 Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thanks for joining Actin Flab. This is live stream number 21.2, I think. And this is our sixth discussion with John. The first four were background discussions where John and I worked through these jam boards and through the three-part series that John had written, Science Driven, Societal Transformation. And now here we are today on May 11th, 2021 in our second participatory group discussion. So this is going to be an unpacking and an extension and an opportunity to share perspectives and ask John questions. So thanks to all who have joined live and who will be joining live. And also, if you're watching on YouTube, feel free to leave a question in the chat and we will relay that to you. So we're just going to go around with a quick round of introductions. Maybe each of us could just say hello and something that they're thinking of or something that they're excited to talk about today. And then we will pass back to John and just start off on this road together. So I'm Daniel and I'm in California. I will pass to Lee. Hi, I'm Lee. I'm in London at the minute. Although I'm a PhD researcher at the University of York. John, today I'm interested to talk about maybe a minimum viable prototype for one of the clubs. And also a little bit around the metaphor of the superorganism a bit as well if we have chance. And I'll pass to Scott. Thank you. My name is Scott David. I'm at the University of Washington applied physics lab where I'm the director of information risk and synthetic intelligence research initiative. Delighted to be here today. And I'd also very, very interested in chatting about the scale, scale independent variables and how the interventions at one scale can help to alter system performances at other scales do the fractal nature of some of the affordances we're talking about a great interest to me. And I'll pass it to Dave. Dave Douglas. I'm in the Philippines 120 miles north of Manila where it's cool because it's a mile high city. And I just came across the answer to a question. What is a state in the parcels and particles paper? Dr. Friston says a state is a particle. So yes, it really is. Monads not only all the way up and all the way down to and who's left Daniel you've already we already know you. We'll go to we'll go to John. Thanks for the spicy introduction Dave. I'm John Boyk Daniel to go to set to slide one. This series this these numerous talks are on the topic of science driven societal transformation. That's the title of a three part series that I recently published in the journal sustainability. One is worldview part two is motivation and strategy and part three is design. I'm looking at societal transformation through a particular lens in this series. And that lens is the de novo development of fundamentally new systems. So when I say systems, I'm talking about the economic systems, governance systems, legal systems, etc. The we're going to focus today. I think I'm maybe some of the practical aspects like how would this be done. And I would like to just start by saying just a few words about the kind of theory of change that I talk about, especially in paper number two. If I were brilliant, which I'm not. And I came up with this amazing new design for societal systems and governance systems, etc. If there were no way to actually practically implement that, then I would have just been an academic exercise. So part of the series is arguing that there actually is a reasonable way to move forward of a viable path to move forward that is doable that that actually could be put into into implementation. So the series is itself is essentially outlining an R&D program for the development of this framework to study and create and develop and test new integrated systems. And that happens at, according to this theory of change, that happens at the local level. So the concept is that this R&D program is a collaboration between the global science community and local communities. And the new systems are implemented at the local level on a volunteer basis in what I call a club model. So the concept there is that the scientific community would have developed the tools and technologies and resources and things necessary to make these new systems work well. And the local communities and volunteer local communities somewhere in the world would look at the results of all the computer simulations and all the studies that have been done inside. That looks interesting. Gee, it looks like our community might really benefit from this. Let's give it a field trial. Let's give it a try. And so that's the partnership. And then the community itself, this could be, I don't mean a city. I don't mean a nation. I really mean like perhaps a subset of a city. So say just a thousand people or something like that might be enough to start a club. And the club would function, everyone in the club would function as normal in society, except that on top of, you know, there's another layer of organization on top of the normal layer of organization. And that's this club level. So a civic club. You can think of it as a civic club. And the civic club has all these, you know, ways that they go by decision making and exchanging currencies and various things and allow them then to test out these new frameworks of societal systems. So that's the gist of it. And I just want to say a few things about this club model before we really get going just so we've kind of all in the same page on that. But just before I do that, maybe go to slide two of that same deck. I'll point people to principle societies project.org if they're looking for more information on this. All of our videos are posted there and the papers are posted there and there's some other materials posted there. So for information go to PSP. And let's go to slide 17. Oh, that is not the right. Not quite the right one. I wanted the theory of change one and that's not it. They're changing strategy. Which slide is that you're looking at 17 on. Oh, it is. Yep. Theory of change. Somehow I'm, oh, there we go. Yes, there is change and strategy. So this is just kind of capturing what I just said. The idea is to implement new fundamentally new systems at the club level. I'll call the club a community, but this community could be relatively small and just a portion of the city. And the reason I'm one of the reasons I'm looking at the club level is because I see it as kind of the Goldilocks level. It's the smallest size organization of a community that could make the club able to replicate and function. So if we were instead just looking at, say, an individual business, that business, like I say, I was promoting a cooperative business model or something like that. That business would have to function within the wider set of businesses and would have to compete in the normal market for the consumer's attention. And it would have a hard time doing that because it's operating according to some different set of rules than a normal business. So at the club level, I see that as just large enough that all of these new functional systems can be tested and it's large enough that the organization, the community can be self-replicating. The club model can be self-replicating. It can grow in a local area and the idea can spread to other local areas. All right. Slide 19, please. Can we just go to Lee and then Scott, just because we're getting hands raised on each of these slides. So yeah, so Lee and then Scott. Sure. John, in order to start a club, what are the minimum requirements that are needed? Does it need any funding or are there other set of conditions that it might need? Ideally, there wouldn't be any requirements. Ideally, there would be support from the global community to start a club. But the clubs are designed such, or at least later today we'll talk about a simulation I did of a club model, a particular framework I called the LIDA framework. But I designed that so that it could bootstrap its own growth. So there was no, it was not necessary to have millions of dollars, say, to start the club or anything like that. It really just grew step by step exponentially fast. So in the first few years, hardly anything was happening and then it started to grow very rapidly after that. So what would be necessary? Mostly just the individuals that look at the, by the time a field trial would ever be started, there would have been, let's say, hundreds of papers, scientific papers on simulations and all other aspects of this. So everyone would know what they're getting into. This would be very clear what the new systems are and what they do and how they function. And then at that point, all it would really be necessary is for some community somewhere in the world to say, that looks really interesting. Let's do a field trial. You know, here's, we have a thousand people in our little, in our community that are interested in this and let's give it a shot. So that's the main thing. I mean, maybe a little bit of funding would be necessary, but not at an extreme amount. So it sounds, oh, it sounds almost like there's a prelude phase, which is the what we're in. And then the stage will be set for proper emergence for a community to then take that next step. But it's a really interesting question about the viable system. So I hope that we pursue that line as well. Yeah, John, John. And I just maybe we'll add that by the time a first field trial ever starts, there really should be no surprises about any of this. I mean, the community would conduct the trial, but it should be a foregone conclusion what's going to happen as far as how it works and what the benefits are, because this should have been worked out very well already. So, you know, it shouldn't be as it's not like, here's a, you know, here's a new, here's a new machine tractor or something. Now, see if you can drive it. It's not quite like that because there would be, you know, training involved. We would realize what the purpose of the tractor is, what we're going to accomplish with the tractor, how it works, how you repair it. You know, like there would be a, again, there's just to be very few surprises by the time the first field trial starts. That doesn't mean a community wouldn't be able to make decisions on how it, what it funds and, you know, how it functions. Of course, a community would make decisions about how, about its, the kinds of jobs it creates and things like that. But the fundamental mechanics of the system should be pretty well worked out. Yeah, Lee, any other thoughts on that? Just very quickly then. So, if the particular community, so you've got this prelude phase where you're kind of working out all the details of the DeNovo design. Is that done with the community? Partly, I mean, that would be with any communities, like globally in a sense, that prelude part is the global science community and any individuals or communities anywhere in the world that want to participate, provide feedback, do user testing, you know, all the little parts of the systems would be also tested in various groups. There would be like really just a ton of testing that would occur before the first formal field trial ever started. And that particular community, what could have input on, you know, what kind of particular design elements it might want in its system. So, and that's actually a good point that I'm glad you said that because I also wanted to say that the purpose of this R&D program is not to build one system that fits all. It's to build, it's an ongoing exploration of the, you know, different pieces and approaches and ways you might create systems such that they fulfill their purpose. So there could be a wide variety of, you know, parts to choose from or ways to do things or, you know, hopefully there would be numerous kinds and types and pieces of systems that would be tested over time. That communities could, you know, implement then. And all with the purpose of, you know, fit for purpose, you know, all with the concept of fit for purpose behind this. Scott, and then anyone else who raises their hand? I just wanted to go back. You were talking a little bit about the size of groups in the clubs. It's a, the optimizations going to be really interesting because you might have a Dunbar's number involved there. That Dunbar's number concept being the most people you can have as your friend kind of idea. So whatever is 120 or something. But one of the things that's interesting also, you have the internal voice dynamics of the club plus the external voice dynamics of the club. So as the club coheres an internal voice, it will have a more coherent external voice, which will allow it to entrain and harmonically couple other systems more effectively, right? Because it will be more coherent. One of the things that I'd like to get into later in the conversation is we have some ideas we've been working on, on scaling how legislative, judicial and executive function, these three functions of all governance systems have rulemaking enforcement of the rules and operation of the rules, how those naturally layer on just as a function of scale. As you increase in scale from rulemaking, you have to go into different abstractions for enforcement and operation under those rules. And so that would be very interesting to look at the dynamics of club growth as an internal process of internal voice and a recognition of the layering on of governance that occurs internally, and then how that governance then needs to expand into the external environment in order to be more effective. The bottom line is if you have a system, a club, where we say, we have the free speech club, we have the rights to free speech, and there's no other club that has a duty to respect that, then you don't have a right to free speech outside of the club, right? And say, how do you iterate the story outside of the club so that it becomes a reality that's shared so it can be enjoyed? Right, right, right. I'd like to talk about that. Yeah, you know, there's a there's a ton there that we go through. I have these concepts in mind as I was designing these systems or designing the framework. So all good points, just a little bit on size. I'll try to talk about a couple of things briefly that you raised a little bit on size. So, so in our brains, we have a community of neurons that are that are functioning to help the body make decisions and that that community of neurons is very much connected with the rest of the body also beat and the liver and the heart and everything else. Well, how does all of that, you know, how does how do all those cells and tissues and organisms cooperate together to make the body function the way the body functions? One thing that happens is there's a very rich stream of communication that is passing between all these different cells and tissues and things, hormonal signals and small molecule signals and blood is circulating. There's all these this awash and signals and communication. So communication is one of the prerequisites for any kind of large organized, you know, set of individuals, whether they're cells or whether they're people to function together. So one of the questions that we can talk about today is what kinds of tools are necessary to allow for rich communication to occur in say a group of let's just say 10,000 people or 100,000 people or a million people. How does a large group of people come together, richly communicate their narrative, their story, their, both of, you know, I want to tell my group what is happening for me, what I anticipate will happen if we choose A over B over C, where this might lead in the short run, where this might lead in the long run, and how this fits into other issues, issues D and E and F. I mean, you know, I'm an intelligent person, everyone else has intelligence, and that intelligence can be used in the group cognitive, you know, the group cognition in order for the group to make wise choices about, you know, actions and where they want to put their attention. So the tool question is a big one. And I would say that that currently there are no tools that allow a large group of individuals to come together to collaborate via rich communication and rich storytelling. Right. We, that doesn't exist yet, I would say. And I have ideas on how we might create that. But that's one of the, that's one of the, one of the tasks that would have to happen over the over the first several years of the program is addressing that particular problem of how does a group richly communicate and collaborate in making decisions. So, so if we're just talking to get to your point now, if we're, if we just have a small group and we're just talking, we're working out things, we're making decisions together. Well, maybe that group can't be more than a few people before it starts to fall apart, or, you know, maybe it can't be more than 10 or 20 or 100 people or something. But if we have some way to richly communicate, then maybe we can scale that, you know, we can scale that communication to a larger group to thousands or 10,000s. And still there might be some limit beyond what a club wouldn't, you know, like maybe a club should never be more than 100,000 or never more than a million or never more than 10,000, you know, who knows. And so that's between that's of individuals in a club, and then there should be similar communication between clubs. That must happen. And that's getting to a, that's touching on another point that you raised is how do, how does a club reach, reach the, you know, interact with the wider world. And the both in the my framing, both with other clubs, how does decision making occur between clubs, how does communication happen between clubs, and then also how does communication happen with the rest of the world. Thanks, Sean. I'm Stephen, and then Scott, and then anyone else who raises their hand. Yeah, thanks. I think I'm interested by this, the word purpose, you know, we think about purpose in all of this, and clubs tend to have a particular focus or purpose as you're mentioning and I think it's interesting you're bringing in the science intentionality, you know, the intentionality of the science community to enable sort of seeding. So I'm wondering how that might, you might think about that, sitting alongside, say, community organizations or like community hubs, for instance, or multi service agencies in the community or nodes of support, those types of things. This might be something which could fit in there and give this kind of club purpose that might compliment, or is it different similar to some of those types of service provisions that exist out in the towns and cities. I'm not exactly sure the question you're pointing to, but let me say a few things and maybe I'm going to touch on it. So, in the abstract, the concept behind this whole program is that an organism has an intrinsic purpose, and that intrinsic purpose is to thrive both now and in the future, so expected thriving. And it, in order to do that, it uses cognition, right, and via cognition, and we've talked about how active inference fits into that whole picture, the cognition, it really reduces the uncertainty about its capacity to thrive. It's the essential variables that it, you know, that it, that it needs, that it function, the world it functions in and whether its need, true needs will be met, right. So, that's an organism and I'm viewing a society as an organism, right. So, in the sort of the larger picture, the abstract, a little abstract, the question is, you know, is a community functioning in a way, is a new system functioning in a way that is reducing uncertainty about the capacity to thrive. So, that's, that's, that would be implemented in a way via some kind of fitness metrics. So, just like in normal society and regular society, we have say GDP and other various types of, you know, information we gather and metrics that we use. There would be a set of metrics that would go along with this whole program so that a community would know how it's doing and how it will, how it can expect to be doing two years from now and five years from now and 10 years from now. You know, maybe even 20 years from now. So, so there may be many subgroups within say that say that there's a club and the club is 10,000 people, for example. Clearly, there would be some groups within that club that would be interested in various aspects of, you know, topics or ways of doing things or various kinds of communication and, you know, maybe some some subgroups are really focused on the social components of the community components, the, you know, maybe emotional components, social components, and then other groups are interested in technical components and modeling or whatever, you know, other groups are interested in the environmental components, for example. Well, that's great. That's, you know, association between groups is a part of cognition. Our neurons associate in ways that allows for cognition of the whole and in the same way, you know, a club and a community would do the same. So there could be all kinds of subgroups that are all functioning, but the umbrella purpose would be present, right, because we would be reported daily say or even hourly or weekly, you know, there would be everyone would know how how we're doing as a whole and that we're all in this together to raise our our joint capacity to thrive and maintain our maintain our ability to thrive. So yes, there would be all kinds of groups that would focus on different aspects of this, and the umbrella, you know, reporting and collecting of information would be happening still across groups across the community, so that there would be some sense of how are we doing and what's going to happen next. Can I just reply slightly to that? Yeah, just that's really interesting. It sounds as well. This could tie in with the kind of another type of evaluative capacity or ongoing rolling evaluative capacity, but with an agent based or active inference based engine, so to speak, so that it's given this update to communities around how they are progressing, so to speak, when that may help them in other areas, some of which may be outside of clubs. More bounded area, you know, it gets into the niche and complexity. So the interesting is, if you thought about this might be how this might link in with some of the new developments in evaluative evaluation going on, and that might be quite a good avenue. Yeah, there would be. I mean, if you were going to collect information and and assess how we're doing and what's going to happen next, there would be all kinds of evaluation that would have to occur, not just on the simple things like you could think of some simple things right off the bat, like, do we have enough food? Do we have enough water? Well, fine. But humans are complex organisms. We have complex needs, social needs, you know, emotional needs, you know, like physical needs, you know, and all of those needs should be taken into account in some kind of, you know, comprehensive evaluation of how are we doing and what's going to happen next. And obviously, every any organism has to know that, you know, every organism wants to know it needs to assess its status like, How am I? How am I doing? Am I too cold? Am I too hot? Am I unhappy? Am I happy? You know, like every organism needs to do that. And a community, a community as an organism needs to do that. Cool. Thanks, John. Also welcome, blue. And on the Goldilocks note, and this narrative note, I really like what Scott had said about the internal and external communications and as internal communications become structured from a connections perspective, but also from a narrative perspective, the external interfaces and narratives can be structured. So Goldilocks doesn't just evoke the sort of upside down you curve. I mean, this is something that we know from pharmacology, from temperature, everything. There's too much and there's too little. And there's a failure mode on either side, just like a bowling alley. And of course, the middle solution is going to be better. It just wears the middle. But Goldilocks also reminds us that that middle solution has to be more like a child's story, rather than some sort of abtruse optimization problem. So it's kind of a fun reference that it should be comprehensible internally and also externally in order to be functional. Right, right. Right. So, yeah, and maybe just a touch on that, you know, from this, say the scientific viewpoint, one might think about fitness, you know, in terms of metrics and statistics and things like that. But other people won't relate maybe so much to that kind of assessment. So everyone who's involved has to, there has to be a way to communicate the ideas of how are we doing and, you know, what is our status in ways that are meaningful to everyone involved or else if it's not meaningful, it really won't work, right? So some people might discuss status in very technical terms and other people might discuss status in more, say, emotional terms or social terms or something like that. But the general sense, the general purpose has to make sense to everyone or else why be a part of this. One other thing on the Goldilocks is the question is, to be clear, it's not my intent that a club, say a club started in Houston, Texas with a thousand people, it's not my intent that the club would stay at a thousand people, it would grow. The whole concept of this is that if this new model, this new club model, these new frameworks actually work, if they actually empower a community to do better, to be more secure, to have a higher quality of life, to have economic security, to, you know, in numerous ways, if these clubs benefit the population the way I think it would, then they would grow because it's kind of like the, you know, why don't we use typewriters anymore? Because we have computers that work so much better, I mean, they're just so much better who would want to use a typewriter, you know, that kind of thing. So that's the concept of this. It should be so easy to join a club. It should be so easy to participate that, like, why not? My life will be better if I participate in a club. And if that comes true, if it really works as advertised, then clubs will grow and the club model will spread to other places. And then, instead of having a club of 10,000 or 1,000, you have a club of 100,000, and every city has a club, and pretty soon, you know, much of the world is starting to function along these, you know, with these, along with these new systems, much of the world is engaging with them, or enough of the world is engaging with them that the ideas behind them suddenly become, start to become the dominant ideas. So the goal is not to help a community so much. The goal is to actually transform globally society, or at least semi globally. Thanks, John. I'm going to ask a question from the chat, and then Steven and Lee. So in the chat, Natalia writes, I read in the paper, thanks for reading the paper, Natalia, that people would keep their income when not working. I'm curious what role motivation plays in the success of the system, and what kinds of structures are in place to manage that so agent level motivations. And how do we design incentive structures and ecosystems for participation that are able to incentivize various kinds of participants. All right. Okay, so what motivates us today in our economy? You know, a variety of things. We're complex organisms, we're motivated by a variety of things. But a large one, because the way the system is designed is that if you don't participate, if you don't go out there and get some kind of job, you're going to be in the street. You know, there's this like, this kind of, you know, you're forced to participate. And if you don't, and if you don't, you're going to be in trouble. Well, that's not very useful for many reasons. Far more useful is to offer people what they actually really want, what humans tend to really want, which is a variety of things. They want to help each other. They want to be part of a community. They want to learn. They want to develop skills. They want to do any number of things that engage them with each other and they want to solve problems. They want to be a part of a problem solving process. They want to cooperate. It makes us happy to cooperate. All of nature is cooperating. Cooperation is the rule rather than the exception in nature. So how can we build a system that just allows us to really be ourselves, to really get what we want, most want? I want to be in a kind and cooperative and functional setting, a group. I want to work with each other. I want to work with the people around me and help each other and they want to help me. So how do we make that happen at scale? That's the question. So the motivation isn't to get rich. We'll talk about the leader framework in a little while and that's just one example of a way to organize an economic system. But that particular system actually achieves income equality over time. So clearly the motivation isn't to make money. That's not why you're engaged in the economic system. The economic system is really a cognitive system, not a money system. Money is just a tool that's used as a way to share information. So in the leader framework, incomes equalize over time and the motivation to engage is to fulfill all these deeper human needs that we all have. Thanks for the response, John. So Steven and then Lee. Yeah, I just sort of carrying on a bit from what you're just saying there with the community getting involved and their benefits to the purpose and to their motivation. At the community level, that is a missing link at the moment in terms of and it probably was much more present. Even 100 years ago, 80 years ago, you'd have had the women's institute and you had all sorts of different. So we professionalize an awful lot of roles. And you see that with nursing and all sorts of professions where they've increasingly professionalized and trained. So the question I've got there is how do you bring in the motivations of the professionals who have another niche that they're trying to optimize around maybe writing papers, getting a career and things like this. And do they have to be humble in some way to honor the input from this community? Because obviously you're trying to invert some of the assumptions about where everything should be located. It doesn't need to all be driven by professions and just keep driving more and more professions that you can bring in community input and wisdom to also be part of these clubs. But how do you marry the types of niches that people are in and the competition for their time and motivation? I don't actually see that as too much of a problem. Let's just pick a profession, say nursing or something like that. And the question becomes, let's say that I live in Houston and a club is started and I'm a professional. I'd make a reasonable salary, let's say. Why would I want to participate in a club? Well, there might be numerous reasons. I might understand the potential of the club. I mean, there's this whole body of literature now, these simulations and other literature that suggests that this club model might actually empower people who belong to a club to make better decisions, to achieve higher environmental quality and higher social quality. So I might be interested just to join for that reason because I see it as a beneficial thing for the larger community. I can engage with these people and make decisions and together we can make beautiful things happen. But now let's focus just on the economic aspect. And again, there might be any number of ways to design any of these systems, economic systems, governance systems. There could be all kinds of concepts that the R&D program could assess and try and test out. But in the leader framework, the kind of prototypical economic system that we hopefully will get to talking about here. The question becomes how do we get from here to there? How do we get from today's society and incomes and structure to some other structure down the road? So I try to show that in the simulation model that I published. It goes over a 30-year period. So again, the expansion of the club and its activities is exponential. So maybe in the first few years there's not a whole lot happening, people join, but there's not big effects. But then it bootstraps itself economically and otherwise and then they're starting to be bigger effects. So just kind of jumping to the chase a little bit. In the leader framework, it's designed so that incomes rise over time. And the people in the simulation, people only join if they're going to be better off economically. Otherwise there's no reason to join in the simulation. So let's say I'm a nurse. I have a pretty good income. Why would I join? Well, if I join at any point, I will get a, and my income is high. Let's say the lowest target income is rising, but my income is still higher than that. I can still join and I'll get a small bonus. That's not the word I use in the paper, but it's kind of like that. I'll get a say, let's just say $1,000 a year for joining. Well, that's $1,000 a year that I didn't have otherwise. So even though my income is high relative to where this income target is growing, I still get a benefit from it. And then I get to use that money and part of it is a local currency. So I get to use the dollar currency, the national currency, and this local currency in the decision making process. And I'm engaged. I have some skin in the game now. And then as that income rises at some point, it's likely to reach mine or go above what my current income is. And then for sure I want to join because if I join, my annual income is going to rise maybe substantially. So in the simulation, the income target rises up to about somewhere around the equivalent of about $110,000 per year per family. So that's more than some nurses make and especially for those nurses that are at the bottom level, bottom economic level or teachers or firemen or police or whatever. There would be motivation to join because your income is going to not only increase but become stable. If you lose your job, there's no worries you're going to be taken care of. This system is circulating currency in such a way that once you're in, you're okay. It doesn't matter if you're working or not. It's a way to rethink this driven by money versus not driven by money because you've really said it both ways. You've said people are not motivated by money yet you've repeatedly appealed to the idea that every person will gain more money and implicitly that that's what is important. And so it's actually just it is what it is. And that's where active inference and all these other techniques and extended cognition come into play because there'll be a variety of narratives for people who are in different positions. So we'll go to Lee and then Scott and then I'll ask a question in the chat. Yeah, so kind of a related point, actually. So in the paper, I remember you were reading that at one point you're talking about, you know, effectively after the labor system starts to outcompete the native system. You know, there are going to be winners and losers effectively. So, you know, if you're a franchise owner of a McDonald's or something, you know, you're cheap labor disappeared. So on a larger scale, right, that means that, you know, they're well, I guess what I'm what I'm asking is, is do you anticipate that ultimately the current system, you know, with lots of vested interest to remain the way it is going to start pushing back once you realize it. So this kind of club model is potentially a threat to it. Yeah. So, right. So it's true, there's winners and losers in this. And then in a sense, if you're measuring winners and losers by does this civilization survive and thrive? Well, then there's hardly any losers because the whole concept of this is so that societies and civilization can thrive into the future. Right. And that's not, and, you know, just as a counterpoint, that's not our current system. You know, we're, our current system is essentially on a suicide route, you know, trajectory of destroying life on the planet. So the current system is not working. You know, it's not working in the sense of our insecurity about will we even be here in 100 years is quite high. Right. So, but, but in a, in another sense, yes, there will be losers and winners. So the idea is that this R&D program is creating and testing new ways of organizing society that really do, that really function well. And any organism that functions well is going to outcompete other organisms, you know, that are not functioning well, right, in that sense. So a community say that is using these tools and using these systems and it's really flourishing probably will be doing flourishing more than other communities that aren't. And that's the reason that other communities might say, hey, that looks good, but let's do that. Now, you have a subset of say, you know, multimillionaires and billionaires. And at least on some perspective, they will be losers because, you know, that that's not going to work. That's not going to be compatible with this new way of doing things. And you raised one of the reasons why it wouldn't be compatible is that where are they going to get their low wage workers to work in, you know, work in their factories and stuff. Where are they going to come from? If all the other folks are having high wage jobs in these new, you know, these new systems, right, these new frameworks. So the business model will start to falter. The conventional business model will start to falter. And as it should, because, you know, what are we doing here? What are we doing in society? Don't we want to flourish? Don't we want systems that help us to reduce our uncertainty and flourish into the future? Well, I would think we do overall, right? So systems that don't do that really have to fall by the wayside or transform themselves into new systems that do function better. And the long term aim of this R&D program isn't necessarily that the world will be using these kinds of systems. Another option, another, you know, potential future is that current governance systems, current legal systems, current financial systems, you know, all of our current systems might learn from these experience, these experiments everywhere and go, you know what, that's actually a good idea. That works well. Let's incorporate that into our structure and, you know, we'll be better off. Everyone will be better off. So that would be fun. Maybe the clubs grow to a point around the world and they just, the ideas just assimilate out into the larger world and are taken up and then everyone is still doing better. So that would be great. Or maybe it doesn't go that way. Maybe it becomes, you know, like us against them in a sense, there's the clubs that are growing, the native systems, the current systems are not doing well. They refuse to learn from these experiments. They're not interested in change. Well, then they probably will be dinosaurs. I mean, I was just thinking about, you know, so there are examples of a community energy generation, for example. So those solutions start to exist, you know, and then there are examples of invested interests where they've kind of seen that as a potential threat and moved to outlaw them. So I mean, it's just those kind of, you know, it's those kind of conflicts that I was wondering where they might be. Yeah, you know, of course, those kinds of conflicts will happen and the R&D program and the people involved in creating this whole system have to think these things through carefully to try to avoid, you know, the problems that might be foreseen, right? Obviously. So these are very important questions and we would have to give a lot of thought as to how we, you know, skirt past these problems. Now, you know, I don't, that's to be done. That's work to be done, right? I have a few ideas. And that's, and I can say that's one of the reasons I wanted the global science community as a kind of a, you know, co-leader in this whole process because it is, for one thing, it's global, right? It's not limited to the laws of a particular nation. So, and it's authoritative in the sense that we can write papers and we can do simulations and we can talk with some authority of would this be a good, you know, do these things help humans? Would this be good for human societies and civilization? You know, we can do that. We can, we're independent of any particular nation in a sense. And then suppose that there's a nation that says, no way, this is against the law, you can't do it here. Well, okay, you can't do it there. But there would be other nations that wouldn't have those rules and this club model can thrive wherever it's allowed to thrive, right? And you would think that there would be some nation somewhere in this world where there might be some allowance for these kinds of social experiments to occur. And once it works, that's the thing, that's the concept is that once it's shown to work, you know, first in one community, say, and then maybe in two and then four and then eight, you know, once it's, once it looks like this actually works, then there's a whole nother slew of papers and simulations showing, you know, like we're, you know, assessing that and that information is broadcast to the world. And, you know, at some point it becomes harder and harder for a society to keep it out because, you know, no country uses typewriters anymore, you know. Except the hipster countries. Except the hipsters. They'll say, I want that good old fashioned government. So Scott, and then a question from chat and then Dave. So, great conversation. Thank you. This is so fascinating. So the couple of book references and a couple of things. I'm going to talk a little bit about money and risk here. Going back to what we were talking about a little while ago and that move from money and prosperity. You know, there's a book by I think it's Hannah's Men called Doing Money, where the author suggests that money is a universal risk consolidator. And so I'll hold up here. Twenty billion. Okay. Due to the bearer upon. So it only is as good as the narrative, right? So I always carry Zimbabwe money around because that's inflation protected in the United States that you can't get near the inflation rate to this. So the reason I raise that is money, you know, we there's a book called the past as a foreign country where we think people in the past, oh, they just didn't get it. And then we look at this and go, you know, money, actually, it's interesting when people want to accumulate money. There's a lot of theories of money, this Smith and Wichsel and Hume, but money is a form of communication between people's and encoding of risk in a sense, right? It's what we look at and decoding of risk and a universal risk encoding in a sense. And it's kind of interesting because then it becomes abstracted into its own get its own end. That's when comes the commodity of money, right? And so it's not a medium of communication and exchange anymore, but its own gain its own because it's used generically against all risks. I can de-risk so many universal risks. That's pretty true. It's like a universal solvent of water, you know, it becomes something that's biologically very dynamic. And so the idea of the medium of exchange is a fascinating one here. So I just wanted to bust with that a little bit. And then so if you look at it that way, then the meaning, so this is Zimbabwe local community meaning and then there's United States local community meaning. And they're different because the community is what generates the value, not the money. This is a piece of paper has exactly the same value as a US dollar, but it's the symbol of a system. And the system is the community and the communities where the value comes from not from the piece of paper. So that's the intrinsic uncovering. One of the things that have been fussing with just to share on this point is so the past people have been doing money and maybe they're not so stupid. Maybe they've been doing clubs. Maybe this is a money club, right? And so one of the challenges is, well, now maybe we need a redistribution idea among the clubs. And I think one of the things that's really appealing about what you're describing things is the intrinsic transparency that comes with the exponential increase in interaction volumes. So it's impossible to suppress transparency among so many interactions. It's very similar to after 2008 financial break where there were calls to get rid of the rating agencies because that was one stop shop for conflicts of interest. You pay them more money, you get a better rating. And they said instead let's get rid of the rating agencies and let's use the spreads in credit default swap markets because it tells you the same information. Will the company pay its debts as they become to that's what the rating agency tell you. And that's what the spreads in credit default swap markets tell you. But the difference is in the credit default swap markets, those are set by thousands of interactions so you can't game them. So that's what distributed governance looks like. And intrinsically, it feels like you're building that from the bottom up, but not just vis-a-vis financial instruments, but vis-a-vis anything. And so community as the source of trust and knowledge. And then I call it the community trust, community information boomerang. Because then when you want to authenticate or audit, you go back to the community because that's the ultimate source of trust because that's where it came from the first place because it didn't come from the data passing through it. It came from the fact of the meaning and the community drenching and enriching the information as it goes through. So I really love the way you're talking, but I just wanted to make a few comments on it. That abstraction of money is kind of an interesting thing that you get to levels of abstraction where abstraction itself becomes a form of violence because it reduces the granularity with which a system sees the individual. And so just last point, Kandinsky, the folks on this phone have heard this already, but Kandinsky made a painter said once that violence, societies yield abstract art. And one of the things I always wondered is, is that reversal, is abstraction itself violence? And to me, it feels like getting to a certain scale, it feels like violence. Try dealing with Verizon. The other day, I was so frustrated, I wanted to slam my phone down on the receiver down, but I only had a cell phone. I don't have an old style phones. I couldn't slam it down with drama. So these are, you've raised a whole series of really interesting and important points. So first, what is money? You know, if we're going to design new systems, including new economic systems, new financial systems, new monetary systems. What is money? What is its function in a club or in a society, right? Well, already in what I call native systems, money is a voting tool. If I have a billion dollars, I get to vote for any number of things that I want. I can make, I can make whole organizations do fulfill my desires, because I have enormous voting power. Now, obviously that voting power is not democratic. It's not transparent. It's really dysfunctional inflow of information. And the, and quite obviously, if we're going to design new systems, we would want to, it's fine that money is used as an information tool. But that information tool should be completely transparent, fairly distributed. You know, it should actually function as a way for all of us to share our desires, our fears, our, you know, our viewpoints, our preferences to the community. You know, it's a redesigned money that serves an informational purpose and is transparent and is, you know, deeply democratic in its function. That's a, that would be a useful way to communicate, you know. So that's part of the task is to how do we do that? How do we design a system that functions that, how do we design an economic system that functions that way? Where money is no longer even viewed as money in the normal way. That economics is, as a matter of fact, that economics, like the economic profession, say, for a club, is not even resembles economics. Because suddenly we're not talking about economics. We're talking about cognition. We're talking about societal cognition. This is all about decision making under its uncertainty in reference to some fitness, you know, vitality score of like, how do, this is cognition. How do we, how do we, it's no longer economics. Now it's a, now it's a new field called cognition that happens to use a voting tool called, that we might call money. So, just a couple of things on that. So, you know, a club can't redesign the same national currency, can't redesign the dollar or anything like that. So, but it can create a currency for its own use within its own, within its own milieu that functions exactly the way that I'm describing. That is transparent, that is, you know, does all the things that we've just been describing. So, I take a shot at that in my design of the lead of Framework. And if we get to it, I'll try to, you know, show you how, how, kind of conceptually how that works. Well, it's just a quick follow-up. That's one of the elements of sovereignty, right, is the tax and the money issuance. The M1 supply, you can't use a Starbucks card everywhere because that would intrude on the sovereign supply of money on the fiat. And so the exertion of authority into every, every interaction is, has three parties in it because the trading medium is a declaration by the sovereign that they are there to help. But it's like Von Munchhausen by proxy syndrome, right? They keep people weak in their interactions in order for themselves to be strong. Right. Very interesting. Just because there's a bunch of questions in the chat and a lot of raised hands. So I didn't want to get to everyone in order. So Dave, and then I'm going to ask a question in the chat and then Blue and Stephen. Yeah, it's not self-evident what the relations of property, intellectual property, occupation, competence in the U.S. In the U.S., there seems to be an insistence that the traditional money relationship structures everything else. Your competence is determined by who writes your page. Your credibility is determined by that. It isn't that way every place in Mexico, the right to professional association and voluntary association is written into the Constitution. In the Philippines, the government is constitutionally obligated not just to tolerate, but to actively promote professional associations and voluntary associations. And reading some of the things, and by no means all of the things that Robert David Steele says, Denmark apparently is doing a fabulous job of managing the knowledge economy and moving more and more all the time to open source everything. Except maybe initiation of government force, out and out violence to preserve buildings and children and things like that. Thanks for the comment. Yeah, have you looked at Steele's proposals for setting up a very much more transparent way of exchanging knowledge and vetting competence? No, I'm not familiar. Let's share that. Cool. And part of this prelude in the research and development phase is certainly to take stock of various proposals that address different aspects related to transparency, accountability, information propagation, value exchange, crypto economics, NFTs. All these things are going to be woven together in a new tapestry that hopefully is our parachute slash trampoline. So, Yvonne, Yvonne asks a question in the chat. He says, hello, thanks, John, for the second stream, sixth stream. It is excellent. My question is, does the club model imply a governance where two or more clubs come into confrontation in their ways of acting? So early stage club development or late stage, let's just say two clubs don't just believe different things. They don't just infer differently, but they act differently. What do we do? Okay, so in the R&D program, maybe the first task will just to be to work out how cognition, societal cognition can happen in a club setting. And then all the different systems that support that. But very quickly, once progress is being made towards that end, the next big question is how do clubs cognate? How do they communicate? So just as there would be systems and technologies and frameworks that allow individuals in a club to communicate and cognate together and make decisions together, whether they're economic decisions or whether they're governance decisions or whatever kind of legal decisions, whatever that is, that would be a similar kind of overlay to the between club setting. So maybe it would be similar technologies, maybe they would be adapted a little bit for the club-to-club interactions. But the same kind of concept holds is that clubs, the community of clubs is a cognitive community, is an organism, a cognitive organism. So how does it make decisions and view the world and act? Now it might be that, let's say that down the road there are hundreds of clubs or thousands of clubs and one club says, you know what, we really like this slavery idea that's going to work really well for us and we're going to go off on this tension, or some say destructive tension. Well, you know, I mean, how do you, how does a healthy family or a healthy group of friends deal with issues like this? You know, how do organisms deal with issues like this? You can put pressure in various ways on an organism that is being antisocial, you know, or an individual in your family, a brother that's being anti-violent or antisocial. There's various ways you can try to pressure them maybe to behave more socially appropriately or something. So that would be part of the conceptualizing and the design of these frameworks, is how do you deal with problems when some club is misbehaving or some individual in a club is misbehaving. There ought to be, that ought to be well thought out so you have a procedure that you follow when things like that happen, right? But just off the top of my head, there would be many things you might do. Say a club was, you know, somehow turned rogue like a cancer in this community. Well, you can decide not to trade with it. You can, all the other clubs can say, you know what, this is not part of our larger community, this isn't right, this doesn't work, and we're going to exile you, you know, I mean, various things you might do, but all of these have to be given thought of how do you deal with situations that arise. And, you know, there could well be reasonable ways that through communication, through, you know, through other means that you could start to harmonize the whole if it's in a state of disharmony. Thanks. Obviously, obviously the human body does that, right? I mean, the human, there's trillions of cells in the human body and somehow they basically all work together. And on a rare occasion, some cells decide not to. And we might call that a cancer. So, you know, that answers can happen. And how do you then the question becomes, how do you prevent cancer from happening? And obviously, what I would say, obviously one way is to keep the organism healthy, you know, keep it, keep it all healthy. And that helps keep communications open, you know, that helps. And then if the cancer still arises, then, you know, how do you then we have to have a way to deal with it? Thanks, John. So blue and then Stephen. So, John, I just want to say thanks. I've really enjoyed all of your streams thus far. And this is like a huge problem that you've attempted to tackle here. And so I don't want to like approach it in a way like it seems like I'm a naysayer or like I'm boo-hooing. I just there's some extra components here that I think, you know, maybe you have thought about or have approached it in a very delicate way. So the concentration of wealth and power I feel in this country, and this is definitely personal opinion, or maybe in the world is like stems from some kind of spiritual bankruptcy. Right. And, and we've always had authority, like you talked about authority and societal cognition in the last paper, and you talked about, you know, how authority comes from either voluntary deference or coercion, right. And previously from, you know, the beginning of written record until now, and maybe even still now that voluntary deference and coercion both can come from religion and religious groups. And we've seen the God gene. Right. And so I know that like you've kind of sidestepped and produced a very agnostic platform. And I mean, I know that you also did talk about like the interconnectedness of all things and kind of bringing that forward in an education way and not a religious way. And I definitely appreciate that. But do you think that there it's possible that we're hardwired, you know, we have this God gene, right, like that we're hardwired to need something beyond. And that that if we had that something beyond maybe the concentration of wealth and power if we all gave, you know, if we all did tithing 10% of all of our salary. I mean, I think that that would equal out the world, just that. Right. So, so I mean, is it possible that that religion is absent and maybe plays a more central role in society than you've allotted for here. Yeah, I've not talked about religion much at all in any of the papers, nor in the series, these discussions. And I don't I don't really want to. I think this program can go and continue can move forward and reach its aims fine without without focusing on the topic of religion. Now, you know, because people people belong to all kinds of organizations, including religious organizations, they people get meaning from all kinds of organizations. And then associations. So good, you know, fine, that's fine. The the the topic here is how does a community cognate? How does it make decisions? How can we create systems that favor beneficial and healthy cognition? Right. So those two things can exist at the same time. You know, people can belong to religions and and participate in healthier systems at the same time. As far as meaning goes, you know, people find some people find meaning in religion. But in the I think it's useful for this project to also consider the the some of the ideas that I had in my first paper worldview. Because those ideas of like how we are all interconnected, how we are like, really in some sense transcendent ideas that that have scientific, you know, a rationale behind them. Right. That's useful to consider those points in the worldview paper, because that, at least in my in my thinking, those concepts are are central to even coming up with the concept of purpose. So what is the if we're if we're together in a society, what what are we doing? What is our purpose? Like if we don't have a purpose, why are we even associating with each other, you know, just randomly or like just to take advantage of each other? Like why are we even in a community together? You know, like whether it's a large community or a small community. So I'm suggesting in the particularly in the first paper that that if we come together with a purpose, you know, and that purpose is to thrive now and in the future, then we can do something about that. We can, you know, we can create systems that allow us to fulfill that purpose and that are true that are true to purpose the technology in a sense that's that functions the way it's supposed to function. And the concept of purpose comes from this larger worldview of what is a human? What is an individual? Well, how are we all related to all of life? You know, that's at least in my mind, that's kind of where where the idea of purpose comes from. Like, you know, we're actually together as a society, we're an organism and an organism is connected to all other organisms and all of life is connected all the way up to the biosphere. And our purpose and include all of that. So you could call that a trans, you know, a transcendent perspective, perhaps. And that might be, I'm hoping that might be meaningful to folks who might want to be involved in this kind of project. Because, you know, if it is, there's scientific reasons for all of that, you know, there's a rationale for all of that that we can explore all of that scientifically and otherwise. So, yes, people belong to religions and they can continue to belong to religions. And from my perspective, that, you know, those organizations will continue to exist as long as they're useful, just like any organization, just like any association, it should continue to exist as long as it's useful. That can happen in the club setting. You know, some people might be religiously oriented. That's fine. But that's not really the, you know, like the club focus, the R&D project, the design of new systems, the engagement of people in a societal cognition framework. That can all happen whether someone is religious or not, I would say. So just to say, did I sidestep it well enough there? Can I just ask a quick follow up? So definitely in the societal cognition, I mean, I just think that we have to factor in the role that religion plays in the societal cognition, because we do voluntary deference and coercion through religion. And I think that it's something that if people ascribe to a religious practice, that we have to allow for that and examine what role that will have on societal cognition at large, like whether they're part of a religious organization or not, or whatever. Sure, those are fine questions. Does religion A in some ways impact the capacity of these systems to function in the way we're thinking they could function? That's a fair question. That's a sign to the question. Or perhaps examining the framework through the lens of each religion would be maybe useful. And that would be useful also. That would be part of the question of like, you know, is there some impact that religion A is having on this system? And if so, let's talk about how does this group see the world? How does that, you know, what's our differences of the way we see the world? Those are all fine questions. And all of those questions can be addressed in a kind of a scientific manner. When Scott mentioned that there's the buyer and the seller, but also there's like the umbrella of the trust in the sovereign in the fiat, you know, fiat Lux is how the book begins in some ways. It's a lot like a marriage partnership where there is a third party and that third party is the context and various religions have different ways to talk about that third entity. But it's so interesting how when we're dealing with identity and communication and trust, it is like we need to have a higher level scaffold. Now, can nature provide that? Can so-called science today or in the future provide that? That's what we're going to discover and discuss. So Stephen and then Lee and then Dave. Yeah, this idea of the environment and how we connect in to say a shared epistemic niche, a way of understanding. And Kristen talked about that in some of his interviews around, you know, even religion can help us have a shared, I think it's an epistemic framework or an epistemic niche for how we can align. And that then ties into, you know, how do we treat hidden states if we're going to have active inference. So as well as cognition, dynamical system in the brain and body, you know, the niche and where we are in the niche becomes a big part of that. Of course, what we're seeing over the last 200 years is there's more and more states that are being fixed in the environment. The things that we say we know are mechanical objects which will take over and get rid of uncertainty. The markets will supposedly deal with all of that. All these different and it leaves less of a role for trying to attune to hidden states beyond. So that that may be one of those questions around, you know, money being a classic case of that. You know, how much do we trust in the economics? And that will sell, you know, just a vote for the best economics and it will deal with everything. But where is that? Is that really a deontic cue? Like Kristen talks about deontic cues and cues in the environment like traffic lights that we just build all the traffic lights and then we just work to do what they tell us. But that's where that violence can come in that I think was also mentioned is because deontic cues will always win if they're very strong over active influence in a community. Because active influence in a community needs integration, it needs time to actually listen to the landscape. And if you can have deontic cues that say, well, just, you know, that's not needed, you kill a lot of that. So in some ways that might be relevant here is showing the benefit of epistemic niches. Yeah, in some ways these conversations are related to some of the points that Blue is picking up on. So you try to talk a little bit about this. So religion is a part of culture. You know, you can think of that as religious groups as different cultural groups, kind of, social cultural groups, right? You know, culture is really useful. Cultural norms are really useful or can be useful. They can draw our attention to things in the world that are most important and help us to avoid danger. And, you know, healthy culture is a part of cognition. It's a way to offload my cognitive burden onto the, you know, the history of this culture that has learned as it has gone through life, what works and what doesn't work, you know. So all, you know, it is good that say we had a large club with multiple subsets, so cultural subsets in it. Again, the purpose of the club is societal cognition, right? And we should have ways to measure if that's functional or dysfunctional, both in, are we achieving a quality of high quality of life? Are we, you know, are we, is our uncertainty about the future high or low? Or, you know, how are we doing? So part of that is engaging with cultural groups of subsets, you know, within a club or within a community, right? And the idea of all of this, you know, like what is the idea of cognition? Cognition requires communication. There's no, it's cells in the brain don't function if there's not communication that's going back and forth. Rich communication, right? So we can decide as a group, you know, we can study different kind of designs for systems. We can measure their success. We can, you know, we can, we can apply a kind of a scientific method to come up with good ways to ensure that we're, we can all thrive. But part of that is also allowing for and providing for and facilitating the communication between group associations that are subsets of any club or any society, right? I mean, the idea has to be communication and in a cooperative sense, right? Or else there's no cognition to begin with, you know, then you just have rules and it's who God knows who made those rules in the first place, you know? So we're just, all we're doing is like just, just look at how cognition works and let's be honest about it. Let's be transparent about it. Let's, you know, let's just peel it, peel back the covers and see how social cognition works and see how cognition works in biology and learn what we can learn from it. And let's bring the richness of that out and make it all transparent and fair. So that allows for subgroups to have cultural differences. That's important because cultural, you know, cultural subgroups will have a different perspective on how to do things or what's important or where we should focus our attention. You know, that's all good, right? As long as, as long as it's set up such that we're all able to openly communicate and tell our story and tell our narrative, whether that's as an individual or whether that's as a cultural subgroup. You know, there's a narrative to express to, there's concerns, there's desires, there's needs. You know, again, humans are very complex organisms. We have very complex needs and all of those, you know, all the core needs need to be fulfilled in whatever healthy society we build, you know, the need for association, the need for love, the need for helping each other. Like we, you know, we want to help each other. We have to address all of that and it just has to be open and transparent and openly discussed about what we're doing and how this works and how people, you know, how these tools and approaches facilitate cooperation and cognition or hinder it. You know, that's the experiment. Thanks, John. Lee, and then anyone else for the question. Yeah, I think this is a related question. I'm just going to read out just one thing from your paper actually. So in this paragraph, you say in a second order approach to active inference, if a society understands itself as a cognitive organism, if it understands its cognitive processes reducing uncertainty for the purpose of achieving a sustainably maintaining vitality and understands its social systems as a cognitive architecture, then given those beliefs, what kind of societal systems might develop and employ. So that got me thinking, is that, are those beliefs prerequisite then for everybody in the club? Does it need to be that level of shared understanding or can it be just held within a kind of a subsystem? You know, is that something that perhaps the scientists who are doing the simulation, et cetera. Right, right. That was a good question. Now, you, I think we should allow that if this R&D program were to go forward that, you know, it might start small and focused and there might be a focus group involved of those people who are interested in this kind of thing, right. And if it started to work and, you know, prove to be beneficial to communities that it might grow and other people would get involved. And so we can think of this whole thing as progression. I think that's fair. That's the way it would naturally play out. And, you know, if the scientific community is involved in this and if the scientific community is involved in creating and helping to, you know, co-designing new systems, well then there's going to certainly be a focus on the scientific viewpoint in order to do that. Communities obviously would have their input into the R&D program and, you know, it would, between the two, between the two, it would move forward. But I would guess though that early participants and early efforts would be focused, you know, would more or less align with what I have in the world view paper or else they, why would they be interested in participating in the first place? You know, like they would maybe only be interested because they can see some alignment with the goals of the program and the way the program is oriented and what it's trying to achieve, right. So quite likely the early participants in this whole thing, whether they're scientists or community members, might be kind of more or less aligned with ideas in the world view paper and especially the purpose of, you know, the purpose of a club or the purpose of societal cognition. Now suppose down the road, you know, 20 years from now, I live in Los Angeles and they're, you know, like, I don't care at all about any of that stuff. I just want to live my life and, you know, make sure my, I have a roof over my head and stuff. But this club is up and going and is doing well and they're all there, you know, they're actually doing well. My neighbor is a part of it and his life has improved in some way. So, like, I don't really, I don't really, you know, like, I don't care about any of that purpose stuff too much, but I'd like what's happening, you know, like they got a nice scene going on there that's beneficial. So I'm going to join anyway, you know. And so to a degree, the culture of it would change, it would evolve, but hopefully it would be, it would start with a certain kind of, it would start in a healthy, functional way, you know, aligned with the purpose of the whole project. And then it would evolve the way it evolves, you know, I would, I would guess that if it's beneficial, those beneficial ideas would continue to be the, you know, at its core somehow. But how it exactly evolves, you know, as decades goes on and as, you know, as 100 years from now, it's maybe, maybe, you know, if this exists 100 years from now, and if it's spread widely, maybe we're using very different language to talk about it. And we see it differently, perhaps. Thanks, John. Now, as the author, it is up to you. Would you like to shift the second slide for today? These are awesome questions. Thanks everyone in the chat and for participating because it's a conversation and John's initial inroads are tripartite and very provocative. And we're seeing that play out. And so it's a great beginning to a discussion, even though it's our .2 video. So John, where would you like to take it for the last second? Obviously, there's a lot of ideas in this whole series. There's just a ton of ideas, both superficial and deep. And if this goes forward, it's going to take a lot of discussion. And it's going to take a lot of people involved to bring different perspectives to kind of bring this whole concept to fruition, right? So we're just scratching the surface. That's all we're doing. We're just putting out some of the big ideas and then, you know, there's a ton of work that has to happen to make this real. So can you go to group four slides? Maybe slide seven, six, if you would? Seven integrated components on slide six. Six, yeah, seven integrated components. Okay, so maybe in the last little remaining time, we'll just touch on this leader framework and the simulation model that I put out. It's really, the idea of the leader is more than just an economic system. It is actually the idea of it that is put out in my book, Economic Direct Democracy, talks about the whole picture, the larger picture. But there is, as you can see from the slide, there's seven components to that. And they really touch on all six overarching systems that I talk about in the series. So economic governance, legal, analytical education and health, it's all in there somewhere. So the idea of the leader, that's local economic direct democracy association. The idea of the leader is an integrated framework of cognitive systems. The simulation really focuses more just on the economic aspect, because that was the really was just the easiest piece to pick up first. And the, in particular, it focuses on the, what I call the token exchange system, which is the first three in the list. So there's a, the token is a, is a local digital currency. So that the community creates and uses. There's the token monetary system. There's what I call the crowd-based financial system. And there's a market system, local markets, people sell, you know, credit goods and sell them in local markets. They also obviously sell distantly to people who are either in the local area, but not a part of the club, but also far distant that are not a part of the club. So those first three things constitute the token exchange system. And we'll just maybe talk a little bit about the simulation and some of the results and how that works. Maybe slide eight. Yep. So in the simulation, there's five aggregate agents. There's organizations, persons, the crowd-based financial system, local government, and then the rest of the world, which I call rest of counties. The data for the simulation, the initial data, it was from the US Census for Eugene, Oregon, relatively small community, small county population, 100,000 or something like that. And I used starting income values from the census data for Eugene County from 2014 or something like that. This paper was published, I believe, in 2014, so I probably used a little earlier data to get things rolling. Okay, so the simulation just, it really illustrates, it doesn't predict how the system would work. It just illustrates my thinking about how a system could work. And in particular, I wanted to design a system that could bootstrap itself up without large influx of cash or other things from outside. So that was part of the idea, how can a system bootstrap itself up, start with very little and grow from there. The second was I wanted to create an economic system for the club model where over time incomes became income and wealth equalized. And the thinking there is that money and the whole economic and financial aspects of that really is part of the community's cognitive system. So we're using money as a very transparent voting tool. It's like votes, carrying information about people's desires and fears and everything. Yeah, so that's, I wanted to show that using a stock flow consistent model, agent based stock flow consistent model, I just wanted to show that the numbers add up correctly. Like I'm not creating dollars out of nowhere. There's a logical way this plays out and all the numbers add up. If there's a flow from one agent, one of these major agents, there's a, any flow from one agent goes somewhere, it just doesn't disappear. So very briefly, the lines in blue are the flow of tokens and dollars. So a community is creating tokens as it goes as it grows, it creates more tokens. The concept is that the value of a token would be sort of, it's sort of equivalent to the value of a dollar. And it's made to be non inflationary. So let's just say for 2014 it was the value of a token is the value of a dollar. Purchase and power of a token is that of a dollar in 2014. And the community would create tokens a little bit in the first year, a little bit more the second year is more people get engaged. There's more use for tokens. There's more ways to use them in the local markets than there would be more tokens created and the volume of tokens in the local community would grow. And salaries for those who are members of the club salaries would be paid both in tokens and dollars. So maybe in the first year, you would just get a few tokens. And then over time, your share of tokens in your wages would go up. And the same would be true even if you're just say you yourself own a business, you know, people you would sell your if you're a member of the community would sell things to other members of the community and they would pay you in both dollars and tokens. I'm using dollar as the national currency. So organizations just to look at the blue lines again, organizations pay wages to persons. The persons might be employed or unemployed. I also call unemployed not that there's some people who are unemployed or not in the workforce. That's what and I W up stands for. And people who members who receive dollars and tokens as part of their wages and part of their income would naturally. They would have to contribute a certain fraction to the crowd based financial system. And that's the blue line for contributions to the CBFS. And from the CBFS, if I'm an organization or I'm an individual and I have some idea to start a business or I need I need loans for my business or I'm a nonprofit and I want grants. I can go to the CBFS and apply for a grant or or a subsidy or a donation. And once as a person, once my once some of my currency is in the CBFS, I more or less get to decide how that money is used. Like I want to support schools or I like this idea of a new light bulb. I like that business idea that this person came up with. I'd like to give them a subsidy or I'd like to give them a loan or donation or something like that. Again, this is all very transparent. And again, as time goes on incomes become more equal so that in the because incomes become more equal, everyone has equal amount of power in the CBFS to direct how the community spends its money. The green lines in this figure are dollars and obviously you have to pay taxes and dollars that the government's not going to accept tokens. So you pay taxes and dollars the government also provides some income support for people who are unemployed. That's natural normal. The government also provides some grants and contracts and subsidies to organizations. That's quite normal. And the organizations that are members also have to deal with the outside world. They have to sell their goods and exchange goods and services using dollars. So those are the green lines. So that's how the basic system works. And then as the system evolves over a period of 28 years in the simulation and I'll show you what the results are as everything goes round and round. We only have a few minutes left so I'm going to have to just get to the point here. There's some assumptions on the next slide. Well, John, can I just ask which of these agents are active inference agents or where does active inference come into play or could come into play with later versions of this simulation? Okay, so again the leader framework is an integrated system that has a governance component. The governance component has a legislative component and all the major six overarching systems are addressed in some way. I'm only simulating the economic part. So if you were in a real club and a real club looked anything like the leader, there would be a governance system that you would be participating in some kind of collaborative governance system to help decide what should happen in the community. There'd be legislative system and legal system and so on, education system and everything. So that's one way that active inference would be involved just in the process of decision making under uncertainty. And in this particular simulation, obviously businesses are having to make decisions and choose what they do with their resources. So that's another way that cognition is happening. And then maybe the main in this economic picture, maybe the main agent is the CBFS. That's a financial system where everyone is able to participate in a transparent and democratic way to fund those things that they think are useful to their community. They create the kind of jobs that they want to create as a community. Do we want lots of non-profit jobs? Do we want for-profit jobs? Do we want jobs in the manufacturing sector? Do we want manufacturing sector? Do we want to support this kind of business? Do we want to support that kind of business? These are all decisions that the community makes through the CBFS. And then if the community decides like, yeah, we want this bakery, this would be great for this bookstore or this farm or whatever it is, then the community can associate within the CBFS and say, okay, there's a thousand of us. We'd like this idea for this farm. There's funding for it. So, you know, go for it. So active inference particularly would be happening in the CBFS. Yeah, Stephen, a question and then anyone else with a question? Yeah, I suppose in a way you've seen a mix here between like in the red boxes, you could have active inference like the dynamical nonlinear systems of inference. And then you've got this message passing, which to some extent is then the aggregated system, the sort of steady equilibrium system, the pile of money or the spreadsheet and a message passing where data goes from one to another. But then within that, there may have to be another process of inference that happens, assuming people have any agency. It's not just all automated. So it's like, to me, that's probably where you've got system dynamics in that diagram. And then you've got these inside that nonlinear dynamical systems, i.e. the inference processes embedded inside. Yeah, there obviously is a lot going on there that we're not going to have time to talk about because we have like five minutes left or 10 minutes left. But just to give you one example of that, suppose that a group in the community wants to create some kind of business and they want to produce some kind of product, right? So they come to the CBFS and say, hey, we want to make this new thing. Well, a lot of information has to go back and forth, right? This is an information rich system. So if I'm going to support this with my resources in the CBFS, I want to know where are you getting the raw materials? How is that impacting the environment? How is your product going to improve or harm my sense of community or any one of the metrics that we're measuring? Is there any pollution? How are you going to deal with your waste? How much energy do you need? Do we have that level of energy like electricity or whatever as a community? Do we have that resource? I mean, there's an enormous amount of discussion and information has to flow between these different parties in order to make the kind of decisions that, you know, intelligent decisions that you would want to make in the CBFS. Okay, so in the few minutes that we have remaining, if you could turn to slide 15 please. All right, go for it. So these are some of the results. And I should say that some of the, right at the get-go as a community is forming, as a club is forming, you know, they would be choosing their trajectory. They would be, and this upper left-hand corner is an example of that. They would be choosing that they want income to rise to a certain level over time, that they want participation to happen in this club at a certain rate over time. They want to, they want, particularly the lower left there, they want the income target to rise at a certain rate over time. And obviously you can't just, you know, like you can't just flood a community with money on day one and expect that to work, because there's no, say with digital currency, because there's no place to spend it. You know, it's a tool for voting and if there's no place to vote, the tool is useless, right? So that's partly why things grow slowly over time, so that there becomes outlets for using the currency, you know, to create the kind of economy and economic system that the community wants. So some of these things would be decided ahead of time. Like here's what we want as a trajectory. Here's what we're doing as a community using this system. This is where we're going. This is what we're going to do. This is how it works, and if we all cooperate in this way, that's exactly how it's going to happen. You know, that's the concept. So it's not just, here's a system, use it however you want, let's see how it goes. It's really more, you know, we're a community that we have a goal, and here's how we intend to reach our goal. We want, say for example, we want incomes to rise to a certain level over time. And this is, you know, can this system do that? And if the answer is yes, well then here's how we're going to do it. We're going to increase it a certain amount every year, and it's all going to work out. And so in that sense, some of this should be no surprises for the community as they do a field trial. It should be working exactly the way they intended it to work, bringing them where they want to go. For example, when you drive a car on a trip, you know where you want to go. If you're halfway there, if it's a two-day trip, and on day one you're halfway there, then you know you're moving in the right direction. It's all going just where you intended to go. Okay, so on this slide, maybe on the lower right-hand corner, this is what happens over 30 years as the simulation moves forward. This is showing average family income in the membership. It starts at a fairly low level. This is from the census data. This is where they start on year zero at year zero. And every year, the average family income increases. Essentially, the lead is paying people to join, either because the income target is rising, and my wages are going up as the income target goes up, or I actually make a lot of money, but I'm joining anyway just to get that bonus, you know, whatever it is, $1,000 a year in tokens or whatever that bonus is. So people are joining because it is in their economic best interest to join. And as it goes on, the income target rises, and then family income, you can see the blue line there, average family income more than doubles over the 30-year period. So the average family is between tokens and dollars. The average family income is over, it's around 110,000 annually as time goes on. Now, I might note that the dollar aspect, obviously the community needs to bring in dollars in order for this to happen, because some of the income is paid and some of the wages are paid in dollars and some are paid in tokens. So part of what this community is doing is they're adjusting their outflows, they're adjusting their transactions with the rest of the world such that they're keeping dollars in circulation longer than would otherwise be natural. So for example, there's like a buy local program, there's ways to support local businesses and keep money, keep dollars circulating in their local economy longer. And in the end what happens is at this high income level, what actually happens is the community is increasing the number of dollars in circulation locally up to the point where their average dollar income is the national dollar, average national dollar income. So like today in today's world, the incomes are very, very unequal. There's a few extremely wealthy people and most everyone else is not making very much. But there is an average dollar, you know, the average dollar income over the country. And what the leader is doing over time is kind of pulling dollars into their local system such that they're just reaching the average over time. And then they, so they're reaching the average average dollar income, which is about 70,000 or so dollars. And then they're also have on top of that income in tokens, which the community is creating. So between the tokens and dollars, eventually they get to the point where they're having a family income of about 110,000. So somebody had said earlier that, you know, maybe it was you, Daniel, that I'm both saying that money is a different animal in this system and motivations are different. And in the next breath I'm saying, oh, this is a motivation, you can make more money. So like both of those things are true at the same time. And there's a transition period where we go from here to there, right? I mean, this whole thing just doesn't happen overnight. We want to transform society. It takes time. And so in this transition period, we might be, we might be thinking of money and income in both ways. Like in the more traditional sense of, I need money to pay my rent. And then in the new sense of money is a voting tool. And we all need to have more or less equal income so that we have more or less equal voting power in this community. Now, what happens after 30 years or 50 years? And maybe our understanding of all of this deepens and widens. And maybe the current concepts of money and economy fall away over time in exchange for this new focus on cognition and well-being and value of community, depending on how well it's thriving. John, is the code or the formalism available? Because people might tweak a parameter and get a totally different response. They might include another variable or another function, get a totally different outcome. How can we version this in an open source way so that we can be working together on something that's transparent? Yeah, the code was made of open source to be made available publicly back in 2014. And also there's an interactive simulation on the website. It needs a little bit of work, but it functions. So you can go to the website, principlessocietiesproject.org and you can, to some degree you can type in some different numbers and see how that all works out. So you can play with it a little bit on the website. But beyond that, this simulation is really quite simple. And if I were to recode it, I might recode it in a different way today than I did back in 2014. But the simulation is really quite simple. This is just a first glance of a conceptual glance of how this could work. And it needs all kinds of work. There's all kinds of ways that we could expand this. There's a lot of questions that need to be answered and we could expand the simulation to answer questions better or address more questions. So you can download the code that I put up in 2014, but ideally I think we would move forward and develop a more functional framework for this that we could try out different approaches and different ways to do it. Maybe on this slide 16 in these last few minutes, this is maybe one of the kicker slides you can see on the right the histogram of this is the starting distribution of income in the county. And then below is the income distribution at the end of the 30-year period. And you can see practically everybody is making this 110,000 in currency per year. On the left you can see how the unemployment rate changes. It starts at about 7% or so in the county and drops down to essentially full employment. On the next slide, slide 17, on the top left is the curve of how much money is in circulation in the CBFS over time. And you can see that about 6 billion in currency circulates annually at the end of 30 years in the CBFS. So again, this is a highly transparent, deeply democratic and collaborative way to decide how money should be spent in the community. And imagine, and this is a very small community of like 100,000 people or something like that. So this is $6 billion for 100,000 people to decide how they want to, you know, what they want for their community. What kind of jobs they want, what kind of, you know, how many nonprofits they want versus for profits, what they want. Like, you know, that's a lot of money and with that much money a community would have enormous flexibility and capacity to make the kinds of decisions that it would want to make about how it lives its life. Maybe that's the, you know, that's maybe the main slides, the main results, essentially income more than doubles, enormous amount of money circulates annually in the CBFS, and the community gets to decide, gets to decide in a very transparent and deeply democratic way how that money is spent. So maybe we'll end there since we're out of time, but there's obviously a lot more details in the simulation paper and anyone can read that to pick up more. Thanks so much, John. So we'll chill for a few more minutes. People can drop off whenever they want to, but maybe if anyone who wants to raise their hand and give a final thought, but it's awesome that the code is posted. Maybe you can add that in a YouTube comment because it'd be awesome to see maybe where this even plays nicely with the active inference models that we've been exploring in these recent discussions. So any one wants to raise their hand, give a few more seconds for that. Also one note about communication and Stephen was talking about like the agents active inference agents and message passing between agents. Also, we know that message passing is a mechanism by which active inference can be computed within an agent. There's a lot of cool papers on that. And it reminded me of some work that I had done in the you social insects in the ants, which investigated how physiological mechanisms that were inside of a solitary insects body, like related to the regulation of foraging over evolutionary time in the colony context become rewired to be playing out across multiple bodies. So the regulation of foraging for a solitary insect is all on board the fly. But the regulation of foraging for the ant colony is something that's distributed and it got there at the revolution and hundreds of millions of years of it working. So yes, there are failures just because one is seeking a goal doesn't mean that they reach the goal. Most ant species of course are extinct, but it does point to this way where the kinds of connections that are inside of an agents can be of one kind. And then the communications between agents can be different. We see that with neurons with ants with societies. And by having a scale free framework like active inference, we could rethink how communication happens inside and outside so that we can take some agency ourselves in designing our niche in our evolutionary transitions upcoming. So Dave and then Lee. I see some data from the actual physical economy in Eugene. Is there any interest in setting up Leontief matrices and running an actual physical simulation of the economy? So you don't just swap everything into money, but actually use physical activity and see whether you're exceeding break even over a period of decades. If you mean by physical, you mean like an actual club? Yes, that's where this is going, you know, like in whatever would take six years, 10 years, whatever this is ready. Yes, let's do a real, let's do a field trial in a real club and see how this works. But if you're talking about more like in silicone, sure, I'm all I'm looking at here is just some simple metrics about about this change exchange of currency. But there's all kinds of things that have to be exchanged and considered there's energy, there's waste, there's, you know, pollutants, there's, there's raw materials, there's human resources. There's like all of these things, all of the components could become part of a simulation model and should become part of simulation models over time. So again, this is a very, very simple simulation and there's tremendous opportunities to expand it and make it more meaningful. Thanks, Lee. I am sorry. I'm going to try and get two questions to the price of one. So my first question is given that there's, you know, you see this kind of preload phase. What would you see as priorities, initial priorities for research then to get this really moving? I mean, good question. And I wish I had a, you know, a clear path to let's do A, B, C and D and then it's all going to work out. But I don't. So we have to decide that together, really. I mean, I could, I could come up with a list of ideas that we could all discuss together. You know, for just one is that these kinds of simulation models could be expanded. But there's other things too. For example, it would be really interesting to just do a survey either of the general population in, you know, in one country or maybe multiple countries, or do a simulation of the global, in the global science community and just say to scientists, you know, if this kind of R&D program were, were available or were, you know, it was activated and there was funding available. Would you be interested in participating in this, you know, like it would be really interesting to know is there support for this in the scientific community and in the public? Does the public, is the public interested in fundamentally new systems? You know, those would be interesting questions. There could be media. You know, somebody should make a documentary about the concept of society as a cognitive organism and what we could become. You know, there could be art projects. There could be media projects. There could be literature projects. There could be simulations. There could be surveys. There could be assessments of say, you know, choose some community, some were maybe a smallish community and assess what is there. How do we apply metrics to their current fitness? What kind of metrics, they could be work on metrics. They could be work on applying metrics to an existing community just as a, just to get a background of like, where are we now? And how would we collect this information? There could be, you know, there could be work on computer models to be like, you know, if we had 50 metrics, how do we combine them into something meaningful for, you know, for making decisions? You know, like, so how, or on the topic of tools, how, what kind of tool would allow 10,000 people to richly communicate and make decisions together? And how can I give, how can I tell my story to a thousand people or 10,000 people? How can I, I can tell, how can I tell my story, my narrative, my understanding of things in some rich way such that it is computed and used by the whole in a, in a meaningful way? John. You know, a few ideas. Yeah, thanks for the answer. And live stream is a new affordance. It allows those to speak, but with 100,000 people, there isn't enough hours in the life to linearly hear from everyone. And so when we want to speak and we want to hear and listen, active listening, passive speaking, all these things, how are we going to make that happen at scale? So awesome questions you're raising, Steven and anyone else and then we'll close out. Yeah, I think the scale question keeps coming up, right? That's the starts to realize that's, that's everywhere, but often is, is not talked about. One thing just to sort of to finish off was there's the inferences about how to act in the world, which there's also the ways to get an insight into the inferences that we're making. So in some ways, I almost think this is giving a way to look more deeply and go beyond, you know, system dynamics, which is used quite a lot in population work, but to go into this kind of way to sort of say, OK, we're not necessarily creating these clubs to tell you what to do and to replace other governance structures, but to give other ways to get insights into what is going on in the influence process here. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. So this is, you know, potential, this whole concept is potentially useful for making actually making decisions, decisions for the future by a group, but also for individuals and a group to understand how are we, how do we cognate? How are we cognating? How could we do that? How could we cognate better or how do we cognate? How do we actually function? You know, like all of these are questions and all of these are open to assessment and, you know, like I could imagine thousands. If this went forward, there could be thousands of papers on all kinds of topics, not just about cognition, but, you know, that would include cognition, but how does it actually work? How do humans, how do humans associate and cognate together? What a time it will be. So thank you, John. It was great to have you on and the six appearances were just the tip of the iceberg. So we look forward to continuing the discussion with you, with seeing you in our tools organizational unit where we're really inspired to be working towards developing some of those things that you're suggesting that there's a need for. So thanks everyone for joining live and for watching and for the awesome questions, Yvonne, Natalia, etc. So we'll see you in the coming weeks with future papers and future discussions. So see you later. Thanks much. Bye.