Redefining Wealth Distribution: A New Economic Paradigm, The FairShares Commons with Graham Boyd

Imagine a world where extreme wealth gaps are a thing of the past, where everyone basks in the glow of abundance, and society thrives as a resilient, regenerative ecosystem. This is not a utopian dream, but a vision made possible by the revolutionary FairShares Commons model, co-created by our guest, Graham Boyd. In our enlightening conversation with Graham, we peel back the layers of this groundbreaking model, designed to treat companies as free entities with their own agency rather than properties of the investors or workers. Graham's South African roots have deeply influenced his innovative approach, shaping a unique worldview that you don't want to miss!

We promise you'll be intrigued and inspired as we explore how the FairShares Commons model goes beyond creating a fair system for individuals. It aims to benefit the entire ecosystem, fostering harmony between collaboration and competition. But we don't stop there. We also discuss how this model can lead to a more resilient economy, replacing monolithic entities with an antifragile federation of smaller ones that can adapt to shocks and provide a more equitable distribution of wealth.

In this episode, we paint a vivid picture of a future marked by abundance and resilience, where the FairShares Commons model is widely adopted. Envision a federation of coliving spaces, utilities, and sectors creating an ecosystem that maximises antifragility. Imagine a world where nature is integrated into the system, ensuring the sustainability of our planet. It's a future filled with potential, where our collective success doesn't come at the expense of the individual or our precious Earth. So, tune in, open your minds, and let's explore this exciting frontier together!

Transcript

Daniel: 0:13

Welcome everyone to ColivingDAO Insights. This is Daniel, and today I'm joined by my cohost and cofounder, Gareth, as well as our special guest of the day, Graham Boyd.

Gareth: 0:25

Hi folks, welcome back, and I'm really pleased to interview Graham Boyd on the show today. Graham Boyd is the co-creator of the FairShares Commons, author of Rebuild and the Ergodic Investor, and Graham has created an integrated model for running organisations, the FairShares Commons is a critical pillar in this model. Welcome, Graham.

Graham: 0:47

Thank you, Gareth, thank you, Dan. It's superb to be talking to you on this podcast.

Gareth: 0:54

Yes, so welcome. So on the last podcast we spoke to Professor Rory Ridley-Duff about the FairShares and the origin of the FairShares and it would be great to get your insights into the FairShares Commons, which is kind of the latest iteration that you co-created with Rory on this model, and can you just describe to us what the Fair Shares Commons is relative to the FairShares model that we spoke about before?

Graham: 1:25

Yes, yes, gladly so. The key difference between the FairShares and the FairShares Commons. The FairShares is designed very much within the current paradigm of what a company is, as a thing to be owned by the shareholders, but with the massive improvement that all of the key stakeholders have a share of the governance rights and a share of the wealth generated. The FairShares Commons goes one step beyond that and it solves one of the root cause problems of the poly crisis that we're in and all of the intractable things we're facing. Let me say first what that root cause is and then I'll come from there to the difference. So when I left Procter Gamble in 2008, as a good engineer, a good scientist, I was asking myself why are really good companies like P&G finding it so hard to do things that are truly sustainable, truly net positive? And over the course of a couple of years, I came to the conclusion that one of the deepest and least visible root causes lies in, on the one hand, the fact that the real value of a company lies in the human beings inside it, in any typical working company. So a company is very much a way of organizing a wide range of human beings to collaborate towards a common endeavor and in that sense, when we take the definition of a company as a legal person really seriously, it means that any way where we're treating a company as property is the same as treating, at one layer removed, all of the people associated with the company that make up the company, treating them as property. And it's really well known that anybody that is being treated as property is going to perform deliver significantly worse results than somebody who truly has agency, and by agency I mean not only are they free, but they have the education, the support systems, everything that they need to work from their own inner motivation rather than from external motivations. So the origin of FairShares Commons was me saying what do we need so that organizations, groups of people, whether you're an employee, a supplier, a customer, whoever, whether you're putting in financial capital, natural capital, human capital, what do we need to maximally enable this organization to really deliver with the least use of resources? In other words, in modern language, what do we need for an organization to be maximally regenerative across all of the capitals available? And one of the conclusions I came to was we have to treat the company now as something that is free, that has its own agency that is not in any way treated as the property of the investors. The staff and a normal company is treated as the property of the investors. A cooperative is in the paradigm of being the property of the workers in some sense, and even a multi-stakeholder co-op or a for-purpose company or a public benefit corporation. And even Rory's fair shares commons is still in some sense operating within that paradigm of a company as property.

Graham: 6:00

And that's what then led me to FairShares Commons, as when I met Rory I realised what was lacking in my concept was the depth and breadth of this equitable distribution of governance power across all of the stakeholders and capitals that they represent, and this equitable distribution of a share in the wealth generated. And so we integrated those together to get to what's now the fair shares commons. Elements of that were ported back into the original fair shares as much as elements of the fair shares were ported into the FairShares Commons. But there's still a distinction to have a range of offers for business people who want to do something that is within what they can achieve right now, within their constraints.

Graham: 7:06

But the last thing I'll put in is for two things. I'll put in here the key message to take away is that this is about what is the most pragmatic way that we can achieve today in existing legislation of enabling human beings to work together towards a regenerative economy in the most effective way possible, in the most efficient way possible, with the least unnecessary causes of dysfunctional behavior, waste, friction or whatever. So it's really I'm coming into it very much as a pragmatic engineer what will get this to work properly, regardless of what ideology I may or you may want to have.

Gareth: 8:10

Brilliant. Thanks very much, Graham, and I think for our listeners the concept of a free company is a really intriguing one, and it's one that ColivingDAO enables as a FairShares Commons company to reach its full potential. And we know you grew up in South Africa. Can you talk a little bit about how growing up in South Africa inspired some of the creative vision that you have for the fair shares commons?

Graham: 8:36

Gladly, gladly. There are two key contributors from growing up in South Africa to the FairShares Commons vision. The first one is growing up in a system that was deeply dysfunctional. The metaphor of a fish not being able to recognize the water it's swimming in is commonly used, and the same is true whenever you're so deeply embedded in a paradigm, with the institutions and structures built to match that paradigm, that you really can't easily tell the difference between what is attributable to an individual human being acting as a free human being and what was really just attributable to the paradigm and the institutions you're in constraining your ability to do anything else, and the big.

Graham: 9:48

So the one big lesson in South Africa that contributes to where I am now was growing up I didn't think that there was any hope for any kind of viable transition out of apartheid. Many people today, and myself at times as well, look at the situation we're in globally now and think there's no way out. So the one big thing that I carry with me is having lived through this before and knowing now from experience that the fact that I couldn't see a way out was because of my limited ability to see. Because I was within the paradigm. There was a way through. Things like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Montfleur dialogue processes all of these created a significantly better way out than anybody had any right to expect or any data in the years before could have led us to believe. So that's the one. It gives me the hope I need, at least at a cognitive level, even if not always emotional, to keep going even when things seem absolutely impossible.

Graham: 11:14

The other big thing is that simple, pragmatic thing. So, in South Africa, the philosophy of Ubuntu I am because you are really recognizes that the behavior of an individual is, to a greater or lesser extent, and sometimes completely, driven by the entire context that they're embedded in. If you're embedded in an apartheid context, you may not be able to do anything other than what you're doing, unless you have extreme strength in multiple directions. And when I say extreme strength, I mean the kind of strength of, say, nelson Mandela, where he sacrificed almost everything he had and was willing to sacrifice his life to stay true to his chosen purpose. And so what this amounts to the core of the apartheid paradigm was if you have a white skin and the fact that I have a white skin is due to the luck of birth 95% of South Africans were not born with a white skin and lived very different lives to mine. But if you were born with a white skin, that gave you all of the voting rights in the country, which gave those with that luck all of the control of the country, which gave them control of how the wealth was distributed.

Graham: 12:48

And it struck me nearly 15 years ago now that we have a parallel in how we build business If you have money to invest, you get the voting rights, you control the organization, you control how the wealth is distributed. And that really brought home very clearly to me why we need the FairShares Commons, why it's pragmatic to give governance rights to all of the capitals and stakeholders. That's not ideology, it's just pure pragmatism. Just as countries run better when all of the citizens of the country can engage to their fullest extent in both governance and the economy and in society, the same is true for business. It simply works far better if all of the capitals, all of the representatives, can fully engage in the success of the business. And they can only engage fully if they also have an appropriate level of governance rights so that they can steer the investment they can steer today towards the future, the investment that they put in yesterday.

Daniel: 14:06

Yeah, I think it's a very important point as well, because a lot of people think to make society fairer, we necessarily need to compromise and maybe get a worse result, just so that we have something that is more equitable, more equal, and so on. The reality is just like you're saying it's possible. And it's not just possible, but it's also proven in many ways that by having a fairer governance system, a fairer wealth share system, the ultimate result for each stakeholder actually be better in the long run as well. So that's really a great concept and that's literally the foundation on which we're building. Koli Vindal yes, exactly.

Gareth: 14:50

I was going to say it really paints a picture of hope, right? The FairShares Commons is a company or organizational structure. It's not just a business to make money, right? This is the simplest conception of a business, as a business is there to make money for the shareholders and for the investors and founders. But it paints a picture of a company that can actually change the system. Potentially, yes.

Graham: 15:17

Yes, exactly, it's definitely there to change the system, and it's one of the things that I point at repeatedly in rebuild. All too often we look at two opposites, as if they're on a single line and we have to compromise between them or choose one or the other. For instance, we think that collaboration and competition are on a single line and you're either 100% of the one and 0% of the other, or 50-50 of each. The FairShares Commons is designed to enable, let's say, 80% collaboration and 80% competition, and that leads to what Dan was pointing at, that the way nature works is that, because of the high level of collaboration, every individual's needs, every individual's success, is better met, and so, paradoxically, high collaboration outcompetes pure competition for selfish interests of the individual.

Gareth: 16:36

Yeah, and that's really interesting. It's counterintuitive because people think that Darwin's theory of evolution was that nature is basically dog eat dog and the strongest survives, but that's not actually true. It's sometimes a case of the one that adapts to their ecosystem or their surroundings, is the one that thrives best, and that might be in collaboration with other species. Right, the animals can't survive without the plants, the flora and fauna around them, and so it doesn't make sense to say that it's only the winner. The winner takes all in nature. That's not actually true.

Daniel: 17:16

Yeah, and it's interesting that a lot of people forget the concept of survival of the fittest. It's not survival of the strongest, it's not survival of the most powerful, it's survival of the fittest, meaning the one that achieved the best fit with the environment and everything around, and what we're doing here effectively is we're finding a better fit right.

Graham: 17:38

Exactly, exactly. It's finding a better fit, also linking to evolution, as you were saying, gareth. What's becoming more and more clearly understood is that evolution works based on multi-level selection, not on single level. So it selects for the most effective warren of rabbits, the most effective ecosystem of rabbits and grass and plants and other animals. It selects at multiple levels, not just at the single level, and you have significantly higher levels of collaboration, say, within the rabbits of a single warren, less collaboration with the rabbits of a neighboring warren, more competition, and it's that sitting at the sweet spot, depending on how strongly interdependent the various components are with each other, that you get to the sweet spot of just how much competition and just how much collaboration gives you the highest level of anti-fragility.

Gareth: 18:47

And you've set us up with the perfect link to the next question. So we're talking about nature and ecosystems and Coliving DAO can be a federation of coliving communities. It's not just one coliving community and a federation of coliving communities can create an ecosystem because all of the coliving communities are interconnected in that structure. It would be good to get your input on to you know you used the phrase anti-fragile, which is a great phrase If we can dig deep into that in the context of a coliving DAO, federation of communities, of coliving communities. How is that anti-fragile and what are the benefits of having a federation of coliving communities versus single entities?

Graham: 19:43

Yes, beautiful question. So I find federations are far more effective. We're far better off having a large group of smaller entities than one massive monolithic entity. In particular, the worst situation is one massive monolithic entity that only has a single product or a single service. So have one massive coliving company that has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people living in multiple locations. That's going to be very, very fragile. All it's going to take is one shock to the system and that entire monolithic entity can collapse. You only have to look at how quickly Nokia collapsed when the entire market shifted from cell phones to smartphones and Nokia, as the big gorilla on the planet, was just not able to shift fast enough. Their first smartphone offerings were lousy compared to the competition and people just deserted Nokia. Similarly Kodak they invented digital photography, but they continue to focus on their monolithic chemical photography business, simply not realizing that that had passed itself by date. So this is the big issue of monolithic approaches.

Graham: 21:28

The federated approach is far better because in a sense it doesn't really matter if one instance in the federation drops out of the federation. The federation as a whole continues Almost certainly all of the wealth of the component that drops out the staff, the relationships, quite possibly the money, the intellectual property, etc. Will remain in the federation. It would just go to the other entities. And so it's much more like you know, my body doesn't care if a skin cell dies. In fact, all of my skin cells get replaced approximately every four weeks. It's built into the stability of the system that there's this constant decay of the existing skin cells and birth of new skin cells. The monolithic, huge organization cannot do that. It can't die and be replaced by its successor. It's just too big to die. That's why my body is not an amoeba cell scaled up to the size of a human being. It's a large federation of individual cells, each about the size of an amoeba, that collaborate in an anti-fragile way with, if you look at the body on the appropriate time scale and length scale, it's in constant turmoil of new cells being created and old cells dying away. It's a classic federation.

Graham: 23:11

So this is what we need to build an anti-fragile economy. We need to really get to a federation of companies of all sizes, but predominantly smaller companies, all of them built as a FairShares Commons so that they can collaborate highly with companies that are close to them in the ecosystem, less and less with companies that are further away, and that way you get the best of both worlds. Instead of big or small on a single axis, it's back to this big and smaller, two independent dimensions in a two-dimensional space. With a federation, you have all of the economy scale of a big organization. The entire ecosystem or federation is big and you have all of the agility, the responsiveness, the flexibility of a small organization, because each member of the federation is small. And when you really have the strong connectivity of a federation or an ecosystem, with things like fractional profit pooling between them, then you maximize the best of both worlds. You have all of the benefits of being big and all of the benefits of being small.

Gareth: 24:34

Yeah, and that's fantastic. And if we think about that on a practical level, say through the eyes of a resident in a coliving community, where there is, in the future, a ColivingDAO of communities, perhaps in lots of different towns and cities in different countries, what does it look like in terms of the benefits for that resident to be part of that ecosystem on a daily basis? How does that improve their daily life?

Graham: 25:07

Yes, yes. So this is the kind of question where, if you give me an area of benefit or a current detrimental characteristic of today's world, we'll find how the FairShares Commons and the federation of FairShares Commons leads to benefit there. But I'll give you a couple of examples that are at the top of my mind. One of the big benefits is at the moment, the relationship between the people living in a residential space and the people with money is to a large extent, an adversarial relationship. So you may have your own money and be able to buy your own apartment. Then you're in possibly one of the best situations in the current context. But even then, in most cases you don't have enough money to buy the apartment. So you have a big mortgage. So you're now in an adversarial relationship between you as the person living in the apartment that doesn't actually own the apartment and the mortgage provider that actually owns the apartment until you've paid all of the money back, plus lots of interest. Or you have investors that buy property and then rent it out to tenants who are living in there. Again, you have this adversarial relationship. So one huge benefit now of a federation of fair shares commons is that you completely change through the governance, etc. This adversarial relationship to one that still has some adversarial tension but that is complemented by a large amount of collaborative relationship. Both of you are in there to make this entire endeavor succeed. Now Just recognizing you have different roles and invest different things, and that works, whether it's large, monolithic or a federation of small. The federation of small gets so much more powerful then because you now have far more, far more degrees of freedom to optimize as the context around you changes. So, for instance, if all of a sudden some disease comes in, let me invent something and call it COVID-19. Let's pretend that something like that exists. That comes in and all of a sudden the office space, the need for offices, changes completely. Nobody's traveling into the cities anymore to go to offices and then back home to where they live. They now need to live and work from the same place.

Graham: 28:35

If it's federated, then it's very, very easy for the entire ecosystem, the entire federation, to continue to thrive, because it doesn't matter whether that empty room that is empty for, let's say, 12 hours a day is an empty room in your residential space or an empty room in your office space. It's still an empty room for 12 hours of the day. In that sense, nothing changed when people started working from home. In some senses, if it's a federation of working space and living space, even if they're different buildings, both of them continue to thrive. It then opens up degrees of freedom to build buildings that are designed to be flexible. Imagine a federation. You could build buildings that are designed so that you can easily extend out the apartment if new members of the family come in. You can easily convert office space to residential and back again. You build it for flexibility rather than monolithic, single function. All of these degrees of freedom come in when you get to that 80 percent collaboration, 80 percent competition point and you federate.

Daniel: 30:05

That's a very valid point and it answers the question brilliantly. More importantly, I hear most of the time okay for residents is very obvious to understand the advantages of being part owners not having the mortgage, not having the debt and all that Whereas for most people it's a little bit harder to understand the advantages for purely financial investors. What you say, I know, already partly answers this question. In fact, having more control in percentage points, let's say it doesn't necessarily translate into being better off. This is a very valid point. So if we wanted to go a little bit deeper on this concept, because I know that a lot of people would really benefit from really understanding the long-term advantages of being even just a purely financial investor in an organization that is set up this way.

Graham: 31:03

So certainly this is a better game for investors to play, even from the purely financial point.

Graham: 31:15

You mentioned control the way that business is currently structured, where the investors have all of the voting rights and the investors have the information rights, the wealth share rights, etc.

Graham: 31:30

That leads to a situation that is where the stable point for any company is where one investor has 100% control of the company.

Graham: 31:45

So there's a natural gravity in the stock market, how it works. That sucks companies to the point where one investor has 100% control. That means that the natural tendency is towards companies actually operating at the smallest size and scale and effectiveness that they can get to, because if it's tending towards one person as 100% control, that's pulling the company down to the point where one person or one institution's money is enough to control the company, whereas if you have this kind of collaborative competitive, the stable point is actually a stable point where each person's slice is as big as possible because you're trying to maximize the whole rather than your own control, and so it's actually significantly better for investors because it leads to companies that are more successful across all of the metrics, including the financial one. Now put in one comment that that dives quite deeply into some research in game theory which demonstrates that one of the reasons why we have the dysfunctional capitalism we have today is not actually a problem of capitalism per se. It's a problem of the way we've built our version of capitalism around pure competition.

Gareth: 33:35

That's great and it leans in well to your latest book, Graham, on the Ergodic Investor, the view from the investment standpoint where it's better to invest in an ecosystem than a portfolio of individual companies. Can you talk about how that might apply to ColivingDAO again as a federation from an Ergodic Investment standpoint or an ecosystem investor?

Graham: 34:05

Yes, yes. So the whole theme of ergodicity in economics, investment and so on is not that simple to truly understand, but the simple message to take away is that it shows that there is yet another flaw running through modern portfolio theory. That means that portfolio investing cannot deliver on its promise of a risk adjusted returns strategy. It just doesn't do that because it cannot see critical risks in the system. Orgotic investing has the potential to do that. What it means is a couple of very simple things.

Graham: 34:58

First of all, it's dumb to invest in single products, single businesses. They are guaranteed to perform worse than their own expected average performance. So, number one, do not invest in single product companies. Even if it's a big single product company, do not do it. Number two, it means that it's dumb to start up, as a founder, a single product, single company. Do not do it.

Graham: 35:30

Instead, invest in ecosystems of companies that are running with fractional profit pooling between all of the companies in the ecosystem. Start up companies in such an ecosystem and make sure that those are companies that are as diverse as you can get to. So it's also not enough if all of the companies in your ecosystem are doing exactly the same thing, just with slightly different flavors and color makeup. What you really need is a real diversity and, in that sense, if we have a federation of coliving spaces as the residential or property segment of a much, much larger ecosystem, that includes utilities, energy, water supply. It includes a financial sector, it includes perhaps an education sector, it may include a mobility sector, whether mobility is a service or directly building and selling vehicles. It includes perhaps an IT sector.

Graham: 36:53

If it includes all of these sectors in a federation of federations, an ecosystem of ecosystems, and you have an appropriate scale of a Godic ecosystem profit pooling across all of those, you're now at the same maximized sweet spot of antifragility or regenerative capacity or capacity to thrive that nature runs at. And we don't need to look any further than nature to see something that has, for millions of years, bounced back from massive shocks to the system. Nature is still thriving and yet 99.9% of all species that has ever lived is no longer with us because of massive shocks. And yet it still bounces back in another way. It's because it's a federated ecosystem with fractional profit pooling in natural capitals.

Gareth: 38:04

It's really inspiring to paint that picture of what the future could look like, and for us, we're really motivated to change the way that people live in coliving now and improve the overall experience of being a resident anywhere. Actually, the model could be applied almost anywhere in any type of living space, and not only does it change the way people live today, it starts to paint in that picture of the regenerative economy that you mentioned, that you touched on right at the beginning, and what this looks like 50 years in the future. It's not just changing the way people live, it's really changing everything around the way people live as well. Potentially and can you just talk a little bit about what that future vision might look like 50 years in the future, using companies like ColivingDAO? It's not just going to be us, right, but we're a potential bridge to that future of anti-fragility, which means things that bounce back and become stronger even in the midst of shocks.

Graham: 39:20

Yes, so super question. First of all, this is just one sketch of what the future might look like. None of us can claim in any way whatsoever to be able to say this is what the future will look like. But if we had all DAOs, all companies built following the FairShares Commons pattern language, we'd get to a point where, first of all, the entire economy, capitalism, would be sitting at a blend of collaboration and competition somewhere around 70, 70, 80, 80 of each, and what that would mean is that, first of all, the way that our economy runs today is incredibly wasteful and we're unable to address much of that waste. It's like carrying water in a colander and just trying to build bigger colanders and run faster without blocking the holes to stop the water leaking out. So, first of all, we'd eliminate most of the wastage. It means we'd be living in a world of significantly higher abundance for our actual lives, without actually needing to consume any more of the capitals of the planet. In fact, we'd be living in a more abundant. We'd be living more abundant lifestyles with significantly less consumption. We'd, in fact, even go beyond that, because we'd get to a point very quickly where we had negative net consumption, or in other words net positive where, just like nature, the more that nature grows, the more that nature grows, even faster the capacity of the planet to support more life on the planet. Nature's growth increases the carrying capacity of the planet. It doesn't decrease it, whereas our economy at the moment still grows in a way where the more we grow our economy, the more we decrease the capacity of the planet to carry human life, which is really dumb.

Graham: 41:59

And I define dumb as doing something that doesn't benefit anybody, nor does it benefit you. It's detrimental to everybody else and it doesn't benefit you. That's dumb. That's like winning a sawing competition when you're sitting away from the tree trunk end of the branch that you're sawing. You don't want to win that kind of competition. It tends to hurt you. We're doing really well at winning that kind of competition.

Graham: 42:29

So we'd be living in a world of abundance. We'd also be living in a world of very high levels of individual agency, of really being able to figure out what's my essence, what are my natural talents, what am I naturally really good at and how can I really fully express these talents in the best possible way. Each of us would not only be more productive in a practical sense and from a big picture sense, we'd have many more real Picasso's out there innovating in the arts, many more Einstein's out there innovating in the sciences, because everybody would have the basics covered so everybody could be able to tap into. What can I really do, would be more productive, and all of this would be being done in a way that regenerated the planet. It would also mean, yes, we wouldn't have the kind of massive wealth gaps that we have today. So some people, compared to today, might not have whatever they currently have through extreme wealth. However, that's relatively small compared to everybody who would have significantly more, and it's really going back to what Henry Ford did so well.

Graham: 44:09

In one sense, henry Ford's biggest innovation was not was what the production line led to. His biggest innovation was being able to pay his staff a high enough salary that and build cars at a low enough price that all of his employees could afford to buy a Model T Ford. That was really his biggest innovation. So this is the future. Instead of having a world where it only really works if you're really at the high end of financial wealth, we'd get to a point where the abundance is there so that everybody can enjoy, let's say, the Model T Ford kind of wealth. And I'd also add in one more thing especially this kind of FairShares Commons coliving approach. It really integrates nature and given that we're dependent on all of nature doing its jobs, that we have oxygen to breathe and things like that, we absolutely have to get out of this adverse serial relationship if we're to have much chance as human beings of surviving far into the future. And this kind of federated FairShares Commons coliving approach I see as being an essential next step to get there.

Gareth: 45:50

Thank you so much, Graham. I think we're near the end of the podcast, but the takeaway there is the future can be abundance for both nature and humans. If I was to simplify it down and have a takeaway message for that, yes, Dan. Any more questions before we wrap up.

Daniel: 46:10

I think we covered everything brilliantly. I think the audience can have a much better understanding now the advantages not just for residents but for investors as well, and what we mean when we say net positive. I think Graeme painted a beautiful picture so that effectively now people understand that we're not discussing a potential utopia. We're not talking about let's make society fairer just for the sake of it, but we effectively envision a future where nature, humans, in general resources are just a lot better off. They use better and ultimately, every human that is part of the system can be a lot more abundant using a lot less resources, which is literally what we wanna optimize and maximize. So there's a very clear direction that we're taking here at ColivingDAO is great to be able to utilize the results and the principles of your work, Graham, as well, so we're very grateful to have this opportunity and excited to make this vision a reality.

Graham: 47:25

Excellent. Very much appreciate that. I'll put in one last thought. We're not in the situation we're in because we didn't try hard enough or because people aren't bright enough or capable enough. We're in the situation because we're trying hard with tools that are not designed to do the job. We need to try differently, not harder.

Daniel: 47:53

Exactly, differently, not harder, really like that, and it ties in as well with the non-dualistic view. I personally really love the idea of not seeing competition and cooperation as two polar opposites, but they can coexist on different degrees as well, and I think this is a point we made before. But it's great to reiterate that we're not envisioning a society that goes against capitalism. We simply reinventing that and finding a much better way where we do take into account all types of capital and by removing this dichotomy or dualism between competition and cooperation, removing a lot of adversarial relationships like you described them, we are finding a much, much better way forward.

Gareth: 48:43

Yes, exactly yeah. Thank you so much, Graham. It was really good to dive deep and get really into some of the deeper insights and on your vision for what the FairShares Commons enables. So thank you so much for your time.

Graham: 48:58

Only a pleasure. Thank you, Gareth and Dan. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Look forward to the next one.

Daniel: 49:06

Awesome. Thanks, Gareth. Thank you so much, Graham, and thanks everyone for listening. If you haven't done it yet, make sure you subscribe to this podcast, because we are coming back every week with more exciting content and would love to see you around, so we will be back next week. Thanks everyone once again, and this is Daniel signing off for today here at ColivingDAO Insights.