Founders of Web 3 Podcast Series-The Role of DAOs in Web 3, Peter Pan of MetaCartel

Founders of Web 3 is a podcast series hosted by Outlier Ventures Founder & CEO Jamie Burke where he introduces you to the entrepreneurs, their investors and the policy makers that are shaping Web 3.

Peter is community lead at Meta Cartel, an innovative Web 3 ecosystem of creators and operators building decentralized applications (DApps) on Ethereum.

He discusses the foundational role of DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) in Web 3 a means of organising around public works enabled by blockchain, cryptocurrency and smart contracts. They explore the importance of community in Web 3, its fusion with gaming culture and how there is already a whole generation who will never work for a company and will only ever know digital wealth.

Listen to Peter’s podcast on Apple podcast.

Jamie: Welcome to the Founders of Web 3 series by Outlier ventures and me Your host Jamie Burke. Together we’re going to meet the entrepreneurs, their backers, and the leading policy makers that are shaping Web 3. Together, we’re going to try to define what is Web 3, explore its nuances and understand the mission and purpose the drive its founders. If you enjoy what you hear, please do subscribe, rate and share your feedback to help us reach as many people as possible with the important mission that is Web 3.

Great so today I’m happy to say we’ve got just Peter. I’ve been told to introduce from Meta Cartel Peter Pan and I guess I don’t really give you a title because it’s a fairly leaderless organisation.

Peter: Definitely leave it. I guess, but it’s just like I, you know, I don’t think there’s I think it’s hierarchies important, but you know, there’s no need for titles often it could be useful, but you know, I personally, my selfish preference is to not have anything typer.

Jamie: Well, I can see I mean, you know, ultimately you look at things like the manifesto, the Web 3 Manifesto, I can see that that was drafted by you, I’m sure in collaboration with a number of other pencil. So the reason why I wanted to get you on and to explore meta cartel is this series is really speaking to founders across what we could loosely define as Web 3. That’s a rabbit hole, we can probably go down a little bit later as well, to what degree you subscribe to that. I can see as I said, there is a manifesto it directly references Web 3, although I would say you have a more unique perspective on it or a more expanded perspective on it actually society than perhaps most people. But it would be good to understand you know, the journey of Meta Cartel you describe it as folklore leveraging the kind of the gaming analogy. But the reason why I wanted you guys on is I think I don’t fully understand the direction it’s going and that might be a generational thing. But it certainly feels of the Zeitgeist right now I can imagine that this promo organisation is going to become increasingly common, not just in Web 3 and crypto, but potentially, across, you know, the wider internet and many other different forms of economic activity. So it’s something I’m personally intellectually interested in. But equally, I think if you’re a founder, and you’re considering how you’re going to bring a particular innovation to market, clearly, setting up a start-up raising money from a VC in a classic sense through equity isn’t the only game in tiny town now there is an alternative. So that’s really why I wanted you guys. So, but yeah, be great to understand, you know, your personal background, what led you into Meta Cartel and then the folklore that goes behind it, its creation.

Peter: So before the whole crypto space, I was a product designer, an UX designer, mostly, you know, in roles and really Osage projects and teams. Well, you know, maybe the teams just raised a seed round and they bought the first dedicated designers Dream Team. And I would do a lot of like, you know, user research, UX research, talking to customers, you know, clients, people, users, right and you know, understanding them and that I guess, you know, the interesting thing about Web 3 was it drew me in interestingly because of like, I guess where I could see this technology going, I really couldn’t pin it down what it was but I guess I was kind of drawn to the space and I was magnet stated and you know, I in and I joined the space around late 2017 nearly at the height of the bull market then I think I you know, I think it was like my bolo who like mentioned something called a theorem and I just love about it. Something learning and I started attending meetups in the City of Sydney right? And I go, I was on boarded. And I guess I was brought up into the crypto space by a community called, I guess the Sydney fencing team and mainly by a guy called Baki Cooper, I’m not sure if people know. And he ran, like, if you’re in workshops, like if you’re in one on one workshops with beginners, and that’s why I started joining. Um, I guess with a good point being is that, you know, you don’t really see what the direction is going with a lot of this stuff as well as Meta Cartel and what it is right, I guess it’s a pretty good reason for it. You know, I mean, medical toll was never set out to, I guess we never pre meditated what Meta Cartel would be and should be, you know, the medical data itself and the other data that we’ve created, right, mostly, mostly stemmed from like being there, you know, with the community and seeing where people want to what people want to build and where things want to go. And I guess I wouldn’t call it like a sauna in the sense that we’re trying to build a company. Right, I guess it’s a big experiment. And you know, I’ve always my basically just stumbled and navigated my whole time throughout the web for uniform ecosystem, just experimenting and being led by my curiosity. You know, I’m otherwise pretty much an idiot on most topics are in good company? Yeah. So I, you know, I guess it’s a big experiment. And, you know, I think we’ve learnt really interesting things. And it’s been a great tool for us to reflect upon. And I think, you know, those, I guess the insights that we’ve learned from like experimented medical data, building this community of doubt, dap devs and Tao creators, right, have kind of beginning to lead to other questions. And you know, we’re just exploring them.

Jamie: you kind of describe yourself as an ecosystem of creators, operators and builders of decentralised apps daps. And obviously, you know, the concept of a dow has been on the hitlist of the theorem community for a long time, right or the wishlist titlist as I look at it, and obviously, you know, the Dow kind of set set that back a little bit, why do you think it’s now that we’re revisiting the idea of a dow and it’s beginning to see more traction, because it almost seems exponential growth? Not quite, but it feels like it’s on the cusp of an explosion of dows.

Peter: I think the under the his argument that, you know, cerium and work for you how what was created here to build dows, you know, as a main focus, you know, except we’ve kind of, I guess, it’s like, in a way, you know, you can think of like, what for you all about being creating projects and systems that are owned and owned governed and, you know, run by communities, you know, bottom up projects, you know, where, you know, people are able to have a say in like, how, how it’s created, you know, how evolves, you know, and I guess it’s like, the reason why we haven’t really focused on that. I wouldn’t say so I think like, tokens in a way, like resemble tokens, the tokens that we’ve seen here kind of attempt to achieve that vision. upset, except it did it. Because it turns out you don’t build a community by, you know, selling large chunks of your community off to the highest bidder. Apparently, that doesn’t work in, like, the community building process, you know, turns out that one of the things I’ve learned is that, you know, country building, you know, it’s not a linear process, and you can’t necessarily force it, it’s not amount of money. It’s actually a matter of trust. And, you know, that’s one thing that I think that’s something that you know, needs to be built over time, right and in move other factors involved.

Jamie: So it’s interesting because, you know, when you speak about when people speak about tokens, they talk about it as incentives and disincentives to bootstrap and coordinate distributed systems communities. But one of the things that keeps coming up when I interview people is this concept of trust, but not, not codify trust actually, you know, actual real meat based trust that has to coexist alongside the technology. And I think that that’s really interesting to understand your most people think that you’re devolving all trust to code when you’re launching your dow. But clearly, that’s not your perspective.

Peter: Well, yeah, like, let’s be realistic. The whole world operates in trust, trust is great. What about trust sucks. And, you know, I think the thing of trust is that there’s, I guess, you know, what I’m trying to get to is that, you know, like, the inner community, a country is built with trust, and your non transactional relationships. Whereas with crypto, everything so far has been all about incentives and transactions, right? transactions of rewards, incentives and blah, blah, blah, right. And I think this is like conflict here with like, you know, what, how do you build a community that is aligned together without, you know, like, ruining what the community is and how the, the spirit of it right it’s like, incentives, winter incentives, you know, I Judo I guess Value aligned often, you know, a conflict of each other. And I guess, you know, you could explain, you know, all these Icos being you know, it was all incentives, no community, community in the sense of like trust, human trust and the bill and the willingness to transact in, you know, in non monetary matters, right? Reputationally, even spiritual, if you will, right? You know, because it’s one common theme of that we’ve been, I guess, once removed and we’ve been talking about in medical school is just like, we’ve written now a new kind of, kind of like guide I guess on how to build a Dallas right? It’s called the 21st Manifesto. We like manifestos right around here. And you know, we kind of realised that it didn’t really it doesn’t really talk about like crypto at all. It’s just like, you know, gift to people around you give to others and you know, like, Be a Good Neighbour basically, right, like to be an asshole. You know, reward people who contribute, you know, like, be open, efficient. Information symmetry is good. And it’s like it’s kind of almost like the sounds like a religion. Yeah, you know, the sounds like, you know, the Christian thing of like, go to your neighbour and you know, sure you should do well. And in a way, it’s like with medical to Adele being a grand style, right, where people pledge, you know, a minimum of 10 eath to join. It’s kind of like, people willing to pledge 10 eath, because they believe that the value gained from coordinating together is so much greater than just the 10 eath in monetary value. And I think we’ve kind of like been rediscovering what that means for these doubts, which are on the other side of the spectrum, self curated, right, very kinky focus. A lot of work is done for complete, like, without real incentives. And, you know, I think people are looking at it and being like, you know, that all new monetary incentives have been Meta Cartel, they are no, you know, structured system, but why are people why it’s frightening. Yes. Right. And I think what does it represent? What’s been missing, I guess? Right, right. And I think you know, that’s looking at that. You know, I think it’s, you know, we have to learn from that. And we have to learn and I guess we have to ask ourselves have the systems that we’ve been building up to today have been working? do they work? Do they, they do the work to the extent that we want them to work? Let’s be real here. Yeah, we blabber on about like to run projects and systems but like how many projects and tokens on the top 10 bucket list? For a few ERC 20s have a real frightening contrary community? Or is it just a company that just like doting everything, paying everyone salaries? No bluffing. I guess it’s like, I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault as well. I think, you know, there’s definitely like this. It’s a mixed breed, to like, not know what we’re doing to like, you know, I guess just trying to figure it out as we go. Right. It’s, it’s, I also think by nature, like when you have like these commissioned and curated Open Season systems, if you go via these tokens that are purely based on financial incentives, you’re going to get what you saw.

Jamie: I mean, I know from my perspective, it, it feels like we’re in a natural cycle. So when the innovation, the underlying innovation was money, it was only natural that you would get this, you know, hyper exaggerated hype cycle, that that would be distracting. And, you know, I think the fact that a lot of people who have been in the space for long enough they’ve, they’ve made, some of them have made millions and have lost millions in a matter of months. And so I think finding things that have value beyond that they probably have a new perspective on money and wealth that they didn’t have when they entered or it wasn’t there at the peak. And it’s actually quite aligned to you know, as an investor or an accelerator. We see lots of people entering with a start-up, because it’s a good idea, or it could make the money or they could exit it. And I always tell them, Look, assume it’s going to fail, because most do most start-ups fail. And you know, would you have done it anyway? Because if it’s something that you’re going to spend five years old, you’re probably going to become overweight, you’re going to lose your hair striking me as we’re talking.

Peter: Well, I also don’t have hair right now. So, like I’m getting,

Jamie: And you know, very likely you’ll end up being poorer than richer. So, if at the end of all of that if you didn’t, yeah, if you didn’t enjoy the, if you didn’t enjoy the process, then you might as well have not done it. And so I think perhaps that’s the thing that you’ve that spark you have reignited in the community generally, which is, you know, well, why are we here? I mean, yes, be a nice by-product if we can make money but if we’re, if we’re going to spend a lot of our time contributing to something at least make sure it’s impactful and rewarding on a personal level.

Peter: Like I’m sure there are plenty of like companies out there and corporations out there yet to be built and a highly profitable like that, you know, like companies today highly like the thing about corporations in general and like how they’re structured today is that the two folks have problems, and hence this new ones. Anything else? So like, you know, in a way, right, it’s like if you really wanted to, you know, create profit seeking, and I guess I guess there’s a middle ground between, like maybe Taoism creep, you know, on aggregate more value, right and more profit. But I guess it’s like, you know, yeah, you know, what are we here and what we do here to do, right, I’m here to spin the wheels, or you know, and I think definitely previously had a bit of frustration against that, but I guess it’s like, I think we still need time. Right. So why do you think that this movement was born out of the theorem community?

Jamie: What is it about the theorem community that it was or is and is it fair to say, Well, do you think that this is an extension of the theorem community, it’s expanding? Or do you think that this is kind of it fracturing?

Peter: Oh, it’s funny. I often joke. That if you’re thinking his business model is begging, but in a slight way, in on the positive side of things, it’s also true in a way in the sense that, you know, in aetherium that you have this culture of like, I guess I’m yoloing and just throwing your money into things that, you know, interesting. Like the Dow itself was an unproven concept yet it like, had a coordinate about like, 15% of a firm’s total amount of eath into automated smart contracts, crying out loud, right? And it’s like, it went up to $240 million, and it didn’t even make a single investment. Right. That’s like the foot that was a sign of like, the epitomises What if it was culture it looks like it is right? And it may be what enabled all these like, you know, Bull runs and Ico craze, but I guess it’s Southern like I think with Macau, you know, started 2019 but you know, before then like before 2019 there were so few operatives like del second power got way. They’ll kind of like so continue watching the Dell concession line, but it was still highly theoretical. And I guess it was listening, right? I mean, no, no, no, no, don’t give a shit. You know, don’t give a fuck. And I guess it was kind of like, and everyone’s so hypothetical. No one, you know, doesn’t matter much. And I guess it was with Moloch del Rey does create a bunch of by a group of people from the drinking tea. They wanted to create a doubt to find and solve the problems of sharing infrastructure and public goods funding, right. Like, for example, you know, the EF can only do so much and they can the fairly like, I guess, they can be seen, you know, as a slow moving optimization. Let’s put it that way. Right. And, you know, people needed to solve problems today and needed resources today, right. And I guess, I mean, it’s Alani and a few other folks, right, James young recall. And they basically created ngmodel, where basically it’s a MVP for doubt, basically, that aim to low the minimum cost to participate. I guess the future could reach way and basically, I love that concept.

Right, it’s a really the to do the concept is that typically, you know, when you commit funds to something, you may not be able to pull it out, right. And I guess in a traditional grant style or even a venture fund, right, you commit funds, and it’s locked up, right. And the idea of like the motel race could function for funding funds, right? It’s just that when you commit funds in a, in a, in this town, you can leave at any time of everything you have, or at least are entitled to. And basically, you know, this gal created, you know, a new wave of interest in Dallas, mainly because it works, you know, you know, they built the thing is, it’s like, you know, very, very simple, it’s really simple code, they shipped it, and, you know, accordingly about $200,000 initially, and then you just got to work and, you know, and I think that was when I wanted to I kind of became aware of the project and I wanted to join the project, and, you know, pledge. So basically it was by having ultimate is pledge funds into it right. The minimum pledge was about 100 eath at the time, and I wanted to join but I’m not rich. Right? So I wanted to join with like my 10 I only had like, 10 to spare. I was like, 50% of the if I had something like that back then. And, you know, I wanted to pledge and they rejected me because I was too poor. Um, you know, and I guess it’s like, that’s sort of the whole saga. And I think, you know, you know, that Dell was important for theory and because there was no financial incentive upside from like, if you help if you grow your own portion of assume goes up, maybe. Right, that was the outlier perspective, and I guess incentive, right. But aside from that, it was kind of like, Hey, this is doubting let’s like, solve some problems you’re in. You’re not going to make money from this. Yes, no. And then people said, let’s do it. So in a way, like if you’re in passes culture of like, just betting on like, you know, things that things are, I guess not only highly risky, but you know, just that push the push the needle, you know, I would say the firm investors are not a very at times. They can be very altruistic in many senses, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, I guess it comes down to like, what are we here to do?

Jamie: So you guys have been around since 2018. Is that right? 800 plus builders, 30 plus meetups. It looks like GitHub is kind of the main place where a lot of that action happens. And is it 90 k USD, that’s been deployed since July 19 $23.

Peter: About that. Well, that’s about me. More or less that it’s numbers needs to be outdated. Right. But I guess, you know, so that was meltdown, I guess Meta Cartel is created by the medical community that was focused on funding, you know, dots, right. products in the space because, you know, at that time, I guess, you know, in the space it was a narrative of the drink early 2019 knows we’re building products. No one was trying to find new use case, Norman’s building for people. Still overly focused on infrastructure and technology. And I guess, you know, Meta Cartel was initially created right as a technical Working Group on us solutions for filling in gaps, right? most known as for the Meta Cartel transactions, right technology that we worked on. And I guess, you know, this as we solve various problems, you kind of like, didn’t have your problems solved. So, but we realised we had a community, and we wanted to take the community and, you know, see if we can solve another problem. And I guess you realise it was the lack of focus on the end user, that was like, the narrative that we wanted to change. Right. And I guess like, as going back to the Moloch story, I was rejected from law doubt, because to portal for only pledging 10 eath. So I mean, just told me to fork Moloch down and you know, and start your own medical at all. And I guess that’s when, you know, I just did that and, you know, it became a thing. But you know, what a cartel was a was kind of just like a casual Working Group. We had we have a dancing chilli as a logo because people thought. Like, you know, we the meta console name came out of a community vote, like what would be the funny name to name out what technical working group? Right?

Jamie: I mean it from what I can understand it was it was really like a social group that would meet up around largely aetherium meetups conferences and stuff like that you now have a formal presence there. So you’re you’re financing gaps at the moment. Is the intention to finance things that wouldn’t get financed elsewhere? are you focusing on a particular stage? Or are you really looking to invest in things that could go on to become a start-up in a classic sense?

Peter: So there are various Dallas within the medical community right? I would say at the core of medical schools community, we have medical gal which is a purely grants giving you no doubt where it doesn’t see profit rate or returns. And the only real returns I guess it’s looking to deploy funding for is really projects and teams that you know, are looking to solve and prove out new use cases and you. No, that’s really the focus. You know, and I guess, maybe this internal discussions are where men should be focusing on next. But that’s kind of what it’s been working on for the last, you know, kind of like, I guess, 10 to nine months. Right. And I guess we have another Galco adventure now that’s focused more on investing, right, directly for profit into projects and companies and daps and doubts. Right. And I guess they’re looking for projects that, you know, become fully fledged, I guess, products and project.

Jamie: I mean, it definitely feels like I mean, I probably spent too much time with lawyers, we have an in house wall. And, you know, whenever I look at something like a dowel for investment allocation, investing in things, whether it’s a token or anything else, I always get told, well, it looks a lot like a collective investment scheme. That’s a regulated activity. I mean, I guess that just isn’t a concern for for something like ventured out or because they’re so distributed. They actually think the risk associated is too low. Well, rationale is just a it’s just a, it’s just a guess I will see.

Peter: Right. Well, you know, credited, you know, individuals and collectively invest money. Right. They are accredited them, they’re all accredited individual. Well, we have Well, I guess and not everyone is accredited. But, you know, we have various founders in the group, mostly, you know, we have we have we’ve been selecting very carefully and curating the group very carefully, for only folks who are able to kind of like, I guess, be somewhat active, right, provide for us, you know, highly qualified individuals, and how we structured the down rain is, you know, we basically, you know, we see ourselves right, as almost as general or general partners, right. So, there’s no, you know, in traditional firm or venture firm, you’d help LPs we would just see ourselves as you know, we’re direct, you know, general partners of this organisation right next to so what

Jamie: We actually structured not as a GP LP fund, but as a we call it an LLP partnership. Right. So it is it is a partnership, there isn’t a company, we do have an operating company.

Peter: Outline does not have on outside capital, right?

Jamie: No. Yes. So I think we’re now 25 partners that just kind of come in organically over over the last six years. It’s probably very similar. Probably very similar.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s probably very similar in that nano, right, where it’s everyone’s sim game. Yeah. Jamie: And you know, it also brings a different approach to investments because investing your own money or, you know, people with a greater degree of proximity versus an LPs money, which is often you know, can be something that’s an entity that sets a distance. I guess, you know, you’re thinking a bit harder about that.

Peter: incentives are definitely different. But another way to put it, you’re less incentivized to invest into Ponzi schemes.

Jamie: Yes, exactly. I’m looking. I mean, I think there are Yeah, there are certain funds that are quite happily invest in things if it’s going to deliver yield. And, and that’s good on them. But yeah, I think also when a partnership is, in theory, something that happens in perpetuity, unlike GPL fee for fund structure, which has a, you know, an end beginning and an end, it kind of forces you into thinking within certain time cycles and yielding certain returns is that pressure to deliver a return, whilst in a partnership model, especially one where a partner can enter or exit easily. It’s kind of more of an evergreen structure. So that allows you to be a bit more aligned with the things that you’re investing in. Certainly, that’s how we found it anyway. Yeah. So this Web 3 manifesto that you did, I just reread it before we started recording the podcast. I think it’s really interesting. Because one of the things that I’m trying to uncover in this podcast is, you know, can we learn upon a commonly understood definition of Web 3, currently, the answer is no. I think you’ve certainly got one of the more expansive and one that that is much more concerned about societal impact. But for me, most importantly, this concept of, I guess, convergence of gaming culture with hacker culture, and crypto, and specifically you say, Web 3 has the potential to be the ultimate massively multiplayer online role playing game, I’m using the I’m explaining it for people that might not know slightly older generation, and that transcends entertainment or gaming. And really, this concept of kind of gamifying I guess all the relationships around is perhaps a merging of work and play. And whilst I feel I feel a little bit old when I read that I’ll be honest with you because you know, I do game I wouldn’t class myself as a gamer. Intuitively, it feels like the correct generational shift, right? If I imagine the people that I work with on a day to day basis and how they look at the world, how they look at work and employment or not, it totally makes sense. But it definitely made me feel a bit old. So could you could you explain the kind of core principles and obviously dows you’re very clear. dows are foundational piece of architecture

Peter: I guess. Yeah. I guess the document, the word free Manifesto, it’s, I think, the primer, I would add that it’s not to be fully read with full seriousness. You know, I think, you know, in a bit, we often joke in Meta Cartel, that everything we do is just a piece of performance art.

That, you know, that aims to like, that’s just another, you know, experiment for us to observe and to see what comes out of it. And you think that you know, the document is almost like, we are You know, the strange thing about Meta Cartel is that last year in October after DEFCON, right, we actually came together with the most the key contributors of Meta Cartel in person in Denver while we met each other for mostly different members of the process ever. Right? Even like talk, you know, like I’ve met people who I’ve been talking to for over like a year, right? And the strange thing was, was Bill’s a pause in the room at one time when we were brainstorming workshopping things, where it was, like, you know, what is like what free and you know, what, what are we going towards? And I guess it’s like someone saying, you know, someone asked, like, What’s this? What’s the craziest thing that we can think about? Like, what, what is the craziest thing that makes sense to us? And I guess there’s always been the discussion around like, how, you know, you can actually work free you can actually perhaps, like, build a game that encompasses everything you do in your life, you know, and, you know, we just kind of built off that vision of like, Oh, well, you know, why not? Why not? schools eventually run like a dow, you know, to align incentives of all the students You know, teachers and parents and local community, you know, with and etc. And we just went, you know, very, went very far with like how we, what made sense to us. Right.

Jamie: But all the way right so if I remember, you went to unbundle the state, so in this idea of what is sovereignty so right, you definitely, I don’t think you can go any further than let’s unbundle the state.

Peter: Yeah. Sure. I mean, that’s, that’s, there’s a pretty like, it’s a big statement. Right. But in general, I think it’s like, we’re seeing this happen today. Trudeau has unbundled the state or like what we know now as health officials, right? We trust the logic on Twitter without health more than we trust the w h o in many senses now, right? We trust only right here, by the way, crash he fucking got it. Right. You know, I mean, and you know, I, a lot of other groups in Twitter got it right. And your advantage was the ability to make decisions very quickly. propagate information has information symmetry, not be held back by bureaucracy of like, you know, off top down structures. And, you know, I see that as long as the first step snap, right. It’s like the whole, you know, thing in the last month really the crisis wrong. It’s really taught me that, you know, we can’t rely on the government’s like, currently relying them on like doing the job. Well, you know, they can hand out money maybe, but, you know, trusting them without health. No, that’s cost lives the incompetency of like these systems that, you know, also, you know, top down that we see out in the world right now, they’ve been remained so unchecked for so long, that, you know, they basically wrapped it into what we know as the great epidemic, or the terrible 20s as 2020 is no one else. Right. And, you know, I think that’s a very clear case. And I and I think that’s in the discussions I’ve had with people. recently, in the last couple weeks, I’ve kind of shown that a lot of people feel the same way in the sense that you know, they no longer trust what we know previously have known as authorities? What does it mean? What gives them the authority to make these incorrect decisions in the first place? You know, can we ever trust with the Conservative Party and they think, you know, naturally without, like, these imposed parties that, you know, I’ve been kind of offered to us by these institutions. You know, we naturally find, you know, who do we trust? No, we asked questions, and we look around ourselves and say, I guess it’s like, what can we depend on. And oftentimes, you often just go to go down a path and you’ll end up with like, groups of people who know what they’re doing. And it turns out groups of people who know what they’re doing, can organise much more efficiently than what we have done. So today, and maybe, you know, as a way, a framework in which people can organise themselves under and you know, allocate resources much more efficiently. You know, like, even though the data that we’ve seen today on a theorem had been predominantly grants Dalles a proven out one thing very well that you can distribute capital efficiently in the capital distribution mechanism for these thousand communities? I would say there’s not there’s, it’s not fully, we still need to see a lot of experimentation around that. But I think, you know, there’s some decent validation of that sustainability. I think that’s another question. But in the context of, say government, or they are just a grants giving organisation, and they take, you know, they skim off the top right to fund their own grants, giving operations or non grants giving operations,

Jamie: Right on the argue that, you know, the financial system, as governments are now trying to distribute money to whether it’s SMEs, even large corporations or individuals, you know, they’re finding, can they mobilise the existing financial system to get money to people quickly? And the answer is no, we saw with 2008 that banks were incredibly ineffective at handling that and I, the thing that I’ve kind of been, I think we had a tweet, there’s a tweet storm Where we started talking and I think I started it saying if it feels intuitively to me like the way that 2008 was the right moment for for Bitcoin to kind of come into play that 2020 It feels like the right moment for the doubt came in for all the reasons that you just met, right? So to allow for communities to self organise, and I think when you read your Manifesto, maybe six months ago, it would have sounded crazier than it does now. In in, in this current context, and there’s a lot of things in it, like you read, you know, self sovereign individual, the book, the natural conclusion to software that can empower sovereignty of the user is the dissolution of the state. Now, a lot of people just think that that’s crazy, or at least, they don’t want to imagine it,

Peter: But it’s an upper self sustainable, self sovereign community. Right, that can allocate resources in you know, like club Guess solve its own community problems for us. Right. And I guess it’s almost like I think that’s an underlying theme of what free isn’t it? You know, it’s like to me like to run and own projects that it’s like that’s a hot like, please just please broken hard to use software if otherwise

Jamie: Yeah, perfect. Yeah. We lots of inbuilt friction. So, you know, your experiences in both participating in dows creating them supporting them. Do you think there’s a threshold to the to the size of a Dale, you know, this this kind of, I forget the name of the law around the average person has a certain amount of friends and their network of first degree friends, that that’s kind of innate to humans in terms of how we can organise or socialise. Do you think that’s true with dows and I’m assuming that in a way that you are supported to go and create your own dow. You also include to others, and you’ve now got an ecosystem of dows centred around meta cartel. So do you think it’s natural that each dow will always kind of spawn another down? Is it quite evolutionary like that? Is there a threshold to size scale?

Peter: I think the size narrative of dows have always been very theoretical. You know, and I think like, you could argue that I seriously doubt that grew too quickly and didn’t work like communities that didn’t work. Right. I think that it’s very obvious that you can grow down so quickly, I’ll just communities in general, if you grow communities in general too quickly, without having them right, like cycles of you know, growth and consolidation. You know, you’ll end up not the right duration, you’ll end up with like lack of signal right in the community. I think that we get to see like, you know, medical toll Dallas reaching that hundred member thresholds, where it’s like very tight, very strong culture and some valid strength of the values and where you Got to see how it can evolve that was sad to see the friction points of like, the friction points already with like, you know, scaling governance. And I think, you know, that’s when we need to concretely solve like things are just like, okay, like, let’s just like delegate people, delegate Qt, because now, you know, like, knacks a people commendable, like, you know, Max eight delegated votes a single person and go from there. And you know, suddenly it’s just like 16 people again, practically voting right, and have participate in governance. I think like, we’re just, we’re here to just solve this right now. Right. Um, so I think I don’t know, we’ll see, I think well, depends, right?

Jamie: Well, I mean, there’s lots of, you know, there’s a millennia of political science in in understanding and you can see, it makes logical sense. The way I look at crypto is we kind of have this bottom up permissionless proto capital market, and the way that I look at what’s happening in the airspace now is you know, we we are forming if you take just n states As you say, this protest state, but in the interim righto corporation or, and it’s interesting that once you hit a scale point, the same the same patterns emerge, right? You start to revert to delegation and you kind of have that the equivalent of a parliamentary committee ultimately we end up with potentially

Peter: as you have many different vowels, right of different sizes, and perhaps if you if these different details, such as medical to modality, say, give us down, right, um, you know, they like each other, this symbol values that are compatible, they might actually, you know, set up, you know, their own, like, almost their own, like dow interface for interacting, they separately clearly define the values, how to interact with them, you know, the, you know, the resources, what they care about, and they, you know, perhaps form a federation of different Soccer Federation, right. Almost a network state. And if these groups of Dows can then decide on like, you know, it’s like the Federalist paper, Federalist Papers all over again, it’s United States all over again, why is this different states essentially, why should we band together to work together? How do we even have a Do that, right, I think we’re going to encounter that we’re probably going to encounter that we’re not going to encounter that anytime soon. I think we’re going to start playing with these ideas. But I guess, you know, I think I also think that, you know, Dows, also can enable like dictatorships that are much more fluid, like enabling, like, safe dictatorships, like even, you know, even the most democratic countries in terms of need need, like, need, you know, the tend towards a more for terian, you know, sort of role and which is fine. I think that’s honestly, like, the kind of the goal, it’s like, you want to, you want to, you know, you want it, you know, I guess transition in and out of different, you know, modes of governance as needed. And that’s where, you know, the kind of the bottom up model works very well, because you can go from, like, very democratic, you know, from a very democratic down to one day, perhaps delegating and locking up all your voting power to one person for maybe three months, right. It’s like the logistics, right? Everybody’s just gonna, exactly it’s a holy shit. Elon Musk take care of our shit. You know? Tell us what to do. We’ll follow you

Jamie: You know, it’s different to, to a city state, you know, you look at Singapore or certain places within the UAE, you know, they kind of exist outside of larger nation states. But in a way, they’re kind of critical to the global economy, right. And you could imagine that these are really just a digital instance of something similar to that. And it’s not impossible to imagine that let’s say there’s that federation of dows that very quickly, the economic value that passes through them could equal any one of these city states.

Peter: Yeah, and I guess it’s like, just communities in general, I have never had a means of like, manage money together, you know, in a viable, cheap, like, unsafe way. Like we’ve just like, had bank accounts until we had like the idea of smoking. Like, Isn’t it weird? That you know, we’ve always had to, like manage money, either physically or like, relying on the traditional financial system via bank accounts. Before we had like crypto. Like it’s a wild wild fucking like possible that we lived in

Jamie: some people talk about, you know, onboarding the unbanked into crypto, the fact is that the unbanked don’t want a bank. They don’t want one, they´ve never had one. And what they want is something that is much more efficient and effective. So what´s next for Meta Cartel and I guess also the venture down is there a predefined roadmap? Or is it kind of you are experimenting with different pathways and being reactive to be the user or whether.

Peter: It´s been is narrative building community for the las year or so. We are at a transition point. I think you know we´ve done a lot of experimentation. And we are at a stage to go for the next stage and at the point to see what it will look like. Because you know the world is changing. Not distract ourselves. We always do it. Experimenting. If you think where you want to go next. I think it is the point.

Jamie: Look, it is really good to chat with you. Hopefully we get to meet in person. We really get in deep into all these rabbit holes that are there. I think it´s really fascinating the space you are in. now is the moment. Perhaps no mainstream, but build up way more momentum than previously. Myself personally and Outlier are actively looking how to participate in this whole ecosystem so I am sure I will add you on twitter.

Peter: Absolutely, thanks for having me on.

Jamie: Brendan really appreciate your time, keep doing all the great work you are doing with Brave, I think it is the killer app at the moment. Looking forward to having you again at some point.

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