# New Institutions Roundtable Source: https://otherinternet.substack.com/p/new-institutions-roundtable ## Summary The roundtable, part of a three-part series tied to the Other Internet book, asks whether new institutions were built during the last decade, or whether efforts should go toward fixing old ones. Christopher Goes argues that crypto projects have succeeded narrowly but not broadly, since Bitcoin, despite its political aims, appears to be integrating into the banking system rather than replacing it. Sam Hart says the bar for an institution is low, describing it as a set of organizational practices that persist over time, and that crypto clears that bar. Trent van Epps suggests consistency and stability are a good first measure of persistence, citing Bitcoin as an example. ## Article This conversation is part of a three-part series of roundtable discussions, mirroring the chapters of the forthcoming Other Internet book: New Institutions, Squad Energy, and Networked Spirituality. This conversation, between Christopher Goes, Trent van Epps, Laura Lotti, Toby Shorin, and Sam Hart, covers New Institutions, building commons and publics, and what emerging crypto researchers should learn from the past. Other Internet 2018–2024 is available for purchase on Metalabel. Laura (00:02) Hello and welcome to the New Institutions round table. So new institutions was a major cultural theme of the last decade, as well as a through line for much of Other Internet research. We think about it as a shift in power structures caused in large part by internet technologies as a cultural and infrastructural force. So the three of us — Laura, Toby and Sam — wanted to have a broader discussion around this topic with two experts that I'm very happy to welcome: Trent van Epps and Christopher Goes. I'll let you guys give a brief introduction about yourself before we get started. Trent (00:48) Sure, I can go. I've been in the Ethereum community for a long time and over the past few years, I've been fortunate to work with the Ethereum Foundation on a whole number of projects, mainly centered around core Ethereum development, the core protocol itself. And as part of that work, I've helped to bootstrap Protocol Guild, which is the leading independent funding institution for core Ethereum developers. We work on funding and ensuring that they have sustainable support for years into the future. And I imagine that will come up in this discussion. Toby Shorin (01:19) Thanks joining us. Christopher Goes (01:21) Yeah, thank you for hosting this. I feel like I'm woefully under qualified to discuss the topic, but hopefully I'll manage to prove myself wrong. I’m Christopher, I guess the most institution-like thing that I've worked on would probably be the IBC protocol, which is sort of this interoperability institutional substrate that at least to some extent has helped facilitate the institution of Cosmos, if we can consider that an institution, maybe a proto-institution. I want to wait more time before judging whether a thing can be called an institution or not. But you're the experts on that, so maybe I'm wrong. I guess the question, part of the question that I'm very interested in is what the relationship is between technology, particularly seen as the thing which is changing through history and the institutional possibility space. Hopefully we'll get to that. Laura (02:15) Thank you. Before we get started with our conversation, I want to briefly introduce the topic of new institutions from our perspective. And I'll do so by reading a couple of excerpts from a new essay that is part of Other Internet's anthology: The late 2010s, were a time of unbounded institutional and infrastructural imagination. As legacy institutions struggled to keep up with the accelerated pace of a world becoming ever more connected, infrastructurally, socially and culturally, new organizational experiments simmered below the surface of mass social media. While platform cooperativism had already paved the way for rethinking the extractive paradigm of Web2, blockchains promised even more radical tools to power horizontal collaboration. Bitcoin made it possible to reimagine nothing less than the global monetary infrastructure beyond the constraints of age-old institutions like central banks and states and Ethereum promised for the first time the ability to build new organizations from the ground up governed by their participants through credibly neutral mechanisms. […] The desire for new institutions wasn't just about replacing outdated extractive Internet infrastructures. It became a quest to affirm the possibility of new worlds governed by their own space times and laws of physics. This is why blockchain protocols — as a new transcendental time machine for creating and distributing value across the planetary computational stack — offered a fertile ground for world building experiments to reimagine how communities and organizations could exist, collaborate and evolve beyond the rigid structures and hierarchies of the past. In these decentralized systems, the story goes, the architecture of trust, value and agency could be rebuilt from the ground up. This renewed techno-optimism sparked institutional dreams for self-sustaining dynamic ecosystems that could evolve within their communities and outside the linear constraints of the old web. So these little excerpts try to capture some of the energy and enthusiasm for institution building through technology that was very prominent in those years and that in many ways shaped also Other Internet as an organization. But so to get us into the first questions, do we still need to build new institutions or should we prioritize fixing the old ones? Christopher Goes (05:07) Do you think we've succeeded? Do you think from the Other Internet sociological vantage point of vast scope and wisdom, said in all earnesty, do you think that we have built new institutions? I'm not convinced. Sam Hart (05:23) Yeah, it's a great question. We spent a year just talking about what an institution was, like whether this is the right term. And when you really boil it down, the bar is very low. We had a debate internally as to whether a handshake was institution. It seems like the lowest threshold that you could imagine but it potentially meets some criteria of being an institution. Yeah, I would say crypto is probably above that bar. Toby Shorin (05:59) I'm curious about your feeling that you're not convinced. I'd like to hear what, in your mind, what could qualify. Christopher Goes (06:11) I guess to me, and maybe this is coming at this from a somewhat crypto specific angle, but part of what I would see is the new institutional disillusionment of the mid 2020s is a lot of attempts to create new institutions having in some narrow sense succeeded, but in a broader sense failed. What do I mean by that? If we look back to the Ethereum launch video, which I watched recently to prepare for a talk, there's this great vision of a world computer for everything from IoT to payments to commerce. The scope was expansive. It was not just like: build this specific thing that can be used not even for gambling, but just for sending stablecoin payments, like some pragmatic use case. It was very broad and the aims were more sociocultural in nature, or at least partially sociocultural in nature, instead of just some narrow product or technology focus. Like the Bitcoin white paper has all of these, or the Bitcoin Genesis block has clearly a political statement about the banking system. And has Bitcoin dethroned the banking system? No. I mean, if anything, it's being integrated into it. To me, the thing that brought me to some of this, that made me interested in this discourse in the 2010s was, or those things were, these kinds of broader, in scope, sociopolitical aspirations. And I think that some progress has been made, but I don't think that the revolution has been made. So maybe that's where my dissolution comes from. Trent (08:02) One thing I can add to this is that, well, I'm not sure where you define the point of evaluation, but part of building institutions is that a big part of it for a long time is aspirational, that your thinking about this thing will persist, or we hope that it will persist over a long time. And I think it's unavoidable that if you're at least claiming that you're building an institution, there's this sort of forward-looking possible future that you're trying to shape. And then the question, I guess, comes like: OK, how successful are you in actually reaching that goal? And who's capable of doing that evaluation? But I think it's unavoidable that it's a bit fuzzy when it comes to actually figuring out where that line actually sits and whether you've crossed it. Christopher Goes (08:54) Yeah, just one other point I would add is to me the question, and I'm curious for this, it feels like a thing that you might've thought about. To me, the question of institutional identity seems critical and even just evaluating what's going on. Like, let's say that we try to take Bitcoin as an institution. Well, in some sense, Bitcoin as an institution clearly exists. It has things that I would define as institutional properties. On the other hand, there's another institution called like the US financial complex, let's say, and that clearly exists. And it seems to me like the institution of Bitcoin is being sort of subsumed into it, almost to the point where I question if it really makes sense to consider it different, right? So whether the institution of Bitcoin is in some sense succeeding or failing or doing what it was set out to do seems to me to hinge quite substantially on how exactly you define the boundaries of identity. Sam Hart (09:54) Yeah, the identity issues don't even stop there, to be honest. Like when we got down to what we could confidently say constitutes an institution is something along the lines of a set of organizational practices that persist over time. That's about it. And, you know, if two or more people are doing something together habitually, you've institutionalized. The other thing is the definition, something goes from a kind of ad hoc practice to an institution just by persisting. It's more of a byproduct than an intentional act or something. So institutions will exist in the future. It's not like they're going to go away. It's just like which institutions, which collection of institutions, will those be. Trent (10:48) We're saying this word so much that I'm thinking of other uses for it. Sometimes you hear famous athletes described as an institution if they've had a major impact on a particular team or collegiate athletics program. I guess you could say that's one person, but actually it's their whole team of support staff and their team that they play with. But they're sort of embedded within these two different systems. Laura (11:24) I was thinking also about the difference between all these experiments. There is this experimental phase that we’ve been through where a lot of these initiatives — a bit through LARPing, a bit through actually building tools and developing new practices — are gesturing to becoming institutions or definitely express a desire for the creation of new types of institutions. But I guess the challenge there is then exactly how do you sustain that practice or that desire and that willingness also through the changes. Obviously, institutions that we know are what persists, but then there is also the question of adaptability, of being able to evolve. Maybe we haven't seen anything yet. We will only answer our initial question on what these new institutions are in another 10 years or more. Toby Shorin (12:26) Yeah, I mean, we've gone through 10 years. What have we learned about the criteria of persistence in that time? Have we learned anything meaningful about that among this group? Like, what does it take for a new institutional attempt or project to stay viable in like 10 years? Trent (12:56) Yeah, I mean, I'll just go first. The first thing that comes to mind is Bitcoin. We were talking about it earlier. And like the idea of stability and consistency, whether you agree with how the protocol is defined and the goals that they've decided as a community, they're pretty consistent. Again, depends on your perspective, whether you're inside or outside of it. And even inside of it, there's divergences, but they have been pretty consistent over the years in how they define this and then in turn, how the financial ecosystem and other crypto communities engage with it. Maybe consistency and stability are a good first stab. Christopher Goes (13:51) Yeah, I guess. I don't know if this is a thing that we learned or even agree with, not up to me to judge, but I feel like in the early days — I don't think it was just me in the early days of some of these new institutional projects — there was, if not exactly technological determinism, then at least a kind of assumption that certain values could be embedded in technological design choices and the technological design choices having been fixed in some kind of protocol, the values would just perpetuate themselves through people using this protocol. I consider that hypothesis to have basically been falsified. I don't think that it works in practice. I think that protocols manage to sustain themselves, if anything, by being somewhat flexible about certain values, like Bitcoin pitched itself, or even just the purpose of what they were intended to be used for. Bitcoin in the white paper is described as peer-to-peer electronic cash. This is not how most people describe or intend to use Bitcoin in the year 2025. And probably that adaptability has been critical in some way to Bitcoin's continued existence as at least the institution which it is today. But I also think that whatever attempt there may have been there to make it into an institution with a particular shape through protocol design choices has also not worked. Trent (15:19) Would you say that public-private key pairs as foundational element of many of these systems is cypherpunk values and ideals being born out? I guess you could argue, depending on the percentage of users that are self-custodying, or using a custodial service maybe makes it a little less clear, but that was the first thing that came to mind just now. Christopher Goes (15:46) Partially, I mean, I think there are some things that one could consider successes in this vein. Even with Bitcoin, for example, it is possible to use Bitcoin by running a node on your computer and use public and private key pairs and transact with people purely that way, and interoperate with this giant sprawling financial system. And say what you will about Coinbase, but they still follow the rules of the Bitcoin protocol. At least for the time being there's still some kind of supervening agreement that is, in fact, defined by the software and the sort of open source, clear, legible set of institutional rules that even powerful actors in the system currently follow. Just viewing protocol rules, of course, anyone can choose what protocol rules to run. If you're trying to promote cypherpunk values by choosing to run and promote a protocol where there are public and private keys, then that having metastasized into Bitcoin in year 2025, I would consider that a partial success. Also, I think the values which cypherpunks, at least to me, have are not exactly: ‘We should use public and private keys,’ but more: ‘People should retain autonomy, some freedom over their choices, some freedom to disclose information.’ And for most people, does the system of public and private keys and Bitcoin full nodes practically provide that? The answer is no. So there's this discrepancy. Trent (17:14) Yeah, I just threw out the first exception I could think of. Christopher Goes (17:18) No, it's fantastic. Curing my depression. Toby Shorin (17:23) Yeah, your depression. You mentioned this new institution disillusionment of the 2020s. I think that is something that we've noticed when we do our book tour workshop, where we take people through these different eras [of internet culture]. And people tend to describe this period as one of disillusionment and giving up on some of the ambitions of a new institutional development. I think that's something we've seen is not just restricted to people interested in protocol design or novel economic systems or decentralized finance and crypto economic systems, but other kinds of institutions and efforts broadly. I'm curious how you situate yourself in that broader landscape as well, and what you see about new institutional efforts today as opposed to 10 years ago in this broader sense. Sam Hart (18:37) One thing is, if you actually take this view that institutions are more of a natural phenomenon, they're a byproduct, the assertion that Laura made at the beginning (that a lot of this is driven by a more network native culture and changes in information distribution and people's relationships with one another) that implies the existence of new institutions, so you can almost guarantee that new institutions will exist, and with that in mind it's more a question of: what control do we have over what those are and can we actually alter that trajectory? Yeah, I do think that new institutions are emerging. It's hard to pattern match on them because they operate on slightly different registers. You know, the TikTok algorithm is kind of an institution these days, and that's just not something that you would really think or you would have thought of 10 years ago. It's just that you didn't have the language or context to draw that boundary in the way that you might today. Christopher Goes (19:55) Yeah, I think your question, Toby, is great, and I'll get to what you said, Sam, in a second. I don't have a systematic or a systematically considered answer to it. One pattern that I've noticed that extends beyond crypto, sort of through this whole new institutional milieu is maybe a reckoning with power dynamics that were previously considered to be out of the design scope, as opposed to just trying to build a technology and offer it to people or build a company and offer people a product or, you know, write things on the internet in blog form or something like this. People who think about institutions across the political spectrum have been more willing to engage with existing institutional power structures both in theory and in practice. In practice, trying to actually lobby them or affect certain policy changes in the US government; and in theory, to reckon with how cypherpunk values or whatever are the thing that you're interested in, how does this relate not only to Bitcoin support of public and private keys, but also to the much broader institutional landscape? Much of which, at least in practice, impacts the degree to which this specific technical design choice is able to help your institutional project. I consider that to be at least, I think, a promising theoretical direction and that I feel like people are considering more. And I think they should be. Like if you design an institution in isolation in this very interconnected network landscape, you're not necessarily able to predict much about what it's going to become in the future, which parts of the institutional practices which might persist, which would not persist, et cetera. I don't know if that's in the direction that you're looking for here. Toby Shorin (22:12) It's a conversation. Sam Hart (22:13) All answers are valid. We're not looking for anything in particular, just your views. Christopher Goes (22:22) I mean, I would be curious to ask Trent. My only relationship with the Protocol Guild historically is that I at least somewhat organized a donation to it through the NAMADA Retroactive Public Goods Funding Program. Hopefully, are you still aware of that? Trent (22:42) We are and yeah, we were trying to check back up on our application and like where the where's the key is and yeah, but we are aware and following up. But thank you. Christopher Goes (22:52) Right. OK, fantastic. My question would be, I guess, do you see Protocol Guild as an institutional project, and how does it relate to the institution of Ethereum? Trent (23:04) Yeah, I'm smiling because we worked with Toby a while ago, well, a couple weeks ago at this point to help define what it is and the tagline I went with at the beginning is direct from him. So thanks, Toby. I used it in some presentations last week, so I'll make sure to send them to you. But yeah, it’s: Protocol Guild is the leading independent institution funding Core Ethereum devs, with a focus on long term maintenance and sustainability. Toby Shorin (23:15) That made me happy to hear. Beautiful. Trent (23:28) So yeah, I mean, I'm kind of locked into that given I've gone with that as the pitch. So I think it is an institution. One of the comments I gave earlier was very much about institutionality is also a belief or it's an aspirational thing. And obviously, I'm speaking from my experience where it's not an institution until it is. And you can lose this institutionality over time. And so as long as you're aiming towards this consistency and stability, I think you have a reasonable claim to actually follow through on that. So yeah, definitely aspirational. Same thing with norm building. I guess these are kind of, Sam, what you were talking about. The institution might be a byproduct of some other conditions. Sam Hart (24:11) Would you? Trent (24:21) I think the same about like norm building is that the norm doesn't exist until you just kind of yell it enough and just kind of bake it into people's heads that this thing is a norm where it should be a norm that's reasonable to follow. And these things are often paired with each other. Like opt-in funding, you don't get people to believe it's worthwhile until you demonstrate that it's a good norm that they should follow and kind of agree to contribute towards. Sam Hart (24:50) Would you call Protocol Guild a public institution? Trent (24:55) Yeah, I've also used the terms like a civic organization because I think maybe classically public would be, you know, the state versus public versus private enterprise. Civic is like these citizens or people who consider themselves stakeholders in a particular resource production system. This is why I like civic because it's a little more neutral. Public also works here. Toby Shorin (25:20) We actually had a question about that. What did we end up coming up with? Nice tea up, Sam. Sam Hart (25:24) I'm teeing. Yeah. So I mean, everyone here is like very fluent in crypto protocols. And the question is: should we call these public institutions? I would say Ethereum and Protocol Guild in particular are certainly making gestures towards this type of language of a public. And notably a public institution implies the existence of a public. And so you kind of need to talk about, well, what is that? What constitutes it? What makes it? We've kind of inherited an interesting lineage here where historically, a public was defined or tied to a government institution. That definition has been expanded with open access and open source into a kind of broader notion of media public and we kind of come full circle a little bit with crypto institutions where there's more enforceable structure with a crypto protocol and a notion of a digital media environment. This is one of the most interesting through lines with a lot of our work. It’s like observing that convergence where Vitalik and the Ethereum community started talking about public goods and, Chris, like you and I started talking about public goods. The Overton window was open to even discussing that topic in the context of a blockchain. Trent (27:03) Yeah, one thought that comes to mind is actually now that I'm thinking about it, I do maybe echo some of Chris's disillusionment, but specifically when it comes to the term public goods. I think most of us followed the beginning and the arc of that term and how it's been so watered down over the years that it really doesn't mean anything because people have applied it to anything. And we try very intentionally to not use it when we're talking about Protocol Guild. Maybe we're early, but we use commons or shared resources to describe this. Maybe in another 10 years, we'll have to move on to something else. Public goods at this point has unfortunately been applied to so many different contexts to companies that haven't found product market fit or very, very niche small publics that it's really hard for people who are allocating funding to actually disambiguate what it applies to. Sam Hart (27:53) Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That said, feel like that just kind of moves the problem elsewhere. A commons also suggests some kind of cohort in which a resource is thriving. So... and Ethereum is like a very amorphous commons, right? Trent (28:14) Okay, so a couple thoughts. We've talked a little bit about how institutions maybe are different in the presence of networks or distributed systems. I think that obviously applies here. If you look at how Protocol Guild is structured, it literally takes into consideration, for example, client diversity. We have a spec with 10 total client implementations. And the reason we need this, or the reason this is very desirable, is because of reliability of this distributed system. It really only comes about through the interactions of these many different versions. You get fault tolerance. These are really good properties. And you see this directly represented in how Protocol Guild defines eligibility. And it says, okay, we want to fund not just one implementation or not just the specification, but we also think it's really important to fund the implementations, plural. So that's one interesting thing that came to mind. And then, Sam, you're also talking about open source software. And this is, again, a really interesting relationship when you take not just open source software, but in the network context. Like there's a huge gradation. When I talk about the commons, it's very, very broad. And when you start to think about, what does it mean to be a part of this commons? Is it just projects that use the EVM? Is it projects that fork mainnet? Is it any project that uses some parts of the stack? Then you kind of have this gradation, as you move closer and closer to Ethereum mainnet, of projects that maybe could consider themselves part of the commons. Or from the perspective of a fund requester, is it reasonable to ask for funding for these resources? Then you can get even deeper like, does this Ethereum L2 use native blobs for DA or does it use a separate provider for DA? And then you just kind of get like more and more nuance as you get closer to this main net construction. Toby Shorin (30:30) I wonder if that analogy or that dynamic has analogies to the public realm of the state or the city or something where there's a spectrum of how public serving these things are, how much they address like public concerns or shared concerns in a way. Like one thing that I've noticed in the IRL world is that in the wake of the collapse of this New Institutions energy, clubs are becoming very popular and they also like span the range. There's now like a lot of kind of elite private club spaces getting built in places like New York and LA, centered around different themes. There's ones for people who like to drive old cars. There's ones that are kind of like a new version of the traditional social club, like the Harmony, and then there's athletic clubs and fitness clubs that are private wellness clubs. And then there are also these run clubs and public fitness clubs that have a semi-public boundary. All of these things are kind of wrapped up in the narrative of social connection, which seems to be, it seems like, in the public discourse. It seems we've realized the bar around creating new institutions is very high and we've somehow lowered it to like, well, let's just like organize people collectively. It doesn't really matter what they're doing. Let's do that. And there's this Netflix documentary, Join or Die, which was about joining a club that kind of represents that. Well, it came out a couple of years ago. We're not calling those things institutions per se, but maybe some of the same questions around the scope of their engagement with the public, the scope of their actions on behalf of the public, and even what we were first talking about, criteria or potential for longevity of those organized bodies, not to say institutions, perhaps still apply in those contexts too. Toby Shorin (33:14) This is definitely in an American context, but Sam and Laura and Chris, you live in Europe. I wonder if similar stuff is happening there or if this discourse has taken a different direction. Sam Hart (33:31) I don't think this is strong. There is a little bit more state or city directed public infrastructure and a little bit more of a regional identity that's coherent and binds some people together. But certainly to some extent, when you're describing this, one thing I was thinking is, no matter what you're calling this, some kind of social cohesion is obviously like just implicitly desired and this is serving a specific need. It's kind of in this emergent view of what's going on. It's like there's an absence there that people feel like it is not being fulfilled by public institutions. So they're filling those holes to satisfy those needs. Laura (34:20) Yeah, would say that also here I feel it less or like there seems to be a base notion of a public that is still maybe more relying on the traditional types of institutions and notions of publics. Maybe they don't work very well, but there still seems to be a bit more an anchor to smaller kind of initiatives. But then I'm wondering whether all these new types of initiatives that Toby was mentioning, are they forming new publics or is like a further privatization perhaps of some kind of social space? Toby Shorin (35:06) Yeah, I'm not sure. Trent described going down the turtle ladder and trying to decide every layer of the stack, well, how public serving is this? And you might be able to perform the same kind of inquiry around these organizations where some of them are not public serving at all, or they're club goods, properly speaking. They might even use that format. There's like a club good oriented, like nonprofit, it's like a 501c4 or something like that. But if that same organization organizes weekly street trash cleanups or something like that. What are we looking at here? It could be an institution. It is maybe not itself a public, like it's addressing the public. I guess this is where we're getting back into the semantic rabbit hole where we have trouble defining exactly what these things are. But if we think back to what Sam said about institutions at the base being collections of organizational practices, then we can evaluate their kind of public mindedness in a way. Christopher Goes (36:32) Yeah, to me a related question, and something that does seem to be different in this sort of highly networked world is that what might have previously been considered different institutional spheres are boring. Like, you know, clubs are not a new institutional type. I don't think anyone would really argue that. Clubs and the market, let's say, at least until recently, to me seem to be relatively separate institutional spheres. I don't know, clubs that were highly for profit or operated as large companies that had multiple instances in different cities. These were uncommon clubs were just very local things. Whatever exactly the legal structure they operated with maybe matters a little bit less, but the practical functionality was some kinds of shared services, social gathering place for members, et cetera. And I think much of the time, it was considered to just be in a separate domain than the market. Like you had your interactions with the club and you had your interactions with the market and maybe they need to interoperate in a limited way. You pay your club dues, but other than that, they're driven by different logics and goals. And now it seems to me that in this very networked world, those lines are kind of blurring and we see a lot of experiments of mixing them. Sometimes it doesn't really work, but there's sort of more of that. There are a lot of attempts in that direction. Also I think the financial and media institutional spheres are blurring. This you really see in crypto, memecoins are an easy example to throw out, but I think it's also more fundamental than that. Even with the example of public goods, the institution of language is sort of blurring, how meaning coherency is maintained across a semantic graph mediated by the Twitter and TikTok algorithms is not an institutional question that users of language have faced until the last 10 years, right? Toby Shorin (38:44) That's interesting. Christopher Goes (38:44) And I think that it plays into the public-private distinction because the public-private distinction is like almost the OG case of two institutional spheres that are considered fully disjoint and oriented towards different purpose ends or something. Toby Shorin (38:57) What it makes me think of, especially when you mentioned the linguistic element, is Libby and Tiger's lore essays. Libby's essay specifically, which talks about how lore is this kind of linguistic matter which has an exteriority and an interiority to it. The interiority feels a certain way—it feels very private—and your trajectory through it really makes you feel you’re on the inside of something that you don't want to have interpreted and digested. But the stuff of it—the matter of it—is on the public internet, floating around everywhere on the timeline. So this thing has a weird public and private quality to it where it just actually totally depends on your positionally in the network to assess who is it for at all. Sam Hart (39:47) It's encrypted. Toby Shorin (39:58) So that's a really interesting point about the like the blurring of institutional categories, inside and outside. Sam Hart (40:15) It's really funny that you went to micro level linguistic constructs, I was going the other way. One thing that we talked about a ton during our writing process but never really published on, was the power that crypto gives individuals. Our shorthand for this was that “crypto gives everyone a nuke.” And there’s a similar phenomenon where you get peace through proliferation of weapons. Peace is a public good, but it only comes about through the paradigm of mutually assured destruction. These two different spheres carve one another out: war on one side and a global public sphere on the other, created through that armistice. Toby Shorin (41:18) I have to say, it feels that like now that we've entered the scam-or-be-scammed-economy, this is the Hobbesian “war of all against all.” And it doesn't really seem like the deterrent of “give everyone a nuke” really worked out. Trent (41:36) Yeah, I think some people have better nukes than others, or they've learned how to better weaponize them. We were talking about the overlap of media with other social functions. You guys can correct me if I'm wrong—but I don't think the New York Times has ever had a VC arm. Quick fact check… But today in crypto, everyone plays both sides. Media institutions used to be trusted sources. Now you have the KOLs who have monetize their following, monetize their brand. But even on a larger level, you have these institutional media organizations. I mean, I don't know if sometimes they try to skirt away from being an impartial source to a purveyor of entertainment. Many crypto media organizations have investing arms attached. Toby Shorin (42:28) So when we wrote the public goods essay, this kind of complexity, and the problematic nature of these interactions is what brought us to the definition of public goods that we landed on, which is basically creating positive externalities. Externalities that don't just affect your own organization, but are laterally scalable, or have positive impacts that are good for adjacent bodies. I'm curious what other criteria we could have for “public goods,” because the whole notion of being civically inclined is kind of reaching for *doing good,* for not just yourself, but for others. Clearly where we've gotten in this conversation (and I think this is generally true) is that the Habermasian language of the public sphere and these sorts of strongly demarcated institutional categories does not really work because now, because they're all kind of inside each other. that, We can't use the idea of the public to encode what's right or what's good. That means we need to evaluate the notion of what's *right* or what's *good* with some other criteria—or get more accurate about what we think is worth doing. Our idea of positive externalities is one way of getting at that, but I wonder if we have other ways? Trent (44:21) The inverse could be: if a resource were fully captured, what set of people or projects would be negatively harmed? Then we might need to count every single person, or the total harms to them. But that's at least the first thing that comes to mind. Toby Shorin (44:39) That's a really great evaluative heuristic. Christopher Goes (44:51) I think an interesting twist here that might give us some more analytical muscle is to take the first derivative and look at the institutional dynamics. Like if an institution is trying to serve—whether it's a club or a public—maybe even to be accountable to that group in a changing institutional landscape—what tools does it have at its disposal to manage and react to that change. The reason I think this is a useful analytical lens for crypto is because it's clear that there is a vast discrepancy with respect to scale—as in the public and private keys are held by individuals, maybe some media companies, Coinbase in a custodial sense. But despite having the ability to print money by creating new tokens almost none of the large scale crypto institutions have discretionary power to do that, right? Like the Ethereum Foundation can't print ETH. Maybe you're lucky to receive some of the donations to Protocol Guild. But if we think about this situation outside of the crypto context, if the Ethereum Foundation were tasked with maintaining the public goods of Ethereum, we would have tied it in a straight jacket, right? We've taken away the key institutional power that an institution of this size would usually have—which is some discretionary control over value flows. Maybe in a more traditional institutional context there wouldn't be a token, but the Foundation might have a giant government grant that it would get to dispense however it chooses. Crypto isn’t this. You’d need to convince 100,000 validators to change the protocol. There's more discretion on some levels and less at the scale of institutional decision-making. I think crypto has had a hard time figuring out how to blend goals at different scales. If arbitrary people can just mint tokens what actually supports the conditions required for sustainability? A competitive institutional landscape requires the power to do some of this stuff. Toby Shorin (47:21) That's definitely true. How do you see that relating to this question of how we find a moral compass. Christopher Goes (47:52) When we look at things in crypto as public goods, one thing that's missing is some clear aspect of an institutional body that’s consciously making decisions on behalf of the public. Sometimes it's there, sometimes not so much. We’re also missing a way for that institutional body to learn what the public wants and to be accountable to it. Looking at dynamics can help us insofar as we talk about what an institution is capable of doing on behalf of different publics or different groups, and how it would go about collecting information to make decisions. Maybe it doesn't address the problem that you're looking to solve, but I find it useful. Sam Hart (48:47) One thing worth noting: Chris and I have discussed this before, but we took parallel trajectories and both arrived at “accountability” as one of the core institutional dimensions that one should design around. I arrived at this through Laura's post actually and kind of iterated on it. This accountability lens is quite powerful and let’s you ask question like who is it accountable to? What is the strength of the accountable relationship? How is that relationship projected? What does the supply chain look like? How robust is that supply chain to institutional change? Toby Shorin (49:35) Laura, maybe you'd want to say something about accountability and its role vis-a-vis the public and institution-building. Laura (49:45) I can try, yeah. I think what Sam was referring to it was part of a research that we did with Uniswap governance. This was when the DAO had just formed and questions about accountability were like starting to become really important—in the sense that accountability is not just a thing you can install, right? Also, accountability doesn’t exist solely within the realm of the mechanism at the end of the day, it involves how people actually relate to one another, how they share resources, etc. So what we found is that accountability creates this kind of feedback loop where someone is responsible for another, who then holds that person to account. So accountability always works both ways. Looking at current institutions, you’ll find this loop is often broken. The discretionary power is where I think accountability ultimately plays a really key role. It’s appropriate for institutions to have discretionary powers for many things. Not everything needs to be like the Bitcoin protocol. But exactly how to build also these accountability structures is really the key question. That's where still there is a lot of work to be done. Toby Shorin (52:00) It seems like so much of crypto, and I guess tech more broadly, puts the emphasis on credible neutrality or automation. Technology that creates non-discretionary institutional capacities is only meaningful if you point it at, say, the institutional corruption of the banking system and legally entrenched backdoor dealings. I guess where the industry’s gotten to now, is that important human institutions like the Ethereum Foundation, and other foundations that modeled themselves after the EF, really took on the properties and affordances of the technology. Maybe what we're getting to with this conversation about discretionary decision making is some kind of Aristotelian notion that the key criteria to have an accountable institution is to have an organization that pursues “the good.” You have to have decision makers who are more or less capable of using personal judgment to assert what good is on behalf of a public or a group, even if that’s fallible. Sam Hart (53:49) Well, I think this suggestion that Laura made, like, you can't just install accountability. There's some kind of contract that you enter into and it needs to be built and negotiated. And that's that's how that's actually how you end up defining what constitutes the good and to whom. This is kind of more art than science, guess. In order to do that, you need to have a proto-institution that is willing to expose itself to being accountable. At least to have longevity in its commitment to aligning with its constituents long-term interests. And on the other side, you need to have some kind of latent constituency who's willing to participate in that system. Trent (54:45) I can add something from the world of practice. For Protocol Guild, this is a really difficult tension for us because obviously we want to do right by the donors and the people that are funding us. However, we ultimately serve a much, much broader public than just these projects that are making that decision to fund us. For one, we put all funding into an immutable four-year contract so nobody can claw it back. You can't revoke this funding, and this removes a significant bit of leverage that these projects would otherwise have. You know, in the extreme case, let's say a major funder donates a billion dollars and this is like, my God, we're gonna suddenly contort ourselves to meet whatever their requests are as the protocol is defined. And so if you put it into the four year investing contract, there's no way you can get it back unless at the other end, we decide to give it back to you. But then this conversation about accountability is also resonating a lot with me because in theory, this accountability should be: we listen to and accommodate the requests of funders as like, a direct relationship with people who are funding this work. Again, do we accommodate their desires for how the protocol should be shaped? or do we have to condition that against what the broader five and 10 year needs of Ethereum, the broader Ethereum Commons is. We're currently like deep in this discussion of, how can we give something back? In the sense of, they hold us accountable and we understand what their needs are, they're unique to their specific context, but without going too far into a world where then all of a sudden this protocol is being designed for just people who have funds to give. And this is something out, like I said, we're very much deep in this discussion of, okay, how much further can we go to, you know, we can give you, we can celebrate your contribution, we can recognize that it's important to follow these norms. How much further can we go beyond that before the broader non-funder community is like, that looks a little strange, what you're giving back in return. And Toby, the final thing you said was, basically, we have a lot of trust bound up in this thing to decide what the right direction is. We can have very strict accountability measures inside of the mechanism. Like, if you're not doing the work, you no longer get funding. That's very easy. We can develop robust processes to actually manage the membership. But at the end of the day, we ultimately decide, OK, the protocol needs to go this way and we're not beholden to these funders in this particular dimension. Christopher Goes (57:30) To me, related to accountability, an interesting question to ask is what does accountability look like for or within in relation to a particular institution versus what does it look like in the broader institutional landscape? And sometimes I could even imagine that these would be in tension or opposed to each other. For example if we take Protocol Guild, suppose that you have various mechanisms to try to take into account some interests of the funders, but not too much, and also the Ethereum public, which is very hard to measure, and I have no idea what it means in practice. So from the outside, this is kind of illegible. By contrast, if we imagine there are Protocol Guilds 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and they build Ethereum 1, Ethereum 2, Ethereum 3, Ethereum 4, and Ethereum 5, and they are very clear, they're almost dictatorships. Like we will do X. If you give us your funding, it will go to fund X. If you don't want X, go somewhere else. In some sense, in this broader, even though there's absolutely zero attempts to be like accountable to some changing interests of, you know, the funders of each individual institution in the broader landscape, I would argue maybe there's actually more accountability because there's this very clear way in which outside participants can take their preference and express it through their choices and their interactions with these institutions. I'm curious what you think of that. Sam Hart (59:07) I mean, the result is kind of like turning a quasi-public or a commons-based institution into a market. And that has real trade offs. In crypto's drive towards like non-discretionary policy, I think there a lot is lost in just acknowledging the value of youthful enthusiasm and taste and people's intrinsic desire to put their energies towards doing things that are meaningful and have a large impact. Creating that channel for youthful enthusiasm of putting your energies towards doing something for the public good, I think is so important. Turning that into a market that's extremely rigidly defined collapses that channel. Toby Shorin (1:00:16) The market is famously not that good at rewarding those kinds of activities. But I think that this is kind of an interesting moment to ask Chris about the Namada RPGF program because that was it. You know, it wasn't necessarily an ongoing thing. The allocation has already happened, but that's an opportunity that you took to basically express on discretionary principles, a perspective on what things are considered meaningful to you, to Namada, to your team. Other Internet received an allocation, Protocol Guild received an allocation. There is also a broader set of organizations there too. How did you think about that as like a moment to create the channel that Sam was talking about? Sam Hart (1:01:10) I also think it was quite interesting, some of the information collection that you did in advance, there was a referential thing that you did in order to aggregate a lot of that. Toby Shorin (1:01:22) Yeah, maybe talk about that process too. Christopher Goes (1:01:24) Yeah, I mean, we went through a relatively simple process (and I think I could reasonably argue it was even a public process) of collecting nominations for a direct public goods funding, which could be placed on the forums. Some of them were sent to us in private and we assembled those together into a list which went in the Genesis Block proposal. Now, the amounts that were chosen practically were discretionary on the basis of not just my own opinion, but those of others involved in the project. We also consulted Gavin a lot, who heads the Minaro, which is now kind of a Namada public goods focused organization. Whether that meets some of our more theoretically rigorous definitions or not, I don't know, but he's certainly interested in the public good. Yeah, I guess I mean, I didn't mean to suggest that we should just reduce everything back to a market. I think there are many possibilities opened up by a the ability to issue new, functionally to mark denominations of money in some form, and the ability to knit those together in the complex flow relationships that technologically crypto has opened up. But sociologically, the exploration is still I would argue quite scarce. It's not necessarily just that you know maybe if these things appear, alternative Protocol Guilds 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 just appear it's not like a market where you're buying a sandwich right? It's like a market where you're choosing what goods you want, what public goods you want to be funded, assuming that all of these Protocol Guilds are producing you know different protocols or other things like this. So I think that somewhat different, maybe it's more like sort of donating to different NGOs or something like this. I guess, to me there's an interesting possibility where if we assume that people will continue to issue lots of new denominations of money with both different initial allocations and different flows over time, how do those interacting with this complex economic system craft their interactions in ways that support whatever it is that they want to support? And is there some kind of accountability flow that we can construct there? To make that more concrete, let's imagine that they're just like lots of tokens, I have lots of tokens and I look at periodically who holds those tokens, what they're doing and where the new issuance is going and what it's doing and whether I agree with it or not, more or less. And then I change my parameters of interaction with the system accordingly. Like maybe if you pay it a token that, you I like what the Ethereum Foundation is doing with its Ether, so if you pay me an Ether, I give you a 0.1 % discount. Which seems like a very small thing, but over time this could kind of steer the system. But I don't think it has been thought about holistically from the monetary flow perspective or the like, what is the actual user interaction perspective. Crypto is mostly just still treated as an investment class. And when it's an investment class, it definitely doesn't have the systemic effect, right? Trent (1:05:03) One thing I just want to clarify is earlier, Chris, you said I assume there's something that Protocol Guild gives to donors. I just want to state that we don't, and this is kind of part of this accountability process. It's kind of just like a no-strings-attached contribution. For example, I have never spoken with you about what you want Ethereum to look like, and yet there is this funding grant. For listeners who have made it to this part of the episode or this podcast, Christopher Goes (1:05:13) Right, okay. Hahaha Trent (1:05:31) Just wanted to be clear about that. No, no, it's okay. Christopher Goes (1:05:32) Sorry, my apologies. Toby Shorin (1:05:36) Respect the nerds who have made it to this part. Trent (1:05:38) Yeah, good job if you're listening. Sam Hart (1:05:38) Yeah. Toby Shorin (1:05:41) How do we, where do we want to go with this? Like how do we want to wrap this up? Sam Hart (1:05:44) Well, yeah, we're almost at end of time. We had a final set of questions, one or two questions, I think actually do kind of close this well. The kind of mechanism design space that you described, Chris, it kind of assumes some kind of shared resource, although your framing of it is like Ethereum one, Ethereum two, Ethereum three. You could imagine those as completely distinct resources, but the... Like our final question here is kind of like, well, how should we navigate that tension of a shared resource or a globally shared resource? A resource of like a certain size constituency? Like, is it important to be trying to put energy into creating like, you know, a global commons? Or at least a commons that has some reach? Or is localism where we should be trying to put our attention and energy and making those more kind of congruent with one another? Like, I would almost say that like... This isn't 100 % true, but it's a good point of tension: Protocol Guild is trying to cast a relatively wide net around Ethereum and Ethereum L2s and there's a larger flavor of global commons. A lot of the Anoma project is, we're going to have some shared standards, but like, it's actually more, more a view on localism in some sense. So you've both kind of channeled your energies in slightly different like directions to like, to in service of a public good. Christopher Goes (1:07:37) I’m going to be contrary and say neither. I think the problem is institutional compositionality, which is the part that hasn't a that crypto hasn't quite got right, and that even the whole new institutional movement hasn't quite got right, which is how to compose institutions in a way such that, you know, A) maybe the original purpose is preserved and B) the right compromises are made. Maybe I would argue, not that localism, global or local institutions aren't helpful, but I think they're kind of clearly not meeting. Like there's clubs and then there's Ethereum. These things are so far away from each other, right? And almost, I mean, there are also lots of Ethereum meetups and stuff like this. Maybe they're like Ethereum clubs. But there also seems to me to be kind of a gap in between, just from the perspective of scale, right? Like Ethereum's a big institution. There are lots of ETH holders. It's kind of a global protocol. And a club is sort of a little institution. And maybe you have like Megacorp clubs, which are somewhat bigger, but they tend to be very tied to the market, right? And I wonder if there's some mid-scale institutional design space that's not really being explored yet. I’m not 100 % confident but that was my contrarian take. Trent (1:08:58) Yeah, I can just add to that. I think the gap between your local club and like you said, Ethereum, which in reality Ethereum is probably way down here still today and there's many other things in this zone. I think one reason that there's such a huge gap is kind of the accretive effects of network effects. And kind of going back to your idea of like Ethereum 1, Ethereum 2, Ethereum 3, like these different Protocol Guilds that are pursuing different visions, at the end of the day, they all collapse back into the same governance system. So you can have these kind of competing visions, but governance bandwidth or governance throughput is unfortunately single threaded. Like you have to make this decision at this point, release the network software releases and like there's no way getting around the practical limits of human time and you know, the time that stakeholders need to actually decide which decision tree to go with. And maybe this is just a practical limitation of distributed systems at scale. I know people are now more and more talking about futarchy, and we should have these branching realities of different funding decisions. I'm still pretty skeptical about applying these in really technical domains. Not saying they'll never work. When Sam was talking about like, bringing in markets into these deliberative governance discussions. At the end of the day, there's still like a decision point that everybody sort of has to collapse to. Christopher Goes (1:10:40) Well, yea, I think though, to me, there's a question of like, what exactly must you agree on in order to achieve the kind of even institutional relationship that you want to achieve. And that's a question you can ask at the level of the protocol. I mean, to run a distributed consensus system like Ethereum consensus, you need to agree on actually a lot of things. Like you need to agree on a very exact protocol. And if any one line of the very exact protocol is different, it's a long time since I read the Ethereum consensus papers, but for most of the lines, if that line is different, then you would no longer be able to come to agreement in the strict sense of “what is the state of this blockchain,” at block 10 million or whatever. I guess maybe the follow up question is like, what does coming to agreement on the state of a particular block mean for the institution and the kinds of agreements that we want? Ultimately the block is a block. It has some numbers, right? And those numbers only matter as they represent things in the real world. And the thing that we want to track are like agreements in the real world, which are somehow, you know, represented in this syntactical way. So I would also want to ask the question of: through that mediating lens, can we almost minimize or be very precise about what it is that we need to agree on at these different levels and thus reduce the pressure, reduce this bottleneck pressure, if you have, no matter how sophisticated the social consensus mechanism you have? If there's one bottleneck and everyone needs to agree to all of these things or none of these things, then it sort of limits freedom vis-a-vis a system where you could pick and choose more precisely. Sam Hart (1:12:32) Maybe to close, so this New Institutions like chapter in the book, it kind of represents the early stages of Other Internet, although it's been a throughline, you know, throughout Other Internet's history. And I think can maybe speak for all of us that to some extent it represents a phase in our personal development where we got into the industry through kind of youthful enthusiasm and naivete of, “we can do something here.” I wonder if you had to kind of give a word of advice to someone who had that same kind of enthusiasm today? What is the one sentence that you would give them? Where should you best direct your energies? Trent (1:13:29) I hope the hosts have some pre-writings. Toby Shorin (1:13:33) Now we're going to make Laura drop knowledge bombs on you now. Give everyone a wisdom nuke. Christopher Goes (1:13:53) That's a very hard question. One sentence. mean, I think a thing that I wished that I had done earlier was, you know, I was interested in technological systems for socio-political reasons. And I read a lot about the technology and not a lot about sociology or political theory. I mean, I read a little bit, but I didn't have a good understanding of how, say, the technical details of a protocol and the social functionality of a complex social system could or should or might relate to one another. My understanding was blurry. And I think as a result of having that blurry understanding, I made the same mistake that I think other people made. I ascribed too much import to the technology. I was optimistic about the ability to embed sociological values in some technological design choice. And I'd like to think that over the years I've arrived at a more precise understanding of what that boundary actually is. And I think that's true still of people entering the industry, often they're coming at this from maybe more of the technical background. Well, either they're coming at this from more of the technical background and they might have blinders with regards to histories of social systems, or they're coming at this from the social systems background and they don't have quite enough understanding of how the technology actually works to distinguish the things that sound good from the things that are possible. And I think you really must be able to synthesize both in order to achieve new institutional design that sticks. Trent (1:15:33) Yes. Okay. I'm going to extend that again from the applied perspective. And one of the things I've seen over the years, again, specific to my experience, is that sometimes there's a tendency for people to anchor too much to the mechanism design. Kind of exactly what you're saying of like, if only I have this perfect technical unlock. But what I've seen is like, not to downplay it too much, but the design of the mechanism is almost secondary to the social and political infrastructure around it. So over the years, we've seen many mechanisms like quadratic funding, retroPGF, and now there are things like deep funding or using AI agents to ascribe value. As it relates to like finding something to work on and how you shape your work, I sometimes see people focus too much on the allocation mechanism or the mechanism itself as being like, this will be the huge unlock that suddenly funds all public goods in perpetuity. When in reality, it's finding the right niche or the right level of abstraction to operate at. And that is a much more productive exploration. Just because you have a perfect consensus mechanism doesn't mean your chain is going to be successful; just because you have the perfect allocation mechanism doesn't mean that you will suddenly solve public goods funding. So for anybody new I would say: find the the abstraction layer that is missing this particular construction. The final reference of Protocol Guild is that we created the thing, and only like two years later, we invented this thing called the 1 % Pledge, which as the name suggests, is 1 % of token supply. And before we even announced the blog post, we already had a project come to us and say, hey, we want to do this thing. And historically, this had never happened on that scale, because all of a sudden, there was a vehicle which could accept this funding. It operated at the scale of the commons, or at least a big approximation of it. This was late in funding that would have never ever gone to Consensys or Paradigm or the Ethereum Foundation because they only represent small parts of what Ethereum is more broadly. And so when we designed this meta organization on top of all these other groups that represented the individual and took into account the breadth of Ethereum development, all of a sudden this funding appeared. So hopefully that's helpful for anybody getting started. Toby Shorin (1:18:12) Do we have Other Internet answers to this question too? Sam Hart (1:18:17) Yeah, yeah, we do. mean, the one of the biggest learnings of the organization is echoed in what you're both saying. Like there was a big emphasis on technological determinism, on mechanism design, on “DAO tools” as another way to name the whole category. and we were guilty of this too. We we participate in a lot of these things, helped think through a lot of these things, and the amount of time and energy spent on, on like new mechanisms is just like versus actually asking people and finding a constituency and understanding their needs. Institutions I think are built up from people first, thinking through: What are they doing? What is the mode of behavior that they have in common? And how do we want to enhance that? There's just like very little thinking from that perspective. And so that was kind of the shift that the organization made, I would say, trying to advocate for that kind of groundwork and dialogue happening first and then bringing tools in to satisfy those needs and enhance the kind of coordination or interaction within that community. Laura (1:19:46) Yeah, second that, like all you just said definitely deeply resonates with the journey of Other Internet. Doing some of the first studies of the social dynamics around the mechanisms was quite exotic, I guess, at the time. But we're seeing now that there's perhaps more need for these types of work. Let's not build tools or institutions in a vacuum, but actually first talk to the people that we want to build these things for and with. Toby Shorin (1:20:26) One more to offer that's somewhat in a different vein, and I think is more to the tune of the “discretionary” conversation we were having earlier. I think this is a win. This is a positive learning from the Other Internet experience, which is: large new bodies of funding like crypto and tech in general have a much more restricted set of concerns than the space of the public, or what was previously considered the public. And if you can build trust and credibility, it is possible to be a broker between those areas. Other Internet certainly did that successfully. I think Protocol Guild has also managed to do that within a slightly more narrow confine. That’s less about the specific research you do and the mechanisms you build, but like more about how you go about building a reputation and building credibility within these wannabe new institutions that have a lot of capital and resources. If you can do that, then it is possible to like use your taste-making and your discretion to like divert and like route capital to things that are also worthy and maybe not being considered viable by those kinds of organizations. Christopher Goes (1:22:02) Well, I think it's amazing that you're releasing a book. I'm glad that this history will be chronicled for the future to learn from. Trent (1:22:11) Is it physical? Sam Hart (1:22:11) Yeah, it's a physical book. Maybe too physical. It's what? Six hundred and thirty pages or something? It got a little out of hand. I mean, it's got a lot of the previously published essays, a bunch of kind of internal writings to to one another. Trent (1:22:14) Wow. Awesome. Christopher Goes (1:22:21) Wow. Sam Hart (1:22:37) Yeah, I mean, you both, Trent and Chris, like you were definitely like a big part of the thinking of Other Internet and, you know, influenced us a lot. Christopher Goes (1:22:48) Do you consider this book a funeral? Toby Shorin (1:22:53) Have you seen the cover? Christopher Goes (1:22:57) No, no. Toby Shorin (1:22:59) It's got tombstone energy, let's say that. You know, I got an email from Laurel a few days ago. Obviously Laurel is a genius and like can just see these things intuitively. And like the first line in the email was like, “congrats on the book. I know you wanted to publish one. It kind of reminds me of a tombstone!” Sam Hart (1:23:01) Yeah, it's a death and rebirth. One of the reasons that I asked this question at the end was we want to put more of our attention into helping younger people start their own version of Other Internet, or whatever their flavor is. Not called Other Internet, but just the next generation of institutions. Understanding how to grow up in an ecosystem like this, how to navigate and make yourself legible or not. So it's kind of a new chapter, not an end, but yeah, just a different kind of role that we wanna play. Trent (1:23:59) I think the other answer is to really lean into it and just have a hand busting through the soil on the cover. The rebirth is there. Sam Hart (1:24:08) Yeah, that'll do it. Toby Shorin (1:24:09) Zombie institutions, that's our next essay. Trent (1:24:11) I know the zombie is maybe not the best association, but… Sam Hart (1:24:18) Well, this is wonderful. It's always so to talk to you both and to have you both in same room is a treat. Toby Shorin (1:24:19) Yeah, I think we got some net new ideas out of this too. This is good thinking, y'all. Trent (1:24:24) Thank you. Laura (1:24:32) Thank you. Trent (1:24:33) Thanks for having us. It was a lot of fun. Christopher Goes (1:24:34) I enjoyed this a lot. Thank you for hosting. Sam Hart (1:24:38) Thank you all. Laura (1:24:39) Thank you all.