonia.
I have an E residence from Pulao.
And one of my best friends has an E residence from Estonia.
Barbados already opened the first diplomatic office in the metaverse.
There are countries out there that want to be forward thinking.
They may recognize a Dow as a semi sovereign agent.
You're never going to be so academic knowledge.
Help us do that.
The only way anybody is going to take any of this seriously is if you have a paper written
that has proper methodology, research, academic rigor, and it's published in recognized journals.
It's peer reviewed and universities and international organizations and scholars can look at this
and say that is verified.
Because right now we suffer from a crisis of what is the truth.
We live in a post truth society.
We don't know what's true and what's not.
We literally just had a debate last night in America with two people where they needed
to be fact checked because they say things that are not the truth.
We don't know what the truth is.
There are lies all around us.
So blog posts, I'm sorry, they don't cut it.
It just doesn't matter.
You can have a hundred blog posts with a thousand great ideas.
Cambridge won't take you seriously.
Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT.
These are blockchain societies.
There's a blockchain society at every one of those schools.
There are people engaged in this and the ones who are getting the grants.
America gives out billions of dollars in academic and scientific grants every year.
Most universities give out hundreds of millions of dollars in academic grants.
People think that the money in web three comes from NFTs.
Real money comes from governments.
That's where the money is.
It's in universities and governments, but they don't give it to blog post writers.
You know, to get a seat at the table, you really need to be able to participate in the
web one world of knowledge creation.
And so many Daoists talk about education and education is the transfer of knowledge, the
transfer of skills, but it's not the creation of knowledge.
In Daoists, we're trying in metaverse, we're trying to create new ways to govern.
We have to prove it works.
I mean, I just said, you know, Apecoin Dao had hundreds of thousands of people in $3
billion.
That was less than six months ago.
Now they have $300 million.
Do you have any idea what would happen to a country if they went from three billion
to 300 million?
It would be, I mean, it's a, the whole place would fall apart.
Like this is not being studied.
How did that happen?
We need to know because we can't prevent it if we don't know.
All of these things need to be learned and studied at the academic level where they're
published in journals and scholars from around the world trust that because while we do live
in a post truth society, scholars and academics are actually a pretty sizable group of people
who kind of still have a method of truth.
You know, this look, the, the slogan of the Royal society in England, this dates back
to 1200 people don't read, or maybe 1100 was don't trust, verify.
People think that's a web three slogan that was from 1100 AD, the Royal society of England,
don't trust, verify academics have been doing this for a millennium.
They've been doing the don't trust, verify you can't, you just, we want to see it at
the table.
We have to verify that this stuff is real.
Nope, that not make sense to me.
I like the way you're going with, I can see some connections to the sandbox towel though.
You can hold off on that because I think your connection to the Apecoin DAO does bear fruition
in what you're saying.
A study from it going, I think it was, I calculate the exact figures in one of my improvement
proposals because that spawned a sip for me to, as of right now, put together a team of
experts to churn out realistic revenue options and revenue plans so that the sandbox style
can start generating money now, start accruing revenue streams now versus years down the
road when like Apecoin DAO where it's now, it's trying to grasp for whatever it can,
as fast as it can.
I've been listening to BOTB for quite some time and that theme started emerging over
time.
I was like, wow, this train's coming for all of us.
Every doubt.
How do you bring in more than what you're pushing out?
And if what you bring in isn't enough, if what you're spending is less than what you're
earning, then it's only a matter of time before that number capsizes your project, your organization,
unless you have some sort of philanthropic factor.
I mean, this comes back in economics, this is the free rider problem.
So if you want to create something, a community, a business, an entrepreneurial enterprise,
a startup, whatever it is you're creating, I, if you're creating the free rider, if
you're creating a transit system and you spend all this money on the trolley or the bus,
how do you stop people from just jumping on and using what you created to their own benefit?
It wears it down over time.
It takes up the resources, it uses the infrastructure, but they're not paying for it.
How do you prevent the free riders?
People in all of these Dows, you know, you buy the token or the NFT, you hope the price
goes up, but you're not really involved in the governance.
And here's the thing, people want to be the people I've, at least I can't speak for everybody,
but most of the people I've met in web three, they deeply want to be involved to the extent
they can be.
They want to learn more.
So in city Dow, we had guilds where each guild brought in people and we had weekly meetings
and people who didn't know much about stuff.
We would train them up, whether it was an advertising or marketing or graphic design
or law or whatever, we, you know, you got to train people up in a community.
And I think a lot of Dows, you end up with a small group of people who make a lot of
money.
There's something in sociology called Michelle's iron law.
The iron law, which has never been broken, says every small community that starts for
a good social purpose ends up with a small group of people in power who want to hold
onto their power.
The iron now I've oligarchy.
Yeah.
Michelle's iron law of oligarchy.
Now I don't think it really is true in every, I'm sure everybody could find edge cases where
there was some community, let's say a religious community like the shakers or something, maybe,
but Dows, I believe could be the community.
We don't get anywhere until we break Michelle's iron law.
We need a community of people who are socially minded.
And I don't mean, you know, they're look at something like clema clema Dow that works
for carbon credits, you know, and climate activism.
Great.
You can have another Dow that's pro saving the dolphins or saving the coral reef or cleaning
up the debris in space.
You could have Dows for every single one of these purposes and the Dows could make money.
But if you have a small group of people who rise to the top and start making a lot of
money, a big part of my research now is the effective incentives, financial incentives
in Dows because we have all this money.
We could distribute it to people, but that's not really what happens.
What happens is a few people earn a lot.
Everybody else earns nothing and hopes their token price goes up.
That is a reiteration of Michelle's iron law.
When we break the iron law, then we're really getting somewhere.
Okay, I put that put that in the open topics if we have enough time to get to later because
I'm I'm intrigued about that.
Let's see when on on CDAO took me by surprise that it's all over with.
So at this point, it'll be like a debrief, a retrospective, if you will.
At the time, I had a DOW based AI show that it had 4800 token holders, 68 proposals and
3400 wallet voters.
So that that was that was interesting.
Very fascinating to see.
And so the DOW history is that so you said in the beginning and as as of over three months
ago, the DOW, CitiDOW is concluded itself.
It airdropped its treasury to the community.
Yeah.
So let me give a if it's okay, like a quick debrief and run down.
Sure.
The next was CitiDOW.
So go ahead.
CitiDOW started in around 2021 based on this idea from a guy named Scott Fitz without doxing
his real name.
And he had this idea.
He put out a tweet that said, hey, guys, I want to buy some land and create a down in
Wyoming to test out the new Wyoming Dow law.
And a bunch of people got together.
They put in some money.
They created this NFT that was CitiDOW NFT citizen.
They sold them first citizen founding citizen.
They raised, I don't know, something like four hundred thousand dollars.
They bought the land.
It was, I believe, 40 acres of kind of scrub land.
You couldn't really build much there.
It was zoned for a one family house, but very windy.
There were bears.
It's not a good place to live in Wyoming.
That was pretty cheap.
Now, very soon after that, Vitalik Buterin wrote about CitiDOW because they not only
do they run in similar circles, Scott and Vitalik, but Vitalik is very interested and
I shouldn't speak for him, but his blog posts speak to the idea that he's very interested
in how DOWs can help humans to gather and how we can change things like fractionalized
ownership of assets and real estate through DOWs.
So he mentioned it.
Well, boom, all it takes is a mention from Vitalik.
We were up to eight eight million dollars.
Now, here's where you get problem number one.
I joined CitiDOW shortly after that.
Maybe this happened in 2020 and I joined in 2021 or 2019 and whatever it was.
I joined shortly after Vitalik had mentioned us.
When I joined, we already had eight million dollars.
I didn't know any of this stuff about Vitalik or I mean, I knew who he was, but I didn't
I didn't know the history, the early history of CitiDOW then.
I just got in because I was interested in fractionalizing real estate.
And problem number one, this actually is very similar to kind of what happened in Apecoin.
The way the tax law works in America, and this is not true in lots of countries, but
it is in America, is with crypto, every time you transfer an asset to another asset, Bitcoin
to Ethereum, Ethereum to, you know, whatever, to Ethereum to Seoul, Seoul to AVAX, AVAX,
whatever, anytime you make any transfer, it's called a taxable event and you have to pay
taxes.
So when people bought the NFT with cash, the price of Ethereum at that time was around
$4,000 per token.
CitiDOW now owed tax at a rate of as if we got $4,000 per ETH.
That's what we owed taxes on.
However, our treasury, because we didn't, we just started, we didn't have a financial
manager or anything.
The price of ETH dropped to like $1,000.
So take a look at Apecoin, you know, you had a billions of dollars when the price of Ape
token was $4.
Well what happens when it drops to 60 cents?
If your team never diversified from Apecoin to gold, silver, Bitcoin, Ethereum, US treasury
bonds, USDC, anything, they just had it in Ape.
Well, the price plummets, so does your treasury.
Well that happened to us.
Our treasury was 100% in ETH.
ETH plummets to $1,000 and we now owe taxes that would almost bankrupt us.
So already we were in a tenuous situation where we had less than 3 million and we owed
a million in tax.
We did pay all the taxes legally.
That was a big part of my focus on legitimacy was we have to pay our taxes.
You know, we cannot be incorporated in the metaverse.
We're really incorporated in Wyoming.
So anyway, throughout the next two to three years, we had a first city council.
I was on that.
I helped write the city charter and we started these guilds and we developed a lot of people
and it was going great.
The education guild, we had a three day online conference with academics from around the
world.
We were doing all kinds of things, but the money was going down.
You know, we were getting all these CIPs and people were requesting grants for this and
that and it's supposed to be algorithmic.
So if you get enough votes, but it wasn't that hard to get enough votes if you knew
the right people.
And you know, you started to get these issues and then you started to have these de facto
delegations.
They're not, you know, we didn't create them, but you would have the Chinese delegation,
the Middle Eastern delegation, the Turkish, just all the people would sort of band together
and block their votes.
And then these delegations could kind of vote against each other and it became very politicized.
So at that point, we really needed to pay our taxes.
But again, this is a problem with DAOs.
If everything is done through a democratic vote, well, if you take a vote, you have to
take a vote to pay your taxes.
But if people say no, which is what they did, so we couldn't pay our taxes, but we have
to pay our taxes.
Like what do you mean?
It's like, it's like taking a vote on whether I can go to the bathroom, but I have to go
to the bathroom.
Like, so we, I was able to help engineer an international city council with a certain
number of Chinese members and Turkish members and French members and you know, just something
to get it together.
So great.
We had an international city council and we paid our taxes, but then the international
city council was deadlocked on everything.
Every time the Turkish would make a proposal, the Chinese would block it and the Chinese
would make a proposal and the British would block it.
It was absurd, but you know, learning lessons.
So you got all these delegations kind of not working together.
Ultimately, it really came down to one issue, which is if we're going to build land, build
something on land.
Well, I guess two issues, one, if we're going to buy land, should we buy a pre-existing
structure like an Airbnb or a school or something, or should we buy empty land, which is cheaper,
but you need infrastructure, you need electricity and plumbing and you need to build something
and that takes time and permits and you know, money.
So what land should we buy?
And then the bigger issue, where should we buy it in China?
Should we buy it in Turkey?
Should we buy it in the Philippines?
Should we buy it in Vietnam?
Should we buy it?
Hey, it's a great time to buy in Cambodia.
Yeah, it is, but who's going to be there in Cambodia?
So we couldn't decide where to buy the land and Scott kept putting out proposal after
proposal.
Let's just do something.
Let's do something grand.
Let's do it.
And every proposal just kept getting blocked and the community started to get a little
bit toxic, I feel, because nothing was happening.
It was stagnant.
And finally, I decided to leave and I gave in my notice, my resignation.
When was this?
Because I felt, sorry?
When was this?
Probably six months ago, I'd have to look at the CIP, but I decided to resign because
I felt like the community wasn't being well served by all this infighting and that the
best thing I could do was continue being a citizen, but continue working on what I believe
is legitimacy and fractionalization.
And at that point, Scott, the founder, also chose to leave.
And once the two of us left, pretty much, we made a proposal to just give the treasury
back to all the citizens.
It passed with a super majority.
And so we gave a couple of weeks.
Scott had taken a snapshot and let everybody see it to be transparent so you could see
how much you were getting to make sure your wallet was listed.
And then in tranches, we gave it all back to the people.
I believe the land was donated to charity.
And the end of CityDow.
Wonderful learning lesson, really.
I take so much away from it.
I made good friends who I still talk to all the time.
A ton of great experiences.
I wouldn't trade it for the world.
So this happened three months ago is when it all came to a close?
Pretty much.
That's when I joined ApecoinDow.
My friend MeanBrainz had recommended ApecoinDow is kind of like it's a whole level above.
I mean, ApecoinDow at that point had like a billion dollars, 300 million, whatever they
had.
It was a lot more than we had, which was 3 million.
It was an order of magnitude, two orders of magnitude larger.
But what's been fascinating is to see how problems do get replicated.
Scale doesn't necessarily matter.
We need to fix these problems, but to fix them, we need to analyze them.
I've seen so many people at ApecoinDow, very, very smart people making very smart suggestions,
but they have no real rigorous data to back this up.
I happen to agree with some of their opinions, but it doesn't matter if I agree.
But what happens is when you've legitimized evidence that's been proven and a lot of people
agree, that's when it becomes much easier to pass a vote.
So I did some history digging myself when I put together a revenue option SIP for SandboxDow.
And ApecoinDow has only been in existence for two and a half years per CoinGecko.
Apecoin's original $25.97 billion market cap from April 2022 had been reduced 96% to $843
million in July of 2024.
And you're talking about market cap.
So that's if all of the tokens were sold, which of course they're not.
The amount in the actual treasury was billions at one point, then was $300 million.
Now the banana bill passed, which was $100 million proposal, which passed very, I mean,
that's a great case study.
It passed like that.
It just slid right through because all the people who have millions of votes wanted it.
It didn't matter how many other people, there are 224,000, I think, individual wallets.
You could have every single wallet, but I've vote against it.
It would still pass super easily.
And the dashboard, I see $289 million, Ape.
And this was just a month or two ago.
Its cash flow is $10.9 million, Ape going out the door.
So that to me was a big eye opener for myself that if you don't have something going for
you, you cannot expect to keep on going out money and grants and expect to remain solvent.
And then all the problems-
This is a big issue in the Dow space.
Are Dow's businesses, you know, because businesses don't operate this way.
Businesses don't just give out grants with no accountability.
That's just not how they work.
You can't-
Obviously you can't expect-
I think it operates closer to a nonprofit, the more I observe.
And I've only been looking at Dow since May 28th, since Sandbox announced its Dow out
of nowhere.
There was no preamble.
There was no preface.
They had been doing it in secret.
I say in secret.
They had been doing it outside of the public's view for eight months.
And then May 28th, they announced the Dow and the SIP and the foundation to the legal
structure and the budget and the special counsel all at once.
And now I've been delving into it ever since.
But the more I look at it, the more I think this looks a lot like a nonprofit.
Let me propose a vision to you that I have of the future, five to 10 years from now.
Imagine a company like Nike-
Different than the five to 10 years that I know that you talked about in Dow to Metaverse?
Go ahead.
Well, I don't remember-
I do.
I've got it as one of the questions.
But I already know the answer now that CityDow is gone.
I love that guy.
I forget his name.
I haven't talked to him in so long.
We used to talk every week.
God, he's so cool.
Forget his real name.
I'll have to find him.
You've inspired me to do that.
I know I wrote it down.
Please.
I miss him.
You said in the next five to 10 years, this was two years ago, you wanted to be the dean
of the city and you want to be offering multiple degrees, sociology or history.
And my question was-
Oh, I'm right on that pathway.
Are you still?
Okay.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
I am now working with a group in California called RTM, the Center for Research Theory
and Methodology.
They are a group of professors.
They have 30 to 40 years experience.
They publish a very well-known academic journal.
So they have it down.
How do you go from being a professor to writing articles, to getting them reviewed, to making
your own journal, to publishing a journal for years and years and years?
And their philosophy is we need to end this pedigree stuff.
We need to have teams of methodology experts, PhDs who know the academic game, along with
people who are content experts.
So let's say you're a firefighter.
Why should I, the PhD student, interview 20 firefighters and then think I know something
about it?
Why wouldn't I co-write the paper with you?
Because nobody's done that before.
Every single paper has always been by the PhDs about non-PhDs.
How about the non-PhDs get involved in it?
Then you start to get the pedigree.
Well, nobody ever wanted that before because that's disruptive.
But that's what this group in California has been working on.
And couple that with the idea of starting a journal, so they already have one.
Recently I met the guy and I'm not going to give any names yet because it's not formalized,
but it's the first journal of its kind, let's say.
Very legitimate.
This person is, I was starstruck and I don't get starstruck easily in the crypto space.
But this person blew my mind.
They've run a journal for a very long time and they're very interested in working with
this team.
And just this morning I had a call with somebody who does very serious work in micro-credentialing
and courses.
I mean, this stuff is, it's taken years, but it's coming together for very real.
I mean, I'm not going to be the Dean of City Dow University.
Not anymore.
So that's taken on a new form, but the vision is still the same.
By the way, his name was Zach.
Yes, thank you.
So, my vision is, what I was just talking about is not a vision for David.
It's a vision for the Dow space.
And it's one that's a little bit contentious.
So imagine the big companies, Nike, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Merck Pharmaceutical.
Let's take Coca-Cola as an example, Kellogg's.
Let's take Coca-Cola.
Let's say that every company learns about Web3.
Web3 is just starting.
It's nascent.
Nobody knows what the blockchain really is.
I mean, so few people.
Big companies don't have blockchain departments.
But imagine that Coca-Cola realizes we can take $5 million, $1 million, nothing to them.
You know, absolutely nothing.
We'll take a couple million.
We'll put it in a Dow treasury and we'll create the Coca-Cola Dow.
Now everybody who is in it, you buy an NFT and you are a Coca-Cola citizen.
And you can be part of the Coca-Cola world.
The Coca-Cola country.
You are a citizen.
You're not just a brand representative.
You're not just wearing Nike shoes.
You are part of the country, Nike.
You're a citizen of Nike.
What do you get for that?
Right now, if you wear your shoes, you just represent the brand for free.
But if you buy the NFT or you're airdropped it or something, you're part of this Dow community.
You can rise up.
What if you have great marketing strategy ideas?
What if you're a kid from Istanbul who's 17 but has fantastic marketing ideas or graphic
design skills?
You propose them through a Coca-Cola improvement proposal, a CIP.
They get traction.
They move up.
You get more money than you ever could have made working locally.
And you get known, you get a team.
I mean, Coca-Cola is watching all of this.
You have another team that has a million dollars just to spend for the public good.
All it is.
Right now, just to help out communities, to help out minorities, to help out disadvantaged
people, they can focus on whatever they want.
How does this look bad for Coca-Cola?
This looks fantastic.
So Coca-Cola would have people from around the world or Nike or Reebok.
All of them would have customers, consumers.
Because while I am pretty anti-capitalist, I'm a Buddhist and a Taoist, I live in the
real world of capitalism in America.
I am not trying to disrupt the world.
I'm trying to figure out how we make it better.
So we get these big companies that have these enormous treasuries that have consumers and
what they want is the customer to feel connected to their brand.
Right now, if you buy a pair of Nike shoes, you know what you don't get?
Money.
How about you buy a Nike NFT and you get to be part of a Dow that is five million in its
treasury, and you can make all kinds of proposals and you can get compensation.
You can have teams that run it and get money for all people all around the world.
Nike could, they could slash their advertising costs if they have their own customers doing
their ad campaigns.
They could slash costs all over the place.
You could have people around the world.
You could create a customer base that is international, that knows very little divisiveness, that
is incredibly diverse, that is committed to your brand because they're personally benefiting,
and you could give back to communities.
I don't see why any company wouldn't do this.
And I think they will.
I think, look, we have a Dow law in America in two out of 50 states.
This is not even taken off yet.
No one knows what this is.
We don't have the Dow law in 50 states.
We will.
And when we do, then people are going to figure out what to do with it.
Well, you know who helps them figure out?
We do.
And you know how we help them figure it out?
By academic work, by the creation of knowledge.
Now, that's not the only thing.
You know, let's say you're doing all this work in Sandow and you're on the ground and
you're writing SIPs and you're developing the community and running this podcast.
And let's say I am a PhD scholar, which I am, and I want to write a paper and I want
to work with you.
And it discusses how did a Dow just come into being like that?
Because hey, if Sandow did it this way, so could Coca-Cola.
They could work privately for eight months.
And what you and I could study would be how did this affect the community attitudes towards
the Dow?
All we do is interview people, give out a survey.
Did people feel good about starting the Dow this way?
What were their things they were?
They did not.
So, well, and then why and what would make them feel better?
And how did it happen?
And what could be?
We write this into a paper and we demonstrate that this maybe was not the most effective
way for brand loyalty and for consumer engagement.
And we throw in these kind of words and we use some classical theories of marketing and
advertising or customer satisfaction theories or the rational theory of choice of motivation.
You write a paper.
I mean, that's all it is.
And then universities, companies, I mean, you want to make money, ask how much money
Coca-Cola has.
You know, this is not I used to tell the people as a final point on this when I was a theater
teacher and they would say, David, we need to charge more for tickets.
And I would say no, because you don't make your money from tickets and you don't make
your money from classes and you don't make your money from selling t-shirts.
You make your money from getting commercials and you only get commercials if you're the
fucking best.
Oh, can I curse?
I'm sorry.
I cursed.
Two of my actors are now multimillionaires listed in the top 10 A list actors in China.
They are so rich that they came to me crying after this was all over telling me that they
lie to their parents because they are ashamed that they have so much money.
They are rich beyond their wildest dreams.
And they didn't get that money by charging $10 instead of five for a ticket.
And you know what, we don't get it by charging $20, 200 instead of 20 for an NFT.
That's just not where the money comes from.
Not the real money.
You know, the money doesn't come from I have a brand of coffee called Sandow coffee and
I'm going to return 2% to the treasury and I expect returns of $1,000 per month.
Cool.
That's awesome.
Do it up for brand loyalty and engagement.
Let's get involved.
Like that's not Oxford money.
That's not Coca-Cola money.
They will throw millions of dollars your way if they think it can increase their brand
engagement half a percent.
Like companies don't know about this and they will and they will throw money at whichever
Dow has a seat at the table.
Yeah.
And the way you spoke about that, I was looking at it through those lens as well.
Whoever can bridge the old and the new.
Old is the wrong way but the persistent common language of humanity and business and all
the different ways of being in the world versus what we are evolving into, which we don't
know yet.
We are still very much under debate and discussion and conflict and tension.
All of that is messy and this is more stable.
Stable as can be really.
But if you can find a way to bridge that, like you mentioned a paper and then bridging
well-known business concepts or like McClelland's or Hertzberg's, all these different things
that I learned in business school that if I can then connect as having a foundation
of hey, I know what McClelland's theory is and what's the need of achievement or power
have to do with sandbox Dow and if I can make that connection, if I can articulate that
in a way that someone over here can understand, then more people over here will start to bridge
that gap and then just start horizontal.
I mean I love the example of Hertzberg.
The opposite of satisfaction is not dissatisfaction.
The opposite of satisfaction is no satisfaction and the opposite of dissatisfaction is no
dissatisfaction.
You take a theory like that, which is engaging and reasonable to understand.
You couple it with some data about sandbox Dow and you publish that in a business journal
marketed towards here's what a Dow does and how it potentially could be used.
Here's how it was implemented by this particular organization and here's ways it could have
been improved.
I mean this is, there are many bridges to get to the new land.
It's not difficult.
It just takes effort.
And time.
Yeah.
It's not difficult.
Time and effort, yeah.
Especially if you have an understanding or even a Wikipedia knowledge base, let's call
it of business acumen or you've owned your own business and so you know what a balance
sheet looks like.
Like you know, all you have to do is just connect it now to what academic theory has
been studied, it's relied upon and it has the necessary rigor behind it.
That if you connect it appropriately, then now you just access this whole network of
very well connected, very powerful.
You made an important point before.
The old world with the new and part of the old world for publishing these kind of articles
is being a PhD scholar.
It's hard to get that done if you're not.
The network is really only available to them.
It's the same with being a lawyer.
There's just things I'm allowed to do because I'm a licensed attorney.
Anybody could do them.
They're just not allowed.
You know, and as a PhD scholar, anybody could publish in a journal.
Theoretically, I had never seen an article published by someone who wasn't, who didn't
have a PhD.
If I were to attack this and I wasn't a PhD person, I would first start with the Web
3 network.
So like Coingraf, Cointelegraph or yes, somewhere like in that realm.
And then I would start moving to Forbes, just announced their own Forbes Web 3.
It's probably in there.
Then I would target the the undergraduate academic portion of a blockchain oriented
people within Harvard, you could call it University of South Carolina, doesn't matter.
But you start building the foundation of you had said before, bridges.
And you know, I live in a city where there are lots of bridges.
Many of them will get you to the same place, just different bridges.
So that's certainly a bridge.
Now what I would do, I would take that same article and publish in the American Journal
of Management.
And while you're getting a base of young people and support and Forbes and this and that,
what I'd be getting is citations.
And let's say I get 500 citations from scholars.
And now when your students who you're cultivating want to write articles about stuff, they're
citing me.
We're going to get to the same place and I hope we're going to get there together.
And it's okay that there I mean, we got to build more than one bridge for sure.
Yeah.
All right, so that was an interesting detour.
What was your your role in city down?
I got that you were part of the legal guild and the education and research guild.
But I thought there was a different go ahead.
I would call it myself a facilitator.
That's usually the word we used.
I thought I heard a director of partnership or something about that line.
Okay.
Must have misheard then.
So what did you do inside city down?
Why you were there?
Well, for the legal guild, we held weekly meetings that were open to everybody.
We discussed the legal stuff.
And then I worked with the other lawyers to draft the contracts agreements, the independent
contractor agreements, the legal rules when we had any sort of conference or get together
or things like that to discuss with the rest of the Dow what you should and shouldn't say
publicly and you know, all of the legal stuff.
And then with the education guild, we held a weekly call.
We also held a weekly discussion.
We also held a bunch of different projects.
Like I said, we did a convention.
We taught a course in I think it was New Zealand at a very reputable university there where
they were teaching about blockchain and city down was their case study for the whole semester.
So me and that economist Scott, different Scott had both gone in and we were kind of
professors there alongside the New Zealand professors and we had groups of college students
that spent months on our discord and in the discourse forum looking at CIPs and then they
made their own proposals of how to improve the Dow.
So trying to take it to the academic way and we're a bunch of other big main proposals.
We did this thing in East Denver and those are the ones that come to mind.
We did, you know, mean brains around the podcast.
I was just looking at his profile while we were we're talking about him and I did see
and didn't notice it before but but city podcast.
So what sort of governance structure did Sant the city Dow adopt?
Well at the beginning we had non quadratic voting.
So one NFT equals one vote.
So there were people who were whales so to speak, you know, we nobody had millions but
there were people who had like 200 or 300 NFTs and our forum.
We had two levels that and this was a learning exercise for me where if you made a proposal
for zero to $10,000 it required on I don't know if I'm going to remember all of these
exactly but I think it was 250 NFT votes.
And if above 10,000 it required 500 NFT votes and it was I think 50% majority to pass.
Now that was okay for a while until people figured out how to game the system which is
to say 999,000 was everything you know and as long as you could kind of what eight coins
going through right now it is I have no idea why they did this because we fixed it.
We fixed this problem by creating an algorithmic formula that I told a point about which was
the more money you asked for it was then the higher voter approval rating that you would
need.
You don't make it 69.
I mean come on that's adorable.
It's cute guys but like you can't have the same approval rating for somebody asking for
$100,000 and $3 million.
You shouldn't.
I don't think.
If you have the exact same vote for that then if you amass enough people on your side why
would you ever ask for less than $10 million or whatever it would be like so you want to
make it a cap of 250,000 great now everybody's going to do 249,999.
Fine like all you did was that.
So okay but you know we did find an elegant solution that our economist proposed that
was an algorithmic curve so that there was a minimum in city that if you ask yeah no
matter how little you asked for you needed at least I think it was a hundred votes quadratic
so we started using quadratic voting where it's the square root of the number of NFTs
you have.
I wish a point would do that too but so if you have I sit wait say it again slower the
square root of the number of NFTs you have.
So let's say that I am rich and I have a thousand tokens so the number of votes that I can exercise
is the square root of a thousand.
Let's make it 10,000 I have 10,000 so the square root of 10,000 is a hundred right is
a thousand a hundred a hundred times a hundred ten thousand.
I'm pretty sure a hundred yeah so I have 10,000 I have 10,000 NFTs that means I get the square
root of 10,000 votes.
That makes sense no no you lost me okay if I have one NFT what's the square root of one?
One yes so if you have one NFT you get one vote to get two votes how many NFTs would
you need to own?
Four yes to get three votes what's three times three?
Nine yeah so as you want to buy more votes like an Apecoin you want a million votes buy
million tokens but with Quadratic if you want five votes five votes you need to buy 25 tokens
right square root of 25 is five.
Does that make sense?
I hear what you're saying I don't understand why you're saying.
Oh yeah I'll get there I'll get there just so if you want to have five votes you need
25 tokens that makes sense right?
Okay.
Now if you want to have one more vote so now you want to have six votes.
Thirty-six you're going to need to have 36 tokens so whenever whenever a proposal is
on the floor for voting if I have 36 NFTs it's only going to equal six votes correct
for everything for everything now let's say you have a hundred NFTs you're a whale at
CityDow if you have a hundred NFTs so you have a hundred NFTs that means you're going
to get ten votes I don't like your proposal I think it's bad for CityDow to defeat you
I just need to get eleven people eleven individuals and defeat one rich person no and if you
have a hundred votes let's say you want to you want to get eleven votes instead of ten
it gets algorithmically you know exponentially bigger if you have a hundred NFTs you get
ten votes if you wanted eleven votes now you need a hundred and twenty one this is good
for our treasury because if people want hey you want to buy the votes fine but it's going
to cost you so much more and I can defeat your bad idea by just getting a couple more
people with one NFT each to oppose you so the the little people with a little bit of
money can oppose the rich okay so for sandbox you have a hundred lands then let's just say
36 lands then you have in effect six lands for voting I mean if you did it that way it
depends the purpose of voting this way is to get rid of whales or to reduce whales power
okay because if you can reduce whales power then you can get a large group of poor people
a large group of people with one NFT or one token can actually challenge a rich person
yeah so that was our purpose with that and that was for the quorum and then for the voter
approval rating which like ape dow just made it 69 percent that percentage was an algorithm
that went up the more you asked for so you could ask for our whole treasury but it's
going to take like a 99 approval rating if you ask for five thousand dollars it would
take like a 35 approval rating so you need to pass quorum and you need to get an approval
rating so approval rating was is not quorum no quorum if you don't get enough rating
would be not even legitimate approval rating would be it needs x percentage of vote to
pass yes correct all right got it where ape coin dow was 50 percent now or 51 now they
just made it 69 for votes above 250k okay so and this scaled up the higher percentage
you got for the the budget was in the more money you requested oh the more money okay
of the higher your percentage to pass would need to be these are interesting things i'd
like to consider we thought a lot about governance how do you stop whales from controlling this
and i feel like we did successfully stop whales what we didn't foresee was regional delegations
okay let's get into that you i believe this is where you started talking about probably
i can only stay for about 10 more minutes i gotta go oh all right let's triage then
what we've got left here because we're coming up on two hours sure okay what what are some
lessons let's just rapid fire and then we'll use whatever time we have left what are some
lessons that you'd offer any dow about governance stuff that you learned from city now if people
aren't kind to each other you have an immediate giant problem that's number one money people
will come to a place they want to be and then they will find ways to make money people will
not come to a place where it's not a nice place to be and everybody's trying to figure
out how to make money it's about the place it's not about the money people think it's
about the money the number one reason people take a job according to studies is the salary
and the number one reason people leave a job is because they have a bad relationship with
their boss number two relationship bad bad relationship with your co-workers so people
enter for money and they leave because they don't enjoy relationships and that's been
proven time and time again in multiple industries and it's just as true here if it's not a place
that's enjoyable to be it will not work financially what are your view on what is your view on
governance working groups i'm too new to ape coin doubt a really weigh in on their effectiveness
though i guess i would go back to michelle's iron law of oligarchy if you have a small
group of people making a lot of money and it's not clear exactly to everyone what they
are doing they will try to defend their position and say they're working hard in order to keep
their privileged position of money and power what are some successful ways you've seen
to maximize community communication video on calls irl meetings talking to people consistently
outside the dow whether it's phone or text but like not just meeting for calls actually
reaching out every single day to people and having conversations with them finding out
what people's interests are besides just the dow getting to know them on a human level
okay and sandbox the same box game as as you've seen is a metaverse gaming place the sandbox
dow is a community who is still struggling to understand what its relationship is most
of the sentiments right now is that the the way sandbox dow was introduced out of the
norm out of the blue was thrust on people mostly as a negative viewpoint people are
declining to participate in some cases some of them just vote no on every single proposal
till they believe that a voice from the community is put onto governance type leadership places
under these conditions what would you offer as an emergency triage addressing opening
up the levels of trust or regain some semblance of participation can ask a couple questions
sure as many as you feel you can get as long as we can get to an answer before you go go
here how do you vote is it based on the sand you own a sense of and so one sand equals
one voting power one land equals forty five hundred voting power just regardless of the
size of the land regardless of the size so if you have one hundred lands you have one
hundred times what do you need what's quorum quorum is currently thirty million so it's
one percent of the total supply do most votes meet quorum the last three have failed the
past two that just passed the past couple days only met quorum because sandbox use its
twenty seven million voting power from the wallet otherwise it would have failed so we
don't yet know what that is that's also kinda pushed into mistrust this whole thing about
how sandbox that they wouldn't use it but they did this time around it wouldn't have
made vote otherwise it it it abstained so it didn't change the vote it just allowed
it for the s votes to have have any votes achieved that quorum that didn't involve sandbox
using their voting power yes the of the thirteen uh... i think seven or eight of them passed
without and who had i mean thirty million like who had voting power like where there
some individuals who have five or ten million or something though it seemed to be i mean
that there's some of them i don't think there was one that was over five million there were
a few one millions but it was mostly uh... just people voting there's a pretty good how
many people then you're talking about thirty million i mean can you give me a general on
a on a good vote how many individuals vote uh... somewhere between two to three hundred
that's one so people must have quite significant voting power uh... some of them do but like
i said i don't think i saw one of them even above five million but if you have let's see
look at the math you're talking about you need thirty million so let's look at the one
that just uh... let's look at it by three hundred people you would need about a hundred
thousand each person for three hundred people so six six right at seven hundred eighty
two voters that was the most popular community set the first one top one had three point
six million voting power so yeah okay i'm i'm getting an idea of it i'd have to look
at a spreadsheet you know in more detail to get a real sense of how many are over five
hundred thousand how many are over and of those that are over five hundred thousand
how often have they voted you know how has it been consistent or no problem it's it's
some of the enough
yes some of some of those data points would be valuable but you're as you said you're
very new so there wouldn't be that much data
do you have a treasury
we do
fifteen point five
fifteen point five million sand of which we spent fifteen percent
what's the current price of sand
it was twenty six cents
let's see if it was twenty four cents right now
times
twenty five cents
okay so you have three point seven five million dollars ish
are there is there a financial team that's in charge of the treasury
negative
when uh... s i p passes how does the money get from the multi sick to the proposers
there is a doubt administrative team
which it was commissioned by sebastian
or jay
the the co-founder
and they are
they have control of wallets
question mark
and or seven his team then transfers the money
person okay
so none of the leaders of the dow
who have significant administrative power
were chosen by the dow
you could theoretically argue
that that is the case because
the the dow pass the first three steps
although
that was uh...
i would not count that as a
call it a a real
test of the community's
and indication couple other questions
who is the highest
or what is the highest elected position that you have in this town
uh... it is the special counsel
which are it uh... five
five-member
team
uh... yet sues on it
sebastian borgia john michelle pile
chan's and those
those people were chosen by the dow voting not by the
not by the sandbox deciding
they sebastian borgia
sent to join the special counsel
the second sip was the one that ratified the special counsel
okay so they weren't elected by the people necessary
what it was a lot of people are voting no because of that
do you know what salary they're getting is that clear hundred thousand sand
per year just in your ear
a hundred thousand sand of the summer much
and forget sue i mean
owned animal like the biggest web three company
ever of all time
okay so there are no i mean i don't mean this to be
disparaging
but it sounds like there are no high-level leaders have been chosen from
the
down members really correct
okay that would be safe to say
that's where a lot of problems
is broken
right now sure sure
well i mean no trust was really established so there isn't much to break
but
bear also fair
you know obviously what you would want would be
to
almost like unionize you'd you know i think you would want the community
without the involvement of any whales i would almost
wonder if there's a way to make an informal vote
of
anybody with
under
a hundred thousand sand may vote and nobody with more camp
and it is that
well i did try to elect a representative from within the people who are involved
but not heavily invested in
this project
now maybe you make it anybody with less than a million whatever it is like
just a vote that can't be controlled by the whales like a uh...
up more like a poll an informal poll
where you try to elect let's say three
representatives of the dow
who have no formal affiliation with sandbox or anything like that
and then try to hold a meeting between those three
and the special counsel
to find out what it is
the that sandbox what what do they want
from this down
because you know in working in this kind of situation
to me it seems have no leverage
you can't make demands on them that's correct
what you need to know is what is it they want to achieve
and how can you help them achieve that
art uh... let's go back to
give me as many rapid fires we have
i'm left for
sixty eight proposals at a city now i heard you say
uh... out there algorithmic solutions for quorum and approval ratings what are
some other rapid fire type
best practices that you learned out of that
standardized
c i p s or s i p s
making sure that every single one is legal
extreme transparency
uh... and obviously that's an issue you're talking about cuz to me that goes
directly to trust
you know you need to be able not just to
get of report
from somebody about what they did or didn't theoretically do they need to be
available for calls they need to be beholden
they need accountability i mean accountability for me is a real keyword
people need to see what they're going to do and then
do it by that deadline or not get paid
people cannot
how did city down do that
we did our best not to pay in one lump sum
also
you know we we tried to use bounty boards
we give people bounties instead of giving them compensation
and if you had a project you try to break it into parts and you don't get the next
part until the first part is met
and we'd have to make sure that everything is overseen by your peers and
not by the quote unquote leaders
because there's always the temptation for the leaders to just not give you the
second part of the money or the third part
where what you need is
governance by the people for the people
i'm seeing some cross
uh... some intersectionality with sandbox on that one
uh... thank you for your time
i really appreciate you very much discussion
and
i think we got through like eighty eighty five percent of the question so that
there's no
we got exactly what we're after which is learning from city down
learning from your experience
which is vast and i think we spent
at least an hour and a half
talking theoretical stuff
but even there i was able to pick out some pieces that i think
is very interested to in relevant to the the sandbox down
well i think we should be opportunity and i'm very happy to meet you and i
hope we can
keep talking in the future i really
i really applaud your efforts
the
attitude and precision
that you're taking in trying to move this forwards
thank you that those are very kind words i appreciate that
are there any
uh... closing comments any shout outs you'd like to give
big shout out to scott the founder scott fits the founder of city down
and shout out to all the people in
in city down you know i won't list them all by name but
it's been a great experience shout out to a point now
and shout out to
all the the nice people i've met their shout out to your community
and then ultimately
shout out to every
kid or person sitting at home
looking listening to this and being like i wonder if i could be part of this
because i'm not a lawyer and i'm not a coder
and i'm not in anything and you know
shout out to that person
who absolutely like this it's not just that you could be a part of this this is
your place
this is for you this isn't
this isn't for me i'll be dead soon enough this is for
the young people who are like what what could the future possibly hold like this
is what it could hold
absolutely
and shout out to you my in the chat who has been very very active
having a
little mini conversation
in the chat but thank you you very much for participating in rocky mcgill
proxy mcgill as always
uh... thank you for your time
of evey and uh...
cc
have a great day
by heart
that was impressive
so the vb has departed
and
trying to
my thoughts together now on
there there are some key moments and i put him in the chat excuse me i put him
in the slides
if you're watching the vod
you can see
and i was trying to keep up
he's very very knowledgeable as you can see he's pulling together different
facets
of life and education
academia
into experience
into his understand these weaving it
as g is a says that we need to tapestry
some things that i pulled out
specifically
from his notes
was
uh... the first one
when he started talking about
fine academic knowledge
those who have to see it when he explained with that what he thought that
meant
and
but i heard him talk about was
being able to apply it and academic setting
dickly a paper
something that draws in
some of the well-known
academia
let's just use that word for now but
for business management concepts you know talking about
series a series b funding
or or management theories like mcgregor
here he acts in theory why
that he mentioned maslow's
a lot of things like that where we can
make it not just
and of a case study but offer it back to the web to web one community
where it became become
the kind of
boat that they used to cross over into web three
something that can help build bridge
that that was fascinating
that would take a lot of effort
not difficult but it would take a lot of effort
to achieve
and being able to because academic rigor there's a reason why
there's such a high bar when it comes to educational standards
it's gotta be peer reviewed it's gotta use well-known studies he called it
academic rigor
quite difficult
resource
those venue
but once you do
as he mentioned once you bridge that gap
can really start to
those who figured out
have a seat at the table
and and as they say it elsewhere business
if you're not at the table
you're on the menu
uh... some mounts he mentioned was when we start talking about
he started talking about the city council
how real-life regional politics started playing into that
where that that you mentioned the turks
when the turks propose something
the turkish
international council members propose something
chinese international council members voted down
and seem like it was just kind of that
without regard to what the content was
and that's not unlike what happens in the united nations
between countries
there there are long-standing rivalries blood feuds
i mean that many of these countries have been in existence for hundreds
i don't even know thousands
definitely hundreds of years
that gets carried into these formal settings
where you would think
that it wouldn't
but it does this is real life
you have a there are a lot of
stakeholders a lot of factors
i will influence your decision
what is something he said
uh... here's something else i said
uh... could be applied to the sandbox was
the quadratic
uh... not just a quote that the improvement
to the algorithmic solution that they found for quorum where
the square root
of your
of your tokens and nfts it
your voting power
so for those who have thousands square root would be
hundreds or less
if you own thirty six lands
uh... which would equal
thirty six times
forty five hundred
one hundred sixty two thousand voting power
suddenly your square root of that is going to be four hundred
voting power and that's much more accessible
for or someone to
equalize their own vote against
so like he said
uh... in order for
someone to be
thirty six square root of that is six
you just need six other
square root people to do it
much more accessible
versus someone who has a million
voting power and
you don't have a hope to do that
but even with a bunch of sixes
so
that was fascinating learn about
and the very last thing
uh... he mentioned
the the
how to maximize communication
uh... he mentioned a union
i've had some thoughts about that unions you have
pros and cons about them
sometimes a victim of their own success
however
unions at its core
it's just
power that is
across a wide spectrum of individuals
combined together
to equal
other
large power
large groups they have power inherently
but then you have a bunch of little
individuals and together
unionized and
has some parity some equality between
their union
and the larger
groups that are already exist
that in and of itself is that wrong with that
but as we can see kind of what's happening
in other dows
how do we
how do we combat michelle's iron law of oligarchy maybe some sort of union
is is in
is in play here
so
i think a governance working group can get us there
and not so much a union but as as a way to have a voice
to start rebuilding trust
so really fascinating discussion the v
uh... i'd
i didn't really know him before all this i didn't know him at all really
is vitamin he came on
and then had a podcast and now
so i have to connect with him at a later time
drive done process all this
but really fascinating discussion
loved it and
uh... future episodes
so
we already did the interview with crypto dip low
and we also did the
that's gonna release after this
is the rules of the down money with joseph
so i'm gonna release this podcast here with the v v
there tomorrow
and then rules with joseph dow running rules joseph will release in some
next few days
the reaction that did the sandbox tutorial
is probably sometime next week
i have a number of other
other episodes that are upcoming
see if i can get my tales
who's an advisory board member i'm still trying to get in touch with staff trial
another
uh... that the next one is likely going to be a queen data with derek smart
the deck the smart
and then if i can't get
one with big bull
on the government's working group
and i have some other ones and i'm going to do more
business oriented stuff
that i think excited for like the business
of publishing experiences in selling assets on market place
sort of thing
i think you offer your time and i'll end it there
his main message
i feel that i received from him
we have to find a way
to build bridges with web one web two in a way
that will augment
and strengthen and build unity
thank you all for your time