Welcome to another episode of the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast. It's a podcast focused on helping geotechnical engineers stay up-to-date with technical trends in the field. I'm your host, Jared Green, and I've practiced as a geotechnical engineer for over 17 and a half years. And in addition to practicing engineering, I enjoy mentoring young engineers and first-generation college students. I've focused on helping to increase the number of pre-college students that are interested in STEAM majors in fields. STEAM meaning science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. In this episode of the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast, which I may sometimes refer to as the Geopod, I'll be talking with none other than Dr. Sam Clements, a professor at Syracuse University, about his role as a professor at the university and the things that he does to help geotechnical engineers and students succeed. Before we jump in, let me remind you that you can find everything you need at the following website, geotechnicalengineeringpodcast.com. There you will find links to the past shows and links to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And there's also a form where you can submit topics and guest ideas. Again, that's geotechnicalengineeringpodcast.com. And please, if you've enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast. As doing so will help more geotechnical engineers find the show. Now, let's jump into our conversation with Professor Sam Clements. All right, welcome to another episode of the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast. We have our guest today, Professor Sam Clements. Welcome to the Geotechnical Podcast. We are honored to have you, Professor. Jared, thank you. Thank you so much for including me in this wonderful program. I really, really appreciate it. Oh man, this is kind of like a moment of personal pride because you are my first soil mechanics professor at Syracuse over 20 years ago. You believe that? Wow. Actually, I remember. I was going to include a little bit about that. Oh, I get this. No, I remember teaching you foundation engineering and design. And at the beginning of the semester, you were okay, but you didn't seem to be tuned in. And then one day we talked after class, and you had this little gleam in your eye, and I thought, oh, we've got him. He's going to be a great geotechnical engineer. And sure enough, that happened. I'm so proud. We're all so proud of your accomplishments. Thank you so much. That means a lot. That means a lot. Yeah, at first, I didn't know what was going on. So as a particulate matter, I was like, what is going on? That's right. That's true. It's very different from structures and a lot of the other civil specialties. You're right. Exactly, exactly. Wow. Well, we gave an introduction, went over your bio earlier in the show, but like if we had to say it in your own words, what would you tell the listeners? Your daily life is like at Syracuse University. And you've been here since late 70s. So your daily life probably changed over the years, but yes it has. I've been here, let's see, wow, 43 winters. We counted as winters. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia originally, but 43 years. I retired in 1914 and I still continue to... 1914? I'm sorry, 24. Okay, just checking. Cut that out, would you? But that's a blooper. But I've still continued to be active in the department and I assist with the senior design course, which is a wonderful, wonderful experience. We really have one of the oldest senior design courses in the country. Almost 60 years ago we started it. It was called planning engineering in those days, but it's really a wonderful capstone design course and I think it's something that I love to teach because it gives students that are not necessarily great analytical performers, but are good designers a chance for them to excel. And it's always wonderful to see students that you know maybe not the smartest kids in the class, but the ones that know how to design and get excited with teamwork and work well together and come up with a good project. So I do that, I'll review papers for several professional societies, help in the department anyway I can. So it's good. That's great, that's great. And I remember the capstone design that was a lot of fun, you know working with somebody to focus in the civil, somebody to focus in environmental, focus in the structure and the reality is that that capstone was a preview of what you know the daily life would look like as a consultant because we work with different consultants all the time, different disciplines. Thank you, that's what we hope to do to simulate. And then the wonderful thing is at the end we have a presentation where we have engineers come, prominent like Jared Green come and visit and listen to the seniors present their their projects and you ask wonderful questions. You prepare them for that real life experience and so I'd love to do it. I hope I can maybe be hobbling in there for the next couple of years to continue to do it. Sounds awesome. I also saw a video that Syracuse posted, I believe it was from last year where it showed I think there were freshmen or sophomore students that had prepared bridge designs and they had to step on them and one of the things I thought was so powerful is that you would step on the bridge with the designer. Sometimes you'd stay and other times you guys would you know come down to 18 inches. That's pretty awesome. Yeah that's a lot of felt was a freshman course and we would give them a limited amount of material and they had to support 300 pounds and it was fun. I think it really sort of brought home not just the theoretical part but practical application. You got to build something that's going to stand up and take the load so they get a visual visual idea if it doesn't perform well. Yeah and everybody's watching too which makes sense. Yeah that's right yeah we do that at the end of the semester yeah. That's great. Oh professor I know that you served as a naval officer in the U.S. Navy Civil Engineering Corps and I want to thank you for your service. Thank you. I would just say how did that you know experience benefit your career. Yeah that was a wonderful adventure number one and number two it really turned me into a man. I really recommend it for anybody that gets out graduates and doesn't know what to do. Boy it just what they do is they take you they train you and they put you in big big physicians of responsibility and I mean it was amazing. I was in the in the CBs they call it construction battalion a naval construction battalion of about 1200 men and after I had finished and gotten my commission we went through training and then we went to Guam there'd been a typhoon that had gone through there so we went to repair a lot of the works there. Interesting geotechnical project there was a warehouse right along the wharf in Guam and we had to drive steel piles down because the hurricane or the typhoons that call them out there the wind pressure and uplift and so we were driving them into crystallized coral and it was really interesting stuff you'd you'd get a real high blow count and then bam it suddenly would break through the coral and drop a few feet. Wow. We had to drive them pretty deep and get them into where there was enough skin friction for us to be able to ensure that we had the uplift capacity for these typhoon type winds. And after actually the great Alaska earthquake occurred while we were out there and we thought a tsunami would hit us but it missed Guam and but hit Hawaii and while we were there we got called up to go into Vietnam it was at that time when that became very very active and so I went in with an advanced party and we did that was combat engineering very different from regular engineering you know you're you've got people shooting at you you've got to be careful what you're doing you would always be ready to grab your weapon and protect yourself and wow yeah that was that was it was exciting and then probably I'm going on about this but I this is not fine uh probably the best adventure I had was um I had a CB team they called it uh took 12 enlisted men and an officer and I was a young guy it was an ensign I guess when I went and they sent us up in the northeast Thailand uh to build a dam a road and a bridge the communists were coming across the Mekong River and they had this aid USAID program where we wanted to show that you know we were supporting the people so we convoy up there with bulldozers and drapers and all this equipment and we had about 30 or 40 young time in to help us and we built this road and um we had it was actually the material was interesting it's laterite I don't know if you've heard that term maybe it's a residual soil it's kind of like low-grade iron ore it's red and I remember even when I was in a masters at Georgia Tech George Sowers who was a wonderful professor had talked about laterite so uh scoop I got a big box of it and mailed it back to Georgia Tech I don't know if he appreciated it or not but we had to compact the road and we didn't have a water truck so we took a big old connex box it's a big steel box turned it on its side and put it on a three-quarter ton truck and cut a hole in the box and put a pipe on there and a water spreader and you know got the optimum moisture content for this stuff so it was you know it was really you had to really do sort of innovative things to to complete the project we had to hire some elephants to make some timber out of the jungle build a bridge and so it was a great adventure I love doing it and we built a dam and uh we had a concrete spillway and it was so hot we had to pour concrete at night you know because it would get a flash set and when the dam was about completed we the rainy season was going to start and we were worried about erosion on the dam so I talked to the mayor of the city where we were they were called a nyan poor and I said look let's make a deal if you'll ask every family around here to bring about one square meter of sod we'll provide water you'll provide some food we'll have a big picnic and we'll sod the top of the dam to protect it from erosion and we did you know about a hundred families showed up it was cool that is awesome yeah I've got these pictures with these people out there putting grass and and the dam you know it survived the first year I never did go back but uh so that was it was a wonderful wonderful experience I loved every minute of it that is so cool you talk about having to you know gather the given information dealing with constraints you know dealing with material challenges equipment challenges and then involving the community that's a powerful experience yeah yeah it was really great yeah so I loved it wow well professor when I look at your uh accomplishments and awards you've won a lot you won a lot of awards and a lot of them tie back to excellence in teaching I just I just picked one from the bio it said that uh one of the awards was in 1998 you got the Outstanding Educator Award from the St. Lawrence section of the American Society of Civil Engineers now I would imagine an award like that comes from somebody that is passionate in what they do now I had you as a as a student so um as a student I had you as a professor so I know that you're passionate about what you do but tell us more about why you wanted to be a professor what what that's meant to you yeah thank you Gerard yeah actually that award I didn't know anything about that the dean nominated me for that the dean of our college and I was shocked I was really grateful that he did that yeah but uh it was wonderful yeah I I um I really came into teaching rather late because uh I had co-op through Georgia Tech I spent six or seven years in the navy and took me a long time to get a PhD and I really wasn't sure that I wanted to do it but once I started teaching I loved it and I tried to make it practical I tried to bring in practical examples I think that's the value of going out into practice first and then teaching you know you if you have some experience I think the students appreciate that so I love to do that I'm kind of a visual learner so I tried to I've taken a lot of pictures as I've gone along so I tried to reinforce concepts with visual ideas uh and I just loved it I love student I love having students like you somebody that you know you started you didn't know if you wanted to be in geotech but when you found that you liked it it was just thrilling to me to see you know you you take it and have all the wonderful accomplishments that you've done since then that just makes my heart full to think about students like that so you know it's a something that I love to do I have to tell you about the visual part um often I would talk about a concept I don't know compaction or permeability then I try to show some slides you know that I had some examples so I had a 830 class uh typically and one day I go to class and almost everybody's there right on time there's a lot of people there earlier than me and that's kind of suspicious you know but so I've lectured on and about the last 15 minutes of the class I'm going to show them slides so I uh I shut down everything and I said okay we're going to show some slides and I pulled the screen down and they had taped a center fold of a playboy bunny on the screen and it said hi sam I love your southern accent when I pulled down the screen to show the slides so I was so flabbergasted I could I I just had to dismiss class but they knew I was going to show some slides so they knew that I love to use visual learning so it was fun yeah that's uh I think if you if it's a profession that you love just like you love your profession and you can just feel it when you talk with people and work in it so that's great yeah that's wonderful and when you think about you think about your experiences think about the good time but what are some of the challenges that you had to overcome right right right um in the beginning teaching is um you don't get you do have to make some sacrifices you're probably not as well uh paid for it you know often you don't get much recognition at the beginning is all this pressure to do research uh and you get hit from all different sides for for research for committee work and it and it's it's funny that I don't think um you know how I wish we had mentors we I think I was department chair for a while we tried to do more of that but I think faculty need mentors as well as they do in the practice I'm sure you had mentors when you got it definitely yeah yes companies yeah and uh I think that uh that was a part you weren't sure what you were supposed to spend your energy and if you do too much in teaching and neglect your research then you know you're in in jeopardy of not getting tenure if you do too much research then you kind of become you're not as excited about classwork so it's a balance and it's something that you have to feel your way along especially in those times in the uh in the 60s you people there weren't people there to guide you along so I think I hope that's gotten better today yeah mentorship is is is so key I think that whether you're in an academic sense or if you're in the professional sense if you're in the contracts if you don't have a mentor you almost have to you know have find yourself and it's really hard you know you know you're the beginning of the forest and it's like you got to make that path it's very exact yeah yeah exactly wow and and as a professor I mean what are some of the ways you think we're instrumental and continuing to learn to stay on top of things as far as yeah what well again I think the professional societies do a great job at that ASCE I was a committee chair for the shallow foundations committee the deep foundations institute get involved with those institutes you can go to seminars you can learn things I learned so much from some of the short courses there just going to meetings and meeting with colleagues talking to other faculty and what they're doing one of the other things I did if anybody ever goes into education I got we had an accreditation review you know every six years and we had this guy that I was a department chair and he was such a nitpicker oh man he made me so mad with the things that you know the little things he found wrong with the with our program so I called up and complained and and the guy says well why don't you become a evaluator if you want to change the system become one of them so I actually did start going to accreditation visits and it was eye-opening I went to all different types schools from small ones up to I went to Stanford I went to you know and you really gain a wonderful sense of what others do in their educational programs and that was a really great help to see how other other people did approach their education a lot of good ideas came out yeah that's awesome and that's so important I mean if you you know lose your a better accreditation I mean that's that's kind of it that's right so it's very important yeah it's a very serious program it's wow when you think back on your career I mean what are you what do you think were some of the big surprises when you think about the time as an educator um I don't I'm that's hard to say I don't know I guess I'm surprised at how much today the computing computing applications have taken over how much that's used today and it's wonderful and I agree with it but I always uh in in classes and graduate courses always one of the students for instance if they do a slow stability analysis and they use a computer program I want a little hand check on you know just we call it a gut check I was a consultant for O'Brien and Geer for the geotechnical group and they'd always say okay we need a gut check on this question here so I was surprised at how much I mean we rely on it and it's great and finite elements are wonderful and but I feel like uh I was surprised I think we still need to be more maybe that sounds old-fashioned but I think it's we need to have a gut check when we do this type of word well I I agree I mean you can have all these colorful you know plots but yeah you know how to explain what the soil should be doing you can't check to see if it's right yeah even if you have you know 12 significant digits for how much settlement it's going to occur it's like can you solve it on the back of an envelope is what we used to say right that's right that's so true yeah and I think that stands people can stick good stead it's sort of good innate engineering sense you know sort of what's the scale of things I used to have my graduate students read a paper by Ralph Peck about scale you know looking at a site somebody says oh there's 320,000 kip loads well wait a minute let's you sure that's right I'm yeah just just have practical understanding of scale and quantity and what's right like you said with settlement you bring it out to all those all those significant figures and it's really not very valid scale is so key I can remember as a as a young engineer you show up at a site client says it's going to be a you know a seven acre site you come there and he said what do you think it's pretty big he said yeah it looks like a seven acre site I mean that's what you said right exactly you you know if you don't understand scale it's like yeah how do you tie it back exactly exactly now another another thing I always think it's great about your experience is that you tried to retire a few times you tell our listeners about that because I think as a geotechnical engineer and a geotechnical engineering professor your retirement is pretty spectacular when you think about where what happened but you're very sweet Jared yeah let's see 2014 I retired I had a great party I gave a lecture on the history of engineering but some of my students came back from all over the world it was fun so the chancellor called me uh the next fall and he said you know our the dean of Hendricks Chapel who is the religious leader on campus Syracuse University was founded as a Methodist Church by the Methodist Church a long time ago in the 1870s and we built this beautiful chapel right on the quad as you remember yes in the surveying course you had to estimate the height of the chapel using a triangulation but anyway he said um how would you like feel about being the interim dean of Hendricks Chapel at the chancellor you know I'm a Christian I've got a little Christian group I advise but holy moly he says you can do it you can do it only for a few months till we found a replacement well it turned out being two and a half years I served as a dean of Hendricks Chapel it was wonderful because I got to see a whole other aspect of the university community there's a lot of support out there for students you know that are having problems we have a food pantry we developed a lot of programs to help people so it was a 180 degree turn from engineering but but actually I think I think some of and we had we had let's see 10 chaplains we had a tremendous we had a catholic um I don't can't rehearse all of them but you know 10 different faith groups and here's an engineer talking to them but I try to be logical I think but we finally found a wonderful replacement and then about six months later he says calls me up again he says Sam he says we're starting an ombudsman program on campus to have a university ombudsman how would you like to be the first the interim university ombudsman only take a couple of months he tells me the same story about finding so I took that on and I served in that for about a year and a half and that was interesting too as an ombudsman you know it's an old swedish term that the king people were unhappy with the king of sweden so he appointed an ombudsman a person that you could come to with complaints anywhere there was no retribution and so I would hear it's amazing you know people would come with with complaints I couldn't do a lot about them but I could kind of head them in the right direction and try to and I had to report to him every month about what he what no names or anything you know all all what do you call it um says you know no no but what the temperature of the campus was where were people unhappy what could he do to help thing so it was quite an interesting position and but I'm glad to be back now in a good old senior design and helping with that course but that was fun yeah it was really interesting that is cool you talk about you know expanding the scope of practice that's yeah right fantastic it's just you know sometimes when you raise your hand and say yes I could do it you have to figure out how to do it thanks right you've done that I know you've done it yes sir but it is but it's it takes a little courage but it's really rewarding I think isn't it you it opens up your mind to you've done that I know in so many different areas yeah so it's it's fine it really was yeah that was great and we think about you know diversity within what it means to be a geotechnical engineer I know there was a time you taught a class about Leonardo da Vinci and I think that's just awesome actually I have a little shirt that you know gives a tribute to that yeah the divine geometry tying that back to pizza right I wish you'd been around for it um I had a good we had a Mellon Foundation project where we we tried to integrate the arts and sciences with the professional schools that seemed like there were separate entities you know engineering's over here law is here new of public communications how do we integrate those with arts and sciences how do we get you know to get to know faculty and so actually we had programs and I got to know a Renaissance art professor and I'd always been interested in the history of engineering I tried to bring it into the class and so he asked me to lecture on Roman engineering he was teaching an introductory art course or history art history and he was talking about the Romans so I did that and then we did a little bit about Leonardo da Vinci so one day we're walking across the quad and he says you know I teach a course on Michelangelo it's an art course and I what I do is I teach the kids about Michelangelo and then at spring break we go to Italy and we see his works he says but you know it's kind of boring as the art students are okay but I'd like to mix it up I said he said let's do someone Leonardo da Vinci I said okay we'll call it Leonardo da Vinci artist and engineer nice and so we made a proposal to the dean of engineering and arts and sciences and they each gave us several thousand dollars to support the kids at spring break so so here's the plan so we would teach the course together he was a wonderful teacher he was a lot better than me I had to really scramble I mean oh he he was one of these eloquent professors that speaks in paragraphs you know he talked about Leonardo's concept of the Mona Lisa and all this so I had to really scramble to keep up with him but so what we would do then and we would stay in the class it wasn't that he would teach one day and I wouldn't teach them you know I stayed with him he stayed with me he asked questions I asked questions and the students often said they loved it when we get an argument about something that they could see but then so what we would do at spring break is we would limit the class to about 25 students half engineering half arts and sciences we'd gather them all up and fly to Florence and spend a couple of days there and then we go up to Vinci where Leonardo was an illegitimate son of a notary so his name means Leonard of Vinci you know he didn't have a last name it was Leonardo of Vinci because he was born in Vinci beautiful little mountain town excuse me right outside of Florence so we'd go see where he was born and then in Florence we'd go visit his workshops a lot of his paintings are there at the the main art institute in in Florence what's that called anyway we we visit there and then we fly we take a train up to Milano because the last supper is there and that's a magnificent painting it's been damaged and they only allow 10 or let's see 20 people in as a group for only 15 minutes at a time it's all humidity and temperature control so we would go into the we visit that and then Leonardo at the end of his life the king of France Francis the first brought him to Amboise in France and had a house for him and so Leonardo died there so with the last two days we go to Paris we go to the Louvre because most of his paintings are there the Mona Lisa's there and then we go down where he would he died so we started in Vinci where he was born and ended up in Amboise where he died wonderful program the kids loved it we enjoyed it and we did it for about 10 years and it was exhausting though to take for about 10 days spring break yeah you're not a old man I mean he anticipated I mean he understood geology he says how do you have these fossils up in the mountains how did they get there you know amazing polymath you know your shirt is mathematics yeah his geometry is amazing is we we actually have a copy of his some of his notebooks at Syracuse University we had to have to handle them with gloves on you know we take students and let them see their replications of his drawings and wow they're just phenomenal wonderful wonderful experience yeah that is awesome those students are never going to forget that you know yeah right yeah yeah I think so yeah yeah that was wonderful so I guess you know our listeners are you know geotechnical engineers from you know folks that are in school and trying to figure out if they want to go on a geotechnical all the way up through practicing PEs and PhDs what advice would you give them for staying technically sharp like what are the things that geotechnical engineers should be doing consistently so they can stay sharp over the years right well I mentioned these are I know you all know about these there's they're very very good number one I tell this to my students to join ASCE join the profession you're part of it you need to support it you need to be active in it uh one time I used to teach it well the freshman uh and the seniors we'd have a part of the course was on ethics or you know proper professional conduct and uh I would always say we'd have some examples and I'd say make sure that you um join the ASC because they can help you with these problems and so about oh I don't know 10 years ago I have a student call me up and he says he says I graduated uh in civil engineering and he says I went into the rock business he was a what do you call those people that helped set up rock shows uh I don't know what's the name for him anyway but he's a grunt you know and he says I'm I'm down in New York City and we're setting up this rock concert in this warehouse and older part of New York City and some of these they're they were steel beams up there steel steel beams and someone were really corroded okay and he says I'm worried he says I went we're hanging heavy speakers from these so it's an engineering problem but he's a grunt you know so we go to his boss and he says you know I'm worried about these steel beams up here they're those joists you know welded barge or okay and uh and the guy said don't you tell me about that we put in a concert and I wouldn't lose any money you know he blows them off and he says well I need to tell the owner and he says you do you're fired so he's caught you know between no the finest or not so he calls me up I don't want to now you're involved I know it yeah I said uh I've forgotten his name he said I said contact ASCE the headquarters right there you get a hold of their legal department and they'll help you out and sure enough they they guided him through he wrote a letter they wrote a letter and presented it to his boss and to the owner to sort of protect himself yeah but I don't I'm sorry I got off onto that but anyway no it's fine the the profession I think is uh just invaluable um and go to those meetings get to know uh your fellow colleagues I love Geo Strata of the magazine there you go you know I was gonna say the we were talking about new research there's a one of the things I always think is so important one of my graduate course I spent almost a half a semester on field test interpretation of the results you know before you even do any design what have you got out there in the field what's the geology what it's like and they've got this new thing where you can do visual you can do virtual reality and look at the profile of the soil so really wonderful I would encourage everybody to I love the DFI that's a wonderful organization well as ASCE both of them provide great support for young engineers so do it have fun meet those people and talk dirt you know talk soils I agree it's been uh many years now that I've been you know working as a geotechnical professional and I guess say that some of my best memories are being a part of these organizations yeah especially the two that you mentioned yeah all right people yeah well thank you so much we're gonna take a quick break here and then we're going to close out our talk with Professor Sam Clemens when we talk about the career factor of safety stick around welcome back everyone it's time for our career factor of safety in segment in geotechnical engineering just like many disciplines of engineering it's important to incorporate a factor of safety into your design but what about incorporating a factor of safety into your career today of course we're speaking with none other than Dr. Sam Clemens and we're going to ask him just that Professor we spoke about you know all that you've accomplished in your career what advice would you give to those geotechs that are listening that are planning to transition into the academic realm they might be you know a master's student getting ready to get a PhD and then become a professor or they might be working as a professional and say you don't want to go back and teach how can they build security in their careers to give them a factor of safety when planning such a transition thank you Jerry that's a great question and i'm so glad that you're posing that because we need good teachers we need people committed and passionate about teaching so it's really important thing to do i think the first thing is you have to realize that you may be poor for the transition may not be so easy so be willing to have a little sacrifice there i would say for for young students masters phd students if at all possible get out there and get some practical experience six months a year whatever you can fit in uh to sort of underpin when you go into teaching it'll it'll serve you in so many ways for many many years for those people in the in the mid mid-level or later that want to think about going into teaching first thing i would do is volunteer at your local university or somewhere to be an adjunct professor they won't pay you very much i can guarantee you that but you'll get a feel for what it's like to teach now it's not exactly the way it'll be because if you do it full time it's completely different from just dropping in and doing it you know once a week or whatever but if you if you can find an adjunct position or if you can offer some seminars at asce or dfi try that and see if you enjoy doing it if you like it then it would take the step and you really do need you what we call your phd card your union card your phd so that uh it kind of ensures you helps you along the tenure track and all that uh and the first few years it's a struggle it may be a struggle financially but if you make some contacts with local consulting firms you've got all this wonderful experience if you're an older more mature person or if you're a young person coming out you've got some great research ideas look up with those in consulting firms and see if you can't serve them help them and use that during your time that you complete your education and start teaching so please do it we need people out there to get involved all right thank you so much professor thank you for coming on and thank you for sharing such great insights for our listeners uh we have a lot of information here and i'm sure our you know the listeners are going to want to hear more what is the best way for them to find you you're in social media or email you can share uh linked in yeah but i'm on my email is spclement spclemm at syr.edu love to hear from anybody love to hear from people all right thank you so much thank you jared i hope you enjoyed the episode today we would love to hear your feedback comments or questions please feel free to go to our website that being geotechnicalengineeringpodcast.com where you'll find a summary of the key points discussed in today's episode that being episode three as well as links to any resources websites and books mentioned during this episode until next time we wish you the very best in all your geotechnical engineering endeavors peace


Every person is so unique in this world and if you believe that there's something that needs to be addressed You should just go for it And it doesn't really matter that you know You don't need to check all of these like very specific boxes that the internet may tell you you need to check in order to succeed If you believe that something is valuable I think honestly anyone should just like go for what they think is important and just I think the only thing that founders Really need in my opinion is enough optimism about what they're doing to be able to persist because things take Way longer than you think they will pretty much across the board I experienced this time that protocol apps and I'm experiencing it now with with my new company But it's so rewarding and so worth it and as long as you don't give up something amazing will come from it even if it's just like learnings or just like an incredible opportunity to build a team of people that you really enjoy working with but It'll be worth it. So I would say people should just go for it All right and with that Very inspiring advice from Pooja. We are gonna get right into today. Great Welcome to lab day in June everyone. Thank you so much for joining today and For those who are new again This is a monthly meetup of PLN Network members and friends of PL to learn about what's going on around the network get updates and Learn about, you know important problems that people are working on across different teams We meet on the third Wednesday of every month for 30 minutes at 4 p.m. UTC and we also have IRL dinners in cities all across the globe that are open to all members For those who are here today This is a great place to again get updates celebrate wins and learn about tools that could help your team and for those who are presenting It's a really great way to get in front of very qualified group of web 3 and web 2 companies get feedback and learnings from your presentation and Like I mentioned these are all of the cities we have IRL dinners if you're interested reach out to the captains in PL Network IO slash directory and we can drop this list of cities into the chat as well Quick recap before we get into it The protocol labs network is a community of teams that drive breakthroughs and computing to push humanity forward members contribute time or equity towards important projects in computing and as a result are able to Get help and resources on how to grow their company. There are a ton of teams in the network This is just a small snapshot of them And if you'd like to learn more look you can scan the QR code right here and check out the PLM portal So something a little different this month that we're going to try Up next is a segment. We're calling around the network where we want to feature wins and announcements From different teams. Please let us know your feedback on this at the end of the call we always love to hear thoughts and Incorporate them into next iterations for a lag day And so first up want to give a huge congratulations to artisan They recently closed a 2.2 million round to help creators in the art sciences technology Frontier of design fund new projects And so here to tell us a little bit more is Renee Renee, are you there? If not, I guess I can steal his thunder. They recently yesterday just announced a Funding match program with the network goods team at protocol labs and what that means is For their next season any teams that are focused on public goods funding can also be eligible from funding from the Procollabs as well as the both that they receive from season 3 season 3 is closing on July 1st so if you have a project in public goods in Science technology that you'd like to fund learn more about it here and To see what's been submitted and support a project you can vote on the link here We'll be dropping these links into the chat as well. So thank you so much Moving on to next is Filecoin green They are working with over 400 Filecoin minor IDs to validate energy use and become certifiably green storage providers Some of the largest ones in the network like decent sxx and picnic have already completed this validation process They've been awarded respectively gold bronze and silver tier sustainability claims It's really great to see the network Continuing to scale responsibly and staying green. So great job to these storage providers as well as the Filecoin green team for providing this platform That we can use to continue to monitor our progress If you'd like to check it out, you can follow the link that we'll drop into the chat here and Look at which storage providers are How storage providers are doing on their sustainability claims Another Congratulations goes out to dummy They recently completed a 3.4 million dollar seed round to build out their platform That allows you to use AI and generate video shorts And so if you think you spend a lot more time Editing video shorts than you would like you can use their promo code pln for the win plnftw To skip the waitlist, which is currently at 20 000 and get onboarded to check out this new tool Next up zone We're diving into a huge success in the metaverse now Zone is a music tech startup that has partnered with Universal music and an indie pop band called easy life to turn easy life's latest album into an immersive fan experience Where you can go and complete daily challenges collect different memorabilia from the and and Really explore a different way to be a fan and learn more about These artists and so to learn exactly how they did it through a custom music accelerator program And what is next for the zone team? You can check out this link that will drop into the chat here And finally, I'm sure if you've been following crypto news There's been a lot of discussion around how to scale on ethereum with layer 2s That has also been a very big point of discussion for the filecoin network and here is marco to tell us a little bit more about the upcoming IPC deployment to mainnet. They recently just completed the deployment to space net test net and are gearing up soon So marco over to you. Yeah, thanks Deniz. So We have been developing interplanetary consensus. Well building consensus lab team and developing interplanetary consensus throughout the last year And this culminated late last year where we launched the space net. So what is space net? Space this is now our test that that basically since november runs what Will look like as an IPC subnet. So this is a efficient low latency consensus, which looks like tendermin, but it's more efficient because it has multiple leaders And basically the key feature of IPC and filecoin mainnet will be that you will be able to permissionlessly spawn Subnets on demand. So unlike for example in avalanche ecosystem where you need to you know set up with Basically the permission way Different summits. This will be totally on demand and on fly spawning of summits, which will be powered by Efficient consensus, which is a lot of tendermin, but we that we develop based on lotus code base so this is a consensus protocols called mir and renter and then So he started in november 2022 when we launched space net and then we added this ability to spawn Subnets on space net in april 2023 We will be dependent on fem because like we want this permissionless without any upgrades to the filecoin mainnet. So basically We just now completed with the external depth shop Building of solidity actors, which will govern. So we have two main solidity actors on the on the filecoin mainnet Which govern the spawning of summits and we completed this and we will have the functional Demo or in july on mainnet. So there is a disclaimer. So this is not still for locking significant significant value But we are getting there and this will be the mark the first milestone where we will be able to launch efficient submit and help scale Filecoin basically starting from july If you want to learn more go to consensus lab dot world and ipc dot space Which is the landing page for ipc project and also go to filecoin slack ipc dev ipc health and ipc docs channels Subscribe to them and get in touch. There is also documentation So you can already try this on space net in a permissionless way. You don't have to ask us to set up anything Thanks Awesome. Thank you marco. Yeah I'm deploying anything onto mainnet is definitely nerve-wracking. So Really excited to see how you guys move forward on this. Um Cool, uh, it looks like renee. You uh, we're able to join us. Let me get back to your slide here Do you have any apologies for that? I had to log into a different zoom account all good Yeah, so we partnered with Funding the commons which is the amazing event that protocol lab kicked off a couple years ago and now is being run by David and his team and we partnered with them to launch a match fund for public goods So if anyone on the call is working on a project that needs You know some additional funding not a huge amount, uh, $20,000 Please submit. I'm going to throw a link into the chat log Um, or if you know any creators that are working on public goods and need that sort of like five to $20,000 Uh amount of money to push their project forward. Please encourage them to submit as well. Um, and again, I'll throw that into the chat log Awesome. Thanks renee and it's great to see you. Absolutely. Yeah expanding beyond just the arts into technology and public goods as well Super exciting. Yeah, the big big push for us So artisan is not just for artists even though that's what's in the title of our company name We really do want to support coders and scientists and people creating anything in the very broad category of human creativity Awesome All right, that wraps up our around the network section moving on now to lightning talks and kicking it off with Hannah telling us about lassie from bedrock Lassie is a new ipfs retrieval client and because it's so good at finding and fetching your data It's been lovingly named after the famous collie So hannah's here now to tell us more about how holly how lassie does this and what this means for the retrieval market space So hannah over to you. Cool. Um, yeah, so so, um Lassie is indeed a new ipfs retrieval client I'm gonna talk a little bit about what it is why we built it and where we're going with it. Um, so, uh Let's make sure this is there we go.  It's kind of sometimes called the swiss army knife tool Lassie it was built essentially like a scalpel. We started with Essentially, we wanted to build a tool that could get your data on ipfs and filecoin networks without you having to think about it We found that a lot of the tools out there. Um, they work, uh, but you have to understand them and it's kind of a process and You know, like, uh, you have to know a fair amount about like the underlying technology to really make them work officially So with lassie, we wanted it to be a sort of set and forget if you want your data, just tell lassie to fetch um And so what is that what what do we have to do to get there? Um one of the the First things we wanted to take away in using lassie is worrying about what data transfer protocol you're using As ipfs networks have grown. Um, there's been a proliferation of transfer protocols I don't even know who in this call knows all of them But you you're forgiven for not knowing them because for most people they don't care about protocols, right? They just want their data back and protocols only Matter in so much as the data comes back fast So lassie sort of approaches, uh, we're we're going to know how to talk to all the protocols We already support, uh, bitswap. We support, uh, which is the primary ipfs transfer protocol. We support Hold on. I don't want trouble. Oh, there we go. All of it. Uh, we support, uh, grass sync And we support hdb actually this this presentation I gave once before and at that time hdb was in development, but it is now shipped We actually speak of hdb gateway protocol to a number of back end providers, including Folks like the dot storage sites and fst dot storage and web 3 dot storage and soon to storage providers as well um We maybe in the future will you know implement some of the other Transfer protocols that are being developed around the network. Um bow in the ira space for the ira implementation vision also has a Protocol called carpool car sync. These are all super cool technologies And i'm sure any of you who are not in the weeds of it Don't care one bit because all you want to do is get your data and we want to get it for you So you don't have to think about it. Um So, uh, the other part about this is that most people when they want their data They don't want to have to worry about where to find it Where to find your data is not something that like most people when they're used to using the web Um, I have to think too much about because the tools are really good In lassi we want to find your data for you and this should be it shouldn't matter. Um whether It's on ipfs or filecoin. This has been an ongoing thing, right? So we can find content in the ipfs dhg um And we can find uh content on the filecoin network. We even have some other weird methods like bitswap Like finding things to bitswap peers. Um, uh, there may be other things we do We're going to you don't have to tell us where to get your data. We're going to find it. Um, and uh If we do most of this through, uh, the network indexer, um, we work with their team to really build that out And we can we can keep adding more ways to find data as time goes on So, yeah I'm having a little bit of trouble advancing the slides. Let's see if we can get it to go one more time new Okay Here and not uh, there we go Wait, all right. There we go. Yes. So, uh, how do you use lassi? Um from the start we've designed it with three four use cases The first is to use it. Um from the command line you can If you open your terminal you install lassi you can You can download it already compiled and ready to go. We don't want you to have to install go or any other dev tools Um, uh, and it's designed, uh, and you can essentially run fetch. Um, and it's designed Like other unix commands to be type or composable. I'll show you how that works at the moment The second way to use lassi is a lightweight htdp gateway to ipfs filecoin Um, basically we have a little server that exposes an htdp gateway interface to serve our files. Um lassi Well, yeah, it's and that fits the Latest version of the htdp trustless gateway spec that has been in development And we've actually drove a number of uh, sort of improvements and new features through the process of developing lassi Um, finally, um, we've designed lassi to work as a code library. Um, that you can put into your code application We want developers to be able to use lassi to add retrieval to ipfs and filecoin to their To the projects and not have this Um be like a big endeavor. Um, we're already seeing this start to start to emerge. We see this as a long-term superpower We would love to partner with your team. Um, if you want to integrate lassi into your code base so um There's a few things that lassi won't do and this is specifically because we want to make keep the purpose really focused and keep it lightweight um Our goal is to retrieve data. There's features that are left out We do not actually hold a permanent data store on your machine Um, we fetch things and give them back to you as car files Um, and this is important because uh, it just limits a lot of complexity. Um, it enables us to focus just on retrieval Um, and that also means uh, because we are not holding data. We are not providing records back to the dhg again More of retrieval client not a server. Um, uh, yeah, so lassi is not a server implementation We think design constraints are good. Um, and we think this is useful Interesting fun fact. There is an in development companion to lassi that is just server To stay tuned. Um We think it's important to stay focused and this is this enables us to do cool stuff Okay, we're going to watch lassi do stuff. Here we are we're fetching stuff We're putting in our command line. We're fetching we put in a Content and we're going to extract it and play it and because you can pipe it directly from a car to the go car tool and then to ff play ffm egg We're actually downloading and playing a video automatically for the command line. All right, sorry That was very fast. I did not mean to skip right into that slide so quickly But I guess my presentation skipping around so much so you can see what we did there is we actually Put in a lassi fetch we piped the output to extract it from the go with the go car tool And then we piped the output again into the ffm peg player and it opens up a video There are a lot of other cool things you can do lassi's production ready We are already using it to download almost all the content on the saturn network. Um And uh, we're getting we're downloading 140 million states per week With it. So I think it's actually ready to be used in your programs. We think we're going to hit 1.0 soon There's a lot of other cool.  I'm not going to go through all of these because They are Because you can't get to them anyway from the presentation But if you look at the presentation afterwards, you can see this where we are going We're already seeing lassi start to show up in places lassi is now integrated into station the The deployment that allows people to run file point retrieval checks directly from their own machines that are in file point doing that And we are deploying it into a number of other things right now. It is a tool that is designed to go everywhere. Yes I love it. Um, we'd love to integrate lassi into spice xyc. This is what I love. Okay, cool You can you can go to all these links or hit me up on file point slack And I would love to chat with you if you want to integrate it in your program. Cool. Sorry for the long presentation thank you so much hannah and If anyone has more questions feel free to drop them into the chat for her We will be moving on to Jake from third web who's here to talk to us about the challenges of building a web 3 How third web plans to Solve that and also what he would like to see builders, you know, be able to focus on once they don't have to worry so much about infrastructure So jake Over to you Hey everyone, i'm jake cto co-founder of third web um Since we have like a few minutes here really just kind of want to dive into, you know, the challenges that Comes in building the web 3 space I'm sure we have all heard the phrase of hey, we're still early How early is early, you know When will we get past that right? Before I understood that I think It's important for us to take a look at that from a builder's perspective like How can we as a builder help users realize the value? in order to then, you know, onboard more users to believe in the technology and See why it's important for them and why it matters for them, right? I do believe that we are here because we believe and excited about the tech and the value that web provides The decentralization trustless system permissionless system For different use cases and I think it's our job as a builder in space to help people see that right But here comes a problem as a builder myself, you know, when I try to be Application in the web 3 world any decentralized app Very quickly, I'll run the roadblocks, right? Here are the problems It's really hard for builders to build in the web 3 space So if it is hard to build real use cases, how can we onboard more people to realize and see the value of what web 3 could do? And let's unpack that a little bit, you know As you remember when I first came into, you know, building in the web 3 space Um, one of the challenges I run into was, you know, there was a lot of information being thrown at me Um, I came in I was like, oh, I'm excited to build a decentralized internet app. I was trying to build a, you know A card system like using nft and whatnot, but then very quickly, you know, I had to learn solidity I had to learn what an rpc was what an ab is And then private keys and so like there are a lot of different tools and a lot of different term technology that's been creating space so that, you know Every builders that come into the web 3 space when they're trying to build they have to learn all of it from zero Right all the knowledge I had in the web 2 rule would turn out a window didn't matter at all I had to relearn everything in the web 3 way and figuring out like, you know, the The nuances and the complexity of each of the tools And that also kind of led to a second problem was tools fragmentation I'm pretty sure, you know, we all experience this When you're building an application, you generally probably need to sign up for like 5 10 15 different services Because they all do one specific thing. Oh, you're trying to talk to a blockchain. Cool. You need an rpc provider to help you with that And then you're slowly going down the rabbit hole. I figure out. Oh, what about this blockchain? What about that blockchain? And so over time, you know, you just have to like figure it out and navigating through all of those names And then next thing you have your nft store on the ipfs network or a filecoin event Well, you need a way to start good data You need a way to make sure that you know the nft that you know, you uploaded being stored in a permanent storage and not temporary, right Who wants to like wake up next day and nft data is gone, right? Like and that's terrible And so there are a lot of like just a very basic things in the web 2 world They're not really they're not really basing the web 3 world just because of like the technology and kind of the way that we as industry really thought Kind of tell the story, I guess and really kind of focusing on the wrong thing focus too much on technology but not really on the product and As a builder that kind of knew the space then it would be hard for them to really know, you know What's the best way to do things? And we're you're gluing all different tools together when one of them start to break Well, good luck. You know, you better hope that they have a good support channel that can help you with it because You know different providers like five different services have five different sla agreements They have five different supports and different pricing plan and you have to figure out all of that So not only you have to figure out what to build you have to figure out how to make it happen And you have to figure out making sure you make the right decision When you're picking a tools and then you have to figure out how to integrate and pull all of them together All by yourself and maybe through youtube or some internet search But it's really hard for you as a developer or a builder to kind of know all of that upfront And all of that led to a long build cycle too, right? A regular product cycle is usually go from like it usually goes from development to deployment to post deployment and all along the way, you know You have to learn specific tools. You have to learn how to set it up. You have to learn like, you know five to ten different new ones like decision that you have to make to get past each of the stages And so this is going back. It's like, hey, when you're building a product Why should you spend so much time worrying about the tooling worrying about like, you know, making sure you do things correctly Where's where are the guardrails, right? Like who should be the one to kind of help you set things up in the web tool world is very straightforward. If you want to build a website You can just do it in two seconds and you you know, correct app. You deploy it on your cell But in a web 3 world, there's nothing equivalent. There's nothing similar And if you look at kind of web 2, you know A lot of tools help you take care of development deployment and the management of it, right even analytics like post deployment In a web 3 world, there's nothing similar. There's nothing equivalent And I would say the last tone one of the most frustrating one for me personally was keeping up with the industry You know, like web 3 is a very fast-paced industry We all heard, you know, people would kind of throw around like, you know One one month in the web 3 space is equivalent like one year in the real world, right? At this point, I don't even know like how many years I've been into this but Like the sense of time is different. I wanted to mention that that means that like a lot of information That you kind of picked up from the internet, they will get outdated really quickly You know the best way to do a thing or the best standard to follow today could be the best today But tomorrow could be completely different. Why? Because the tech is still new Everyone's still figuring out everyone's still navigating through all of it And so we are all learning at the same time and it makes it harder for you to Have to build and then also have to keep up with the industry You know, everyone has 24 hours in a day. How much time are you going to spend on each of them? It's really important for us to kind of allocate the time Effective efficiently to focus on the thing that we want to build and you know standard change best practices still being established You know As a builder in space, you kind of have to keep up with that and all of those, you know Makes it really hard for developers or builders to come into the web 3 space and build any decentralized internet products When you tell people you're building in web 3 space and what it really means that you're figuring out What is the web 3 space? You're figuring out what's the best practices the tools the tech Regulations and all of that on top of that you're building a real product of what people want Right, you're taking a two full time job at the same time And it's a very different story when you're building the web 2 space where you know a lot of the infrastructure or basic means being Those are being taken care of and what it means is you as a builder is only focusing the product, right? And that I would say like kind of some of the challenges that I feel I felt in a web 3 space I believe we can do better obviously. That's why I'm here And you know for us at third web we take a look at that and we said that that obviously is a problem, right? and we built third web because We believe that it should be easier obviously and you know the way that we have set it up is you know Third web is the complete web 3 development framework Everything you need to be a web 3 app a decentralized internet product In a box we have SDK to help you build a multiple different platform and languages So if you want to be a web 3 game, we have a unity SDK that help you communicate with blockchain communicate to the decentralized storage network help you take care of you know Like wallet issues and all of those things We are comprehensive a complete web 2 development framework If you need a smart contract, we have prebuilt smart contract for you to use and we also have you know Different like you know UX enhancement features like you know gasless or you know fiat on fiat the crypto on rem and all of that And one of the the reason why we are excited about web 3 is obviously kind of permissionless Trustlessness nature of it and we want to be in the same way So we have made it so that our product our SDK permissionless and they are completely owned by you And there is no vendor locked in and so you know we at third web our SDK has the best default options or settings We also made it configurable and customizable so that you know every developer can bring in their own implementation and you know really just like Soft than these the arts like you know, you you don't have to just like use whatever we decide And we don't want to lock you in because that's not very web 3 and we want to make sure that we keep that open for developer as well Um, and you know ultimately what we care about is want to shorten the time to production for developers while allowing the composability that is the ethos of web 3 And what's next all the challenges and what we provide at third web I believe that you know, we have spent the last 18 months at third web laying down laying down the foundation of The almost like a building block or for web 3 so that builders don't have to and obviously, you know That is the statement that anyone could make You know, we don't want to just be another person to make that statement. And so we challenge ourselves You know, we for us at third web We talk about like, hey, we made it easier to build a web 3 game. What does that mean? You know, we spend three weeks one person to We managed to build a web 3 game called the web 3 warriors Using our gaming kit and you can check it out web 3 warriors dot third web dot com It's a full on game on a blockchain We deploy it on a base test net and Really showcase the demonstrate, you know, what a web 3 game could be and build using our tools, right? You would hear like games studio would spend years and months Trying to figure out how to build a pregame, but we managed to kind of do that in, you know, a shorter amount of time with one engineer Commerce kit when we think about like, hey, how can we make web 3 useful? Right commas is kind of one area where you can use it You can use an appease you can use digital identity for commerce And so we partner with Shopify to build commerce kit and really it's just to show like how you can build You know, digital commerce experience leveraging web 3 technology and obviously mean thing everyone does it this day, so What's next? I think in the last decade we have seen that, you know, how compute aws gcp azure outflare They have unlocked a way for builder to build without having to worry about servers, right? And I believe that nobody none of us here really are excited or passionate about racking servers And waking up midnight like dealing like this failure and all of that, right? And cloud has made it so that we as a builder in the space Really just like let our creativity run wild and let us build products that we wanted to build The combination of better cloud infrastructure The tooling it frees builders up from dealing with all the burden infrastructure the hardware security recovery disaster recovery all of that And all of that led to, you know, the born of web 2 application that we've seen, right? Like social media snap instagram Auto application of a familiar with twitter and all of that and similarly, you know We at the world want to do the same for web 3 We want to empower developers to build the centralized internet product Without having to worry about the infrastructure We want to let you figure out what to build And then we will take care of the how And so anything that you want to build we can help and what that means is, you know, you as a builder We want to free you up and let you be creative and innovate to build real use cases What is web 3 social like what does what we're broadcasting like what do brand means what do brands get out of it games commerce and more All right, the true innovations happen when builders is free from all of this burden of like the infrastructure problem and really focusing now on like what the user want and what application is useful for everyone And that I believe will unlock, you know, we'll bring in more users in space and really really just like legitimize the industry as a whole but also just like help people realize, you know What a decentralized world could be And that I'll leave you with that and if you're building web 3 Love to chat if you're a builder, you know, we'd love to help You can email us at partners at the red dot com or you can reach out to me Jake at the red dot com as well. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jake And really appreciate everyone for staying on extra You should be getting a poll on your screen About giving us some feedback. So please take a moment to fill that out And if you're going to be at each cc, we will hear the list of pl and events so far Please learn more and register at events dot pl network dot i o if your event is missing You can also add it to the google sheet that was dropped into the chat And that way we can get it added to the website Thanks again everyone and Yeah, also if you have any additional feedback We have a discussion hub in github that we would love to get your more detailed thoughts on This way we can continue to improve this meeting and make it something that is Useful and exciting and informative for everyone who is here. So thank you again and have a great rest of your day