really good success stories. But I think you find a lot of people who are gathering together to try to have purpose oriented for profit ventures. I think it's a very an area that's very rich for innovation. And then I think at the global level, especially with a lot of the work around climate sustainability, there's a lot of really interesting innovation and some funding, both for designing the systems and, and deploying interventions. And I'm happy to brainstorm with you guys on this. I think it's an interesting area and I think many multinational corporations and foundations are trying to understand this. So then, you know, just this with this one we can talk about maybe it's another future project, but I've been talking to the King of Bhutan, and he's trying to build a city which is sustainable and mindful, was its own new currency with a new legal system and using web three and I told him that the most advanced community I think, doing this stuff is the web three and government community in Taiwan and he was excited to connect and you know, there's going to be some investment in this sort of systems there. And I want to want to set up a I'm setting up a graduate school at CIT, and we're going to try to fund some research in that space. And by the way, this is it will get announced in December. So it's not it's not secret, but it's not public. So please don't post about it publicly. But we can talk about it publicly that Bhutan project it again, it's not secret, but it's not. It hasn't been announced. But But I think you know, that kind of thing where we take work that you're doing in Taiwan ring with nice government in to learn and then they bring corporate funders into a university environment. And this is, you know, again, a kind of a, it's not transdisciplinary what is its trend sectoral innovation, and I think there's a lot of incentive for people to experiment and work with people who are interested. And then the other question was, how do you stay radical? I think it's quite hard. I think you have to have a sense of humor. I think humor is very important because I think humor, you can sort of say and I think Audrey is very good at this too. But it is and you have to create a style so that it's it's, it's, it's comfortable and radical. And I think the thing in Dharma is doing a lot of this work on the community. But I think if you have community trust, you know, I think for example, I think I have a very good relationship with the Japanese government because I think they trust that I'm very long term. And I'm thinking about everything for the public benefit of society. And so even though I say things that are radical or annoying, and maybe troublesome, they know I'm not doing it to overthrow the government. I'm doing it to improve the government and I think you do that by just being consistent with your values and to show that the core values are aligned, I think is important. And I think again, I think you do this very well in Taiwan where you show that you actually are trying to help people and help this society and doing radical things and you know, and saying being very principled about what you don't agree with and what you agree with it. I think that it's still dangerous theoretical, but, but I think the important thing is is you know, that, that you have a long term alignment and hopefully eventually the long term alignment with the planet is enough to be trusted. But right now, I think we're in a period of, of nationalism. So I think that's a it is complicated, but I'd love to talk more about that as well. Thank you.
I think we're already running out of time, but this is it is possible that we switch to another link and continue to continue the conversation. Just want to check in with you guys. Oh, that's too long of a call for you guys.
If it's okay to continue, while longer my hard stop. Is within about an hour so
great, so we have another hour with you. That that's great. Um, that's hop on another Google meet that Billy your town just posted. In the chat here. It's me
hello.
I think most people are already joining
let me paste over the follow up questions we got from the last cat falling up on the the former question Joy already covered. First one is kind of a following question. Does Media Lab even intend to influence cultural wise either institution or department in an MIT dot you are muted.
At least when I was there. My goal was to influence others by changing yourself so I tried not to tell other people what to do. But you know, we did the first gender neutral bathrooms in all of MIT and we just did it, you know, we broke the rule and just did it and then other people copied, you know, and so, so for us, we hope that we would have an influence, but that people will pick the pieces that they they liked and and we when we got attacked, we would defend ourselves but I think but I don't think we were we were trying to prescriptively change although we tried to change all of them it but I think I don't think we were successful. And then the transition and centralized capital you mentioned determine how so yeah, so I think now you know so getting away from MIT media lab specifically I for me, I think that what's important is Danella meadows, levers for change where she talks about you can change the rules you can change incentives when you say incentives or feels to me sometimes like carbon credits or like nudges and stuff like that, and I think that helps. But I think you you have to change the goal. And so I think that you change the goals through culture, and I think that if everyone doesn't want to invest in or buy things from companies that have bad values, I think that changes the incentive of the company because no one buys the products, no one invest in the company. And I think with web three and AI, we can have extreme transparency, and extreme programmability of money. So if we say I don't want any of my retirement money to go into bad companies, and I don't want to buy anything from bad companies, and here's my definition of bad companies. And I also don't want to put any money in anything that's not transparent about their values, and it's all audited and it's all on chain, and then suddenly bad. Companies, you know, our definition can get resources. And the flip side is I can say I want all of my money, even if it doesn't make as high returns, if even if it's minus 10% returns. I wanted to go into companies that do positive social development that use web three tools and you can basically if we can express our preferences in purchasing an investment, then I think that the people will have the power. And right now between our money and the expression of preferences, you have fund managers and bullshit media so the money isn't acting on our behalf, but I think that can change. So that that's sort of mid term, but I think that's why I'm glad you picked up the accounting. I think that changing the accounting is how you fix the voice of the people in the money but the problem also though, is because the social media right now is also managed in a not so helpful way. I think social media needs to help us facilitate and come up with long term goals and consensus. But the problem right now is I think a lot of people's preferences are biased by the media consumption, which is short term and commercial. But despite that, I think we see a movement of people who are more socially conscious, but I think that that's also a key thing is that when you because when you don't, because I think some of the system feeds you what you want, but what you want is what you want to want or what do you want, like I want to be but I don't want to want a cookie, I want to want to go to the gym, you know, and I want to be strong. I want to get a PhD but maybe every day you don't want to study so. So I think what you want is a media in a social system that pushes people to be the best versions of themselves, and then express those wants in the preferences and I think change from pattern. That's the other problem is I think just giving people what they want is actually can be corrupted. I think that's and that requires things like awareness and philosophy and community and stuff like that. So coming up with a social communication platform, and I think this is what bull is in a lot of the work that you're doing in Taiwan is I think so impressive because it's really trying to help society become the best version of itself. And I don't think anywhere really has that. That kind of incentive. That's the problem with incentive if you have big companies, which are incentivized for short term returns, creating the medium of communication, the overall goal of the system is wrong. So I think the key thing about having something like the Taiwanese government team in the middle is that that government theoretically has the right, higher level incentive to make everyone thinking long term and building trust. And so even if it's hard to resource AI with three at the government level I think that this is such an important experiment because you have it as as the government isn't competing with its anybody. It's competing, it's trying to build the right system. Whereas you know, Facebook and Twitter and all these guys are competing with each other on short term returns. So it's difficult to imagine how that will produce the right kind of incentives in the architecture. So I think you have a very important mandate.
We read a lot about like changing the culture as I click on donation of any any basically any practice of change. I think, from from our side. We basically all agree we can't all I'm not representing everyone but many of us actually agree with that. But it's just like it takes a lot of time which means that you need to be very, very you need to have the love have patience, live with whatever you are working on. Maybe the change is not something you can witness within your lifetime or within the case or so. But just being optimistic in general. Yeah, that's just I mean, that's very impressive. To me. I know mastering already prepared some questions. You want to go through some of your questions?
Yeah, because we don't have much time. So I will just ask one or two questions. The first question is, is the alternative educational pathway for Internet activist? And because in this month, Vitalik has visited Taiwan and engage in our study group with us, and I think that it seems to you odd return and batalik share the common threads in your upbringing. All of you have experienced automative educational pathway and it be it is through Internet communities, hippie cultures or digital nomad lifestyles, and have subsequently exerted considerable influence or on traditional systems. So how do you see the possibility of redefining educational pathway for the younger generations?
So So I think an important part is to look at the system and realize that most people are so the people often go to university to get a job. And the workplace in the companies sort of define what they're looking for, which then defines what is being produced. And so I think that you can't look at the educational system in isolation from the workplace. And, you know, and I think that, you know, if to be able to survive an alternative education system, you have to have very brave parents, and you have to be somewhat privileged to be able to drop out without your parents getting upset. So I think that in the My mother was very supportive of us. So I think it's, it's not it's very difficult, you know, and also, I think that you have a little bit of survivorship bias. I think, Audrey me and Vitalik got lucky. But I think for most people, it's easier if you have a degree and you get a job. And so I think that you can't you shouldn't design a system where it causes too much pain and risk for everyone. It's not sustainable. So I think that was one thing. It's important. And I think in order to do that, I think that we need to change the workplace. And we need to change how assessments occur. We need to change the diversity of the workplace. And I think one of the things that's key is, and this is a longer term project, but like whether it's the assessment process for the working style that has changed before we will see the universities changing the way that they do degrees and assessments. So assessments is one path and I think there are some interesting movements around qualification frameworks and around instead of doing testing is the other way to model what people do and what the capabilities are. And I think that, again, is related to web three and accounting and AI and so so I think that's an important area to do. Having said that, I think that you know, there are people and institutions and workplaces that are kind of alternative and for the people who are going to not fit in the system anyway. So like, for me, I was really not very good at university and so I didn't have any choice other than to make my own educational system and for those kinds of people, I think we can create alternative paths. I think media lab was one of those places. I'm trying to create that kind of thing at CIT. There's a field that my sister helped develop called connected learning, which is the idea that a lot of the work that you do is outside of the school, but can you connect to the work that you do online, the work that you do in a museum or in, you know, computer club, and for credit back in the main system, and how do you sort of express what people are learning outside of the system and how do you facilitate sharing of credentials and knowledge? And I do think that the credentialing badging systems can help people with informal education get credit for the work. And I think the other part that's important is fear learning. And so the web three class that we did at CIT recently, we issued a token. But what was interesting is we incentivize people to help each other to teach so actually, you got more reward for teaching than you did for learning. You know, and I think that creating an environment for learning is actually probably more important than creating a competitive environment to teach yourself. It's kind of and I think this you guys seem to be doing this quite well. I think this book club is very important, but like if we were to take this book club, and if I were to try to hack it. Now, what I would probably do is to attach it somewhere to a formal educational institution that can provide credentials for people who want that and I'd be happy to discuss maybe we provide a credentialing process with CIT or maybe work with a university in Taiwan and I know that how and the Tao team on our side machine is working with you guys about kind of using D IDs and NF T's for credentialing but see if we can get some companies to formally recognize that credential. Figure out if we could do some formal publishing. One of the things that I wanted to talk about at some point was I was talking to Amy Grant, who runs MIT Press. And when I was at MIT, I created a journal called Journal of design and science. But after I left it, it stopped. So she said she gave it to us if I can find the publishers I've been thinking about restarting it, and maybe we can do it as a collaboration between Taiwan and ncid. But if we can put together education, editorial board, if we can create an academic publishing platform, so some sort of hack to the API's of academic publishing academic credentials, those job credentials, and then using the kind of peer learning, I think that that's, that's also a thing that we can do. And I think this project that we're working on right now, I think would be a potential thing. I'm trying to create a graduate program from 2025, which will be interdisciplinary program master and PhD. And that could be another thing is if we could find a few people in this community who wants to do a master PhD around some topics, that's it, maybe we can design it to be more participatory, and we I've been discussing with several academics about why we can't have multi author dissertations. So maybe we could try hacking, and creating a multi author, PhD dissertation or something like that. So So I think these are some things we can try hacking and I think you have the critical mass to do it, so I'd be happy to discuss this.
I feel like we're already doing the multi author dissertation thing. So recently that this group, basically it is on Taiwan. We are so inspired by like clarity Taipei and like all three and Gladwell, they're doing your book Lartigue dotnet. There's a whole chapter on like the view from your son basically wanting like us to share the experience from Taiwan and how Taiwan approach digital democracy as the path forward for a future and we like the whole group here basically decided that we want to forge a version of that and just basically create our own version of the book. So that there's like more diverse perspective being included because within the book structure, there's already some limitation and the framework doesn't really, like suits us. So I feel like that's definitely something we can explore on and if Joy already have some of the thinking around, like, basically LinkedIn, how can the API of all these different credentials and stuff maybe we can all get another degree after reading that? writing that book, of which will be amazing. We got another question here. From Adler was a shared vision of transforming academia and knowledge production system. I wonder, where are you? Where are you now after five years publishing your dissertation as you take over the prominent leadership role at Cid, and what what are your plans to implement your vision?
Yeah, so I think I shared some of it. But I think that, again, I think thinking more collaboratively. No, I think what would be very interesting for me is I'm literally in the process of designing this graduate program. And just to give you a little bit more again, this is still very sketchy. To give you kind of what I'm trying to do is to officially do PhD you have to have a a PhD advisor, that's a permanent faculty member. So I'm trying to come up with a fellowship where we have I have a small group of PhD advisors in my new graduate program, and then that we have senior researchers and junior researchers. So senior researchers will be researchers who can who want to advise a student on a PhD and, but isn't a professor and then a Junior fellow is somebody who wants to get a masters or PhD. And so I have a combination one of my professors who does most of these administrative work of PhD or masters and then the domain advisor so that could be you know, Audrey, or it could be somebody else. And then a junior person who's going to do the work of the research and the writing and it could be a team. So this is the thing that could be interesting. So we have a multiple team, and then the CIT can submit the credential, the masters of giftees I have just started negotiating this architecture with the Ministry of Education is quite. And then the idea is to bring all these people from international network so and then I think if we can prototype it, we can then obviously do it open source and sharing. I'd be interested in talking to a Taiwanese university if you have one that you think might be interested in this experiment, but, but the idea that, again, just to simplify that you have one formal professor who says making sure that the PhD adheres to the protocol of academia, and then a senior researcher who makes sure that the junior researcher is being advised and can provide kind of mentoring, and then the junior researchers doing the work and again, think about having multiple senior researchers as well as multiple Junior researchers. And then coming up with a publishing framework and the publishing framework together with Media Lab at MIT Press. We created a group of knowledge features group, and they have a platform called Pub Pub, and they're trying to break slash fix academic publishing because in the West, it's all owned by Elsevier, these big academic publishers, and all of the tools for managing this has been acquired, and they basically are extracting huge rents. So we're trying to redo that and build an open source platform for academic publishing. And this is a very American centric group. But we want to make this international so I'm starting to think about doing an academic publishing all stack. And I'd be happy to bring that team over as well. This is mainly based at MIT. But we can we can work this and this could be maybe a Taiwan, Japan collaboration with CIT and some institution there. We can bring other people in. The difficult thing, as you know, if you're academic is you have super rigorous scientific academics and they're very fussy. And it's it's important to go deep when you're doing a discipline because I think that you know, that's how you move things like science forward. And so the interoperability and the relationship with rigorous deep domain discipline and this transdisciplinary This is always the difficult thing, even for media lab because I think the rest of MIT Media Lab was flashy and shallow. And what we would do is we would pick the people from the disciplines that were open minded and report them into the Media Lab, but it was often difficult to incentivize, or to capture these people who are just drilling down, down, down, down, down. And so I think that's we came up with one design, but I think we need to figure out how to because it's kind of a it's kind of a union, you know, you have to have mutual respect, I think you'll find the disciplinary people who respect the value of trans discipline. And you have to frame the trends to some people who are deep enough to at least talk to disciplinary people, and this architecture of kind of the deep and the why I think we need to think about what is the academic publishing version of that too, because I think for real deep scholars, they don't want to publish in journals that are not like, high reputation, and we have to come up with a new credentialing method for this transdisciplinary