Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 5: Jack Zampolin
This blog is a transcription of the fifth episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews Jack Zampolin, product manager of the Cosmos SDK. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify; or read the transcription below.
Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I’m your host Gregory Landua. Alright, folks. This week, I’m proud to present to you my friend Jack Zampolin. Jack is the product manager of the Cosmos SDK. He works with the Tendermint Incorporated and creating the software developers kit for people all around the world to create their own custom blockchain. There are over a hundred projects in the larger Cosmos ecosystem. One of those projects is, as you may know, Regen Network, the project that I’m passionately engaged with, working to create an ecological contracting platform. Jack and I had a great conversation and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. Some of the topics that we covered were digging into some of the game theory behind blockchain, money as a meme, how money is a social construct, why that’s important, and some of how that fuels the Web 3 and blockchain movements more generally. We also talked a little bit about what he’s been learning as a product lead at Cosmos, and whether or not coding could be considered an artisanal craft. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Jack.
Gregory: Welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast Jack.
Jack: Planetary regeneration, nice. I like it.
Gregory: Yeah. Would you like to just take a quick moment to introduce yourself to whoever might be listening? Why are you working at the intersection of decentralized technology and finance, and cooperative open-source movement that you’re in the leadership position? What brought you there in your life journey?
Jack: That’s a great question. Great way to put it, Greg. I’m Jack Zampolin. I’m a product lead over at the Cosmos Tendermint. How I got here? As far as the finance piece of it, I was an accounting and business administration at college, very interested in financial accounting, a job I had in college. The last day there was the first day of September in 2008. Two weeks after I left that job, it elapsed. The bottom fell out of the market. The one I ended up working for, ended up closing two months after that. My plans post-graduation to go work up in finance in New York died at that point. I ended up spending a few years cooking professionally in a fine dining restaurant in Virgil Virginia, and moonlighting, and for a company that made sausage, and worked on a few food trucks, and made some ramen for a while. I got to cook food, which was kind of fun. Then after that, the hours are long, low pay. It was rough. It was hard to start your own restaurant. It was a career change, so I ended up doing a kick-starter, a company in Montana. Through that, I started teaching myself how to code in an effort to automate some of the marketing tasks. That was initially what I was coding, but I ended up following in love with open source culture and ended up doing Bootcamp, moving out to San Francisco, and starting to look for jobs. I think, Greg, what you’re talking about is this open-source ethos. That was real software in a lot of ways. The people that I met are just wonderful, want to share their knowledge and want to love what they do, and spread to as many people as they can. The first job in software that I got was at a company that builds open-source technology. I only worked in open-source since I’ve been in software. Those things are very important to me. Also, at the same time, carrying that finance background, you could imagine how I was drawn to cryptocurrency, which is open-source finance. In 2008, 2009, I don’t think I ever thought I would work in finance again. It’s funny coming back to it in a roundabout way. It feels familiar in a weird way, but also coming out. Did that answer the question you’re asking?
Gregory: Yeah, it did. I have more questions emerging. Given that you have some direct experience in the centralized finance industry — why is it important to have an open and decentralized approach to finance? What does that make possible that otherwise wouldn’t exist? What’s at stake if we don’t have some balance in terms of openness, transparency, and decentralization in the financial industry?
Jack: I think that the real power of capitalism is the ability for large numbers of [inaudible] experiments to be run independently and to give people the tools and the funds to go do that. [inaudible] over money and finance too much, it leads to fewer experiments being run and it leads to less efficient markets. It leads to less financial inclusion, generally. I think when you see a lot of things like the environmental issues that you guys are working on, and a lot of the negative externalities to come out of the companies, a lot of those come out of the large companies that are essentially government-supported. If you look at the oil industry and healthcare and a lot of these other sectors, they are experiencing extreme cost inflation. They are basically the government-protected sector. [inaudible] and maybe it’s one of those. The US dollar is supreme in the world and it’s controlled by [inaudible] which is so many people. Having a global money supply tightly controlled by a really small group is potentially bad. [inaudible] currency is an innovation and an economic advancement for a lot of countries. I think, moving to a world where we are allowing currencies to compete with each other and decentralize control to larger groups, and letting social groups to define what they value, is going to lead us to a much more efficient market, and an efficient way to organize ourselves. [inaudible] and environmental integrity. In order to allow those communities to qualify that value somehow and work to improve ecological health, you need to have some way to quantify it. The concept of money is a natural way to do that and it provides people incentives to go and fix the things that are broken.
Gregory: No, it’s a super helpful context and where it leads me to be thinking, to frame what emergence for me is. What I’m hearing you say is, essentially, decentralizing and opening up the basic building blocks of capitalism allows for what’s good about capitalism to be. (This is going to be an interesting one. My internet is also unstable.)
Jack: This is a fun conversation. I do enjoy talking about that stuff. One of the cools stuff about the blockchain is that you find a bunch of people who want to talk about big ideas. (cut the videos?)
Gregory: (Yeah, let’s try that)
Gregory: I think what you’re saying is, if we decentralize and open up the building blocks of the financial system, that is one of the underpinning elements of a capitalist approach. What’s good about capitalism is that it allows for agency. It allows for people to say, “I’m going to do this,” and go out and do it. That makes me want to talk a little bit about capitalism, free markets, libertarianism and what I perceive as some of the fundamental assumptions that are actually pretty deeply embedded in the crypto culture. Let’s go there. What are some of the dangers? Is there a downside to unfettered, complete, and ubiquitous capitalism?
Jack: Yeah. I think that capitalism, and modern culture in a lot of ways, [ inaudible ]and we are inherently communal beings and we need to exist within a society, but in the stable, large-scale societies we also need to provide people freedom. The way that we mediate that is through the government. I view libertarians and people with that bend as making the argument that the level of government we have now is stifling innovation or creating disruptions in a way that we’re allocating resources. We need less of that. I think that, at the core of some of the libertarian arguments, danger’s there and obviously a more atomized society, and weaker communities. In that anarchist-libertarian spectrum, there’s a lot of different schools of thought. Obviously with my use of the word “communal” and “community,” you can tell there’s much more nuance there. [inaudible] Sorry, it’s a very ill-formed thought.
Gregory: There’s something there that’s really interesting. You’re saying that the good part of capitalism which is it allows agency and independent initiative is also the downside of capitalism which is it tends to atomize us. I think that’s really insightful. That’s maybe a foundational premise. It feels like there’s this paradox in terms of, for instance, proof of stake as a building block. There’s this paradox between the unfettering and unleashing the creative power of individuals or small groups, while at the same time acknowledging — what I’m hearing you acknowledge — is that we also have to figure out a way to knit ourselves together and have healthy cooperation and agreements with one another. We’re social beings, so intrinsically I’ll be a healthier human if I have friends, family, and community. What does proof of stake has to do with that paradox between individual initiative and the imperative around communal health for humans?
Jack: Yeah. I think that’s an excellent thing. The way that we’ve, as a society, dealt with this is by allowing people to create mutual organizations like cooperatives. There’s a bunch of different words for them pulling their labor and resources together to achieve common goals or live in a certain way. I view proof of stake as a way of writing those contracts in code and removing potential points of friction and allowing people to experiment with new models of governance. Because there are these economic [00:15:04 premises] that are deeply in there, these communities already inherently have these ideas of value, whether it’s a social value or political value in the case of companies that they need to keep track of and be able to build incentive schemes around that. That helps build stronger communities.
Gregory: Let’s take a step back. This is really a rich place. Take a step back and explain as if I’m someone who’s slightly crypto-skeptical and doesn’t really understand what proof of stake means. What is a proof-of-stake network and why might it benefit people who are looking to cooperate? Why is it interesting from the perspective of autonomous agency and people taking initiative? How does proof of stake relate to that? Pitch it to me basically. Why is it interesting?
Jack: What’s one of those fundamental units of cooperation that most people use now? I think a company is a great example of that. In companies, we have cap tables, which is basically ownership. Pretty much, what proof of stake does, is that it takes a cap table and it says — hey computers, this is what we’re going to use to agree on what data is authoritative in this system. That gets really technical really quick. Let me try to dumb it down a little bit. If we’re thinking about this cap table analogy or owning shares in a company, that company might have a certain rule-set of how it’s accepting orders or carrying out various work. There are decisions being made on how to change those rules like we want to take contracts from companies that are only small companies because we want to support the local economy. The shareholders would vote on that proposal and they would use the rules to make it so that the company only works with smaller companies. With a proof-of-stake system, you basically take that voting and that share-ownership and that cap table, and you put it on the set of computers, and the way that computers agree is through that cap tables. The people with the most stake have the most votes. That’s the most simplistic version of proof of stake. Tying that up with governance, I’m glossing over a bunch of technical details from the bottom of the stack, but for all intents and purposes, that’s how it works.
Gregory: Although there’s a difference, which is by and large, in shareholder-based capitalism — 51% votes will carry the day. In proof of stake, by and large, you need over 66% in order for it “carry the day.”
Jack: That’s definitely true. That’s where this distinction between the voting and the consensus mechanism comes to the play. You can think of it as almost like overriding a veto. If 30% of the company is really not interested in doing something and they are trying to stop the network, the majority of the network could essentially override the veto and fork them out of the network. I’m trying not to get too technical on this one too early. Are you familiar with the framework of Loyalty, Voice, and Exit?
Gregory: Walk me through it.
Jack: When you’re in an organization or any collective group, one way to look at your options is loyalty, i.e. be loyal to what the group wants to do and be a good member, whatever that means in the context of that group.
Jack: Voice. Voice issues that are problematic with it and try to solve them from the inside or exit. Leave it. In the forking scenario where there is a very strong disagreement and one group is going to break away from another group, that would be the exit case. Voice would be voting within the proof-of-stake system. Loyalty would obviously be upholding the status quo. These proof-of-stake frameworks and, I think, cryptocurrencies, in general, have this property where they respect that framework. When I think about forks and how communities come together, form a potentially break apart, and splinter within this ecosystem (and I think in a lot of other ecosystems as well), I find that framework helpful.
Gregory: One of the biggest critiques I’ve heard about proof of stake is essentially the risk is that it capitulates an existing oligarchy where the only people who can afford initially to invest in a network are people who already have a certain amount of access to finances and they may not actually the right stakeholders. This stake distribution, and therefore voting distribution, may not actually represent the healthiest distribution for a set of stakeholders who will make a network healthy.
Jack: I don’t think that’s a fundamental issue of proof of stake. I think it just goes to show that distributing resources evenly and properly among any group of people is a really hard problem and one that we do not do well as a society.
Gregory: Right. Because there’s a tension in capitalism where you need to be capitalized. There’s a propensity in the system that having access to capital begets more access to capital.
Jack: That’s definitely true. That’s the thing about capitalism, but if you go back to this competing monies idea, groups can start their own monetary units with whatever they value. They’re living in this interconnected blockchain universe if other people value the same things they value, the currency that they’ve created and given value to in their own community, will have that value outside of that community as well.
Gregory: Explain that a little bit more to me. I think what you’re saying is if you succeed in having a group of people who value a stake in token because it gives them access to voting, governance, and maybe the rights to earn from what this network is doing, and their value is strongly held in their conviction about it, that then translates to other people also desiring or wanting that currency to gain access to that.
Jack: Yes. I think you’ve said it very succinctly.
Gregory: I don’t want to gloss over the previous thing, which I think is really fundamental. I’m taking a beginner’s mind perspective here for listeners. I’m also somewhat bought into this idea also. What I’m hearing you talk about in terms of a competition between money. Can you just actually take a moment to define what you think money is and maybe talk about how that relates to what, for instance, a staking token is, and what the relationship there is? Then, we can go into what the world looks like in which these currencies are actually competing with one another.
Jack: Yeah. If you think about a tribe that says, “this group of five hundred stones is the way that we’re going to vote and make decisions. Whoever has those stones at the time of a vote, they are going to place them on whichever vote they want to vote on. Then, we’ll make the decision with the most stones.” Those tribe members will end up trading those stones for various things. People who are more interested in governance and are more passionate will be able to convince other people to vote for the outcomes that they’re interested in. That’s how that system would work. That’s a basic economic system. If that tribe runs in an area that has a lot of value associated with it — let’s say they’re governing in an area with a lot of fishery resources — the value of those stones that they have is going to go up and people are going to place value on that. It all goes back to what we view has value as humans. Money is one thing but then there’s also other things that we place value on — stocks, bonds — a lot of these other instruments that have value. Are they money? They have some of the properties of money, but not all of them. I think that the type of instruments that are getting created by this proof of stake systems — you can think of them like stocks and bonds — these things that have some of the properties of money that we invest value in and that we view as valuable, but maybe not necessarily you’re paying for a latte with it. If you think about it that way, throughout history, humans have placed value in a number of things. Going back from that stones example which I did relatively poorly — cowry shells and all different kinds of things we’ve invested value in — you can represent those on a blockchain very easily.
Gregory: What I’m getting from you is, number one, there’s this basic assumption that money actually derives from a social contract between people agreeing on a basic unit of accounting for some specific either actions or resources that have value to everyone. Everybody’s saying, “Yes. We agree on that.” I think generally for people that’s implicit and people don’t even think about that, but what you’re unveiling is that is just a basic function. If we take that for granted and move back to, “there’s a world in which monies are competing” — different currencies are competing with one another — how would you describe what the US dollar represents as a unit of account and what being bought in and having a fundamental belief that US dollar is the currency? What does that then mean about the agreements we’re making with one another as a society? How is that different from an ATOM for instance? What are the fundamental assumptions baked into an ATOM having value, the Cosmos Hub’s native token? What being bought into that unit of account, what does that engender in people?
Jack: Let’s take the second part and let’s just talk about the dollar for a second, and then come back to the other piece of it. As far as the dollar thing, one of my favorite sayings that for instance I’ve got in this space is “money as a meme.” It really is. This basic idea that this piece of paper is valued as a dollar and that there are all these other things out there in the world that I can go buy for it — obviously, that’s a huge, huge network effect of a bunch of people accepting that as a value. I think that when you see the bitcoin price and there are these huge spikes, and then it levels off for a while, and there are these huge stakes, there are waves of people coming in and saying, “Hey, I think this thing has value,” and they then bid it up. Some of those people are, “Yeah, maybe this doesn’t have value” and they leave, but a lot of people end up staying. There’s just this increasing number of people with each market cycle that believe that these cryptocurrencies and these digital assets have value. As that number of people grows this digital economy grows along with it. In order to reach the scale of the dollar, we need to convince a few more billion people that cryptocurrencies have value and that it will be around in the long-term.
Jack: That’s an ongoing challenge for an industry that we’re going to be facing for the foreseeable future. The dollar is just the current world reserve currency and is the most widely accepted currency out there, and has the strongest network effect.
Gregory: From your perspective, what are the underlying assumptions that are baked into the US dollar? Where is the value of the US dollar derived from and what’s the social contract that we are — for the lack of a better word — buying into when we choose to use the US dollar as our basic unit of account?
Jack: One way to look at it is that you’re buying into this US-led monetary system that’s guiding world affairs for the last hundred years. You can look at it that way or you can look at it in a very simplistic way and say that there’s this collective delusion that bills that are green in color with certain patterns on them are extremely valuable and scarce because of the way that they’re issued and people view that as having value. Do you want to dig into the fed and things like that?
Gregory: We could. I have the sense that even thinking about the fed and the mechanics of it is going in and talking about the difference between Tendermint and HotStuff, as a consensus mechanism.
Jack: I agree with you.
Gregory: Whereas I’m more interested in the essence level. Different proof-of-stake networks are going to be trying to achieve different things, I assume. There’s also a technical piece of — can they achieve it and keep it operational? What is trying to be achieved by the social contracts that the US dollar is derived from? I have an opinion about that. I actually don’t quite know what we’re trying to achieve when we all believe in the US dollar, but somehow underpinning it is the corrosive power of monopoly, affluence, and collective power of the US monetary and the ability to maintain strategic oil reserves that are then a physical asset that backs the US dollar as a reserve currency. I think that’s part of it.
Jack: This gets back to the distribution question. That’s basically one group saying, “Our distribution is the best distribution out there and you’re going to use this. If you don’t, we’re going to send tanks and planes to blow you up.” That’s kind of what the dollar is, in a way. Interestingly enough, I think bitcoin and proof of work mirrors that in a very interesting way where there’s this arms-race-like dynamic with buying miners. Essentially, these miners are going head-to-head every block to see who has the most cash power. I think there is an interesting parallel between that currency backed by violence with the US — if you want to look at it that way, that’s a very meta-way to talk about the US dollar — and Bitcoin that is backed by proof of work, which mimics that same system.
Gregory: There’s a competition between people and it’s nested. Bitcoin is competitive within itself and bitcoin is competitive outside of itself. Earlier, you started with this theory of competing monies, competing currencies.
Jack: Competing stores of value is a better phrase, but yeah.
Gregory: Okay. Competing stores of value. Do you want to distinguish between those?
Jack: I mean, maybe a currency is something that you buy a latte with, and the store of value — that’s a loaded term and obviously if you’re talking about store value, people are, “gold” and “bitcoin.” I haven’t dusted off my economics textbooks probably as recently as I should. There might be a better word that I could be using here, but Apple’s stock has value because Apple produces iPhones and they are paying dividends on it. What I’m talking about is that these instruments that are created in proof-of-stake networks, these communities that we’re talking about valuing them and use other resources that pay for those and establish the value of them. Is that too abstract?
Gregory: I’m following. All of this is at a level of abstraction. One of the struggles that we’ve had at Regen Network, is trying to bridge into a very practical, pragmatic — how do we care for the ecological commons and what is the role of the market in the relationship to the ecological commons? It’s the fundamental question we’re asking all the time. A lot of people in that world are rightfully so, very pragmatic about, “what are we talking about here?” We’re talking about soil health and we’re talking about biodiversity. We’re talking about “is there a forest or not?” and then it translates up into these — what are the economic forces that create rivalries dynamics between people in which they make choices that end up shooting themselves into the foot, degrading their ecological commons and crashing our biosphere essentially? What I struggle with a lot, and part of the reason why I’m still pulling on this thread with you is, somewhere along the line if you follow that chain deep enough, you get to the point where you’re asking — okay, what’s the game that we’re choosing to play and what is the unit by which we measure our success or failure? — which is a way of talking about money. That’s why I want to explore this because part of the Cosmos’ vision and the Interchain’s vision is that we actually need competition between monies, between currencies or stores of value. Regen Network, we’re throwing our hat in and saying, “Great. That’s a cool thesis.” What we’re saying is, “The best store value is one in which there’s a direct link to a tendency to better steward the underlying ecological living capital that the entire existence of humanity and the planet exists on.” If there’s a currency to properly account for that and allows for regenerative, cooperative outcomes in the stewardship of that, it will be the most competitive, essentially. It’s kind of what we’re saying. However, that is a layer of abstraction that is not accessible to most of the people. In order to succeed, we need to have a stake in the system. That’s explaining one of our basic problems, which is that the overlap of people who have the right skills and the right beliefs to dig in and steward landscapes and participate in a pretty sophisticated, complex, monitoring schema — so that we have the right accounting around the game essentially — those people have an uneven overlap with the people who are able to, at this current moment, speculate on the market success. How do you bootstrap successfully an initiative to create a co-op with its own unit of account when the people that are the most needed for the operation of the co-op don’t necessarily have access or interest yet?
Gregory: This is what I think is one of the biggest challenges around crypto adoption and network creation. I’m hoping that you have an answer. [laughter]
Jack: If I did, I’d have a lot more money than I do now. I think your point about games and whatever unit of account in that game is, is a really important point. A lot of activities that we end up doing as humans can get boiled down to that. Are you playing this cryptocurrency game? Are you trying to collect these coins and sell them to other people? Are you playing the farmer game where you’re growing crops and then using those to nourish more life or sell those to more people? Bucky has an excellent talk on dissipative and additive cycles, and those getting used to create complex systems in nature and figuring out — using your terminology — how those games work and what’s the unit of account there. Once you have that, putting that in some sort of distribution and letting people play that game, it’s only going to have value or bootstrap itself if people are interested in doing that. There’s a fundamental marketing and sales function here where you need to convince people that this thing that you want to do, this game that you want them to play, is worth playing. Once they’re convinced, then they’re bought into the idea of your money, and those incentives and economic games that you designed will drive them.
Gregory: Now, putting my devil’s advocate hat — why on Earth would we devote all of this energy? Are you devoting all of this energy to this abstraction of creating the building blocks for people to define a new game to play and invite people to play that game as a theory of change? What does that uniquely create that I couldn’t do by starting a shareholder-based business and competing for US dollars? What does it make possible that otherwise is just impossible?
Jack: I think this goes back to the political question that you asked earlier on this libertarian, anarchist, lower-government, in this realm of thought. How do we deal with these large, centralized power structures that have kept getting larger and more centralized throughout the last couple of hundred years and this right-left dynamic that we’ve had since the French Revolution that’s essentially been static in a lot of ways? On both the right and the left, the power of this state has continued to increase. Those large entities, be they governments or corporations, push a lot of externalities out there. You would think that “decentralized” is a really loaded word. An organization system where there are many smaller organizations and entities is going to be more dynamic and able to recover more quickly from negative events. If you’re thinking of a large coordinated response to an earthquake or a natural disaster, it’s not as fast or as effective as the coordination that the people on the ground who have actually experienced the disaster are going to do it themselves. They’re going to be able to go find out which of their neighbors lost their homes, shelter people, efficiently distribute the food and resources that they have until they can get more of this larger help. If you’re thinking about a world that is going to be changing drastically with climate change mainly, our government structures are very slow to change right now. I think most of the rich world is experiencing this political gridlock and this return to populism. How do we provide a different vision for the future which is something that people would want to live in? I personally think that this vision of decentralizing this power, bringing more of it back to these communities and people who are actually dealing with these issues on the front line and letting them make the decision, is probably a better way to do things. I don’t know if that’s answering your question.
Gregory: I guess I have the same bias and I wonder — what are things that are better accomplished through some top-down central mechanism?
Jack: Anything that requires huge amounts of resources or globalization is inherently difficult for small teams and organizations. I think that the moonshot is a great example of that. It was this really far-out technology on a lot of different fronts that had to be assembled in this massive expenditure of money and human effort to get to the Moon.
Gregory: Thinking about that coordinating decentralized network of autonomous communities to get to the Moon feels unlikely that that ever would happen. Maybe arguing — even with myself here — is taking this capacity building on a local, decentralized scale, an approach that can actually appropriately meet the existential crisis of climate change where there is only one planet, for instance? What does it mean if it can’t and what does it mean if it can?
Jack: Let’s assume that there’s either a centralized approach or a decentralized approach, not a mix of approaches that will end up working. If you look at the way systems are built, they are essentially layered. If we layer these games on top of each other and there’s a complex interplay between these different layers, some of them are more decentralized, i.e. the decision-making is widely dispersed, and some of them are more centralized. The way that interplay works depend on any given system. Thinking that there’s not going to be some level of global coordination to solve this environmental problem and have this central focusing point, I think it is naive potentially. But thinking that you’re not going to need a lot of independent actors to make that squad-level — if you think of the military that way — that’s extremely important. If you think of the military as this very centralized, top-down, command and control structure, the way that military power is evolved is you’re pushing this power out to units on their edges. Ships in the age of sail were pretty decentralized. You would write an order that says, “Go attack Calle” and you would send out these ships and they each have their commanders. In the heat of the battle, they are all making decisions on their own. If you look at the way the US troops get deployed, they are in small squads, and each of those squads has goals and they move independently. There are these interplays between centralization and decentralization that I think is necessary. These decentralized technologies and this ability to organize in this way, it’s not the only way to do things. You can also use it to build centralized systems as well. I think it’s going to be interplay between the two.
Jack: Building in the ability to decentralize and the ability to push this power out to the edges into the core of the system, I think it’s extremely important because if you don’t, then you have only the system that tends towards centralization and really disfranchises large groups of people who are involved in that system. That leads to disengagement and not as strong of a community around this idea. When we’re talking around the idea that we, as humanity, need to be stewards of the globe — that’s this huge idea that requires buying from tons of independent entities and individuals — and doing that in a very centralized way is very hard because it’s easy to alienate people. Allowing these more free-floating communities to be trying their own experiments towards this top-level goal of more sustainable stewardship of the environment, seems to be a more promising and quicker way to get to the end goal that we’re looking for than by having some top-down approach where you’re only pulling a couple of levers at a time. Whereas you can have this many-arm banded approach where you can have all of these independent entities, pulling levers that you can’t even see in this decentralized entity.
Gregory: I love the initiation to look into the layers of this as I sometimes refer to as “the nested nature,” as a Russian doll. The systems are nested within each other. The paradox is that there’s a need for global coordination and boundary conditions that all of the sub-games follow, but then they’ll need to have the ability to generate their own social contracts and initiatives, and within that innovate infinitely. What you’re saying really resonates, which is it isn’t actually that there is one way or the other. It’s that in some way, the aim of this movement is to find the dynamic between the initiative and coordination, or centralization and decentralization, to communicate intelligently and optimize in some way.
Jack: Yeah. I think that’s a really great way to put it. I think that there’s a lot of folks in this space who are deeply skeptical of the way that we’re doing things now. If you look at my resume, I saw the beginnings of the financial crisis from the inside. That internship I did up in New York, right before that, Derek Stern failed. Right after that, Liven Brothers failed. As you can imagine, working in New York up in the ’40s right next to JP Morgan building, I talked to a bunch of people. I heard people and what they were talking about, how they thought that the financial system might meltdown, and gold bugs, and all that stuff. I think that the way that we centralized control in a lot of these large banks — I think “too big to fail” is a great example of that — has centralized control of the economy in too few hands. If you look at the wealth disparity, it increased pretty markedly since the ’70s. I think the numbers bear that out. That’s an orthogonal point though.
Gregory: A slightly new topic but I think very connected. What’s the world that you’re trying to create building these tools?
Jack: I don’t necessarily view there to be a single instate. I can tell you what I don’t want. [laughter]
Using these digital social coordination technologies that the social network has developed and weaponizing them on their population, and enforcing this central control on a much more draconian, invasive, and personal way than it’s ever been possible before in history — this would make George Orwell blush. It’s that future and that level of centralization is something that, I think, we in the West that value freedom and individual autonomy, view as terrifying. I don’t know if that’s the future we as humanity want. In order to fight that, you need to give the power back to individuals and small groups. That’s what we do here in the blockchain world.
Gregory: What’s being built is a direct response to this surveillance capitalism approach, which is to collect a huge amount of data and then manipulate people to get what you want, which in this day and age is get people to buy shit.
Jack: Get people to buy shit. In China, it’s getting people to walk on the right side of the road, not spit, and for God’s sake, don’t ever think about Falun Gong or badmouth the communist party. What are the goals that you’re set for this system that you’ve built?
Gregory: Right. But the same tools can be used. What I’m hearing you say is that this is pushing those tools out to the edges so people can choose how they relate to the ability to have this huge amount of information so that a group of people can get together and create a proof-of-stake network where they are monitoring their own purchases and credit scores, and incentivizing themselves in some way. The point isn’t necessarily that those tools in it of themselves are bad, but that the right people need to be wielding them.
Jack: Yeah. I also think you need to have the option for people to be able to choose when you think back to this loyalty, voice, and exit framework. If you’re in this draconian system, you should be able to exit if you want to. In this world where there are these multi-faceted economic systems where people can pick and choose, that would be much more viable. If you look at what kind of world this might produce, I think in fiction it’s probably best done by Neal Stephenson in books like The Diamond Age or Snow Crash. We can debate up and down whether or not that’s the reality that people what to live in. That’s the future that is represented by this in some ways. I’m not saying I want “Snow Crush” future. What does a world of smaller, autonomous governments, in his word “files”, look like? How does that play out in the real world? There’s been fiction written around it if you’re interested. Did you read The Diamond Age?
Gregory: I don’t think I’ve read The Diamond Age. I’m trying to remember. I don’t think I did, no.
Jack: Gregory, let me tell you. I’ve just re-read that for the third time recently. It’s so good. If you liked Snow Crush, Diamond Age is better.
Gregory: I love Neal Stephenson. I’m not sure I totally resonate with his politics, although I’m compelled by them. I’m not sure I resonate with them. I really loved The Baroque Cycle of Neil’s work. The Baroque Cycle, I thought was so fun.
Jack: I don’t know if I read that.
Gregory: Oh, man. It’s so good. It’s old but it has some of the same lineages of characters. Meaning it’s old, it’s historical fiction set in the 1640s up through the early 1700s. It’s the age of enlightenment and it’s tracking the rise of money basically, and the rise of science, and the global expansion from Europe. There’s a couple of the same characters throughlines as Cryptonomicon.
Jack: Which is also a super fun one. World War II — for anyone who’s interested — and gold. It’s a gold time. That’s a super fun book. I’ll have to read those.
Gregory: Cryptonomicon is cool because it’s basically the creation of digital currency, pre bitcoin, and what that looked like. There were some things happening at that time around gold-based currencies, I remember, gold-based digital currencies that he was obliquely writing about. That history is really interesting because — I forgot what it’s called, like “digi-gold” or whatever — it failed because it was centralized. There was a centrotrophic failure because the government could basically say, “We don’t want you to be issuing a gold-backed currency.”
Jack: Yeah, for reasons that are pretty obvious.
Gregory: Totally. What else are you reading right now? What’s on your nightstand?
Jack: Let’s see. I do a lot of audiobooks. I’ve been going through the Foundation Series recently, by Isaac Asimov.
Gregory: Oh, fun. Yeah.
Jack: I’ve never read those as a kid. Diamond Age, Foundation. One book that I’ve found interesting recently and this is whole another thread, is Homo Deus by the author of Sapiens, Harari.
Gregory: A friend of mine was recently chatting about that. I didn’t totally get the synopsis. Are you in the middle of it right now?
Jack: I’ve finished it. Did you read Sapiens?
Gregory: No, but I’m familiar. Share a brief thesis about it.
Jack: The way that I always describe Sapiens is referential. Have you ever read Guns, Germs, and Steel?
Gregory: Yeah.
Jack: It’s like Guns, Germs, and Steel plus genetics is the way I would describe Sapiens generally. Guns, Germs, and Steel starts off with this fundamental question which the author calls “Yali’s question” — why do your people have so much cargo, yet mine has so little? What are the reasons behind global wealth disparities and how did those come into being? Sapiens answers that question, but goes back a little bit further and talks genetically about pre-humans and goes all the way up through the modern era of technology. His second book Home Deus says, ”Well, we’re at this place now where we have science and we’ve developed this ability to change ourselves through genetics, and through computing, and really to have progress, but how do we measure that progress?” I think this is very applicable to a lot of human-environmental stuff and work that you do. If we’re just measuring that progress as global GDP, that’s just the sum of human activity on Earth. If we’re just continually increasing that, we’re going to get to this place where we’ll destroy ourselves. In Homo Deus, he talks a lot about ideologies and religions and posits that they’re roughly the same thing. One of the most interesting pieces in the book that I’ve found was when he told the story of the twentieth century as a series of religious wars between different nationalist religions in World War One, and then between different humanists religions in World War Two. If you can think about what the Nazis were doing as this exclusionary version of humanism i.e. only Germans are humans, everything else is not human and therefore must be extinguished. Whereas the West had this much more inclusive version of humanism that elevates the individual and believes that there’s a much broader version, a broader swap, of people that are human, and what the evolution of humanism looks like and how that might affect the future. Interesting book. I advise you to check it out if you’re interested in topics like that.
Gregory: Yeah, definitely. I’ll put it on my Audible list. I love being able to listen to books. The way my life is, it’s so much better.
Jack: Pretty fun. For me, if I can clean the house and read at the same time, that’s better than just sitting down and reading. I love going on long walks and listening to books. It’s just fun.
Gregory: I remember growing up; when I was a kid my parents would listen to public radio. It’s in the background while I was playing or doing things but they’d be around. So, sometimes, as a dad, I hang out with my kids and put on an audiobook instead of listening to the radio. Sometimes I lose the thread of the book. When push comes to shove, the attention needs to be on the kiddos, but it’s still nice to be able to be flowing through a well-formulated thought or a novel, and have my kids along for the journey. It’s an interesting experience. I’m sure I’m not the only one these days doing that.
Jack: I grew up to a lot of spoken-word audio. I took a lot of road trips as a kid, obviously MPR and all sorts of other talk radio. I really love audiobooks and podcasts.
Gregory: It’s like a whole revolution taking place right now. It’s the healthiest expression of spoken word in terms of the abundance of available content, and how much people are metabolizing, and digesting that content, in history basically.
Jack: I think this goes back to this idea that capitalism is an atomizing society. People aren’t having these long-form discussions with their friends as much and they’re not seeing them as much. Part of that is because, I think, the political dialog has become so contentious and fractured that a lot of people only find communities of interest online. How do you communicate with those folks? Spoken word audio is an excellent tool. This long-form discussion that you and I are having, a bunch of other people can listen to this and think the same things we’re thinking, and engage in those same thoughts. It’s a way of passing on online culture. I think spoken-word audio is uniquely powerful.
Gregory: Yeah, it’s super cool. Are you also a podcast listener?
Jack: Oh, yes.
Gregory: What are some of your favorites? What are you listening to right now?
Jack: The one that got me into podcasts the most is Dan Carlin. I really love his stuff, both of his politics podcasts which I find extremely interesting — Common Sense and Hardcore History. Also on the history side of things Revolutions from the guy who did The History of Rome podcast, which I really love.
Gregory: Totally. What’s his name?
Jack: Mike Duncan.
Gregory: Mike Duncan, yeah. I’ve been saving up a little stock of those to go through. He’s in the Russian Revolution right now.
Jack: It’s one of the better ones he’s done in a while. He had a series on the Central American Revolutions that I don’t have as much context on. I’ve had a little trouble with that, but this Russian History one I’m riveted by. I think his coverage is excellent.
Gregory: I actually really love the Bolivarian and Mexican Revolutions. I spent so much time down there and I agree. Man, his Haitian Revolution one and the interrelationship between that and the tail wagging the dog with the French Revolution, it’s so good. I feel like it should be required listening at this stage of our historical context for everybody to understand all of that.
Jack: I totally agree. This gets back to something that I view as extremely important, which is learning history and the value of history. I think, especially, in today’s day and age, there’s a lot of people who look and they say, “Oh, that’s 30 years ago. That’s completely irrelevant. They don’t have anything to teach us.” But I think the one thing that history can teach us, all very vividly, is that human nature never changes.
[01:10:00]
Gregory: Are there any historical parallels? It seems to me that history has a sequence ark like a spiral. It’s never exactly the same but has similar patterns.
Jack: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure as fuck rhymes.
Gregory: Yeah, exactly. What are we rhyming with right now from your perspective? What is the era that this crazy, complex world that we’re living in most seem like to you?
Jack: Even as somebody who just came out and said, “I think history always has something to teach us,” — and that is human nature and what humans do when pushed in extreme situations, and you can go back and read that in a wide variety of extreme situations — if you’re talking about crypto, I think the wild-cut banking era in the United States after the abolition of the first bank of the United States, is interesting and potentially informative.
Gregory: When was that?
Jack: I want to say the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. There are a few good books on it. There’s this one that I have bookmarked somewhere that I need to download.
Gregory: It says 1836–1863.
Jack: Sound about right.
Gregory: Yeah, you nailed it.
Jack: The introduction of the Greenback to pay for war debt during the Civil War ended that, which, if you’re talking about centralization, is pretty obvious. An interesting era in history — if you want to talk about a previous era where wealth was as centralized as it is now and the current historical dynamics were enforced — I think the history of the gilded age and the tech titans of that era, i.e. railway, electricity, banking, is very interesting. I think financial and monetary history has a lot to teach us. On the whole, we’re living in a world with almost ten times the amount of people that there have been on average in the world. If you look back through our history, the human population has gone somewhere between 500 million and then billion people and stayed steady somewhere in there for the last few thousand years. Something happened around the enlightenment and scientific revolution in Europe that caused this massive population explosion and all of the technology that supports that around agriculture and social technology that enables to live together.
Gregory: Medicine.
Jack: That’s a huge one. Thank you for giving the obvious one there. I think we’re in this place where we really need to start thinking bigger and differently as a society. When there are ten times as many people, things have changed drastically. We need to really rethink things. When the United States was created, there were three million people there. There’s like 300 million people here now. That’s a hundred times more people and we haven’t fundamentally changed our constitution. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about some of these fundamental operating-system-level humanity things that we’re doing and update them. I’m 32, and when I was born it was the mid 80’s. There was a little under four billion people. There’s almost double the number of people now than there was when I was a kid. That’s crazy to me. I think that’s something that people don’t think about enough.
Gregory: Yeah, definitely. In addition to the exponential increase of population, there’s also an exponential increase in technology, specifically digital technology. There’s a whole bunch of other technologies, interestingly enough, that doesn’t seem to be evolving much. Digital technology is completely different. I was just reflecting. My family was pretty connected. They kept up with the releases of Apple and I remember a time before personal computers. Obviously, I was also born in the computer age. It’s just so different. I remember being a kid. To meet with people or to navigate somewhere, if you were to meet somebody at a particular time and place, the reality of that, pre-smartphone and post-smartphone, is stark.
Jack: Drastically different. This was a couple of years ago now, but I was at an event in Portland and my phone had shot itself on the plane ride. I had to order a new phone. I was traveling without a phone. I had to print out directions. At one point, I needed to get somewhere and I had to go ask somebody for directions. They looked at me like I was crazy. I was, “My phone’s dead, I can’t,” and they were ”Oh.” I watched them sit there and think, “How do I give this person directions?” It’s the skill that we’ve almost entirely lost, weirdly enough.
Gregory: In a very short time.
Jack: Yeah.
Gregory: I think that that’s a really interesting piece, which is, technology and tools allow us to optimize specific tasks whether it’s chopping a tree down or tiling a field or breaking open a shell to get the oyster. There is a thing and I want to do it easier and quicker. There’s a cost to us in which we lose the previous, higher degree of human capability that was necessary when it was harder to do whatever the task is, like navigating. If I want to navigate across the ocean by the stars, I personally have to have that capability. Whereas if I’m going to navigate across the ocean by a GPS, someone just needed the capability to use math and computer engineering to create the tool for me to use so I don’t need the capability anymore. I’m just curious — what do you think are some of the fundamental capabilities that we either lost or are at risk of losing that the technology is actually contraindicated where we as humans need to be able to do that stuff?
Jack: As we’re automating a lot of these more complex physical tasks, where we’re spending more of our time and energy is on this social coordination piece, in this realm of ideas and ideologies. I think that because of the way that we’ve evolved and who we are as a species, we do need to do some of these complex physical tasks. I think that people that don’t end up cultivating some sort of hobby or skill, they end up dissatisfied and missing something that they wish they had. How much the digital variance of this can be a replacement for more traditional things is something, I think, we’re all at the cutting edge of. Is coding as a type of artisanal activity like woodworking and do we get the same satisfaction out of it? As someone who did work in the craft for a little while when I was cooking, I have my own view on that. I do personally believe that coding and cooking are very [01:19:50 simpatico] in a lot of ways.
Gregory: What you’re saying is — yes. There can be meaning generated intrinsically just by the time and care to be a good coder.
Jack: Yeah. Going back to this community stand, that’s the social consensus of the other people who code — will they welcome you into this community and what are the steps necessary to do that? How are we going to govern ourselves? Those are all questions too.
Gregory: Back in the day I did HTML when I was younger, as all that stuff was starting to move. It’s been a long time. I don’t consider myself a coder at all. If I was to be, “Hey, I’m in this world. I should at least have a basic level” like I should be able to whittle a stick. I may not be able to build a house but I should be able to whittle a stick to use the woodworking artisan metaphor. Where does someone like me start in terms of building literacy and capacity?
Jack: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny. That’s a really interesting question. I think because it’s such a complex area, and it is so multi-faceted, i.e. there’s a bunch of whittling sticks that you can start with, I always tell people when they ask me a question like this is — what do you do with computers that you would like to do faster or that you would like to be able to automate? What are the programming tools that people traditionally use to do that? — and then start there. Anchoring something that’s extremely abstract and complex in your understanding and being able to internalize it, you have to have something existing to grab onto. Otherwise, it’s this group of buzzwords and vocabulary that you’re just trying to pile abstractions on top of those abstractions. Grounding it into something you already understand and work with actively, I think, is the best way to get into it. Some people are dealing with a lot of data or spreadsheets, and figuring out how to manipulate that data using a different programming language is an easy way to understand the basic syntax and vernacular of a programming language potentially more, depending on how your exploration goes and then finding the areas that spark joy and bring you interest within those things and exploring those. The cool thing about computers is that every little piece of it, when you ask some question like “why is that like that?”, it can lead you down this rabbit hole that is infinitely deep. Especially as a beginner in learning about computers and learning about the architecture and how these systems are designed, that’s something that I find extremely interesting. When I find something that sparks my interest, going and chasing that. Grounding it in something you know, and following what you’re interested in and enjoy.
Gregory: Did you grow up coding or is it something that you chose to pay attention to and build as a skill as an adult?
Jack: It’s the second one for me. I was always in advanced math classes and physics classes. I think that helped me as an adult to jump into it because I had exposure to a lot of fundamental concepts, but I didn’t do any coding as a child. I really wish I had been exposed to it earlier because I think I would have enjoyed it.
Gregory: Yeah, cool. This is a random aside here, but as someone who has their livelihood connected to essentially building a software-based toolkit and you’re a lot of time on your computer — what do you find as necessary in order to keep sane and healthy?
Jack: Exercise, nurturing close relationships, seeing other people, and sleeping eight hours a night.
Gregory: Are you able to appropriately time-box your work?
Jack: I think I do a good job sometimes. I think I do a not very good job at other times. That’s maybe not the answer you were looking for. I think sometimes when the work is really engaging, it’s easy to overexpose yourself and end up working too hard and burning yourself out. That’s the downside to this whole “follow your passion” programming thing.
Gregory: Totally.
Jack: You do have to rain your passion in every now and then and say, “Hey, you’ve got to sleep” or “hey, you’ve got to spend time on the things you really care about in life,” not just coding.
Gregory: Especially when your passion is for doing social coordination work on a giant, decentralized network with people around the world, in which you’re maybe dealing with breaking changes and some update that needs to happen with a whole giant group of people and you can get sucked into that. It’s a totally different thing than just working on your own little software project.
Jack: Yeah. As somebody who learned coding later in life, when I started coding and when I decided to take a plunge and do it professionally, what I always said to myself was, “the value that I bring is not that I’m the greatest coder ever. There’s a bunch of people that have been doing this since they were kids. I’m not going to catch up to that amount of time spent. I do have a lot of other experience that I can add to this understanding of code and engineering, and bring a different perspective to that, and help explain these highly technical subjects to people who are maybe less technical and understand it less. That’s the way I always viewed my role. I’m just fascinated by the technical side of things and love ripping through [01:27:13] and trying out new code, and staying up with all that stuff. At the end of the day, you need to convince people to use this code, and to do that, they have to understand how it works so they have to want to use it. I think that’s a much harder problem in a lot of ways than the problem of writing the actual software. If you look at Libra and Facebook, I think that’s a great example. To write the Rust code that builds the blockchain, they got a nice team together and got that done. They have a pretty significant implementation that they have working, and that’s great for them. The hard part is, as you’ve mentioned, the social coordination part, and the ability to actually get users on that network. For them, that runs through the US Congress and they have to get a bunch of approvals from World Wide regulators. That’s the area that I view as my core competency, that intersection between people and code. Zacky describes this as — they understand people and they understand code, but there are more people than code. The way I’ve always described it is — 50% code, 50% people skills.
Gregory: Yeah, totally. What emerges for me now at this stage of this conversation is wanting to know what — I have two threads. One is the social thread of coordinating a group of validators and delegators around a shared interest and what you’ve been learning doing that work with Cosmos — specifically around Cosmos Hub — but also how that relates to what you’re seeing in the interchain, in other zones and hubs spinning up. What are you learning about groups of people coming together and governing public infrastructure together or a common infrastructure? What’s been surprising?
Jack: That’s a really interesting question and not one I really thought a whole ton about. I’ll just give you some unfiltered ideas. My first experience here at Cosmos was that test-net program and helping build that up.
Jack: That, to me, felt very familiar to a lot of other open-source work that I have done in decentralizing and building communities around software on the Internet, but there’s this additional, added social coordination mechanism. In order to start and upgrade these networks, you have to get a bunch of people all around the world to turn their computers on and off at the same time. I’ve learned a lot about different messaging platforms. [laughter] That’s a really dumb way to look at it. I’ve made a joke because I have eight different messaging platforms that I have to use in my day-to-day.
Gregory: That’s insane.
Jack: I think the reason for that is because, in order to do this, you have to meet people where they are. If somebody wants to talk to you on Orion, you need to talk to them on Orion. If somebody wants to receive updates over Twitter, you need to push them out there, or one of the many platforms out there. Having a community like ours that’s global, in states all around the world, meeting people where they are has been extremely important, and being able to reach across a number of different channels, to coordinate these larger upgrades. Another thing is there’s no time that works for everyone in Asia, America, and Europe. You just can’t find it. [laughter] That’s one of the observations.
Gregory: What do you do? Do you rotate through who gets the crappy time?
Jack: Not yet. We should be doing that.
Gregory: You’ve been thinking about starting at one place and every time there’s an upgrade, somebody else gets the crappy time.
Jack: I think that’s by far the best way to do it. I would totally agree with you on that one.
Gregory: Is there anything that’s surprising you? Is there anything that’s “wow, I didn’t see that coming” in terms of social coordination either on the challenge side or that actually is “wow” surprisingly graceful or fun or enlivening that wasn’t apparent before?
Jack: Yeah. For all the talk about how toxic and tribal crypto is, one of the things that have been really nice for me is to find that bunch of strangers on the Internet that are just awesome people. I think we’re intentional about trying to be pretty open and a good community to be in. We don’t have a ton of official codes of conduct, but finding this group of people online and then being able to meet them in a series of conferences — you’re one of those folks obviously and I think we met up in real life for the first time in Toronto and a few other conferences since then — finding this group of people that I’m a part of and helped to organize has been a really cool and unexpected experience for me. I grew up in a mid-sized, Southern town and went to a small school, and always had a tight-net social community and never really developed a bunch of online friendships. Developing those online friendships and being able to meet those folks in person, the longer and longer it’s gone on, the more and more I really value it and enjoy it. I do really feel a real sense of community around that. I think for me that’s been kind of surprising and something that I didn’t think I would necessarily find.
Gregory: Cool. That’s exciting. I’ve experienced that too in the Cosmos world. It was like “wow.” What an amazing thing. There’s something that I’ve found really surprising and exciting. I’ve been to some other crypto conferences, not as many as some, not as few as others probably. There are some things that I think are unique about the Cosmos community but I think there’s a larger pattern, which is people who don’t know each other, who are working together on something because they’ve independently come to care about it, meeting each other for the first time, and having totally diverse experiences and backgrounds but having some common goals and caring about the same thing, is really, really fun. It’s totally different.
Jack: Yeah, I agree. In that experience, it has given me hope that this idea of being able to build these communities around these sets of economic incentives with these chains and having them trade with each other, that is a really viable thing. At the end of the day, this ideology or an idea that we all share — that we’ve spent a lot of this podcast talking about — and we’ve developed a system to help us grow and support that idea, and we’re running it. You’re right. We did time to come together from all over the world because we all share this idea. It’s a cool thing. It’s a really cool thing. [laughter]
Gregory: Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that’s unique about Cosmos in this, is that the founders of Tendermint, Jay and Ethan respectively, and the first people who are working with them are all uniquely — I think humble is an accurate word, but I don’t think it’s just that. It feels like there’s way more space in the Cosmos community for people like Zacky, Sunny, and yourself and many other characters — different zones, validators, and people — to have been carving leadership space out because there’s something about the core idea that actually is the point somehow.
Jack: Centralization and pushing this power to the edges. At the core, the system allows that. The communities that it builds are a function of that.
Gregory: Are aligned around that as a core value. That’s actually strangely enough, unique in the crypto space. Somehow, in most other projects, people think that their way is the way. It’s like — this is the way to decentralization. Whereas in Cosmos, it’s more like — it’s kind of ironic.
Jack: It’s really ironic. It’s hilarious to me. I see it all the time. It just cracks me up. [laughter]
Gregory: Yeah. This is one way to achieve decentralization. Oh? Okay. Whereas, in Cosmos, I experience it more as, “Hah. We’re going to build some tools to try our best to achieve decentralization.” There’s more willingness — I experience this a lot which I super appreciate — a willingness to be open and honest about where the trade-offs are and where things fall short, which feels to me again as essential for a healthy community to be able to be, “Oh, here’s the trade-offs.” If you’re trying to do that, the trade-off may not work out, but if you’re trying to do this, it’s right on. Again, I think that is one of the fundamental values that a community focused on building tools for folks to define their own set of rules and create social coordination mechanisms, that’s just needed. People need to be able to be informed about the toolset they’re choosing basically.
Jack: Totally, I 100% agree with that. It’s really informed by the original ethos of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and this cypherpunk ideal. That’s cool to me. I believe a lot about the same things and it’s cool to find a bunch of other people who do too.
Gregory: This has been a fantastic conversation and I super appreciate for your taking the time Jack. We delved into some of these bits. I hope this conversation serves to listeners. I’m going to be thinking a little bit more about some of the key points that emerged for me, that I feel are worth thinking about more. Some of the stuff you were bringing up around, that I made into a dyad, a thesis, antithesis or whatever — the balance of coordination and initiative that, somehow, proof of stake is working at the intersection of those. That feels so on point to what needs to happen in the world. I’m just super grateful for your work in that, stewarding and being on point with the code, and being on point with the social coordination, and inviting people to participate. I’m super grateful for your work in the world and for you taking the time to have a chat with me.
Jack: Yeah, absolutely Greg. I love having talks like this. Again, it’s one of the reasons I love crypto because a bunch of people want to talk about stuff like this all the time. Thank you very much for inviting me on, and for the work that you all are doing over at Regen — which I think is incredibly challenging — and how do you measure these things and quantify them, and then actually develop communities around fixing some of these environmental issues that we’re seeing. I think it’s probably the hardest problem that we’re facing as a society today. It’s really cool to see you guys trying to use our technology to go solve some of those problems and having a lot of success. I really admire the work that you guys do as well. Thank you very much for your time.
Gregory: Thanks, Jack.
Jack: Awesome, talk soon.
