Imagine think of, like, a BBC for AI or a PBS for AI. Instead of the world where power in this industry is concentrated within maybe two or three companies in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Right? What Web3 is giving us because of the data infrastructure that we kind of just get for free that would take potentially, you know, millions and tens of millions of dollars in investment to get us to. One way way of describing what MetaGov actually is is it's really just a bunch of researchers and hackers held together

It is. We don't need to take the Internet down this path of intitification.

Discovery is like, you know, the invention of open source. Right? That was a fundamentally new way of producing useful stuff in the world that nobody had seen before.

Sweet. Let's do it. Well, first off, thanks for having me. So my story, I guess, or why the hell I do do what I do. Honestly, I asked you to list off you can just, like, list off list off the things high level. Sure. Yep. So, obviously, one of the things I work on is Medigov. So Medigov is a nonprofit research lab that specializes in digital governance, and I should say especially in digital self governance. It's like how do online communities govern themselves. And as part of this, we do do a lot of different research across a lot of different spaces. So we do we're funded, for example, by the Ford Foundation, Sloan Foundation to do research on sort of how we can model and, sort of, calculate the costs of transitioning from, let's say, a closed source product into an open source product or from a BDFL, like a one person running an open source repo to many people running a repo. Like, it's like, what is the cost and the risk of going from point a to point b? We do a lot of work within, AI. So we, and I guess I in particular help lead one of our projects called public AI, or AI is public infrastructure. And the idea of public AI is that, you know, maybe AI should be offered kind of like, you know, we offer or support public goods like public libraries or public highways or public parks. Imagine Think of, like, a BBC for AI or a PBS for AI. Instead of the world that we seem to be as we're trending toward right now, where power in this industry is concentrated within maybe two or three companies in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Right. And of course, I'm companies in Silicon Valley. Yeah. Right. And of course, I do, I and Medigov, we do a lot of work in DAOs and blockchains. By some measures, we probably do the most research on DAOs of any organization in the world, inclusive of any university. And part of that involves running DAOSTAR, which is the standards body for DAOs.

Yeah. There are a lot of reasons I think we absolutely need this grant center. And, honestly, you more than anyone, I think I've seen the response we've gotten from this ecosystem where it's like everybody we talk to, whether it's, like, one of the cofounders of Optimism or Awakie from Gitcoin or Stellar or Octant or like, everybody agrees. Like, everybody agrees. Like, this is so necessary. And it's kinda, like, obviously necessary. Right? Like, like, it would be amazing if we had this. And now, hopefully, we're getting closer. Mhmm. I think maybe, like, another way of maybe, like, putting into into, like, understanding the scale of this, like, what we could actually accomplish. This is something that, traditional foundations have been trying to do for, like, sixty odd years. Right? Yeah. Like every ten years or so, you know, the Rockefeller Foundation or, like, Sloan Foundation or one of these, like, big, you know, well founded foundation says, like, oh, we should do something like this. We should have, like, a common application across our organizations. And they say, like, let's do it. And then they do it. It fails invariably. And then, like, twenty years later, they forget the failure, and they try it again. I think we're actually have a much better shot at getting something that's truly scalable. I'm realizing this interoperable vision for grants because, I think, because of what Web three is giving us, because of the data infrastructure that we kinda just get for free that would take potentially, you know, millions and tens of millions of dollars of investment to get us to. Mhmm. But,

standards are definitely a big play within MediCove. We run not one, but two standards bodies, actually. One of the other ones is called Comtech. So there's a project within MediCove called the Comtech Foundation, which publishes standards for, you know, tech that is actually respectful of your attention. And more broadly, Medigov is, like, kinda what draws people to Medigov as a okay. One way of describing what Medigov actually is is it's really just a bunch of researchers Yeah. And hackers, held together by a Slack and some vibes. Like, it really is, like, deeply informal in a way. Yeah. And people kinda hang out because, you know, it's like it's it's a community of people who, like, a community of people who, like, really love building communities, especially kinds of online communities. Right? And standards are very much, like, part of that play. Like, what do you need to get a standard? You're effectively building, like, a coalition of the willing. Right? Of people who might be competing with each other in normal circumstances, but have said, like, you know, we care about some common objective, some shared goal enough to say that, you know, we're gonna get together and, like, put our energy into writing this piece of of paper that I don't own and I'm giving to my competitor. It's, like, for free. It it's it's you know, you need some sort of, like, coalescing to to make that happen. You need that community.

you know, we've been hosting these, like, tradition of foundation and nonprofit dinners, for, like, four years now or so. And, you know, what I always kind of the way I always introduce it is, like, back in the day, in the early days of Web one, the legendary Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and many other projects, you know, brought together people from the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, from, W3C, you know, which, like, operates the standards for HTML, like, that was founded by Tim Berners Lee. These were, like, the founders, the original founders of the Internet. And Brewster brought these people together for, you know, on a regular basis, like, for a chill, no chill, you know, series of dinners to figure out, like, how do we make sure that the Internet itself is something that is gonna benefit everybody rather than something that, you know, just a bunch of companies are looking at figuring out how do I extract the maximum amount of value. Right? Right. I think that's the hope of these dinners and these communities and these events that we try to hold is that try to hold space for, you know, all the people in Web3 that are really, like, thinking, like, who are committed to this idea that this is something that can be actually for the social benefit, that can be for the public good. The Internet doesn't have to be shitty. And We don't need to take the Internet down this path of of intitification.

involving some people, including Nathan Snyder. And maybe the best way I can introduce this subject with this kind of conversation is something about one of my mentors, Lawrence Lessig, used to say is that, you know, America and he's folks in America, but I think something we can say about many parts of the world, and many industries, is kind of, like, stuck on this wheel of market power. Yeah. It's just Yeah. You know, we build monopolies. We gain make money to further make more money, which ultimately kind of sucks the air out of many of the other kinds of institutions that we care about. Institutions like democracy, let's say, or institutions like, I don't know, public health. Like, there's this, way in which the market which is, like, within I think we can agree that, you're the blockchain socialist, not the blockchain communist. That in many ways, like, market dynamics, market forces are a powerful and important component of many societies. Right? To have that kind of decentralized decision making infrastructure, or information processing in the Hayek sense. But, like, there's a way in which these things can, like, go out of control. Right? And they start to sabotage and undermine the very institutions that make markets function. Right? Institutions of the state, of rule of law. And that's the kind of path, this wheel that we sort of like we can't seem to stop. And I don't know. Like when I think about these kind of questions I'm like you know many would a lot of times I'm just at a loss. It's just such a huge problem. Like how do you stop this like giant force of, billions of people and trillions of dollars, like, moving in inexorably toward this direction? And I feel like, you know, governance is part of the answer. But I maybe, help us, you know, maybe help us, you know, start to peel back direction? How do we, like, build the tools and start, you know, initializing these movements? At least that's the, you know, the thought process that we had when we were starting Medigiv, that it was not enough to be just advocating for, like, policy changes within traditional governments and traditional power structures. Right. We needed to be, in some sense, starting our own projects, starting, like, fresh companies that were organized better, more democratically, or at least in a way that, you know, you could see at the end of the at the end of the tunnel that this was gonna be better for society. Mhmm. That this was actually gonna make a difference for humanity rather than just for, like, this set of, like, you know, stockholders and their bottom line. Right.

Yeah. No. Absolutely. Maybe, like, I'm gonna I'm gonna maybe put this in a slightly weird way. But so I began my career actually, in robotics. And my PhD, at least in the beginning, was actually about, was actually in AI. It was in theoretical machine learning. It was, like, pro making proving theorems about, like, the behaviors of certain kinds of algorithms, learning algorithms, trying to find structure in these kinds of questions. And I ended up leaving AI for, let's say, you know, let's say a certain kind of social science, DAOs, collective intelligence. Lots of reasons, which are very complicated for for that. But the, when I think about, like, these disciplines and how they relate, you know, I think of blockchains and DAOs as very much a question, like, you know, we're looking at how humans interact with each other. We're studying collective intelligence of, like, many, many people kind of, like, interacting to generate whether it's a market or a company or a DAO or a blockchain. There's some sort of collective exercise and collective experience. You know, there's, like, this, you know, this community that's created out of out of our joint imaginations. But AI is, along with all the other things that it is and absolutely is, I think, concentrating power in our society, as a field where it's also like, you know, it's a very deep, it is a record of over eighty years and more, I suppose, of people, especially a set of, like, let's say, like, applied mathematicians, trying to figure out how to interact with the world. Right? There's this record within, sort of, the history of AI going from, you know, there's, good old fashioned symbolic logical methods to sort of early kinds of robotics to now the sort of modern era of, you know, these giant net deep nets that really come down to different ways of interacting with the world, right? These different ways of imagining this is how I'm gonna be in the world. This is what it means to experience and to learn. I think there's a lot of things that we could learn that we when I say we I mean like people in blockchain in DAOs who are thinking about like how do we design new kinds of institutions that we can learn from the practice of AI over the past eighty years that I think if we could learn correctly, could fundamentally change and supercharge, the way we build institutions today. That we, in fact, the way maybe we build companies, that we build democracies. I don't think we know what those answers are yet, but I I I truly believe they are there.

So, like, a lot of okay. So some of these are, like, direct analogies. You can sort of say, oh, there are, you know, different kinds of multi agent architectures or kind of like, ensemble methods within machine learning that are variations and perhaps more sophistic more sophisticated kinds of voting methods. Right? And you can sort of, like, take these analogies and map them into, the way we design institutions in DAOs. Another is just sort of like, oh, look at, you know, these kind of, like, generative adversarial networks. Right? Where, like, there's, like, you know, two agents playing kind of zero game, like, a zero sum game against each other. But in a way, that's designed to produce something that's better than either could achieve. Right? Because they're competing against one another. Or variations of self play, like, you know, when we, like, train chess, agents or StarCraft agents nowadays, we have them play against themselves. These kinds of designs, these kinds of like sort of like differentiable architectures, can be applied and, you know, we can sort of use them to reason about and think about, like, how do we design multiple institutions? Like, within DAOs today, you know, we there's just, like, you know, there's this meme of, like, this mycelium, this kind of ecological organic, like, cellular network, like, different organelles of a DAO interacting with each other. Right? There is, like, parts of AI are thinking about how to, like, map that, how to construct it so we can better understand it and, like, tune in a way so it's actually producing, like, optimum social good rather than just, like, all these things competing against each other and going, like, crazy. Right? So these are tools that we can start applying from day one. I think there's a deeper set of things you can unlock if you really understand, like, how AI has been built from a methodological perspective. This is like a larger set of conversations that I think I like to sort of call like a CERN for collective intelligence or CERN for, like, the social and behavioral sciences. That has to do with understanding, like, why the hell has AI, like, moved so fast and made such progress, in the past twenty, thirty years? And how can we start replicating that in the social and behavioral sciences? Like, in how we design institutions?

I I don't think, we've gone yet to DAO of autonomous agents. Soon. Soon. Soon. You heard it here first. Actually oh, man. I actually registered, like, the dye.xyz, to do actually this, like, the decentralized AI Oh, okay. But also playing on the DAO. This is, like, a thing that I think Ori, one of the sort of founders of the org, and I were kinda brainstorming on during the first Zuzalu, actually. Uh-huh. Ultimately, it didn't happen, but it definitely would be such a fun experiment to run. The, but there's there's a lot of this happening outside the blockchain space. I think, like, I was just talking to a professor at UW. His name first name is Max. His last name, I cannot remember right now. But, he, wrote a paper on, basically, governance simulations with LOMs. There's a kind of wide range of these kinds of research that are coming out where I have, like, just a bunch of AI agents that are interacting with each other with some within some controlled environment, and we're just kind of, like, playing it off and see what can happen see what happens. I still believe though, like, at the end of the day, these are all as fun and sophisticated as they can sometimes be. They are all just toy models, and there is no replacing the actual real world. At the end of the day, if you want to make progress in these things, you need to be able to run experiments with real people. I think that's the difference between a DAO and some of these, like, AI test beds.

So I think there are two different perspectives on what a DAO is. Mhmm. And I I will make a statement and say, like, what my perspective is, but I just wanna kinda, like, highlight. There's the movement perspective on what a DAO is. It's so important to understand, like, that this is, like, core to the people who actually build DAOs in many ways. That, you know, DAOs need to be decentralized. That they're about offering something that is new to this economy than just traditional corporations. That, you know, DAOs are kinda like digital versions of co ops. Right? Like, exploring how we can make cooperative structures, union based structures, you know, communal structures more viable and more competitive, and using technology to do that. So, like, this is founders of a mutualist society and an incredible person. So there's the movement notion of a DAO. But then there's also the money. Right? And I think let's we have to be honest with ourselves as an ecosystem. Like, the reason so many people pay attention to this space is because there are billion dollar DAOs that are floating around out there that are making a lot of money and generating, I think a lot of, let's say, surplus that is then going back into both the movement DAOs, public goods, different kinds of things that we care about. Right? But the movement DAOs, public goods, different kinds of things that we care about. Right? But, like, there are these, like, red hot engines, economic engines, which are generating and spinning out wealth. And the fact that, you know, these things, these, like, DeFi, these large DeFi DAOs, which, you know, oftentimes can and look like very corporate, right, just, like, slightly, like, if you, like, just, like, fuzz your eyes a little bit, like, the Duke start to look a little bit like corporations. I think many ways they're they're really not. Mhmm. I think these are both, like, legit and real perspectives that, like, a lot of people hold in this space. And, like, when I sort of look at this, when I'm, Iim, like, putting my hat, like, my DAO star hat on, like, I need to say yes to both parties. Right? I need to be a representative of the entire DAO space, both the movement and the money. Right? Money. Right? Okay. So let me take off my institutional hat and just, like, put on my Josh hat and, like, say, like, what what I what do I think about DAOs? Or what do I where do I want them to go? Let out. For me I am here and in some sense I'm here like in MediGov because I want to see because I think I am have a much better chance of seeing and discovering truly new forms of organization that have not been seen before, in these spaces than anywhere else. Like, discovery is like, you know, the invention of open source. Right? That was a fundamentally new way of, you know, producing useful stuff in the world that anybody like, nobody had seen before. That was only possible because of the Internet, because of the nature of software. And I wanna see more stuff like that, more innovation, more knowledge. And sometimes I think this innovation can look like figure out like, solving deeply unsexy problems around, like, how do we coordinate or manage rights and sort of HR kinds of things that I think DAOs could be really good at. Right? So DAOs, in this sense, could be, like, much much better corporations. Right? More compliant, more transparent, better governed, more productive. It could also look like, wow, these are like this is like changing the the possibilities of governance, so that we can have more competitive, bigger scale, cooperative kind of structures that are, like, giving back to the communities that they serve. That it's, you know, in MedecoF, we like to say, like, you know, making democracy at least as available as autocracy. The idea would be that autocracy is, like, pretty easy to implement in tech. Democracy is hard. Yeah. But part of the idea of doing research is not that we prefer one the other. Like, sometimes you you need, like, one person calling the shots in a small in a small company, for example. Right? But it's, like, at least making it possible to sort of say, like, you know, here here's an alternative. Let let's see if it could be right or let's lower the cost of implementing this alternative.

both Medigov and DAOSTAR are very open communities. Just go to medigov.org, daostar.org. You'll find ways to join our respective online communities and start getting plugged in and actually contribute to some standards.

Yes. Let's do it. Yes. Right. Right. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.