Ep. 20 Community Currencies for Economic Regeneration with Scott Morris

In today’s episode we talk with Scott Morris, AKA the Token Jedi. Scott graduated from college with an interdisciplinary degree in political economics amidst the great financial crisis of 2008. What followed is a captivating story of Scott researching and implementing place-based initiatives, because as he puts it, “Place-based organizing in real communities, changing patterns, with real people, will create real outcomes and real value.

Scott is a seasoned veteran when it comes to community currency and I particularly loved this conversation because it is both philosophical and nuanced. We dig deep into what is actually within our means to protect the “main street economy.” To Scott, ReFi can steer us away from a shearing economy towards a sharing economy by making use of new capabilities that allow us to re-localize and re-circulatize our economies. These new capabilities allow for greater monetary pluralism and economic diversity, allowing for back-up systems and safety nets. 

We discuss why Bitcoin is important to the world, but also how Scott sees the commodity aspect of Bitcoin being a tool of wealth preservation, whereas the folks who do not necessarily benefit from this are those people living on less than a dollar per day. Scott poses the question of what are certain instruments and strategies to bring people up from the bottom and helps us imagine what benefits a community could reap by using local currencies. 

We get an update on what the ReFi DAO is up to, and discuss the ReFi DAO local node incubator: Alert! There is a local ReFi chapter coming your way! Go get involved locally!

Scott truly cares about making place-based systems for economic regeneration happen. I left this conversation inspired, I hope you enjoy it.

The Token Jedi's Twitter
ReFiDAO.com
ReFi DAO Local Communities

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

The reality is right. We just live in an exceedingly extractive environment and the technologies that were sold to us as sharing economy tools and we're just going to be able to, you know, have a stranger come, stay in your room and earn a little extra money right Even that has become wildly extractive and has not at all lived up to. You know, the sharing economy promises you economy promises that were made. It's more like the shearing economy, where we're getting fleeced.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Welcome to Refi Generation, the podcast that talks to experts and leaders in the new frontier of regenerative finance to examine how blockchain technology is creating the next generation of environmental and humanitarian initiatives. I'm your host, cash Upton. In today's episode, we talk with Scott Morris, aka the Token Jedi. Scott graduated from college with an interdisciplinary degree in political economics amidst the great financial crisis of 2008. What followed is a captivating story of Scott researching and implementing place-based initiatives Because, as he puts it, place based organizing in real communities, changing patterns with real people, will create real outcomes and real value. Scott is a seasoned veteran when it comes to community currency and I particularly love this conversation because it is both philosophical and nuanced. We dig deep into what is actually within our means to protect. The quote Main Street economy, to Scott ReFi, can steer us away from a sharing economy towards a sharing economy by making use of new capabilities that allow us to relocalize and recirculize our economies. These new capabilities allow for greater monetary pluralism and economic diversity, allowing for backup systems and safety nets. We discuss why Bitcoin is important to the world, but also how Scott sees the commodity aspect of Bitcoin being a tool of wealth preservation, whereas the folks who do not necessarily benefit from this are those who are living on less than a dollar a day. Scott poses the question of what are certain instruments and strategies to bring people up from the bottom and helps us imagine what benefits a community could reap by using local currencies. We discuss and get an update on what ReFi DAO is up to and the local node incubator alert there's a local ReFi chapter coming your way, so go get involved locally. Scott truly cares about making placed-based systems for economic regeneration happen.

Speaker 2: 2:52

I left this conversation inspired. I hope you enjoy it, hey Scott, how are you doing today? Hey Cash, great to join you here. Yeah, I was really excited to meet you in person at ETH Denver and get to have some more fun philosophical-type political economy refi questions. So I think today would be a really good opportunity to do some broad strokes of what is refi trying to tackle and how is it solving some of the traditional political economy problems we find ourselves in. And to start, maybe we can just kind of go in with a little bit of your background and how you got into refi.

Speaker 1: 3:32

Yeah, sure thing. So I actually grew up in the north of Alabama, which, in spite of the state's reputation, you may be surprised to learn, has one of the highest concentrations of PhDs in the country, and that is because we have a federal army base there and a lot of focus on rocketry. We like to make things go boom, and not always in a good way, so I grew up there. I ended up graduating from the University of Alabama with an interdisciplinary degree in political economics in December of 2008. Right, so into, you know, the nuclear wasteland. That was the post-GFC economy. You know, mid-gfc economy, gfc being the great financial crisis, naturally, you know. And what brought me to ReFi was, you know. Basically, I knew enough then to know that we were in big trouble. I did not know enough to help my family or anybody else avoid that trouble. Right, so the great financial crisis ended up taking our family business. We had a photography and marketing and printing business and we lost our home because my grandfather and all of his wisdom took out a toxic mortgage and they foreclosed on our lovely lakeside property that I had known since I was a child. So it really had a strong negative impact on my family. It basically knocked us out of what was the American middle class. So, around that time, I decided to hit the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by going to grad school. I moved to a little tiny town called Fairfield, iowa. It has about 10,000 people in it. They also have the Maharishi International University there, where I ended up doing a one-year degree program in what they call Vedic science, which is basically consciousness studies and the development of human potential, and I had committed myself to learning how to organize a community currency.

Speaker 1: 5:44

At that point, this is 2009. Specifically because I wanted to understand what was actually within our means to do to protect the Main Street economy from the next financial crisis. Right, because I was old enough by that time to be on the early stages of my disillusionment with America and the global financial order as we grew up in, and I realized that they are the people who caused this problem, not the people who are going to solve it. People who caused this problem, not the people who are going to solve it. So we cannot rely on the institutions behind these issues, right, to solve them in a truly meaningful way. Right, they have too much of a vested interest in the state of affairs, and that can mean, you know, politically, financially, technologically right, and along comes Bitcoin. Technologically and along comes Bitcoin Came in like a wrecking ball, and really I was excited about the emergence of Bitcoin because part of its stated aim was to provide an alternative financial infrastructure, a design space where we can create new kinds of financial space, where we can create new kinds of financial and economic models and, by virtue of that, existing on a blockchain, that means that any time that one community figures something out and they push that up onto the chain, then another community can immediately kind of you know we call fork it and you know make use of those solutions themselves.

Speaker 1: 7:21

You know we call fork it and you know make use of those solutions themselves.

Speaker 1: 7:25

So it told me that we had a bright future in the realm of economic systems design and you know the need for those systems was not going to go away, because the system that we have continues to repeat the same you know boom and bust cycle that we've come to understand as a feature, not a bug, because it consistently siphons wealth up from the bottom to the top.

Speaker 1: 7:59

So to me, refi is how we're making use of the new capabilities that we have on the table thanks to Web3 and all of the various disciplines that have emerged around making use of that, from making trad-fi solutions, on-chain to DeFi, to CoFi to refi, on-chain to DeFi, to CoFi to ReFi. It's really about creating the economy that works for all of us and that, hopefully, will help us avoid climate collapse. These are evolutionary imperatives. Basically, the sooner we have the systems that help us retain wealth locally, rather than just standing by helplessly as it gets siphoned away from us all the time, and helps us relocalize and recircularize our economies, the better, because we are wasting so much energy, resources and emissions, shipping stuff halfway around the planet just to turn around and ship it back again, and all of those costs are just being externalized into the atmosphere and it's screwing all of us. So that can't continue, and so we need a new set of economic and financial circuitry, and that's what I think ReFi represents.

Speaker 2: 9:28

Yeah, that's really cool. I'd love to just pull in that Bitcoin narrative a little bit, like just to start at the base right, because that is the foundation of kind of where we find ourselves. I think one argument is that, even though it is volatile because of price speculation, the issuance itself is known and fixed, and so people know how much Bitcoin is going to be out there, unlike traditional financial systems where people who are unelected have the power to decide when to print money, and some people call inflation a tool, others call it a tax on the poor right.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Yeah, yeah, I mean to me, when I was in college, I spent time like I got into political organizing, and that was in the 2007, 2008 campaign. While most of our age group was out for Obama, I was out there for this, you know, old ass guy from Texas known as Ron Paul, so it was really big on civil liberties and minding our own business when it comes to foreign policy and, yeah, that that kind of vibe, right. So I've been hanging out with a bunch of libertarians, um, and you know, caught on to, you know, in the fed and you know criticisms of the dollar through that community. Um, their solutions were, you know, what people refer to as gold bugs. Right, they, they love hard money, honest money. They've all the code language around it, but they just want, like, commodity based money, and it dawned on me that the reason why they have a preference for types of money that preserve wealth is because they've been born into that wealth.

Speaker 1: 11:24

When you have a bunch of wealth, then, yeah, you're worried about the government coming and trying to tax it away from you, and I realized that that was in stark contrast with, you know, the people that I'd met in Vietnam in college who were living on less than a dollar a day, right.

Speaker 1: 11:36

And I was more interested in what are the you know instruments and systems and strategies that we would need to bring people up from the bottom, rather than help preserve people who'd already made you know, preserve the wealth of people who already made it. So I realized that you know gold and silver and stuff wasn't really the kind of solution that I was looking for, and you know. But when Bitcoin came out, I realized like, oh, this is basically going to act as a digital store of value. This is going to be a digital gold and the libertarians are going to love it. They're going to go apeshit for it, and sure enough they did. And to this day, crypto is still having to reckon with the kind of libertarian, anti-government cultural roots of the space. So it's interesting to see people from other political philosophies joining this space and really tapping into other kinds of systems that can be engineered when wealth preservation isn't your only priority.

Speaker 2: 12:49

Absolutely. I love that alleviation of suffering kind of mantra. That's a really powerful one. I think that's awesome. And growing up in the United States in a fairly similar middle-class background, we had a really lovely life when you take everything into account, compared to people trying to get by on a dollar a day, so that's a really powerful way to frame it. So along comes Ethereum, smart contracts, the ability to have a little bit more programmable data sets in this blockchain technology, and so it created refi tools. What's your one-on-one take 101? Take on. You know what are these tools, how are people using them? We'll go into some of like the how to improve refi later, but yeah, that's just kind of like go down the rabbit hole and refi them. And political economy you know post capitalism, not communism, but those thoughts yeah, absolutely, I mean so.

Speaker 1: 13:45

My primary frame in this space has been around place-based organizing right, because my background was in community currencies, I should probably mention I piloted my first system in 2010. We did a second pilot in 2012. 2010. We did a second pilot in 2012. And then later that year, I moved to Ithaca, new York, where I take over for what was previously known as America's oldest and largest local currency. It was known as the Ithaca Hours. It started in 1991 and was in circulation until 2009, 2010. Kind of ironically, in the same period of time as it would have seen a lot more adoption, but that's. You know what happens to these systems, especially when the primary organizer moves away, which is what happened with the hours. So I didn't actually lean in with crypto. I kept an eye on crypto until about 2016, 2017, when I'm in ithaca and I've got a network of 100 businesses or so. We've issued, if the dollars out, into circulation using an off-chain centralized accounting and transacting engine where you could access your account on your computer or you could link your cell phone to an SMS gateway and you could send transactions through text messages. So that was really handy.

Speaker 1: 15:19

Along comes these Israeli-Americans who later become Bancor. They bring me a marketplace app where, you know, I can bring together the offerings of real goods and services into a marketplace interface and make those easier to afford, with local currency all baked into you know, one seamless transaction. That was a game changer, right? What happened was they? By working in that format, they realized, okay, we're going to have marketplaces over here and they're going to have currencies, and we've got some over there and they've got different currencies. How on earth are we supposed to run the exchange rates between all these little micro-currencies? That was the question that led them to become Bancor and create the Bancor protocol, which was the first DeFi protocol, where smart contracts are automatically managing money.

Speaker 1: 16:18

So I had a front row seat to that innovation experience. A front row seat to that innovation experience. I rewrote their white paper with some help from their all-star advisor that I also helped bring in, bernard Lietier. He is unfortunately no longer with us. God rest his soul. But Bernard was a long-, long time advocate for community currencies and what he described, as you know, monetary pluralism or, you know, really just economic diversity, right Diversity, and the types of money that we're using, the types of financial systems that we're using, so that you know when the macro economy crashes? Right, we hit the next bust in the cycle. You have backup systems in place. You have safety nets. Right, we hit the next bust in the cycle. You have backup systems in place. You have safety nets. Right, and it's way better to hang general side note here way better to hang those safety nets before you're falling out of the sky. Right, generally speaking.

Speaker 1: 17:16

But in any case, that the creation of what are now known as automated market makers with so-called bonding curves right, that was when my world really practically intersected with Web3, right, and so it began with a contemplation of okay, I now have the ability to spin up, you know, an automated exchange facility so that, hypothetically speaking, anybody can come here, they can put in some dollars, stable coins, whatever, and they can pull out Ithaca dollars and they can go spend those in the community and vice versa People with Ithaca dollars can go to it and convert out for dollars.

Speaker 1: 18:02

It needs to be, with a responsible system design, a little more complicated than that, right, in terms of entry and exit restrictions, but yeah, that's where it really started to engage and get practical. There's a number of other mechanisms that we can kind of factor in, but that's been my primary filter is like I want to create a regenerative economy in new york city or fill in place name here. What is the stack of doing that right if I want to maximally right develop this economy and recirculate uh, wealth within it? Um, avoid as much unnecessary, let's say, food miles from importing a bunch of food when we could be growing it right here and the people growing it could be locals that are hired to do that. So we're creating wealth on a bunch of new fronts. What's that need to look like? That was my kind of driving question.

Speaker 2: 19:03

I love it. Yeah, that really comes back to the on the ground active work that is fighting climate change and the social problems that we're facing, and it adds like a gamification layer too, in a way. I think that could be fun to get people to do the right thing. But then it also sounds like you're talking about ways to support local charities and have loyalty programs for local business support and kind of creating more of a cyclical community engagement.

Speaker 1: 19:36

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean like, so you know, just taking coming off of our session earlier, just still very fresh in mind. You know Gitcoin has grant stack. So what if we have a grant stack, instance, right for a city, right, or even just a neighborhood right? What would it look like, right for a community to have, you know, basically like an endowment fund, that it is allowed to direct right, that it is allowed to direct through some kind of democratic means so that they can invest in their own communities and improving their own quality of life? To me, this should not be radical. To me this seems like it's just common sense. But we have not existed in a political, economic and technological paradigm where we've had the capability to institutionalize that kind of thing. And now we have those tools and the needs are only growing larger and more urgent, I think.

Speaker 2: 20:50

Yeah, and what's cool about the Gitcoin model is the quadratic aspect and that seems to solve some coordination of funds issues where maybe our local tax dollars aren't solving those problems or it's not being addressed by local government. And so you're creating these tools for active engagement from citizens. And what's so cool about Gitcoins it has matching aspects. So if you could involve, like a local philanthropy organization to match some funds, then you could be really getting community engagement and to allocate local funding. Because also one thing I thought about today when someone was talking about public goods is who gets to decide on a public good? We saw the Jaguar token that region network launched was to stop a road going through Ecuadorian Amazon tribe that doesn't want a road because of the development and the destruction and deforestation. So a road is not a public good to them, but to other people a road is a public good and we have to make those decisions locally to really make sure we're not paving over people's wealth.

Speaker 1: 21:59

And sometimes that wealth is biodiversity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a very good example, yeah.

Speaker 2: 22:06

Do you see any SEC problems with this local currency model?

Speaker 1: 22:12

Not really. I mean, where the SEC cares is. You know they've got the Howey test of. You know, are you? You know, contributing money and profiting off the labor of others?

Speaker 1: 22:23

That is what I would describe as a capital layer constraint in the currency space. The different set of rules that you've got to worry about and that has a lot to do with how you issue the currency. Does it recirculate? Is it redeemed out of circulation? Can people cash it out for dollars, is a critical consideration. I mean, that's actually what it ended up roadblocking me from incorporating an automated market maker into the design for Ithacash was that New York State came out with a bit license and their primary criteria for whether or not you qualified for those regulations was can people convert back into US dollars? And so if I had opened up the conversion window, then I would have been subjected to compliance things that I was totally unable to handle. That I was just totally unable to handle, you know. So, yeah, I mean you do have to be familiar with, you know prior laws and those regulations for all the units that you might be issuing and circulating. Make sure that you're doing that with compliance in mind.

Speaker 1: 23:46

Cool, unless you enjoy having your door kicked in with the FBI.

Speaker 2: 23:50

Yeah, when does Ithacash stand right now? That's so cool that you launched it. What's it doing right now?

Speaker 1: 24:00

Well, I mean, it's a sad turn in the story. So, in spite of striking a deal with the Israeli Americans, who became Bancor in exchange for helping them with their ICO which, by the way, broke the world record for a single amount, for the largest amount of funds raised in a single day right, so in two and a half hours they raised the top level of valuation was $153 million. Okay, so it was not like they did not meet their expectations and had to, you know, tighten their belts or anything like that, but they did eventually go back on their commitment to provide the grant funds for thethacash, for a whole handful of community currencies that they had used in pitching Bancor and in achieving those fundraising goals, not the least of which was bringing Bernard on as the president of the B Protocol Foundation Board, and again, I had a hand in that. So you know, it should have been reasonable to anticipate that they would have followed through on those commitments, because it was not a large amount of money that they were asking for there. But then you know, it just kind of happened that they're really bad people, and what I mean by that is, two of those four founders are the niece and the nephew of Benjamin Netanyahu and, as you might imagine, that came as a bit of a shock to me.

Speaker 1: 25:36

I was unaware of that when I started working with them and it really came back to bite me in the ass. Let me tell you so, especially in light of the, you know, the Israelis genocide in Gaza, the world can now see, right, these are the kind of people that we're dealing with. So, you know, when you got a war criminal for an uncle, you know a little bit of fraud in business is just another Tuesday, I guess. I guess that's not how I do business anyway. So the cash is is like stuck, like there's, there's not really anything I can do with it at this point in time. If I could go back and do things differently, I'll tell you cash I would have gone to the printer money printer go bird, cause we had some of the finest note designs ever done for a local currency and the fork in my road was go after the marketplace app or print currency and I would go back and I'd print the notes in a heartbeat.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Gotcha, and then, with that quote, printing of the note you would have minted at the cash. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 1: 26:49

uh, yeah. Yeah, I mean we have the digital system and so we minted digital notes, right, minted digital units before, but these would have been physical printed currency notes. Really nice man, I'll tell you that's cool.

Speaker 1: 27:03

My graphic designer actually just called me up the other day like, hey, I'm doing a gallery down here in Philly, I want to show the note designs. We never got to do that. We only ever showed the front of the five at our launch event. And in this one quarterly piece done by I can't remember what it's called, maybe Finance and Development is the name of this periodical. It comes out of the IMF. They contacted me to talk to me about the system and I put the front of the one in that periodical. But that was the only out of eight pieces of art. Those are the only two that we ever surfaced. But yeah, so it would have been real nice, well, there's still hope.

Speaker 2: 27:49

I in my mind, I I see it, I see it the cash there? I mean, it's just it's got such a nice ring to it from a refi angle, like so let's just give some examples to our listeners. Um, how would these, if the cash, be earned? Um, I'm thinking um, you know, cleanups of creeks and rivers, maybe can earn you some ithacash yeah, yeah, we, we did a.

Speaker 1: 28:13

I'll give some real examples that that we did so. Um, there was this one winter um, this is actually kind of how we got started. Uh, there was one winter where downtown ithaca was, uh, a construction right, and downtown meaning like the downtown shopping district, the main walking mall lane gets dug up because they had to replace all these pipes underneath it, and so all the businesses downtown are panicking and their peak season, when they need to be doing the most sales, they're in the middle of a construction zone, right. So what I went down there and did was I I emulated a kind of an easter egg hunt campaign that I had encountered in another community out in iowa, where basically we took these little presents, uh, we, we wrapped, we, I got these little jewelry boxes and I wrapped them in a map of the commons that's the name of the area and then put a little bow on it and we would hide it in the shop. And so people got a map of the different shops that were participating. They would go into the shop, they would hunt down the present, they would go to the cashier and say, hey, yo, I found it behind this stuff, teddy bear, whatever and then they'd get a sticker on their map and so basically, the more stickers you had on your map, the more Ithaca dollars we would give you.

Speaker 1: 29:35

Right, so it created a fun way for people to go downtown, do their holiday shopping, look around and have fun, right? Give them after their kid or whatever, and it got them into a bunch of stores that they would not have gone into otherwise, which is huge. Right, businesses will pay good money for that kind of service. Just bringing in a person into the door for the first time is a major benefit, because that that makes that person time is a major benefit because that makes that person super likely to return later, right? So we did that kind of campaign.

Speaker 1: 30:13

We replicated that in the next holiday thing and in between there were a few different opportunities for people to earn. Obviously, they could buy the units, but you know, in these kinds of cases, especially as we're just getting started, you want to have engagement-related incentives for people to earn the units rather than just buying them outright, because it's a tough sell to get people to sacrifice their hard-earned USD, which they can spend anywhere in the world, or Ithaca dollars that are only good in Ithaca. It's a major difference in liquidity. So as much as local currency organizers the world over would love it if people were just like they just saw it and they got it and it all clicked Like, oh wow, this local money is going to create 10 times as much economic benefits for my community. I should definitely use this whenever possible.

Speaker 2: 31:11

Like that is just not a thought that occurs to main street america, at this point in time at least yeah, as a walkie says, a lot of people be brought into crypto by receiving a reward for positive impact and some people could be volunteering around Ithaca, earning Ithaca cash and then putting that into local economies and having a regenerative flywheel effect.

Speaker 1: 31:36

That's right, that is the aim right, Generally speaking. When you're in it for the long haul and you're there doing it, that's exactly what you're after.

Speaker 2: 31:45

A lot of what we've been talking about the last few weeks is the ReFiDAO local node incubators. You want to just give us the quick update on kind of what ReFiDAO is doing across the globe with these incubators.

Speaker 1: 32:00

Yeah. So ReFiDAO had a leadership transition at the end of last year where John and Daryl passed the torch over to Monty and Anna. I met up with Monty and the crew at Traditional Dream Factory outside Lisbon for ReFi Week at the end of last year and decided that I would join a DAO-ification working group to DA, daoify, refi, dao. This year and also because it's my background, I would help out with the local node program. They had done one incubator cohort, the alpha cohort, where they had about a dozen local node organizers step up and start sharing their strategies, different things they're working on and using Web3 tools. Now we're in the beta cohort. We got about three times as many, I would say, local nodes that are in there from all over the world. The general notion here is to help everyone develop their strategy for place-based organizing for economic regeneration, and what we've been up to there so far is one. Our first session was on purpose. So why are you doing this and the different levels on which that occurs? It happens for me personally and on the other end of the spectrum, the world is in crisis. We have the meta-crisis, the poly-c, poly crisis, whatever it is that people have termed it, but in the middle right, kind of the mezzo level, is you know what we would describe as a refi, local node, right, which is you know for Medellin, right? And what does that mean? Well, it means whatever we decide. It means right, right, and, and. And what does that mean? Well, it means whatever we decide. It means right. It can mean that I get a couple hundred bucks out of a get coin round and we have monthly meetups and you know it's an open tab for an hour and we talk about some web3 stuff and regen stuff, right, that that could be a local node activity, right, and it could also be you community-led hub for innovation around all kinds of regeneration and all kinds of sectors. And we could have financial infrastructure, we could have market infrastructure, we could have currencies, all this infrastructure kind of, in a way of the commons for those communities to, you know, take control over their own political and economic destinies, right? So there's a big, there's a wide range of you know what qualifies as a node and you know the levels of sophistication and those strategies.

Speaker 1: 34:53

So we started out with purpose, just to get clear on what is it that you're trying to accomplish. So we started out with purpose, just to get clear on. What is it that you're trying to accomplish? Next is stakeholders who are you working with?

Speaker 1: 35:02

You know we surfaced a canvas that classified those pretty well and helped get people started on that, and then the session we just had today was the first of three on the what, right the system, and so I introduced a framework that I've innovated and been working with since about 2018 that groups these considerations into five layers right, the compass layer, capital mechanisms, currencies and commerce. Right, the costs and benefits. And how does this all kind of collapse into a package that you, as an operation, are bringing to the community in what I call the cooperative layer? So that's where we are. We're going to have a couple of more sessions that look at the what and just surface the range of options that are available, and then we're going to start working on the strategies and the how portion of the incubator on the strategies and the how portion of the incubator.

Speaker 2: 35:59

Yeah, it's been really exciting. I especially liked those integrating the five layers of impact and you know, what we've been kind of talking about was jumping around local currency, right, and that's like the practical day to day interaction of people spending and earning and participating in an economy. I really like that you said. You know, currently a lot of the opportunities to get involved and to volunteer or to give back are very dispersed and niche and hard to kind of get involved with or stay involved with or collaborate with right. We can't be, you know, reiterating and building something that's already built in our own silos. We need to be collaborating. So I see that as probably one of the biggest areas for this coordination tool to work is really just bridging people who are existing in the world already solving a lot of these issues onto a shared modality or platform to really impact, amplify the impact.

Speaker 1: 36:59

Yeah, exactly, and you know, Cash, the reality is right. We just live in an exceedingly extractive environment, right, and the technologies that were sold to us as sharing economy tools and we're just going to be able to, you know, even have a stranger come, stay in your room and earn a little extra money, right, Even that has become wildly extractive and has not at all lived up to. You know, the sharing economy promises you know that were made. It's more like the shearing economy where we're getting fleeced, you know, yet again. And so you know, what I see as the greatest opportunity in ReFi, and especially around the local node, is that it becomes a rally point for those who share the value of regeneration. Right, we want to move from the degen to the regen economy, and the first thing we need to do is start aggregating the opportunities to support regenerative practices and business and other ways of relating to one another.

Speaker 1: 38:02

Now, where we get caught in traps is in thinking that this is a technical problem or that even a new type of money is going to be the solution.

Speaker 1: 38:15

Even a new type of money is going to be the solution. So I call this kind of the silver bullet trap, where we find a really cool innovation and we see how powerful it is and we're just like, oh man, if everybody did this thing then all our problems would be solved. But this is not. You know, given the size and scope of all the crises that we're facing all at once together, it's less of a silver bullet situation than a full silver arsenal type situation. So we need to bring that arsenal together and make it really easy for people to live in line with their values. So if we want to have a more regenerative economy in the future, then I need to be working with those kinds of organizations, I need to be spending at those kinds of business, I need to be donating those kinds of projects explicitly, because we can see that they are creating the systems change that we need to get away from a degenerative dynamic over there to the regenerative economy that we're trying to move into yeah, that's powerful right there.

Speaker 2: 39:21

Let's continue on that. What are some of these ways refi can continue to evolve from degen to regen? Where do you see some areas of improvement still needing to be made to kind of push the needle?

Speaker 1: 39:33

um, it's a great question. I mean, like the refi space has grown very quickly, um, and there's a lot of people who are doing a lot of good stuff, um, you know, I mean not not least of which is, you know, creating um ways to, you know, tap into the power of the uh, of the carbon market. Uh, so tokenizing carbon emissions and, you know, creating ways to trade there. I, I think there's an argument for uh web3, adding value to that over kind of traditional markets that have been there. Um, as well as you know, defining other classes of uh. You know ecological benefits that we should be focused on, right. So carbon is something that we have a little bit of tunnel vision on right now, and you got organizations like the Lexicon creating the ecological benefits framework right, which seek to break that tunnel vision to include other things like air and water and soil, and equity and biodiversity, right. There's more going on here on the planet that we need to be concerned about than just carbon.

Speaker 1: 40:45

Um, uh, I I see a lot of people learning from one another and finding ways to be supportive. I love seeing more and more public goods-oriented funding mechanisms cropping up. I think that's huge, including the surge in retroactive public good funding. I think that's especially valuable in a space where it's really hard to sell people on the front end of doing the good work, right Of like hey, if we go, you know, do this double, dig right this field, then we're going to be able to create the community garden and people can come and grow food and it's going to save them a bunch of money and people are going to get all kinds of health benefits. It's going to save them a bunch of money and people are going to get all kinds of health benefits.

Speaker 1: 41:43

You know, for some reason or other, doing good just seems to be hard to get traditional funding for, and having the opportunity to ask for retroactive funding after you've already gone and done it, you say, hey, we made the community garden. Look at the neighbors gardening, look at these dang tomatoes, don't they look so yummy? They're like twice as nutritious as what we can get at the dollar general. Right, like then people can already see that change and be like yeah, like that's worth 20K, that's, you know. Let's make sure that these guys get compensation so that they can do it again. Right, and to me, that's what refi is ultimately really all about is creating ways for people to have a livelihood by doing good stuff right, being a good human taking care of people, taking care of the planet. Who cares about profit. I'm just saying like what, what, what are we saving up for? Hell, get out of here.

Speaker 2: 42:41

I know all the wait till you retire type conversations is glancing over people's true agency and ability to interact with the world and I do agree with you. I think that was a really interesting take is, yeah, how can these systems be built where we can live a healthy life with, like the traditional dream factory? You mentioned that um love talking to sam and t-rex and when you guys were all at that refi week of just like they're building an area, uh, where people can come together with um tech being something on the back end, but they're creating food together and community and shelter and I mean that's valuable right there. That's a lot of value right. And that's.

Speaker 1: 43:18

That's real value, right. Yeah, hashtag real value, right. Like. I can go there, I can sleep there, they can feed me. That's real value, for sure. Yeah, but just on the in terms of growth edges, right, I mean, I'm I'm very biased, I'm not even like trying to hide it. I care about place-based stuff because that's where real change happens, right, that is where the rubber meets the roads and where traction occurs is in real community, with real people, right, changing their patterns to create different outcomes.

Speaker 1: 43:52

Um, and so I hope that more people that are engineering in this space will start to take that a little more seriously and give consideration to how they're going to plug in to something like a local node, right, some kind of aggregated resource for people to come in and engage with multiple ways of being regenerative, being a good region.

Speaker 1: 44:20

And you know thinking ahead to, you know how businesses might engage and you know various other stakeholders that they're not, that they haven't really been too concerned about when you're only designing for a global community, right, things change when you get on the ground and you start talking to. You know Jim, the 68-year-old owner of the dive bar, and why you want him to be accepting your tokens for beer, right, like that's a totally different kind of conversation than you know. We're going to hop on a Zoom call and anybody around the planet who likes this idea can attend. It's a different ballgame there on the ground. So I think it would be very beneficial for the people who are engineering these kinds of systems to reach out to people who are doing on the ground, you know, organizing, especially around social and economic and environmental justice, and to start asking how they can be developing tools that are, you know, really enabling and empowering, that work right, rather than trying to create another silo because that's their pet issue.

Speaker 2: 45:30

I love it. Yeah, that interoperability and cross ecosystem collaboration is is really where a lot of the blockchain tools can support existing on the ground and institutions and stuff. So yeah, I love that. Would we be remiss to not talk about, um, the zebra question?

Speaker 1: 45:52

basically like zebras unite and regions unite, and refi dow and green pill they're different brands on the same concept.

Speaker 1: 46:05

They're all trying to do the same thing, right with with with some nuanced difference, but big picture speaking, we want more regeneration and where we start out as a global kind of thing, you know these ideas are dope great. Let's take them into our communities. Shit. Now, what happens every time happens every time.

Speaker 1: 46:25

So really, what I'm I'm aspiring to do is to connect across those networks and to do what I can to help them start speaking the same language as one another, so that that interoperability just kind of appears right, because it just so happens that we're using rather similar models around how we're approaching these kinds of things and articulating it, organizing it, minting the hyper certs right. Like, at a certain point we're doing the same work and we want to be acknowledging the value that everybody's bringing in um. So that's been my, you know, worst kept secret, because I talk to people about it every opportunity I get um. But yeah, that's that's the general idea. Is that, like, hey, if you're trying to make place-based systems for economic regeneration happen, like those systems are what they are and require what they require, like it's not rocket science, it's a little bit of political economic systems engineering.

Speaker 2: 47:28

I love it To reiterate call to action follow what refi local nodes are being incubated and see if there's one near you, see if there's a green pill near you, see if there's a another regions unite club near you, and and then bridge ourselves with local organizations and non-profits that are doing environmental and social equity projects and and be a conduit for showing the tools of what blockchain can do to collaborate and raise funds and actively regenerate our communities.

Speaker 1: 48:02

Yeah, bro, you said it like that. That is really the sweet spot, right, and people who are currently in Web3, right can go and get plugged in with those organizations First, go to learn, right, and realize that the things a lot of what Web3 is trying to design are wheels that have already been engineered, and so we can go and learn from the work that's already been done and then, just like you said, is basically be an educational resource of like, hey, are you aware that there is this mechanism that you know might be useful in these circumstances? Right, so it's really as you become more and more familiar with the broader toolkit, right. Then, when you're actively in the community, it's like, okay, which tool should I introduce now? And it's really just providing optionality. We're not here to push an agenda.

Speaker 1: 49:01

If you're there trying to shill your shitcoin, then you're doing it wrong. Friends, nobody cares about your shitcoin. If you design a system that's good, then, yeah, the token will be used, but that's only because you know it was issued in recognition for somebody doing something that has real value, right, and there's real value elsewhere in the system that they might be interested in. It's very rarely, if ever going to be the case, that they want your token just because they want the token. That's just not something you can build a business model around. I can tell you that.

Speaker 2: 49:37

Yeah, scott, I love it. The uh degen to regen narrative is very important. Anything we didn't cover that we should end with, or further ways to support I think we covered the bases, bro.

Speaker 1: 49:47

It's been great cool.

Speaker 2: 49:48

we'll direct people to refi dow, get involved locally, and um definitely want to have you come back on and keep pulling these threads, man. This was a really fun conversation, so thanks, scott.

Speaker 1: 49:58

Anytime, Thanks guys.

Speaker 2: 50:00

Cheers.

Speaker 1: 50:01

Cheers guys.

Speaker 2: 50:03

Thanks to Matthew Patrick Donner for the ReFi Generation production, including the music, mixing and editing. As a reminder, none of this is financial advice, and feedback is the breakfast of champions. Please subscribe to our show and send your thoughts, critiques and ideas for future content. Be well, take care of each other and do something good today.