Bankless - Ether's Phoenix with Optimism's Karl Floersch | GreenPill #2

Starting point is 00:00:00 How can I make the highest impact today? Right. That is like the only thing on your mind. How do I make the highest impact? Hello and welcome to the Green Pill. I'm Kevin O'Waki and this is the podcast about public goods and regenerative crypto economics. This episode is with Carl Floresh, who is the co-founder of optimism and one of the primary

Starting point is 00:00:23 advocates in the Ethereum ecosystem for public goods funding. I've known Carl for a couple years now and he inspires me on many levels. The first is just the level of energy. and optimism through which he operates. The second is his sheer brilliance in working on the plasma group, and then later on optimistic roll-ups in launching the Optimism Layer 2 network.

Starting point is 00:00:45 So I think that optimism is a really exciting place because it's one of the best layer 2s out there in the Ethereum ecosystem. And they've also pledged to give $1 million of their first sequencer fees to public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem through what's called retroactive public goods funding. So Carl continues to be a source of inspiration for me, and I hope that he gives you inspiration

Starting point is 00:01:11 for what public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem could become. Without further ado, I give you Carl Flourish. Alchemix is a Defy app that offers self-repaying loans that lets you spend money and save money at the same time. Alchemics allows you to deposit the die stable coin into its faults, which earns some of the highest yields that Defi has to offer. You can then take a loan from Alchemics of up to 50% of the $5.5% of the money. of the deposited die, and that loan automatically pays itself back from the yield that is generated

Starting point is 00:01:39 from your deposit. It's a savings account that the banks don't want you to know about. Alchemix also has ETH faults available, so you can get a self-repaying loan that's denominated in ETH. Coming up in Alchimix V2 is a bunch of cool new features, such as credit delegation, multi-chain expansion, and Dow revenue sharing and vote boosting. Alchamix lets you get your interest payments on your deposits paid to you up front. Check out the power of Alchmix at alchemics to dot-Fi. And make sure to join their extremely vibrant discord if you want to participate in governance or have any questions about the project. Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book

Starting point is 00:02:18 system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Inputs a token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at Uniswopgrant. And help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. I am here with my co-conspirator in Regenerative Crypto Economics,

Starting point is 00:02:57 Carl Floresh, the co-founder of optimism and of retroactive public goods funding. Carl, what's up? How you done? I'm pretty good. I'm really excited to be here and excited to take the green pill. So tell us, how did you get into crypto and how did you come to founding optimism? Well, I guess it all started with my mom and my dad, actually. My dad being a kind of radical political contrarian and my mom being a Hindu, know, universal consciousness kind of person. And then growing up on things like World of Warcraft, getting me into the metaverse,

Starting point is 00:03:42 kind of all of those things combined. It was just, it was such a natural fit in around like 2015 where I just saw these DevCon zero videos with Vitalik. And I was like, oh my gosh, I got to get involved. I got to start doing peer to peer stuff. Google is not for me. And yeah, dove right in, worked at consensus. and then stopped doing that and worked on Casper with Vitalik and Vlad and traveled around the world and talked about Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:04:14 And it has been a whirling roller coaster ride ever since. I'm realizing now that you and I overlapped at consensus probably in 2017 back in the day. Yeah, we did. That's where Gitcoin got it start as well. So I recall that you were a founder of Plasma Group, which was doing research on plasma, and that's become optimism, which is one of the top layer twos based off optimistic roll-ups. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Oh, definitely.

Starting point is 00:04:44 Okay. So what happened was, you know, was working at Ethereum, and we needed to scale this thing. It was known from the inception that we needed to scale up the core software, the corporate, protocol. And there was really a question of whether or not, you know, we scale it at the kind of base layer using layer one or if we allow for a little bit of permissionless innovation and start scaling it layer two. And so myself, Jing, Ben, Kelvin, we all kind of formed this group, this rag tag coalition called Plasma Group, which was exploring and researching kind of the deepest depths of plasma, which was a layer two technology that is now being

Starting point is 00:05:36 kind of brought into fruition, kind of evolved into this whole optimistic roll-up space, and has served as a lot of foundational elements. So we, for that, for that technology. So we worked on it from 2018, 2019. And then we, realized that there were some fundamental limits that made plasma not quite perfect for scaling Ethereum, that we needed to really scale Ethereum at its essence. And we're like, okay, let's do this. Let's fund Optimism, PBC, a public benefit corporation to scale Ethereum using layer two because we can innovate, we can permissionlessly change the protocol and build what we needed

Starting point is 00:06:24 to build. So that was really amazing. but there was actually a side story that I think is relevant to this podcast. And that actually has to do more with the public benefit corporation side of things. Plasma Group was a nonprofit. And we set out to scale Ethereum. And clearly scaling Ethereum is a quintessential public good for the Ethereum ecosystem. It is extremely, extremely important for everyone.

Starting point is 00:06:53 And it turned out that it was extremely, difficult to get the funding, to get the talent, to get people to rally behind scaling Ethereum at a normal nonprofit. And that's just because there's no potential upside. There's no kind of path forward once you actually do scale Ethereum. And there wasn't even a lot of funding for scalability research in Ethereum. Like the block reward. What was the Vitalik Post that said this billions of dollars per year?

Starting point is 00:07:26 is given to the block reward, which is a public good. It's securing the Ethereum network. But one one thousandth of that actually goes to researchers. And I wonder if that's because we don't value that public good or if it's just because it's hard to prove the usefulness of it. With proof of work, you have the proof of work. But you can't have a proof of knowledge work for code because it's almost like, well, the code I wrote this morning,

Starting point is 00:07:46 I don't know if it'll ever go live. And even if it does, doesn't even provide value. So do you think it's combined with people not appreciating public goods or the unprovability of the value of that public good or both or something else? Without question, it's both. I think that it was the case. It is the case that we did not build these.

Starting point is 00:08:06 Okay, Ethereum solved a lot of problems, right? It really did amazing. It's a full technology stack from the peer-to-peer layer to the consensus layer, everything. So they did not solve governance as well, right? And governance is probably the hardest, problem to solve because what you're talking about with like determining what is valuable is really a governance question so it was so natural that we just say okay you know what we can't solve governance

Starting point is 00:08:34 we know that we need to be supporting and building these public goods let's just kick the problem down the road and let's give the money to the miners we know we need to fund them and it worked for a while but it eventually has become very obvious that there is a huge market failure here like this is absolutely the most egregious market failure in the Ethereum ecosystem, in my opinion, is the lack of public goods funding that we have seen thus far. Right. Okay. And so it was these insights that kind of led you just to fund.

Starting point is 00:09:10 Well, it was moving from plasma, which I understand to optimism, which is about generalizable computation at a layer two, but also bundling in maybe an economic model into the work that you were doing, going from a nonprofit to a public benefit. which I understand is focused on the is a for-profit entity but it is focused on public benefit as well is that right exactly so we have a charter to enshrine fair access to public goods that means that is you know the number one thing we need to do that to fulfill our mission as a corporation and that mentality is it's great and and public benefit corporations are really great vehicles for doing public goods work, but it was not just the structure of the entity that we care about.

Starting point is 00:10:00 In fact, the entity structure is just a temporary thing. The real lasting change is going to be rewiring the economic system that exists on Ethereum today, where transaction fees, instead of just going to minors, can actually go back to fund public goods for the whole community. That was a key motivating factor. That is, in fact, that is why it's so important that we scale Ethereum. It's because we have an opportunity to create that system that will fund public goods and will govern those public goods and the protocol in a fair and representative way. What I think is interesting about what optimism is doing is that it's bundling a bleeding-edge technology

Starting point is 00:10:51 with almost a sort of political belief, which is that public goods are good. And when you use the optimism network, you're not only benefiting from that technology, but you're getting that bundled ethos. Would you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. It's really like the financial infrastructure that you use should support your values and care about your values. And so I want to use optimism, right?

Starting point is 00:11:16 Because I will be benefiting from the public goods. and I believe in the pursuit of public goods and the green pill and all that. Right. Okay. Well, I guess what I want to, like the big idea to me here is bundling one of the most successful layer twos in the Ethereum ecosystem. And by the way, the Ethereum scaling roadmap is all about shards in layer two. Bundling that with retroactive public goods funding. Could you tell us about retroactive public goods funding in the world that you want to create using that?

Starting point is 00:11:48 Absolutely. So, Fatalic really had, I mean, Fatalic is the genesis of literally like every idea. It's pretty ridiculous, honestly. But one idea that Vitalik has had recently and just has captivated me ever since was this, this idea that you should fund public goods that have already had an impact. And this idea is like really simple, right? It's literally just retroactive, something that has already happened, that has already had a positive impact. You give money to the people who did that. And the point is that you'd give it to them without an expectation that they're going to do more work, right?

Starting point is 00:12:31 It is a literal reward for their impact, for the public good that they have created. And the weird thing about retroactive public goods funding is that immediately you're like, okay, if everything was retroactive, then how am I going to get paid a salary, right? how am I going to actually get paid for my work? And the funny thing is it's actually a second order effect. This is the key insight is that if you consistently pay people for the work that they provide and the value that they contribute to the public, to the public good, then you will start to see people investing in the public goods. Right.

Starting point is 00:13:16 It's not this like immediate, you know, feedback. you're not paying someone a salary, you are instead incentivizing the investment in public goods. And so the way that this kind of hooks in is it's like, okay, if you're transacting or whether or not whatever the source of funding is, right, you can accumulate these huge payouts based on the massive amounts of economic financial activity that we will have as a globe, right? You generate all this stuff. And then you use that to essentially reward.

Starting point is 00:13:49 award people who helped you get there, right? You look at their contributions. You see who has been unfairly rewarded? Let me give back to them. Right. So would it be fair to say that this is an original insight back at Plasma Group, which is that it's hard to rally talent around nonprofits. What if we created a world in which public goods are as investable as the average VC startup that has a thousand X upside? Because we've created a world where public goods funding has billions of dollars of capital flowing towards it, then you get this upstream effect where VCs will start looking for projects that create public goods in open source software or climate or journalism or whatever public good. So it's about creating that world in which you can rally capital

Starting point is 00:14:34 around public goods. Is that fair to say? Beautifully put, beautifully put. So how'd the first experiment go? You all just finished retroactive public goods round one. Tell us about that. Indeed, we did. So we gave it. So we gave it. away a million dollars. We had a collection of 24 what we call badge holders who were essentially evaluating these projects, discussing them in the open, and kind of considering, figuring out what good Ethereum public goods should we retroactively reward. And it was great. It was, I mean, it was honestly pretty amazing to be able to do that in the first place. And just, you know, that is the very beginning, right? This is, this will be table stakes when, you know, you

Starting point is 00:15:18 a year from now. But it was, there were actually some interesting challenges that we found there, that we weren't really expecting. One of them was that it wasn't immediately obvious what a public good is or how to really, you know, what to retroactively fund. Because in reality, it's kind of, there's a little bit of a gradient in terms of you know how you define public goods what what a good is who's you know benefiting all that kind of stuff yeah so yeah so it was really not not super easy um but we came one one framework that actually

Starting point is 00:16:01 was really helpful in thinking about this was the fairness ratio so the fairness ratio is something that some uh you know folks over at uniswob during a dinner conversation uh suggested shout out to you know those folks um anyway it is impact over profit. So impact divided by profit. So essentially what you want is you want to you want everything to be fair, right? You want everyone to give one value, you know, one unit of impact and receive one unit of profit, right? You want value in to equal value out, right? Because that's, that's like, if we can define what we value as a society as a collective as a public and then we can give people the value that they have put into the system to the public, then you can start operating

Starting point is 00:16:49 as an actor in that system knowing that you'll be rewarded. You think, okay, how can I make the highest impact today? Right. That is like the only thing on your mind. How do I make the highest impact? So the, so we realize that, okay, projects that have made a bunch of profits, even though they have added a huge amount of value and they have had a huge impact. But if they've made made a huge amount of profits. Maybe they're not the right targets for these retroactive rewards. And instead, we should be giving profits, like, increasing the profits of the public goods that are underfunded right now.

Starting point is 00:17:24 And so actually, in some ways, public goods funding is almost about, you know, making the economy a little bit fairer and correcting market inefficiencies. So anyway, that was an, I did not expect that kind of discussion when going into experiment one. It's an interesting governance problem. It reminds me about how on Gitcoin grants, there has been backlash against people who have raised tokens or VCs continuing to get get coin grants funding.

Starting point is 00:17:51 Like, hands off, keep your money, keep the money for the public goods that have not raised that money. And it's like the same governance problem, but chopped up in different bits in both the ecosystem. And it's kind of fun to look in the mirror and to hear how y'all have handled it. I do want to ask, so like what's the end game with retroactive public goods funding? paint me a picture of, let's say it's 2025, what does the world look like?

Starting point is 00:18:15 What is the world that you want to build with retro public goods funding? The world that I hope exists, that I hope I can participate in, because that's what this is about, right? It's a world where all of my digital assets, my financial activity, my crazy Web 3, Metaverse activity, all of that stuff contributes to values that I believe in and contribute. to making a fairer, more just society where I know that I can focus on value add, right? I don't need to think about anything other than let me make a real big impact. That if if if if that exists, right? I mean, I'm obsessed with emergent complexity. I'm obsessed with like emergence generally as a thing. And I had this sneaking suspicion that the the crazy.

Starting point is 00:19:12 like the world, I mean, you talk about the solar punk stuff, right? Like the incredible, just potential future that we can live in, that the simple rule that gets us there, well, a couple, there are a couple of simple rules, but you know what I mean? There's one correctly aligning the values, determining what we value, right? Coming up with systems for deciding the values of our society as a, you know, species, right? that's that's one and then the other one is reflecting those values in our economic infrastructure and making sure people who put in value get out value so I'm really hopeful that in in 2025 I can work for a Dow doing whatever I want to do that I think is going to really have a huge

Starting point is 00:20:03 impact I don't have to worry about profit I know it's covered and I just I'm just I'm just contributing I'm just a worker bee you know right so so is there an up like it would it be fair to say that there's an asymmetry between value created and value captured with legacy business models and the way that the world works right now and the more that we can close that asymmetry between the value you create in the world and the value you can capture the more people can just focus on creating value as opposed to capturing value is is that a fair reflection of what you said precisely yes and and it just one of the dependencies of that is that people do feel like the right values are being rewarded, right?

Starting point is 00:20:45 We do reward things that we value in some messed up sense, right? But we don't have good mechanisms right now for collectively determining our values. And so that is a key ingredient, this whole governance question. And I think for that, it's really going to require a lot of iterations and innovations. But yes, that is the future I want to live in. So you mentioned what is the mechanism through which we determine our values? And I want to double click on that because I think it's really interesting. One of the things that I've realized is that when I buy something on Amazon and like it improves my life, like a new computer monitor or something like that, I really appreciate it because I like I spent money on that and I know that I value it.

Starting point is 00:21:29 One of the things I've noticed is that people, public goods are kind of like out of sight, out of mind. And there's like a there's there's kind of like an asymmetry there where public. the goods are actually really, really important, but because they're out of sight, out of mind, I don't, I don't appreciate them as much. So like, you know, what's, what's the value of having a new computer monitor if the sky is on fire or if you have lung cancer because of, like, not clean air or like, you know, you, you don't have open source software. And so I think that there's a asymmetry there. And I guess what I'm teeing up for you, Carl, is, you know, what's your favorite public good or like, what's your top three list of public goods that you think are good?

Starting point is 00:22:06 Hmm. Okay. Wow. I got a long list. Okay. I'll just say my, okay, I'm not, there's not an ordered list. It's too hard to choose. You can't rank these kinds of things. Yeah, of course. Yeah. One of them is definitely, uh, information dissemination. So one public good is I, I want open source software that allows me to better reflect my values or my, I want my software that I use every day. day to better reflect my values. And that can go from anything from my my Twitter feed, what things get, you know, populated there, the way that I'm able to spread information. Like, I want public goods that help us spread pro-cooperative information or pro, like, you know, societally helpful information. I think that's a really, that's going to enable a lot of other public goods. Right. Okay. So like, Wagmi Media, like, reminds us that we're all in it together and, and helps us disseminate information that reflects our values and helps us work together.

Starting point is 00:23:14 Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I mean, look, I want to, I want to get, like, mad at people, too, you know? Like, I want to feel, like, angry at the other tribes, too. But, like, I just want that to be, like, correctly channeled into some the right avenues. So I'm not, yes. Anyway, that's one thing. The other one is, of course, I mean, lokey. I okay this is my recent I've recently just been listening to some podcasts on environmental protection and I'm like my god

Starting point is 00:23:41 It is legit like this is this is a the the the long-term future of humanity Really really interesting to think about I definitely am very wasteful but I don't want to be I would love to improve that And then the last one which is of course the most key to To my current existence is the scale of this financial infrastructure. I do want, I really want Ethereum to succeed and to support the global economy because I think every human matters and we should include every human and be able to include every

Starting point is 00:24:20 human. Amazing. Yeah, if you didn't put the scalability of Ethereum on there, I think I would have to kick you under the table and say, hey, man, show some optimism. Or some get-coed grants. That would be fine, too. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto.

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Starting point is 00:26:21 And I think that this last one is kind of meta, because you work for a project called Optimism. But Carl, you're consistently one of the most charismatic, energetic, and optimistic speakers for public goods. And I want to ask where your optimism comes from, where that energy comes from when you're rapping about this stuff. Rapping is the opportune word. I would say that there's a level of, I mean, okay, first off, I feel blessed to be in this community. And so I feel grateful. And so the energy that I put out, I really do feel like I get it, you know, and it's more of a reflection. Like the people here are just unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:27:05 And I am really excited to, like, see where it goes. And I, here's the thing, right? We can either choose to be, to, you know, not think that there's a possibility for change and not think that we can actually make an impact and change and and go somewhere good and or we can try to make try to make that world actually come about and then have a good time as we do it. So like I here's my, you know, if the ship is going to sink, I want to be like plugging the holes and singing and like having a good time as we're like, you know, fighting for our lives to make sure that, you know, humanity actually succeeds and, you know, consciousness pervades. And like if I was all depressed and sad while the thing was happening, that's like, that's lame, you know, have a, have a journey. Have a have fun. Keep it light, you know. Totally. Yeah. Well, one of the things I'll say is that if we're going to try to plug the holes in the ship, then it's more fun to do it all together. And I find your energy to be completely infectious. And there's this feedback loop where we all choose coordinate over defect. And the more people choose coordinate, the better, uh, the coordinate decision. comes for everyone else.

Starting point is 00:28:21 And it's that feedback loop that I'm really excited about. Ether's Phoenix, you will be rewarded for your coordination in the future, public good, solar punk, utopia. Hello, hello. This is an Ether's Phoenix, TLDR. So, Ethereum is all about building systems which enable mass coordination. And the most fundamental coordination game that we're trying to solve in Ethereum is the tragedy of the commons, aka Free Rider Problem,

Starting point is 00:28:50 aka Prisoner's Dilemma. In these games, you have two choices. You can either defect or you can cooperate. Defecting maximizes your short-term payouts, but cooperation maximizes your long-term payouts. And right now, if you think about it, right now it feels like we're living in a world where everyone is defecting.

Starting point is 00:29:16 Cooperation is in scarce supply. So, how do we stay strong and cooperate in a world full of defectors? I got an answer for you. It's Ether's Phoenix. Put a little faith into your life. So what's Ether's Phoenix? I'm glad you asked. So picture a future where public goods are being rewarded with profits equal to their impact, right?

Starting point is 00:29:43 Fairness ratio. We are rewarding public goods. Well, we can call this future. this utopian future, Ether's Phoenix. In this world, one of the most critical things that deserves retroactive public goods funding, reminder, that's just paying people rewards for the public goods they create.

Starting point is 00:30:03 One of the things that deserves retroactive public goods funding is not just the futuristic public goods, but it's the early contributors who made that future a reality. That's the contributors like you and me today. So Ether's Phoenix will look back in time and reward us the early cooperators, the early public goods

Starting point is 00:30:24 creators. It's kind of like a reverse Rokos basilisk which is an evil AI that punishes you if you don't summon it. But instead Ether's Phoenix rewards you for your early investment in public goods. So let's build public goods, let's invest in public goods

Starting point is 00:30:42 and let's start a retroactive public goods revolution. That's Ether's Phoenix for you. yet. We just heard from Carl Flourish talking about Ether's Phoenix, which is the opposite of Rucco's Baskolix. Rucco's Baskolix is a demon that punishes you for not summoning it, and Ether's Phoenix is a angel that rewards you for summoning it. So it's basically a recursive algorithm that retroactively rewards public goods funders in order for bringing public goods into existence. One of the things that's most interesting to me about Ether's Phoenix is, like, how do you

Starting point is 00:31:17 know that it's good. So basically in the X-Men series, there's a character that becomes the Phoenix, and she like turns on the X-Men for a little bit. And so I'm wondering if you're building the, bringing this Phoenix into the world, how do you know that it's a good Phoenix? I think the answer is that at the center of it is that the algorithm only rewards you if you fund public goods. And that's a really hard problem to know, like, which public goods to invest in, but in the present moment. But if you do it retroactive, then basically there's a lot of consensus about how much public goods, say, lib P2P has created or scathold-Eath or other public goods in the ecosystem. So basically, you've got a recursive algorithm that rewards public goods funders for creating

Starting point is 00:31:55 public goods. And then the result of that is Ether's Phoenix. So really interesting take from Carl Flourish. So my experience with Bitcoin grants is I've been doing this for four years and it is sometimes a grind. I work long hours and sometimes things blow up in my face. And I want to ask, like, have you found, do you feel like you've been grinding and like, you know, how do you keep that optimism alive when you're just working really hard on this to on on such a huge ambitious mission? Wow.

Starting point is 00:32:26 A lot of things. One, know your boundaries. Make sure that you don't stretch yourself too thin. I have become extremely depressed to the point of, you know, being like suicidal, being very scared, very, very depressed. because I pushed my boundaries and did not know what I needed to like be a happy and healthy human being. So that is very real. Mental health is very real. Another thing is just during the grind trying to keep the, trying to keep the, you know, everything in perspective, right? Like we are, we are very small. We are very insignificant. We are part of these like big waves up and down.

Starting point is 00:33:10 Um, it's, you know, can't, you can't get, you can't, I, I, I feel like very afraid sometimes of like losing what I have, right? I'm just like so fearful of change. And it's really hard to remind myself constantly like, change is okay, whether it's up or down. Like, it is totally fine. And that, you know, once you, once you like let go a little bit, it's, it's a lot easier to be, um, to feel good, right? you're maintaining your mental health, you're being happy, you're, you're, you know, doing that, and you're also not afraid of the future. And, you know, that helps with anxiety. So anyway, it's, it's not trivial, you know, but, but, uh, totally, but good vibes are important.

Starting point is 00:33:54 Nice. For sure, yeah. Um, is there anything I didn't ask you that you, that you want to say about regent finance, crypto economics, green pills, solar punk worlds? Is there anything I didn't ask that you one aside. Can I ask you? How would you define? What is what is your, I just love the term Regen finance. What is Regen finance? Well, back in D-Fi summer, there's this thing called D-Gens. Like the D-Gen score, D-Gen became a meme. And I think it was kind of focused around people who are gambling with speculation in crypto. And what we've been trying to do with, Gickcoin Grant's mission is to build and fund the open web. We want to create a world where the media and software engineer can quit their job at JPMorgan Chase and work for the public good, work on open source. And I think

Starting point is 00:34:42 that regent for me is just the opposite of D-Gen. Instead of focusing on instant gratification and that gambling and that race to the bottom of the brain stem, it's about creating a world where we're focused on a little bit more long-term values, where we're focused on creating the world that we want to live in. Regenerative means that there is positive externalities to the work that you do as opposed to negative externalities. And so I think that regenerative crypto economics are mechanisms that create positive externalities. And that's what we're trying to meme into existence. But I don't know. Our marketing guy is like, Kevin, just pick a mean. Is it Regen Finance? Are you green filling people? Are you creating more solar punk world? And I say it's all those things.

Starting point is 00:35:25 So yeah, I mean, what would you call it if you had to, if you had to meme the world we're trying to create? I would honestly. in, I would call it all the things, and I'd find one champion for each meme, because it's really about telling the stories in different ways, and it's all the same story, right? I really think that we are all saying the same things, 99% of the time, we're all kind of, you know, we are definitely in this together in a very real way. So I think, kind of to each, to each their own. Sure. Yeah. One of the things I'm hoping to do is,

Starting point is 00:36:03 is, you know, you can, you can describe the world as much as you can, but if you can show it, show it to people, you know, sort of like ghost of Christmas future style, like show them the world that we're building is much better than telling them. And one of the things that's really exciting about me, to me, is that all of the Regen projects that you're going to hear on this Green Till podcast all stack on top of each other, proof of humanity and retroactive public goods funding and get coin grants and common stack all can be, and it can create. a more solar punk public goods world. And if you can show people that world instead of tell them,

Starting point is 00:36:38 then I think that's what will really get people to turn the corner. Beautiful, yeah. And I totally agree. And I just want to remind people that even if it's green and and regent and all these kinds of good, you know, good vibes things, it's also going to be fun and going to be crazy. And you're going to get your ups and downs, you know, it'll be great. I think we can have fun while we're improving and causing positive externalities. I feel like there's a, there's maybe like it's like, there's some kind of like weird appeal

Starting point is 00:37:15 to self-interestness, you know, but I think that we can align our self-interest, right? That's the, that's the thing. I don't think that we should be like shunning self-interest. We should align our self-interest and have, have a good time with them. So anyway, that's my. Yeah, aligning the profit motive with the motive to do good can be a really powerful thing when those two things intersect. Yeah, so Regens is fun. Regen is fun.

Starting point is 00:37:42 All right, Carl Flourish of Optimism. How can people find you and how can people find you the projects you're working on online? Great. So I work at Optimism PBC. That's at OptimismPBC. Definitely go to Optimism.io. That's the place to be. And then I'm on Twitter at Carl underscore dot underscore tech.

Starting point is 00:38:04 And yeah, definitely follow Vitalik also. I'm sure you do. Well, Carl Flores, thank you so much for being on the inaugural episode of Greenfield. Great to have you. And looking forward to having you back in 2024 once we've created a more greenfield world. Peace out. Peace. Bye.

Bankless - Ether's Phoenix with Optimism's Karl Floersch | GreenPill #2

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