# Devconnect ARG - XS Yellow Pavilion

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-11-25
- Duration: 3:43:54
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-szklyKbIiuk
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szklyKbIiuk

## Transcript

[snorts] All right, let's bring it back in. Okay, hopefully that was u the beginning of an interesting conversation that you'll be able to continue u through the day and we'll hope to have a lot more such conversations. But congrats, you guys just earned yourself a protocol watcher badge. So Timber will point out where you can grab a badge later, but we tried to actually make this a badge you could have fun wearing in the real world. And I' I've been trying this for the last few days, and it's actually fun. People look at it strangely because it's not a normal, you know, promote something kind of badge. If you wear this badge and go and like stand around in public somewhere and look at something protocolish and like just act curious about it, people come up to you and ask and what are you looking at? So, this is a nice little conversation starter. Uh kind of like you know if you had a bird, what's your badge? So, grab a badge and a challenge for you is try this. wear it in public and go protocol watching and see if somebody comes up and talks to you. If you do find that, take a picture of that protocol, maybe a selfie with that person, post it on our Discord and join our community. We actually have a very active Discord with a channel called Protocol Watch where people just post interesting protocols that they spot around. That's uh the invite QR code if you'd like to join. Okay, so that's the agenda for today. Learn for everything or development finance which needs massive um transparency where this is seems to me as someone that's new to this space like the right blockchain to build on top of. So I just wanted to see if you know you've thought about it in any way. >> Yeah. So from a personal perspective, I'm trying to do one thing and do it extremely well. And so I'm very focused on specifically American traditional uh finance. Um I think there's massive massive opportunity in the global standpoint. And I think that you're right, like in some of these markets, the selling point of what you get out of an actual neutral programmable blockchain is is much more apparent. And I will admit if I'm having a conversation and trying to convince somebody of the value of Ethereum over the past eight years, if they like refuse to kind of get it and they're like, you know, everything's actually like fine. I don't know why I need this. I do throw my hands up in the air and say, "Well, if you lived in Venezuela, I think you might." Um, and so, which is me kind of throwing in the towel, but it's also representative of um, yeah, the the kind of like neutral trust components of being able to architect protocols on top of Ethereum. Um, there is a a deep value proposition in places where trust is a scarce resource. So, I've been living here in Buenoseries for two years now. Uh, kind of as a surprise, I came here and I was confronted by a giant crypto scene here from all the OGs from 2013 and 2017, all of whom are really important for the space. And a lot of what they say is that a lot of it is or a lot of governance is actually not transparent. But in the US we have a sort of maybe fiction maybe reality about transparency uh about all levels of governance are transparent and I want to know like in this new world where we're moving where it's like immutable transparent everybody can see it what does that do to the layer of governance that needs to be not transparent >> or is that necessary? >> What is the layer of govern that governance that needs to be not transparent? >> Yes. whether that matters like what because so in Argentina there's a lot of things that get done that nobody knows and in the US a lot of things get done that nobody knows about what what are those parts to this and how does that work in a >> decentralized governance world? >> Yeah. Yeah. And I guess maybe less about governance in the abstract but just like a bound coordinated behaviors on blockchains. I mean a huge component of what we've seen in the past week is a dialogue around privacy. And when I'm thinking about um rewiring the plumbing of a traditional market onto Ethereum, um I have to be guided by the principle of this market needs to be uh have the same properties of privacy that the market currently has or it's kind of a non-starter. Privacy is table stakes. Um and so I think we we do have the tools with applied cryptography to architect the world as it is today onto Ethereum. Um it does I will say that anytime you architect private things on top of a public blockchain you get a lot of great benefits but you also do reduce the um immediate ability to coordinate around it and the immediate ability to act upon information about it. I can prove things to you around about something that privately happened on a blockchain and so we can act upon that information. I can premise other programmatic behaviors and things upon that information, but at the same time, I don't I don't get it for free, but at the same time, the world is not going to entirely move on to blockchains without being able to encode privacy into into them. So, I I don't have a deep answer in relation to governance, but I will say uh privacy is requisite for building bridges into the real world. Um, and at the same time it makes coordinated behaviors and protocols more complex. For sure. >> Yeah. I was just struck right now by the irony that cryptography originally started in the most secret of worlds like you know spies and deep state trade craft. Then it created the most public of technologies which is blockchains. And now it's going right back to what you're asking essentially is how can blockchains bring crypto back to the world of spies in a way. So it's kind of funny but thank you Danny for making the time and kicking us off here and we hope you enjoy the books that we published in the last three years. >> Yeah, this is awesome. >> And uh >> one more >> uh we have time for one more Kimber one more. Let's do >> maybe I missed it on the slide venet but you talked about the age of protocolization how much of that is just the proliferation of the internet and software into the existing world. >> Uh so if you look at the Google trends of the world word protocol it starts actually in the late7s so before the internet but it does peak around 2000 um with internet protocols then it goes into a plateau. I have the graph in one of my other slides but then it again has an uptick with crypto. Uh so I would say that protocolization as a wave a frame of the world started with the 1970s wave of automation and factory automation that's probably where it started but yeah we are now I would say in the third mini age of protocolization industrialization internet crypto I would say. Yeah. >> All right so let's see who's up next. so much. >> Oh, wait. Who's up next? Is this thing on? Okay. Is anybody else switched over to Argentina time? I'm finding like 10:00 a.m. is I'm starting to wake up now. Um, okay. This is a new word on my slides. Um, okay. Um, my name is Timber. I help run some of protocols with Venat and Josh and Tim and a few other people. And today I'm here to talk to you about a couple tools that I think are really great for ecosystem diplomats or protocol diplomats. But first, uh, four diplomats log into a Zoom room, one from Canada, one from France, one from Argentina, and one from Germany. And the host is having some issues with their camera, and he asks, "Can you guys see me?" They see, "Yes, we see you." You're going to have to be better at jokes than I am to be a good diplomat. Okay. Um, second thing, since we've got a bit of a game room vibe in here, what tools did diplomats historically bring to with them when they went on diplomatic missions to other countries? Um, I put six here. I think that they're all one word. If you have any ideas, just go ahead and shout it out. Um, I'll tell you if you're right. I couldn't get the animation to work, so they'll all come up at the same time after. >> A gift. Yep, that's one of them. Diplomatic immunity kind of one of them. Definitely. I'll talk about that in a bit. >> What was that? >> Translators. >> Translators. Yep. >> No guns. >> They're atache. Yep. Okay. Um, so all these things and I'm surprised that none of the cipher punks got cipher. Uh, I think that was a really important one. Diplomatic um, delegations had to send messages back encrypted and now we can do that basically all this with their phones with the exception of GIFs. Um, one thing that protocol diplomats do not have is legal immunity. So you can still get parking tickets unlike a real diplomat. And protocol diplomats and ecosystem diplomats have a different job than regular ones. They have different tools. You don't have legal immunity. You have all the things that regular diplomats do now on your phone. You don't have to pay a translator. You don't have to pay as much for security. You have um basically a bunch of advisers in your pocket for scientific matters. And today I'll teach you how to use two which some diplomats use, but I think they're particularly relevant for you guys. Um one for the shape rotators among you, one for the word cells. I think this provides a complete set um for whatever your skill set is. So, let's get into them. The first one, um you've seen this word come up a few times. I might be like, uh like the head of Coinbase and come up and just like read off all the things that are on, um Poly Market, so you guys get your bingo sheets done. Uh I think tensions are are really important. Uh who's seen this bridge in Argentina? Okay, we got a few here. It's in Buenos Aries. Um this is a pretty spectacular front tension um bridge. Um you can see that it actually swings open. It doesn't lift. That thing in the back there is the support column. And this whole thing is possible because of the tension exerted by the the strings in this bridge. And so why would you want to think in tensions instead of trade-offs? It's a slightly nuanced change in how you think about it. But a trade-off is an engineering problem. A conflict is a social problem. And if you've been paying attention to anything lately, these are becoming increasingly entangled. So you can't just look at an engineering problem and solve it that way. There's a history behind it. Ethereum has the unique problem of some serious uh issues with perceptions of being a scam that now shape its engineering decisions every day, which you wouldn't think of from the get-go. and vice versa. Social problems have a strong engineering component. So you have issues about access to services, you can solve them through engineering. Doesn't have to be a social fix. Um, one example of a tension that I like to use all the time is efficiency versus thorowness. Um, I come from a health and safety background in government and one of the things that we often look at is how safe is something versus how efficient it is. And you can increase the safety, but often that means you're reducing the throughput significantly. And the reason there's a tension is because safety and productivity is an engineering problem. You can adjust a system just with technology to do one of the things more or less. But people have different opinions about where you should sit on that. And that's why you get tension. You get tension because you don't want your security team to design your user interface because nobody will ever be able to use your app. And you don't want the user interface team to design your security back end because it'll just let everybody in and have a good time partying with all your assets. So typically you're sitting in the semoptimal range. So there's some improvement that's possible, but you need to talk about it and you need to figure out who you're working with and what their tensions are. So safety versus productivity, efficiency versus thoroughess, whether you want to oify or continue evolving your protocol to reach some sort of functional escape velocity, the example that Venap mentioned of aesthetics versus function. So take a couple minutes with the people at your table, come up with attention, this versus that. preferably from your field. Try and come up with one that's from a different field. And uh yeah, raise your hand when you've got one. >> [music] >> So, it seems like private sections. >> Okay, rapid fire. Who's got one? We'll dig into them later as part of the exercise this afternoon. Quick tension. This versus that from your field from's field. Yeah. >> Decentralization versus efficiency. Good. Another one. >> Breth versus depth and education and learning. diagnostics, >> speed versus quality, and healthcare diagnostics. Yeah, these are all tough ones that everybody has to deal with when you work with other um industries, other protocol domains. And the best thing you can do to get to the core of this thing that somebody's worrying about what keeps you up at night, what's the key tension in your field? How can I help you navigate that? What's the conflict? What's the history? They are the raw material of bridge building. Once you find out what people's tensions are in their domain, you're going to be able to build bridges with them much faster. You're going to help them build bridges in their field with the people that they disagree with and come up with creative solutions. It is not easy to find out what somebody's key tension is. But once you do, those tensions are going to last longer than the people that are in that field. We will always have to deal with issues about safety versus productivity, decentralization, and efficiency. And there will never be a perfect answer for all time. I've written about this a lot. Um I've hosted 42 sessions about tensions and helped people walk through them from government to the private sector to startups. And there's a QR code for that article and we'll be doing a little session this afternoon on this. The second tool I want to teach you about is literacy. This is um I think highly underrated. It is a tool for word cells. I assuming that most people here at Dev Connect are indeed shape rotators. If you're not familiar with the difference, are you like more of a Matthew person, more of a wordy person? This is for the wordy people. And that bridge is the ambassador bridge between Canada and the USA, the two countries of which I'm a citizen. It is um very valuable for both uh for trade. It was also a symbolic achievement for the two countries to build that bridge together. It's not easy to do that and I think people are pretty proud of it. But the thing about literacy and for it to be a good bridge is it's not just vocabulary. You can't just learn a bunch of new terms. You can't just look up all the things that we put on the slide earlier or read a book and start using them because people will be like, "Dude, you're going to talk to me about protocolization debt. This is just gibberish to me." You're going to have to find some in between terms. They should accumulate. They should foster clearer thinking on your own problems. And importantly, they should change your behavior, how you actually act with other people. Why is literacy so effective even though it's such a soft concept? Because when you build bridges, you have to build them one at a time between protocol domains. It's expensive. It's really hard. It takes a lot of effort to build a bridge and you're usually doing it alone at the start. But then, you know, you build a few bridges and language has this nice ability that's soft and it it transfers well. So instead of a bridge, you kind of get this like area where you can fly around and jump between conversations and start to connect the dots a little bit more. And eventually when people start using language effectively enough and broadly enough and it becomes a new term of art, it becomes the foundation for something new. This is what we call a whitehead advance. I think that protocol language that you'll learn today is like very powerful and it helps fields connect with each other. So when you're a diplomat for technology, listen to people. Start expressing things in their terms and start developing this language that'll be the foundation for future innovation. Once you learn to think intentions and you learn to speak in terms of other protocol domains, you'll build bridge bridges without even trying like they did in Japan. And we're going to learn more about this later, but that's it from me. So, thanks for listening. [applause] I have time for a couple questions before we have a I think a sci-fi writer coming up to talk, which is going to be really cool. Um, somebody texted me one, but maybe they want to ask it out loud. Okay, I won't put you on the spot. Any questions about tensions or literacy? I waited for the mic. Yeah, >> sorry. This uh Hello. Uh this might be a little off topic. Um could you go into your background before uh you were sort of stewarding the program? I'm just wondering. >> Yeah, a little random. Um so graduated from business school. I went to work in quantum computing. Um I helped found a large quantum computing research facility in Canada. COVID hit and then I switched to government work um working on health and safety for three years. I saw this program. I applied to be a researcher and I was like, "Oh, this is kind of cool. This Ethereum stuff, I've never heard about it." Um but they use the word protocols. I use the word protocols a lot. and I wrote a 6,000word essay on the evolution of coal mining safety protocols and its relevance for Ethereum and now helped run the program. Um, you can read it. It's in the binder out there. I yeah I I also have a question [laughter] which might be uh a little bit spicy but I'm wondering if this is the process of trying to reinvent the concept of protocols which similar to what web 3 does a lot with a lot of other concepts considering that protocols are something that have been around for a long time right like even when benadesh was mentioning uh mercantalism in Italy Like literally there are protocols that used to be followed in terms of how mission missionaries would go from one country to another. This is also where for example the thing of gifts gift bearing and so protocols is actually not something new. I know that they're um and so I'm wondering if this is more a trying to get more technical people to make sense of what this tool that has been used uh is out there. Is is is this more for us to try to convert it into something more technical so that it is clear for more technical people? >> Yeah, the it's a great question. And you should always ask if you're reinventing the wheel. Um, we've done a lot of research into if anybody else has done this. Um, now a few people have. A few people have written books on um, interdisciplinary study of protocols. We had the first one. As far as I know, nobody's done this since we started using protocol as a word in like the Roman like legislative assembly when they start they used it as like the word for the glue between the first page of a document and the second page. It's come a long way since then. Um yeah and I I think that both social people who talk about government governance have a lot to learn from technical people who use it like how do computers talk to each other. um is a difficult thing to figure out and it requires a lot of research, but I don't think we're reinventing the wheel. Yeah. >> One more. >> Um going back to the curve you had of the tradeoffs, you know, my favorite part of it was actually that you could push the entire curve out as well as navigate the frontier. Um you know, what are some of the ways that you can push out the curve? You know, I think the the first answer is technological innovation, but are there other ways? Like what else is there? I'll give um kind of an interesting example. Um anybody here have a food allergy? Okay, we got we got a couple here. Um so in the United States and Canada, there was a policy put in place around the 90s or the late 80s um because the health uh health department saw a rise in peanut allergies and they said, "Okay, we need to take peanuts out of schools. We need to make sure the kids aren't exposed to peanuts. And then the allergies hit an inflection point and went up again. Okay, the problem's getting worse. Now we have to crack down and do more advertising. And then there was another inflection point and allergies went up again. It was because there was a fundamental un misunderstanding between safety and resilience and there was no medicine involved with this. It is only about at what age you expose kids to allergens. And there's this very complicated mechanism in how people develop allergies that we don't yet understand. But it was this simple protocol of okay, under doctor supervision, let's expose kids to the allergen and let the body develop an immune response that's effective. Um, we still don't understand why it works. It's not technology. It's a weird protocol where you're interfacing with something you don't understand. And it's totally empirical. And I think that's a good example of people rushing to either end of like safety versus just let the peanuts rip. And the compromise took a long time to discover, but was a lot more effective in pushing that curve out. Okay, that's it from me. Um, we have a sci-fi writer coming up. He's the two-time winner of Protocolized Contest. So, we had him down here. His stories are in the books that you guys will get. Um, and they're outside along with the badges if you feel like grabbing one. I actually recommend, you know, stand up, get a little stretch on. We've been talking a little bit. And, uh, yeah, Spencer will get up here. Hi. Uh, my name is Spencer. I'm a science fiction writer. Uh, self-identified word cell for sure. So, happy to represent the, uh, wordy among us. And I'm just going to hopefully spread the good word about uh storytelling and stories as a really effective um and interesting way to create and build bridges. Sort of want to start off by talking about how fundamentally I kind of view stories as a type of bridge. They at a really basic level connect writers with readers. Uh sort of the beginning and end of a story. The the actual substance of the story bridges those. Uh, but I'm a lot more interested in some of the other stuff that stories can bridge. I think one of the most powerful things is it they can take changing environments, changing worlds, and create really powerful analogies that help people understand, contextualize, and live within that change. This was sort of the self-identified purpose of the sort of golden age of science fiction. uh writers John Campbell actually renamed his pulpy science fiction magazine from astounding to analog because he really viewed the science fiction genre as a way to help contextualize and build understandings of the rapid atomic changes, technological changes, social changes happening in the 20th century. Um other kinds of bridges that stories connect, facts and feelings. How do physical uh social realities in human experiences sort of feel to people? Um the sort of empath uh version of stories is you can explore differences in a way that enhance understandings. They connect sort of how a world exists with how a human feels in it uh or vice versa. And of course they sort of bridge the present with the future when you're dealing with speculative fiction like science fiction. Um which is sort of where protocol fiction takes off uh in my view. And so when we think about science fiction as being what helped sort of analogize the change that was happening in the 20th century, what does the 21st century need? We we've heard some of the things that define this this current time. It's a planetary century, a a digital century, hopefully a decentralized century, and ultimately we're sort of moving into a protocolized century. and sort of two visions of how a 20th century analogy of change is this I I think represented really well by this picture of Earthrise where all of a sudden we were able to view in real time in in in reality our entire planet captured in this small little dot through these combinations of rocket science physics deeper understandings of technology uh and we're all sort of shrunk into this one image and this doesn't quite have the same representative uh resonance in in the 21st century anymore. We have projects like the Opta project that attempts to visualize the planet as a set of network and data flows. Um so if we need new pictures of what reality is shaped like what kind of stories can we tell that bridge you know the the rapid interesting changes we're going through right now with a a sort of understanding and and an ability to grapple with it. I think all of us here at uh SOP are sort of hoping that protocol fiction becomes that genre for us. The 20th century fiction, science fiction was great. They were great stories. They helped spread scientific literacy. Uh but ultimately they were about great men achieving great things. They were if they were a bridge, they were a bridge that was often sort of uh poll blocked by a toll booth. You had to be a genius scientist, a uh uh a underserved bureaucrat with a a grand ideals and an ability to sort of make huge scientific leaps in order to understand the world. Protocol fiction, on the other hand, takes the focus from special strange people and focuses in on the strange rules. Uh these often take the shape of protocols, of course. Um but we refer to this as Chang's law. Uh, science fiction writer Ted Chang talks about fantasy being about strange or special people and science fiction being about strange or special rules. We really believe that stories about rules and not people generate a lot better bridge between the complex realities and an actual way for humans to understand their place inside these systems and how to build better systems within it. They're centered on how systems changes and protocols affect everyone. again, not just how great men can influence and change systems. Uh, and they and they deal in the engines of our era, which uh we like to say are protocols. Uh, it asks what happens when we deliberately design cables that link actors together and then explore that possibility space. Um, ultimately I think these are stories that can prototype empathy, governance, and consequence. And as such, they're really useful tools. I think stories can be really, really helpful in this case. Uh so to sort of show what that could look like, I put together a little prototype on how I have thought about sort of bringing together and writing uh protocol fiction. We'll have kind of a uh workshop where we do a sort of Mad Libs uh version of some of this a little bit later this afternoon. I think you start by rendering a rule. So you you find an interesting rule, you render it, you rehearse a failure mode. What are the ways in which agents acting together or agents acting with a prototype uh or rather a protocol uh how can that go wrong either for the prototype the world or the sort of individuals reacting with it and then ultimately like all good fiction you want to reveal something deep and meaningful about uh human in uh about humanity about us about our role in the world uh I want to sort of break this down a little bit further when you're starting a protocol story how do you figure out what rule to examine I think a great start is uh the Whitehead candidate which uh comes from philosopher Alfred North Whiteheads quote that a civilization's advancement is measured by its ability to extend the number of important operations that can be performed without conscious thought. Some interesting starting points for protocol fiction are examining the protocols that have sort of sunk into our subconscious space and thinking through what happens, what could change with our world, with ourselves, with the rule to make those suddenly conscious things we have to think about. That can be a really promising start. I I think something else as a you know someone who grew up on a lot of science fiction, creating speculative protocols. Um consider rules and protocols that apply to large numbers of people. Again, protocol fiction is not about special people. It's about the rules. And I think the most interesting resonant rules are going to be ones that resonate with a large number of people and apply to a large number of people. Uh an example of this uh one of the stories that I wrote that's in the description kind of uh the rule I rendered is thinking about ways maybe a verified identity would never digitally die. Um, when identity anchors are marked as deceased, the AI personality rapper attached to them enter failure recovery, they gather as much identity as possible, and then they become kind of semi-autonomous digital ghosts. There's a lot of reasons why you could sort of think through people wanting to do this, you know, having ways to sort of control what happens with your assets after your death. There's a lot of reasons why you'd want a digital identity to sort of persevere past death. So, this was sort of the strange rule I started with. Then you think about uh failure modes. Um something that has come up in a lot of protocol fiction is this notion of a traffic jam which comes from science fiction writer Frederick Pole who said that good science fiction stories are not about uh predicting the automobile but predicting the traffic jam. So it's not just about thinking through what's the coolest possible future technology I can imagine but what are these sort of complicating effects that that technology would have on the world. Another useful term from protocol fiction is Kafka protocols. Um, obviously I like these because the phrase comes from a fiction writer. Uh, and in Kafka stories, characters are often confronted with dense mazes of bureaucracy where the rules are, if legible, totally totally uh unable to be changed, if they're even legible at all. A Kofka protocol are spaces where protocols hold too much power and participants are trapped uh in a maze full of rules that they can't understand or can't escape. What did this look like in my story? I sort of conceived it as coordination without context plus volume overload. The internet slowly filling with these echoes which uh in my story I I didn't want to make sort of you know haunted ghosts. I I I wanted to think through the sort of positive iteration and still how that could go wrong. But slowly the internet you could imagine is verified identities are adopted broader. The internet is slowly filling with these ghosts spanning their relatives emails with ASI art hacking LED ads. They're usually harmless or even sweet, but you could sort of see how a broad proliferation eventually becomes a problem. What if they set a power plant's cooling system to the temperature their husband liked to sleep at as an act of service or love? you could still see how this sort of goes wrong. And then finally, the hardest part uh I guess for me um usually is this revealing a human insight element. We still want to write resonant fiction that connects with people and builds those bridges. If people aren't invested in your story and don't feel like they're getting something out of it, it's not going to really work for a a broad number of people. Uh so the question I kind of ask is what deep shared emotional human experience uh does your rule change, intersect with, create? Uh something important that uh I heard the first writing uh workshop I ever attended and I've heard it pretty much everyone since to remember with this is even though you're dealing with broad human insights, universality comes through specificity. If you want to create stories that connect with people, uh, taking a really, really broad view can be useful at an ideation iteration stage. But in a story, you're going to want tangible specific details to sort of latch on to. And almost counterintuitively, that ends up creating stories that resonate a lot more with uh, people in my experience. How did I sort of do this? Uh in my story I I thought about how grief is really resilient and that people are going to adapt rituals to continue to grieve their relatives. So in the story some people sort of suggest trying to just erase these ghosts. Let's uh see if we can get rid of these digital identities. But people have become sort of attached to the people in their life. I think if uh if I had someone I loved who sort of stayed with me in some way, I don't know if I would feel comfortable just sort of burning or deleting that. Um so in my story a global group of mourers kind of adapt an old ritual these um Southeast Asian spirit houses where uh people leave offerings to their relatives um uh just throughout the year they're they're almost everywhere. Uh if you visit a place like Mai and Thailand you'll just see these almost mini temples that just sort of dot uh the cityscape. So there's already kind of an infrastructure that we have of these sort of nodal grief uh grief remembrance spaces. So adding a technology layer onto that to sort of connect and contain their uh their loved ones echoes in a place of reverence. So not deleting but still revering but then sort of problem solving. And I think the place I kind of want to finish is just uh again you can kind of see this laid out here uh as a sort of example. Um but the place I really want to finish is I don't think protocol fiction is just for writers or people writing stories. I think taking the tools of storytelling and writing protocol fiction, it's a way you can prototype the human layer of sort of any system or technology and really force yourself to imagine how in an embodied human sense things are going to feel for the people in those systems before it becomes real. Obviously, it gives you a chance to explore failure modes, which is always useful when prototyping. Um, and also it's just a chance to sort of investigate and better your understanding of the world around you uh and your lives today. That's uh that's all I had. Um I think I went right to my 10 minutes, so I don't know if I have time for questions. Um one or two. Okay. Yeah, if anyone has questions, I'm happy to word sell out with you. No pressures. [snorts] >> So you've been writing fiction since before you joined our little scene of protocol fiction. Y >> what's been the biggest change in outlook for you as a writer >> starting to write protocol fiction as opposed to what you were doing before? >> That's a great question. I'd say a lot of my sort of pre-protocol fiction um focused a lot on the sort of individual experience grappling with a change or a technology. I wrote a lot of speculative science fiction. I'm still really interested in how like one person's specific unique lived human experience can interact with um technology, but protocol fiction I think has really pushed me to think about ways in which um protocols maybe more broadly apply to and connect broader swaths of people than my sort of older fiction dealt with. Um, so I'd say yeah, protocol fiction has helped me on a sort of craft technique level uh expand my sense of scale and sort of consequence in stories would be the two big things. Awesome. Thank you. Um, I'll pass it off to Sam, [applause] I think. >> Thanks. All right, let's see if this works. Cool. Good morning. Thanks for being here. Uh we've heard a bit about protocols. We've heard a bit of a few tools. I'm going to talk now about something that feels like an oxymoron, but I think it's an actually interesting opportunity uh as we zoom out from where um we are today in Ethereum's uh 10 tier uh and also a lot of bridging we're talking about. And the broad concept I'm going to introduce is this idea of punk diplomacy. So quick bit about myself. Uh my name is Sam Chua. Uh I'm based in Asia. I live in Koala Lumpur, Malaysia. So kind of the other side of the world from here. Uh I'm a program ambassador for Southeast Asia. I think I've been given a title this week or something uh by SOP uh which I guess I talk about protocols a lot and do programs. I'm also the founding curator at a research and imagination collective called Cunk Studios. Uh so we do a bunch of different things involving how to expand imaginations around like uh especially solar punk imaginations especially in Southeast Asia at the SEA in Cunk and the global south. So we've done things for example if you saw the newspaper outside that's called uh flyways about experimental globalization. We did a workshop over the past month to do things like that. We've also been involved in uh uh some of the initial uh workshops for uh some of protocols that created the concept of artificial ghost that you can read about in one of the uh anthologies that's out today. So I'm a researcher and cultural entrepreneur by background and that's my website if you want links to uh my my my other things. So, uh, punk diplomacy. The first thing you might that might come to mind is, uh, punks and fancy hair, uh, as well as maybe the game diplomacy, which is actually not diplomatic at all. If you've ever played it, it's a great way to lose friends. Uh, the talk today to just set expectations is not going to be about either of these. Uh, it's actually going to be the most punk diplomacy thing possible is actually when it doesn't feel punk or dipl or diplomatic. And I'm going to explain uh how that unfolds. So uh this is kind of a brief sense of where we want to the bridge we're going to cross over the next uh 8 minutes uh towards uh this is the vision uh an ecology of self-starting briders uh who can observe and imagine where their worlds might want to go and help build bridges to help get their worlds there. And I'll unpack this over the next few slides. So, what is punk diplomacy? So, what does punk mean? What do we mean with punk? We've seen like uh the funky hair and all that. And uh I've had a chance inadvertently to speak about punk and research it a lot over the past uh couple years. Uh and I think the essence of punk is really being permissionless. Uh punk music started because people wanted to make and play their music the way they wanted to. There's also a very strong resourceful do-it-yourself kind of um attitude towards it. So instead of saying if only we had funding for a studio, if only we had speakers, if only had a guitar, the punk attitude is really like here we are, what can we use and let's go, let's let's just do it, right? So there's a sense of small sovereignty about the punk that's not trying to be the big king. The punk doesn't particularly care about taking everything over. They just want to have the autonomy and sovereignty to do it themselves. So I kind of summarized that as uh in the phrase self-starting that a punk is really about that self-starting energy and diplomacy uh is about facilitating not forcing. A diplomat doesn't carry a gun. You can't control somebody. You have to facilitate a particular kind of outcome and often that comes by being relatable. A diplomat is usually someone who can share your language. You can connect with you. So they understand not just your language but also the the the way of seeing the world, the protocols you live with, the metaphors, uh the analogies. Uh diplomats enable connection and learning. Often relating to a diplomat gives you access to different things that you might have access otherwise. Sometimes their country, sometimes their company, sometimes a whole body of knowledge. A professor is sometimes your diplomat into a whole field and a way of seeing the world. So diplomats host, they link and they bridge. So why does punk diplomacy matter? Why why do we care about it? Let's start with a question and uh we don't have the time to do a full exercise on this, but uh what makes a great leader? Anyone shout it out? Empathy makes a good leader. Anyone else? Communication. Yes. Vision. Empathy. communication. Second question, what would you consider most important if you have to choose somebody to help or serve you and your interest going forward? So, let's say we had a situation where there's a crisis coming. You're all part of different island or village. Uh you have to choose a leader. What's the most important criteria for you? Someone? Anyone? Yes. Sorry. Experience. Okay. somebody else. No. So when you look at these questions a lot of times what we think about what makes a great leader from the outside is often distinct from actually what people will choose in what helps me. And the gap between the first and the second question is actually like part of the difference between like what leadership or building something and what diplomacy or being useful to somebody or helpful or having them feel like you understand them and you actually can be able to help them get through this. uh is second exercise uh what does a bridge actually do? What's the most important aspect of a bridge and that is the bridge itself as beautifully as it's built is only as useful as important as what it connects to. Uh a lot of people use a lot of like really crappy bridges because what's on the other side is really interesting. It could be a hole in the fence. It could be a rickety uh rickety like log or something, but it's useful because of what it connects to. So, let's put these together a little bit. So, um a good leader, a good bridge, as well as the function of it is really about like identifying what's worth connecting to. Uh and that requires something we've heard about a bit today, which is understanding the interest, right? Right. We heard Danny talking earlier earlier about what is Wall Street interested in? What do people want to be connected to? Even if they can't necessarily like uh articulate it yet or see it yet because they can't imagine it, it's a new thing, right? How does that align with their deeper interest? So, uh most people choose who they trust and maybe change or adopt something. They're not basing it on who you are or how good your product is, but they're basing on what does it do for them? what can you help me become or what can you help me do? And typically uh I think it's a famous insight by Steve Jobs and others that says what people fundamentally want uh and people can be individuals or other scales is often essentially a better version of myself or ourselves. A village might want a better life for themselves that has more prosperity like uh the traders on Wall Street might want a faster more efficient way to do the trading that that is part of what they do right. So why punk diplomacy matters is uh that as we think about what Ethereum diplomacy means uh and we think about we have a mature technology that that's coming out uh this gives us opportunity to go beyond just let's build bridges to Ethereum or what we are but to actually think about how do we bridge through the technology we have to what people actually care about and this probably lets us appeal and connect to and serve an order of magnitude more people using the the technologies and the promises that we have. And so punk diplomacy is actually about how do we enable this kind of approach. So to sum for diplomacy, diplomacy allows us to meet people where they are. Uh users, partners, collaborators, ecosystems, the world is full of them. People choose what helps them, not so much how great you are. Uh diplomacy also is about learning what pe what interests people have, what matters to them. Sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they can tell you, sometimes they're not so obvious and they're deeper. And uh diplomacy gives us a superpower to not just bridge to who we are, what we're doing, but to actually help people bridge to what they want using the things that we can offer them. And why does punk matter for this diplomacy? It's one thing. And this is really because centralization, decentralization, most of us here are familiar, right? bridging like so many other things like finance or databases or security. It's too important a function and too powerful a function to just centralize and leave only to the professionals or the opposite of punk which is the preps people who have been groomed their whole life to be diplomats. Yes, there's a value in having maybe some centralized appointed diplomats who represent parts of the ecosystem. But if we can unleash all of us to exercise some practice of diplomacy to be able to help bridge the communities we connect to to better versions of themselves using technologies that we understand that actually scales things up by many orders of magnitude. [snorts] So to be able to decentralize bridging is be able to to be able to distribute bridging. And if we have a whole ecology population of citizen possibilists who enable possibilities, right? We can enable hyper contextual super adaptive context local bridging in all sorts of different situations whether it's in fields of science or healthcare, finance or more. So hope you get a better sense of like why bank diplomacy matters. And I'm going to quickly run through uh a bit of how we get there. So we've had a lot of tools over the past uh couple hours that uh our colleagues have introduced and uh I'm going to start with this. Um many of us and over the past one week we've seen lots of different uh builders right and courses for builders and there's a lot of learning about how do you build a good bridge? How do you engineer it well? How do you ensure that it protects privacy? It's secure etc. The skill set in diplomacy is a complimentary set of questions. Where should the bridge be? What are you trying to cross? Where should it go? What are you linking people to? That's a skill set of surveying, navigation, strategy. And that comes from what Wat has shared earlier, which is to get to good surveying, get good navigation, good strategy. You have to be able to observe, to listen, to understand and imagine, and do all this as a diplomat while bringing the people along. Because if you're just doing this by yourself, you're not able to bring people along with you. There's a lot of different tools and means beyond the protocols uh centric stuff you've heard about, right? Diplomats are really good observers and listeners. Uh they're often really good at translating and code switching as we heard Danny talk about earlier. Uh diplomats often are really good hosts as well because to host is to create a space where you can engage with people in richer ways. And sometimes by creating hosting you create a different kind of space where different actors in your ecosystem can interact in different ways where people from different countries that are often arguing can maybe come together and listen to each other. Uh instead uh coalition and community building is also really big part of diplomacy. Uh coalition building is being able to craft and find stories that allow new us or we to emerge. uh we might be different countries but Canada and America with the bridge can actually be a collective uh economy or ecosystem or society. Um a lot more channels being a person that connects different parts uh cocoons for innovation containers for new ideas a lot of uh different tools and stuff in diplomacy. Uh we've covered a lot in our CPU studios experience uh in all sorts of different small ways. I'm happy to share those about you maybe during the break. So this is maybe the opportunity for us uh the punk diplomacy opportunity for us which is to expand beyond uh the building and engineering aspect into all these opportunities that like diplomacy might be able to uh unlock for us. And this doesn't mean that every single builder has become a diplomat overnight. But it does make us ask who do we partner with that could create these complimentary skill sets. Can we expand our impact through accessing these things? And so that's a summary of punk diplomacy. Uh an ecology of self-starting briders who can observe and imagine where their worlds might want to go even if they're not if they can't see it yet and then build bridges to help them get there. And in short, right, there's an opportunity to to transcend from being builders to also being brides and to expand the vision from just uh adoption, which is a really good measure, but maybe not the pursuit to augmentation, which is if we can center on augmentation as what we offer to the people we link with, then adoption follows very naturally. So, it's maybe it's time to debridge. Thank you. We're doing questions or Okay, I've been given permission for two questions if anyone has them. Wat, >> so you've helped us build the Southeast Asia program in particular and um that's an archipelago with the growing uh crypto scene as well as many other things happening. Can you like point to a couple of like interesting experiences you've had doing this in Southeast Asia? >> Sure. Uh so Cong Studios, this experiment uh has been in existence for just over a year. Uh I think we started off as a small experimental meetup in uh Changai last year amidst all the pop-up villages over the past 6 months. Uh we've actually been able to build bridges into like uh academic communities as well as uh like the climate scene. uh a few months ago uh we presented CPA studio one of our first papers that was on the sepang theme at an academic conference in Chiang Mai uh that and we presenting it along with other Southeast Asian scholars uh and we were doing it as a basically a non-academic entity right we have no like housing university we have no background like that and I think the way we did that was just by I mean like you know learning the rules of the game and trying to play with it right so we went there as you would to an academic conference we prepared a paper that was quite like academics submitted in the usual format and in doing that we were able to actually not just bring something to an academic spot. We were a able to also offer something to academics that was fresh for them right we attracted a lot of academics who were a bit frustrated by the maybe like what they felt was the lack of imagination uh in some of the spaces they were with and we were like the I guess the punks who somehow ended up in a scholarly conference and could do something with that. Uh second example is we presented a climate fiction exhibition at uh Bangkok climate action week uh just last month. Uh and we were able to also interface with a whole bunch of different workshops with climate stakeholders. I remember in a room like being in a room like this with about 70 people where the median age of how long they had been in the climate movement was about 35 years. Uh and how do we end up in there? Because again we kind of came in through like working with different partners we had uh before through often just through casual conversations meet someone at a conference say hey we've always thought about doing fiction for something and then they say oh we we are interested in doing uh climate topics is there something there and just by being very extremely open-ended and open to saying hey we do a bit of this but we can only do this but if you want to explore this we can do that together with you we somehow stumbled into what felt like a really uh important conversation that we I didn't expect certainly at the beginning of the year to be in a climate circle with all these people uh at the beginning. So I guess serendipity uh just being open listening and exploring is part of how I would answer that question. Yeah. Second question if anyone has one otherwise I guess it's lunch. It's hard to see with the lights in my face. So uh if you see one let me know. Otherwise I guess is it lunch after this or one more? Okay. Oh, yeah. This this is a video. Cool. Well, thanks. I'll be around if you have any more questions. Cheers. Oh, wait. You have a Okay. Okay. Speaking of speaking of ghosts and machines, our next talk is actually a recording. Um Tim Beo is the executive sponsor of of summer of protocols and he's been involved since the beginning as a director of the program helping guide all of the study, all of the research, all of the field work that's gone on. And yeah, if we could pull up There we go. Perfect. Um yeah, and he couldn't be here because he just had a baby, which is very exciting. It's the um it's not the first summer of protocols baby. There have been a few, but it is the most recent. U he uh which is super exciting. Um Tim also helped write the pilot study that kicked off SOP and I think he's got some very sophisticated thoughts on bridge building especially looking to the future. Um and you'll hear about it in this talk. Um, and after the talk, I'll give a quick uh brief on what's going to happen for lunch and afterwards. So, stick around for that. Since he's online, since he's just a ghost in a machine, there there won't be a Q&A, but I encourage you to chat with people like Venat and I. If you've got a question for Tim, we can be proxies for an answer. Okay. Hopefully the sound works here. This is a real real ghost in the machine. Now, sometimes you have to unplug it and let the ghost out. [music] >> I know. I don't have the uh the silicon thumb like this guy. >> Hey, it's Jimmy Harvey and Amy Watson. We are in Spain. Today, we're going to take you on a tasty flavor trip. We're going to cook a pa vigana and listen to some chill out deep house music. Enjoy. >> Okay, here we go. Hi everyone, my name is Tim Bego and I've been involved in several protocols since it started in 2022. Title of my talk here is argument engineering from the ivory tower and in short it's a talk about protocol design. My goal is to show why protocols are their own class of things and how thinking about them that way can help us design both Ethereum as well as many other systems more wisely. And protocols borrow from a lot of familiar things when you look at them, but they never quite seem to [laughter] fit any of those. If you take Ethereum as an example, um, one person can look at it and see that it's money or, you know, part of it resembles money. Uh, other people will look at it and think of it as a world computer or a settlement layer or even something like a digital nation. And while Ethereum has parts of all of this, it's actually neither of those things for. And the core premise of sever protocol started somewhere around this image to try and figure out okay is there a better way we can actually look at this and instead of zooming in to Ethereum directly we figured we should instead zoom out and try to think of this as a class that's broader than just blockchains and so protocols is what we came up with and we decided to study them as a first class topic to try and understand the commonalities and see if there's these kind of highle rules we could derive that would apply beyond just a theory One way to think about this is to think of protocols as Swiss Army knives. Swiss Army knives all have similar features. They tend to all have a blade, for example, but each knife can have like its own weird set of tools and its own constraints. And so through this lens, you can think of Ethereum as being effectively a Swiss Army knife with a money tool attached to it. This makes it a very useful framing to both communicate what's special to Ethereum to people outside of blockchain, but also for us to learn from them. Right? We can look at these other protocols in the world, see what affordances or things that they have that they might be lacking and try to understand how it kind of squares with what we have here. And when we talk about protocol literacy today, this is what we're referring to. The idea that we want to come up with this vocabulary, these mental models that help you think in terms of protocols and reasons about them at a level of abstraction slightly higher than just Ethereum or just the thing in front of you, but to still come up with things that actually apply across all these domains. And one of the most interesting insights that came up from this work comes through like a quote from this philosopher Alfred North Whitehead where he said that civilization advances by extending a number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. And so we've come to think of protocols as tools for whitehead advances. These whitehead advanced machines that encapsulate complexity and make it disappear allowing society to build more and more complex things on top of them. I have a couple example on this slide. You can think of something like GPS which is this complex technological coordination protocol that allows us to go from point A to point B anywhere on Earth trivially. Or you know looking into the crypto space think of unis swap which has protocolized markets. Right now we can just open a liquidity pool between two assets which is something that before was this huge complex thing to do and that was definitely not permissionless. And you know looking outside of technology even things like traffic and and road control protocols effectively allow us to do these very complicated coordination exercises across everyone who wants to navigate in the same space in a way that's understandable and where the complexity is mostly abstracted. But one implication of this is that once these protocols get good and get adopted, they tend to fade into the background. Right? Society forgets that they're there. And this means they become much harder to change. You sort of oify to some extent. One good model to think about this is Stuart Brandt's idea of pace layering which uh looks at how different things evolve at different time scale. So we talked a bit about protocol watching earlier today. So if you are watching protocols, you'll be sitting in these slower layers, layers around culture and governance and maybe bleeding a bit into infrastructure. Protocols don't change every week, right? Like they they don't update. And this is good in that it provides some stability, but it also means that they can get out of sync with the faster things that happened on top of them. And again, looking at Ethereum, we kind of see this all the time. There's this mismatch between all of the things that happen on the protocol, all of the considerations that we have, ranging from how the blob markets work to censorship on chain to behaviors and rewards around me that just happen at a much quicker iteration speed between hours to weeks. Um, compared to what we're able to do at the actual protocol change levels, which takes us months to year. And this is why protocol work can feel a bit like working in ivory tower compared to doing product work. We can't go and change things at a very rapid iteration pace. So we have to choose to step back, be more slow, more deliberate, and really kind of spend a lot of time at the design side of thing, hoping that what we come up with is robust and resilient enough to accommodate all of these short-term perturbations. And part of this is kind of what led us to come up with a better definition of protocol throughout the years. So in 2022 when we started this work Danny had this definition of a protocol that was accurate but a bit of a mouthful say it's a stratum of codified behavior that allows for the construction or emergence of complex coordinated behaviors at adjacent to low speed and after two years Vancap was able to distill this a two-word definition protocol as engineered argument you can think of a protocol as something we create to structure and mediate conflict over time which specifies actors orderings what count as valid or invalid and what are the governance or meta parameters that you use when things go wrong. This has been a helpful shorthand mental model of like okay why is a protocol different from an API from a grammar or from these other things that exist and once you have that you can start thinking about okay how do they actually design and work on protocols so I think the standard way this happens is that if you're doing this type of work like I do on Ethereum and you think about like okay what will the world look like with my protocol being successful you kind of imagine the world today and then you imagine your protocol all over where you know I work on Ethereum and then I imagine okay the future will look just like today but Ethereum is going to provide hardness settlement programmability resilience and you know digital assets to the entire world but we're not the only ones who thinks like this we're not the only ivory tower in the world if you go and say talk to AI people right they'll have the same view where they imagine the world today and then AI being like the most dominant force that's going to affect it and their version of the future is like today plus AI everywhere and even outside of tech think of things like climate change and environmental activism where they imagine the future as being like today but where there's a bunch of things that happen or that we change about the environment and that's like the main novel change but in reality it's much right because the world is not static all things happen at the same time and another insight that came out of this protocol is that you can just learn a lot about your protocols and its place in the future by seeing how it would land in someone else imagined futures and this is Um, I think it's it's an interesting place to contrast protocol governance versus protocol diplomacy. You can think of protocol governance as being how do you think about the things that affect your future for your protocol, right? And on Ethereum, we have, you know, both formal and informal governance that we use to do this. And you can think of protocol diplomacy is how does your protocol negotiate the way will exist in others future. Um, what guarantees are we going to offer? What will we refuse to do? and how are we going to meet them where they are and again here we can look at examples of the history so if we look at say academia I think there's actually a case where we did diplomacy pretty well we helped bring a lot of things from academia like starks or futures out of just being merely academic papers none which is a huge alignment the futures that environmentalists imagine and and we got some short-term goodwill from climate folks but I wouldn't say that like Ethereum today is deeply embedded in the broader climate narative which I think shows that technical alignment isn't quite enough. You need some amount of diplomacy if you want to actually live in somebody else's future. And one case where we're seeing this today is with AI. It's probably one of the most active futures being built right now and people within the Ethereum community asking, okay, how does Ethereum fit? How do we build affordances for AI? How do we frame our problems in ways that AI people won't resonate with? And how do we align our temples? AI moves at a different speed than Ethereum, different ways. And so what are the ways in which through the protocols and through the community and governance we build around it want to align with this. This is a diplomatic challenge. You need to define both technical interfaces and the forces in your protocol as well as social and governance bridges that allow you to intersect those futures. This is why we think protocol literacy is so important. It's a shared language that allows us to actually talk to other ivory towers about what we're doing. And without this, you know, explaining say Ethereum to AI people or a climate person or someone working on workplace safety protocols just doesn't stick, right? They don't have the same references, the same mental models. Whereas thinking about protocol literacy and these shared concept allows us to have conversations. It's like this different level of abstraction. And so this is the goal of this event and the goal of this work we've done where we see good protocol diplomacy as building bridges between these different Swiss army knives figuring out how they can work together and figuring out what we can give to them and what we can learn from them so that if we actually do see these protocols succeed and we do see them get adopted, we've designed the best possible version of them. We've engineered the arguments in the most resilient and future compilable way such that when they fade in the background and automate everything, we actually do end up in a utopia and the only way I think to really internalize this is to put it in practice. So this is why this will be the last talk today and all of this afternoon will be spent on workshops and you digging into those concepts and trying to work with them and understand them much better. Thank you very much and I hope you have a great rest of your day at Bridge Atlas. Cheers. >> Nice. A little applause for the ghost of Tim. Okay. Well, I will give a little bit of a preview here of what's going to happen this afternoon. Okay. Just going to pull up the agenda here. Okay, great. Um, we just did the talks. These were like mini classes on tools that you'll use this afternoon plus some stuff and um, yeah, this afternoon we'll actually get into little delegations and go around and do these exercises. I think it's going to be really productive and put these ideas into practice. everything from the orientation that you got from Venat and the really shining example of what Danny's doing with Wall Street with his partner at Etherealize. We uh didn't have Nicholas coming to talk today. We hosted a really great event with him. Um on Wednesday, he was going to talk about bridging the gap between technology and culture. That's really really important for Ethereum. And there are some people doing great work with like art and protocol art. We've taught some classes on protocol art as well. Um, Spencer talked about how to tell stories about protocols and Sam's lens on punk diplomacy I think is is really excellent and uh fits with the ethos of the people here at at Dev Connect. So, what we've got now is some custom protocol empanadas. They're not the same empanadas as as out there. So, you can go ahead and enjoy those over lunch. I encourage you to grab your science fiction swag, your protocol watcher button, put on the button, read the books, chat with the people here if you have questions. Um, everybody that spoke will be around and yeah, come back at yeah 12:30, 12:35 for uh the workshop. We'll form delegations and then go through the the exercise. It's going to be uh pretty sweet. We spent a lot of time getting it together and um have some great exercises planned for everybody. So, thanks for your attention this morning and uh yeah, if anybody won bingo. Yeah, let me know. See you at 12:35ish. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat. >> [music] >> Peace. back to ah [music] Hey, hey, hey. [music] >> [music] >> Hey, by the way, >> [music] >> Please dance. >> [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] Hey, [music] hey, hey. Hey, [music] hey, hey. >> [music] >> Hey, hey, [music] hey. feel. [music] Hey Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] >> Hey, bye. Hey, hey, hey. Hey. every [music] heyday. >> [music] >> Hey, [music] hey, hey. Thank you. Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] >> Okay. >> [music] >> Are you for you? Wakey wakey. >> [music] >> Are you [music] crazy? Are you doing? I'm ready. >> [music] >> I don't know. [music] Heat. Heat. N. [music] hey baby hey baby hey hey hey hey hey hey. Heat. Heat. >> [screaming] >> Thank you. Hey, hey, hey. Hey everybody. [music] >> [music] >> Heat. >> [music] >> down. Hey >> [music] >> Let me let happen. [music] Go. Get on your dick. >> [music] >> Get on [music] >> out. >> [music] >> I [music] let I do [music] the >> [music] >> I know >> Heat. [music] >> [music] >> Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Heat. Hey, Heat. >> [music] >> Hey. >> [music] >> feel. I got Hey, [music] hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, [music] hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. [music] Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Think think deep think welcome. Another big one, baby. pink. Pink think. Heat. Heat. N. think pink think about pink up. Another Come >> [music] >> on, baby. fing. Your flagrant disregard for protocol has unnecessarily placed yourself and my officers in the line of fire. >> Yeah, I don't know the protocol on that one. >> Well, what's protocol then? >> Warning. Violation of protocol. >> This is beyond protocol. There's a plan of action that exists called the least resistant bomb location protocol. >> The house party protocol, sir. >> That was my protocol. That was [music] just protocol. >> Some protocol we got here. >> So, I don't really know the protocol here. >> Sir, that's against protocol, sir. >> Secondary protocol. >> Protocol one has been validated. >> Protocol? >> Our first protocol demands that we protect you. Now, the protocol in theory is sound. >> No, he just asked for the protocol. >> Observe rounds and stay within hospital protocol. >> I was asked to acquire the recognition protocol, which I did. >> It's just protocol so we don't address each other by our names during the robbery. It >> is not correct protocol. >> I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. >> I didn't know you'd be a stickler for protocol. >> How did the protocol fit in? >> Deniability. >> He's only got part of the protocol. He doesn't know the protocol yet. >> Follow protocol before extracting him. >> Engage new contact protocol. >> Do you know the rules of protocol concerning my son? >> Detection protocol now. >> Containment protocol initiated. >> But we do have protocol. >> But this is protocol. >> And that being the case that we all desire peace, you only have to follow a few simple rules of protocol. Your flagrant disregard for protocol has unnecessarily placed yourself and my officers in the line of fire. >> I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. >> I decide what protocol is. >> That would be standard protocol. >> No, I followed protocol. >> Just protocol. >> Disengaging safety protocol. >> I don't know what the protocol there is. >> Follow protocol. >> Well, the um the customs, the history, the protocol. >> Look, nobody's in trouble. I'm just following protocol. >> Protocol. >> I'll repeat the protocol. Okay, >> wait. >> Protocol says we make a distress caller. >> In the event of a third, we have to implement the ice cream protocol. >> This protocol droid might be useful. >> I mean, follow your protocol and all, but you should really keep your distance. >> I'm a protocol expert, not a marriage counselor. >> There is nobody here to impress with your protocol. >> Your flagrant disregard for protocol has unnecessarily placed yourself and my officers in the line of fire. Yeah, I don't know the protocol on that one. >> Well, what's protocol then? >> Warning. Violation of protocol. >> This is beyond protocol. >> There's a plan of action that exists called the least resistant bomb location protocol. >> The house party protocol, sir. >> That was my protocol. >> That was just protocol. >> Some protocol we got here. >> So, I don't really know the protocol here, >> sir. That's against protocol, sir. Secondary protocol. >> Protocol one has been validated. >> Protocol? >> Our first protocol demands that we protect you. >> No, the protocol in theory is sound. >> No, he just asked for the protocol. >> Observe rounds and stay within hospital protocol. >> I was asked to acquire the recognition protocol, which I did. >> It's just protocol so we don't address each other by our names during the robbery. It >> is not correct protocol. I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. >> I didn't know you'd be a stickler for protocol. >> How did the protocol fit in? >> Deniability. >> He's only got part of the protocol. >> He doesn't know the protocol yet. >> Follow protocol before extracting him. >> Engage no contact protocol. >> Do you know the rules of protocol concerning my son? >> Detection protocol now. >> Containment protocol initiated. >> But we do have protocol. >> But this is protocol. Place yourself and my officers in the line of fire. >> I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. >> Quite decide what protocol is. >> That would be standard protocol. >> No, I follow protocol. >> Just protocol. >> Disengaging safety protocol. >> I don't know what the protocol there is. >> Follow protocol. Well, the um the customs, the history, the protocol. >> Look, nobody's in trouble. I'm just following protocol. >> Protocol. >> I'll repeat the protocol. Okay. >> Okay. We're going to get started on the workshop soon. >> In the event of >> the protocol supercut will continue to play in the background. If you're coming to the workshop, uh bring your empanada in. Grab your empanada to go. Make sure you get your empanada and your sci-fi and come on in. >> You got your your gear. >> Do you have a scissor? >> Um, do I have a scissors? >> Forgot to cut these out. >> I also did not cut them out, so it's my bad. >> It's all good. >> Just meiss. Do the like a million fold and then >> cannot mess it up. I need some reverb on this. Okay, if you are a part of the Bridge Atlas workshop, start making your way. The protocol in theory is solid. >> No, >> he just asked for the protocol. >> Observe rounds and stay within hospital protocol. >> I was asked to acquire the recognition protocol, which I did. >> It's just protocol so we don't address each other by our names during >> not protocol. >> I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. I didn't know you'd be a stickler for protocol. >> How did the protocol fit in? >> Deniability. >> He's only got part of the protocol. >> He doesn't know the protocol yet. >> Follow protocol before extracting him. >> Engage no contact protocol. >> Do you know the rules of protocol concerning my son? >> Detection protocol now. >> Containment protocol initiated. >> But we do have a protocol. >> But this is protocol. And that being the case that we all desire peace, you only have to follow a few simple rules of protocol. >> Your flagrant disregard for protocol has unnecessarily placed yourself and my officers in the line of fire. >> I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. >> I decide what protocol is. >> That would be standard protocol. >> Joe, I followed protocol. >> Just protocol. >> Disengaging safety protocol. >> I don't know what the protocol there is. Follow protocol. >> Well, the um the customs, the history, the protocol. >> Look, nobody's in trouble. I'm just following protocol. >> Protocol. >> I'll repeat the protocol. Okay. >> Wait. >> Protocol says we make a distress call. >> In the event of a third, we have to implement the ice cream protocol. >> God, this protocol droid might be useful. >> I mean, follow your protocol and all, but you should really keep your distance. I'm a protocol expert, not a marriage counselor. And >> there is nobody here to impress with your protocol. >> Your flagrant disregard for protocol has unnecessarily placed yourself and my officers in the line of fire. >> Yeah, I don't know the protocol on that one. >> Well, what's protocol then? >> Warning, violation of protocol. >> This is beyond protocol. >> There's a plan of action that exists called the least resistant bomb location protocol. the house party protocol. Sir, >> that was my protocol. >> That was just protocol. >> Some protocol we got here. >> So, I don't really know the protocol here, >> sir. That's against protocol, sir. >> Secondary protocol. >> Protocol one has been validated. >> Protocol? >> Our first protocol demands that we protect you. >> No, the protocol in theory is sound. >> No, he just asked for the protocol. Observe rounds and stay within hospital protocol. >> I was asked to acquire the recognition protocol, which I did. >> It's just protocol so we don't address each other by our names during the robbery. >> Is not correct protocol. >> I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. >> I didn't know you'd be a stickler for protocol. >> How did the protocol fit in? >> Deniability. >> He's only got part of the protocol. >> He doesn't know the protocol yet. >> Follow protocol before extracting him. Engage no contact protocol. >> Do you know the rules of protocol concerning my son? >> Detection protocol now. >> Containment protocol initiated. >> But we do have protocol. >> But this is protocol. >> And that being the case that we all desire peace. You only have to follow a few simple rules of protocol. >> Your flagrant disregard for protocol has unnecessarily placed yourself and my officers in the line of fire. I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. >> I decide what protocol is. >> That would be standard protocol. Joe, I followed protocol. >> Just protocol. >> Disengaging safety protocol. >> I don't know what the protocol there is. >> Follow protocol. >> Well, the um the customs, the history, the protocol. >> Look, nobody's in trouble. I'm just following protocol. >> Protocol. >> I'll repeat the protocol. Okay. >> Wait. >> Protocol says we make a distress call. In the event of a third, we have to implement the ice cream protocol. God, >> this protocol droid might be useful. >> I mean, follow your protocol and all, but you should really keep your distance. >> I'm a protocol expert, not a marriage counselor. >> There is nobody here to impress with your protocol. >> Your flagrant disregard for protocol has unnecessarily placed yourself and my officers in the line of fire. >> Yeah, I don't know the protocol on that one. Well, what's protocol then? >> Warning. Violation of protocol. >> This is beyond protocol. >> There's a plan of action that exists called the least resistant bomb location protocol. >> The house party protocol, sir. >> That was my protocol. >> That was just protocol. >> Some protocol we got here. >> So, I don't really know the protocol here, >> sir. That's against protocol, sir. >> Secondary protocol. Protocol one has been validated. >> Protocol? >> Our first protocol demands that we protect you. >> No, the protocol in theory is sound. >> No, >> he just asked for the protocol. >> Observe rounds and stay within hospital protocol. >> I was asked to acquire the recognition protocol, which I did. >> It's just protocol so we don't address each other by our names during the robbery. >> Is not correct protocol. >> I'll give you a call for a protocol test as soon as it's hot. didn't know you protocol. >> So, we're going to start getting into tables here. >> If you're not in a table that says like table three, Andes, table three or table five like Amazon Forest, go ahead and head to a table like this one. >> It'll have a number, a name, and a print out of the agenda. Try and form roughly equal groups. We got one here, one here, one at the back with Spencer. Um, and then the last one here. This table's looking a little skinny. Anybody wants to join up here? These will be your not know yet. Maybe somebody that you want to be your friend. Somebody that looks like they know a lot about diplomacy. Okay, this table could use another person. Perfect. All right. And if you'd like to join the workshop, sir, table at the back is a good place to go. Okay. I thought this was for later. Okay. >> Okay. It seems like we're set up. This is great. Um, okay. So, was anybody here now that wasn't at the talks this morning? I know there there are a couple people. All right, I'll do a short little TLDDR of what we talked about this morning. Um, I'm going to use the mic because I have a hard time projecting my voice. So, this morning we learned about ecosystem diplomacy, which is different from regular diplomacy. Ethereum doesn't have the ability necessarily to appoint diplomats or to hire them. So people kind of choose to be diplomats for Ethereum as their own um vocation. Today we've been talking about tools for ecosystem diplomats and how they're a little bit different from regular diplomats. And we have four esteemed people here who are going to teach you these tools. So Michelle, raise your hand. Michelle was a grantee of the first summer of protocols cohort and she's going to be teaching you about gift giving and parties and the social aspect of diplomacy which is very important. You don't want to just show up to a party guns ablazing. You can get yourself into some trouble. Sam who is our ambassador for Southeast Asia for summer protocols is going to be talking about punk diplomacy. Sam if you can raise your hand. Um this is going to be really interesting table. And then we have Trent Van Eps who has written a lot of interesting stuff about capture. He also coordinates and organizes Protocol Guild and is a member of it. Um that's going to be a good table thinking both about the offensive and defensive side of diplomacy. And then back in the middle we have Spencer Nikki who is a two-time winner of our science fiction contests. If you haven't grabbed a science fiction anthology, make sure to do so. um and he's going to talk to you about telling stories about protocols. How do you tell a story about Ethereum that people will understand? Okay, that said, you will notice at your table there's a name for the region that you're representing Andes Guyana Shield, a forest. Keep in mind that this is like you're a diplomatic state. So, you're going to be going around to the other regions and being a bit of a diplomat, learning what it means to, you know, express the message that you're supposed to negotiate with others, learn about these skills, practice them. For simplicity, we're just going to rotate this way about every 10 to 15 minutes, depending on how long the exercises take. So, keep in mind some of the skills that you're supposed to learn today. tensions, how to negotiate trade-offs and conflict, how to think about literacy and developing terms that people can use, um to understand others fields. Ethereum isn't just its own thing. You've got to bridge it to other places. Think about what it means to be a punk diplomat, even if that sounds like an oxymoron. How to protect your field from capture and how to think about the future and understand the stories that other people tell. So, keep these things in mind. If you have any questions, just flag me down. Um, I think the facilitators are all awesome and we'll do a great job. So, it's just about to be 1:00. I almost timed this perfectly. So, let's do the first exercise. Give you 15 minutes to warm up, get to know the people in your delegation. Um, you'll stay with them through the exercise. So, treat this as like a little expedition. You're going to the different regions, you're going to pick up some skills, you're going to come back, and you're going to share what you've learned. Okay? So, let's go until 1:15. again. Let me know if you have any questions and we can get started. night. We dance with low. We go high. Don't stand. And the night we dance, we love your body. Get on the floor [music] all night long. [music] Move your body. All night I'm [singing] [music] your [singing and music] >> [music] >> I'm drinking. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, heat. Hey, down a number. Get up. Get up. Get up. Get up. Get up. This is rule the nation. Okay, couple minutes left. You guys are everybody on track to finish on time. Couple minutes. Couple minutes. Okay, couple more minutes. Get up. Get up. Get up. Hey guys, let's uh let's get ready. Time to pack your bags. Time to go to another region. Um, okay. 60 seconds to wrap up your exercise and then the delegation should stand up and get ready to move over clockwise with that music. kind of felt like musical chairs that we've got going here. Okay. Fun fact about diplomats is you are not allowed to check their bags. You cannot look inside the bags that they're carrying. Okay. Make sure everybody goes in the same direction. Yeah. That group come up to the front. You you guys go over there. >> Yeah. Okay. And then the Andes, you'll go to the back. Yeah. Now you're on someone else's turf basically. So the facilitator is the the host of the region. You guys go to the back there. Okay, great. So same same deal. Um again, try and pick up the tool that they're teaching. Think about what it is. Think about how you could use it. And we'll come back in 15. Okay. Good. Okay. What are the Don't speech. Deep eyes. Hallelujah. Yeah. I'm alone. Let's take another four minutes to wrap things up. Come on. Heat. Okay, okay, okay. Time for another round. U, we had a couple people trickle trickle in. So, if you've got somebody new in your delegation, get up. We're about to rotate one more time around to the different regions. spend a couple minutes either with your new teammate onboarding them to the delegation or with your old team being like, "What's our strategy moving forward? How are we going to make a good impression on our next host? How are we going to show them how smart and diplomatic we are?" So, let's just get up or just, you know, stretch a little bit. Touch your toes and let's move in 90 seconds. We're going to go the same direction. Okay. 30 second warning about to rotate. You're Okay, this looks like a little bit of a funky rotation, but we'll work with it. Yeah. >> Yeah. You guys come on over. You're coming here. You guys, sorry to interrupt. Before we get started, you guys are going to that table. >> Okay. So, we come to this one. >> Yeah. Sorry. >> So, I I'm relocating as well. >> No, you're standing there. >> I'm staying. Okay. Stay put. You're the host. >> I'll see you later. >> Okay. >> Okay. Looks like everybody's in the right location. I'll let you get started. Who's feeling like they're they're becoming a little bit better of a diplomat? They can wrestle with the big boys at the at the table. Um, all the Italians, all the Americans, um, all the lobbyists. Okay, I think we're on the right track. Same deal. Um, 15 minutes. Last time it ran a little over. Try and keep it tight. Hello. There you go. Oh, me. sugar. Fore So yes, mech. for me. again. Jesus. Thank you. smile. Goodbye. That's awesome. That was fun. I think the thing I was going for was pretty much Okay. Okay, let's do um 3 minutes to kind of close out this round and then we'll head to the the last round, round four. And then after that, you'll return to your home region and debrief with your delegation. 3 minutes. Tell One minute. One minute to wrap it up and then we'll do the the final region, the final rotation. You're almost home. There are no, but you can All right. Who's seen uh who's seen Sam Chua's new magazine? This is pretty cool. This is kind of a an unorthodox approach to diplomacy that Sam is taking by printing a newspaper. And I'm kind of reminded about um diplomacy today because traditional diplomats are on a bit of a back foot. I think that you guys as new protocol diplomats of a technology ecosystem are a little bit scary to the diplomats today. Just like this newspaper is scary to the New York Times. It's like, oh, anybody can make what me we make. Anybody can do diplomacy today. This is a great opportunity. So, we're heading into the last round. One final rotation, then you're going to head back to your home region and I'll give you instructions on how to wrap it up. Um, yeah, these are great sessions. I'm sure you want to see it through. So, head on over same direction as before and let's finish strong. Does everybody know which direction they're going? >> Know if you want to check the pockets. >> Sure. >> Did somebody lose a leather jacket? >> We got a leather jacket over here. >> It might be from before. Yeah. stage put on stage. Yeah. >> Okay. >> There. All right. Cool. Everybody at their uh their final region. Here we go. Okay. This this one's looking a little light. I think Venat and I might join Trent's table. Um all right. Again, 15 minutes. This is kind of your last chance to learn a tool for diplomacy and then we'll finish back at your home region where you started. All right. 15 minutes. So that will be 212. Echid. Veils of gentle breeze. of time. Exploring Love. Hallelujah. Five minutes. I love this song. Very cute. Maybe. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. Sorry. sing. Sing it. Yeah, I can go. Let's Let's start wrapping it up. Minute minute and a half. Once you're done, stand up. return to the home table that you started out at. Just just to add a physical touch to the returning home, the table that you you daydream about, your childhood table where you grew up I'll give you I'll give you two more minutes since these conversations look really good and then we're going to come back to the home regions. Okay, it is time for the last stage of this workshop which is the delegations are going to do a little shareback. So, who had I think it was the Andes. Who was the Andes starting out? Region one. Are you guys the Andes? Okay, awesome. We have our first group here. So, everybody's now gone through all the regions, all the exercises. Hey, you guys ready? >> You guys ready? >> You ready? >> Yeah. Okay, here we go. So it is um customary in diplomacy to be very good at talking. I think that's the part that we noticed the most about diplomats is they like to yap. But it also involves listening. So everybody, every region is going to get a chance to share a couple things that they learned today. I want you to focus on three things. One, you had a little fact sheet in front of you. What was something that you took away about the region that you were representing? I think that South America is really really cool and thinking about it in terms of bio regions adds a special layer of appreciation for me in terms of okay there's an overlap between countries that's like very deeprooted um what's something you took away from that then I want you to share two things that you took away what are two ideas or two tools that you picked up here that you think that you'll take away and the last thing I want you to share is how you think you'll use them moving forward. What's your plan? To keep it short, let's uh let's start with one person from the delegation. If you feel like you really want to chime in to what your teammate said, go ahead. But just for the sake of time, um keep it simple. So, one thing you appreciate, two ideas, and the last thing is how you plan to use it. So, we'll start with the Andes. >> [laughter] >> Um, again, what what [laughter] we didn't have time to pick. >> Yeah. Something you liked about the region that you were representing. >> Two ideas and how you think you'll use them. Um I guess like I can speak as the NDS and say that like one thing that we love about our region is that um it's a it's a very um rich region in terms of ecosystem um diversity that we have. We have like cloud forest but we also have a glaciers and so on. So like the the ecosystemic diversity that we have is for sure our health wealth sorry. Um, one thing that we will take away is, >> um, I think you need two things that we take away. >> Okay. I think one of the things when we were playing the game, uh, on that table, Michelle's game, I think one thing that we kind of found like a surprise convergence on is that we were talking a lot about protocols that are drawn from society and culture. Um, and in finding and going through that, we found that there may be differences, but there are also overlaps. And the more you go into it, the more you recognize. So we were so focused like most of the table was focused on cultural dis differences, right? Um and then you pointed out that there were actually gender dynamics at play as well. So just the interlinkages of different things going on and how you can't really look at it from a binary lens or one lens. There's a lot of overlap and things going. So just kind of having a a well-rounded and coherent lens is more important than having like a singular lens. So I think that's one takeaway. Um, the second takeaway is probably the importance of a good narrative. Um, that you could have a complicated thing, but if you could kind of simplify it or tell it in a way that's appealing to the audience or package it in a in a decent or like an amusing way, um, I think that goes a long way. Um, and then one final thing, I know you asked for two, but we went through a few, so I do want to say that as well. Um, and then another important thing is to recognize the players that you have in diplomacy. So you could have different actors as Trent pointed out. You could have different actors at play and you kind of have to recognize the role that all of them have. And what I learned from this one or what we learned from this one is that you have to recognize who your audience is. Um, it's not just what you're doing. You have to recognize who your audience is and tailor everything um that we just discussed to your audience. So those would be our takeaways moving forward. do all of those things. [laughter] >> Perfect. Okay, >> great job Andy's team. Little little applause for the the Andes team for going first. >> Are you the Griana Shield? >> Okay. Who's the Who's three? Gana Shield. Oh, this is Okay. >> Yeah. We'll give you a pass because the rest of her delegation fled the country. Uh, are you guys five or seven? They're seven. You You'll go last. Okay. Five. The Atlantic Forest. You've been Looks like you've been volunttoled. >> Wait, what? >> Okay. One thing, one thing you appreciated about the region, two things you kind of took away, and how you think we'll use it moving forward. Yeah. Um, one thing we liked about the Atlantic forest was just the sense of this forest being something, as you said, that spans the entire continent, providing oxygen to the entire region, regulating the climate, and it's not really something that any one country. Um, it it spans more than all the single countries, which we kind of liked. Um, yeah, these were really great exercises. I think we really enjoyed them. We had a lot of fun getting to know each other and sort of pushing ourselves a little bit. the uh star sign uh communication was was a lot of fun. The game was fun. The the the capture was fun. The story was fun. So, they were all great. Uh one thing that I really took away from the whole the whole workshop was really the empathy about the other person. You know, I think I often get so excited about things that I want to share that I want other people to get excited about as excited as I am. And that doesn't always work. Um, and so really thinking, okay, like I have something to offer, sure, but let's start always with who is this person? What do they want and need and think and believe and then really work from there? Anyone else wants to add? Any other thoughts from this group? >> Okay, that's great. Nice job. Atlantic Forest. Also, I think my favorite region. Not cuz my name's Timber, but Okay. And last up, we have the PMPAS. Okay. I'm not too sure of what I'm what I got to say, but basically what I think we we take out from today's experience is how uh storytelling and how to uh keep public interested in in your idea and what you are trying to communicate at the same time of uh working uh consciously on diplomacy and how to communicate that uh always keeping aware of uh the objective basically. I don't know if that surrounds a little bit of what happened at least how I lived this today. >> Okay. >> And how do you think you'll form a narrative and carry it with you moving forward? this message that you want to share with people as a diplomat? Yeah, I'm not too sure if I I followed the question, but basically uh what is what I think is uh being aware of who you are interacting with and uh keeping uh again focus on making interesting uh an interesting storytelling of of what you or as a tool of communication of what your goal wants to of the goal you want to achieve basically is our is our >> perfect yeah okay and >> thank you >> yeah thanks everybody for participating um the workshoppers nice job this is kind of an interesting thing to walk into uh and then the last thing I wanted to do before we kind of wrap up there are the QR codes to keep staying involved this bridge atlas podcast is really neat we had some great guests including Trent over there um who spoke with Yansy Strickler who founded Kickstarter and now works at Metal Label. The other thing I wanted to do, it's just on YouTube. Yeah, you'll have to go over to the YouTube >> Spotify soon. Yeah. Um, the last thing I want to do is the facilitators. I'm curious what your takeaways were like teaching these tools, how you think about them, if it's changed at all, any limitations you can foresee, any tips for using them moving forward. So, final thoughts? Um, you want to start, Michelle? >> Uh, it was quite interesting to see how the answers were different depending on age, gender, region, um, cultural norms as well and a lot of similarities, but a lot of differences and the differences in group because each group had very different dynamics and I think that was fascinating. Um, I just like the level of awareness and insight in general. I was impressed by that. I was curious and I didn't want to have any preconceived notions, but that was pretty cool to um to experience I guess. Um if you [snorts] do want to explore that in I think a lot of you wanted to play the game, you can find it on the magazine. I would if you have any questions and you want to create your your own version, that would be cool. One comment I got from two different groups was this is a great game to get to know your colleagues that you're working with. Um and they would want to play this with them. So that was my head is now I've got some light bulbs and I'm thinking, "Oh, wait. I've never thought about it in that context." But maybe that would be an interesting use case too. >> Yeah, just uh protocol party. >> Cool. Yeah. So uh this was the interstellar ELI uh explain like I'm code switching exercise. Uh I think the groups learned pretty quickly. I think uh initially I I budgeted about 5 minutes for people to plan their things, but I think most people seem ready to go after a minute or just stepping into it. Uh and I think quite a good amount of role play. People got into their roles pretty well and actually made it more interesting. And there was also a lot of learning from observing other people do it, not just doing it yourself, you know. So like that's also really powerful. A lot of diplomacy, as Vancad noted this morning, is observing how people interact. And sometimes you notice gaps in communication better when you're not trying to be part of it and you're just watching and you're like this is clearly going nowhere right that's these are really good learning moments and I think uh having the groups as teams was also quite useful because they were able to in some ways I think the groups that came later on had already like you know like had some background and dynamic together so uh like cohort learning is actually pretty good as well right if you want to be a diplomat maybe learning yourself isn't that necessary like finding a group of friends even a small three four people who read things together and uh like try out fun exercises together is also a good way to do it. We had a vampire thing. It was like a nocturnal 500-year-old vampire that >> Yeah, we we we had we had a really really like uh like exciting roleplay of a vampire earlier which uh well yeah learn more about that later. Um, yeah, I was uh just as I almost always am really impressed with how uh how many stories people have and how many directions uh people's imaginations go. um when they're asked to sort of iterate on an idea, uh I found there's a lot of sort of natural inclination towards storytelling that uh was really positive to see. Um I also something I noticed was uh in sort of going through in the storytelling workshop there's kind of in a downward flow to the thing of how often people would sort of go back to their earlier steps when they were visiting sort of the next step which I thought was really an interesting insight into how um how sort of confronting the next problem in a narrative sometimes helps you refine what came before. uh which is what the process of revision and editing is. But it was just really interesting to see that in real time. Um and also just like people are working on such cool stuff. Uh it was really nice to learn a bunch on my end about what people are doing. >> Yeah. So I ran the capture session and yeah echoing what others said it was really interesting to see how quickly people settle into these roles or grasp the the assignment. Um I will say maybe a little bit concerning how quickly people understood the assignment to capture a resource. So but uh jokes aside or or how well they were able to do this. Um, but yeah, jokes aside, I think, um, the best way to prepare for adversarial situations is to kind of put yourself in the shoes of what some what a malicious actor would do if they if they wanted to destroy a resource or kind of corrupt it for their own benefit. So, um, at the end of the day, it's always healthy to try and understand what your adversary might be thinking. If you want to build a protocol that has um benefits to public welfare, um you really do need to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who might be against that vision. So um yeah, I I really enjoyed facilitating them and and all the people who had interesting perspectives on how to how to corrupt public resources. Very valuable moving forward. So yeah, grab the anthologies, join the Discord, subscribe to the magazine, and uh yeah, we'll see you online. There's a couple lost and found items up here. Uh there's a leather jacket >> and a hotel key card for >> the Clarage Hotel of the anthologies, but tell them they can get the ebooks online. >> We're out of the anthologies except for the few that Spencer's hoarding over there like a little dragon. Um but you can get the epubs online on the Discord and the protocol reader eub.