Partial Common Ownership/Plural Property: In Conversation with Will Holley, Graven Prest, Kevin Seagraves
In today's episode, Will Holley (Founder of 721 Labs), Graven Prest (Co-Founder of the Geo Web project), and Kevin Seagraves (CEO of NiftyApes) are three mission-focused entrepreneurs who join host Matt Prewitt in a roundtable discussion on the topic of Plural Property — RadicalxChange's umbrella term for Partial Common Ownership, Harberger Taxation, Self-Assessed Licenses Sold via Auction or SALSA, and Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax or COST.
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Transcript
This is a RadicalxChange production. Hello, and welcome to Radicalxchanges. In this episode, Matt Pruitt facilitates a roundtable discussion with three mission focused entrepreneurs on the topic of plural property. Plural property is one of the core ideas that RadicalxChange advocates for. In this episode, you'll hear many references to a handful of terms such as partial common ownership, Harberger taxation, self assessed licenses sold via auction or salsa, and common ownership self assessed tax or cost. While there are nuanced differences to each of these terms, they're often used interchangeably as the core ideas are essentially the same. At RadicalxChange, we find that these different terms make those core ideas way more confusing and intimidating, so we use the term plural property as an umbrella term that encapsulates all those others. The main concepts of plural property lie in the writings of economists Henry George, William Vickrey, and Arnold Harbarger. While these writers were largely ignored for most of the twentieth century, their ideas formed a core thread in the book Radical Markets by RXC cofounder Glenn Weil. By taking different aspects from their writings community, where many entrepreneurs are beginning to develop these ideas into real world solutions, which brings us to our guests in this episode, all three of whom are entrepreneurs that are actively incorporating plural property mechanisms into their businesses and bringing these ideas to life in real world applications. Graven Prest is the cofounder of the GeoWeb, which is a public good augmented reality network. Kevin Seagraves is the CEO of Nifty Apes, which is an NFT lending protocol. And finally is Will Holly, who is doing some amazing work with CityDAO. All three of them go further in-depth into their projects, so I'll leave it at that. We hope that by the end of this episode, you'll have a much better understanding of Plural Property and see some of its vast potential for radically changing society for the better.
Alright. Welcome to Radical Exchanges. Happy to be talking to you all today. I think let's start with introductions before we get into the conversation. Joined today by Kevin Seagraves, Graven Press, and Will Holly. We're going to talk about partial common ownership slash salsa slash harbor taxation slash new ways of thinking about private property. Yeah. I would love to hear a little bit more about who you are and what you do for the benefit of the audience, and let's start with Kevin.
Cool. Yeah. Thanks, Matt. So my name is Kevin Seagraves. I'm the CEO at Nifty Apes, which is NFT collateralized lending protocol, and we've implemented harbinger style lending auctions. So we've turned loans into a public good. We're applying hardware or taxation in that context. Previously, I've worked on Bitcoin, a couple other projects in the space, got to be the lead engineer on Bitcoin grants e zero. Yeah. That's what I'm doing now and my credit in the space in the past. So that's probably good for now.
Great. Welcome. And, Will? Hi, everybody.
My name is Will Holly. Originally a software engineer, came into the space from the art world. When I was opening up a gallery in New York City last fall, I was exploring partial common ownership in the context of leveling the power differential that's traditionally existed between the gallerist and the artists. And that led me down this amazing rabbit hole, and I was already working on projects within web three. I lead a organization called seven twenty one Labs, and we've run experiments around quadratic funding and quadratic voting, how to represent real world assets on the blockchain, and partial common ownership is kinda logical extension of that. And since then, I've been developing token standards and working with some of the guys here in order to get better understanding of how partial common ownership will work in the real world.
Super. Thanks, Will. And Graven?
Alright. Yeah. I am Graven Prest, one of the cofounders of a project called the GeoWeb, which is a fair property rights system for anchoring digital content to physical land. And a buzzword version of that might be a augmented reality metaverse, but the fair part is we use partial common ownership or har harbinger taxes to actually administer our digital land. I entered the crypto space in 2019, didn't really know what I was doing, and worked in previous tech startups, but knew that there was a lot of smart people in this area and kinda went down the rabbit hole. One of the my cofounder actually introduced me to radical exchange and the idea of harbinger taxes and been working on the GeoWeb and in this space ever since.
Super. Thank you all for joining me today. I think that so full disclosure for the benefit of the audience is that, you know, the four of us have been talking and working together at various capacities and for quite quite a while thinking about this, thinking about the concept of what we're calling partial common ownership or harbinger taxation or salsa or self assessed taxation. There's kind of a kind of an extremely messy, confusing jumble of vocabulary here, which we've kind of already jumped into. And so I think it would be useful to take a moment to clarify it for the audience, to clarify what exactly we're talking about. And I can start the high level by saying that the general idea that we're talking about today and that we're working on in in different capacities is a way of rethinking private property. It's a way of rethinking the way that control or possession of property or some scarce resource or a governance or something like that. It's a way of thinking about of basically rethinking how control over something is shared or allocated. That's very abstract. But basically, we're talking about rethinking property here. And we've got this kind of alphabet soup jumble of vocabulary that we're using all to name basically one idea, but one idea that has various, different permutations. So with that said, I wonder if I could invite one of you to take a stab at at defining a few of these terms, defining, let's let's say, partial common ownership, harbor or taxation, salsa. And is anyone brave enough to take a stab at that?
Sure. I'll say I'll start off by saying I I look at them all as the same thing. They might have different context that they're used in, but I think of they basically all have the same rules. The idea is to create a property rights system where someone can control a scarce thing, like Matt was talking about, control a scarce thing, and the rules for controlling that scarce thing require them to, one, set a self assessed value that they're willing to sell that asset at. And it's like crypto's great. You can enforce these sorts of things. And so you set yourself assessed value. That is your for sale price, but it is also the basis for the calculation of a tax or a fee or some sort of percentage assessment on top of that. So that's called a like, that's people talk about it as a self assessed tax. So the idea is that those two incentives, you wanna set a really high price because you don't wanna sell it for too cheap, but you don't wanna overprice it because you don't wanna pay too much in fees and taxes. Those two balancing forces are, like, the the the very simple but very impactful thing that gets rolled up into harbor taxes, partial common ownership, salsa, cost, whatever you wanna call it.
And I'll I'd like to add just kinda why it's cooler. Basically, in a in a more traditional ownership sense with just private ownership, you maintain a high level of investment, efficiency. If I invest something, I'm gonna receive all the returns from that investment. But I have really poor allocation efficiency and that, like, for example, you could have a parking lot in the middle of Manhattan that's just sitting in the it's a parking lot, but it could be a 100 foot sky rise. It could be massively more productive use of this resource. And so with a harbinger tax system, you're able to more effectively allocate these resources while maintaining some of the investment efficiency as well. You know, whatever I put in and invest in this to build the SkyRise, for example, someone's gonna have to pay me that same amount when they wanna buy me out, but I couldn't just squat on it as a parking lot. So it's a little bit of, like, why is this valuable?
I think it's also Kevin. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.
It's also important to note the class of assets, which we believe partial common ownership should be applied to. There's probably someone out there right now who thinks we're a bunch of socialists saying we should end private property, and that's not the case. But there's certain types of property where the value is based on the network around that property. Some quintessential examples of this are land. You can take an apartment within New York City and you can say that as the surrounding neighborhood becomes more desirable, better restaurants, art galleries close to schools, you name it, a subway stop, the value of the apartment increases. But the landlord might not have actually made any material improvements to the apartment itself. And so the question becomes if you think about fairness, does the landlord in turn owe something to those surrounding businesses? Right? The landlords obviously paying taxes, but those taxes don't necessarily benefit the network. Another example is taken from the art world where if you look at the value of an artwork, a painting for example, it's not the oil and the canvas, it's the reputation of the artist. It's all the people who have within a larger network built up the reputation of that artist, the collectors, the gallerists, the fairgoers, the museum directors, the curators, the other artists. And so for example, when a painting sells at auction for a million dollars, does the collector or the seller in an ethical sense owe something to that network because that's where the value is being derived from. These are the type of questions that partial common ownership provides a new answer to. And essentially it says yes, because traditionally you just don't think about that network value. But if you really wanna get down to the soup and potatoes of it, you really do have to think about where this value is being derived from and it's not strictly from either the private ownership or, some form of public ownership in the abstract.
Super. Thank you. So partial common ownership, when we talk about partial common ownership, harbor taxation, and or salsa, which is an acronym that you might find out there on the Internet if you're reading about this, This stands for self assessed licenses sold at auction. All these things are basically referring to the same idea, which is what we're talking about here today, which is where, basically, you have sort of property interests that the the possessor of which sort of self declares the value of that property interest, pays a tax calculated as some percentage of that self assessed value. But then that self assessed value is also a sell offer. So in other words, it's not really the same thing as a normal private property interest. It's not the kind of thing that you can just hold on to forever if you want to. For this kind of possession of of an asset, it's a different kind of asset because if you want to hold on to it forever, you have to set a high price for it so that nobody else will buy it and therefore pay a high tax on it in perpetuity. And so that that and and so the word tax is also, I think, quite confusing here. Right? Because a better way to think of it about it might be like a fee that the possessor of something is paying to some community or that we might define in different ways that is, like, around the asset, participating in some network that's creating the value of the asset. So, like, I think another kind of dimension to this where people get super caught up is has to do with the ambiguity in the word tax. Right? Because, for example, we might think of partial common ownership as a system that we would apply to, like, land, like, legal interests in land so that these sort of quote, unquote taxes on them would be similar to, like, property taxes. And if that if that's what was if that's what we're talking about, then we're basically imagining a very different system of private property in land than the one that exists in the normal legal system. We don't have to be talking about land. We don't have to be talking about tearing up the state law regimes of Colorado and California and Canada and whatever. This is really just sort of a formal way of understanding a possessory interest or a property interest that could just as easily describe like a license. So, for example, we could just write up a contract that would assign some kind of a possessory interest from an owner to a possessor or a, licensee, if you will, that would have the same sort of a structure. So in other words, this is it's just kind of an abstract way of rethinking a property interest. And it's important to keep that in mind when we we may use the word tax or you may use the word license or you may use the word fee. I think it's it's extremely confusing. And, I just wanna put a pin in that. And I hope that this little discussion helps any listeners who are new to this kind of pick their way through what we're talking about here.
Yeah. And I start off by saying they're all the same. They're the same mathematical mechanism, but the context really should have different terminology. Vitalik tweeted about harbor taxes as he does occasionally and stirs up a lot of conversation. And the most recent one was in context of artist royalties on secondary sales. And we use the word like secondary sales royalties. But the math for that, like the math mechanism that's used to reward artists that we call that other word is the same as a sales tax. Right? Like you're taking a sale price, charging a percentage, but the money isn't going to a government, so we use different words. I do think as people understand the mechanism, first, just understand the math and why it can be powerful, then start to apply it in different contexts and the different implications and the different reasons why it's a good fit there, then hopefully we can start to have different language to separate them. Because where those fees, taxes go, I think can produce very different outcomes.
Yeah, absolutely. For me, this idea, this quite abstract sort of complicated idea about how to rethink a property interest has been really influential. Like, thinking about property interests in this way or shifting into thinking about property interests in this way from the more sort of default mode of thinking about property interests that I think, you know, most of us are, like, brought up in has really, really changed my perspective on a lot of things and kind of, you know, been quite quite a fruitful intellectual path for me to to walk down. And I wonder if any of you all would like to say say a little bit about your journey with this idea. Like, how did you first encounter this thought, this, you know, this idea of partial common ownership? What grabbed you about it? What why have you spent a substantial part of your time, professionally and personally thinking about it and working on it? Why is this something that anybody should actually care about if they're not just, you know,
a wonk of some of some sort? I can jump in first. Yeah. My first exposure was, through through the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in 2018. It took up a lot of esteem and mind share in the community when Radical Markets, the book by Eric Posner and Glenn Weil, came out. Around that same time, it's like DevCon, so it was kind of October, late fall in Prague. Glenn Weil and Vitalik had just released the Quadratic Funding paper. And so it was all the buzz at DevCon. I was like, I I gotta figure this out. I think even Glenn gave a talk at the conference, and that was kinda my first exposure to some of the ideas. And then I read the book, and there was an example where he's talking about harbinger taxes in the context of Rio De Janeiro and how all the, quote, unquote, best real estate is all the views is they're all slums on the hills. And all the rich people live down in the middle of town where you would think it would be reversed. They would they should be up in the hills, but there's these kind of different incentives that keep each of the groups where they're currently located. And if you implemented a system like harbor dirt taxes, it would it would change that dynamic. And so that always grabbed me. But around that same time, I was building Gitcoin grants. And so Quadratic Funding really grabbed my attention first, and that was really where I engaged more with these radical market ideas. Things happen. Years have gone on. I've moved different projects, and now I'm thinking about loans and how to have find a true market valuation for a loan or a derived true market valuation for an asset. It's really hard to do price valuations for NFTs because it's a small collection of assets. It's pretty low volume and low liquidity in general compared to most asset classes. And having this self assessed valuation for the loan that's always on auction that any other lender can buy at any time provides this really useful dataset and allocation efficiency of capital, which isn't really possible before. And so it kind of I fell a little bit I fell into that architecture and that ability to like, oh, this is a this is a harbinger thing. This is awesome. That's kinda where where I started with it and why I'm working with it now. And and, honestly, it just has always been really value aligned, thinking about what does it mean to be radical revolutionary and, like, push the boundaries and challenge the status quo. How can we create a better world? Like, I think it it offers the opportunity to, you know, have a more egalitarian, equitable world. So that's why I'm into it.
But so, Kevin, the way you describe that so in in Rio, the slums are in the hills, and the rich people are living in the not as good real estate. The way you describe that would be is that there were harbinger taxation, then it would switch. That actually sounds like a bad thing to me. I don't want that. So
why why is that a good thing? It was a good thing because it doesn't allow people to squat on the real estate that they're currently in. Right? So it's like, yeah, the the rich people could then buy out the nice real estate in the hills, but then it doesn't allow them to they can only use so much of their capital towards different assets. And so it actually frees up this real estate to be purchased by people who have less less value. They can't hold on to where they currently live, right, as well. So it actually offers the opportunity for people to move around to where its most effective use can be realized. Is that helpful?
I think so. So the I think that I think that what I just wanna point to is that in this mechanism, it it is a it is a complex thing. Right? The reason it's a complex thing is that there are two sides to it. One side is looking at things from the perspective of assets themselves, thinking about how does this asset flow to its most efficient use. Right? And if we just think about if we think about assets flowing to their most efficient use, that is going to look like like, on average, that's going to be the better assets flowing to people with more resources. Right? But that's not and this and I'm speaking for myself because I I actually do think that this is that this thing is kind of a crystal ball or something so that you can see people different people can see different things in it. And I'm so I I believe that, you know, whatever sort of side you look at the crystal ball from, it turns out that there's something attractive in it. But that can be that can be and often is, like, lost in translation when we talk about it in from only one perspective. So what I mean by that is like if you if we had if more assets were managed through partial common ownership instead of through private property, There would be many cases where high value assets would flow into the hands of wealthier people. But that's not all that's going on. That's not even close to all that's going on here. Another thing that's going on here is that assets are flowing into the hands of people who are better positioned to use them productively. And often that is not going to be wealthy people. Often wealthy people are like squatting on things because they can afford not to sell things and they're earning passive income from things despite doing nothing productive. There's a lot of wealthy people doing that in our economy. That's like a major force in our economy actually. So, there's also that. But then that's not all. Right? There's more in this crystal ball. Some of the other things going on are and one of the other super important things that's going on that I think you just can't understand this idea if you don't have this before your mind is that this form of asset possession is generating a constant stream of fees. So, first of all, it's basically it's weakening the grip on private property that anyone who's possessing something has. So, right now, like wealthy people own things permanently forever. Nobody can do anything about it. This weakens that. Right? So this is a weakening of of what we traditionally think of as a property interest. And it's generating a constant stream of fees, which is being redistributed. So that constant stream of fees, which is being redistributed, is not primarily being redistributed to, like, the wealthy who might occupy the high value real estate. It's primarily being redistributed to the nonwealthy who are, through their labor, through their work, through their participation in networks, creating the society around assets that is basically breathing value into those assets. There's a deeply redistributive thing going on here in addition to, you know, all these other complex things that are going on here. Well, it's it's redistributes,
but it it's like it's redistributing in a way to those who are doing work. Right? The more work you put it into the system, the more value you derive from the system. Exactly. And so that fact, the fact that it's redistributing
to people doing work is a progressive thing, not a regressive thing. Right? Because what one of what capital allows you to do is to earn money without working. Right? This is, like, one of the main things that capital is good for. The more capital you have, the easier it is to earn money without working. And this makes that harder, not easier.
Mhmm. And I would say it doesn't take it away as well. So it's not like completely tearing down the system as we currently know it. It just makes it that you have to continually provide input to maintain position. Like, for example, in my in my context, if I have a lot of capital, I can provide a lot of loans, and I I can make a lot of money doing that because I already have a lot of capital. So I can still succeed in this world, but it also offers the opportunity for someone who has much less capital to play the same game and benefit in the same way. There's not so much of the same barrier.
I think a decent reframing of this is around the original premise of the book looking at the world instead of seeing left or right rich versus poor, whatever the political default is looking at it as markets versus monopolies. And what we're describing here is the inherent monopoly in private property rights where it doesn't matter how productive you are. You can own the asset. You can squat on the asset regardless of your productivity. Private ownership just has no measurement within that context. And I think the fundamental innovation here is saying that the person or persons in whatever capacity who are able to be the most productive with the asset will be the possessors of the asset. And so I think it's in practical terms to get hyper focused on the capital aspects or the money aspects of things risks alienating people where we all can agree that there should be less monopolies in our society. And if you look around and you start to think about what constitutes monopoly, we can start to see them in all sorts of interesting places. And and so for me, it's really about how do you use this framework to start thinking about where monopolies exist. And ultimately, a monopoly is just the opposite end of a of an efficient market, right? And so if we want more efficient markets and we believe that efficient markets are better for creating wealth for everybody, just regardless of who you are, then we should all want more efficient markets regardless of where we sit left, right elsewhere politically.
Totally. Yeah. And to be clear, like the four of us have thought about this a lot, and I think we all see the the shading and the complexity and the multifacetedness of this. But one thing that I'm very cognizant of is that a lot of people, for perfectly understandable reasons, when they're approaching a new idea like this, are trying to figure out who's the winner and who's the loser in this idea. Like, how does this idea map track with the politics of x or the politics of y? So if you say it's gonna be more market and less monopoly, then it's like peep people hear that and they're like, alright. What does that mean? Are we helping the poor or are we helping the rich? And, basically, I get why people think that way because because most ideas out there, most policy proposals out there are, like, trying to do one of those things. They're, like, trying to, like, help the rich or they're trying to help the poor, and they're throwing smoke in front of what they're doing and, trying and making it complicated for people to see which one they're doing. So people are trying to, like, sort through that and figure out, okay. What what are we really doing here? But I think that partial common ownership is one of those rare things. It really isn't really doesn't track that. It really isn't on on the side of this is not like a secret way of trying to help the rich, nor is it like a secret way of trying to redistribute to the poor. It's actually like a very kind of deep reimagination of some fundamental institutions that actually could make everyone better off, which sounds like an insane sounds like an insane thing, and it's not without its complications. It's not you could you know, reasonable people could disagree with that. We can talk about some of the challenges and some of the difficulty of this idea. But if we could make this idea work, if we can sort of figure it out, it would do that. If we can figure this out, it would be the kind of thing that that would that theoretically could make every different sort of quadrant of society better off. And as Will said, in the context of networks
and networked value or value that comes from networks, partial common ownership as a system and a mechanism more accurately reflects where value is produced. And when you say, like, what is fairness? It's it's about, like, put in work, put in capital, put in whatever, and then get your fair share back. And so being able to, at the very bottom layer, rethink and reimagine how property rights can better match reality is why I think it should be apolitical unless you just don't want fairness. And I think that's obviously maybe some people won't, but they won't admit to it at least.
Oh, I think the conception of fairness that we have usually falls into gray ethical areas and it's not usually quantified if I give you a dollar I more or less expect a dollar of something in return right that would be fair you are not treating me as a means to an end your own end you are treating me as an end in and of myself right one of the fundamental premises of the enlightenment and if you believe in that then you treat people fairly you give them what you expect in return And so the concept here is really just about establishing a series of incentives that promote that. And to keep let's use a really practical example to ground this for a sec. You might go to your local sports stadium. You catch a baseball game. If nobody showed up to that baseball game, then how much value does the baseball player, create? Right? They're hitting the ball, but there's no one there to see it. Is it a $10,000,000 contract? No, probably not. If a tree falls in the woods, no one's there to hear it. Does it make a sound? And so the question then becomes, were you receiving or is the city or whatever collective of people, the community receiving $10,000,000 worth of value when the baseball team pays this person that contract or do the people deserve more? How would you even start to measure that relationship? And that's kind of the fundamental premise here when we talk about fairness. It's about measuring what you receive and what you're giving. Now, not to reduce everything to numbers and money because I think there are things go a lot deeper than that. But even in relationships, even friendships, you know, you do wanna give what you get, and get what you give. So we're really trying to enforce that and create a a stronger system to do that on the number side and the money side and hopefully see it seep into other parts of society once you can more clearly think about it and more clearly see it in practice.
I think another sort of mental model for what partial common ownership is doing that is has often been useful to me, and so I wanna make sure that we kinda throw it out there in this conversation, is that it is is a mechanism that that tries to capture the negative externality of exclusive possession of something and then redistribute that negative externality to the people who are harmed by the exclusive possession of something. So for example, if I own in full in the a block of real estate in Manhattan and hold it as a parking lot or just a vacant lot and don't let anybody else on it, there are basically millions and millions of people who are just a little bit harmed by their inability to use that piece of real estate for to connect with one another, to start a business, to exchange with one another, all of the many valuable things that you can do with a block of land in Manhattan. There are millions of people who are harmed by my exclusion of them from it. I think you should you should stop this. The
idea of harm here is a little bit of a misnomer. Perhaps a more accurate description would be the there's an opportunity cost that's imposed. You're not going out and and stabbing people.
We could I mean, we could break down the term. I mean, I don't know, actually. To me, the the term harm doesn't feel I mean, that you could use the you could define harm in in the way that you're defining it, and it wouldn't be crazy. But I do think it's actually a form of harm to exclude people from land, let's say. Like, the argument that it isn't sort of depends on the like, this actually this goes back to John Locke. I mean, maybe we should talk about John Locke for a second. So because, you know, John Locke I'm gonna sort of botch this. I apologize to philosophy buffs, but John Locke had an idea of of just ownership of land. So, like, what, you know, what makes it just to own land? John Locke's basic thing was if you mix your labor with the land, then you if you so if you have, like, unowned land, which is already this, like, abstract concept and he was a colonialist and he was, like, imagining The Americas as this, like, you know, there's already all that all that stuff going on here. But let's modulo that for a second. John Locke's point was, if you have unoccupied land, how could you how could a claim to possession of it arise? And his his answer was, if somebody mixes their labor with the land, then, just claim of ownership of that land would arise. That was basically his theory and that kind of makes sense. But even he admitted, he said so it's this famous sort of Lockean proviso, which is like a little asterisk basically on his theory of just ownership where he says, but that depends on there being enough and as good for everyone else to do the same thing. So in other words, that theory of just ownership arising in land depends on the assumption that there's still just like an infinity of other land that is just as good as that land where everybody else can do the same thing, can make the same move, mix their labor with land, and get their claim in land. And that asterisk turns out to be pretty problematic because there isn't an infinite amount of land. And especially if you zoom in on the phrase as good, enough and as good, There's not even close to an infinite amount of land that is as good as a block of Manhattan real estate or as good as any valuable land in a population center or whatever. Like, that is scarce. So, you know, Locke's logical construct really breaks down. And I think that
for that reason, traditional libertarian theories of of just ownership, they're kind of based in the Lockean thing. Like, they have a real problem. The shorthand that that I like to use for what Matt's talking about is, like, resources that ought to be in the commons. And I borrowed that from Simon de la Riviere who's done a lot of hardware attack stuff. He's probably the first person that comes up when you Google this sort of stuff in the blockchain sense. But he he used that short that shorthand of ought to be in the comments. But for practical reasons, we created private property rights so we could get investment efficiency. Private property rights didn't always exist, and they didn't exist in every culture. We created this new technology, and we got away from what ought to be because there was advantages, economic advantages to people investing and overcoming the tragedy of the commons. And I look at this as kind of a swing back in the pendulum back towards that ought, but still get the economic benefits of investment and, balancing incentives for people not to just deplete or squat on on these scarce resources because we do live in a scarce
world. So just on the point of back to the point of harm, like, I totally get that having a one plot of land when there's, like, the whole rest of the world isn't really okay. That it's a little bit of a stretch of the concept of harm to call that harm. But if you bring it to its logical extreme, if you claim one piece of land and then another piece of land, another piece of land, and then eventually, you've got 99.9% of the world, and then everybody else has point 1% of the world, then that that is harm. Right? So there is some kind of little bit of sense in which I think it it does make sense to to think of exclusive possession of a scarce asset
as a harm on others. Does that make sense, Will? It does. But I my concern with using the term harm without a big asterisk is that it comes across as an active decision to harm by excluding whereas exclusionary behavior is also one of the fundamental roots of investment efficiency in creating surplus wealth that overflows beyond just the capitalist into the people that work for them and how society as a whole can grow more productive and more wealthy. So to to I think it's important to really talk in specifics there when you give that example of the person who owns all the land in the world except for that one plot. Realistically, everyone else is gonna go kill them. So I don't necessarily buy the argument, but a little bit more fundamentally, there is an opportunity cost that's imposed, from a non financial perspective where if this one person is making everybody else suffer, they're not gonna be necessarily happy person. They're not gonna necessarily be a loved person or have those more foundational human connections. Now the relationship here between the financial allocation and harm and exclusion, I think it's a little bit more murky than talking about what happens when you do implement this. And the idea of the allocation of the harbinger taxes is something I think we should discuss a little more because you can get into a scenario where and you were you were talking about this before in excludable goods. You can get into a scenario where private markets can actually better fund collective goods that benefit everybody without costing the private market as much money as they would be spending if they just went out and gave their taxes to the government. And so I think it's a little harmful to just stake one claim or the other. The big asterisk here is that all this is highly theoretical. And, this group here, we're all really focused on actually going out in the real world and and building in a whole host of scenarios, private property, public property, brand new property that has no, legal status, and figuring these things out.
Yeah. No. Absolutely. I mean, I think and there's another so should we talk a little bit about, some of the work that we're doing, like, how we're thinking about this form of of property interest in our various projects? Great. Okay. Why don't we start with Graven, you wanna talk a little bit about the work you're doing at GeoWeb?
Yeah. Sure. The idea for the GeoWeb started with first principles look at what can blockchains actually do right now? They're slow, expensive. Like, what what can you actually do? It's hard to bridge real world assets for oracles. And so in evaluating that, I kinda came to this idea of augmented reality. It's self contained. It's you can just create a digital world or virtual reality, basically, augmented or virtual reality. And so a blockchain could be good at maintaining the property rights for such a system. And I focused on augmented reality because I had seen some technology demos of it and was super excited. And the idea was like, well, the the the I live in Denver. Denver Broncos have a stadium. How if we're gonna try to get everyone to communicate and have this world where we're seeing augmented reality everywhere, I I would want the Denver Broncos to have control of that airspace. And so the conflict starts there. It's like, how can you ensure that if you have this blockchain that's good at keeping these property rights, but the wrong people have them, then you did a really good job of creating a bad land registry. And so we were I was banging my head trying to figure out ways. Obviously, we want this to be decentralized and all all the sort of buzzwords. And we're like, okay. We're gonna have to interface somehow with physical property rights. We're gonna have to onboard that. We're gonna have to give them the land for free because this isn't a cash grab. And then my cofounder, when I just happened to meet him at a conference, and I talked to him about this idea. And he's like, well, have you read Radical Markets or heard of this thing with from Glenn Weil? And first time he said it to me, it was even maybe a little too radical for me, but it was like, oh, like, those two balancing mechanisms actually mean we can get fairness. I've I've probably overused that word so far today, but we can actually end up with the people that we want. We like and it's there's public land. There's places without property rights. There's no property right records. There's all these sorts of things that make it an impossible thing to say this is the right person to have it in, like, an objective sense. And so when he explained that to me, I was like, okay. This is, like, some good rules that can get us close in all the use cases. But it took me a little while to warm up to the idea of other people warming up to it. But once we did, I really just started going down the rabbit hole of what the implications of this are. We are starting with kind of a greenfield ish property right. Obviously, the physical world is pretty much chopped up and doled out. There are other augmented reality blockchain projects out there that are basically auctioning off land, and lots of speculation and people are gonna squat on it. But with a harbor attack, we can actually implement these rules, open up the whole globe, start the adoption cycle, get people experimenting, building, doing all these sorts of things, but not to the the total detriment of late adopters. So that just really started clicking, and we've ended up modifying in different ways through feedback from users in different things. Our our auction system has a a bidding system where there's a little bit of owner forgiveness, where you set your price, someone matches or exceeds it. You have an opportunity of seven days to to match that price and raise your payment accordingly, but also pay a penalty. So you can't just get unlimited free rolls at systematically underpricing your asset. And so we think that the generally, it's like the equilibrium point if we're successful and people adopt this. The person that is physically occupying a space is probably the one that can put the digital land to best use because they can put up their arts and entertainment. They can decorate their restaurant. They can provide digital information to travelers, whatever those sorts of use cases evolved to be. We think we naturally end up in the place we want, but through a a mechanism that isn't aware of the physical world at all. And so that was really cool. And then the next part, and Will kind of said, like,
where are these these When you say isn't aware of the physical world at all, I just to be clear, what you mean is it's not linked to, like, ownership registries
of of land. Yeah. You know, that that's an important distinction, I think. Yeah. It is based off of lat long sort of idea, like the whole space in the world, but it does doesn't pay attention to any sort of legal regime. Yeah. It it's it's it's greenfield ish. That's why I say it's, like, obviously, there's a little bit of overlap, but we're able to do this. And I think it actually has an opportunity to be a a way that physical property rights can actually be like, hey. That actually worked. Maybe we should do some more experiments planned with partial common ownership.
And just to pick up on one interesting part of what you said, one of the things that attracts you to it is that by organizing property interests in the ecosystem like this, you're creating a situation that doesn't just, like, massively disadvantage latecomers. Yep. And that's really important. I think that's a design pattern that a lot of ecosystem builders are not paying enough attention to. So for example, I think a lot of people when they're building a digital ecosystem of some kind, they think if I give some big advantage to the first movers, then I'm gonna create a massive rush, and that's gonna be great. Right? But, actually, that is not true. If you think bigger, if you have a little bit more ambition than that, you realize that creating some massive early rush does not create a sustainable ecosystem. It disillusions people in the long run. And if you get a few whales that grab up the whole ecosystem that you create early, then a few years into your project, your project is gonna suck, basically. This is a way of of letting it breathe, letting it be a healthier ecosystem long term. And there's just something, there's just like a much more real kind of ambition in that than creating a quick rush.
Yeah. Yeah. And I would say, like, we are like, people jokingly say we are so early in blockchain, but, like, I'm talking about augmented rally. No one even has no one wears augmented rally classes around. So, like, there's a long ways to go. And so it is kind of this toy that us nerds are hanging out, messed around with stuff. Hopefully, we get get it right. We're trying to think long term. The piece that gets me most excited now is it's almost like the property rights is kind of solved. And there'll be tweaks, and there's maybe some social input and some things to balance out the rough edges of the market. But for us, we're early. We believe land should be in the commons. So the fees that we collect or the taxes should be reinvested into public goods. And so the idea that we can actually help spur this this technology forward in a way that raises it for all and allows all to participate is the really exciting thing. Allow people to because you can pay out, like, a UBI or something with the the taxes. We're not gonna be on that sort of level, and there's all sorts of civil things that civil resistance and things that make it tough to do UBI on the Internet. But if we invest in public goods that are nonexcludable and anyone can use them, that's kind of like a UBI for everyone. Right? If you create more software that more people can use or creates more abundance, that's a good thing and help can help our ecosystem go forward. So I'm really interested in the feedback loop of what harbor taxes, partial common ownership, what those fees can then do for the public, the commons as well.
Super. Kevin, could we zoom in for a second on how partial common ownership functions in the context of Nifty Apes?
Yeah. Absolutely. So Nifty Apes, I said earlier, was a, NFT collateralized lending protocol, which really NFTs are just a certificate of ownership, and they can represent nearly anything. So right now in the blockchain ecosystem, it's mostly, like, pictures of monkeys and crypto punks and stuff like that. But it could be items in a video game. It could be billboard space in augmented reality. It could be the title to your car, deed to your house, commercial real estate, corporate assets. It's really, an open ended thing. It's just a a registry for ownership, and that's really powerful. Right? The global lending market is hundreds of trillions of dollars with lending on all of these types of assets. And so instead of having a in the traditional finance world, like, taking a mortgage, for example, you have, like, your county registrar that holds a certificate of ownership, and then you need, like, a title company and an escrow agent and a mortgage agent and the bank and the borrower and the lender, all coordinated through a human set of rules to coordinate a loan on that asset. With NFTs and with blockchain, we can basically collapse all of those actors into simply code. Right? So we have a a registry of ownership, which is now inherently linked to the financial system. So that's really cool. And then we get to write those rules of the game for people to play, out the these lending interactions and agreements. And so for us, it was originally a way to find, as I said earlier, the the market valuation for the loan itself. Like, what what is the most effective terms for this loan on this asset? And that's also finding a derived true market valuation for the asset itself. And then we realized, oh, this is a harbinger thing. And what it actually does is it creates a more egalitarian and value optimal debt market. So in the traditional world, again, let's take mortgages. Once a lender gives you a loan, they own that loan. And, typically, if you take a house, the value of the house generally goes up. And every month you make your mortgage payment, the risk on the loan goes down. So more value, less risk over time. The lenders just squatting on that value, gaining more value over time, exposure to more value in in the asset appreciating and less risk. They can resell and repackage that loan, making more money on it if they choose to or they can hold on to it while the borrower kind of experiences that harm we were talking about and they have a hard time getting any exposure to that. That's time, effort, money, friction to to refinance the loan and gain exposure to the value that's accrued to them. And so what we've done with Nifty Edge is we've turned loans into a public good and that no banker lender ever owns the loan, and any lender can, at any time, provide better terms and buy out the loan. Right? They're not buying out the loan, but they have the right to receive the interest payments from that loan and the right to seize the asset should the borrower default. Yep. So you're basically making capital compete for the right to receive that interest payment and the right to, like, gain that value from that public good while they're doing the work of pricing the asset, pricing the loan, and providing capital. And the borrower now has an automatically refinancing loan that improves over the duration. Right? So it's not an adjustable rate mortgage. It's just a better rate mortgage. And as your asset appreciates in value, your terms get better. And so we have positive externalities for the borrower and for the ecosystem because now there's pricing data for these different assets. And so it's really a it's a win win win game. It's how we've designed it. So lenders can at first be like, oh, I'm getting rubbed. Like, I can't squat on my capital. Yes. That's how we've designed it, but you do have a guaranteed minimum of how much money you might make. You now have access to loans that you know are active, so you can come in, take a loan that you're gonna get a return from, and you have a guaranteed minimum. Again, borrowers have access to that those better terms, larger line of credit, lower interest rate, a longer duration, and then the ecosystem has this high fidelity dataset. So that's kind of our context and and how we've applied it. We don't really have the tax part as much. So we're we're still big believers in public goods. Right? Like, a Getcoin person over here, Quadratic Funding. You know, I helped build the fund distribution system, and so I really wanted to include that as a piece. There is still lenders are providing the self assessed evaluation and providing the capital to back that self assessed evaluation, and that's kind of how it's working there. There is value of flowing to the other actors, so that's positive. But what we're doing in addition is the the protocol itself is you know, in this case, we're calling it a donation. We're donating 1% of revenue to public goods. We kinda had to create a meme through which to do that. We didn't wanna just give it all to Bitcoin because there are other experiments happening for funding distribution. So we created a it's basically right now, it's a multisig, but it's really a meme called the Regen Collective. And the goal is to get as many Web three protocols and platforms to programmatically donate 1% of revenue to public goods as possible so that we can fund these other funding distribution experiments. And so that's how we're kind of closing that loop of redistributing value. Yeah. Go ahead.
So the tax is is basically set at 1%,
and that goes into this fund? So it's not a tax it's not a tax on the lender. It's a tax on the protocol. Right? Because the protocol is a public good itself as well. Got it. It's essentially riding the subway or or, like, paying your water utility bill. We're paying for the upkeep and maintenance of these protocols. And so that's kind of, like, what revenue the protocol makes. It's essentially equivalent to that. And then the protocol is taking 1% of that revenue and giving it back to public goods. So if the global lending market did $7,000,000,000,000 in revenue in 2019, if we took 1% of that revenue and gave it back to public goods, it'd be $70,000,000,000 a year for the planet, potentially. So that's how we're kind of tying it back. What prevents,
though, a lender from overvaluing
their loan so that nobody buys it from them? So they totally can. The risk there is that to do even better. So you're able to find as a game theoretical equilibrium and that you don't want to overprice your loan because you might put yourself into a risky position where the asset actually drops in value and your loan is underwater, and the borrower's not gonna repay the loan. They're gonna be stuck with the asset.
So oh, oh, okay. But so the the re what's the actual check on it, though, is that is that the the self assessed value is the actual value of the loan also to the borrower?
The the the risk there is that the the asset might not at least right now, it's a very volatile market. Right? So they can overvalue the asset. If they're providing really good terms and everybody's really happy, then that's a good thing. Right? That is the borrower is getting great terms, and there's no other actor in the marketplace who's willing
to to do even better. Oh, okay. But so the the re what's the actual check on it, though, is that the the self assessed value is the actual value of the loan also to the borrower. Correct. Not yeah. Got it. There isn't, like, a private valuation.
No. It's like if you're providing evaluation, you're staking the capital upfront, and someone can walk away with it. So you have to, like, have a an accurate valuation of the asset and the risk on the loan so that you're not, yeah, losing money along the way. Cool. Interesting.
So that's me. Yeah. It's a super exciting model. And you can imagine I mean, obviously, you can imagine it someday. It would be interesting to see that kind of model being applied to different kinds of of Totally.
Of access to the financial system. Yeah. Right now it's JPEGs, but it could be the the housing market. Imagine, like, right now, interest rates are going up. It's let's just say it's 6% right now. And over time, I I wanna buy a house, so I take out my loan. But over time, the interest rates dropped. And in the current system, I'd have to wait or, like, try really hard to refinance at some future date. But in this system, it's like, oh, okay. My house is probably going up in value over time. And as interest rates drop, like, other lenders are going to wanna take over that loan in order to receive those interest payments. And so I now my opportunity cost for taking out a mortgage now is diminished because I know in the future, I'm likely to get refinanced, and it will reach that market equilibrium through game theory rather than through, like, forced private actions. And you can also do amazing things with this protocol. So it's like, I can offer a loan on an on any asset in existence, right, at any time even before that asset has been minted. So I always look at these example. There's a neighborhood here in Boulder, Colorado called Martin Acres. And as a lender, I can make a loan on every asset in the entire neighborhood all at once. So anybody who owns a house at Martin Acres can come and get a loan for three hundred thousand dollars at 5% for twenty years. Just blanket statement. It's just sitting there, standing offer. They can come execute the loan, which is a pretty amazing value prop for a lender. Right? Instead of having one on one transactions that have to go through all these steps with all these different actors, you now have a protocol that can execute one offer, standing capital. And then once it's executed, it goes into this always on auction. So, yeah, it's pretty fun stuff. There is a white paper out there if anybody wants to dive in. White paper dot nift h dot money. So
And, Will, would would love to hear a a bit about how you're thinking about this stuff in your work as well. Could I we could talk about our or we could talk about your work on protocols, I think, whichever you prefer to focus on.
Yeah. The I mean, the big thing right now and this is, I guess, gonna be one of the first public announcements. So I do some work with CityDAO, and myself and a small team just passed a proposal in order to test out partial common ownership and quadratic funding in the real world. The basic hypothesis that we have is that if you apply partial common ownership and take the harbinger tax revenue, put it into a quadratic funding matching pool, you can thus incentivize a positive sum feedback loop to create a city from scratch. And the way we're gonna go about doing this is by purchasing land that has no economic value and bootstrapping value on it. Cultural value by bringing in fine art, world class fine art people will go out there be able to stay on the land experience it. One of those get off the grids you're under a beautiful starlet night with sculptures and your family and friends. It's just something very unique in the world. Now rather than having private leases for these surrounding land, I'm talking about purchasing a couple 100 acres here. So perhaps one acre will be used for this core value proposition. All those surrounding acres will be leased out under partial common ownership. And the idea here is that teams from within CityDAO or outside of CityDAO, anybody really can come in and take on one of these leases to improve the overall user experience. So our v zero is gonna be pretty minimal amenities. You some luxury tents, clubhouse where you can wash up and eat something but there's really not much more than that. Teams will come in and build on top of that capture, excess or unrealized value that nobody else is capturing. They will then pay some harbinger taxes into the pool those harbinger taxes are an incentive for other projects to come in and and because we're talking about the desert here it's pretty expensive for the delivery of a lot of services which known as a high last mile cost So we wanna subsidize lower that last mile cost high speed internet better facilities easier to get to from the nearest airports. We're looking at land that's about two hours from the closest international airport easier to get there all those basic infrastructures that a make it more desirable. Just get the word out there make it easier to come to so make it more accessible resulting in better margins for the projects that are already built on it more customers which increases the harbinger tax revenue and again using the perpetual auctions in this allocation mechanism, we should get to an equilibrium where the most productive projects are the ones servicing these tourist needs, which ultimately just means a better user experience for the people coming out there to experience this And all in all, increasing that funding pool for the next round of quadratic fund matching. So my prediction here is that in turn, this should get a positive sum growth feedback loop. The type we would see if we were going three hundred years ago to New York City or San Francisco. Ultimately, this is completely experimental. The people of CityDAO voted overwhelmingly in favor to run this experiment, and we're really excited to do so. So that's gonna be something we'll be working on, over the course of the next two years. This all just happened in the past week, but the ideas have been cooking for about nine months now. And the logistics of trying to get 10,000 people behind a single proposal took about three months, especially when Amazing. We're talking about partial common ownership, which is a whole a whole case of ideas in and of itself that needed some good explanations.
Totally. Super, super exciting. And you've also built, like, tools and smart contracts that people can, I mean, I guess you'll be refining them in the context of this project? But you've already got some pretty great resources out there for people who are interested in picking up on this template and integrating it into their own to their own work. Yeah. Yeah. Where can people find out about that?
Yeah. It's on GitHub, github.comslash, 721labs/partialcommonownership. When I got into this, I was describing the idea to people and trying to get them excited as well because it was very clear to me how it could impact their businesses and the projects that they're working on, originally on in the art world. And then I realized, wait a minute. Even if people understood this thing and they wanted to implement it, it would be really hard for them to implement it. Those upfront costs are way too high. And I looked around at some of the existing implementations and just saw that, again, they were way too complex for somebody who wasn't familiar with this concept. And so, I forked some work that was done and kind of refined that made it much more mature, than it was back then. And as you probably guess, there's so many different variants of what we're talking about. There's so many gray areas and unknowns and trying to support as many of those as possible so you can really plug and play your flavor of partial common ownership and make it work for you without needing to, reinvent the wheel here. Super. You know, I think some of there there are a lot of different sort of permutations
of partial common ownership, but I think we might wanna we might wanna say a few words just to kind of help accelerate listeners' understanding of what are some of the different things to think about or different kind of ways of doing this. Some of these are enabled by the work that you or others have already done. Others are maybe not. But I think it might make sense to just point to some of the kind of trickier issues that we're all still thinking about in the context of this quite new sort of institutional thing. One of them is and you you should all feel free to sort of jump in and supplement what I'm about to say here. But, like, one of these one of the issues with partial common ownership that in a practical implementation needs to be thought through is this issue of basically bundling. So for example, you might and you might imagine a sort of a grid of a whole bunch of different parcels that are all just separate, and they all have their own separate partial common ownership interest associated with them. So we just are buying and selling each one separately. You can imagine another world in which you're able to bundle a bunch of those interests together into one and sort of have a self assessed price for the combined thing. And on the other side, you can imagine being able to buy one partial account ownership interest and then subdivide it into lots of different pieces. And both of those two things, the sort of bundling thing or the subdividing thing, present issues and complications in the management of partial common ownership interests. To save the listener a whole bunch of thinking about this, I will I'll I will I'll state my view on how to think about it. So, basically, I think that these issues, the bundling and subdividing issues are issues that need to be cited collectively. So, basically, the partial common ownership interests are the are individual interests. If I own one thing and I'm I'm self assessing the price on it, I'm acting as an individual. But when you sort of take that turn into the bundling and the subdividing of interests, Those decisions shouldn't be unilateral. They need there needs to be some kind of other democratic mechanism for making those kinds of bundling and subdividing decisions. One other one, continuous auction versus periodicity. The way like, the way that partial common ownership is described in the book radical markets is as a continuous auction system. And most of the experimentation that's out there now having to do with partial common ownership conceives of it as property interests that are up for continuous auction. So in other words, that third parties can buy them at any time. There's another way of, you know, sort of a tweak on how to think about it is is to think of partial common ownership interests as up for auction, not all the time, but periodically. So in other words, if you could buy a partial common ownership interest in an auction, and then that interest, like, just by default lasts for six months or a year or something like that and then has to go up for auction again, then you can win it again. Or if you lose the auction and the winning bid goes to you as opposed to to the auctioneer or whatever. That's another way of thinking about partial common ownership interests as these sort of periodic interests. And that I think that that option of periodicity, that variation on this is an important thing to keep in mind in a lot of practical situations. Because in many practical situations, this the idea that something can always be bought on no notice is like a nonstarter. But if you reconceive of partial common ownership interests as these periodic things, then owning one would feel basically the same as owning, like, a lease and, you know, having a certain amount of time with an asset, which opens up a lot of things. And then then you can start to think of it as basically kind of a hybrid between a rental interest and an ownership interest, that has attractive advantages over both of them.
We went pretty far down the line with periodic auctions for a lot of the the reasons that Matt said. I would the one thing I'd flag for people that are in the blockchain world thinking about this, blockchain transactions are transparent. Like, you can see a bid. Like, that's the standard. And so you kinda start to have if you have these periodic auctions and you need to collect bids, you start to have information leakage. And there's ways you can obscure how much a bid is, but it's gonna take more capital to to basically hide the money. So we ended up not doing periodic options. And I think there's definitely they will they need to become more accessible because people worry about losing their object overnight. And so we end up having a different solution to that. But there's some things that just require certainty to make the sort of long term investments that we still want to encourage. And so depending on use case and all that sort of stuff, having periodic auctions will be really important, but I think it'll probably require some sort of commit reveal scheme or some sort of shielded transactions or something like that so that you can have a fair auction where the incentives for people being honest about their evaluations going into the auction aren't undermined. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I'll I'll jump in with the biggest problem that we're coming up to. Right? So we're we're about to launch. Feels really exciting. It's great, but it there's this question around when we talk to lenders. Like, oh, I could get rugged at any time. Like, what? It's a it's the paradigm shift. Right? Well well, yeah, we're turning loans into a public good. Yeah. You could you could continually put in work and provide a true market valuation to continue to receive those interest payments. Why would I ever wanna do that? It's like, well, this is where ideally, we're gonna be attracting a lot more borrowers. So it's how do we get that five o spending, and how do we get people to to buy in and start that cycle? We think there's a lot of attractive things about being a part of an ecosystem like this for all the reasons we've talked about in this whole show. But that's the biggest one that I see is convincing people. We basically have to demonstrate to them through usage of the protocol that it is worthwhile to be a part of and there's value to be had in in many different ways. So, yeah, I'm not sure exactly the answer of how to do it. We're gonna go try. That's where we're at.
Yeah. I think all of this stuff is we're really still in very early days here working on it, working in a vein of innovation in a really fundamental institution. There are gonna be some there's gonna be lots of difficulties and, like, little fits and starts to work through, but I think we can all see that working through those difficulties working through the unfamiliarity that a lot of people have with this kind of system is worth it. Because if we can figure out a we can figure out a way of, you know, essentially managing shared interests in scarce stuff. It's like there is not that many things that are more fundamental to, like, the functioning of society than that. So any, like, you know, incremental improvements to the to property systems that we can get going through this kind of work are gonna be are gonna be a big deal, gonna be really transformative to to fundamental, like, whole sectors of the economy and potentially transform a lot of lives and make make important things work better?
It's just as as far as pitfalls. One thing I realized is that when you're working with abstract things, so, like, alone, it's just it's just an agreement. Right? It's not a physical piece of property or it's, you know, advertising in the metaverse or, you know, augmented reality. Those are easier things to, easier systems to seed and get moving. And especially with a loan, it's much easier to be like, well, okay. I put banks on the loan. Like, banks. You actually have to do work now. Those are easier systems to get people to buy into and to start. It seems like in the conversations I've had so if anyone's looking at starting a system like this, consider something that's a little bit more abstracted than a physical reality because people don't wanna have their homes, you know, rugged, quote, unquote, from underneath them. That's one thing I've come across.
Yeah. I, just to dovetail with that. I mean, I agree. In all of the conversations that I have had about this idea with people, the thing that comes up again and again is is this idea of homes. Right? So, I mean, nobody wants to lose their home. Homes have this emotional connection for perfectly good reasons and are therefore probably just the last place to to think about this radical of a rethinking of an institution. But in the context of commercial real estate or in the context of loans or in the context of any of these other kinds of things where the stakes are just a little bit less personal, it becomes more, you know, people are more open to a different way of of thinking about things. So that's right as a pragmatic matter, but I I do want you know, I mean, one of my Sisyphean tasks is I really do want people to understand that even in the context of emotionally sensitive things, even in the context of it's like, this is a better way of sharing power that isn't just some kind of a market maximalist, the help of the capitalists exploit everybody thing. It really isn't that. It's a way of sharing power better and of helping people who deserve a seat at the table have one in a way that are inherited institutions, which, by the way, were invented by, like, feudal,
lords and things like that, don't do. Yeah. It goes back to the earlier conversate like, when you were talking about the financialization. People just worry that, oh, yeah. Like, financialization, bad. It's really hard to imagine the second, third, and fourth order effects. So we start with things that aren't as that there's not as much emotional attachment, but we prove that it works and help build people's intuitions about, like, the positive impacts. And nothing is perfect, but, like, the trade offs in this case, I think, are good. And if we can prove that with things that aren't emotional, aren't home shelter, things like that, people will have better intuitions about what the impact would be if we took this thing and applied it to, say, housing. And so, yeah, for sure, if we can build a build a few examples, then, like, we can gain some momentum and start to see this in more ambitious and bigger markets.
Yeah. It's been great to to talk to you all. Thank you for taking the time of the conversation. If there any sort of closing thoughts or reflections? We'd love to hear them. I'm I'm,
obviously, I enjoy talking with you guys, working with you guys on this sort of thing. Hopefully, we convert one one or two other people out there. Come join us, work on this stuff. I I really do believe, like, what Matt said about this can change economies. This can change the trajectory of of where where we're going. And so, yeah, it can be silly little metaverse and ape loans and all sorts of things like that. But I I do think we're on to something, so come join us.
Yeah. I just wanna say thanks for, having having me on and, you know, allowing me to be a part of the club. I feel like, you know, we talk about luck and a lot of those ideas that a lot of the people in that era came up with, they were just sitting in, like, pubs and, like, talking about, oh, what if this happens? What if we did things this way? Right? They were just kind of just a small group of people talking about crazy ideas, and that's what this feels like. And so it's super fun to be a part of. So thank thanks for being my friends and working on this kind of stuff with me. And as as Graven said, if anybody wants to come join us, you know, there's a there's a discord. You know, we hang out every week, or so, and, we'd love to have more people in the conversation.
Amen. Thank you for all the awesome work that you are doing. And, yeah, I hope anyone listening take a moment, reach out to to one or all of us, join the conversation. There's really a deep well of interesting work to be done here, and we need as many people as possible to pitch in. So thanks.
Thanks again to Graven Prest, Kevin Seagraves, Will Holly, and Matt Pruitt. We hope that you're leaving this episode with a better understanding of how plural property works and are excited by the many rich possibilities it could have, not only on our economy, but our society as a whole. The Radical Exchanges podcast is produced by g Angela Corpuz and Matt Pruitt and is co produced, edited, and audio engineered by Aaron Benavides. This episode was produced and recorded by myself and gee Angela Corpus. If you would like to learn more about RadicalxChange, please follow us on Twitter at rad x change, or check out our website at radicalexchange.org. And if you'd like to join the conversation, we'd love to hear from you. So please hop on our Discord where we have channels discussing topics like what you heard today as well as topics like plural voting, community currencies, soulbound tokens, and much more. There will be links for all of these in the description. Have a great day, and stay radical.