{ "metadata": { "transaction_key": null, "request_id": "metagov:cox-metagov", "sha256": null, "created": "2025-10-27T23:38:00.186406+00:00", "duration": null, "channels": 1, "models": [ "metagov-manual" ], "model_info": { "metagov-manual": { "name": "metagov-manual", "version": "2025-10-01", "arch": "manual" } }, "warnings": null, "summary_info": null }, "results": { "channels": [], "utterances": [ { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 0.0, "end": 0.0, "transcript": "So we're here with, Thomas Cox from StrongBlock who's gonna, tell us a bit about the work that he and the working group he's leading and and his company are involved in doing around standard development for governance in the blockchain space. So I'll pass it over to to Thomas. He'll speak for, you know, fifteen to twenty minutes or so, and we'll have plenty of time for for conversation. Thomas, thank you so much for joining us this week." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 15.0, "end": 15.0, "transcript": "Hi. Thomas Scott. In addition to my commercial work in blockchain governance, I chair a group called p two one four five, which works on blockchain governance standards under the IEEE Standards Association umbrella. And a bit about the IEEE, those of you who don't know it, I wasn't as clear when I joined that it was in fact the largest association of technical professionals in the world on this behalf across 160 countries. They've been making standards of all kinds for a very long time. They're not by any means living standard organization. But they're out there with things like nuclear power, blockchain, health care, smart grids, nanotech, aerospace, antennas, if it involves electrical engineering, electronics, they've probably got their finger in it. We do have a bit of a proliferation of blockchain standard groups right now. I believe we're kinda working on the excessive proliferation. My antidote to to new standard groups is to harmonize a lot. So I'm talking with Anakpa and ISO and anybody else who's doing a blockchain governance standard effort. ISO has TC three zero seven working group five, which is in some ways ahead of us in terms of work product. My goal is to make P 2145 the place that you can go to and find out what everybody's doing because we're gonna talk to everybody, try to consolidate all that. If someone's gotta be a hub, that is its own task or project. And so what is governance? I think we all have roughly the same thing in mind when we say we're about blockchain governance or something else. It's the making of collective decisions. It's the carrying out of those decisions. Make a decision that carried out what you really do. And then tweaking the decision making rules using the collective process. So it can be thought of as change management for blockchains. People wildly underestimate this in the blockchain space because they're used to IT and having a you know, a suit assistant man or a database administrator or super user or somebody to go to, like, go go fix things. And that's been taken away from us and watching everything's it's a never ending homeowners association meeting, as I like to put it. It, everything goes through a committee somewhere somehow. Which is a great protection, but it also isn't great. Extra labor. And the scope of my efforts and people for five our groups is to primarily work right now on the lexicon, some sort of framework and vocabulary for talking about blockchain governance. It's not we're not in business today to tell anybody how to govern anything, but rather we wanna try to formalize, you know, converge on a set of words to talk about phenomena. Because there's nothing that proliferates confusion like having multiple terms for the same thing, or people talking past each other. You know, is it a block producer? Is it a validator? Is it a node? Is it a minor? Are those all the same thing? Are they are they solid differences? If so, what are they? And if we don't understand each other's language, I promise you communication is futile. See. These are the folks who work with me. There's not Dave, the officers. And we've got about a 180 people that expressed interest in this project sometime, and it is typically 40 to 60 folks once a month plus the subgroups. The subgroups, of course, where the real work gets done. The main group is more about coordinating information clearing exercise. The main subgroup that from my perspective is lexical standards that's really working on vocabulary, which for us is taking the draft vocabulary published by TC three zero seven with group five of the ISO group. That's a European bound standards group. Our group sadly is mostly North America. We're trying to reach out and help you on that, but we haven't succeeded yet. So we're we're taking the ISO and the Anapa work and digesting it and working with it. We've got a group inside there who do DLT governance design pattern research. We're taking sort of anthropological exercise of going to see how people have blockchains working today. They must govern them somehow. What are they doing? What recurring patterns are there? Nathan Schneider was a huge influence on us in that regard because that is community.org website. Other subgroups of relevance, you have one on interoperability, not just the interoperability of blockchain, but the interoperability of the governance because good luck interoperating for long if you don't have some sort of governance interoperability or some kind. We have a life science liaison to the p2418.six. Different IEEE blockchain without science. So there's an intersection between them and us, which is the governance of life science that are blockchains because life sciences, health care are absolutely wrapped up in heavy heavy legislation, regulatory restrictions. You can't use a generic governance mindset to talk about the governance or something that specific. We've also got cyber business systems under consideration. Oh, our reputation. We have a group working on reputation, which is kind of like identity but different. Those are fascinating conversations. I mentioned cyber physical systems, which is the superset in which IoT or Internet of Things is a subset. And then we're talking about possibly a finance group and make it smarter. I'm trying to resist an explosion of subgroups when there's already, like, eight or 12 IoT groups doing Blockchain and IoT. Do I really want a Blockchain governance and IoT subgroup or should we just liaise with those people? Hard to say. But, again, I'd much rather liaise with existing groups than duplicate them. And that's the quick overview. As I say, standards are are fun, but I always warn against premature standardization. That's why we're going for vocabulary first. Longer term and thinking we might do something useful over here. This is a private effort. It's a DLT consortium governance formation and scaling process with design process on the left, governance material phases on the right, and some governance artifacts on the center. Things like a memo of understanding of social compact, some sort of consortium draft agreement, formation documents and bylaws, constitution by other name if you will. Over here, you'll see, you know, the timeline, the maturity phases from founding to minimal viable governance, what I call the end of cabal leadership where your founders stop taking advantage of their early mover position and you'll have control to the the populace at large if you will. And then moving eventually into from early scaling to late scaling. You probably don't have time to go into that. I don't think it's all that mature document yet. You get the ideas, the kind of things we're trying to bring to the world. As standard efforts go, it's very not standard. It's really much more exploratory, which is probably very appropriate given the relative immaturity of the space. On the other hand, governance, as we all know in this group, is, a thousands of years old human process that is in some ways well understood. And so maybe there is some hope for standardization at some level sooner than I might be putting up. Let's take your questions. At all points." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 30.0, "end": 30.0, "transcript": "Well, my question would be whether you are how are you what is your governance for the development of your governance system? Are you doing it as a cabal, or are you doing it under some formal process?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 45.0, "end": 45.0, "transcript": "Right. The reason I I wanna do this under I Tripoli, I've been doing it sort of solo. I had Joshua Pan on this with the earlier subject I created, called, Bizdig, which is the International Society for the Center for Centralized Governance. I couldn't find anybody else doing it at the time. And I realized that standards was kind of where I was headed. And I'm like, I don't want to reinvent standards creation. Let me let me please plug into some existing structure for that. And I, truly, SA, the Standards Association has been doing it for decades and has an extremely elaborate process including voting, credentialing, and, you know, a commitment to open access. I literally can't deny anybody membership unless they are actively disruptive and violent violence, which are filed in the state of New York by the Equitable Standards Association. So I had to agree to, like, four levels of bylaws and guidelines that I created in 02/00/1945. So let's just say it's highly formalized." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 60.0, "end": 60.0, "transcript": "Where do I go to read those?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 75.0, "end": 75.0, "transcript": "The IEEE, SA website. Good luck navigating that. It's it's not for a while. Yeah. Rather" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 90.0, "end": 90.0, "transcript": "I'm a ten year I triple e member. I'm well aware of the nested web of actually, I've used I triple e as an example of conventional institutions growing sort of organically into mess in discussion with people talking about decentralized systems, but it's interesting as a foil for the kinds of things that are happening. So I am actually curious more about the details of those bylaws and processes because, anyway, I I share similar interest and applications. So I'll shut up for now, but I wanna read the those process." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 105.0, "end": 105.0, "transcript": "Yeah. And I can't promise I'm actually abiding by every single one of them at all times, but I do try. And certainly if I violate one and someone says, hey there, Thomas. Didn't take minutes the right way or whatever. We we have to go fix it." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 120.0, "end": 120.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Makes sense." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 135.0, "end": 135.0, "transcript": "But, yeah, it's right now, it's it's funny. We're using a standards process really early in a very young industry, which makes me a little nervous, probably appropriately. And at the same time, I'm determined to treat it like we treat the English language rather than, say, the French or Turkish languages. Both french and turkish have government agencies tasked with defining what official french and official turkish are until fairly recently and so there's official french which didn't have a word for walkman for like seven years after the walkman was introduced, which is why the word lay walkman is part of the French language. They were too slow to offer their official substitute. And so the Americanization, the French language continues the pace." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 150.0, "end": 150.0, "transcript": "That's a really interesting observation that I think would point out about just governing or standardizing things too sharply means that you get the opposite effect because you leave a vacancy for the sort of yeah. I mean, you the example speaks for itself." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 165.0, "end": 165.0, "transcript": "Yeah. How do you how do you rapidly and flexibly respond while creating standards which are, by definition, somewhat rigid and prescriptive? And the the Turks are doing a better job because there's no lay walkman equivalent in Turkish. Okay? As soon as there's a a popular usage, they're on it because they see that as their path to relevance." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 180.0, "end": 180.0, "transcript": "I I see, Daniel's raised a question in chat. Daniel, do you wanna, bring that forward?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 5", "start": 195.0, "end": 195.0, "transcript": "Sure. Thanks. So I, I think it was a great way to start off by saying that you're starting with the semantics and the definition. And I was just curious from other IEEE projects, what are the best practices for assigning this kind of rigorous and definable scope, but also leaving it open and these are changing technologies. So how do we make a constitution or what kind of document exactly are we looking at, and how does this semantic work relate to non semantic work that's implemented on top of that, preventing this kind of situation that you brought up where if you wait on the semantics, you're not gonna get anywhere." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 210.0, "end": 210.0, "transcript": "Yes. And, of course, we're as about as toothless as we can be. Right? Because, you know, it's not like the p two one four five police will come and and, you know, pull your publication from the world because you didn't use the language the way we told you you should have. So our best bet for relevance is to publish early and propagate broadly and make it easy for folks to conform and have some way to check that they're they're conforming to the the language recommendation. I made the bold move of claiming that our language standard would be normative, which is in the standards world kind of a big deal. And I defend that by by saying, look, if we can't somehow arrive at a shared meaning of shared words, all is lost because you can't have a meaningful dialogue if you can't have shared meanings to words you use with the dialogue. So, yeah, it's it's a bold ask, and I don't know if we've yet discharged that because it's early days. But, no, there's literally no way we can block anyone from anything. They're gonna call stuff, whatever they call it, and then they may have to rephrase things after the fact if we can't run alongside them and pick up their their new terms as they're using them. Our best hope was to just literally be as open as we can and have lots of conversations and liaison relationships and make sure we're being seen and heard by the people doing the actual work in those actual different areas, cyber physical systems. I never heard of that phrase. I thought it was all my IT. Turns out, no. No. There's, like, some suitors that that includes is that" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 225.0, "end": 225.0, "transcript": "CPS? CPS. Actually, well, no. For clarity, like so, like, I've worked in that field. So it's generally for people who work on systems engineering and higher order combinations of things. So IoT inherently relates to devices and their low level control and their low level communications, whereas you start to web them up into higher order systems. You start to create fundamentally different effects on the larger sort of structural human systems. And so if you wanna understand the difference between, say, whether or not your devices actually talk to each other and whether or not, say, the policies that you implement that sort of act on a system level actually elicit outcomes that are desired at a system scale, you need a different field because a lot of the skills are different layer and not unlike the way that we talk about blockchain governance versus smart contract development. Like, the systematic policies and the way that they might result in, you know, higher and higher combinations having broader reaching effects. You need this superset or these higher order combinations, and you reason differently than you would about a low level embedded controller or some, like, signal processing at the device level or local networking?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 240.0, "end": 240.0, "transcript": "Yeah. So the, it sounds like cyber physical systems is it's like those that there's, you know, physics and and chemistry and biology are building on each other. And similarly, IoT is, like, a low level thing, and then some of these systems is up at the biochemistry level." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 255.0, "end": 255.0, "transcript": "But to your point about words, you'll find people in the field even arguing about how distinct those actually are because the control systems engineers like me tend to be like, yeah. It's a different thing. We need to do the systems engineering stuff. But the people who work on the low level systems are just like, oh, yeah. We're doing CPS. And then you get these weird things at conferences and review like, weird and misaligned reviews. And it all comes back to a sort of some lack of clarity in the definitions. But you can actually go back to quotes from the original NSF proposals that funded their original research on cyber physical systems, if you wanna tease out at least what it was intended to mean." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 270.0, "end": 270.0, "transcript": "Seth's got an interesting question. Question." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 285.0, "end": 285.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Seth, do you wanna raise that? Can we resolve?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 6", "start": 300.0, "end": 300.0, "transcript": "No. I can ask it since we're recording. So, Thomas, from your story, centered development, it just seems like a really different kind of governance than other kinds of governance we tend to focus on when we build tool. We're less about decision making, and you're can't even tell if this is a very, unromantic view of governance, very romantic view of governance. But I I don't hear you getting in a lot of conflict. I don't hear you fighting fights or, like, trying to get the votes. I hear you just having a lot of phone calls and really listening to people and hearing them out and and trying to, like, what your word was nice. It was harmonized. That sounds like I mean, from from the from a, like, a so let's say, a blockchain community perspective, and there's a lot of blockchain people in this community. What Medigob is is there is there a connection of that idea that governance can be the mission that runs itself, but there's inherently a human part to it. And that's sort of something that we're occupying and and really into. And you seem to be validating that a little bit. Do you have a sense how technology or, like, mechanistic tools can make the work of harmonizing easier, or is it, like, inherently human legwork, human human contact listening" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 315.0, "end": 315.0, "transcript": "and caring and all that? Yeah. My my take on something like language you know, I come from English. Right? I'm not a a French or Turkish speaker, so I I tend to have this sort of, you know, free market. Like, language will evolve whether you like it or not. And, you know, the English language is I guess, those I don't only know the one. So but what I hear from people who know multiple languages is that English is particularly difficult and weird and fast evolving and likes to follow other languages down dark alleys and knock them out and rummage through their pockets for unused bits of syntax to steal. And so I I that's kind of the the approach I'm taking is that we'll be relevant if people follow our guidance. And the only way they're gonna follow our guidance is if it's not very hard and if they feel good about it. And the only like, it'll be easy in if I talk to them early, I make really, really accessible guidances and and and so on. And when they've got pushback, I have to treat all pushback as interesting. Right? Not not as it's like it's not it's not challenging my leadership. You're like, oh, you've got some legitimate beef here. You know, tell me more about your your interesting resistance and what it can educate me about." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 6", "start": 330.0, "end": 330.0, "transcript": "So yeah. In in so far as harmonizing work, I mean, you make it sound a little bit like therapy. Like, oh, well, tell me more about that. Oh. Yes. So so that means we can we can automate harmonizing by automating therapy?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 345.0, "end": 345.0, "transcript": "Well, interestingly enough I will put somebody else on screen in a second, but John had a had his hand up to tell me." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 360.0, "end": 360.0, "transcript": "Oh, I was just gonna say, well, therapy is interesting, but behavior change is is actually a different channel a different challenge. You know, it it occurs to me that getting I've had the I've had several experiences relevant to this. If you get people in a room from different disciplines, you run into the problem immediately. If they're determined to work together, they have to get they have to solve the problem. I'm just wondering whether, simply having the perfect set of recommended terms isn't step one. Step two is to come up with a series of, experiences in which people learn how to use those terms in order to solve the real problem, which is, you know, shared understanding across disciplinary boundaries." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 375.0, "end": 375.0, "transcript": "Yes. So if the battlefield is not coming up with the perfect dictionary and getting it through the I triple a process, well, I we could frame it that way, in which case we'd be fast moving and insular and, we'd come up with a really fast moving irrelevant document, they would get through the hoops. And to me, that's not very helpful because I want I want the result. I don't wanna just, like, tick boxes on a process. So, this is a document I put together of mental models. And I did this because, this guy, I think it's John Boyd. Last name is Boyd. He's an air combat expert who created this thing called the OODA, where you observe, orient, decide, and act. If you can do that faster than the other guy, your action changes reality. So he has to go back and observe and orient again before he can actually do anything. And so the faster you get through the loop, the more you dominate their combat, which is why American fighter pilots predominantly from basically mid Korean War army. And so he said very smoothly, mental models were how you orient faster. You observe and you say, what is this like? If you have enough mental models loaded up, you can do that fast. And if you lack mental models, you're like struggling and searching for metaphors and comprehension. So, I use this set of mental models in this document to talk to people about how do you lead others, which, by the way, is how you get uptake on language. It's how you get people to behave in the way that you think they should because you help them see how they should because it benefits them. I'd start with psychological safety because that's the absolute prerequisite for a team to be effective. If people think they're gonna be, you know, punished or humiliated for speaking up, they won't. They'll keep their problems to themselves and hide their mistakes, and the team will suck. Okay. So how do you make sure they don't feel that way? Because people who are scared, Oh, you're new to the standards organization. Oh, we'll make sure you feel small and insignificant. And then they'll be more asked questions, they'll hide their mistakes, they won't offer any ideas, they won't offer any criticism. And the whole thing is useless. It's like, why are they even there? And so how do you change that? Well, you model curiosity, you establish your fallibility, you frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. And that's the what I teach my group leads to do, my subject leaders, is make sure we're doing this because, otherwise, your subject will suck. And your product will suck, and we won't be able to go to market. No one will adopt it. So further down, you asked about so here's how to listen and show empathy. This is from a guy named Stern. It's a scale between responses from the toxic to the cold, to the warm, to the empathic. The book here is called The Field Guide for Spiritual Seekers. And I invent nothing. I just feel like an artist. And so, you know, things like self referential free association is in the toxic category. You say something and I say something, you reminded me of a thing that interests me. So I know I talk about that. John is laughing. Or what engineers typically do is they do, you know, non nurturing things like, well, yeah, that's how that works. You know, that's what you put your troubles or yeah, I know what you mean. But there's no emotional resonance whatsoever. It's all about the facts and the logic and the well, of course, it didn't work. Things like that never worked. You should have known better. No. No. No. No. No. What you really wanna do is show people that you can feel what they're feeling or you're at least attempting to try or wow, I'm trying to imagine what that feels like you when I came in with gas, that must be awful. That kind of thing connects to the deep structures in the brain. Here, right, you can oversimplification of the brain into three major sections, the reptilian or amygdala, the fight or flight piece, which by the way, when you're scared or when someone threatens your your status or your position in a group, John's waving his hand, you get into amygdala, like, how dare you question my authority? You're wrong. That's the wrong word. Okay. No. This isn't gonna have a good conversation. People gotta feel the trust in order to unlock the higher brain functions like the neocortex to actually solve problems. John?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 390.0, "end": 390.0, "transcript": "I'm just gonna say, I would love to, get my hands on this document, but it's actually addressing a different question and I see there are, some other questions in the in the stream. So" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 7", "start": 405.0, "end": 405.0, "transcript": "Yeah. I have a can" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 420.0, "end": 420.0, "transcript": "can we, can Divya, ask her a question? Are you there, Divya?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 8", "start": 435.0, "end": 435.0, "transcript": "Yeah. I was jumping off of what Seth had put in the chat, which is this idea on, standards development as you were talking about it, you know, requiring all of this harmonizing work, and what the potential technology is to kind of help in that space. And we had talked about this tool called Polis in the seminar that seems to potentially fit into that or if you had come across any specific facilitation platforms that can play a role here in terms of, like, drawing the bridge between the participation piece and then into the the outcomes?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 450.0, "end": 450.0, "transcript": "I'm really looking forward to doing exactly what you just described. My my my belief is that for my language effort to succeed, we're going to have to deploy, people with good facilitation skills to get people to talk about their interests long enough for us to understand them and help match it up to what the language needs to turn into and then feed it back to them. Like, oh, so if we translate what you're saying into our language, it would look like this, and then we can give you this little stamp saying, hey. You're conformant to the standard for for language discussion. And I'd love to have an automated tool that, you know, scans for usages and translates things into, you know, approved language, hopefully, in a non Orwellian sense. But yeah. Or some sort of a little, you know, AI driven or or a rule driven thing that can give you prompts as you're typing to say, you're using a term. Are you sure that's the right way to use that? Or what have you. Where it's easy at the point of creation of content to be, you know, nudged in the direction of whatever the definition is these days. But, yeah, you're you're noticing the heavy role I'm putting on persuasion and engagement. It's because I can't even have the conversations with people if they don't engage with me. And my effort to come up with some sort of shared language with founder there's two places with founders. One is they never talk to me, and I can't find out what words they're using. And second is they don't like or trust or care about my effort enough to bother to even make sure a big interest in rewording what they're saying because who on earth must have to rephrase everything unless you wanna be a cool kid. And so I think that some of the appeal, some of the way we can get people or maybe is to give them not not the stick of nonconformance and noncompliance, but the carrot of sounding cool with the cool kids, which, again, is a very human motivation and very soft." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 465.0, "end": 465.0, "transcript": "I I wonder if you could hear a bit more about some of the content of the discussion so far. And, you know, one thing that we're, you know, we're trying to think about governance standards as well. And, yeah, yeah, a question that's that's always in my mind in that context is what would be included in it and what wouldn't? So I'd be curious to to see, like, you know or to hear from you about what kind of Venn diagram or, you know, what what what kind of, overlapping consensus is emerging in terms of these different stakeholders. What what do you think, you know, a final governance standard, you know, your best guess, would include, and what would it not include?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 480.0, "end": 480.0, "transcript": "It would probably include some kind of very high level explanation. By governance, we mean a particular kind of group decision making, which can be formal or informal, whatever. Maybe there's classifications of formality. And, you know, this idea of a stakeholder and what does that mean in some broad you know, like, there's always this class of stakeholders, right, or this set of classes or metaclasses. I think Lane was there when we when we discovered the word betrofenin, and and we've been trying to insert that now into and I've gotten it into several PowerPoint slides. So I think there's some hope that betrofenin will grow legs and and show up in more and more governance conversations. Betrofenin is the German term, which if you if you like, steal it or stick it in English, you know it's not gotta stand some sort of common or garden meaning that has to be a technical term. It's the people who are affected by the system that have no formal say in how it operates. I think it translates into, you know, being slashed upon in some sense. So b e t r o f f e n e n. And that's the plural. And betrofen is the singular it has that great, you know, b e prefix on it, which I found so delightful. So yeah. But the the the trophin are are are are those who are affected by systems they themselves have no say in, which is the most of us most of the time in a lot of ways. But having a name for it gives us the ability to talk even more explicitly about it. And we're seeing things like, you know, KYC AML systems and banking, which are used, you know, ostensibly to fight money laundering, which they are wildly ineffective at, and do have the actual side effect of freezing out of formal financial systems millions of people who can't jump through the hoop. And so you have a very large class of voiceless betrothalates who are being financially harmed by a system that actually just performs financial surveillance, and does nothing whatsoever to advance its supposed stated purpose. And being able to talk about that pattern of I I I claim a goal. I'm serving a different goal. I'm harming a whole class of people who can't stop me. This is a pattern as old as time itself, and we're seeing it play out in KYC AML, for instance. But we can come up with half a dozen examples if we try. And so that's the kind of pattern where we've got systems, we have participants, we've got those with a voice, we have those without a voice, the people who can control the system but are completely unaffected by it, people who are affected and completely out of control of it, and people who have skin in the game and our participants both. And so those are the three major classes of stakeholders arguing. And it's nodding. So I think I got that right. And so isn't that interesting? And how do we use that very high level lens to look at our system? And so, boom, I just slipped the Trophanin in, and now it's an earworm, and you'll never get rid of it. I hope. Right? That's the goal. And, Jim" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 495.0, "end": 495.0, "transcript": "Just to to build on that, though, I you know, I'm curious also from the kind of more selfish perspective of, like, your company, or the other the companies of the other bitrofen in, in this process. What do what do does a company building blockchain infrastructure or any kind of governance infrastructure, what what what stake does it have? What what motivation does it have to see standards developed? And, you know, I I know this is kind of a stupid question because companies, for all sorts of reasons, have have, you know, have have wanted standards, developed by Right. For good reasons. But I'm curious if you could answer that question a bit more specifically on governance. Why is this something that people are willing to invest time and energy into standardizing?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 510.0, "end": 510.0, "transcript": "Right. I think the upside for for a willingness to do it is you'll bypass a whole bunch of avoidable errors that you won't be able to bypass if you aren't plugged in. And you'll have to let go you are if you don't learn the lessons of history, you're doing to repeat them. It's kind of like that. If you don't learn the lessons that the standards makers have come up with, you will have to recreate all those lessons yourself and learn the most expensive, slow way imaginable. And my my metaphor for that is I once learned how to load and fire a civil war cannon from US civil war. It's like the muzzle loading black powder cannon. And the guy walking me through it said, okay, and now you turn your back to the battlefield and walk backwards from the ammunition to the cannon. I'm like, what? Why would I do this? And the answer is because this shields the the powder charge from incoming fire with your body. And if you're facing and it hits the charge, it kills you and the entire gun crew. But if your back is to it, it just kills you. And it doesn't kill the rest of the gun crew. And I'm like, how long did it take to learn that one? And clearly, whoever's got his back turned is not doing it for his own benefit. This is a generous act. We buy him beers. And so that kind of the whole thing on loading and firing the gun is literally like little things. You point your thumb this way, not that way, because you point your thumb the wrong way and a certain rare thing happens, it tears your thumbs off your hand. But if you point the other way, you just lose the skin off your palms, which is okay. I don't like either of those, but one's clearly worse. Okay, great. Point the thumb that way. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Don't want to have to wear that twice. And the world is full of stuff like that. And with governance, it's not blow your thumbs off. It's your blockchain doesn't work because no one believes in the governance and you've lost credibility. Lane is nodding vigorously. And so, yeah. And so Merced, like, loses a year and a half in marketplace dominance because they fucked up, pardon me, their governance model, and they couldn't get other stakeholders engaged. And, I mean, I saw that one coming in. I don't even worry. I was a novice at the time. And I thought, what the heck do they think they're doing? So, yeah, you make a mistake like that, there's, like, billions of dollars off the bottom line if you screw it up in the wrong way at the wrong time, where the entire thing blows up. Or maybe it's just your reputation dies in your company because your proof of concept never scales because the governance was inadequate and no one believes in it but you. Right? How do you get from early adopter to late adopter? The early adopters believe in the vision, and they're super excited, and they love you all, oh my God, well, bank the unbanked, or whatever the thing is. And then, ta da, you throw it out to the world, and nobody jumps on your bandwagon. And unlike any other application, like I could come up with an iPhone app and get a small following and, like, bootstrap it slowly. Blockchain is not like that. If you don't get a critical mass, you die, because it has to be a shared source of truth. And if no one's sharing it with you, you are utterly irrelevant. And so, you get over that adoption gap from early adopters to late adopters. Early adopters believe in the vision, they're totally passionate, they go, Oh, yeah, blockchain, yeah, we're going to do the thing. We're gonna save the world in this whatever way. And then you go to market and nothing. And the nothing happens because you didn't do anything about governance and you wasted dollars and time and your career takes a hit. You look like a clown instead of, you know, being on the cutting edge of cool stuff in your company or your industry." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 9", "start": 525.0, "end": 525.0, "transcript": "Thomas, can I have one quick super quick thought? Please. I agree with everything you're saying. I just wanna say that you when you get these things wrong, you don't die. In fact, what happens is you stagnate and you sort of slowly fade into irrelevance and you don't die because you have so much money and the incentives are so backwards that, like, you're a zombie. That's all I wanted to add." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 540.0, "end": 540.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. It's it's hard to have the courage to kill off the thing because, technically, it's working. And it is a proof of concept and all the bits flow. And so it's not, you know, it's not a horrible twitching car accident death. It's more of a fading into a why is no returning to my fault?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 555.0, "end": 555.0, "transcript": "A lot of the death is externalized onto people who invested time and energy in earlier on or people who invested money. Like, there's a even if the thing is a zombie, there's, like, a residual negative energy around it that created the energy that's keeping it alive." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 570.0, "end": 570.0, "transcript": "Yeah. It's wicked. It's really sad. And so many good ideas should die for this. And so I I I'm trying to, like, carry carry the message that, you know, please don't commit, you know, career zombification, and and waste your company's resources. If you're a senior leader, don't let them move forward without proving to you that they've got their governance tied in." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 585.0, "end": 585.0, "transcript": "John, you had something you wanted to raise?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 600.0, "end": 600.0, "transcript": "No. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 7", "start": 615.0, "end": 615.0, "transcript": "Oh. Maybe I I have a quick thank you." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 630.0, "end": 630.0, "transcript": "Recording Relay agrees with me. I prize those moments." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 7", "start": 645.0, "end": 645.0, "transcript": "Something just to go back to the kind of language question that we kinda got started on when we're talking about semantics. Well, first, a question and second, a kind of announce announcement slash something I think that you might be interested in, Thomas. The question though is have you found any like, we've talked about harmonizing, but have you found that there to be a lot of conflict and disagreements in sort of deciding on these, like, these definitions and these semantics?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 660.0, "end": 660.0, "transcript": "We're not far preference. Have any interesting fights yet, which is sad. Whatever. We're get we're getting COVID." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 7", "start": 675.0, "end": 675.0, "transcript": "Fair enough. Makes sense. And the thing that I wanna share is one of the things that we've presented here in the context of this seminar is a project called GovBase, which maybe I I think maybe the last time we talked, I this hadn't actually come into fruition yet, but we actually are, like, actually releasing it pretty much. This week, we have I just shared the write up, and you can guys can take a look at it. So this is just an internal draft. So feel free to sort of add your comments and Zargum and I are still adding it. But it's I think there's different kind of ways of expressing language. And one of the things that, you know, we were interested in doing is expressing that in the form of the database where I have, like, consistent definitions, matching columns, because in definitions in sort of, like, you know, kind of more rigorous standardized formats, such that you can interact with the database. And such that, you know, once you have this language codified in this way, you can start building additional rules, automations, and even AI on top. I just wanna share this. Well, first off, because it's ready and I kinda forgot to announce this during the announcement phase. But also because I think it's actually quite relevant for thinking about, I think, what what language can do for us and how language when it's appropriately codified and formalized can be used to sort of support different kinds of tools including blockchains in this case." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 690.0, "end": 690.0, "transcript": "I would add about this particular, Josh, to that because of the open nature of the database, even though the data structures take some maybe maturation into something that we could think of as standards, the actual evolution of the content, especially if it's crowdsourced and people participating collectively, maintaining it, it can actually sort of keep up with things. So we wouldn't necessarily have quite the same language stagnation that we would if we were defining a set of static standards as opposed to static standards as opposed to really, like, as we discussed earlier, going out and talking to people and starting to try to learn about what's happening in blockchain governance and down governance and getting that information into the gov based database so that it can serve as a sort of basis for algorithms, possibly rules, data analysis, even some of the AI type concepts that, Thomas suggested. But, ultimately, if the lowest level database is a collective, you know, curation act, then, it can actually, in theory, keep up more readily with the the changes in the use of words or the the emergence of new structures or composites." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 7", "start": 705.0, "end": 705.0, "transcript": "Yep. Sorry. I didn't mean to hijack the conversation, but I thought it's Doug and I were talking and it seemed especially relevant Yeah. To your presentation." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 720.0, "end": 720.0, "transcript": "No. I I think it's a really good point. The you know, there French and apparently maybe Turkish do actually have committees that say what is proper French. To me, that is a and and I gather for them also, it's a fairly hapless enterprise. It's a really daunting task. Someone should write a biblical parable parable about a bunch of people who try to adopt a common language. And your point about gov base having at its bottom a facilitated process does suggest that there may be a way of enhancing what what, after all, humans have done since they invented language, which is to converge somewhat within communities, but then provide handles that Thomas and others could use to sort of pluck out the stable nuggets for the, you know, international dictionary or whatever." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 735.0, "end": 735.0, "transcript": "Right." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 7", "start": 750.0, "end": 750.0, "transcript": "I think having some sort of convergence would be really wonderful actually to sort of give a sense of what the definitions are in the, like, the blockchain standard you guys are building and making me kind of to align those definitions with, well, essentially, like, gov basis, a bunch of different representations of governance kinda like smashed or smushed into one thing. So we actually love it to kinda work through that and making sure those concepts are aligned." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 765.0, "end": 765.0, "transcript": "And I think it shares the goal of identifying the sameness of structures across words. So, you know, you brought that up and it it kind of resonated with me because I I view that as a recurring issue. It's the use of the same word for a different thing or a different word for the same thing. These underlying structures or patterns that Josh and I have been teasing at and although not, you know, by any means saying we've discovered where we are, like, sort of asking the question, where does the pattern show up and when is it the same? When is it different? And to a greater extent, how does it appear in real systems?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 780.0, "end": 780.0, "transcript": "I wanted to share something real quick that seems like it's we're we're brushing up against it, and it it helps. It's it's in there with metal models in terms of, like, useful bits to share. It may seem like a bit of a so we find this is a little out of left field, but I'd like to talk about the Jungian archetypes that are in play, and we work on things including neurons. So this is from Gareth Hill work on Jungian thinking. You have masculine and feminine polarity, you've got static and dynamic polarity. And so if you look at static masculine, let's see. It's the realm of order and structure. Standards are here. Rules are here. The dynamic masculine is the realm of initiating, starting projects, and setting goals. The static feminine and I don't mean voice and girls, it's not feminine. I mean, like, Yin Yang. Right? The masculine and everyone, the feminine. Static feminine is about nurturing home and heart. The dynamic feminine is about imagination and play. So if you look at how that plays out over time, I think there's some detail behind it. You know, the the static masculine is about order, rules and regulations, systems of meaning, hierarchies of value, work breakdown structures, dictionaries. The the archetype is the great father, right, or the rule giver, the king. Right? If you look at static feminine, we're talking about, you know, organic undifferentiated wholeness. It's about the being and self acceptance and love, unconditional love. It's home and heart. Right? The great mother being the archetype there. Initiating dynamic masculine, initiating those goals and goal directed activity. It's very linear. It has a lot of grandiosity and technology tends to fit over in there. And, dynamic masculine is about ignoring everything except the one thing. Right? So you're like, I am focused on that which I will do and I will neglect my family and my health to bring them out to whatever the thing is. And you'll notice that the diagonals are very opposite to each other in an interesting way because you have to have a home and hearts to leave to go out to slay the dragon. And once you've slain the dragon, you go home again. And so you can't be the dragon slaying hero if you didn't have the home and the heart to grow up and be strong. And then, you know, dynamic feminine play is transformation, it's altered states, it's drinking and dancing. It's out there in the same way the set with Dynamic Mask one is, but it's not goal oriented. It's more exploratory. It's like, I wonder what we'll find. I'm not looking for a dragon. I'm looking for whatever. I'm going to catalog all the wildlife. And you can get into, you know, the dark side of everything. People hate governance, not for what it offers, but for the downside of its negative aspect, which is organization for its own sake, it's rigidity, it's dehumanization, inauthenticity, pettiness. I don't know if this sounds familiar. And so when people resist governance structures, it may be in some cases because it reminds them of that And they suffered that at some point, and they don't want any more of it. Or they mistakenly believe that if we have order and structure, then we don't get to play. But all play has some sort of structure to it as rules and their roles and their tokens and there's, you know, a field of play or whatever. And so actually, again, the diagonals support each other. But if you know where the resistance is coming from, you can see when you're taking something too far. Right? Static feminine can be smothering, it can be excessive, it can be infantilizing. Like, I don't want you to grow up and leave homes like you do like a child, grow into your thirties. You know, goal directedness and the dynamic masculine can do, you know, willful destruction and violence and life taking technology and warfare. And then play can lead into, you know, complete loss of self, intoxication, hysteria, madness, and so on. So, yeah, anything can be taken too far, I guess, is is the main point here. So" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 795.0, "end": 795.0, "transcript": "Well, that that's a great, way to end. Anything can be taken too" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 9", "start": 810.0, "end": 810.0, "transcript": "far, including" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 825.0, "end": 825.0, "transcript": "I just wanna one." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 840.0, "end": 840.0, "transcript": "The timing of this of this, seminar. So this is fantastic, and I love that that, you know, that that that note on play. You know, I I have this phrase in my head all the time in this work that documents our violence, you know, that, but your reminder that they, are kind of core to to to play as well is is really, is really valuable. So, in three, two, in just a moment, let's all unmute and show our appreciation. Three, two, one. Thank you very much, Thomas. This has been a fantastic discussion, and and we, you know, look forward to kind of being fellow travelers in in this work of of trying to advance, some some clarity and and interoperability in in how governance works online. So thank you so much for for being part of this conversation and" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 855.0, "end": 855.0, "transcript": "My" } ], "summary": null } }