This time we got Stephen Reid - a teacher, technologist and coach who is involved in a variety of projects related to web3, metacrisis, metamodernism, psychedelics & personal development. He has taught numerous courses including Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance, DAOs, Web3, and AI. Currently he is studying for a certificate in machine learning and artificial intelligence from UC Berkeley.
Steven starts by describing his background and interests. He first became interested in metamodernism and the metacrisis around 2016-2017 by listening to thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall. He sees himself as a bridge builder between different communities like web3 and psychedelics that have more in common philosophically than people realize.
Peth & Stephen discuss the concepts of metamodernism and the metacrisis. The metacrisis examines the common drivers behind global crises like climate change, inequality, and more. It's about systems thinking and understanding how everything is interconnected. Metamodernism focuses more on inner development of individuals with the idea that if more people are self-actualized, it will be easier to address systemic issues.
Stephen shares his insights and experiences, exploring the interconnectedness of global challenges and how understanding underlying generator functions can pave the way to solving multiple crises simultaneously.
Some key ideas covered:
- The multipolar trap - how even good people can be driven to bad things when coordination systems fail. For example, countries not wanting to be the first to decarbonize their economy out of fear they'll fall behind competitively.
- The importance of both inner development and compassion as well as designing better external coordination mechanisms. You need both personal growth and systemic solutions.- Concepts from integral theory & the book Reinventing Organizations - which distribute ownership and decision-making rather than having rigid hierarchies.
- Practices like authentic relating that help groups attune to collective intelligence and make decisions together.
They discuss the challenges of governance in DAOs. Having tokens be fully transferrable often leads to plutocracy, but more experiments are happening with reputation-based voting and other models. The goal is distributing power but avoiding the issues of both "one person one vote" and pure token-based control.
He emphasizes the need for people in the web3 space to focus on how their work really contributes to human thriving, especially with the urgency of interconnected crises. Overall it was a wide-ranging conversation about systemic issues and personal growth.
Metacrisis thinking is joined-up thinking, holistic, and systems thinking. It's about understanding the interventions in any domain and how they can affect other domains. We should create a culture where everyone is aware of the possibility of downstream consequences and takes responsibility for understanding and mitigating them - Steven Reed
Key Topics:
- Systems thinking and the meta-crisis
- Coordination problems like multipolar traps
- Inner development, compassion, and practices
- Distributed ownership models for organizations
- Projects related to the meta-crisis
Resources:
- Metacrisis XYZ
- Reforge the Ring
- Futurecraft residencies
- Metamoderna
- Reinventing Organizations book
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