The Divine DAO with Tracheopteryx | Layer Zero

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code but is composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with Tracheopteryx. He has been on a number of podcasts talking about very big cerebral topics about DAOs, DAO coordination, how DAO coordination mimics nature. And this is all stuff that just really gets my mind going. And I just love all of these very just like far out subjects, as you can tell if you've been listening to the Layer Zero podcasts. So we talk about how one of the most underappreciated lenses for viewing this crypto industry is one of biology, how DAOs will have biomimicry in their organizational structure, and how computers will become part of humans, as we know. Like we're building out AI, but it's not going to be external to us, it's going to be a part of us, like our DAOs. And so we are just creating these technologically enabled futures, these technologically enabled humans with AI, but also with DAOs and DAOs being one of these stories. We talk about how DAOs can help change society from being one of command and control to one of being sense and respond. And how does that change culture when our organizations, our institutions don't have this scarcity mentality of resource competition, but instead have this competition of how best can they sense the needs of their constituents and respond to the needs of their constituents with the best possible carrot? There's so many different angles of this conversation that I thoroughly enjoyed with Trakey Octoric. So I think you will also enjoy this conversation as well. So let's go ahead and get right into this conversation. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. What's up, Drake? How's it going?

Good man. How are you?

Oh fantastic, fantastic. You've been on the podcast circuit lately, and I think everyone is realizing that you have a lot of interesting things to say. And so I'm bringing you on this podcast because I think I can do it better.

Let's do it. That's great.

I've said it a few times on the show before, but I think the most underappreciated lens for viewing this industry is biology. And that's why I appreciate your takes the most, is because we're looking towards nature for guidance more than just trying to, you know, top down architects, you know, create this thing without any, you know, kind of feeling around in the dark, right? Like crypto, it's a new frontier. We don't really know what we're doing here. We get some semblance of an idea, but I think looking to nature is one of the best guiding lights that we have in this industry. I'm wondering your thoughts on that to kick this conversation going.

Absolutely. And just in general, I I'm I'm always looking at ways to expand my perspective and like step back and see things from another another angle. And I think, you know, we can get so caught up in what we're doing. It's just everything's within this one little space and becomes tautological or something, and it's all just in here. And then, you know, biology is one bigger lens we can look at. And there's many, many others to step back and, you know, reframe the context of what we're doing.

Do you remember like our first early moment or aha moment where you were like, Hey, this crypto thing relates to nature pretty well. Do you remember the first realization you had with that?

Uh yeah, let's see. Um I think it was basically right right away. Like I um

I've always been interested in, you know, uh developmental psychology and bio and physics and various sciences. And I tend to like see echoes of things everywhere. And so I think um, you know, one of the things that really drew me to

to crypto is DAOs. That was the thing that really from the beginning, that that idea. And to me, that was always part of a kind of, I guess, biological framing, like, or at least how I.

how it resonated with me.

And was it strictly like the org structure of DAOs or how DAOs coordinate you thought was going to be like mimicking nature in some way, or what was the angle?

Well, I guess just I've never really agreed with this idea that we're different than other things, you know, like it's all like, okay, so we have computers and we have technology, but really that's just another extension of the phenotype. That's another part of this organism. It's all kind of where you draw the circle and how you draw a boundary around something, what you define the self. Like it gets very confusing. You look at bees or at ant colonies or at cephanophores or all of these different or the bacteria in your gut or whatever, and this notion of identity really melts away as soon as you kind of interrogate it. And so, yeah, like the human condition of trying to create things and working together. Like I started a bunch of companies and ran teams and things like that. And and to me, it's always very much about that interpersonal piece. And that always felt like part of some expanding mammal broad set or something. You know, it's always just some like piece of turbulence. And so, you know, the idea that a DAO could put this structure together.

that can hold these types of interpersonal dynamics and this creative energies, you know, was the kind of the first thing I thought when I saw them.

Mm-hmm. I can't I can't remember where I heard this first, but if you look like at a beehive or an ant colony and you're looking at like the bees and the ants, the organism itself isn't the individual ant or the individual bee, it's the hive itself, which is makes it intangible, which is kind of cool. Like there is no actual center of a beehive of the organism. It's just like the whole many, many individual moving parts. And when you talk about the self, like you can even get into the human body and talk about our individual selves. Like we have our body, which is our container, but our cells come and go, our brain cells come and go. And you alluded to it like your gut microbiome, which is a very critical part of who you are, literally is not part of you. How have you extended this concept of what is alive to DOOs? Like, what is alive with a DAO?

Well, you can very easily get into kind of like semantic corruption here by stretching the definition Tao, but let's not worry about that for a second and just play with it. And so you can think about like the Tao within. You can think that just like you say, like it's a little bit more obvious when you look at a beehive, but it's the same problem when you look at a human being. You know, there's a notion of cellular psychology or, you know, and the bacteria and all of these different pieces that that create this colony that is me and that has a lot of the same kind of relationships, dynamics as a organization has. And you can look at a uh a company like Apple, or you know, and you can you can think of that as a life form. You really can. I mean, the definition of life is pretty flexible, and you can at least it's worth you know the curious thought experiment of thinking about it that way. And think about what it, if you draw the boundary of life around that organism, what does that do? And how does that function? And then around a DAO, and just keep drawing different circles and seeing how they they compare.

The way that I try and like understand if something is alive or not is if it is self-interested in its own well-being, right? And so Apple certainly self-interested in its own well-being, right? And will take both defensive and aggressive moves in order to make sure that it stays alive. And so, like, you know, if it's self-interested and it's actionable, it is alive, like whether it's like a cell or a company or a DAO. And I think like when life begins, like when some sort of life form forms, we started off as singular cellular organisms, but then we started appending on like newer structures onto these cells that could sense the world around it, right? Like receive inputs and allow it to process data. And so I think a lot of like what your work has been doing over at Coordinate is like building out like one of the first appendages that allows DAOs to like receive inputs to make sure that the DAO can know about the information that it needs to know in order to self perpetuate its own ideas into the future. How do you feel about this?

Yeah, I I love it. I mean

whenever I'm building things I'm thinking about

biology and science fiction and fucking spirits and all the different weird things, you know, like like that's the the terrain I'm I'm I'm walking. And um so like with with Coordinate, yeah, I think of it like that, like an organ, you know, um, and particularly like I love this idea of sense and respond, which I I think I heard from Zach Anderson first, who's a a co-founder of Coordinate, which is a totally different kind of modality for operating, you know, rather than um just command and control this this kind of dichotomy is one I often use, like where most corporations and nations about command and control this idea that wait, we can actually work in a different way, which is like listen and react, you know, sense and respond and like what do what do tools look like? What do apps look like that are designed in that way and to support that kind of interpersonal anti rivalrous behavior.

Do you have any just thoughts about like what society looks like when it migrates from a command and control dominated version of coordination versus a sense and respond like version of coordination? Like if we all shift on the spectrum from command and control to a sense and respond, like how would society be different?

Well, I think the first thing is that we won't all do that, right? And like there's always just a super heterogeneous, diverse population of people. There's always going to be people that are in a rival risk mentality. There's always going to be people that um, you know, are in scarcity ideas. And uh and that's okay. But to the point of your question, I think there it does become a threshold where there's enough people that are starting to work in this sense and respond uh abundance mindset that things really do start to change. And um and I really like uh one of my, you know, kind of favorite thinkers, Ken Wilbur, talks about, you know, in the in the 60s, there was a similar kind of big mindset change, uh, the countercultural movement, you know, which he uh looks at as being this kind of developmental tier, this kind of pluralistic intelligence or the sensitive uh intelligence. And um, and because about like, you know, 10% of the world around that time started to have this level of development, it created these huge systemic changes. And I think we're at a similar, you know, not just me, a lot of people I've read and others think that we're at a kind of similar fulcrum right now, and that this new level of development, this new intelligent kind of integral or sense and respond or non rivalrous is starting to get enough. There's enough people with running this operating system.

You know, that things like you know, the DAOs and the that we work in happen.

You indicated that like the whole command and control type of uh modality is uh one of s of a scarcity mindset. Is that true? Can you go into that? Why is command and control a scarcity mindset and why is sense and respond abundance?

Yeah, that's a good question. So I can't say that they are both apt like synonymous, but I think they tend to align more. So, like, what's the point? Right. Like it kind of goes back to that just that question. What's the point? What worldview are we operating from? You know, if you're operating from a worldview where you're going to die unless you take this other dude's shit,

you know, uh, a command and control like program makes a little bit more sense. It's like, let me control all the variables, make sure that I'm safe, you know, create a strategy that I can then execute to get the reward, and then I'm good.

And the thing about those strategies first is that they're really closed. It's like in my little brain, my little view of things, like I can control all the variables and like probabilistically I'm gonna get the thing that I want, and that's gonna be good. Like when I get that scarce resource, now I've won.

But we know that that's never really the case. You just want another scarce resource and another scarce, and that doesn't actually solve the problem you're trying to solve. If you come from a different worldview, one that's more about the journey than the destination, sense and respond makes a lot more sense. And I think it tends, I have to think about this more, but I I think you could use sense and respond in a scarcity dynamic as a type of strategy. I think it's more natural fit for different kinds.

Yeah. A sense and respond organism, whether it's like something as small as a bee or us humans or as something as large as like an organization, corporation, or nation state, sense and respond seems to have connotations of like empathy.

Yes.

And cooperation. Certainly, I think I could say without you know too much evidence that people, the culture of today, we are looking for institutions and corporations that have more empathy. Uh, I think it's something that a lot of like perhaps the left, but has really nailed down. But I think we're all kind of looking for it is that like these ultra capitalist, like late stage capitalist large corporations are all lacking empathy, right? And maybe it's because they're all operating on this command and control paradigm and they don't have this sense and respond paradigm.

Yeah.

There's a thought. If you have any reflections on that one, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's very true. And uh there's a lot of ways to look at that. First of all, it can be strategically advantageous to like numb your own empathy if you're in a really hostile environment. So like there's nothing wrong. First is like, you know, if people haven't developed empathy or they're functioning in a kind of low empathy environment, like I don't want to cast any blame or shame there. Like that can be the best thing you that that person needs to do. And, you know, I think a lot of the systemic issues in the world do come from a lack of empathy. I mean, what are we talking? We're talking about coordination issues. How do we share resources together? You know, if we're playing the resource war game, you know, then um, you know, we're really depleting the resources on the planet too fast. And

I think, you know, it also goes to notions of divine masculine and feminine. And I don't mean female sex, male sex. I mean, you know, the idea of, you know, recepting and transmitting and listening and speaking. And the world has been really dominated by a kind of masculine energy for the past long time. I don't know, thousand years or something. And um,

that's manifested through nations conquest and corporations' conquest and command and control are both these very like emissive, like controlling ideas of subjugating uh, you know, things. Whereas sensing is more receptive, it's more the divine feminine and also just more the feminine energy that each of us can source within ourselves that the world is in kind of dire need for, which also tends to be more empathic because you're listening.

Do you know if we've ever had a paradigm of sense and respond before? You alluded to like a counterculture revolution in the 60s and how that became a very strong component of society, but I don't think it necessarily resulted in a complete phase shift from command and control to sense and respond. Do you know if we've ever had a society that was dominated by sense and respond?

It's a really good question. I mean I think um

From the little I've read about, you know, uh tribal communities, I think there's some examples in those types of uh of networks where it is much more like, you know, you have a really strong matriarchy and a really strong patriarchy, and they both have different roles in the community, and then you have shaman and you have outliers, and you know, altogether the tribe becomes this kind of organism that can work in balance with the world. So sense and respond is much more about balance, like so much of the command and control stuff that's happened has been about the opposite of balance, about conquest, you know, expansion by all means, cancerous growth by all means. But that's part of that, you know, critical operating system change is to get into a mode of balance with the environment and each other.

Right. So if I'm interpreting your answer correctly, you just said like we haven't had like a strong dominance of sense and response since we were hunter-gatherers, which was, you know, many, many, many thousands of years ago. It's basically before we invented any meaningful amount of technology, right? Like the first version of technology we really invented was the agricultural revolution, and it's been command and control ever since. It's been the resource game, it's been playing the resource game aggressively ever since then.

Yeah, that's, I mean, I certainly don't have a comprehensive knowledge of everything here, but that sounds right in a lot of ways. And, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, talking to Kevin O'Walkie, like, you know, from the moment of agriculture, like there's some interesting research showing that like when agriculture was developed, we stopped being hunter-gatherers, we started having, you know, need to be rooted in certain areas. And then all of a sudden, this notion of paternity certainty became important. Whereas before there was much more kind of free love and families like raise the children's, tribes raise the children together. All of a sudden now you have property and you need to staff that property. And you staff that property with your children. And so you need to know who your children are. You know, all of a sudden there's the notion of labor in a workforce right at the beginning. And I think maybe we can we can say, like, look, there's this kind of

you know, all of a sudden masculine imbalance that emerges.

Oh, that's super interesting. Right. Okay. So going from hunter-gatherers to agricultural revolution, we stopped moving around a society. The action of stopping and like planting ourselves into one place on the earth because that's where we would need to grow food, right? Like you can't move your farm. So all of a sudden we stopped being nomadic. We started being fixed. And that allowed people to have more things because then we didn't have to move with them. We could just keep them, you know, in our huts, in our houses. And then we established property. And then that turned the resource game into like the next level, right? Where it's it's more than the things we can carry on our backs, it's like the things around us. And then all of a sudden, that kicked off a much more aggressive and less holistically coordinated version of society. Is this the right conclusion to be tracking on?

Let's go with this because I think this there's a lot of far-out ideas that come from this. So we can say that there's been this kind of arc in history that has started from that transition to agriculture where all of a sudden you're like locked in a location all the way to let's say even 2020, where I love this thing Balaji wrote, which was that 2020 was the first year that we became digital first citizens, you know. Yeah. And I think that that was this kind of germination event of COVID that forced us all to like move into this new territory of the digital network. And the crazy thing is, it is that starts to change that constraint of place because we've been really stuck into this notion of place and property for 10,000 years. Let's say that that's the arc that we've just come to the end of, a 10,000 year arc in human evolution. And now there is this opportunity to move around more, you know, like, but move around in this digital space, which has totally new properties. And, you know, when I think about this, comes kind of goes back to Dow's.

DAOs, you know, this idea of cloud nations too, that we'll be able to create these digital societies. And like, look, there's lots of questions about that. We're already creating them. But one cool thing is a kind of modular politics where if DAOs or digital communities can start to intermediate between legacy government, like nation states and corporations, and start to take more power and hold more power, which I think they will, because they can outcompete financially in many ways, then we'll be able to have this ability to choose our allegiance very easily without moving our physical location, which is like uh actually goes back to this interesting idea I learned about a number of years ago, seasteading by uh Patrick Friedman, who's this this really I the idea of this kind of modular politics that the reason that we're fucked is that you know we can't move very easily. The cost of moving is so high, so you can't change your politics. But if everybody would live on a boat and we just tied the boats up into a giant island in the ocean, then you could just sail your boat to a different political island if you wanted to, to like, you know, but we don't have to have boats, we can just do it on on blockchain.

Right. Yeah. The uh every single DAO or every single like nation state in the cloud is inherently opt-in. Right. Like nothing can force you to become a part of it. This is something that's also in the sovereign individual where all these nation states compete on monopolies of violence, as in like who can have the strongest armies. Because if you have the strongest army, then you control the world. Something I actually got out of Bitcoiners in their reaction to their very, very strong reaction to COVID is that like a lot of countries started like locking in their citizens. Like you couldn't leave Australia for like two years almost without like a lot of friction. And really the only people that could leave Australia are the people that are wealthy enough to afford it, you know, being able to like lock themselves into a hotel for two weeks because that was a quarantine protocol. And Australia wasn't the only one. That was like a lot of countries like that. As the arc of nation states comes to an end, they get more aggro with controlling their property. And one of their nation-state properties is their humans that live inside of them. Like that's where they get their tax money from. And so the arc of nation states is as they kind of come to the end of their lifespan, they start to clamp down harder and harder and harder on taxes and on their citizens. Meanwhile, and I think we all kind of feel like we're coming towards the end of the nation-state arc. Meanwhile, we're creating these digital nation states, which are inherently opt-in, which we can choose to align with based on our own personal values. And one of my talks at ETH Denver was about how Web3 protocols are going to compete for our love because of this opt-in forcing function. They can only compete with our love for our love because they only have carrots. They don't have any sticks, right? And so it's inherently a sense and respond competitive environment. It's like going from the nation state environment of who can command and control the best, going to a digital nation state environment, which is who has the best carrots and which has got to be a sense and respond. Like who can sense the needs of their constituents the best and respond to the needs of their constituents the best.

Yeah, I mean it's a much more sovereign kind of place to be, right? And I think, you know, you can look back and you can see this kind of trajectory of these different dominant coordination methodologies, basically, like or phenomena. Like religion for a long time was the dominant coordination story on the planet. Like most of the human interpersonal relationships were mediated through

that fiction of religion. But that didn't go away when the nation state started to rise to dominance. Like just it started to take some of that coordination function into its sphere. And then the same thing happened with the privatization of so many services through corporations, you know, private prisons and private services, everything like that. And I think we're going to start to see the same thing now with Web3. And for instance, privatization of governance and politics and public goods can all be better, you know, coordinated through these substrates.

It's a really big claim, right? And I love the idea. And it makes sense to me if we zoom out and look at this industry from the 100 year timeframe. It's like, oh yeah, DAOs will eventually be able to coordinate global resources and coordinate governance way better than nation states. But then it feels like one of those things where it's like, you know, step one, create a DAO. Step two, question mark, question mark, question mark. Step three, uh, we control the world. Like this, this the step two thing I'm really confused about.

Don't worry about the details, man. We got this covered. Just sign sign your check right here, please.

Okay, do you have any ideas? That's like what is like the first few steps we need in order to actually unbundle the role of the nation state?

Yeah, I mean I have some ideas and I think um I think the important thing is like we're really early, right? Like so we're having all these grand ideas and that's great. You know, that's that's it's inspiring all like

Podcasts.

Yeah, like we're like people are asking me to talk about this stuff. I don't know what the fuck I'm saying. I'm just spouting bullshit. And like there's all these beautiful sci-fi fantasy ideas. And like those are great. Those are let's not forget about the value of those. And look, why why are they coming up? Because we're seeing some like

Some hook, some anchor in this stuff that we don't know shit about yet. But we're like, maybe, maybe, maybe, right? Um, but now I think one of the things, and I'm starting to do this work with a couple of people now is to really look at um the problems, like in in really, really, really high detail, like Daniel Schmachtenberger's work and Jordan Hall on the metacrisis. And so working with those guys and like, like, can we define the nature of the kind of systemic problem? Because it's so can it's so hard to figure out, like that's a long rabbit hole. But just defining what the problems are and then what the design constraints are for solving them, and then seeing like, hey, do DAOs like, can we provably say that DAOs have the mechanisms or can they have they shown potential for solving these problems? Because we're stuck in this um, you know, bad Nash equilibrium right now, where, you know, in this nation state, you know, resource war corporate world that we can't get out of, do DAOs really fundamentally change that equilibrium? Um and we have to actually do the work of.

proving that. So okay, we're like it's still Kool-Aid time. That's fine. Not gonna knock it. It's great. I drink it too. And we have to like really drill down now.

I'm gonna ask you the same question. Like,

Hmm.

where do we start? Like what is the first W that DAOs have that's going to like wake up the rest of the world to be like, oh okay, that's a real thing now.

Oh, let's see. Um, well, I think we're already starting to see some of them. Like these massive kind of flash DAOs that coordinate to buy historical relics and and other things like that. I think that's interesting. But that's just like kind of like one little like, oh wow, what's that? And we're seeing these, you know, DeFi DAOs that are doing these incredibly financial things that are creating. It's like, oh, that's interesting. But, you know, we're not solving major governance problems yet, right? And I wouldn't suggest that you apply a DAO to the actual governance of a of a political territory yet. But um, I think we're gonna start seeing some impact there. Like you could imagine some cases where you use DAOs or Web3 coordination to start to become part of it, not just through like donating to Ukraine, but like through some type of decision making or some type of public policy sense making. I think potentially one way that we start to really see.