9 - Proof of Regeneration with Gregory Landua

what's happening coordination got a really fun episode for you today i've got an episode with gregory landua the founder of regen network gregory is a true og having worked on local currencies in 2009 and following bitcoin and peer-to-peer money since its very inception we talk a lot about local currencies on this episode talk a lot about the lessons that financial capital can learn from living capital things like climate and biodiversity and diverse ecosystems of animals and plants in the

animal kingdom uh gregory has informed a lot of my thinking about the space he published this piece back in the early 2010s about the eight forms of capital basically going from financial capital to also intellectual capital experiential capital cultural capital social capital and i just think that it's really created a vocabulary for me to understand the regenerative world that is being created created in the crypto space so eight forms of capital is gregory's work and it's very foundational to my thinking about regenerative crypto economics we talk

about a high functioning automatic which is just basically how do we make the automatic or the default decision that economic actors make regenerative for public goods and for our communities we talk about how humans can be a regenerative keystone species for planet earth keystone just basically means the species that all other species depend upon and it that's the keystone species talk a little bit about robust and healthy ecosystems and what financial capital can learn from living capital in this episode so coordination this episode was one of my favorites

that we've ever done and i am really excited to bring it to you today without further ado i bring you gregory landua the founder of regen network 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 you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that's why you should be using matcha matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various liquidity sources in ethereum and is also operational on polygon avalanche finance smart chain and other

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ability to fund payroll in fiat and stable coins without the use of centralized exchange you can also receive paychecks in fiat and white listed digital currencies so sign up for opelus today and get a thousand work and a thousand bank tokens when you become a member of opolis by may 25th 2022 and get started working your self-sovereign life hey hey coordination i am here with gregory landua the founder of regen network what's up gregory yo kevin awesome to be here so glad to have you um you have a really

deep history in building regenerative stuff um and i'm curious to pull pull on that thread can you tell us how you got into crypto and how you founded the regen network yeah totally well so um gosh i definitely stumbled across crypto first like back in probably like 2009 or so when i was pretty deeply engaged with a bunch of alternative and complementary currency work like local currency work

local exchange trading systems time bank work uh and i ran across the bitcoin white paper and that was you know like 2008 you know crisis and during that whole time i had been um doing a lot of community organizing actually in a very you know um quirky strange part of middle tennessee uh summertown um in hohenwald and we had been convening kind of in a pretty traditionally thought of as a very conservative part

of the united states we've been convening politicians and business owners and farmers around this concept of of relocalizing and regenerating the economy and you know and and during that whole sort of like arc of my life and my career i stumbled across bitcoin and was really immediately interested and i actually remember sitting around a campfire uh with some you know pretty hardcore like deep green

kind of like deep green resistance sort of bioregionalists talking about if bitcoin provided could provide us some hints around what you know relocalizing and having bioregional currencies reflective of ecological health might look like and having fun arguments and conversations about it way back then you know and and like right there the dawn of the the crypto era really yeah can i pull that thread a little bit not to take us on a

tangent but i'm curious what you see as the upside in the work you're doing with local currencies does it allow communities to represent their their values in a little bit more of a uh high-resolution way like what's exciting about local currencies to you buy your regional currencies yeah i mean i consider money to sort of be a root protocol for social coordination and you know how we define the social the process of the social construction of value

i would define as a basic human right i think you know if you look back in the to the dawn of history there's a really amazing debt the first five thousand years by david graber his recent book the dawn of everything all of your listeners should read these they're really foundational in understanding the the plurality and multiplicity of different types units of account forms of currency that that different cultures over

millennia have have created for their own cultural con context and so i've always been really passionate about this concept of relocalizing that so that process of the social construction of value and sort of you know maybe a nested dunbar kind of uh scale where you really need to participate in asking questions about how you're reflecting value um in order to anchor it in a more holistic sort of health and the

more that it scales and the more abstracted our money gets from our culture the the more the more challenging i believe it is to have our money systems be interwoven with the generation of public goods essentially because it just gets so abstract that you know the the games that we play around the economy kind of get further and further from something that accounts from for

i guess a healthy society i see okay got it so that localization i can almost sort of imagine a i think in the united states there used to be different state currencies and and you know i'm wondering what it's like what it would be like in a hyper-connected age to have a bunch of local currencies that represent local values but then maybe there's like a uniswap pool to some sort of global more commoditized currency and what kind of interplay that creates between uh you know it's interesting because the united states is kind of constructed around

localism and then the states and then and then the federal government now we've kind of got this you know united nations that we're a part of which are four different holons for human society um and and what does it do when you when you give those those local communities access to their own currency which represents their own values um i don't know if you have anything more to say about that but it seems like a deeply interesting hypothetical design space it's deeply interesting it's really dynamic there's a lot of work that happens around this kind of subject

in the cosmos ecosystem i know bucky um ethan buckman one of the founders of the cosmos project is really passionate around this sort of like localism as applied to currency and monetary theory and design and okay it sort of resonates with this this sort of like concept in cosmos of self-sovereign state machines which are sort of like make it possible for a community to govern the economic parameters of that community in a sovereign way but

interoperate with other economies in this sort of nested way and so you know there's sort of like a deep thread of this particular like geekiness right inside of the like the the the sister or cousin community to ethereum which is cosmos yeah yeah and and i want to get into that and understand that ecosystem um and and i think like maybe i would introduce a language early in the episode for us to talk about the different trade-offs that make different local currencies make y'all blew my mind

when you published this blog post about the eight different forms of capital um taking uh what's commonly understood to be capital which is financial capital and exploding it out into social material financial living intellectual experiential spiritual and cultural capital and um you know maybe that's like a common language for us to talk about the trade-offs between values that different local currencies might have in this world um but i i guess i just want to like say in front of everyone eight forms of currency really blew my mind when i read

it and i've treated as foundational in a lot of the designs that i'm working on these days so kudos for that i don't know if you have anything else to say about the eight forms of of capital yeah well super grateful and excited honored that it's useful and you know and that that eight forms of capital um framework was generated back in 2008 through a participatory process with a community so my thinking partner around that ethan olivia of and i

um feel like we just sort of listened right we were we were listening to this community and we were at we we sort of charged ourselves with asking what were different unique and important forms of value that people didn't feel like were commonly represented by this concept of capital right and and we sort of gathered we interviewed people and we gathered all of these responses and we sort of distilled the

eight forms of capital out of that as as these sort of patterns that could could represent a holistic conception of value and capital and then how it complexes into currencies um and use that as a living framework for us to navigate our work in the world so you know and and since we created it um or sort of like crystallize that as a framework we've noticed that it's been really deeply useful for a lot of very

diverse different communities so the eight forms of capital is very commonly taught in permaculture design courses these days around the world and um and now it's sort of making its debut recently into the crypto space as it's discovered and rediscovered and regenerated by by folks like yourself so it's yeah it's it's exciting to be part of something but you know with all humility i think we were really just sourcing from the moment and trying to express what we were hearing yeah that's so fascinating i feel like

so many of the insights that i have um in working with dals and working in this bleeding edge design space just comes from um communing with people and trying to sense make them like we're on the frontier what do we see around us and and it's it's kind of it breaks my brain every time i just kind of get to be in these these communities where ideas like that bubble up um and so you know has that been something that you've taken forward in your work in the region network uh be curious to hear to start playing forward that story

about from 2009 uh to the founding of the region network and what you all are up to uh these days definitely i mean so regen network is um is built to be open public infrastructure for for living capital accounting and and currency minting essentially um and so that's what we're up to so we're really focused on um you know and and each you know it's a holistic framework and so of course to account for or to explore

as a community living capital as the foundation for currencies and assets and in a living economy you also need to be asking what's the relationship between living capital and financial capital and living capital material capital living capital cultural social so they're all represented but the emphasis at regent network is really firmly on living capital and um you know and again creating public infrastructure for for us to be evolving new ways of accounting for and

expressing and regenerating really at the end of the day regenerating living capital and regenerating just means a system where that resource becomes more abundant over time as opposed to becoming depleted uh at least that's the definition i've been working with how would you define regenerative i think that that's i think that that's a good um placeholder i i tend to use words like vitality viability evolutionary capability and capacity so regeneration to me represents um not just an increase in

sort of like systemic capability and capacity but actually and but actually sort of um increasing the ability for the system itself to evolve and that feels really foundational to sort of the the conception of regeneration that i i work with um i see okay that's so interesting you almost like put it in evolutionary frame there the world's evolving a system if it can evolve along with it is regenerative it's going to keep up in the future

um yeah yeah and in this case it's really about our biosphere our our ecosystems our watersheds our soil our forests how are we how are we knitting them back into our economic system so that our economic transactions relationships our our um our co-regenerating um our culture and our society our economy with the greater the human world with the larger

ecosystem and i i come from a permaculture background myself you know my vocation in uh previous to web three crypto sort of blockchain world was doing um what i think you could broadly consider permaculture design implementation and um there's a great definition by a really awesome um sort of permaculture researcher named rafter sas ferguson of permaculture which is the art and science of meeting human needs while

increasing ecosystem health and i see that always really deeply resonated with me as as a pointer around what are we trying to do here specifically around living capital and like how we weave living capital into this sort of like larger economic tapestry well we want to meet our needs right as a society as individuals as people in a way that increases ecological health and that's always been a nice uh just placeholder for me just like a north star

amazing um you know what i think is so interesting about this space is how um i'm starting to ever since you published eight forms of capital think about different projects is just new arbitrages between different types of capital like ethereum and vitalik i think of as like an arbitrage between intellectual capital and the creation of consensus with the financial capital which then has enabled nfts which are financial and cultural capital um social media and blockchain is an arbitrage between financial and social capital in

in what you're doing is an arbitrage not arbitrage but like a connection between material and living capital and financial capital and so you've just kind of given me this language for looking at different sub sectors of the web 3 space and viewing them through kind of like bridges between financial capital and and many many different different types of capital and you're the deepest person i think i know in the material and living capital stuff bro uh gregory i mean it's been like you've been working on this for like 10 or 15 years at this point so i think it's it's

cool that you gave us all that that other language and and i really want to dive in on the material living capital and where what you think we can learn from that so i don't know anything to anything to say about that before i asked my next question no i mean i love that concept of arbitraging between these different forms of capital and um yeah that's really yeah that's really a nice um that's really a nice mental model um yeah well thanks for giving us the language to talk about that um i want to talk about permaculture

next uh as a i think a modest my audience might be a soft be software engineers and might not know as much about agriculture as you do and i want to talk about permaculture and why that's such an exciting concept to you and what does financial permaculture look like what can finance learn from traditional permaculture well permaculture you know one definition i already mentioned which is the art and science of meeting human needs while increasing ecological health um there it's sort of a set of principles that we're were distilled from

um the progenitors or authors of of permaculture into the world as a as a design science so there's a set of principles that um were observed amongst a wide variety of successful mostly indigenous uh generated land management and agriculture systems and a set of ethics so generally speaking permaculture is like kind of a design science and it's something that you bring to bear

to to to allow you to in most cases it's people designing um the built environment or agricultural systems so living and and material capital systems you know in in people are thinking about nutrient cycles and they're thinking about catching and storing water and and renewable energy and they're thinking about diversifying cropping systems and my specialty in that whole world was really centered around agroforestry and agriculture and

and those systems um and i did a lot of work kind of doing multi-enterprise business planning because one of the things you start to when you get permaculture pilled you start to see you know that that diversity is really um a key to regeneration and so when you look out in an agricultural system and you see nothing but corn for thousands of miles basically you know you know there's an issue right in order to support that monoculture

system we have to pour immense amounts of herbicides and pesticides and fertilizers and have giant machines that manage it all and it wants to grow back it wants to grow the weeds are nature trying to rediversify it and so we're fighting these weeds all the time well you know permaculture is kind of almost taoist it's kind of like how do we learn to go with the flow of life instead of

fighting life in how we're designing our agriculture our built environment and our agricultural systems predominantly like we're all really fascinated about these basic sort of survival you know like all of human life is is sourced from agriculture no one is disconnected from where their food is grown no matter if if that food is plant-based proteins that get recombined into some sort of like weird new age you know

drink or if it's like a big slab of beef on a grill you know either way it is coming from the earth right and so right we permits are super earthy we're super earthy practical folks just kind of wanting to engage at that nexus of of the the process of humans extracting value from living capital right we need to we need to eat we need to have fuel food and fiber and permaculture is yeah it's a

it's a it's a process to explore how to go about extracting value in a way in which the relationship is regenerative in which that ecosystem is increasing in health and i would sort of before i stop with my monologue i would invite all of your listeners who who who yeah maybe more on the sort of um software engineer spectrum of things to consider that a couple of facts um

fact number one wolves right which interact with um which are predatory right and interact with bison and elk and deer as predators when you introduce a wolf into an ecosystem as a keystone predator the diversity and ecological health of the entire landscape goes up right um when so so wolves are this really

fascinating um i think hint to how a species can actually increase the ecological health of the whole system how does that happen why does that happen i think these are really important questions to be asking and i'm always asking how can humans be a regenerative keystone species on planet earth how is our presence here actually uh a force for regeneration instead of a force for degeneration how

is our presence in an ecosystem whether it's agricultural or wild actually engendering sort of this net regenerative results in which biodiversity and ecological health is the result of our interactions with the rest of the ecosystem got it um and you're so i i just had to google it since you said it and it sort of blew my mind a keystone species is a species which other species in an ecosystem largely depend and if you remove from the ecosystem would change drastically in

the story that you told about the wolves are they the are they a keystone species yeah they're keystone species so in places that they were extirpated or removed from ecosystems all over the world those ecosystems have degraded and then the ecosystem changes and and it decreases in biodiversity and stability right and so um when wolves are present again you know like in yellowstone there's all of these indicators and all of the science showing that the ecosystem is more robust resilient and healthy

you know and this is true you know you could think of the larger carbon cycle we're in this climate catastrophe we've been pumping you know um carbon from from below the earth into the atmosphere creating the you know greenhouse effect all these other things cl you know carbon is really the least of our problems in a lot of ways um this is an example of humans not behaving like a keystone species instead we're behaving we're we're behaving as a species that's tending towards

simplifying and degrading and making ecosystems more fragile right but that is not that does not need to be the case there are plenty of examples if you look at at like a larger scale anthropological history of humans there are lots of examples of human societies acting as keystone species in which they're you know like in the amazon there were large you know and mesoamerica um there were large civilizations supported by incredibly biodiverse hyper biodiverse

landscapes in fact some of the most biodiverse hot spots in the amazon there are studies showing that humans were tending these biodiversity hot spots through climactic changes and then the biodiversity was expanding back out from these sort of arcs of biodiversity and that humans were responsible for sort of seeding and stewarding this mega biodiversity of the amazon and so like flipping the script from degen to region you know we don't need to be a force for

degeneration as humans this is all just how we structure our incentives our society our interaction with the the other eight forms of capital besides financial capital and that engineering and design question in a holistic way you know my entry into that was was through permaculture amazing um do you think a lot of this is just about considering second order effects of our actions so you know like when i eat my job to be done is to no longer be hungry right but there's these

second order effects to my health of like what i eat accumulates over time and if i have the aperture of awareness to think about the second order effects of my decisions like i'll eat organic i'll eat like fruits and vegetables and that will create regenerative living capital for me because i'll be more healthy um i guess i just wonder does a lot of this boil down into making so that like the default choice for people it considers the second order effects of their um actions so that the system doesn't become self-terminating um

is that one way of slicing and dicing it in what ways is that right and what ways is that wrong in your opinion gregory i think that's a great way to slice and dice it i think you know i in my language i would refer to that as sort of achieving a high functioning automatic where you know like our habitual patterns if we're just kind of on default mode are tending to have these sort of like positive second-order results instead of negative second-order results and i think that's that's that's totally right on um in terms of like how this is

designing or engineering yeah i also think that that concept of the high-functioning automatic the default network is really interesting to me because one of the things i deeply feel is that being able to care about second order effects of your decisions is kind of a position of privilege right you know it's easy for me to pontificate about the effects on the world of our actions but uh like someone who wants to feed their kids probably doesn't like you know in his living paycheck to paycheck like it's hard to get them to care about the second order effects so one of the questions i always have is how can we bring the high

functioning automatic or the automatic to be more of a high functioning automatic because i think it's too complicated to make the case uh to people when they're just trying to get that job to be done that that they should care about the second-order effects do you have any pushback on that or feedback on that how do you think about that well i mean it generally drives with my perspective which is that um if we're trying to rely on individuals making inquotes the right choice you know

what we're relying on is like a moralizing argument in which you know people are are recreating the prisoner's dilemma right and time after time day after day where they have to take care of themselves and they got to play this game and they got to feed their kids they got to feed themselves they got to take care of the family and this statistically the trend is going to be for people to to defect not because they're bad but because they have present moment challenges that they have to deal with and you know net net

like it's just going to all trend towards that and i think you know i think our quest needs to really be um and i think it is true being able to think about this pontificate about it is a position of privilege and i think we do need to be thinking about how do we create transparent non-manipulative non-coercive high-functioning automatic where people can opt in to a high functioning automatic where when you

when you're making that day-to-day decision on default mode or you know i think another thing that's really important here to consider is that people you know oftentimes people defect not because they're bad meaning defect on like the public good not because they're bad but because they're getting put in a situation where they have to they have short time preference in an economic decision they got to get what they can get right now um otherwise they're going to feel pain

of some sort right and it could be significant and we need to like as a society you know this like first order and second order effects short time preference and long time preference really we need to realign economic incentives right for short-term decision-making and long-term outcomes and that that question about how we do that in a high-functioning automatic i do think is like the the big

kind of like quest we're on together with when you take the green pill and when you're engaging in regenerative crypto economics i think that's that's a big part of what we're all up to 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 for the enlightened kind with inquiring