The d/acc Paradigm: Towards Regenerative Network States | Michelle Avis, Rob Avis & Marc Ziade

I'm told we can adjust these things so people can hear us FYI uh Hey everybody uh thanks for being here um uh this may sound like something a little bit different regenerative EG but uh uh there's a pretty profound uh decentralization component to this in a decentralized protocol component to this um so before we get started um um disclosure uh I know these people um these people know these people um and uh uh my brother uh had some issues with his land and uh and he um um sought out ways to heal his land essentially so he was connected with Rob and uh um the rest of the story unfolded in the creation of a company called fifth World um Mark zad zad um was uh a stellar contributor at consensus and has done a bunch of things in his career um and uh and talked to him about this and he he was excited to join so we know each other um uh so the people around here um live in perfect harmony with nature everybody at at e Denver um is a transformative individual um we've all been living for centuries in harmony with the Buffa corn and the spork whale up up in the mountains uh in Colorado um but imagine what would happen um if something threatened the spork whale or or the buff aorn um intrinsic to The Coloradoan economy um could could you imagine a scenario like that that would be horrible would be absolutely the worst thing in the world can can you adjust a little bit better yeah how's that that what could happen uh to an economy if something uh cataclysmic like that uh that would cause the the economy to to come out of balance well I mean the the economy actually fundamentally runs on uh ecology essentially but most people don't even think about it uh when you think about what civilization is it's civilization right now as we know it is based on uh agriculture plus uh money essentially and so an agriculture fundament is uh allowing us to transform ecosystems in order to create uh the supply chains that humans require in order to run civilization so if the bacorn and the spork whales disappeared we might not be able to run agriculture anymore have we experienced anything like this before in in human history maybe in outside of Colorado well yeah actually uh so when we think about uh the Arc of human history um you know we were actually forced into agriculture as a result of the younger dras and so when we have massive perturbations in ecology it forces us to uh adapt in really unique ways um and I think the risk that's in front of us right now from a regen EG perspective um I'm not sure if you've seen this but in Scientific American they're saying there's about 60 crop Cycles left on planet Earth uh so there's a whole bunch of alarm bells that are going off on what what does it actually mean for us to to continue to have uh supply chain specifically food and water um in light of some of these liabilities that are are right in front of us right now thank you so um Daniel schmachtenberger uh one of the the greatest Minds thinkers philosophers on the planet uh sens maker uh in a sense or or uh this doesn't make sense pointer outer um uh he's he's pointed out uh uh that essentially we're we're operating um with a an exponentially growing Financial economy um which drives um our economy uh our real economy uh far too hard and and far too hot and and essentially um this exponential economy um is driving uh what could be a more linear more balanced more circular economy even um to produce waste essentially at exponential rates um Mark you want to run with that yeah so you know Daniel talks about the third attractor right and the fact that we're kind of um right now stuck between two options which is either increase centralization or uh anarchism right and I think the answer really is U Progressive decentralization so it's the continuation of this mission of progressive decentralization across all levels um I think in the crypto space we've been focused so far heavily on self- custody of bits so digital assets and uh and data and uh we are now starting to move more into self custody of atoms which really means physical infrastructure and uh the good news is that there are so many solutions out there uh that allows us to go in that direction so you think about regenerative agriculture and I think Rob can can talk more about this distributed energy systems uh Water Systems these are all solutions that can enable communities and individuals uh to have ownership over and and self custody over their food energy and water and um it's it's interesting because um I sometimes wish we have uh some technology incentive layer that can enable coordination at scale do you know something about that um I I've been doing some reading recently yeah yeah I think I heard the term web 3 and crypto Maybe maybe or something like that so um if we can start build those networks right of autonomous communities that have self custody over food water energy data assets so both bits and atoms we can really Usher from the Paradigm of linear extractive economies U where basically you know users have an adverse relationship with businesses to an economy that is more regenerative uh circular resilient even antifragile and basically uh allow us to generate positive externalities and solve a lot of those negative externalities that that we're dealing with today and so at fft we call this basically regenerative living or regenerative Network States if if you want to go a little deeper on some of that uh I I do recommend listening to Kevin auk's podcast green pill um he had a three-part a three-parter with Daniel schmachtenberger look up schmachtenberger it's exactly how it sounds spelled exactly how it sounds um but it was uh absolutely absolutely essential um synthesis um of thinking about our own decentralized protocol ecosystem and uh and what what Daniel speaks about all the time um so fortunately I I feel like we're um we're in a transition and the trans transition is accelerating the the paradigm shift is decidedly on uh transitions are hard hopefully this one uh won't be so difficult uh this super Cycle's ending um how do we get to the next Super Cycle what what what does transition look like Michelle so you're asking how what it's going to look like to transition to this regenerative economy I would love to hear what what you're seeing in terms of the business or yeah well different systems with respect to land energy i' say you can you can certainly attest that anytime time you want to go against entrenched interests and existing structures it's difficult right and um we can think about you know this space this web 3 space and the crypto space in the last 10 years and I you know there's this top down model where you've got Authority monopolies or Gatekeepers and in this space you guys have been working really hard in building tools to to have bottomup Solutions and bottomup models and we essentially need to um well those top down centralized systems repeat whether we're talking about energy systems like how do we how do we you know power this building or how do we Supply water or how do we get food it's all top down centralized control and there's very little bottomup thinking and bottom-up solutions so the the challenge is Big because you've seen you know it's taken 10 years and I think if we went back 10 years ago and asked people in this room H how how easy is it going to be to transform the financial system um there would be many people saying oh my gosh it's going to be really difficult it's going to be really hard and I don't want to downplay how difficult it's been but 10 years later I think maybe the mood is different and I and I and I'm excited about we're now facing the same challenge in these other systems and so that that gives me tons of optimism in terms of how um how we can do the same thing and we can also let Lage all these tools systems processes learnings from the web3 community and I feel like that'll help us accelerate this transition to regenerative economies so that's so early on we used to say decentralize all the things tokenize all the things um maybe we should take a step back and figure out how we uh regenerate all the things or decentralize and regener regenerate all the things what what is regenerative egg what what have you and Michelle been doing for for the the last uh many years uh in your practice you want to take that yeah for the last 15 years we uh actually I'm going to go back a little bit further so I'm actually a petroleum engineer so I started off in the oil and gas industry in the belly of the giant Calgary Alberta um I was the guy that was bringing natural gas and fossil fuel to your cars and natural gas to your homes to heat it and felt really conflicted about uh how could I criticize the very industry that that I was supporting as a consumer and so I called my wife up one day after watching a 3-minute video of this guy who was regenerating a a piece of desert uh in the lowest place on Earth Dead Sea Valley uh with very few resources and uh and I was about ready to cut down a massive swath of forest in order to bring a new natural gas pipeline in I'm like oh my gosh what am I doing so being an engineer and a complete nerd I took my calculator out of my pocket I calculated out how many hours of Life Energy I have on on this Earth and I said it's about 600,000 I've burned through a third of them how do I want to spend the next two-thirds of my life so I quit my job I encouraged Michelle to quit her job too and we traveled around the world looking for Positive Solutions and uh we've been teaching that for the last 15 years through a system called permaculture and we've transformed thousands of people's lives around the planet um and what's super exciting about it is actually the issues that we're talking about today are not technical issues it's a social issue we have all the tools we have all the resources we have all the knowledge to regenerate planet Earth rapidly but we're lacking a coordination layer and I'm not sure where we should find that yeah I'm still wondering I know we've been doing some readings about uh web 3 but just just to add to that a little bit like the way I get I got into regenerative agriculture was uh through chatting with Joe and I remember Joe um shared with me a very cool documentary to watch I think it's called the biggest little farm and I and you know my background was in cryptoeconomics and I've done a lot of like uh token designs and like interesting systems designed around how to use tokens and incentives and then I watched this documentary and this was basically the exact same type of thinking but in real life like I I was watching those people actually just creating Life by thinking through how they can build a symbiotic ecosystem and then it just clicked like what if we can use all those experiments all those currenc currency experiments monetary experiments that we're doing in crypto incentives experiments and connect them somehow to Regeneration to agriculture to food energy and water will be able to Usher into a whole new paradigm and a whole new economy and one thing one one comarison I really like to to to talk about a lot is the same way nature needs biodiversity I think our societies today needs monetary diversity we need uh to create money that is linked to specific purposes that allow us to become resilient to financial crisis and resilient to linear and extractive systems awesome so uh Michelle Andor Rob um can you describe what a recirculating agricultural sort of living ecosystem might be so as opposed to some sort of factory farm thing uh which is um essentially robbing the land of nutrients um and destroying the land um what does a what does a recirculating Farm um that is essentially in harmony with itself and in harmony with um people like yourselves what does that look like so the the best example that we have of this one of the best examples is what was actually occurring on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States before uh Europeans came here there was close to 30 million indigenous people uh living on that Seaboard and there were no signs of what we call agriculture today in fact in fact we now know that they were actually uh using a form of Agriculture but it's more of a Copic agroforestry system uh where they were basically living off of the byproducts of perennial plants plants that you plant once and they continue to grow and so we know that the the short answer to your question Joe is nature nature provides all of it's called nature and agriculture in a way for the last 10,000 years has essentially been at war with nature so we've been uh following the same pattern of deforesting plowing and desertify and the problem is is that uh we we had very short human lives and so we were unable to understand the feedback that uh of the damage that we were creating essentially and so um I believe now that we can merge with technology in a way that allows us to uh take all the democratized sensors that that are showing up on the market and we can essentially create a whoop for planet Earth uh whoop this little device right here that I wear has been transforming the way that I interact with my environment when I go to sleep what I eat I can get instantaneous feedback on um what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis so that I can course correct and become a healthier human being we have all the technology now to do that and so fifth world is starting to integrate those people pieces together into a unified mrv system that will allow humans to have a better understanding of what they're doing on a day-to-day basis and so our thesis is that humans are not inherently destructive we just lack feedback and I believe that we will the the system that will allow us to essentially create these new Supply chains that are work in harmony with nature can be worked out and sorted out once we have the right data and the right dashboards at our fingertip tips that allow us to make better decisions I have another example um like taking this bottom up Solutions what does that actually mean in the in the realm of water because that's one of my areas of expertise so traditionally um communities or municipalities when they're trying to provide water to their Community they think we need a top- down centralized solution right we need to build a massive Water Treatment Plant we need to pull water from a river and then build build one network of pipes to deliver that water to all these houses and these communities and we just turn the tap on right and yet um better better tools like big data and systems analysis has actually shown us that it's a much more uh resilient system to have more local Supply so have individual houses with rainwater for example or have those homes um manage their own storm water instead of send that storm water straight to sink and so we need more of that bottom up local Solutions in the same way that you know again web 3 allows peer-to-peer transactions we need more local local energy we need more local water we need more Local Food Systems we need more bottom up and not only relying on top down centralized control yeah so a lot of the time people ask me if I think things are going well in our ecosystem um is this what I expected uh and generally that's a big yes um I'm amazed at uh at how little resistance despite all the resistance that that we've encountered I I'm amazed at how little resistance really uh We've encountered um given the vested interests uh on the planet um they've woken up quite significantly um and the attacks will continue maybe they will intensify uh maybe not um but the bottom line is that we built um these amazing systems decentralized protocols interacting um modular components a a whole new vision uh for a system of the world a new system of the world uh that's profoundly decentralized but it's all sitting up here on somebody else's clouds uh it's all it's all running on fundamental infrastructure um that we could get bumped off of um so and I'm talking about compute infrastructure and yes there is some real decentralized compute infrastructure uh there solo stakers Etc um but I'm talking about land uh I'm talking about food I'm talking about water I'm talking about energy in its various different forms I'm talking about legal systems and recently I've been talking to uh various Builders and um yes investors and other people about uh um what we can do about it it's a coordination problem uh we need to form I think giant pools of capital uh and go out and figure out how to how to to uh ground all this that we're building in in fundamental substructure uh and so um that's that's a big um project and and this is uh I I think a a really interesting part of of that big project um it might need a Manifesto this project might need a Manifesto um Mark if if this project had a Manifesto what what would some of the elements of of that project be yeah only if it had a esto um so you Ed the word builder in there and and I like this term because I think uh for a long time we've been using this word to mean developers but in in in our company and you know in our Network we use this term to actually means creators contributors makers right people who are actually building physical infrastructure and I think we need to keep promoting that and keep building those Builder communities and so if we look at the at the current Paradigm that we're under it's a paradigm of of you know growth above everything else and we love growth We Love Evolution and we want to grow but at the same time we are dealing with a lot of negative externalities coming from only thinking about growth and so what we also focus on is how do we grow in an antifragile way in a way that instead of generating negative externalities can generate positive externalities and and for us we really think you know we are at a stage right now in our human evolution where we're kind of ushering into the next stage I think Joe you call it the super cycle and you know it's it's exciting right but it's also a challenge and I think in my opinion at least the biggest challenge is how do we do that in a way that allows us to build a regenerative harmonious relationship between technology humanity and nature and then if we're able to figure that out this will Usher us into basically decentralized acceleration instead of just effective acceleration I love effective acceleration I think techn techology is a key part of human evolution and a key part of humanity but at the same time if we can grow and accelerate in a decentralized way we'll be basically growing in more in a more resilient and antifragile way and in a more positive way so we know that the coming back to your Schmucker piece that the first and the second attractor are not places that we want to go and I loved how schmuck bger said uh the third attractor is someplace we want to be but we don't necessarily know how to build it completely but the brains in this room I I can almost guarantee can figure that out and this is where uh The Vow is going to play a really important role to bring all those pieces together yeah so Michelle what what does fifth world do uh does it have products does it have Services what roles do the members of fifth world how many people are in fifth world how what roles do they perform fifth world is about uh regenerative living like tools for regenerative living right so we do a lot and that's why it's a little bit difficult to put in one little nugget but let's say if it touches um sustainability and regenerative living we have a play there we teach courses we um or we have we just launched down can you talk about uh so there's a a Verge permaculture group yeah we teach courses in sustainability rainwater design passive solar greenh houses permaculture design gardening all that stuff all those just like hands touch grass hands in the dirt skills that your grand mother didn't teach you um so that's the education side I probably pass it on to Mark Mark's got the crypto side yeah absolutely so fif basically builds designs and builds actually U antifragile and regenerative food water and energy systems we've been doing that for individuals we've been doing that for communities uh we have an education arm that educates people on how to do it themselves and there's a lot of people interested in that and recently we launched this Dow to really figure out how can we use web 3 to coordinate and also innovate and so part of bab is really bringing in the crypto Community with the regen EG and permaculture Community into one place uh enabling discussions interactions and even ideating Solutions in the physical and digital world that can Usher us into this decentralized regenerative uh Paradigm so if you want to know more uh we do have a happy hour later today and I really encourage you all to to go and uh talk to us so so you all have products like green houses designs for for things like Eco Villages Consultants that go out and and work very Hands-On or or just uh indicatively instructively uh with people um what other if if there were to be a Dao uh a vow uh indeed but uh how like what sorts of roles uh could people take on um in fifth world Dow yeah so there there's a bunch of roles uh we basically have have three goals uh behind launching the da one goal is enabling Community interaction and Community discussion in Virtual in the virtual space but also in the in the real world having real world meetups uh having uh supper clubs uh there's a cool uh slow food movement that Rob was telling me about uh that we want to also bring into the crypto ecosystem another big goal of ours is really uh creating High-Tech high nature High touch popup experiences so uh we've been following zalu and we've been following the work that has been going on there and we really want to bring in the Agriculture and food and energy piece into it and the last piece is we're going to be running some idea tuns around itting Solutions some very cool competitions um you know not to convey a lot of details but meme related so follow us and uh you'll get to know more cool so to wrap us up uh five words each on what's most exciting to you about what's going on in your work or in fifth World Mark five words maybe more Community turned our mics off oh no they didn't uh being here and connecting with um this this community is really exciting to me yeah so I'm really stoked about our mrv project so if ethereum is the world computer uh the work we're doing in mrv is is essentially creating the whoop for planet Earth whoop for planet Earth five words perfect thanks everyone that's great all right thank you guys so much thank you this is a world that needs to exist a world that I want to live in and we need to next up we have