Timber, managing director of the newly formed Protocol Institute, opens Season 4 ('New Nature') by outlining the season's focus on AI and protocols, previewing upcoming guests (Denise Hearn, Sriram Krishnan, Kyle Matthews, Danny Ryan, Rohit Krishnan, Tanya). He then argues for a distinction between Safety-1 (minimizing accidents to zero) and Safety-2 (maximizing successful operations per accident, per Erik Hollnagel), applying Hollnagel's 'dynamic non-event' and efficiency-thoroughness trade-off (ETTO) concepts to critique mainstream AI alignment discourse as overly focused on existential risk rather than practical, bottom-up safety protocols.
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Cory Levinson surveys the current landscape of climate protocols, tracing how carbon markets and DeFi have collided since 2023, with projects like KlimaDAO absorbing millions of carbon credits into blockchain form and Regen Network expanding into biodiversity markets. The piece examines how these protocols are attempting to create durable market mechanisms for environmental assets despite fundamental challenges in traditional carbon crediting.
Cory Levinson
Charity Majors, co-founder of Honeycomb, discusses with interviewer Benat (Venkatesh Rao) how observability emerged from her and co-founder Christine's experience with Facebook's Scuba tool, defining it via control theory as understanding internal system state from outputs, and distinguishing it from traditional monitoring through high-cardinality, high-dimensionality data capture. They explore how this concept applies beyond software to protocol governance broadly, using examples like tsunami warning networks and the LEAF Coalition's use of satellite data plus chainsaw-detecting microphones to monitor Amazon deforestation compliance, with Majors emphasizing that the key is capturing enough high-cardinality data to ask novel questions later and tailoring the 'story' to the audience's capacity for action.
Charity Majors
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, recounts Metalabel's two-year journey building crypto-based infrastructure for creative 'culture labels' inspired by punk record labels and the Royal Society, and how repeated crises (the Gitcoin/Vitalik NFT frenzy, Pepe coin gas spikes, and a wallet drain) led the team to go on a 'crypto diet' and ultimately launch Metalabel with zero blockchains underneath, borrowing crypto's values (decentralized identifiers, open data, shared financial outcomes) while prioritizing end-user experience over ideological means. He argues crypto culture often lets 'the means justify the ends,' making it a poor 'major' but potentially a good 'minor' within a broader post-platform, protocol-literate design space, a point Venkatesh Rao extends with his 'brains, trains, and vibes-mobiles' metaphor.
Yancey Strickler