Summer of Protocols: A Safe New World with Timber Schroff

Transcript

foreign [Music] welcome to thegreenpillow.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 some 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 learn more visit our website at greenpill.network where you can download the Greenfield book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local greenpill.network chapter my guest today is Timber Shroff Timber was a core researcher with Summer of protocols he has worked as an analyst in the Canadian public sector for the past four years contributing to large-scale safety policy and economic development projects

so basically this is one of the four episodes that we are doing on the summer of protocols if you've been listening to the greenpill.network podcast for a little while you may remember the episode that we did with venkatesh Rao summer of protocols with venkatesh Rao which is an episode that talks about what if we were to take a protocol-centric world view to to history so as opposed to an agent-centric or institution-centric view of History what if we looked at protocols protocols that help us coordinate like handshakes or eye contact all the way up to TCP IP these are ways that we scale human coordination with protocols when you understand the balance of others Behavior through protocols then you're

able to understand how to interact in a social system and so the summer of protocols is a program that then katash Rao did with a handful of researchers uh in sponsored by the ethereum foundation which studies protocols what if we studied protocols as a way of understanding history and applied those lessons to the ethereum protocol as as a means of scaling Humanity's ability to interact with each other so quite an interesting nerd space and once you understand protocols as a mechanism for human coordination then you kind of can't unsee it within this episode we talk about Timber's work in the summer of protocol says Timber was a researcher in the summer of protocols with Tim

becko and with venkatesh Rao and Timber was studying safety protocols so basically safety protocols like if you're a coal miner or if you are cutting cutting trees or if you're on a boat working in a sort of blue-collar job what are the ways in which we can create a feedback loop that prevents accidents and and helps workers become more safe and then also the long tail things like the health risks that come with working in industry and what are the ways in which you can build protocols around workplace safety and um you know hopefully the end result is having more productive economies that are also healthier for workers people can earn through their vocation without risking their health and without risking

their safety so I just found Tim to be a Timber to be a really really articulate thinker when it comes to health and safety but also when it comes to protocols and I'm just so nerd sniped by summer protocols and venkates Rao and ribbon farm that I'm really enjoying this up this episode and I think you're going to as well so without further Ado I give you Timber Valley Dao 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 from 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 Dao right now and save the planet at valleydow.bio hey Timber how's it going good thanks for having me on really delighted to have you on so can you take us inside of the headspace of Summer protocols to start what was the program what what were y'all doing in summer of protocols just take us inside of the headspace sum of protocols was kind of like this little short-term think tank of a bunch of people that um

venkatesh and Tim and other people from the ethereum foundation got together to do a series of Theses on protocols um and the reason for this was the ethereum protocol and the people working on it didn't really understand what they had in front of them sometimes they're like what is a protocol really so that's what the 12 researchers were focused on one of the reasons that this was so interesting for all of us was historically a lot of um explanations for how we got here today are done through the lens of either agents or macro level Trends so you're looking at economic forces geographical forces or great man theories where somebody had just a outsized amount

willpower but one lens that was missing from a lot of these analyzes was protocols which are the as I like to Define them the patterns of constraint on human behavior that have social benefits outside of the immediate follower of the protocol so just getting a bunch of smart people in room for a you know a few months and seeing what we could crank out uh I think so we had venkatesh Raul on the podcast maybe 50 episodes now and I'll have a link to that episode in the show notes but the one thing I remember from that episode is venka saying that history is great man focus institution-centric agent-centric and protocols as a coordination device are understudied and uh if we think about

just the handshake like something as simple as a handshake as a protocol it took us from being zero-sum uh with each other to uh to actually having more positive some engagements with each other because when my hand is outreached in front of me you can tell that I don't have a weapon that I intend to coordinate instead of defect and so extrapolating that by studying protocols in the development of protocols we can see how humans scale uh civilization and create more positive some games with each other and like I'm thinking about protocols as anything from like TCP IP which is a protocol that we're recording this episode on all the way down to simple things like handshakes or eye contacts uh eye contact or things of that nature so um I'm just trying to

play that back for the audience so they can really get in the headspace of Summer protocols but if you have any other tips for how to get into the headspace of Summer protocols uh would value value hearing about them that was one of the first things that we had to do um as researchers in summer protocols was take the first couple weeks to be really getting the protocol first mindset be like what is the protocol what isn't a protocol when you first hear the word you're kind of like oh this this can describe many things it's almost a synonym for process for procedure for all sorts of other words like that there's small P protocols big p protocols you've got things like the handshake that you talked about and even at a smaller level

um human beings which descended from apes when we meet each other and we give each other a head nod nodding our chins up exposing our jugular veins it's very like biologically rooted protocol between um chimps it's done and then you've got big huge scale International protocols like the Kyoto Protocol or the Montreal protocol where nation states have agreed to limit their behaviors in order to benefit the whole International Community so I guess one way to really get in the space of thinking about protocols is I'm I'm an actor in space and I've got a very very wide range of options what are the things limiting the scope of my options in a way that

benefits me and benefits those around me so this is big trade-off between individual freedom constraining the scope of your actions in a way that's going to benefit you and others so what are the what are the rules that you have to follow on a day-to-day basis and just having protocols that are in everyone's mind in society really help you create predictability about what other agents in a system are going to do I'm imagining like I was just flying uh across the country a couple days ago and just like the queue like a lion uh going to get on the plane is like a very basic protocol where I can expect there's bounds to the behavior that the other agents are going to have their increased predictability in in how we interact in group environments and oh man when I

started thinking in terms of protocols after I did the episode with venkatesh uh it was like that scene in The Matrix where Neo sees the code behind everything and like once you see it you can't unsee it and so I invite the audience to go into the headspace of a protocol-centric world view as as we enter this episode so anything else to say about protocols or some other protocols in general before we we dive into your specific project Timber yeah I'll plug the Alfred North Whitehead quote again I'm sure venkatesh mentioned it in his episode but Society advances by increasing the number of actions it can perform without thinking about it and that really applies to protocols and what you said locks in a certain level of predictability for people to be

creative creative on and build from there I just found that to be such a profound quote when I first heard it uh Humanity skills by increasing the number of simultaneous operations it can it can have without introducing conflict into the group but I'm paraphrasing the quote here but it really for me um it really for me helped me understand what ethereum and a protocol-based internet future could do to scale Humanity uh there's a lot of a lot of context that that gave me and so it's with that perspective that I'd love to dive into your specific project for summer of protocols can you tell me what that was why it's important to you and where you've been researching this

summer so my project was focused on workplace safety protocols the reason I got into that was I was working for the Canadian public sector on a large-scale Safety project I worked on it for two years and it turned out to be far more difficult than I thought it would was going to be um because the conflicting interest between trying to collect data and then trying to make really usable processes and so there's this inherent tension in protocols that they have to navigate between different actors who might have conflicted interests and I thought that was a very interesting aspect of protocols I saw the application posted on ribbon

Farm I threw my name in the Hat one thing led to another and then I started working on this essay which is called safe New World it looks at the coal mining industry and has become so much safer over time so since about 1900 the number of incidents has gone down by 97 percent and the amount of coal that's been produced has grown ever more since um since 1900 it peaked in the mid-1900s so as production was going up safety was going up so you didn't see this linkage between productivity and incidence which was very interesting to me one thing that did eventually happen

though was that less people were getting hurt on the job and more people were suffering from disease so there was this transition from okay we started to make protocols that were very very effective like early basic mining protocols like the canary and the coal mine it was very entry-level safety protocol and workplace safety somebody would take a burden of the mind if the bird died and they'd be like okay we need to leave eventually this was hard-coded in the environment using atmospheric monitoring systems so you get an alert on your phone your device that said okay there's a certain level of particulate in the air we should probably leave the mine which is a lot safer and more effective than using a bird so all of those those

low-hanging fruits eventually got solved in the coal mining industry and it's become very very safe today and my project was looking at rather than using an economic lens or a geographical lens or an agent-centric lens to look at this change in safety I took a protocol Focus approach which said okay have the specific protocols changed over time how have the patterns of constraint on workers Behavior um evolved to get us to a point where it's you're more likely to die of heart disease if you're a coal miner than an explosion which was unprecedented a

hundred years ago I mean I think you're really solving for this trade-off space where in order to make a living in order to have a vocation 100 years ago you're risking your life your life and uh the fact that we've increased our workplace safety by having these safety protocols uh I think really puts into context the uh a sustainable way to do this and and to eliminate that trade-off space and just just think how far we've come over the last 100 years because of these safety protocols really kind of fills me with hope for how we can solve modern day problems uh by introducing protocols in in into everyday life I'm curious why this was a uh an important problem for you to solve uh have do you have do you have work experience in in workspace

workplace safety do you have a background that uh is related to this so I went to business school and then after that I helped set up um a not-for-profit research center um called the quantum algorithms Institute in BC covid struck I moved home to uh my hometown of White Horse Yukon way up in Northern Canada and I got stabbed on the Safety project where I worked for about three years on it I got to work with a whole bunch of health and safety people the reason continuing to work on health and safety has been so important to me is because I had this realization during the project that we're so much safer than we think and there are a few interesting dynamics that lead us to

over focus on safety and under focus on the biggest issue to our health today and our longevity which is chronic disease so the international labor organization and the World Health Organization released a report a few years ago and it found that the vast majority of work-related deaths were from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease stroke and ischemic heart disease and it wasn't from things like car accidents or forklifts or explosions those things do still happen but they're far less common than they used to be and they've been displaced by these modern risks I guess the the trade-off space that comes to mind for me is that you have like the capitalist the person that's trying to

extract the coal or extract the timber um in order to extract that resource they have to hire people um and there's almost like a trade-off space where the capitalist is they want to the first and foremost they want to extract as many resources as possible but secondarily they want to have workplace safety a because they have empathy for the people that work for them in the best case or like in the worst case they just want to have less costs of people getting injured and I'm wondering if like those if workers can be more aligned with the capitalists in a world in which there's instant feedback of like oh this mine exploded um or this person's hand got chopped off by heavy machinery versus things that are a little bit like long-term externalities like uh health benefits or

chronic pain that doesn't show up until later um is is the lack of an immediate feedback loop does that make it harder to to coordinate around these Works workplace safety protocols and is that why we're only now or getting to solving the the longer term issues um am I articulating this in a way that makes sense to you there's the feedback loop I think is is what's interesting to me here yeah totally and that's really at the heart of the issue is the feedback loops with health risks are so much longer than they are with safety risks when you have a pet rattlesnake you know that it's dangerous and you know if you start cuddling with it and it bites you exactly what the problem was when it comes to health risks we didn't really know why people were dying as Dock

Workers but turned out that the insulation on boats was made from asbestos and it took a long time for that feedback loop to get closed for a mechanism to be established for us to understand that it was actually this material causing long-term um can cancer of the lungs the same thing goes for other things like heart disease diabetes stroke but now the technologies have been built that we can close those feedback loops so technology such as continuous glucose monitors are a great example if somebody is pre-diabetic or diabetic they can almost create an artificial sense of anxiety by seeing their blood glucose Spike on the app Beyond a safe level and

it's not that the level is unsafe in the near term but as if you continually spike your glucose above the recommended levels you'll eventually develop insulin resistance and then that will reduce your longevity so it's shortening the feedback loop through artificial mechanisms and then establishing a protocol to keep you within the bounds of behavior that does not create risk factors for your long-term health I guess through technology just proactive monitoring of these things once we know that asbestos causes lung cancer then you can measure their particulate in the air so it's a matter of mapping out what the long-term Health implications of these workplace safety uh situations are and then creating preventative

monitoring and measuring in order to create healthy workplace environments it is that the core Crux of it or is regulation needed to make sure that workers are actually protecting the health of their workers as a very varied by geography well it varies a along a lot of axes it varies by geography so if you're if you're working in a country without as much Economic Development as say Germany you're more at risk of falling into this tough trade-off between efficiency and thoroughness which in the safety world is expressed as safety versus productivity so you're going to be basically forced to be more productive and less safe to meet your short-term needs your short-term needs

are about converting your labor into Capital so you can purchase Goods that will keep you alive for the next two years and keep your family alive rather than trading off a little bit of productivity for increased safety which will keep you alive over 10 or 15 years The Horizon of your concern is much shorter if you're working in a poorer economy another angle is is regulation if you've got capture of government and policy makers from industry you're also going to run into an issue where this again the productivity safety trade-off but at a different level so it's not the individual but it's uh Regulators who are saying okay we're getting our pockets lined by some

Corporation this is happening in Pakistan with coal mining today there's a big capture of government by industry like I think some some high up director in Pakistan is like one of the biggest owners of coal mines there and the conditions are horrible nobody should have to work there so that's another axis but even in North America and Europe in the late 1800s the early 1900s there are changes that need to happen on the behavior of workers themselves to line themselves up with their own interests in the long term and the classic example of this was smoking and coal mines

the U.S department of Mines the U.S Bureau of mine sorry at the time instituted a ban on smoking and coal mines because it's incredibly dangerous both to People's Health smoking leads the chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder but it's also it's going to blow up the mine and it could kill hundreds of people and what happened was the bureau issued this ban and coal miners protested against the ban it was actually the miners who did not want to follow this protocol and it was the Regulator who was way ahead of the curve here for a couple reasons there was a leftover sense of Entrepreneurship and coal miners in the U.S they used to get

paid on a like peace scale so depending on how much they produce they would get paid more that was obstructed to them smoking cigarettes increases productivity decreases safety and then also people just didn't understand that their behaviors were affecting the well-being of other people that was something new so now today we all understand that secondhand smoke a lot of the things that we do affect other people but in the early 1900s people didn't really get that especially in the U.S coal mining industry it was very individualistic and that's something that we need to focus on today again with health protocols it's like our Behavior does affect the

people around us and that's a through habits that we share and B through you know in Canada we have socialized health insurance if you buy a health insurance policy and you're healthier than the next person you're subsidizing the risks that they take we're all very interconnected today I think we need to keep sight of that as we move forward so there's the regulatory angle there's economic angle there's some behavioral angle all these things need to get considered when we're making new health protocols what are some health protocols that you've seen be really successful I'm wondering where you've seen an actual Embrace of the protocols and especially in the last

five or ten years in which we have social media to coordinate and there's like internet conspiracy theories about covid masks and stuff like that you know what have you actually seen be really successful here this is another angle I didn't get to but yeah the polarization of some of these these things can be really intense because it's a lot about Behavior there's a big cultural element one of the ones that I have seen be effective though is there there are two the first one I think is more effective but it's many companies are giving allowances for activity based purchases I've seen companies provide their workers all with bikes everybody that starts gets a bike get a bike lock

um people pay governments companies paying for running shoes paying for smart watches and for all these things to encourage people to get more active one of the best things you can do for your health is get like get your steps in you know we evolved and succeeded largely because we could walk upright and you know being upright was the the key benefit there but we're also very good at walking and we've been forgetting how to do that over the last 50 years and so companies who encourage their employees to get out and move more I think has been a pretty effective one there are also some some protocols around what kind of snacks are being provided in the office so switching from you know donuts and cookies which are

like have very high glycemic indexes to things that are more fibrous like vegetables there's a company in Vancouver BC that does like a subscription service so like fresh vegetables and fruit goods are delivered to your office every week the there's all sorts of Innovations happening around the fringes but I think there are there's still a big lag in terms of how important this stuff is and the amount of stuff that professionals are focusing on it in large institutions I'd say as soon as you get over the size of about a thousand people corporate health and safety teams are way too safety focused and not nearly Health focused enough owner if it's driven by there's more liability with safety issues as opposed

to health issues but that's maybe the cynic in me you know it could be a lot of the literature suggests that what you're talking about earlier there's this trade-off between um capitalists and laborers and the capitalists want to maximize productivity and safety is kind of a secondary feature of work and what happened at least in the U.S in you know the late 1800s again early 1900s was a campaign to show increasing safety improved productivity and it was a worthwhile investment and at first this was like okay it's so unsafe that if you gave people gloves and hard hats you would recognize a return on that because

the material costs are so low and you'll stop people from dying at work over time I think the government had to implement more fines to make the cost benefit trade-off like steeper and that has continued to happen so there are still really big fines for safety and Their fines not just for problems with safety but there are fines for not being compliant with preventative safety measures if somebody gets hurt on the job and there's a fine for that that's one thing but today there's also fines for not supplying your employees with hard hats or gloves say yet those fines don't exist for health related issues say stroke heart disease COPD it's less clear who's liable

because a lot of the things that contribute to those happen outside of work ostensibly so establishing liability is very very tricky in this area I've got a couple terms on on our prep dock here that I love to to Rattle through and have you define could we start with dynamic non-events yeah Dynamic not events are kind of the core one of the Core Concepts in my essay it was a term coined by Carl wike who was a management theorist a dynamic non-event is the thing that continuously doesn't happen so safety is a dynamic non-event when you are driving a car and you don't get in an accident you're sustaining a dynamic non-event

the reason it's a non-event is because the event is defined as the accident so if you get a fender bender there's been an event if you don't get an offender Bender it's a non-event the reason is dynamic is because you are always in varying proximity to an event you might be very close or very far from fender bender you could be very close to a minor one or you can be very far away from a really big one but the important thing here is that there's a lot of variation in how you perform an action which makes the events and non-events dynamic we only notice something's an event when the predicted level of performance Falls below our expectations

so if we're driving we don't really expect to get in an accident or even scrape our car as soon as something negative happens it we pick it up on our radar and it becomes an event we can get very very close to that threshold not even notice it because nothing bad actually happened and so this kind of this is where I Alfred North Whitehead's quote comes back in which is safety protocols the better they are the more operations that we can do the more risks we can manage more Dynamic not events we can scale and sustain without thinking about it the better our Protocols are the more Dynamic non-events we can keep around us without thinking about it just going through my work day and thinking

about all the dynamic non-events that I've been having as as you've defined it yeah it's um you know you can get carried away with it because I think mathematically there are infinitely more non-events than events but realistically speaking um yeah it I guess the moral of the story with the dynamic not event is to be try to count how many times things go well not just how many times things go poorly okay I'm going to keep on moving down the definition list here can you tell us about the case of Wormhole bear uh and I think that will pertain to the social benefits of following your protocol yes um so the Wormhole bear is a thought

experiment that I've been in in real life I grew up in the wilderness in Canada and one of the most protocolized things in the northern Wilderness of Canada is camping and hiking and dealing with bears because they're they're kind of scary and one invention that was made was the bear canister which is this big blue barrel and it snaps shut pretty much impossible for a bear to get into it the protocol for campers is you get a blue bear Barrel a bear canister you take it out in the woods with you and you put all your food in it when you're camping you shut it and the reason for this is so the bear doesn't

come to your campsite first of all it hides the scent of the food so you're keeping yourself safe from a bear encounter immediately the second reason you do it is so that the bear doesn't get into your food and eat it because once a bear gets a taste of human food they're much more likely to associate the presence of humans with the presence of like Oreos or Doritos which is great so if a bear gets into your food they become a greater risk for other campers and you might be disconnected from them in space and time which is why it's the Wormhole bear because they will become a hazard at a different POI point in place and time to somebody who you might not even know and then the third beneficiary of the protocol of the bear canisters the bear

itself because the way that problem bears are dealt with once they've gotten into food and become a continuous issue for campers is they're usually put down so there's this purely selfish angle of putting your stuff in a bear canister that lends itself to a social benefit to other campers and the hazard itself which is the bear and you're helping out people that you're disconnected with completely in space and time this bear could walk 100 kilometers in 10 years and attack somebody if you didn't use a bear canister today and I think that that's um this lens to look at designing protocols you're like okay how do I constrain my behavior in a way that

doesn't benefit just me but benefits as many other people as possible from a specific hazard so if you're worried about bears you're like okay on the one hand I could just put my food really far away from my tent I'm going to be safe in the near term and if I'm not worried about other people this is a perfectly optimal solution but a protocol-centric thinker would think okay I have an opportunity here to benefit other people through my constrained actions today so you can choose something that the bear could not get into and is also a solution that's easy to replicate for other people it's very intuitive how to use a back cancer so that's kind of the Wormhole bear it's sort of interesting

to think about how many of these Protocols are network based instead of just looking at individual agents and thinking of it as a single player game it's a giant multiplayer massively uh multiplayer game and the externalities of One agent making a decision on the rest of the network uh can be can be quite profound yeah they really can and you know this whole the whole protocol studies field that's emerging today it kind of rings in a similar tone to conversations in the mid 1900s about libertarianism and liberalism and the trade-off between people's people's freedoms and Public Safety

you know there is a compromise between everybody being as free as possible and everybody being as safe as possible we can have both it just requires us being very very creative in our in our Solutions and figuring in this like long-term infinite multiplayer game and not just one-off exchanges where you're trying to better every like one-up people yeah the trade-off space between individualism and collectivism with respect to what protocols optimize for I think is really quite profound I think you called it libertarianism and liberalism and yeah that trade-off spaces is um I think an important one and uh yeah I'd be curious to see how we navigate those trade-offs in the future

the next one on my list is I'm wondering if you could talk about Rising expectations of safety uh over time and I don't know if this if this uh bleeds into Rising expectations of public goods in general over time as well the rising expectation of safety is something that has haunted the industry since Returns on safety diminish steeply in the 80s we became very safe and since then has become more and more expensive to improve safety you may have effort that goes into making work safe today is greater than ever has been and there are fewer and fewer benefits but what happens is because the dynamic not event is so big the dynamic non-event space is

so big now and we don't see it that when something does happen it makes for really really good news when a worker gets hurt on the job it is Sensational on media today everybody sees it and we're led to believe not through malicious intent it's just it's on the news all the time because when it does happen it's good news so we're led to believe that these things happen far more often than they do with far greater consequences than they actually do one of the finest examples is not quite workplace safety related but the relative likelihood of uh a botulism which is a bacteria that melts your

brain and getting hit by lightning there was a big poll done of Americans asking what's more likely to die of an inflammatory botulism or to get struck by lightning and about 95 of people said that's more likely that you will eat a botulism and die when you're reality you're 36 more times more likely to get hit by lightning so there's this unfortunate Dynamic and safety where the safer things get the less safe they seem because events become such good news so there's this Rising expectation of okay this this event that happened is completely unacceptable but it's because we don't keep tabs on the dynamic non-event and

see the scale that's become and I would say this is a problem with public goods in general we've got such good access to things like food electricity shelter water the basic needs that when we don't have access to it it's such a catastrophic event mentally and we need to figure out a way to you know practice gratitude but also be realistic like we're trying to not have the power go out but when it does go out it's not the end of the world was it also you know the other thing this brings up for me a little bit is the um you know the feedback loops that happen when something bad happens and there's some of there's some feedback loops that are just like really boring and and mundane you know things like traffic accidents uh or heart disease

but then there's certain ones that are Sensational like a school shooting or uh 911 the terrorist event and they just some of them evoke more emotional visceral reactions that put us in the emotive space and some of them are more quiet and and mundane and it feels like there's like a processing feedback loop there uh with respect to how a nation or a political economy responds to the to the events there I don't know if there's anything there for you but that's what comes up in my mind as we're speaking about it George Orwell had a term called catastrophic gradualism and things only get better when something really really bad happens and sometimes really really bad just doesn't happen in areas like

heart disease it's a it's one person at a time one person at a time one person at a time there's no catastrophe that leads to a big change versus in other areas it's only ever a catastrophe when there's a school shooting that's a horrible thing and it's just kind of how it is there are some things that we find to be really really off-putting psychologically and we will invest more resources in mitigating that even if you look at the data and you say all right Millions more people die from heart disease every year than in school shootings but at the scales we measure things sometimes not with not with data but how it makes us

feel and whether or not that's good or bad I feel like I'm not at Liberty to say but it's something that people trying to improve the world um how they see fit need to take into account all right let's keep uh grinding through these I'd love to talk next about wearables and closing Health feedback loops I think there's a lot of dynamic non-events that could be tracked on an Apple Watch or a heart rate monitor or something like that so I'm wondering if we could dive deep on that yeah I I'm I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of wearables right now and one thing I want to to work on in the future is trying to close these feedback loops for everybody and if we could get everybody equipped with a

sufficiently open source version of the Apple watch Fitbit whatever I think closing these feedback loops would have an immense Roi on public health spending part of that is tracking the dynamic not events so and trying to increase the number of dynamic Don events that we don't have to think about as individuals so it's like how can we use wearables to nudge ourselves into better behavior for our long-term Health the long-term health of our loved ones of our kids etc for me wearables are the tool that wasn't around 20 years ago that is around today at a price where it can be implemented broadly at huge Returns on investment from the perspective of Public Health

leaders it's a very interesting tool because right now you know wearables are used by the like the fitness Geeks and those that want to be active and those that have the allowance for their company to buy an Apple Watch or they're just wearing it because it looks cool you know but it is a tremendous technology for closing those feedback loops that we talked about and the better that we can make those feedback loops and the better we can make the associated nudges the quicker we're going to solve this problem but one one thing I do see an issue with wearables that I've talked with a few people about is like the user interface and the data and how that's captured and shared isn't very protocolized right now you've got like little little fiefdoms

these companies that are trying to design full stack solutions from the monitor to the the nudge let's say versus what might be a better thing for the US government to do is say okay we're going to invest heavily in making an open source standard for the monitor so that everybody has access to the data as they see fit and let the industry compete on the the user interface and the nudge so it's like okay we're going to reduce the cost of Technology greatly and allow Innovation to happen at a level of the stack that's very accessible and cheap and easy to scale which I think is missing I think I would love to see it's really cool I mean it's

one of the areas where technology can really help solve this problem and the more data we have the more we can understand the dynamic non-events by just the power of data warehousing and Ai and uh correlation and all that kind of stuff so seems really exciting to me and in terms of where like crypto and network protocols come into this is one of the big concerns with wearables rightly so is we don't want to create a nightmarish Big Brother situation where everybody's got their Health Data online and there's some big hack so setting up the software in a way that people get access to their own data can share it with public health

authorities if they wish to to help with population level insights but don't have to that's probably one of the biggest hurdles to getting wearables used broadly that will benefit both individuals and populations is Bridging the Gap between individual privacy and population level insights which is exactly the problem that I couldn't solve with safety reporting that I worked on for three years super super tricky and I'm still working on it yeah for these this is where it connects to web3 a little bit decentralization and privacy preserving technology and not having Central intermediaries or core values in web 3 and so hopefully ipfs and filecoin and

and uh ZK proofs and stuff like that will actually solve this trade-off space for people like you in the future yeah I hope so that'd be great all right called other builders out there let's solve this all right I got a couple more uh definitions or prompts for you uh tell me about the end of History slash governance end games and this is another thing that I see crypto coming into play so uh my current project right now I'm going through all of like the end of History Literature that I can find and this concept of the end of History has come up a few times in in literature but most recently and most well known is Francis fukuyama who wrote the end of history in the last man

and his theory was that liberal democracy is this kind of tool that doesn't have a better alternative and slowly over the course of the 20th and 21st century we've seen most the governments around the world convert to a liberal democracy so you've got this governance end game happening now where there's a convergence on a certain pattern which is liberal democracy sovonian the municipal the state and the federal level the way that these democracies interact with each other is different than the way the empires did back in the day there's a lot more Commerce and a lot less war and so for me and it's something that I think you've mentioned earlier is how can we hard code liberal Democratic

processes like voting and elections onto web through your protocols so that countries that want to switch over to Liberal democracy can and how do we make the current versions of liberal democracy in well-established places lower cost and friendlier to Citizens these are both questions I'd like to see answered and the end of History Dynamic I think it's tough for people to to deal with to think like oh like is this all we have now like is there going to be a big change in the future I think we constantly get fed that in in the media we're like expecting the next big

technological Revolution but the whole end of History thing is if there isn't a big new innovation in the world of atoms and where we're just working in the world of bits now to innovate what does it look like like are we solving for this governance in-game and I think it's a it's an interesting question that probably a lot of people that are in this coordination Network are working on and solving so we'd love to talk with anybody about that mm-hmm yeah well I think this is another area where it intersects with web3 for moving from atoms to bits and web3 allows us to have immutability uh and and actual reliable governance in the in the web three spheres feels like there's something

that there's an intersection here so uh you know if anyone that's listening is interested in getting in touch uh we have a link to your web website uh Timber schroth.com and they can get in touch with you there if they're interested in helping out did I say your last name correctly yeah you got it right all right the last one I've got here is rigidity trauma so can you tell us about that yeah rigidity trauma was actually this term that got coined um during summer of protocols and it was when somebody's trying to change something and it turns out that all the surrounding infrastructure so either like real world architecture the Norms that exist the laws that are

present all these things are so ossified and rigid that you can't really change anything other than your mindset to the problem I think that can be very difficult for people who have this bent in them that want to change the world around them in a really fundamental way because many parts of the world are more rigid than you think this happened to me working on safety processes people's behavior is incredibly difficult to change and it's not going to change overnight so I had a little bit of you know trauma when I came into contact with this rigid process that I couldn't affect at all and I think it's something

important for people to keep in mind if they're working on protocols and building them in the real world when you run up to something that's rigid yeah your first instinct will be frustration but it's also a sign that you need to point somewhere else Orient yourself elsewhere and find a less rigid spot to work on in the same system but it is kind of an uncomfortable experience and I think a lot of people have a problem dealing with it especially if they've been learning history from an agent-based perspective and they've got a very individualistic mindset towards things versus more assistance level approach uh let's see I got a bunch more notes here and

um I guess you're closest to this you're you're more close to me so I guess I'll just ask a completely open-ended question is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say what are the highest leverage points here uh that you discovered in your research I'd say the highest leverage point is closing feedback loops on health issues so we just need to find a way to connect like the top three work-related causes of death with mechanisms and close those feedback loops and induce people into changing their day-to-day behaviors that reduce risk factors yeah that that makes a lot of sense for where we are now and sort of how you describe the historical Arc of going from safety to health I'm wondering if we could connect the dots a

little bit here to this audience um obviously it's really important for coal miners and people who are doing uh physical work like Timber uh Timber cutting and and to make them safe and and healthy long term but I'm wondering if we can connect it to people who are remote workers I'm a desk jockey I'm a software engineer I spend 10 hours a day on the computer and I'm imagining the dynamic non-events that I hit are just the the psychological not trauma but just it wears on you being on a computer and not having human contact every day social media and misinformation um you know the mental health issues that happen with social media I'm wondering if we can kind of connect the dots with that audience of which I'm assuming uh a lot of the podcast

listener is here are you know are there any sort of health and safety protocols for people who are desk jockeys like myself that this really connects uh for you I mean for sure and I'm a desk Jackie myself so I spent a lot of time thinking about this I'd say the top three you know number one get get your steps in and something that a lot of desk worker could struggle with like getting away from the desk if you really struggle getting away from the desk put a treadmill under it you know walk two like get outside touch grass spend time with other people IRL it's really valuable even you know I'm a pretty big introvert but like even going for coffee with a friend a couple times a week

super great for mental well-being and um remember you know take care of your body You Were Meant to move not bow to your computer every day so you you're in this long-term relationship with your with your computer so making sure that you're like having good posture and interacting with it appropriately is a good idea uh but it tickles my brain a little bit a long-term relationship with my computer but you're absolutely right and uh type of pro that we're having this conversation over a computer yeah really is one of the things that will be coming out with the summer of protocols um essays is a card deck that I helped make with one of the affiliate

researchers shoya gong and it's got a bunch of protocols and some of them are targeted at the long-term health of office workers and desk jockeys like us so stay tuned for that well we'll have a link to all of these resources in the show notes and I hope that the audience is enjoying the series of episodes on summer protocols it's certainly blowed my mind to hear about this and to work with Benco on it so it's been a pleasure covering it um anything else that you want to say before uh before we wrap no just uh thanks for having me thanks for giving this project a little bit of publicity yeah you bet all right well thanks so much Timber pictures foreign

[Music] we just heard from Timber I'm really excited to talk to them because I think the intersection of health and safety and protocols is a really important design space if we're going to build a more protopian pro-social web 3 environment thank you for listening to the greenpill.network podcast again we are featuring people who are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers building crypto that is positive some digital systems for the world and I think that Timber and the work that they have done on safe new world is a great example of that if you value our work please remember to subscribe rate and

review and we will see you next time peace and love