8 - Human Thriving with Simona Pop

hello and welcome to the green pill i'm kevin walke and this is the podcast about public goods and regenerative crypto economics i am here with simona pop who is the founder of the bounties network does community status endow engagement strategy at bitcoin i hope you enjoyed this episode so you've got some money but how are you going to use it you want to spend me shopping now bro when you know you should be saving you'll never buy a house at this rate but what if you could spend and save at the same time

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bankless and start investing in crypto today hello simona how are you hello kevin i'm good how are you pretty good glad to have you here uh so let's tee off by talking about how you got into crypto and what keeps you in crypto well the how i got into crypto is a shorter answer versus the what keeps me in crypto piece um so i got interested in crypto back um at

the end of 2017 when i was doing a whole bunch of research around um you know technology and really finance and where it could be taken to um in a dynamic where it might serve more people than the current system and so um i stumbled upon a lot of articles around like supply chain and things that i believe find um were doing at the time who were part of consensus

and i kind of started digging a little bit deeper and um trying to understand okay well what are the real opportunities and real possibilities and real um essentially trajectories that we can push this um where it does indeed um serve the many versus yet again the few and that's how i came to um co-found the bounties network mark we essentially discovered that you know

we had this common interest in how we could use smart contracts to essentially deploy funds for anything anywhere in the world regardless of whether individuals were completing bounties were their countries were part of the swift network or even if they had bank accounts or not and that for me was a very interesting proposition right because so many people are excluded um

from participation in the global economy and really just excluded from being able to um let's say realize a higher potential more potential because of their geographic uh position and their socioeconomic status and so it was kind of that um flipping that whole dynamic in its head and really this whole redesign of

the opportunities to tap into resource that really captured my attention and then from there everything that we did and everything dare i say that i continue to do is always with that in mind how can we enable easier access broader access how can we enable seats at the table for everybody uh how do we create multiple tables that multiple people can sit at um

and that kind of brings us to why um even though it is incredibly incredibly taxing energy-wise um it's why like human energy-wise um it's why i kind of uh this is what keeps me in crypto because i genuinely believe that we can get those things done and i genuinely believe in working until we get those done right so you guys have done some interesting

experiments with the bounties network uh uh the things that were regenerative and quite frankly before their time uh can you tell us a little bit about bounties for the ocean and some of the people that you met through the bounties network that uh were able to earn a living and previously weren't able to before i just like the social impact there i think is really interesting because it's very human uh the human thriving that you created there was was there can you just can you tell me about that yeah so

with um and and this is what i really wanted us to do with bounties and like you say we were so ahead of our time that people were still looking at us going wait what what are you what do you want to do why are you doing this um so one of the main things that i really wanted us to experiment with is exactly this right it was the social impact side of things and really go very broad in the application of bounties

with the distinct purpose of distributing funds anywhere and for non-technical tasks for non-technical endeavors because particularly when we did the bounties for the oceans in 2018 there was very little in terms of non-technical um you know ways in to the web3 ecosystem for a great many people and so one of my main desires was

okay how do we create something so simple um in terms of mechanism and in terms of tasks that anybody can can access it and perform that said task this task was a cleanup uh you proved that you have done a cleanup and you get rewarded with crypto now initially we launched it in partnership with um maker on world ocean day at the beginning or i think middle of 2018 and just put it up as a bounty

we were rewarding i believe with uh tendai and it really took off to the point where we were getting submissions from people around the world for these cleanups that they were doing we had people in australia in um romania in all over the us um in like honestly in the uk i can't even remember um the full extent of the geographic reach but it was it really

took me by surprise because i genuinely didn't think there were that many people who would um tap in and start doing this but as soon as we started getting these messages essentially saying this was so helpful because it not only provided an on-boarding opportunity but really an opportunity to do something and earn crypto versus buying it let us remember it was 2018 so exchanges and on-ramps were few and far between

um even like compared to today right so it was incredibly heartening to discover this appetite for for what we were doing and it's one of the reasons why we created the pilot that we did later on in the year in 2018 which was in the philippines the reason why we picked the philippines was two well there were two reasons one the philippines is the third most polluted country in the world

and the second reason was we found a partner on the ground who could ensure the off-ramp and so we partnered with somebody to make sure that if we were people uh paying people with crypto they could then uh exchange it and turn it into filipino peso this was a very very important consideration because i genuinely did not want to show up somewhere and just say here's magic internet money there's nothing you can do with it um so we did this

this project in the philippines across two days um and we cleaned um this beach in manila bay now what we discovered when we were scouting for a good location for a cleanup is this particular beach that was very close to a fisherman community and we met this um guy from that community on the beach on that day when we were scouting to see what the best kind of spot would be for

us to um to clean and he was burning some cables to get the copper out of the plastic casing and so thankfully we had a translator with us and we asked him what he was doing and he basically explained the whole dynamic that is taking that whole community and probably so many others like it that because the water is so polluted there are no fish if there are no fish the fishermen

have nothing to fish right therefore the income dries out and then they have to find alternatives now this is specifically and exactly one of the things that i wanted us to exemplify with this pilot and and what we were doing in the philippines is how can we diversify the means of income how can we diversify the opportunities for people in the situation in other

similar situations in any gradient of that situation to essentially tap into um resource in another way and so um we um worked with that fisherman community we onboarded almost 200 fishermen onto mobile wallets in 2018 and then so ahead of your time mobile wallet so ahead of our time yes yes and also we hot spotted everybody on the beach it was an intense

laborious but incredibly rewarding um incredibly rewarding exercise because one of the main things that we did other than clean 3.5 i think tons of trash and this was in four hours two hours per day because then it gets too hot and we couldn't be on the beach um we also unlocked this opportunity for people to understand the mechanism

have the tools in place i.e a wallet and know where to go to do more bounties and this is what a small yet very interesting percentage of that group of fishermen did they went on to complete other bounties and that was the main thing and the main takeaway for me is that you open up a door to alternative to choice

you create that choice people as soon as you give people the tools to do it they will do it and that didn't depend on any bank it didn't depend on any charity it didn't depend on any uh i don't know international organization that has an office in that country that costs i don't know how many millions in admin and all of that it was a a

simple opportunity a simple event and the tooling that is needed to then continue tapping into um the obviously the pool of opportunity that we're all building yeah you know it reminds me of that charlie munger quote uh show me the incentive and i'll show show you the outcome so you know what i the bounties for the ocean situation it kind of seemed like oh uh the water was polluted and so all of these fishermen didn't have a way of

earning an income and so they had to burn trash in order like or find other ways of creating an income and there they had to burn trash which probably further polluted the ocean and then you know the cycle sort of continues as coordination failure and then you like using ethereum and mechanism design have this really elegant protocol for uh if you do x i will give you y is basically the the bounties protocol and then uh what you do is you go to all the fishermen and you say if you clean up

the trash on the beach then i will give you tokens and it sounds like you all cleaned up 3.5 tons of trash over the that afternoon and so i think that it's a really interesting example if you show me the incentive i'll show you the outcome you basically shifted the shelling point of the incentives of all this fishermen on the beach and created a regenerative outcome by using mechanism design is that more or less accurate more or less and to be fair i think it

also dives into the intrinsic versus versus extrinsic motivation or incentive because if you think about it yes they were getting tokens in exchange but they were also cleaning the beach that they need for the fishing do you see what i mean so then you have that double motivation to participate in something like this and the opportunities that this unlocks or rather the the possibilities of these permutations that

it unlocks is just something that isn't necessarily i don't know whether it's not necessarily thought about in uh the current models or it's just like everything is so cumbersome and so loaded with administrative layers that it's just impossible to be as flexible as that or as you know i guess prone to innovation as that right amazing so you know i guess like the other thread that i want to pull on is that

from reading some of your work and preparing for this interview uh the phrase human thriving has jumped out at me and that's something that you've been speaking about through the years and i'm i'm wondering if you know how your experiences at bounties and other places in the ecosystem has led you to pull on this thread of human thriving uh can you tell us about that absolutely so i think one of the main um dynamics that we kind of see in

let's say the web 2 world or certainly the the world as we've as many of us have experienced it for i don't know the past few decades or rather a lot longer than that has been this incredibly extractive incredibly demanding with little reward um play where we kind of come in and everything that we do is um

almost designed to extract every ounce of anything that we have to give and again without that much back and so i think it's one of the the reasons why we see so many different um imbalances and when i say imbalance i mean that across the board right economic social geographical all of that because we haven't necessarily thought about what

it means for a human to thrive we've thought about living okay what does a human need to live um what are the layers of that basic middle class like we've thought about all of these different boxes almost but haven't ever focused on what an individual or what humanity in its totality needs to be in a state of thriving

and a lot of that comes from this um the experience not just my own but i think just speaking to so many people in so many different i guess situations or times in their lives or um i guess space in their mind that they always feel like there is

something that they would want to do more of but feel unable to because of some sort of constraint whether it is i cannot do this volunteer work because i have to work to pay my bills right or i would love to get involved in this but again the country that i'm in does not have xy connections with the global economy or i live over here and i would love to work over here but there's no opportunity for me to do that and so

that just creates this imbalance and creates the stress that so many of us go through on like a variety of different planes of uh let's say or or um areas of our lives but i think one of the the things that web 3 puts in play are the mechanisms to potentially at least take care of some of those right and that for me is something that is incredibly incredibly important and

incredibly powerful because you are shifting from a fully extractive way of being and having to behave in an extractive manner yourself because your whole environment is like that and shifting to this regenerative way of doing things where i put value in i get value out and it is like a butterfly that constantly moves this value all around its wings and back into the

body and over and over again versus a you know one way i'm gonna take from here and just keep it there's nothing going back to replace it there is nothing going back to essentially ensure that that continues to provide value um and so it's it's the main thing that um i think for me is what i see

in web3 that is the promise that i see and that is what everything that i tend to get involved with and there's many things that i want to get involved with because i want so much to move and push this whole thing forward um that i think it's yeah it's it's very i don't know i want to say intoxicating but it isn't that

it's just it's very um i guess it's where the hope keeps like the well of hope keeps like being at a certain level that enables me to continue doing what i'm doing right so so i guess you know what i heard was that the current financial system is not serving people it's become this sort of extractive tool of the rich and the few to extract from the

poor and the many and what if we could build a more regenerative crypto economic system by hitting a reset on that and programming better incentives into the system using mechanism design or ethereum or community culture you know i actually think that mechanism design is one thing that we're all very long on in the space but uh the creation of social norms in these communities and the selling points created around those i actually think is a really important part um and how can that lead to more human thriving not

only in our local communities but then exporting that to the world uh did i just say back to you what you said to me is there anything you would change about that i think a big piece though um and this is again something that that i um tend to bring up in conversation is that there's a lot of unlearning that needs to happen because again we first generations have been programmed in the same extractive mindset and i think it's important when particularly when we talk about

communities and particularly when we talk about these norms and particularly when we talk about evolving that and not recreating the same thing somewhere else it's important to build mindfully and i say this a lot and i mean it to uh you know a high degree it is important to do it mindfully because i think we need to build with that thriving mindset whilst being in an extractive environment

right because right now with where most of us are with our feet in two boats we've got we still have to deal with like you know day-to-day life and every structure that we kind of encounter in that whilst building something completely new and that is very very hard because you're so deeply immersed in this extractive thing whilst trying to build something that is it it's opposite almost or so

far from it that you it would uh you know uh stimulate human thriving versus again just maintaining that extractive um dynamic and so it is very um difficult and i think i've spoken about this you know in kernel and i've spoken about this just in you know either uh group conversations or one-to-ones it is important to unlearn a lot of the behaviors that we have just

almost created into habits which are if i win you lose if i get ahead that guy loses or is left behind yeah and i think that's like what's hard there is is the nuance that's involved in running our whole financial lives on this on this old system that we've got a hundred years of cruft and you know probably some of those learnings are good and we want to transport over but some of them are not and then you have

to live in both worlds in order to have a toe into one of one of each and then you have to shift your center of gravity forward to the other one almost you almost have to imagine literally being with one foot with one leg in two boats what does that look like in terms of balance it's gonna be hard yeah yeah so i think agility is key um and then you know hopefully hopefully for gen alpha and beyond there's this regenerative crypto economic system that

they can just sort of live in natively and i'm wondering what that looks like and how to build that if you could just solve that actually simona real quick a whole web skill regenerative crypto economic system you know what that brings to mind is just like that um meme of the it's always sunny yeah like no it's always sunny in philadelphia with all of the um oh yeah the red's red yes um charlie will figure it out for us yeah exactly um i've given up smoking

though so like that will not um i can't recreate that perfectly but one of the things that i will say is it's incredibly important to bring as many perspectives into solving that as possible and i think again that just brings me to a lot of the things that i tend to do um other than you know those core i guess areas of focus that you mentioned um for me right now but just in the broader

ecosystem i you know i'm very very involved in creating opportunities for or hopefully creating opportunities for new people to come into the space and hopefully creating pathways for them to do that versus the dynamic of um you know here like people come to the edge of web 3 and we're like okay see you in there it's great but you know find your own way in um i think it's important to create

those those pathways right when you go into like you go hiking there's you know the beaten track and then sometimes if you go off into like the wilderness it's a little bit more difficult right there's gonna be branches they're gonna be all sorts of crap that's in your way and you know some people might turn back and not persevere it's important for us to at least clear some sort of path or at least create some sort of way in so that people can then continue their

own journey um at their own pace um you know with whatever it is that they're comfortable um with the uh and get involved in whatever they resonate with right and value aligned with and i think creating those opportunities is incredibly important again for that perspective for that plurality of perspective i don't claim and i will never say that i can solve the whole thing because i can't there's so much thinking that needs to come into

play there's so many blind spots that i myself have let alone like everybody has blind spots everybody has the curse of knowledge everybody uh you know has certain degrees of privilege and it is important to get a multi-faceted view of where we need to get to in order to get there because again the same way as you have a flat map versus a 3d one you can definitely see more and

um understand the ways around and the ways in and the ways through and the ways like uh you know across um when you have that 3d model versus an incredibly like think of the old maps right there weren't even to scale when we were like just very crudely drawn versus something that is incredibly incredibly um let's say granular and incredibly nuanced because i think that is the way

we build what we want with nuance right now we don't have new ones yeah the word that i've been using for this is intersubjective consensus so the combination of multiple people's subjective consensuses and or and skills is is how you kind of grasp the whole elephant of what we're building when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades

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