Governance with Forrest Landry

Denizen

In this episode we address a foundational topic: governance. Governance refers to how we make decisions and act in groups, whether that be within a nation-state, a corporation, a community group, or a household. Today's challenges require collective action at a global scale. What factors should we keep in mind as we architect governance processes in various contexts?

Our guest for this episode is Forrest Landry, philosopher, writer, engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur. Forrest worked closely with Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall in the Game B movement, where he focused on questions of governance. This is a core topic that informs many upcoming episodes, including social media governance, delegative democracy, corporate governance, and DAOs.

In this conversation, Jenny and Forrest discuss:

• What is governance [4:39]
• Tribal size and Dunbar's number [7:50]
• Challenges with governance at scale [12:42]
• Group vs. individual intelligence [16:36]
• Embodied vs. abstract knowledge [18:05]
• Bias towards action [25:52]
• The epistemic process [31:41]
• Knowledge as process [33:24]
• Information, scale, and technology [36:45]
• Limitations of information [40:13]
• Multi-polar traps [42:39]
• Dynamics of capitalism [48:35]
• Arrow's theorem [57:58]
• Ephemeral group process [59:28]
• Phase parallax and the importance of diversity [1:03:48]
• Right size for group process [1:09:02]
• Governance and identity [1:17:22]