Summer of Protocols: Past, Present & Future with Venkatesh Rao & Tim Beiko

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and is published every Tuesday and Thursday if you want to lean learn more visit our website at Green pill. Network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local green pill. Network chapter my guests today are Vates raal and Tim boo Tim is Tim is a developer in the ethereum ecosystem and runs the core protocol meetings for ethereum Vates R is a writer and consultant he writes on

the ribbon Farm blog and is the author of tempo a book on decisionmaking he holds a PhD in aerospace engineering from 2003 from the University of Michigan and is based in Seattle on this episode we are talking about summer of protocols which is a program that was run uh this past summer summer of 2023 and it was 33 researchers and Tim and Vates were studying protocols so what would the world look like if we were to take a protocol Centric view of history as opposed to an agent Centric view or institution Centric view what would the world look like what would we discover about protocols and their abilities to help humans coordinate so we're doing a

whole series on the summer of protocols here Vates appeared on the green pill podcast about five months ago before the summer of protocols they ran the program with the 33 researchers and we've had a handful of the researchers on the podcast so producing a Bodywork of podcasts about the summer of protocols in order to spread protocol-based thinking and uh since I've been talking to venkatesh and Tim and the other summer protocols researchers I just haven't seen the world in the same way I'm now starting to see protocols everywhere around me from Basic things like handshakes being a protocol that help humans coordinate to Advan things like tcpip which are formal computerized protocols and so I think it's an

interesting way of seeing the world and it's been really neat to follow the progression of protocolization as a research field not just within the ethereum space but uh we also talk about safety protocols and dangerous protocols things that are outside of the ethereum ecosystem and are establishing different lines of thinking about protocols as a field of study so I'm really enjoying the series that we're doing on summer of protocols and I think that you are as well without further Ado I give you Vena and Tim enjoy Valle da is an open Global Collective working to finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology Technologies to protect the future of our planet research and progress into synthetic biology is

critically constrained by the world of nation state regulations and bureaucracy for middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this Valley Dow does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk World of Tomorrow a reality today so join Valley Dow right now and save the planet at Valley dow. bio hey Tim hey Vana Hey Kevin really glad to have you excited to talk about summer of protocols so can you te us off by telling us about the summer of protocols program maybe we'll

start with you Vena sure uh thanks for having us on Kevin the summer protocols that um started when Tim reached out to me about a year ago at this point uh to just work on like understanding the broader e ethereum ecosystem and its problems and how to like um get it into a more mature shape and we realized that the questions and discussions we were having uh was kind of too big for just the two of us or even the larger group of four or five people that then started having the conversations a bunch of EF people and we thought it would be nice to get a whole variety of interesting people uh both from inside and outside of crypto thinking about protocols in a much broader way than just blockchain

protocols like you know protocols and everything from like politics to health care to climate so protocols as a very general framework for thinking about uh systems and that's how the summer protocol was born and yeah we put out a call for applications uh we had a whole bunch of applicants about several hundred I think and we picked about 30 OD to be with us over the summer and yeah they did a bunch of really interesting and varied projects um that we are really excited to be talking about and yeah Tim um you want to like talk about the EF angle on this um yeah for sure so like vat was saying like when I first reached out uh I had some questions about ethereum like how do we manage this thing it's kind of a weird project uh you know we we don't have a

ton of examples to look at and I felt like all the examples we did have to look at were like very bad analogies so you know people say like ethereum's like a country or ethereum's like a web platform um and those things get to you like a partial picture but if you start digging that the analogy breaks down really quick and it felt like we didn't have like a good mental model or just like theoretical base to think about protocols um and and this is where sort of the idea came up of like okay well potentially this is not just something that like ethereum has to deal with but there's other domains where like Protocols are are you know a big part of them um and maybe by just like putting everyone together thinking about

protocols and and like the challenges that they they sort of bring um you can do something that's kind of like the the parable of the blind men touching the elephant or like everybody touches like a different part of it uh and it feels very different but like maybe you can kind of draw an outline out of like of okay this is this elephant that's actually here that that's common across all threads um so yeah that was really the main goal and and um yeah getting like 30 people from a bunch of different backgrounds and producing things from like essays to code to art I think helped us pay at least like a decent first sketch of of the elephant over the summer so how did it go what were the highlights for both of you I think it went really well and um definitely really broadened the conversation we

were having going into the thing so the pilot study that we produced that's a good snapshot of the state of our thinking before the program and that was the output of like Tim me Danny um Trent a couple of others plus some conversations we had that was the before State and the after state is of course this set of like um 30 plus uh people's projects uh but I think a good way to like characterize the transition that happened along the way was in the beginning I think we all all were convinced this is a thing but within our narrow sense of like crypto is the primary example of the protocol we have in mind and within that framework we agree that studying protocols is a thing

that was a group of five or six people doing the pilot study through the summer it became increasingly clear that the key question was is this even a thing or is this just a random bunch of projects that might have like some overlapping concerns or questions at a micro level or is there a larger meaningful just child here to use Tim's metaphor is there an elephant here or are we literally touching the Rope here and like a trunk there and pretending there's a holistic thing and I think somewhere around two-thirds of the way through the program uh a switch seemed to flip for everybody and this was I think around the retreat which you joined us for for a day I think somewhere during the retreat that switch flipped and I think all of us became

convinced there really is um well an elephant here that's worth studying and thinking about and like you know theorizing about so I think that's the big outcome that I'm really happy with that we may not have all the answers to the questions we dug up in fact we may not even have all the best versions of the questions themselves or all the important questions but I think the big win was we figured out there is actually an elephant here that worth getting excited about Yeah Tim anything to add uh what were you excited about coming out of the program yeah I think um the definitely the validation that there is something there and I I think seeing parts of it like actually change the way I think about like ethereum which is where I have the most context shows that

it's like not only is there maybe like a common theoretical framework but it's like there's actually stuff that's useful that people can bring back and this was maybe the the other risk is you know maybe you just do all this academic work come up with this big like fancy framework but that is actually not usable in practice anywhere um and not that we we even have a full framework but like um I don't know a few of the tidbits that like stuck with me was um one during the retreat we sort of had this Insight that it's much easier to describe a bad protocol than a good one and so when you try to describe like why is a protocol good it gets very awkward and very like conceptual very quickly um whereas if you if you try to describe a bad protocol um and the TSA was our our

default go-to example um just when I say you know the words TSA there's like a ton of reasons that like pop into your head of like why is this so terrible and if you spend five minutes thinking about like okay what's like the root cause for like why all these parts of the TSA are terrible um that sort of paints a pretty General picture of like okay those are the things you want to avoid um and just that sort of that shift in thinking where trying to to figure out how do you make the thing not bad rather than make it good is actually a bit more useful because you just have like a better intuition for like what the bad protocol looks like than the good one um and you know you can think of a bunch of ways to S apply in crypto but the in fact not

only did like this feel really useful to me but then that a bunch of other people from different domains were like oh my God yes this is like such a good way to look at it um that was like it's super validating so I think it's like yeah having a general feeling that there is something here that there's like some cross domain you know theme or or like substrate but also that parts of it if you if you dig in um can actually be useful and I think it's like if it's useful that's what ends up drawing more people in and you know wanting to participate yeah small point I wanted to add to what Tim just said yeah the idea of like trying to define a bad protocol it turned into this really funny thing at the retreat where people were coming up with like CFA protocols and there was

like a whole breakout session people trying to like come up with the worst protocol possible that's where the DSA thing came up and I think that's a general feature we discovered about um studying protocols that this kind of negative definition actually is very powerful as like a research um juristic like even our starting point we use the in whad quote a lot which is you know a protocol is uh how do you like reduce operations to like an automatic status and you know how do you reduce operations to where you don't have to think about them and a lot of protocols is about not thinking about stuff like how do you not think about things as a way to start thinking more creatively about them that makes it like a subtly interesting subject to study and

negative definition is a interesting I think research principle we discovered yeah I was just looking up the uh the Whitehead Advance uh quote which I think I first discovered in one of your Devcon talks was something like uh Humanity's ability to process important information operations increases that's how we create advances in human coordination I think I'm butchering it right now but for me that felt like a very Germaine part of why protocols matter is that they help us process more operations as a society and that advances civilization yeah so I think the exact quote is civilization advances with the number of operations we can do without thinking about them right okay and it's

interesting that despite the Divergence of all the research and projects and people's different ideas of what the even the definition of protocols was this turned out to be one of those strange attracted things that everybody kind of agreed to orbit it was like a useful solid fixed point that everybody could kind of agree was useful even if they challenged it sometimes I think we discovered maybe a few other such fixed points um through the program I'm wondering if you all are planning on doing a summer of protocols 2024 is this going to become a field of research in the future hopefully you my short answer I think the the idea so maybe to take a step back summer protocol sort of came out of just you know me and then some folks at the EF trying to chat with

venat about what problems we had with ethereum and then we realized this was you know far too narrow of a group and and we needed like more perspectives um and and after a bunch of brainstorming and also uh one of the things that like inspired me for this was vet you had this breaking smart project a few years ago where you were like working within a firm and then you know publishing some of the output uh publicly as you were doing that um so we started thinking like okay is there a version of something maybe like that that that would work in this case and um Sil of protocols ended up looking very different than you know the breaking smart project and I think similarly like now that we have some ofar of protocols as a thing that we've done and hopefully

in a couple of weeks we'll be able to like share then thinking about like a 2024 version should not just say we're going to do another round of exactly the same thing but sort of build on that that now that we have this as like common knowledge and like research that we've done what's the best format or what's the best uh way to approach this um and it might be you put a bunch of people together and have them think uh generally but it might also be okay actually here are like five questions we want to answer next year and maybe some of those questions require like a bunch of different people to work together maybe some of them require one person just like spend six months you know thinking about it so it feels like there's definitely a ton of like rabbit holes to explore here and and a lot of

more work to do but I don't want to like pre-commit us to like oh we're just going to run another cohort with 30 people again um because we did that then the results were good I think it's wor of sitting down and actually thinking about okay what are the most important questions and what's the best way to answer those yeah I don't know um do you have any sense of what those questions might be or is it too early I think there's some that like we've definitely had and been thinking about um think get said earlier they I not be the most well formed yet um but one especially from the ethereum perspective is like just the death and the management of like end of life of protocols right how do you approach that um and what and then

there's probably a bunch of sub questions in that so for example you know do things have to get more complex as like the the age and and you know is that like the main cause of death of protocol or are there actually examples of like protocols that stayed for a really long time and you know Simplicity is the thing that got them maybe not I think yeah that's the main one that's on my mind and that's been there and it feels though like to get a satisfied answer to that there's probably five or six sub questions you need to to start answering yeah I think um one of the ongoing discussions Tim and I have been having is of course there's like the Practical design of any future version of the program but what's the sort of like philosophical logic of that and I

think I've been leaning more towards can you connect protocols and protocol thinking to specific important domains that we know are undergoing rapid technological Evolution right now and we would like them to be more protocol like than you know platform like for example and couple that are on my mind a lot is of course uh climate is one I'm personally very interested in robotics so I'd like to see all these sort of Matrix possibilities of like robotics plus protocols climate plus protocols and we saw some taste of that in this year's addition uh but connected to like Tim's um focus on key questions I think the fascinating thing is you can ask such things about like you know if the future is all driverless cars which are

essentially robots running around on a protocol which is the traffic system you can ask the alific question about that system so you can sort of like you know do the Matrix thing of all right if you build a highway traffic system that's going to last a 100 years and maybe countries will even have collapsed by then but the roads might still exist how should autonomous driving Vehicles be living in that world right so this is actually an interesting question of uh across domains it's not just uh blockchain protocols but any protocol is useful a context in which you can ask a question like can this be made simpler is simplification a thing is oif a thing so I think um we definitely want to like address both of these uh vectors and the

other thought that I had was in terms of just not doing the same thing again merely because it was successful the first time but actually leveling up I always like the Seinfeld joke about like you know Kramer writes a book about coffee tables that turns into a coffee table there's a meta joke over there that you know it's a book about coffee tables that has legs that fold out and become a coffee table I think something like the summer of protocols it would be nice to make it a summer of protocols protocol and this has happened before with movements like you know we were talking about the maker movement earlier um arduinos 3D printers and things like that and a lot of that came out of like the O'Reilly sort of publishing ecosystem and the smart thing they did was they didn't just like focus on the

maker movement and 3D printers and stuff they also created like um like you know Fu Camp was the original model for bar camps and that became like a template for unconferences and it sort of like created this whole chemical reaction in the ecosystem where suddenly everybody was pulling together on conferences and bar camps and it became a way the maker movement became self- sustaining I would love to see that happen with anything we do like can we create a template that self sustains somehow yeah one last thing to add on that in terms of like the self- sustaining in the cross domains is like should there be other orgs involved like funding and and you know managing this so like V1 so the the EF funded this but I think both as like

a validation that this is like an itch that other people have but also as a way to make sure that there's you know different perspectives that like help shape the the content and and help shape the questions personally that that's something I think would be very cool if we could find like some Partners who are willing to ro us and have similar questions uh y'all were gracious enough to fly me out from for the summer of protocols for a day and I had a really great time I remember coming home and talking to my wife about summer of protocols and she's like you're really jazzed on this I was like yeah there's a real lot of really smart people that nerd sniped me I think it's so cool this idea of franchising it and making it into uh something that other people can do and and uh we'll be interesting to

see as we build more protocol thinking across the industry how that does that push us towards a whiteh head Advance does that just create Good Vibes uh it's an interesting Community to track the the evolution of and you use the phrase the industry and it's interesting that for us right now protocol thinking and the industry are synonymous we don't have to like specify what the industry is we all three of us mean the crypto industry and that's a good reflection of the state-ofthe-art but I think if this works and protocol thinking spreads you'll have like you know protocol thinking in the coal mining sector and maybe uh Timber's essay and thinking will Elevate the discourse there maybe Drew Austin and Sho who wrote essays teed on urbanism

and protocols in urban environments that'll create like a whole I don't know subculture of protocol thinking in urban environment so I'd like to see this happen in all Industries not just you know the industri yeah that's actually a good segue into my next question which was you had 33 researchers out for the summer of protocols I believe they each produced an artifact uh relating to protocols and I've got their research summaries in front of me I wonder if we could just popcorn back and forth couple times about some of the research summaries that that we're excited about I know that they're all different and uh we don't want to create atmosphere of favoritism uh across any of them but uh just wondering if we could popcorn back some of the research projects and and

what what's cool about them so maybe I'll go to you Tim first I feel like I always use this one so too bad about favoritism but uh I guess it's it's such a perfect example of like what I wanted to get out of ser protocol somewhat selfishly uh so M get mentioned Timber so he his his work looked at the evolution of workplace safety protocols in mind specifically so like you know how do you stop people from being blown up or inhaling weird weird gases uh when they're in mines and you know how does that evolve over time and his essay is really interesting because first he goes to that history and then he he paints like a general picture around like what's like a theory of protocols based

on this and I remember the first time I like the first draft I read of this the whole time I it just felt like smart contract or protocol Security in my head um even though I was reading something about like mining safety um and I don't want to spoil the whole thing but IO was just such a wild example that it's not something remotely connected to blockchain it's not like saying I don't know there's this like law protocol that's similar to how we do governance on ethereum it was like a completely different domain a completely different even time scale he's looking at it on the order of like 15 50 years or something um and it just felt like I was really about my day job and that was like the sort of magic bit of you know submer protocols to me where yeah

hopeful like the hope is like a bunch of other people from different perspectives have a similar feeling reading something so I'd say that's the one that had that strongest effect on me throughout the program I was looking more for like you know specific interesting connections more than the individual projects uh because to me that's kind of like a measure of like the some greater than Parts effect I was hoping for so I'll call out a couple of those that I thought were interesting one was um Shino project on addressable spaces this was a project that looked at how addressing schemes for urban environments emerged like we think of like street addresses and things as like familiar uh you know unconscious Whitehead advances you could say like a

300 years ago there weren't such things as like Street numbers and house numbers this had to be invented in the 19th century so she looks at the evolution of that and how that's changing under modern Trad conditions and things like how you can create like almost a fiction of um an address based like elevators have like series of numbers they might be missing the number 12 even though there's a physical 12th floor it skips the 12th floor and goes oh sorry 13th floor and Skips from 14 right uh so that's addressing in physical spaces and Kia her project was on history of artificial memory going back to the ancient Greeks and the concept of like you know mind Palace for remembering things and she trases that history

through thousands of years and it ends up in modern times but it got me really thinking about how addressing is a a sort of like key feature of like um accessing memory systems going back to like ancient stuff written documents print and so forth and it's part of like how you live in the built environment and neither of them is actually the most familiar example a computer science person would think of if you mention the term address like you say address to a computer science guy they'll say oh yeah memory addresses we have these memory addressing schemes caching and things like that and this connection between built environments and the history of like artificial memory that to me is a very powerful theme and I'm hoping to see a lot come out of it like maybe more

people will think about addressing in like a really uh broad way so that's uh there's another project that hit on address in a more traditional computer science way which is Dorian Taylor's dense hyper media one and that it's kind of interesting to think about all three of them together and like what the hell is in fact an address what's a hash and one of the things St and I are talking about can we actually use this sort of informed understanding to now maybe write an explainer of what addresses and hashes are in reference to this more complex uh thinking we've done right so yeah that's one of the big connections that uh really jumped out at me and and there were a few others like that like another one memory seems to be

a very strong sort of Central Link in this idea graph um so Kia did a great job but beyond her doing a great job I think memory is like a central Hub in this idea graph so memory also connects for example to death uh which is Sarah's project on how protocols di it's like partly a question of how do you memor memorialize a thing that's dying into like a preserved memory there's also another connection to Angela's project which was the EXP of a protocol as you journey through it which is again like you know how do you manage a memory and how do you sort of like sort of evolve Beyond a particular tra being trapped in a protocol lots of such interesting connections throughout the set of projects and one of the sort of like

follow on meta projects I personally want to do is create a map of these connections actually I think one thing as well as you were talking that uh bubbled up for me is during the offsite uh we had a lot of people make us like try protocols so like and there's a bunch of this that's included in the research as a way for you know folks to just you know try stuff themselves and and to me that was like a pretty powerful part as well because Protocols are like these very abstract things but then if you actually experience them you get like a very visceral memory of like how they work kind of like these abstract machines in the way that if you can find a way to like instantiate them and and then get like a tactile or just

like a a concrete experience with them it makes them feel much more real so for example the memory like people gave us these memory stones which are a thing you're supposed to keep with you in touch when you when you uh when you have something you want to remember and I don't know just like a small thing like that made it feel much more real so that's I think another thing that'll be cool is not everything coming out of Summer protocols is just like an essay um a lot of these artifacts are done in a way that you know allows people to experience uh different aspects of protocols and um yeah I think I think that helps like that helps it sink in on a different level than just reading an essay about it and to connect to something you said earlier Tim like

going into this a year ago we had a set of like bad metaphors for what protocols are and you mentioned like you know ethereum is like a country is like a default mental model many people have and they approach etherium governance the way you would approach like a country's governance and I think this broadened the so this is connections from the Beyond um the summer protocols projects themselves so an example is how do you start thinking about protocols with other metaphors and one of the affiliate projects was um masal uh she came up with a little card game to teach people how to basically respect the rules of etiquette and gift giving in

Middle Eastern culture so the context of the game is something like you're at a party in Dubai and you have to like you know behave a appropriately and greet people and give gifts and so forth so that's the premise of the game and that game was inspired by Angela's project and like a journey through a protocol system but that got me thinking like going into the project um we used to say things like when people asked us what we were doing we would often use the handshake as an example of like you know very simple protocol that's not a crypto protocol and handshakes are like a good conversation starter but it kind of just stops there like it's like a cool idea to talk about for a few minutes and I think M's projects like pushes that to the level of sophistication where it can

actually become rich enough that you can talk about uh it as a mental model for etherium so instead of saying ethereum is like a country you can ask is ethereum in some sense like a party like maybe you have to give and receive gifts to each other like if you're talking about all these like you know producer validator nodes and things there's like very technical stuff going on there but is there for example something like a gift economy protocol that's like softly evolving there right so I think this is improved our sophistication and range of reference for how we think about ethereum type problems as well as like you know other problem like you know maybe safety protocols can be thought of as gift protocols as well right so yeah those are some connections outside of um

the set of projects well that's maybe a good segue into letting the audience know how they can consume some of the artifacts the art uh the essays coming out of the the research program so um I think that we'll be airing this episode on Friday October 6th uh and I'm wondering what are the ways in which people can engage with I don't want to call it content but you know like the things that have come out of the summer protocols and build that muscle memory build that understanding of of of what you done what uh what are you all going to be dropping soon trying to think how much we should how much uh we should reveal here I guess yeah we can probably share the outline so uh the first thing is we want to make sure all the research

and all the outputs are like freely accessible so we'll be releasing stuff over time not all at once but if you just want to look at everything that's been published and read it all and you know do that uh we'll have everything at summer protools.com soon in the coming weeks um and um yeah so that'll be the the main place where we'll just uh every every month or so publish like a new batch of of uh researcher output and then we're working on a for people who want like a physical version of this um as kind of sort of a collectible to get that as well uh so we'll be announcing that uh in the next couple weeks as well and but yeah all the research will be out for free um and

then if you want sort of a a little physical artifact uh there'll be an option for that too uh so if you're listening to this open up Summer but you can sign up for the newsletter there it's called protocolized so the sign up form is on suprtool decom so if you sign up for the newsletter you'll get alerts for everything we put out um including the monthly drops of research output and things like that plus other things we are also continuing we had like a guest speaker series through the summer that we're continuing now as the protocol Town Hall so this is going to be basically a persistent feature um in what we're calling the off season as

well so uh that's a place to continue an interesting um conversation and yeah the Discord is kind of like in offseason mode but it's still there and the researchers are um uh chat chatting there so the idea with this structure for engaging with the output is we want to get like like we said the intent is to create something like the maker scene that's that's been our inspiration so hopefully we'll put out this material in both like digital and physical form and we're hoping they'll kind of like act like the Catalyst for triggering the SC and then if you get sort of nerd sniped um by the idea of protocols we want to like take people who are like protocol curious and deepen their sort of

Engagement with the world of protocols maybe take people who are like in their narrow silos of protocols and broaden their Thinking Beyond like you know maybe just taking pools or whatever narrow concern they have broad into like the broader world of protocols so point of this material and the to called Town Hall salons all of that is get people more nerd sniped something deeper in and engaging in like more active Builder ways so yes and of course we also want to take people who are like completely new to this and build a little bit of what we're calling protocol literacy like just learn to think comfortably with the Core Concepts of protocols and make protocols themselves a first class concept um so yeah that's how we'll be publishing this stuff and the hope is

it'll do everything from like go from zero to one on literacy to take deep people and broaden their mindset and take broad people and deepen their mindset we see a how it goes all right so summer protocols. comom is the website check that out if you are listening there's also a link in the show notes I want to end by asking you an incredibly open-ended question and I feel like it's really appropriate since uh y'all are both Galaxy brains when it comes to protocols is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say any uh interesting tidbits that you want to place in the listener's brain as we're we're wrapping up the episode I have one so um we've been talking the whole time around like you know it was great we were able to take 30 people and put them together and actually you know get a

really valuable output out of it um I'd encourage people to actually check out those 30 people um so you know Ben and me were like high high level coordinating different parts of the program but like these folks did all the worked uh on the sub protocols website there's a little researcher uh tab you can click and that'll give you all their bios and whatnot but I think for like crypto people to say expand their Horizons like this is like a really interesting set of folks and for anyone not listening this to this as well like I think just the like diversity and talent of that group is pretty wild um yeah I encourage everyone to just like literally follow everyone on that list I think that's what made it so good it's just the the quality of the people that we got for the cord I I guess I have

something to much more on the philosophical side of things I think this was interesting for me because most gigs for me um these days are like solo gigs I'm like doing some Consulting work for some um individual EX or something and this was throwing me back to like 10 years into middle manager mode the last time I managed the team was 2011 and suddenly here I was not managing a team but like you know coordinating a large group and one of the things I was kind of like um feeling bummed out about was I'm basically being middle manager and all these guys get to do all the cool stuff working on the ideas and I'm not getting to do any of it myself but I did manage to like you know uncover and start pursuing a couple of lines of

Interest interest of my own uh so two that interest me a lot are the connection between protocols and time and several of the researchers like pulled on that threat so that I had interesting of personal level interactions with them so Olivia is U one of the affiliate researchers she's written a really nice essay that surfaces the time element and that's like increased my thinking here and a personal one that I've been working on is a series of essays on just the historical moment we're in like we're getting out of the Industrial age we're in this 20 30 years into this internet age and that's moving from the platform era to the protocol era and we're looking out for 100 years on problems like climate change this is the 200 years span of historical thinking we

have to be situated in and it's really interesting to think how we do that and one of my beliefs is we do that through storytelling and narrative and the Very fundamental structure of how we tell stories is changing along with our technology and I think we're entering an era where we're going going from like Industrial Age epic Grand narratives like you know a lot of the ring style storytelling to kind of a more protocol like narrative um culture where you're telling stories like you know Marvel Cinematic Universe is like a protocol is way of telling like a large Universe of stories together and that I think excites me a lot um so what I'd suggest to listeners is pick up a couple of your own interests of this sort like you know

I have mine you have yours and try and sort of see how all this protocol um research kind of hooks into that and makes it you know better and elevates it to a higher level like definitely thinking about protocols has like leveled up many of my pet thinking projects by like one or two orders of magnitude in some cases so very strong catalytic effect thank you that beautiful I think Fest since the the first episode that we did together I haven't been able to see the world in the same way uh I feel like it's that scene in The Matrix where Neo sees everything in code um I start to see protocols everywhere since I started talking to you about this and uh I think I made that Meme of uh they don't know

Meme where uh it's the guy in the corner with everyone at the party and I I made the meme uh they don't know it's all social protocols that they're all engaging in so I feel like I see the world in a new way because of your work so uh hopefully we've uh just nerd sniped uh thousands of other people into to seeing the world in that way as well well that's a good point to to end on uh thanks so much for joining the podcast thank you for having us yeah thanks for having us this was great all right peace and [Music] love you just heard from venes ra and Tim boo I am excited about summer of protocols because I think that if we

were going to create more coordination in the world then coordination protocols as a field of study is certainly going to be something that advances that thanks for listening to the green pill. Network podcast again we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world summer protocols the 33 researchers Tim and Vena are an example of that if you value our work please remember to subscribe rate and review and share this episode I will see you next time