So at this point I'm going to I would like to introduce dr. Christine Drennan I'm very excited that she's with us here this morning and Here she is associate professor of sociology and anthropology director Irvin studies at Trinity University And how many of you came just because of Christine? Yeah, I looked like yeah somebody in the back you meet you meet you but I'm gonna read what's on her Little web bio from Trinity because I love this part Christine Drennan as quickly as she could join the Trinity faculty in 2002 So she made it to San Antonio as quickly as she could and within months became engaged in addressing San Antonio's challenges An associate professor of sociology and anthropology with expertise in urban geography and community development Drennan seeks to give her students and all of the rest of us San Antonians an Intense appreciation for where they come from both historically and geographically and help them engage in their individual communities She says once they leave Trinity, but in our communities today Her students often work alongside her in urban research projects throughout the city I can't say enough about Christine and what she has done for San Antonio I wish there was a way to map that and all of The presentations that you've done along the way and all the domino effects and impact that has had So I want to invite you forward But I want to invite you forward in gratitude and in thanks So if we can applause at the beginning plot at the beginning for the work. She's already done Thanks, Anne and whoa. I'm a walker. I have the nervous energy when I speak So I'm just gonna be all over the place Good morning, and thank you for having me and for having Molly and And I this this could be really the really fun morning Let's get off the picture. The picture makes me nervous But this is what this is what I speak about is is all the economic segregation in the city And as a geographer I've been trained as a geographer the question is always well Yes, you know we see all these statistics and let me show you those show you those statistics In the last couple of years and you've probably seen this, you know just in the newspaper on that on on the radio is that Several think tanks around the country have identified San Antonio as one of the most economically segregated cities in the country, right? So we've got the economic innovation group. They're out of DC 2016 and they keep repeating this study every year so the findings are the same is it? Equality scores run from a low in this little tiny town in Arizona to a high of that number We don't know what that number means, but in San Antonio, Texas, right? So they're running just big data sets and they've determined that we are we are amongst the top five I would say of the economically segregated cities in the country other think tanks have followed along Trying to redo a lot of that research and try to understand some of these dynamics The San Antonio Express News picks that up as they should and they and they write if you're born into a more prosperous part of the San Antonio community He has a significantly better chance at achieving professionally and educationally If you are growing up in a one of our more distressed neighborhoods are almost destined for life in poverty And this and and and these are intergenerational questions that we're looking at So the question is really got to be why why why is this happened? How has this happened? They go on and they write for the past 50 years 78207 district 5 has been defined by poverty inequality and a sheer lack of opportunity 50 years Technically, it's three or four generations, right? So these areas are stuck and they're not getting better And we need to understand in order to figure this out and to do anything about it I deeply deeply feel that we need to understand how we got there In order to fix it Just some vocabulary right just so that everywhere all clear where we are We're not the poorest city in the country. Actually, that's McCallan. We're number 26 We're not the most unequal. That's actually Miami. We're number 54 But we're the most that there were the most segregated Which means that there's a spatial component to our inequality So if you make it a whole bunch of money, and I just make a little tiny bit of money I live way over here and you live over there and that's got tremendous implications Because a lot of the services that we receive we receive through where we live They're they're spatially distributed our libraries our school our health care our food is all most of those things come to us from where we live So our spatial segregation right this thing that you know where we're number one top of the list Actually matters quite a bit Just that this is just a picture of it just and just this is my first warning is that I'm a geographer by training But also kind of I think was born that way. I map everything So you're gonna see you're gonna see so many maps. You're not gonna just you can't even look at them anymore But that's how I make sense of the world. So this you know, so you're looking at Bear County here and Color even if you can't read the key. I just use color to to signify Quantities so a darker colors more color higher quantities and in this case just income right if our average income in the city of San Antonio is about $54,000 The lighter colors mean that's mean we're way below that the darker colors means we're way above and in the middle That's right right around right around the 54s But as you can see we have a lot of really light color and we have a lot of really dark color But we don't have a lot of middle and that's the concern here and They're not interspersed right if the lights and the darks were interspersed then the then the kids would be going to school together We would be grocery shopping together. We would be going to the same clinics together, but we don't Right because we're they're not interspersed. They're specialized That this one is just this is like me being fancy with maps this and all this shows is that in the blue areas Those are areas that are significantly above the mean and the brown are significantly below So just trying to get a handle on this this idea of segregation, right? So so what so what so yes lots of people in Washington DC have given us a statistic? We've turned around we've repeated it in the newspaper. We have lots of light We're like there's like lots of conversations about this, but we're trying to figure out like okay The first question is so what? Right. I'm you know, I'm middle-class. I have a job. I have a benefits fits package I'm almost six feet tall. I'm white. All right. So what I'm you know I'm doing fine, and that's a really honest honest statement I'm fine. Does this impact me other than ethically and I'm not gonna go through all of that for you Because I think you know that you feel that you work that that that is your message But for sometimes when I speak about this I do go through the whole litany and all of the literature that says yes, so what this is really important It impacts our economic development. It impacts are as a community Impacts our economic development, which means it impacts our incomes It impacts are the whole idea of social mobility in San Antonio meaning can well my kids grow up to do Would be as successful as I it impacts our crime rates it impacts our social cohesion It impacts our tolerance and our idea idea of social tolerance Which we know in the entire United States is threatened right now is that we don't understand one another anymore We don't when we see a young person who dresses differently and has a different Speech pattern we're afraid because we're not we're not around it enough And this is why our segregation does matter But again, I'm not gonna go on into that as much because I think you get that But what I am gonna go into is okay We've been labeled this We know it matters. How did this happen, right? That's my question How did it happen and there are lots and lots of ideas about that you open the newspaper you listen to the radio every day You will hear all of these different ideas one of them We like to live with our own kind you hear that but there's racism Classism exploitation corruption deindustrialization the biggest one right now out there really I think in the public sphere is Individual choice is it's is that a lot of people make good decisions and some people make bad decisions? And that puts them in certain categories with certain Opportunity you know levels of opportunity right all of these the reason I even bring that up is because if we do the research and we gather the Gather the information and the data and really do a really nice analysis of it Any one of those leads to different policy implications And if we're gonna try to create policy and move against this every single one of those would put us in a different place So and I'm not gonna present on those I'm gonna present a different argument right now And my argument is that I got to do with oh with property because everything in the United States have to do with property The right that is protected in the Constitution was the right to own property It was not civil rights civil rights were added in the 1960s wasn't even it wasn't even the right to the franchise That's only been expanded gradually through the years It was the right to property and it is still the most protected right that we have I cherish my own property But it's it's this that it's this and I'm hopefully over the next well a couple hundred slides I will also convince you that that's where we are so here we go Right and this is what I'm this is this is what I'm going to show what I want to show you is that we have built a Landscape from the bottom up right so we've created a landscape in the early 20th century a landscape of neighborhoods Right and we cherish our neighborhoods We're we were proud of the fact that we are a city of neighborhoods And then we continued through the mid 20th century we invested in that landscape then we institutionalized it and I'll show you what I mean and Right now in the early 21st century. We're in the process of reinvesting But every time we do we go through one of those phases. We don't undo the old stuff Right, so from year to year and this is exaggerating because I don't but fashion changes right and in some of us Probably not us but people like will give their whole wardrobe over to the goodwill and they'll go out and buy new clothes Right because fashion changed. We don't do that with the landscape. We don't do that with housing We don't do that with property just because with times have changed We don't go back in and reconfigure our neighborhoods. They're still there So all of these years of policy they pile up and that's what I want to show you right now So phase one part one creation, right? We're going way back creation Really old map can't see it. Well because of the lighting Um, but oh really old map of bear county and if you if you look at it really carefully You can see the old six by six mile square, right? Which was the old the old original city boundaries centered on the cathedral Six by six mile square and in there and if the lights weren't so bright, I don't know if they can do anything about that um You'd see that even the street patterns going in it's kind of it's kind of interesting And then and the and the outsides in the county land. It's those huge big strips of property Oh yay big strips of property that um, that's old ranch land that's been subdivided, right? So it's so that's very very rural. So i'm actually going to zoom right in into the inner city because that's where this story begins Another old map just to the inner city. That's that's the old six by six mile square Right just and those are the streets you and I recognize it doesn't give the highways in it yet because it's old But there they are right so our streets our street pattern our grid patterns old and these the red boxes our neighborhoods and this is again early 20th century and what a friend of mine and I do is Is and don't catch us on a boring day But when what we do and we love this is that we go to the we go to the county courthouse And we look up the old deeds of when the old when the neighborhoods were originally platted And it's a very similar process to today a developer buys a piece of land old ranch land agricultural land They go to the county and they said i'm going to subdivide this land right they get all the permits They follow the regulations they put in a subdivision fabulous same process now It's digitized then it wasn't But and so these red boxes are all the neighborhoods that we have found in the old historic documents That we can trace their origins, right? So it's like it's it's these kind and and the The marketing around these was the same as today, right?  So this is Bg irish subdivisions in san Antonio and this gentleman is is building all of these subdivisions And he was incredibly prolific in his building Um, but so so i want to look at these right i want to look at these neighborhoods I want to and i'm we're gonna i'm going to just take you in And look at some of them and look at when they were developed and how they were developed Right, here we go north southeast and west north Beacon hill A neighborhood that's well represented over here district one great fabulous old neighborhood right before this is before 10 I don't have a pointer, but beacon hill is up in the northwest part of the old city, right? Um, there it is today and just you know just to make the point that you know that the other map was really old But this is new still there still the same houses, right? There's the housing stock in beacon hill fantastic We love this appreciating Um, there's a new there's there's a new appreciation for this kind of housing stock So prices values are going way up All right, this is the deed and i'm not going to be able to read it either But i'm going to try this is the deed to the house every house has got a deed right You probably have your deed near in your file cabinet somewhere And it's what it says is there's a lot of legal language in there as far as where exactly this property is located in in league in the legal addresses And then it says how much these houses can be worth as this neighborhood is built because they're trying to you Build some uniformity into these neighborhoods. Um, so these were 1500 dollars the houses back in the 1920s and beacon hill Had to be worth at least 1500 dollars Um, it's often about setbacks, right? There's no tents Right, there are no trailers. You can't live in the backyard Um, and then and then finally it says and again, I don't know nobody with tuberculosis But also nobody with nobody of negro or mexican descent May ever live in this neighborhood Right going back North haven another neighborhood right near beacon hill north haven is again in that northwest quadrant of the old city This is the housing. It's a little bit smaller But again, it's a housing that we cherish today It's pretty unique and again in north haven all of these deed restrictions and then in in In north haven this one I can read. No, let's these Any sale or lease of this property or or properties there of to any mexican or any person of negro blood Should immediately cause this house to revert to the grand tour All right, so these houses were these these neighborhoods were heavily restricted for who could live there That's north. Let's go south south I'm going to go south to harlandale harlandale fabulous old neighborhood, right Um a working class neighborhood today. There it is going in that's the original plat the original plat's are beautiful They're all hand drawn Um, and there's all the all the houses going in there. They are today. There's been some urban renewal So there's some newer stuff down there also But in harlandale same thing here's all but here's the lease and it says right here. There it is right there Right no part of this no part of this property. She'll ever be sold leased or rented to negroes or mexicans Let's see Let's go east right east. I'm going to go to the east side of downtown. There it is Dignity hill one of our most coveted neighborhoods today Right, there it is today. I'll plant it out some of the housing stock fantastically beautiful, right? It was allowed to deteriorate But in 1940 it also was deed restricted This is the this is some data from the 1940 census 1940 census allows me to go house by house to figure out who lived there Right and so then that's exactly what I've done in here and I've coded it The blue is the african-american the red is mexican-american the brown the light brown is is anglo-american New bruntfuls avenue. You can see that right there was a divining line between a heavily restricted dignoity hill and a non restricted Neighborhood just to the east and the point of this is see to see how well these things were working They really were sorting us They're sorting us out racially Right by who can live where? All right, that's east. Let's go west west is prospect hill The classic neighborhood on the west side. It's a little bit further west again. No pointer great old housing stock Right and the same thing same thing even on the west side in prospect hill Right and this one this one says no house less than thousand dollars and a lot of the same housing restriction So my point on that north southeast west is these neighborhoods were going in in the 1920s 1930s 1940s They're heavily deed restricted. So my question then Right What's going on in here? What's going on in the middle? Right, so I showed you north southeast and west as these new neighborhoods were going in but my question is What's going on in the middle then right because look that land that that middle stuff You see it without the red boxes. What's going on in there was my question So here they are right here's some of those areas along the creeks and things And I'll get back to that in a second little these and these these also have a history They're different though. They're smaller smaller little developments Right not of the scale that I saw in the other ones. They're like this was an entire development one block These deeds no restrictions. No sign of any restrictions whatsoever, right? These neighborhoods developed by a different developer on a different scale Were not restricted Right, this is what they look like today Right a very different kind of infrastructure Different private infrastructure different public infrastructure The houses are smaller because the lots the plots were smaller when they were originally planted subdivided The plots were smaller Then the streets were smaller and there wasn't the room for infrastructure, right? So there's no sidewalks. There's no space for a sidewalk Right, the street lighting is just like hanging out in the street. The street doesn't have any drainage This is some of our real inner city neighborhoods and these were not restricted so what we're doing Is we actually end up funneling a lot of our population the non-white population is funneled into these neighborhoods Again that 1940 census and this is fun the 1940 census for these areas Says that who's living here and i'm trying to code it is african american mexican american chinese english italian People from louisiana and oklahoma and some russians, right? So that's who that's who's ending up in these real inner city west side neighborhoods, right? There's no yet. Yes the The oklahomans in louisiana might have been may have been anglo, but they were still Still pushed into some of our our deeply inner city neighborhoods Same thing right just to make the point just to show you that these old records All of these little developments were much at various different scale And and when we look at it there we go again. Look at those those pieces of property Right, this is a difference the different thing that's going on here and there's the street Right and that is a street. It's not an alley. That's a street on the west side district district one or district five I'm not sure but again, you know if we look at the housing socket We look at the public infrastructure that we're looking at something very very different All right, there's the housing All right garden dale. This is just I think this might be my last example because this is this one's Very important to remember There's your housing again housing that sits just about on the street We know the drainage patterns in this area when that street starts to flood it's going in that house, right? So so so during this time frame as those neighborhoods I was showing you as those neighborhoods develop their deed restricted which pushed our non-white population And we've always had a significant non-white population today. We are majority minority majority. I don't ever remember the order of the words Um, but even even back here. We had a significant non-white population and they are pushed into some parts of the city The other parts aren't they're not they're not they're not welcome Right, um, and this is really if you can see this. I'm not sure if you can because of the room The really one I want to show you is that to the north This is some area on the west side and maybe for those that are close So the north is is an area that was heavily deed restricted, right to the south of that street That was where this restriction stopped the south of that street was not restricted deed restricted This is today, right? Can you see the difference somebody close? Can you see the difference between the north and the south of that street? words Give me a word Yes, cramped. Yes, but but even if we look at the houses, they're cramped. It's dense It's a little bit chaotic because what you got going on in these areas is people would go in and subdivide their own property Like oh my my son turned 18. He got married. I'm going to subdivide my property and build another house for him Fabulous, right? But and then they and then they patch in they patched into the utilities Right and saws and cps still finds this stuff underground, right? But that's what was going on for generations in this part of town 1948 that's declared unconstitutional, right by shelly versus kramer They say no no no no no no no more of that stuff, right? But By now we're in phase two right investment Right and now we're now that stuff that I was just telling you that was a relationship between you and your developer And you and your neighbors by the 1930s the federal government's taken off and they're getting involved in this stuff And a lot of this was about pulling us out of the great depression Banks wouldn't lend a penny to anybody the building trades were stuck and stopped And frankland on the rules about once we get the building trades going again, and he needs the banks to start lending He's also got veterans veterans just pouring back in and there's nothing to live in right and that's going to be that's going to be unrest So he says banks Banks, please start lending banks say no, we're not going to do it and he said okay What what about here's a deal for you right? If I guarantee if I the united states government guarantee your mortgage Guarantee a mortgage if somebody forecloses on you will you start lending again and banks said We will if it's not that risky, right? We we get that we love that Right, that's an fha mortgage today mortgage insurance, right? But what about but but but the but the bank said but tell us where And and the federal government goes fine. We'll tell you where we will go to the neighborhoods and we will go And this is when the suburbs were built and there they are they're pretty But we'll go into every city in the country Right and they use local appraisers to do this and they will they looked at the housing And they looked at the people living in the housing And if the housing was of a of a good quality and the people living in the housing were white It was coated green That was the signal to the united to to the united states government and to the banks That this was a safe investment right go lend money invest in this neighborhood mortgages rehabs, whatever There's the housing right in some of Montevista Some of the housing up around wood lawn is is was coated green If a neighborhood had had a good housing stock, but he had some room for infill Right and I'll show you what I mean, but it was still a white demographic. They coated it blue It was still deemed a healthy a healthy risk, right? You could still loan in that area You're probably going to get paid back right and this these are our beacon hills Right, so there's the housing stock again. It's a housing stock that we really cherish today There was also some infill the litter little little houses that got tucked into those neighborhoods That that were considered infill. They've aged really well Right and so these were our blue neighborhoods If a neighborhood he had housing stock that was beginning to deteriorate And there might have been a very slight non-white presence on the edge The neighborhood was coated yellow Right and that again was a signal to the banks now we're getting into some risk, right? And so here are our yellow neighborhoods There's the housing right still a housing that that that we appreciate But the banks were like, nah, you know, this is this these aren't safe And then finally if a housing stock it was was in the process of deterioration Which housing does without investment And this is a non-white population. It was the neighborhoods were coated red They were redlined by the federal government And that was a signal to the banks that these are risky investments Maybe you don't want to go there, right? And so so and we know what this housing stock looks like because these are the housing That I was talking about just a minute ago that was built Back when back when there were no deed restrictions in these areas now some really nice significant housing gets caught up in this Because it's close by All right, so we got and this is a house in in our prospect hill Putting all that stuff together so far all those those neighborhoods that I told you that were deed restricted originally They were restricted against anybody non-white. They were open for a white population They're they're blue and green Right, so they're they're then deemed by the federal government safe investments And I'll show you in a little bit how much money starts to flow into them Those areas that were not restricted at the beginning that were available for non-whites They're coated yellow and red Right, so we've got a couple of things going on. We're developing a very racialized landscape But we're also denying all all of those neighborhoods any kind of investment whatsoever Right, so not only are we are we segregating spatially Segregating by race. We're also segregating now by class and we're making that in the process In the meantime as we're doing all of that if that's not enough We start to grow Right, there's the original city limits. There's by 1940 There's by 1950 there's by 1960 new development Was what was was not risky, right? So it was green lined But most of that new development was not available for a non-white population Right, so we're growing And no and those and those neighborhoods do get this kind of investment, but again, they're highly racialized That stuff That stuff also is over 1968 president johnson Removes all of that racist language from federal housing policies through the first federal The this is his fair housing act part of the civil rights bundle, right that he passes in the 1960s Um, but now I want to talk so so that's these are these layers that i'm talking about, right Layer three institutionalization So So I said on top of that once now i'm going to say it again on top of all of that We begin to form the school districts, right now if you can see this Then i'm not sure if everybody can but we complain daily about how many school districts we had until 1950 We had over 60. So that's got lines in it. I don't know if you can see them Um, but we had over 60 school districts. They were mostly rural. These were the csts the common school districts They reported to the county so the county would meet as the county commissioners They would end that meeting then they would and then they would reconvene immediately as the school commissioners Right and they would make the decisions about the csts San Antonio school district was always an isd. That was state law as a municipality They were an independent school district meaning they could raise taxes and they had their own board of trustees, right? Um, really 1920s 1930s east coast movement to start to consolidate this We're an industrializing country. We need kids who are literate and math and you know, no I don't know what the equivalent for math is but math people um, and So they needed to go to school all day. They needed to go school all year They needed teachers who are professionals. They needed administrators who are professionals, right? Let's get it out from underneath the political process So school districts start to consolidate in in in you know in order to be efficient in order to be more professional This is an interesting process, right? So let me see. There they are. There's a better there's a better map There's the red lines on top of this because I want you to watch this process We go to that So the big school districts, right like the north sides the northeast, right our big successful school districts to the north side The little school districts within there literally started making phone calls to one another. This was an easy process They made phone calls and they said do you want to consolidate? And so some of those like there's one of them up there called lock hill selma district There's like all names that you would recognize And they said well, they said, you know, tell us tell us what you're worth How many kids you got how much property tax can you raise? Tell us what you're worth and then they decided it was a financial it was a financial decision Right and so so our big districts form out of that process, right? And they're very diverse And and and they're actually quite successful north side northeast Right and even east central over here to the east and some of the south side, but notice in the inner city San Antonio San Antonio school district. This is why it's so oddly shaped right the one right in the middle They consolidate with three they consolidate with los angeles heights school district white and hot wells and that's why san antonio is also oddly shaped But notice this one Can I do it? See the one just west of san antonio What is it? Edgewood Edgewood, Edgewood's famous So edgewood also Makes the phone call they make the phone call to north side And they say do you want to consolidate in north side? Well says well, what are you worth? How many kids you got what are you worth? What's your property taxes? How much can you raise? In north side says no No, thank you And then they call san antonio school district And they said and san antonio school district says basically the same show us your balance sheet What are you worth and san antonio never calls back and this is in the school board minutes So edgewood has to decide they decide we're going to go we're going to go it alone We can't we nobody will consolidate with us So we're going to become an independent school district of our own so that we can raise taxes From the property that we have within our school district boundaries. We will elect our own officials and all of that Elma heights right san antonio the school district calls up to elma heights And elma height says the same thing they say What are you worth? Right and elma height says no, thank you, right and elma heights goes goes its own way they go on their own Today edgewood school district is one of the poorest school districts in the entire country They're the only school district that was able to get a education financing financing case to the supreme court Because they are so poor right and they struggle to this day Right. This is the institutionalization of that landscape because this is where our kids go to school This is our social mobility as far as how successful we are What opportunities are we prepared for and we get stuck in this right when we buy a house The first thing somebody does is they ask you how many kids do you have? Right and then they try to and they try to direct you into different school districts Right. So what have we done by the 1950s? We'd created a highly differentiated social geography through deed restrictions through red lining through the schools themselves under incredibly exploitative and racist circumstances and processes And then it was the 1960s and we got enlightened And we decided no more of that right no more. We're not doing that anymore. Yay us right So we brought equality Yay, we brought equality civil rights to this landscape, right? We brought global standards Everybody gets to be treated the same now Fabulous love that everybody gets to be treated equally equal rights We brought global standards and applied them on top Of that landscape. What do I mean? Let's treat every child the same Right. That's a standardized curriculum. So that looks like Well, first it looks like brown versus bored, but then it looks like our robin hood And then ticks tax tax tax and star. I just remember those from my kids. I don't I think they go older But um, but so let's we're going to fund them all the same Right every every child gets the same amount of money and every child gets the same curriculum taught in the same way Number two public investment rough proportionality and I should reverse those because we have 10 Equally populated city council districts a equality Right and we divide the city budget by 10 And then and then divvy it out everybody gets the same fabulous But what happens when I do that on top of a landscape that I already created that I didn't throw away like old shoes Um, that was but it was created that to be incredibly unequal, right? What happens? What happens the cumulative effect of that Of our enlightenment is is the maintenance of the status quo, right? Everybody now just stays stays in place Um, and it's this and and this now is where the city conversation is about inequity Because yes, we're treating people equal, but we're starting in a very very different place So and that's what we're what we refer to as inequity, right? Quality inequity are very different Equity is about needs Right. So when we can still see this in the landscape, so those old areas I think they're yeah where the old red and yellow lines are still poor surprise surprise, right? Yeah, everybody's treated the same, but they've remained poor We haven't been able to alleviate this this and I'll just talked about this really quick Is that this is today housing values housing values west side in an area where you can find red yellow blue and green Lines right in the red. Those are little pieces of property and it's looking at how their How their value is going up, right? Because because our houses are savings account That's where I save my money. It's silly to put it into a real savings account You put it into your house and then you plan on selling your house someday In the in the old red lined areas The brown means those area those houses are appreciating two and a half standard deviations Below the rate that the rest of the county is appreciating. That's what the brown signals the blue Signals that those houses are appreciating at two and a half standard deviations above the rest of the county Right. So so when they were blue they were deed restricted then they were red lined and green lined today They're appreciating at this wonderful rate So people are are generating wealth through their through their home ownership in the old red lined areas We're slipping backwards, right? They're still losing Today, right phase four current phase reinvestment. We're reinvesting we discovered this right san Antonio says Hey Our downtown is not where it should be and we so we we formed this thing And it's called the icrip the inner city reinvestment infill policy Formed in the late 2000s and it was intended to promote growth Target targeted in the inner city because our downtown was was deteriorating People didn't go there, right in in the 2000s and before And so so the city came up with this policy, which at the time was brilliant Let's let's let's wave a lot of those big fees and encourage Incent new development downtown Right this that that that area is exactly the area that had been red lined and yellow lines, right So this so and so this is what's happening This is in manky park Old fourplex, right? It would be affordable to moat to a working class family Somebody making win minimum wage working for the city and maybe making a living wage actually working for the city Old fourplexes they rented for like eight nine hundred dollars manky park great location. Yay. We love that These are all these are all being torn down through this incentive policies And these are being built and these are worth five hundred six hundred thousand dollars So this means that we're losing a lot of our affordable housing stock and we're replacing it with very expensive housing And this is what's happening in some of those old areas that had been neglected investment for so long Um, just looking at some recent data. This is mortgage data Right, this is available through the federal government and it's mortgage data and the dots signify How many mortgages? And in any form for a new house for a rehab for anything were made in that census tract in that little neighborhood in 2014 Look at the size of the dots in the red areas the blue areas and the newer areas compared to the red in the red in the yellow areas You see what I mean Little tiny dots. We've got a big dot in south town. Yes But what that means is how much how much mortgage money investment money capital Is flowing into our old neighborhoods Relative to our new neighborhoods very very little still to this day The rate of denial of a mortgage for the inner city neighborhoods is very very high compared to our other areas There as if I look at all of the mortgages made in bear county in 2016 you can see where they are Right, there's still to the north our inner city neighborhoods teeny tiny dots Right, that means that's investment. That's not just me spending money out of my pocket. That's real investment Can I buy a house? Can I can I fix up a house? Um, and finally And I wish that this was blown in but I wanted you to see the scale. This is the west side creeks restoration project Yes, we're finally fixing up those creeks that the that the army corps of engineers Concreted in right san Pedro creek. It's going to be fantastically beautiful Um, the sound it's they're going to look like the like the san Antonio river But that's the map for there's the west side creeks restoration projects. These are public projects county and city Um, and some bonds some other kinds of money Uh, but what's gonna what's happening right along those right now is this right? The soap works is uh, is is an apartment complex right downtown right along right along the san Pedro creek And there's the creek project right there. That's what it looks like when you look through the fence It's going to be so pretty But this apartment complex is right on the banks of the san Pedro creek Right now it's been there for a very long time. It was an old soap factory Uh, right now it is a little bit run down It is but it houses people who are making below a living wage a lot of people on fixed income A new a new management company has bought it from houston and the rents have gone up over a hundred dollars in in a month And people are scared and they're holding community meetings and they're scared because they don't know where they're going to go So that so these are some of our this is our reinvestment Right, so we're not necessarily reinvesting in those old areas that were that were denied investment since the beginning of the 20th century Instead we're reinvesting in these kinds of things that are not necessarily benefiting those Who lost out in the beginning There's the soap works apartments today so For the past 50 years 78207 has been defied by poverty inequality and a sheer lack of opportunity And pardon my language But that I just you know, I just kind of I get All caught up in this when it's when you see that the next time just go well, no shit Right, we did that we built that that was intentional. That was a labor reserve Right, we built that intentionally so people wouldn't get ahead Of course, they're of course, it's still poor. We've never invested We didn't allow them to invest because we didn't allow them to borrow against their house or get a mortgage or fix it up, right So this is the this is the story that the city is involved with right now when you read when you read They use the term the equity lens And it really is and you know, we built a landscape that was highly uneven And and then we brought equality to it, but it just maintained the status quo And so now we're having conversations. We'll see how we do these are brand new conversations About what does equity mean? Well equity looks at at the needs The needs that are in these different areas and since this we need to we need to respond to to equity To to needs not just spread it out all around equally Right, so so really to close. I don't know who said this, but there's nothing more unequal Than the equal treatment of unequal people and that's what we've been doing We've created inequality and then we said then we decided to treat everybody the same And look where we are, right? We have we're we are we've been now like tagged as the most segregated city in the country And well when you look at the roots of it that was very intentional and we haven't done a lot to get out of it Right, so just to close my question is, you know, if we don't start moving on it and thinking about it What happens will our city grow? Or just for some of us, right just for the charmed few those of us for whom it works And and and you know, and maybe we'll just move farther away We can move to the edge and then it's not our problem So thank you for your time. I know that Anne had questions You


Now I'd like to welcome Tamika Tilliman to the stage. Our Mormon keynote speaker is Tamika and he is a partner and global chief policy officer at KRH Partners, a new crypto venture fund led by former A16Z general partner, Katie Hawn, where he builds public policy architecture to support the next generation of the internet. Previously, Tamika served as senior advisor to two secretaries of state, leading a team of experts that built 20 major initiatives in 55 countries. He joined the State Department in 2009 as Hillary Clinton's speechwriter and spent four years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working with Joe Biden, Barack Obama and John Kerry. Tamika has led programs to address social impact, finance, and governance challenges worldwide, including service as executive director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at New America, a member of the World Economic Forum's Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the United Nations World Food Program, Innovation Advisory Council, the Lantos Foundation Board of Trustees and as chairman of the Global Blockchain Business Council. He received his BA, Magnum Cum Laude, from Yale University and holds a PhD with distinction from the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Thank you very much, Tamika. Let me thank Carl for that extremely generous introduction. It is inspiring to be with all of you here today. I have to say that knowing that there are this many people who will give up a perfect Utah Saturday afternoon to sit in a room and listen to the intersection, to talks about the intersection of technology and theology is something that brings me great hope and it should bring great hope to all of you as well. And I really want to extend special thanks to Carl for making this all possible. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the future of decentralized technology and frankly a great deal of my time thinking about the future of theology. It's very rare that I get to bring both of those together, and so I appreciate this opportunity. In the next half hour, I'm hoping we can do three things. We're going to try to cover a lot. The first is to explore some big ideas about a future that will be increasingly defined by the decentralization of power. The second is to spell out some principles that should inform our actions as we approach that future. And finally, while I was certainly not anticipating this when I began our conversations about speaking here a few months ago, I want to discuss how we are seeing these dynamics play out in the invasion of Ukraine. Because it is shaping up to be the single most important and consequential event of the 21st century and one that is going to have profound implications on the future that we are going to inhabit. This is a lot to cover. Fasten your seatbelts, stow your tray tables, but I'm hoping that you will find, as I have found as I work through some of these issues, that the destination is both incredibly important and incredibly compelling if we can get the intersection of these themes right. So first for context, as is often the case in life, technology and theology, if we want to understand where we're going, we need to understand where we are coming from. And so in that spirit, I want to begin by turning to one of my favorite historians, Yvall Hariri, who I expect many of you are familiar with. And Yvall asks a provocative question, which is why do we run the world? It could be jellyfish, it could be armadillos, and yet you look around and we're the ones in charge. And the answer that he comes up with is an intriguing answer. He says we are the only species that has figured out how to cooperate flexibly at scale. There are other animals out there like wolves and dolphins that have figured out how to cooperate flexibly. Then you've got bees and termites that have figured out how to cooperate at scale. We're the only ones who have figured out how to do both of those things. And it is really our superpower. Virtually everything of consequence that we do as a species, the cities we build, the aircraft, and the spaceships that we fly on, wonderful conferences like this, are all dependent on our ability to cooperate flexibly at scale. So this brings us of course to the question of, well, how do we cooperate flexibly at scale? And my take on this, which is a slight reframing of what Yvonne comes up with, is that we as a species have figured out how to define a common set of facts and then go out and cooperate, build, and create on the basis of those facts. And we've done this using a pretty straightforward process that is now deeply ingrained into who we are as communities and who we are as a species.  And at that point, it was very easy for us to come to a common understanding of what facts were. It was very easy for us to come to a common agreement on the core information that defined our lives.  But it gets a lot more challenging to do this as we grow as societies and as we become far more complex in our interactions with others. And the way that we have figured out how to solve for this challenge as we have grown as a species and evolved into ever more complex forms of civilization is that we need to find trusted sources of authority and use those trusted sources of authority to maintain consensus as our societies grow. And those trusted sources of authority help us adjudicate the facts on which we base our lives. The decisions that we make every day are predicated on our confidence in these trusted sources of authority. These institutions and sources of authority take many different forms. We certainly have governments and the rule of law, which we were discussing just a moment ago, we have banks and financial institutions that play a vital role. And historically, we have ecclesiastical bodies that have been foundationally important in the evolution of society. The process of establishing and using authority to achieve consensus is fundamental to who we are. It is woven into ancient scripture from the property rights that we see outlined in the Ten Commandments and the Old Testament to more recently detailed descriptions of weights and measures and currency in the book of Alma. And this pattern even continues in modern forms of secular scripture, such as the constitutions that lay out the basic rules for how we establish consensus in democratic societies. And for good reasons as a civilization, we spend an enormous amount of energy and money trying to optimize these systems. I'll give you just a few examples that are representative, although certainly not perfectly indicative of the priority we place on this. In the United States each year, we spend twenty two billion dollars on establishing the title to properties, just figuring out who owns what property we pay twenty two billion dollars a year for that. The US legal industry, which is critically important in enforcing common understanding of reality and adjudicating disputes when they arise, takes up about two trillion dollars. And if you look at the global financial services industry, which derives a lot of its value from simply establishing ownership and serving as an intermediary between transactions, you're looking at about twenty two trillion dollars. So to put it mildly, these are non-trivial quantities of funds that we are dealing with. And it's important to note that these systems do create real value. Bringing these groups together, bringing a group like this together, requires us to many thousands of times along the way, use the process of authority and consensus in making our decisions. We had to agree that this library was owned by the city of Provo, that the conference had a certain period of time during which we would be able to use it, that on our way here we would drive between the lines at certain speeds and that the value of the funds we use to support this conference is something that we would all have consensus on. This process of establishing authority is about to undergo a profound change. And you'll remember back to when we lived in very small groups and we could rely on the collective knowledge of the group to establish authority and consensus, we're moving in some ways toward a decentralized re-imagination of what that looked like. Decentralized technologies are going to enable in some ways a restoration of this ancient capability going forward. It's not that intermediaries will disappear, and I would argue that we will still need them in many cases. In some cases they will even be more important, such as dispute resolution. But the authority of the bodies that we have historically relied on to achieve consensus is going to be radically democratized. And that democratization will introduce new dynamics to our ability to collaborate as a species. Our relationship with authority will change. We don't have many analogues for this development in the chronicles of human existence, but I'd like to suggest one that intrigued me. For most of recorded history, as I mentioned, ecclesiastical authority has been one of the most consequential and closely held forms of power. It's had a profound role in shaping the processes used to define consensus, establish membership in groups, rights, privileges, and behavior. And it has been very tightly held, usually by a priestly class, that mandated years of formal study and instruction before anyone could be admitted into their ranks. In 1830, the world saw a new model emerge for organizing ecclesiastical authority. A model that radically democratized access to power and that democratization of authority enabled new, or if you go way back, restored understanding of who could perform ordinances, provide theological instruction, and participate in the governance of congregations and religious bodies. Its implications have been profound, and this community certainly would not exist in its present form in the absence of that re-imagination of authority. We are about to see some changes with fascinating parallels play out across other fields of human endeavor. And this brings me to my first principle for a decentralized world, which is that while the sources of authority we use to establish consensus on basic facts are going to continue to matter, access to authority and the ability to invoke and deploy authority are likely to be radically democratized. More people will gain access to a toolbox that has historically been the exclusive domain of a handful of individuals and institutions, and they will use that power to shape a new consensus around the facts that provide the bedrock for our lives. The democratization of authority will reshape the way industries operate, the way companies function, and communities exist. It will reshape the ways in which we as a species converge on the common narratives that form the basis of our decisions. This brings us to a second theme, which is community and the relationship between community and technology. Again, I'm going to go back in time in order to take us forward. By a quick show of hands, and I'm assuming at this point in the day, many of you have encountered this, who feels like they have a good understanding of Web 3 and where we are on Web 3? Some, but not all. So I'm going to go ahead and provide a little bit of context here. In the late 90s and even early 90s, we saw the emergence of Web 1. And Web 1 was this period of open dynamic protocols. We came up with things like email that still consume huge portions of our lives today. And it enabled very powerful new forms of communication. It allowed us to read information and move information in ways that as a species, we'd never been able to move information previously. There, however, was a big problem with this world of Web 1, as marvelous as it was in many respects. And that was that it had no sustainable business models attached to it. It was very difficult to make money using these dynamic open protocols in Web 1. And by virtue of that, everyone came to a rough understanding that we needed a different way of deploying this new toolbox. This brings us to Web 2. And Web 2 coupled the ability to both read information and write information, which was a great innovation. And it provided a new set of business models that made innovation much more financially sustainable and, in fact, wildly profitable for at least a small handful of individuals. But the models that emerged from Web 2, the fundamental business model of almost all Web 2 platforms, involved gathering highly personal, highly atomized individual information. And using that information to build an immensely detailed profile of who we were as individuals so that advertisers could slice and dice us into ever smaller groups with the goal of getting us to change our purchasing behavior. And this model turns out to have been immensely valuable for two groups of people. One which will not surprise you is Big Tech. And the other is authoritarian governments.  The first option is an authoritarian paradigm emanating from Beijing in which your personal private information is aggregated and used to manipulate your behavior for political purposes. And this is now becoming increasingly important in Russia as well. And the second model is a Big Tech paradigm in which your information is aggregated and used to manipulate your behavior for commercial purposes. Neither one of those paradigms, to state the obvious, is compatible with a healthy open society. So this is a real Houston we have a problem moment. Fortunately, we also have a solution and that solution comes in the form of a new toolbox of technologies that we call Web 3. Web 3 technologies are different. They're designed around the idea that individuals should have much more control over our information, that we should have more ownership of the platforms that we utilize. That the digital systems we rely on should be community governed and that they should give communities a much greater say in how decisions are made. When designed right, Web 3 platforms also enable communities to share in the financial upside of these technologies in a way that just wasn't possible in Web 2 for a variety of reasons. And this is not just community as a generic term. Healthy, vibrant, dynamic communities are central to value creation in Web 3. They unlock the potential to build systems that solve the underlying issues we have right now with Web 2. As we are seeing the emergence of community oriented digital infrastructure in a handful of countries around the world, we are seeing some jaw dropping gains. They are truly spectacular. In Kenya, digital payment systems have lifted two percent of the entire population of that country out of poverty. In Bangladesh, citizens have saved two billion days of previously wasted time thanks to the rollout of community oriented nationwide digital infrastructure. And Estonia, a small nation which has the world's best digital infrastructure, recoups the equivalent of two percent of GDP each year. In the United States, that would be the equivalent of a half trillion dollars that we would get back thanks to better access to digital systems. And it's important to note that all of the digital frameworks that I just cited are very, very early processes. These are like the zero point one iterations of what we have the potential to build with Web 3. The second principle of a decentralized future is that communities are going to become the cornerstone of value creation. And this will be, again, in stark contrast to a Web 2 world where communities have merely been a vehicle for encouraging individual participation so that platforms and governments can capture individual level information with the goal of shaping individual behavior. Communities are going to be central to the evolution of a healthy internet going forward. There is, however, one very substantial challenge that we are going to have to overcome on our way to realizing this vision for the future. And that is the deficit, the profound deficit of faith and trust that is increasingly crippling our societies. In 1993, one of the world's great sociologists, Robert Putnam, wrote a book with the catchy title of making democracy work civic traditions in modern Italy. And I'm sure he never anticipated when he authored that book that it would serve as the basis for a conversation about the future of technology. But the premise of the book was essentially this. Northern Italy and Central Italy are, by and large, very wealthy. They have highly functional institutions, high standards of living and high social welfare. And I apologize to any Southern Italians who I'm about to offend by stating this, but Southern Italy, by and large, is a lot less functional. And there's a lot of data to back up, what I agree, is a very gross generalization. And Putnam asked the question, why is this? Why do you have two parts of the same country, two parts of the same society that perform so profoundly differently? And he looked back at the history and what he found is that beginning in about 1000 AD, Northern and Central Italians had a far more active dynamic, what we today call civil society. People came together and took part in politics and social gatherings and institutions, citizens worked through peaceful means to address challenges of mutual concern. And that led to a dynamic in which citizens had far more trust in their institutions and critically far more trust in each other. And institutions evolved to be less hierarchical and more horizontal. Northern and Central Italy created the infrastructure they needed for healthy democratic systems because they designed their society in a way that built trust. Southern Italy was very, very different. Southern Italy had order that was imposed by outside mercenaries during this period. And they set up a largely feudal system where peasants were controlled by knights and knights were controlled by lords. And this feudal system had some characteristics that sound very foreign, but I want you to think hard as I describe this. Peasants would go out into the field every day, create value and send most of that value up to a lord in a manor house. And in exchange, they would be allowed access to some basic necessities they needed to sustain life and receive basic protection. But they had no expectation of private property, no expectation that they would be the primary beneficiaries of the value that they created. And not surprisingly, they had very little trust in the systems that govern their lives because these systems were not set up for their benefit. The mafia and its continuing corrosive impact on Southern Italian society traced its roots directly to these feudal structures. And Putnam found that the differences between these governing architectures that dated back a thousand years continued to dominate the differences in the way that these communities and societies perform today. This is incredibly important to us right now, or at least it should be incredibly important to us right now, because we are living in a digital version of Southern Italy. We are living in a digitally feudal system. Every morning we wake up, we take out our phones, the modern equivalent of farming implements, and we go to work cultivating a digital landscape we do not own and will never control. The value of what we create in the form of data and information is sent to digital manor houses in Silicon Valley and Seattle. And it has created a new system that works well for the handful of feudal lords, but does not work well for the rest of us. Not coincidentally, the systems that we have seen take root in our country have had a profoundly corrosive impact on trust and faith in our societies, which is now scraping historic lows. So we need to ask ourselves the question, how do you break out of a feudal system, because it's not easy. But we know what this looks like from history and remarkably, the ingredients that were necessary to break feudal systems in the Middle Ages are lining up again today. The first thing you needed was a pandemic, ironically. And the bubonic plague reshaped the value equation around labor in the same way that the COVID pandemic has reshaped our understanding of the value of digital systems and data and information. And those of us who have been able to work from home or those of us that work for companies that utilize digital information have certainly seen this play out in practice. You needed new forms of infrastructure to enable people to break out of feudal models. After the Roman roads deteriorated in central Italy, the only place that individuals could take their goods to market was to the local manor house and the local manor house controlled the price and all of the dynamics of the marketplace. With the emergence of new infrastructure and the rebuilding of roads, individuals had options, they had choices, they were able to take the value that they created and find new outlets for that value in other communities around the world and around their country. You need new ideas. And in the case of the original forms of feudalism, those new ideas came in the form of the Enlightenment. You had ideas of private property and individual rights that were profoundly disruptive and foreign to individuals of that day, but opened the eyes to even the beneficiaries of the feudal system that we could design a better set of structures for how we govern interaction between individuals. And finally, in many instances, you needed war. And war is obviously a horrific, horrific form of human engagement, but it is also the most profoundly disruptive form of human engagement and it has the effect of forcing people to question long held assumptions that have governed societies in the past. You put these ingredients together and you had the makings of a renaissance. And I would suggest to you that maybe, just maybe, we are witnessing the earliest moments of a dawning renaissance today. The third principle that I would suggest for the digital future is that in order to realize the potential of Web 3 technologies, we will have to break out of our current era of digital feudalism and build systems capable of replenishing the reservoir of trust and faith that irrigates human endeavor. And I take as my evidence for that claim what we are seeing play out in Ukraine over the last few weeks in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, the government there needed help. Previously, relying on legacy systems, this would have been a formidable challenge. And I know this because in my past life in 2008, I went into the city of Tbilisi, Georgia, together with Joe Biden, the two of us on a plane, we met with the leaders of that country, which was at the time ringed with Russian armor. And as we came home, the two of us started putting together the underpinnings of what would eventually become a billion dollar assistance package to help that nation get back on its feet. But we recognized very rapidly that getting the resources to people in need was going to be almost impossible. It was going to take months and be defined by incredible opacity and uncertainty for individuals on all sides. What we're seeing play out in Ukraine is very different. In a matter of days, a hundred million dollars in digital assets was crowdsourced from individuals all over the world. Those resources were available to the Ukrainian government almost instantaneously. It took a lot of people working behind the scenes, and I've had many discussions with Ukraine's Deputy Minister for Digital Transformation, Alex Bornyakov, as they've tried to put the infrastructure necessary to do this in place. But the pieces are there, the building blocks are there. We have seen dows, decentralized, autonomous organizations come together and enable communities to support civil society groups, voluntary and non-profit organizations that are responding to this crisis. And we've seen distributed digital data networks like the Arweave platform used to safeguard information that will not only help the Ukrainians in rebuilding and protect vital documents from destruction at the hands of Russian invaders, but also preserve evidence of war crimes and atrocities for future prosecution. We're seeing this play out on a global scale using a new tool box that we have never had access to before, and it should make us all very hopeful about what could happen if we succeed in assembling these new tools in a manner consistent with the principles that I've laid out today. Better systems don't form themselves. They are formed in a forge that is fueled by the efforts, resources and ideas of people like all of you in this room. And in the coming decade, we will have an opportunity to decide how we want our systems to evolve. Will we follow the injunction of King Benjamin and use them in the service of our fellow beings? Or will we fall into the trap foretold by Nephi and use them instead to get gain, get power and win popularity? Let me state very clearly that at the moment the jury is out on how this story ends. We don't know where we're headed, but we have the opportunity to get this right. If we hope to realize the potential of this new renaissance, we will need to design digital systems that are better equipped to enable a more humane fellowship with humankind. We will need to embrace the opportunity to decentralize authority. We will need to build systems that establish healthy, vibrant communities as the cornerstone of value creation. And we will need to work to replenish the reservoir of trust that irrigates everything we do. That is the opportunity we must embrace today. That is the cause that must unite us. And that is the obligation we must honor if we hope to make decisions and build an internet that future generations will admire. I look forward to laboring with all of you in that effort and to your questions as we advance our understanding of these issues here today. Thank you. All right, we'll start over here. Thank you, Dr. Tillerman. My name is Lynn Davenport. I have a podcast called Social Impact. I followed your work. And you said a couple of things towards the end that I was going to ask you something different. But you said you were talking about war and war is necessary, yes. Not necessary. Well, I mean, it is one ingredient that can help us break down. I don't mean you want war, yes, but totally, totally. But war and of course this pandemic, they're both being used, or well, right now, the pandemic, I believe is being used as a tool to bring in the biosecurity state, which is going to force blockchain digital IDs. And I've got a specific anecdote in Dallas where I'm from, but I was going to ask you, do you not see how this could be very, it could be digital enslavement? Absolutely. And we need to be very mindful of that potential set of outcomes. And then so I guess your work with the World Economic Forum. So you see all the stuff that's out there. It says you will own nothing and you will be happy and you've seen that. I've not seen that. Have you all seen that? Yeah, I feel like it's the elephant in the room. We haven't really even talked about this. And I think it's something that we need to seriously consider, because I think it's it's going to build a panopticon. And this the Internet of Things, the Internet of Bodies, those are all the things that we're not really we're not really talking about. So let me make two quick observations on that, because it's a really important set of questions. Getting the privacy architecture around blockchain right is probably the single most important thing that needs to happen over the next five years to realize the potential of these technologies. We are investing in that. We invested in that when I was at Andreessen Horowitz, Katie and my new firm is tripling down on that thesis. We really need to get this right. Now, I believe that privacy preserving digital identity could actually be a tool that unlocks profound opportunities. It needs to be privacy preserving digital identity. There's some folks out there that freak out about any discussion of digital identity. That's a mistake. And we're seeing the countries that are starting to get digital identity right, like Estonia, what they're achieving is extraordinary and something that gives people a lot more control over their information than we have today. So you're absolutely correct. We need to be very mindful of the potential downsides here, which are massive. You know, the worst case scenarios are really, really terrifying. Yeah, worst case scenarios. Thank you so much for the questions, guys. We just need to keep it to one question per person. Thanks and try to keep it to one sentence. Thank you. You can use a semicolon. Sorry, I just love that idea. First, thank you for the awesome presentation and as a good Canadian. My apologies for my pessimistic question. From having just finished my own assignment with the OSCE desk at my ministry. When you think about the revolution and war that you mentioned. Yeah. And within the context of decentralization and thinking, frankly, of the past successes of the Swiss Confederation in taking on the Austrian empire and the American militias in taking on the British. But in an incredibly centralized military world in which, as it has been pointed out, there is the potential for vast and immediate destruction. How in all of these processes as we make potentially incredible gains at which the potential for centralized power to say, thank you, I would like those gains and I have guns and you don't. In what way do we overcome the challenge of decentralizing physical military security power in a decentralized context that doesn't lead to chaos and doesn't lead to dictatorship? I would suggest it's already happening. And I would guide you toward the writings of Gene Sharp, who writes on civil resistance. And what we have seen in recent years is that peaceful and I emphasize peaceful, nonviolent resistance has emerged as an almost insurmountable weapon against authoritarian forces. It is really, really challenging. And we'll see how this plays out in Russia. We'll see how this plays out in other societies. It is really, really challenging for any authoritarian movement to stand in the face of a principled, motivated, nonviolent resistance, which is in many ways an embodiment of an analog decentralization of power, if that makes sense. Those nonviolent movements have been very successful, statistically speaking. They have not had access to the toolbox that we are developing today. And so I think the exciting thing in my mind is what happens when you can provide principled, nonviolent civil resistance with access to a Web 3 toolbox? And what new forms of democratic resistance is that going to enable going forward? I thank you for that comment, although I think the people of Hong Kong may have some challenges, too. Please, well, I'll come back to you, please. Yeah. What privacy standard are you most optimistic for, given that you've been looking into this, so you mentioned that it's clearly an area of priority? What do you see? Yeah, I mean, there are some really, really creative platforms out there. One that I like a lot is called Alio, which is using zero knowledge proofs to build a new privacy layer for blockchain. But I think it's going to take, frankly, more than that. And over the last seven to 10 years, in some cases longer, you've seen the maturation of a few different technologies that are going to have to be layered if we're going to get this right. In addition to blockchain, I would suggest we should start looking hard at tools like differential privacy, federated learning and homomorphic encryption, each of which encompasses elements of what will be needed to design really world-class data-rich privacy-preserving architecture. And the challenge here is that it's not just about locking down everybody's data. If that were it, that would be pretty easy, and we could get there relatively quickly in order to compete effectively with authoritarian governments that are proving incredibly reliant on artificial intelligence and willing to utilize artificial intelligence, we're going to have to devise new structures for using data in privacy-preserving ways. We can do this now. So I'm confident, given the tools that are out there, we can get this right. But it is going to require a whole of society effort to succeed. I think that for the first time in the last month, we see a lot of policymakers waking up to this opportunity. And I'd suggest that the executive order that was just issued by the White House on decentralized technology is a baby step, but nonetheless, a profoundly important baby step in the right direction. But it's going to take some work and, again, some creative layering of technologies if we're going to get this right. Please. What you say about trust also definitely has an upside and a downside, and I think most of us can resonate with the chaos and the disinformation and the problems that both naturally and artificially have been introduced into a system that seems like decentralization may actually be exacerbated or exacerbate that issue. Do you have any thoughts or solutions about how to deal with those problems as we try to decentralize and yet still retain trust in a way that people can act in their own best interest? So, wonderful question and probably deserving of its own talk. Let me cite three quick suggestions that I've been noodling on a lot. The first is the way that we know to build trust, the thing that we know works when it comes to bringing people together across socioeconomic divides and getting them to have faith in each other is to unite them in voluntary service in civil society. And the fact that we are seeing the advent of community-based digital platforms, where, again, value is derived from the community, opens up a lot of intriguing opportunities in that space. It's really hard to mistrust the person that you've just spent a day doing ditch cleanup with in your community because you've worked together, you know them, even if you're very different in other aspects of your life, you have some basis for common ground. Wards and congregations are the most extraordinary example that I know of this phenomenon playing out in the real world. We bring people together from many different backgrounds, not so much in Utah where a ward is three blocks, but in the rest of the world, we bring people together from many, many different backgrounds and we all work together on the same stuff.  So that is one really important thing that we need to pursue. The second thing we need to be mindful of is there is a school of thought that has grown up around some parts of the blockchain community that says what this really is is trustless technology and nobody's going to have to worry about trust anymore. I really disagree with that and I think that's the wrong way to approach this. We should look at these tools as instruments for redeeming failed institutions, for redeeming institutions that have lost the confidence of individuals and try to rebuild the ties that should exist within a healthy, open, dynamic community. And the last thing I would suggest when it comes to rebuilding trust is we're going to need to think very hard about the governance of these platforms going forward. The way many blockchain projects are governed right now, ownership equates with voting rights. That is not a system that is going to deliver trust in the long run. That's a system that's going to replicate oligarchy. In the investment firms that I work with, we've taken a very different approach. So we purchase big chunks of platforms but then we delegate the voting rights associated with huge portions of our holdings to civil society organizations, to universities, to non-profit organizations because we think that in the long run, the decentralization of authority and the decentralization of healthy communities is going to create more value. And ideally, we're going to need more approaches like that going forward if we're going to get this right. Please. Yes, I just have a question regarding the time that you spent at New America in Bretton Woods too. Regarding the ethics of faith-based institutions often who deliver social services of using blockchain technologies to invest, make investments in human capital finance and how that intersects with your present position in venture capital. Thank you. What's the question? So do you think that churches or faith communities should be investing in human capital finance? Well, I think that is going to be different across different faith communities. I think some faith communities do that. You know, ours does that. We have a perpetual education fund. But blockchain, like putting people like social impact bond finance that's connected to the Bretton Woods two arrangements that you had. I don't know is the honest answer because I haven't thought about it enough as it relates specifically to faith communities. I've thought about it a lot as it relates to large asset allocators, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds. Those organizations should be without question. But that means people need to get their blockchain under surveillance. Just keep your question to one sentence, please guys. Let's just be courteous with everyone and give everyone a chance to joining the conversation. So I wanted to hear your comments on the rise of the nuns and religious affiliation. Is that a representation of decentralization bearing out or is that a problem that or something that decentralization can actually address? Well, I would say it's much more a function in my mind of the atomization we've seen emerge in a Web 2 world where all of the systems that we interact with on a daily basis are designed to fragment us and designed to dice us and slice us into smaller and smaller groups that in many instances divorce us from communities. I think there are a host of reasons around declining rates of religious observance and religious affiliation. But I definitely think our technology structures haven't helped in that regard. Ideally, decentralized frameworks can provide some on-ramps for people who are feeling very divorced from communities to find their way back in. Please try to go quickly on this last one. What do you think the role of governments is in the face of decentralization? Well, I think the role of governments is going to change. I think it will continue to exist. I think it will need to exist. But I think the ways in which we approach democracy and the implements of democracy are going to evolve. Government and democracy at its core is a technology. It's an operating system. And that operating system is in serious need of an upgrade. And so ideally what we're going to see is the evolution of a new set of tools that improve the user interface that we use to translate the aspirations of citizens into the outcomes that are produced by our public institutions. That's going to take, again, a ton of work. None of this stuff is going to be easy. But we have a toolbox today for the first time in our lifetimes with the power to provide a really meaningful upgrade to the infrastructure of democracy. And let's hope and pray that we get that right. Thank you, Tamika.


What's up guys, in this episode we're going to take a look at the user-centered design process, so this is a personal opinion, I'm going to talk about what I think it is, you know what, everyone's going to have a different idea of what this is. Let me know in the comments what you think, there's no industry standard, but for me every business at its core solves a problem. That's why people come to you for business because you offer the best solution that they're looking for and as a designer that's your job to understand, you need to understand what the company is that you're working for, the client that's approached you, what problem they're solving and you'll only ever really know that by talking to the users. Yes, the company might think that they're solving this problem, but you know what, people use things for a lot of different things that are intended most of the time and that's why you'll be like, oh look at this new startup, it's done a pivot and all that means is that they've completely changed the direction of business based on the way people are using the product. So, let's take a look at the four stages of the user-centered design process, which is research, concept, design and test. We're going to talk about each one of these in a little detail, but the whole point of this is it's an iterative circle, it's infinite, it goes on forever or as long as you're in business and that's really, really important to you. A lot of businesses don't iterate, they don't continue this flow, but if you want to be the best like Amazon, they go through this all the time, that's why the website's not the most pretty looking because at the end of the day to them, making money doesn't matter. It's all about this process and you only find out a lot of stuff about your business by going through this process. So, the first stage, I need to mention, there's a lot more jobs on the market now for researchers, so I'm a designer, so I came into UX from visual design, from magazine design, but a lot of people come to it from science or HCI, which is human computer interaction. So, if you're into that stuff, you might want to be a researcher, I think it's a cool job, a lot of the big companies have great in-house testing, so where I've worked before they've had big rooms where you can meet customers, you can talk. It's good if you're a personal person and you like to meet and talk to people, I think it's a great career to go into and there's going to be a lot more jobs coming up. So, in the research phase, again, your job is to understand the problem you're trying to solve for your customer and you do that by talking to people. There's lots of different techniques you can use. You can use surveys if your customers are around the world. You can do one-on-one talking in real life questionnaires. You can do so many things. You can do personas. Again, based on survey results, if there's not real people there, create fictional people, put them on the posters on the walls, get your whole team involved, understand the customers, ask them questions about how the company solves problems for them, what it's all about, and in this research phase, a lot of ideas and a lot of solutions will just naturally come from this. So, we're not asking you to be a genius. I'm not a genius, certainly not, but a lot of my ideas come from just digging into research and some of the most obvious things come from there that the company will never think about because they're not deeply involved in this. So, research, research, research, and a lot of ideas will spring from this. That moves us then on to the concept phase and in this phase, this is where all your ideas from the research phase come into play. And you know what? Let's take design out of this. So, you don't get marked on your font choice on how good a design you are. You don't get marked on your interactions because at the end of the day, for a lot of these companies, that stuff is just icing on top. And really, concept phase should be about getting these ideas out in public, sketching a lot. I do a lot of crappy work with pen and pencil. And this is where wireframes come in. And the whole point in wireframes, in case you're wondering, you look at them and you think, oh, that looks terrible. That person doesn't know how to design. And you know what? They might not. But the whole point in wireframes is you take the conversation about design out of the equation. People love to talk about, you know what? I've shown people designs for a concept which I think is amazing before and spent days on, and they'll go, that's spelt wrong. And there's nothing more disheartening as a designer to hear stuff like that. Or, I don't like that font. I don't like that colour. So you know what? In your wireframes, make sure it's all spelt properly. Do as least design as possible. And people don't like complex conversations. So your whole point is to make this conversation very, very simple. And because you're demonstrating sometimes a complex idea or a complex flow of a website that you've designed or an app that you've designed, make it as simple as possible because then people won't go, oh, like people might say, I don't like that button. And they'll completely ignore 99% of what you've done. So your job is to strip it back. Talk to the people who you need to talk about about your concept to get it signed off. Show it as simply as possible. Papers fine, wireframes are fine, black and white design, whatever you want. Your job's not a designer. Your job is to get that concept out to just rough through it a few times, do a few simple tests. And then you pass it on into design phase. And this is where all the art happens. So you'll work with a UI designer. It might be someone like me. They might be a screen designer. They'll work with a normal level graphic design background. They'll work with the design style for the company, which a lot of big companies have a UI language. And that is a place where they, like a website where they install all their internal graphics. If you're designing like an app for Android or iPhone, the UI designer will know all the icons that they need to use, all the rules around the design, good design rules, aesthetic like white space and typography. They're the person for all of this. As a UX designer, your job is to bring it to this stage. And a lot of companies combine UX and UI into a new role, which is called product design. So you know what? You might be in charge of both. But your design hat shouldn't come on until this design stage. Once the concept's finalised, once you know what you're designing for, then you put your design in together. And then once that's done, you can package it and work with some corner design, but this is also development as well. So you work with developers. So you'll make this thing real. And then before you release it, you'll test it. So you can test it just with a simple prototype or you can test a simple development. It works in different places. I suggest testing as early as possible, so you don't waste money on development. But test it, get people in. This is where the researchers come in. Test it online with surveys. Test it with as many people as quick as you like. And you know what? Sometimes we used to get testers in. And I used to sit in and reiterate designs as we were going. We'd sit in and we'd see five testers in the morning. And they'd all say the same thing. They'd ignore 90% of it and be like, that button's too small. Or they don't know where to click, so you've got to introduce a new button in there. Or they won't like an image. These things will stand out to you and that's where the best improvements come from. The things that affect the most people and normally the simplest to do. So that will come from testing.  And then this is where most companies stop. And that's like a critical error, which most people do. Because, you know, you've done 90% of the hard work. The other 10% to make this amazing, gives you the most results, by the way. A lot of people don't do because they just like to get it out the door. They like to shove it on and work on something else. But you need to look at your analytics. So most websites or digital products will have analytics built in. This is where UX researchers come in. Or anyone who's just interested in this stuff, a product owner, might be interested in doing it. But look at your analytics. See how people are actually using your thing. This is the only way you know how people use what you've produced. And you know what? You might see people go to, people all take the same journey. And you know what? You might change your homepage to make it the fourth page in the journey, instead of the first page, to save all those drop-offs and save those people. But there are simple things you can do at this stage that will improve it dramatically for everyone. That's where you need to look at your analytics. And then that can go back into concept design, test, and so on and so forth. But there are a lot of quick wins you can get from looking at analytics and do you know what? It's going to be money well spent by taking a look at that.


What the f**k happened in crypto this week? Bitcoin hit a nine month high of $29,000 as banks continued to struggle this week. Unfortunately, it was short-lived. The second yearly FOMC meeting took place on Wednesday, and all lies were on the Federal Reserve. Its decision to hike rates by another 25 basis points resulted in massive Bitcoin volatility as it dropped to a weekly low of $26,600. During the press conference, Paul said that they will conduct more rate hikes if needed, and that rate cuts are currently not in the central bank's plans. In other news, the SEC doesn't seem to stop tightening its grip on crypto. This time, they went after Coinbase sending a wealth notice that alleged it of listing unregistered securities. And finally, Terence Doquan was arrested in Montenegro after months of being on the run. Shortly after, US prosecutors accused him of operating a cryptocurrency fraud. Don't forget to like and subscribe for more videos just like this.