Bankless - Announcing the GREEN PILL Podcast | Kevin Owocki

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Kevin Owocki returns to Bankless with a very special announcement—the GreenPill Podcast! The Gitcoin OG is the embodiment of the best parts of the crypto ethos, and his commitment to public goods is making the world a better place. GreenPill is launching through the Bankless network, and we’re extremely excited to meme ‘public goods’ and ‘regenerative cryptoeconomics’ into existence. Take the Green Pill, anon.   ✨ Subscribe to the Green Pill Podcast ✨ https://availableon.com/greenpill  🟢 Get the GreenPilled Book 🟢 https://greenpill.party/  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 1:55 GreenPill & Regen 4:20 Moloch in the World 6:58  Why Green? 9:37 The GreenPilled Book 11:58 The GreenPill Podcast 17:04 ELI5 & Details 19:57 Closing ------ Resources: Kevin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/owocki?s=20&t=A1yy1WYtQlNAOiSxXtGuNQ  Schelling Point Conference: https://schellingpoint.gitcoin.co/  ----- Music by WABI SABI - snowflake - https://thmatc.co/?l=7786B012  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome Bankless Nation to this extremely special episode of Meet the Nation, where we bring back on frequently returning guest, Kevin O'Waki, this time to announce a couple cool, very fantastic new releases into the world and into the bankless ecosystem. Kevin Awaki, for those that don't know, he is the OG person behind Gitcoin and now Gitcoin Dow. And Kevin, of all people, is the most committed. to public goods of anyone that I've met in the crypto ecosystem. And in my opinion, Kevin just straight up gets it. What is crypto about and why can it bring goodness into the world? Kevin has those answers. And that's why I'm extremely excited to do the thing that I think bankless does the best, which is release new podcasts. So Kevin O'Waki is coming with the bankless network to produce the Green Pill podcast, all about trying to convince people to take the green pill. And in

this quick show I do with Kevin O'Waki, we explain what that means. What does it mean to take the green pill? What is the green pill? And also, what can you expect from the Green Pill podcast hosted by Kevin O'Waki on the Bankless Network? And in addition to that, he also has his green pill book, which is just, you know, the base foundations of what is going to become a green pill movement. We also talk about who is going to be coming on the Green Pill podcast, what types of conversations are going to be had there. How is the Green Pill podcast going to talk about things outside the crypto world and into the more traditional world

and trying to reorient the narrative around crypto into being ones of public goods and public utilities? So I'm really excited to help Kevin Awaki get this podcast out the door. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into this conversation with Kevin Awaki without any break for the sponsors that make this show possible. Kevin, I've been informed that I'm about to get, green-pilled. So I'm sitting down. What does that mean? What's going on? How am I getting green-pilled? Hey, David, thanks for having me. So Gipcoin is launching greenpill. Party and a bunch of activations

associated with green pill. The idea is that green pilling is choosing regenerative crypto-economics. It's choosing to be a regent instead of a D-gen. And that means funding public goods. That means building impact dows. That means choosing to build a more regenerative world. with crypto economics. And we're going to be having a bunch of activations around Shelling Point, the one-day conference at Heath, Denver, and a bunch of different things that you can do in order to green pill yourself and others in the next couple weeks. Okay, let's start with regent, not D-Gen.

What does it mean to be regent instead of a D-Gen? Yeah, so regenerative crypto-economics, the definition that we've come up with is anything that has positive externalities for the world. So you think of a regenerative system as something that creates net positive, either financial outcomes or outcomes for humanity. And, you know, an example of that is Gitcoin Dow, right? The externality for Gitcoin Dow is public goods funding for the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm also excited about other impactals like proof of humanity that creates an externality of more civil resistance for the ecosystem, digital identity. climb a Dow, which is creating an externality of more pricing for carbon credits out into the world.

So the atomic building block of regenerative crypto economics is impact dowls, things that create positive externalities for the world. And I think the world is, a lot of the world's familiar with the concept of externalities. Most of them are negative externalities, such as the smog escaping out of a factory or when people dump toxic sludge into public ocean, you know, or riverways. positive externalities are what I think you and I are really just excited about Ethereum about and crypto at large is because the whole entire concept of like tinkering with incentives or just like incentive alignment is talking about the ability to create positive externalities

where our normal human behaviors can be reoriented into making things positive rather than making things negative. And so we've talked about this a lot. People are familiar with the concept of Molok, but Molok doesn't exactly scale towards the whole entire world. And I think that's where this Green Pill concept comes in. Can you talk about the difference between Molok and Green Pill? Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny that you say that because there are web scale global coordination failures that humanity is facing right now. We're facing climate change. We're facing misinformation. We're facing a lack of funding for public goods. And I think that solving those coordination failures is one of the really amazing things that the Ethereum ecosystem could do.

I mean, we've just been gifted this transparent, immutable, programmable, global substrate for human coordination. And what if we can solve that coordination failure using, like, it's programmable. And we can choose to use it to solve coordination failures that are global in a way that nation states, which could only solve nation state-based coordination failures in the past could do. And so one of the things that I want to do is open people up to the, the opportunity and the possibility that we could be building a civilizational scale of infrastructure for regenerative finance and for open source finance that has a ton of net externalities that are

positive for the world. And, you know, if you've listened to some of the shows that we've done together in the past, David, the one about Molluk that we did with Amin Soleimani, Mollock is the demon god of coordination failure. I don't actually believe that there's a demon god out there. but if you think about like the shared psychic manifestation of all of these different coordination failures as Molok, then that's kind of like Ethereum could be the sword that slays Mollock if we choose to draw it from the stone and build these regenerative systems. And, you know, Green Pill is just a way of spreading that meme in a way that's more digestible by everyday members of society that don't have to learn about deep economic concepts like public goods or maybe some off-putting concepts. like Moloch, like demon gods. Green pilling is more of a participatory, consumable way of consuming the meme of regenerative

crypto. Yeah, so the whole pilled meme is something that has taken shape. It's in many, many different communities. We talk about crypto-pilling people. Bitcoiners will say they took the orange pill, the Bitcoin pill. There's also other, like, non-crypto-related communities that also talk about taking the pill. And it really just is like having this aha-mo. moment about like, oh, I'm now aligned with this concept with this idea. No one has yet taken the

color green. Why the color green, Kevin? Why green pill? Yeah, that's a great, great question. So I guess I want to talk, I'm going to answer your question, but really quick, values of crypto economic systems. We have all come into this space as cyberpunks, advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy enhancing technologies and creating a future that is more credibly neutral and accessible finance for the world. And I strongly believe in cyberpunk values, and I think that those are really amazing.

But another thing that I have in my value system is the idea of solar punk, a future in which humanity has succeeded in solving its major contemporary challenges around sustainability, things like climate change, things like underfunded digital infrastructure, or just underfunded infrastructure in general. And Solar Punk is kind of an evocative of a green, integrated sort of mindset.

And boy, I'm really, I think that we're kind of like taking a look at what the libertarian left thinks the vision of the world can be. We not only have strong privacy and strong sovereignty, but we also have solved coordination failures. And I think that green is the color of the Earth and of like the Gaia hypothesis. and it's the ultimate sort of color manifestation to me of what it means to create a world that's more sustainable. So we are including the cypherpunk ethos in this green solar punk ethos when we talk about green pilling people. And let's get it really, really concrete. And also I'm going to try and hit two birds with one stone with this next question. There's a bunch of just anti-crypto narratives these days.

Like people just hate crypto. Cryptos coming to destroy the planet. NFTs are terrible. they're all scams. But also at the same time, if you're inside of crypto, you think Web3 protocols give power to the individual. They allow communities to have voice and voice their values in ways that other systems didn't previously enable.

And so how do you see this green pill effort kind of helping change the narrative about crypto's branding in the world and also wake people up to this concept of social structures that more align with the ability to actually fight coordination failures. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm not a marketing person, and I strongly believe that action trumps speech.

And I think that what we can do is we can build a more regenerative infrastructure for the world using crypto. And then the narrative naturally flows out from that. But, you know, maybe that's the wishful thinking in me. I do think that, you know, Danny Ryan wrote a forward for, I'm releasing a book. It's called Green Pilled about how crypto can regenerate the world. and Danny Ryan, who is shepherding the merge forward, wrote a forward for the book, which was all about how Ethereum is going to become almost carbon neutral when proof of stake rolls out.

And so I think that that's the opportunity for the crypto ecosystem to first do no harm, not create as much energy consumption as it was before. But then from there, we've got this coordination substrate in which we can solve all sorts of coordination failures for local communities and their values or global problems like climate. change or digital infrastructure and stuff like that. So I do think that there's a turning point in which people can really start to see that crypto is good for the world and not because someone's telling them, but because someone's showing them. And that's what we're trying to do at Gikcoin. Gikcoins funded $51 million worth of open source software over the last three years. And we're trying to create this fractal of decentralized innovation, growth, and impact for the world. And I hope that that is what calms the critics, not what anyone claims is true, but what

they actually see is true because they see that we're actually building this world in the Ethereum ecosystem. Okay, so that was the first teaser, the first product of literature outside of the green-pilled ecosystem. Is this like the green pill manifesto? Is that what this book is? Oh, I don't know. I'm not like the type of person to write a manifesto, but what I have done is this green-pilled book, which you can get at store.gitcoin.co.co, I'll probably give away the digital copy for free just because I want these ideas out there. Basically what it is, is it just kind of talks about what's our moment of opportunity with Ethereum and this global programmable substrate for coordination. And then the meat of the book is really talking about

designing coordination mechanisms, understanding the prisoner's dilemma, coordination games, bentoism, donut economies, regenerative concepts that have existed for hundreds of years that we're now taking forward into crypto economics is basically the idea. So it's primarily an education apparatus for people to understand that it's all coordination and it always has been. And secondarily, I guess it maybe serves a little bit as a manifesto for a green pill movement within the crypto economic culture. You say that you're not a marketing person, but you're writing books to help spread the awareness, spread education.

And that's not the only thing you are doing. You're also starting a podcast. And this is the other cool thing that we're dropping here on this video is Kevin O'Waki is starting his own Green Pill podcast. So you're writing books. You're starting podcasts. Tell us a little bit more about the efforts of the podcast and why the entrance into the world of content production. Yeah, totally.

Well, first off on the marketing point, I tweeted the other day that other Dow's have marketing and Gekcoin Dow has lore. So I think that that's what I'm doing when I think about it. But yes, we're starting a podcast about green pilling people. And it's all about regenerative of crypto economics. What can we learn about creating a more regenerative financial infrastructure from biology, biomimicry, from the traditional financial system, from game theory. And the first podcast guest that we're going to have is Vitalik Boudarin himself. But I've also lined up episodes with Carl Flores, the founder of optimism, one of the biggest public goods funders in the world. Santi Siri, the founder of proof of humanity, Glenn Weil from Radical Exchange, Peter Pan, Manu from doing good.

We've got a stacked lineup of people who really care about public goods and regenerative crypto that we're going to be rolling out on. the bankless network to start. So really excited to be working with you on this, David. Yeah. So this is a collaboration between Kevin Awaki and the back end of bankless. So we're going to be doing just the editing, the infrastructure to really enable Kevin to do what he does best, which is talk about green pilling people, talk about public goods and solving coordination failures. What kind of mindset should listeners go into your podcast with? What do you want them to be able to tap into to learn as they go through all of your podcast? podcast. What are your goals for the listener as they listen to it? Yeah, I think my primary goal is to

build in public and to discover what type of game theoretic concepts are possible within regenerative crypto economics and then showcase the builders who are actually building these things. And what I really hope to do is, you know, I dedicated my book to Generation Alpha and Generation Z, a generation that I think has been handed declining institutions and decaying hope for the future of humanity on this planet by the baby boomers and the older generations. And what I really hope to do is create this groundswell of hope for people that we can build better institutions with stuff that is fundamentally 21st century native like crypto-economics.

And what I hope is that we're showing not telling as this green-pilled regenerative cryptocurrency movement starts. And I've really been inspired by Audrey Tang, who has this really amazing quote about being the channel through which greater combinations of intelligence and strength come together, not being the minister for any group or to broadcast any sort of propaganda or marketing, but to be that channel for greater combinations of strength and intelligence to come together. And that is the ultimate hope for the Green Pilled podcast is to showcase the builders who are doing it and to bring people who are subject matter experts that can create the literature on how this is going to be done

all into one place and bring it to the bankless network. So who is this podcast really for? Is this for the crypto experts or the crypto 101s or maybe this is a podcast for more than just crypto people? Who would you say is your audience that you're really looking to speak towards? The audience is people who are going west and want to see that there's infrastructure built around it. I mean, you know, we have all this infrastructure that we're used to in the physical world. And if we're going to be going west in our digital world and going bankless, we're going to need there to be infrastructure for the Internet of jobs where you can earn an income for for you to contribute to the public good of the towns and

cities that we're building in the Metaverse or the Polarverse. And it's going to be all, it's going to be about all of those things. So if you're going west and you want to learn about how you can have a positive impact on the world and pay your mortgage at the same time, that's who this podcast is for. Is there any prior knowledge that listeners need to come in with to the Green Pill podcast? Or is this also just for, you know, I kind of understand Bitcoin. so therefore I can follow along with Green Pill or is it more for the crypto advanced? Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we'll probably start a little bit more with the crypto advanced and then try to experiment with ways to make it more approachable by people who are

new to the ecosystem. You know, say you joined because you bought an NFT over the last six or nine months and you're not aware of Mollok and you're not aware of coordination games like the Prisoner's Dilemma. This is an educational outlet where you can learn about those things. And the main thing that I want to do is I want to show people that the value of cipherpunks and the values of solar punks are not paradoxes with each other. We can build a more cypher punk world that is also more solar punk. And I think that there's hundreds of people that are just on the precipice of that. If we can just show them the way, if we can green pill them, then I think that we can pull them down that funnel.

So it's going to start off to answer your question more directly. It's going to start off more advanced. But I think that we're going to try to create some more beginner-friendly content as we gain Steam. So Kevin, in that effort, I want to ask you some of the same questions I've already asked you so far on the show. But I want you to do it as if I'm a five-year-old. So this is the Explain like I'm five. Explain like I'm five. What is green pill?

We've been talking about like Moloch and crypto-economics and Prisoner's Dilemma and coordination games and coordination failures. I don't want any of that. Explain like I'm five. What is green pill? Yeah. Well, why don't you take one of these green pills, David? You're a five-year-old, you like candy, right? Yeah, I do like TikTok.

These are just tick-tacks, but they've got a green pill sticker on them. So I don't know. If we're going to start them young, maybe giving out candy is the way to go. No, I mean, I think that the actual answer to your question, explain it like I have five, David, is that green pilling is just accepting that we can build a better world with 21st century technology. We've inherited all these institutions from the 20th century. Let's build infrastructure that's web native and web scale. easy easy okay so you got the book it's uh where can people get the book again green pill dot party you can go in order to subscribe to the podcast to get the book or you can make a pledge to actually

give part of your wealth back to the public good and um you can go to green pill dot party in order to get all three of those things and if you see me at eve denver ask me for some green m&ms or some green tic tacks i'll green pill you on site okay so there's definitely links in the show notes, Kevin Milwaukee has a brand new RSS feed for which the GreenPill podcast is going to go out. It will also be going out on the bankless RSS feed for about the first four-ish episodes. So you will get your first taste of GreenPill there on the Bankless RSS feed. But eventually, it will migrate and fold out into its own RSS feed, of which it has already started. So that link is in the show notes.

You guys can go subscribe to GreenPill right now. You can also go to exactly where Kevin has said, GreenPill. dot party to access the book and also to pledge. Elaborate on the pledge side of things a little bit for us, Kevin. Yeah. So, you know, the fundamental building block of regenerative crypto economics is just creating positive externalities for the world. You can create a complicated crypto economic system to do that, like Bitcoin has with

quadratic funding. Or you can just go to this website and say, hey, like, I've made some gains over the last couple of years. And I know that I want to build my legacy. that I want to contribute back to this world. And you can just pledge, just send a tweet that says that I'm going to give 1% of my wealth to public goods. And I think that that's the idea behind the pledge is that it's creating a social consensus

that, hey, like, it's cool to make some money. But you know what's cooler is paying that forward to the next person who's coming into the ecosystem and is building something good for the ecosystem. So you can take the pledge at green pill. dot party. Let's say that we as a society, as crypto people, we all fight for the green pill fight, but it doesn't work, sadly. And the world does not experience regenerative, regenerative crypto economics. It doesn't really emphasize public goods. What does that world look like? Yeah. Well, you know, this is the ultimate paradox of all these things is that it's all coordination,

and it always has been, but coordination is a choice. And if we don't choose to coordinate to steer the world towards these outcomes, then it likely won't work. But, you know, I kind of don't want to live in a world in which there's climate change, which is making the outdoors uninhabitable for three months out of the year because there's wildfire smoke. I don't want to live in an information environment in which information is just poison, and I can't tell the difference between SciOps from one of my adversaries and someone who genuinely wants to build common understanding. I don't want to work, wake up and sign on to an internet that's fundamentally insecure and has surveillance baked in at the base layer. And I think that those are just three examples of public goods and common

infrastructure that we want to be by and for the people as opposed to infrastructure that's used against us or infrastructure that's outdated. And so, you know, I think that on my first appearance on bankless, one of the things that I said is what good is a Lambo if the sky is on fire? You know, how much you're going to enjoy your Lambo if you have lung cancer? Because we didn't take care of our earth and we didn't take care of the public goods around us. And one of the things that I want people to know is that, you know, you may think a lot about the stuff that you're going to buy on Amazon or the things that you're going to buy with your crypto gains. But 80% of the value that you get in the world is from things like transportation networks or digital infrastructure. It's all the things that we take for granted that are actually providing a lot of.

of the value in our lives. And I think that if we can get people to see those things and not take them for granted, then we can steer the world towards that coordination and towards that world that's a little bit more green-pilled. And, you know, the stakes are high. Public goods are a lot of the different things around us. And so I just hope that we can steer ourselves to an infrastructure that supports public goods as it promotes more sovereignty for the individuals. Well, I think you guys can hear how eloquent and precise Kevin is in his speech. So if you want a whole entire podcast of that, go click that link in the show notes to go subscribe to Green Pill. I'm really excited to see and hear some of the episodes that Evan, oh, excuse me,

that Kevin produces out of Green Pill. And I'm just honored to be able to help produce them over here at Bankless. So Kevin, thank you for trying to green pill the earth. Take the green pill, David. Take the green pill. I'm taking him. I'm taking them as soon as I get to eat Denver. Awesome, my man.