This children's book from 1955 it's the story of a pair of twins Joey and Joan living on a desert ranch with their young mother who is a widow They are income dependent at least Dependent on having enough income to keep living on the ranch on a Scientist from the city who is a paleontologist looking for dinosaur bones in the rocky canyons on their property and as You can tell from the title of the book and from the pictures here Joey and Joan Discover a stegosaurus Out in the canyons who can speak English he is surprisingly wise and eloquent for someone whose Dialogue consists mostly of reminding you how stupid he is I Mentioned this when I got it in the mail. It was something that I saw mentioned on Facebook and I was Thunderstruck because I had read this book when I was a child and I had a vivid though not detailed memory of it and I had no memory of the title or who wrote it or anything and As soon as I saw this book mentioned Online I was like that's it. That's the book. So I found a copy. I wish I had the dust jacket Of course But from page one I was impressed with how good the writing is This again, this is a children's book. This is not a young adult book This is for children small children Authors who write books for this audience they have a tendency to write down to the kids Lampman doesn't The writing style is actually quite good and quite mature. I thought that she has a respect for her audience So that's probably why One of the reasons why I enjoyed the book when I was a child The story is very charming the stegosaurus itself is very charming The science is surprisingly good. There's a lot of talk of paleontology and about fossils not all the science is Up to date. There's a point at which the stegosaurus reminds the kids that Only birds have feathers dinosaurs don't have feathers There's also a moment here in chapter one you can see it in the picture here where The stegosaurus saves the kids lives by stepping on a Rattlesnake and it's made very clear that the rattlesnake is killed. I think a book written today The author would avoid killing the rattlesnake Well, I was I found reading this to be a great joy. It was great fun The art is quite good. I being a cartoonist myself. I really love this sharp clean style It's very expressive has a lot of motion to it But I learned two things namely why I had such a Strong vivid memory of it and also why my memory Lack such detail the the number one thing that I remembered from this book The only thing I remembered from it actually it happened in the first chapter When the kids first met the stegosaurus it describes him as being Physically very colorful with broad stripes of oranges and tans So that when he stood against the canyon wall people actually couldn't see him That impressed me and that was the one thing that Stayed with me all these decades the one big problem with the book and The reason why I didn't remember the rest of it At about the halfway point the author introduces a subplot where two men in a Small propeller airplane make an emergency landing on the ranch because they're out of fuel One of them has a briefcase That he never lets out of his sight and never lets go of and of course they turn out to be bank robbers and then the kids have to Catch the bank robbers and they need the stegosaurus has helped so it started out being a really interesting and really unusual story That I haven't the likes of which I really hadn't seen before or since and then it turned into an episode of Lassie Which I really don't care about Still it was a very enjoyable read. I would definitely recommend That if you have children who enjoy dinosaurs and what children don't This is a book that I recommend that you get and and read to your children It's great fun the stegosaurus himself as I said is very charming and very memorable so many times Stories that involve children and an animal the animal will die or something That doesn't happen in this book. You can rest assured There's no death other than the rattlesnake, but yeah, this is a double thumbs up for a good science fiction children's book with a lot of good science and it's also an antique and You can discuss with your children why Joey and Joan don't just use their cell phones But there you go Shy stegosaurus of cricket Creek You can support 30 second sci-fi and my other projects by becoming a patron There is a link in the description below and visit the 30 second sci-fi tumbler That's my headquarters in addition to my videos. I publish links and updates there every day


This is the first page of the form 1040. We are focused down online number 12, where we have the standard deduction or itemized deductions. You can see the standard deduction amounts on the left-hand side based on filing status. This is the Schedule A, where the itemized deductions will be reported if you will be itemizing. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, actually, we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't wanna be seen with us.  Like our, trust me, I'm an accountant product line. Yeah, it's paramount that you let people know that you're an accountant because apparently we're among the only ones equipped with the number crunching skills to answer society's current deep complex and nuanced questions. If you would like a commercial-free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com. The categories on the left-hand side, this is not the full page, and this is a bigger glimpse of some of those standard deductions which are generally based on filing status. Single, 13,850, married filing joint, double that, 27,700, head of household, 20,800, and then if over age limit and blind, you also have these increases in the standard deduction per the filing status. Given that, we're now focused on medical and dental expenses.


Welcome to the Global Symposium for Regulators, GSR23, which is happening in Shamolshake in Egypt, where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio now. I'm Mr Mario Manovich, who is the Director of the Radio Communication Bureau for ITU. Mario, it's great to have you in the studio. My pleasure. Now, in fact, last time we were here together was at the World Radio Communication Conference, actually, which is happening again this year. We'll come back to that in a little moment. But I wanted to ask you, you're here. Obviously, you're taking the time to be here at GSR as well and your radio communications as opposed to development. But there seems to be quite a lot of crossover. A lot of the conversations here are happening about spectrum. I wanted to find out what your impressions were of this particular event and why it's important for you to be here. And also, we could talk about the upcoming events as well. Well, the GSR continues to gather all the regulators around the world. So it is of utmost importance that we be here as regulators of the ultimate decision makers at the World Radio Communication Conference. But it's not only about the decisions in the conference itself. It's also about the way in which you regulate, in which you allocate spectrum in your countries, in which you manage that spectrum, in which you make it the best way possible for the benefit of the people and the citizens of the given country and around the world. So it's been very helpful to discuss with them these days. There has been a specific session on spectrum for the future, as you know. And it was an interesting discussion because obviously all the segments of the industry are pushing for their own needs for spectrum. But also, there was a good discussion about the regulators' priorities and what they should be focusing on in the future and not to forget the new topic about space sustainability that also has to do with spectrum and orbital resources. And this is a new topic that has added to the overall discussion, to the global discussion on this. Now, I know there's lots of preparatory meetings happening for WRC, but do you think this will kind of focus as well some of the conversations there? Well, at least it sensitizes the regulators on the issues that are at hand. Normally, the ones that attend the preparatory meetings for WRC are the technical people and more, let's say, focused on spectrum-related matters. But the regulators are the ones that are taking the political approaches. So it's important that they also be somehow sensitized on the importance of the decisions they are about to take. And there's also industry here as well. And a number of interesting conversations that are happening here as well. Absolutely. The industry is key in ITU, as you know, and we have them as members, differently from other UN organizations. And in particular, in the ITU, I mean, in the R sector, we need them. Most of the standards that we develop, most of the studies that we carry out in order to see spectrum compatibility and possibilities of sharing and all that are carried out with the help of the industry. And then they have to also own the results of the conference for them to be compliant and for them to be supportive. So they are a key player in our work, for sure. Now, I couldn't have you in the studio without allowing you to give a quick plug for the World Radio Communication Conference coming up. Perhaps you could tell our viewers or our listeners, depending if they're watching this as a video or listening to it as a podcast, what they could expect. Well, if they've been or they've learned about the WRC-19 here in Shamsheikh that you evoked at the beginning, WRC-23 is promising to be even larger with more participants than in 2019. We will have also great hosts this time, the United Arab Emirates and they are legendary for their capacity to host big meetings of the ITU and also to provide great hospitality for the participants. But regarding the content, it is as challenging or even more challenging than the one that we had in 2019. There are many controversial issues that are still not agreed upon. I think the COVID period wasn't very helpful in that regard because we had at least two years where discussions were limited to the online discussions.  So, all the corridor talk and all the social interaction that leads to the compromising and to the agreement of solutions couldn't be made during those two years. So, we are short of time in order to make those happen. But this last year that we came back to normal meetings and people that are seeing each other again have proven to be very helpful and things have advanced. There is yet a lot to do for the conference. I trust that this month in the lead-up to the conference will continue to show progress in these topics but I'm sure that the conference itself will be a very hot one. Now, you're in your second term as radio communication director here. I just wanted to find out how has the year been so far for you? Well, you know, once you are re-elected, on one side you feel reconfortered by the trust of the membership and by the, let's say, recognition that what you've done in the first period was well done. But then in the R sector, in particular, you are put immediately on the run because the conference is coming. So, it's the next conference after the PP is the WRC. So, I didn't have much time to enjoy the results of the PP and I had to put my hands at work immediately for the conference. But I think that there were important improvements in the way the R sector works. In particular, one of my pillars for the first mandate and continues to be this time is to have more and more developing countries join the ITUR in their work and benefit from the work of the ITUR. So, in the past, as you know, there were very few of them and mostly developed countries that were part of the R sector activities. Now, there are more and more developing countries so the conversation has become global. It's for the benefit of all. And at the end of the day, what we are here to do in ITU is to connect everybody. So, that helps that objective. Absolutely. Well, Mario Menovic, thank you so much for joining us in the studio today and look forward to catching up with you again very soon. Absolutely, my pleasure. Thank you. Excellent. And do remember that we have plenty of interviews for GSR23 and others on our YouTube channel as well as our podcast channels as well. So, do check in on those. And if you've got needs for more information, go to www.itu.int. Thank you very much.


Hey babe, whatcha doing? I am uh, stringing up my fishing poles. Just getting ready for the season? You gotta have that right line. Your knot's tied right, you know what I'm saying? You excited to go catch some Mondos this season? Oh yeah, you know I'm always ready to catch a Mondo. This is gonna be my year to catch a Mondo, I believe. Big Mondo. So, what would you think if I got an eight pounder? Or um, a nine pounder? Maybe a ten pounder? Double digit? Oh yeah, that's a true Mondo babe. I'm thinking this is my year.  This year. Or why is this the year? Well, it's because I got a baby growing in me. We're gonna be parents. Dog first. You better put on. Well babe, that's awesome. I mean... No, I just found out like I went to the bathroom in the house and now I'm telling you and it's just all happening so fast. Do you know what it's due? I guess what would that be, nine months, uh, mid-September? Oh no. That's only the beginning of Unix season. Prime Fishing 2. I will have a hunting and fishing buddy later on. A couple years from then that's gonna be pretty cool, man. No, I'm so excited. What if I have a little girl? She could be like a little mini-me, yeah. Or a little boy. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Oh my gosh, babe.  Oh my gosh, this is gonna be crazy. I'm so excited. He decided to tell me my brand new bass boat. I can't think of a better spot. Oh my gosh. It's my sad little small cup of coffee. That's right because you can't be drinking... Much caffeine.  So I'm just drinking it all the time. It's okay, I savor my cup of coffee in the middle of the day when I feel really tired. Well, tell everyone how far along. All right, so we are officially eight weeks now. Yup, eight weeks. Due date is in September. That is right, you guys heard right. Yeah. Beginning of hunting season. Yeah. Sorry. So obviously I wasn't disappointed. The skit is designed to be funny, but there's also some realism there because you do go through those things in your mind, pop up, you're like, what time are you here though? What's going on that time of year? What is happening? Because I kind of, I pretty much missed this hunting season with having Willis and still was able to go do hunts and stuff, but I know that September is going to be pretty much off limits for me. Pretty much. I can still go on on our two in October though, right? Yeah, October is coming. Yeah, see, you heard it.  Okay. All right. Well, this is all new for me, y'all. Which is the best part because you guys will be coming along. That is right.  You're pretty much just going to see funny stuff and not much. But I'm really excited now that we've like told you guys because I've been wanting to talk about it in my vlog so much because I've been just not feeling the best. Things have been going crazy. We literally, we're moving right now. We are literally like probably weeks away from selling our home and we don't have a house. We're sitting at my parents' house right now. We're probably going to be moving in with my parents and we're pregnant. Although all this stuff is going on. We're super pumped and excited. So the skit was designed to be funny but we have been trying for a while but actually before I got the brain tumor and nothing was happening and then I got the brain tumor and obviously there was nothing going on then. After taking care of all of that, we started, we started trying again. And finally we have consumed a little fishing rig in the belly. And I'm sure we're going to have to do one of these gender reveal videos. I'm sure we will. We're going to have to come up with something really cool for that, fishing or hunting wise or something. I think we should know soon. Like how soon? Maybe in a couple weeks. Really? I assume so. Like how do you know? How do you find out that soon? I mean right now just to give everyone a little, the last time I saw it, it was like that big. You feel it? A little baby fishing rig like that big. It was like a little minnow. And now it's like a raspberry, about half an inch. A raspberry. See how our comparisons have a minnow? She's a fruit. That's, that's our channels. So what do they do?  Yeah, so I don't see my next appointment isn't until a couple of weeks from now. And I think that will be the time where they'll be like, Hey, you want to do a DNA test? And I know you can do a gender questioning. Or just seem so early. I know it does. I don't know if they were new to this. Wow. But we do know for sure there's only one in there. And the heartbeat looks good and everything. We're just praying and we hope you are too, that it's just a happy, healthy baby. Don't care on the gender right now. Although, I'd like that little boy fishing rig. Just go throw that out there. Throw that out there. I'd love to have a little girl. I'm just throwing that one out there. But we're excited just to have a baby. And we've been trying for a while. And with Winston being out on the picture, not having a dog, you know, we're just, everything's happening fast now. It's just rocking and rolling. 2018 is awesome. Plus, we're both doing our channels. So there's just going to be constant content guys. So I hope you subscribe. I hope you come along for the adventure of 2018. Yes. Of this whole process. Please understand that once you get like huge, I guess, what do you get huge? I don't know. I don't know. Say. Once you get bigger, videos may change. There may be some mood swings or something like that. We'll have to deal with it. We'll try to create as much as possible without interfering with the marriage and all that. All that stuff. This is something that we've been looking forward to for a really long time. I know a lot of you have been out there saying the same thing, you know, when are you guys going to have a baby? Gosh, it's like every other comment. Yeah, so this is the big news and we're glad to drop it on you here today. I really haven't been feeling like healthy food lately. Yeah, what's your taste buds been like lately? Because you've been, I am, I am along for these emotional and mental, physical changes here. Maybe there's a lot of young fishing freaks out there that are curious about this whole experience. Maybe. I feel like my entire taste palette has changed now. Like I'm going back, like, okay, my normal stuffy food routine. Yeah. I don't feel like eating any of that. Greens sound terrible to me. Avocados, I don't want anything to do with them. Wow. So you just feel like crushing carbs and meats? Like all I want is Mexican food. And that's so not like me. I can get down. Like I can never create Mexican food. I can, yeah, I can tell you the whole time we've been together, I don't think we've ever been to a Mexican food restaurant. And 2018 probably going to be enjoying some good Tex-Mex. And breakfast burritos. That's like a dream. Bring it on, baby. Breakfast burritos, breakfast tacos and breakfast burritos are my favorite on the water breakfast food. Throw it in there with a hot cup of coffee. Make it very rich.  You guys got to see one of the cutest things the whole entire world and stuff got me. It is just a bundle of cuteness. Look at this right here. Oh my gosh, when it came in the mail. Look at this right here. Died of cuteness. Look at that. Baby fishin' freak. That is just, this kind of like, this hits me right here. You know, just to see like the size. It's as big as your thigh. Oh man. This is what's happening right now. Little baby fishin' freak. This also made me think if you guys want like some smaller sizes and fishing freak gear. I really haven't done much fishing freak apparel. But if you guys want to, want to see, maybe I'm going through it out there. Want to see like some really small stuff. I'm not saying onesies. I mean, that's a little, that's pushing it a little too far. But if you want to see like, like more kids size and stuff or some different fishing freak designs, let me know in the comments below because this just got me inspired. To like, you know, get the young kids. She's a fishing right away. Right away.  And that was going to wrap today's video y'all. I hope you enjoyed the skit. Make sure to smash the thumbs up like button for all that. That always takes extra effort. Ocean Spin Girl did an excellent job filming on this one as well. She's getting really handy with the camera doing her own vlogs and we had a lot of fun filming this together. So I think you'll see some more skits throughout the year on this channel. Especially as like we progress. I feel like there's going to be some funny moments. Oh my gosh. I can just guarantee you there's going to be moments where it's going to be funny. We're probably going to have some good creative skits come off of it. So stay tuned for those and I still have full permission to go bass fishing right? You do just not September. Okay. Absolutely. You get out there. There you go. And there's probably going to be moments where I want to go fishing pretty bad. You know what I'm saying? Let's just hope I'm not going to be moody. Alrighty y'all. We love each and every one of you. We thank you for your support. If you want to go check out the merch channel and help support this channel because we might be needing some diapers and all that kind of stuff this time of year. You want to close this one out? This is your charity. The next generation. The future of fishing freak. Yes. Exactly. Expanding the fishing freak army. Mayan that puts a lot of pressure on me. Yeah. Maybe I should go out fishing more with you while I'm pregnant. You should. Absolutely. Absolutely. You're getting started early. Fish is good for pregnant women too, right? Fish, yeah. Just not a big fish. Okay. All right. Well, more of that. Sure. More of that knowledge on her channel. All right guys. Thanks for watching. And I guess we'll see you guys in the next video. Catch you on the next one. Yeah, yeah. Say it like that. And we'll catch you on the next one. Be a board.


Okay, so this is a real pleasure to be with with all of you, whatever you are. We've been actually talking with the people behind the scene and how incredible, you know, this few days of having so many incredible people, people who are actually on the ground, who are everywhere in the world, trying to do their part, companies, civil society, all coming together to show actually that we can change things. And you know, for the ocean part, it is extremely important. We have to recognize the ocean is not just this big amount of water, but it's actually the place where life comes from. And I'm very happy to be here with all of you. My name is Max Bello, Maximiliano, I'm from Chile, and I've been working on marine conservation for a few years, and I have been experiencing some of the most beautiful memories and, you know, things that could ever be the best sort of memories for life, to basically then remember every day, why do I care? Why we should be caring about the ocean and why do we care about the changing what we have been done on climate change? It's affecting the ocean, but the ocean also have something very important. It might be the key also for solving these issues, and that's why we've been talking today about the nature-based solutions. As you see and you will see, you can go into the slide, we are live streaming now, and so you can go into Slido, and you can be part of this conversation too, you can actually send your questions there or your comments, you know, how happy you are to see all of these people here.  There's no better way to say it. So you can actually then go into race to zero in a Slido and or Scandia the code, and then you can be part of this, we're going to be reviewing this, we're going to see your questions, and we're going to be asking those questions if we can to the panelists that you want to talk with. I want to start, and I'm very proud of also presenting Minister Alaman, who I know for many years actually, we used to live in the same region even. Years ago when he was also a senator in the, what is today the region of the rivers in the south of Chile, a beautiful, probably the most beautiful region in Chile, I know people are going to say differently. But, you know, I've seen that how he cares about the ocean, how he cares about environment. He's Minister of Foreign Affairs of Chile, he's been also working hard on many issues among them Antarctica, Antarctica protection, which is a key element also for marine conservation and for climate change in general. So, Minister Alaman, it's a pleasure to see you always and seeing you here. And please, you can start this, this conversation. I'm proud of having you here. Thanks. Hello, Max. Hello, everybody. Dear organizers, ocean leaders and advocators, please receive my warmest regards. It's really a pleasure to share opening remarks in this important event. Allow me for the outset to congratulate the high level champion from Chile and the UK, Gonzalo Muñoz and Miguel Topping for leading the organization of the Race to Zero Events and for recognizing the crucial role of the ocean in climate action. Indeed, the ocean plays a fundamental role in our lives. The ocean covers 70% of the planet, providing us with countless environmental benefits and supporting millions of people around the world. The ocean has a fundamental role as global climate regulator, being responsible for captioning about a third of the anthropogenic CO2 emitted into the atmosphere and for absorbing about 90% of the additional heat resulting from global warming. While it provides us with great benefits and ecosystem services, the ocean also confronts great threats, which include illegal and unregulated fishing, the effects of climate change, and marine pollution by plastics, which directly disrupt our societies and our communities, causing a progressive deterioration of the ocean environment. Specifically, in terms of climate change, the ocean suffers a disification, de-oxygenation, and sea level rise among other processes, creating many existential threats to communities and livelihoods around the world. For Chile, the ocean is a central foundation of our national identity. With a coastline of more than 4,000 kilometers, the ocean is crucial for our culture, society, environment, and economy. In line with this, Chile has assumed its responsibility in the protection and sustainability of the ocean and its resources. In recent years, Chile has created new marine protected areas, which now covers 43% of our jurisdictional waters, equivalent to more than 1.6 million square kilometers. Chile has also introduced the ocean as a focus of the climate discussion, as a reflection of our national policies. For example, the new Chilean National Determine Contribution NDC includes an ocean component with commitments for both mitigation and adaptation. We have promoted the idea that all countries should also include robust ocean components in their NDCs, covering both mitigation and adaptation. It is crucial that we join forces and share experiences about our policies and good practices. Solutions to the climate crisis in the ocean must be built, taking into consideration the local perspective. As we protect ecosystems, we are also protecting the sustainability of our societies, and particularly the communities that depend on the ocean, including indigenous people. These topics will be also explored in the ocean and climate dialogue that was mandated at COP25 under the presidency of Chile. The dialogue to take place in a virtual format next two and three of December will provide the opportunity to take the first step in a formal space on this crucial matter. Considering the great attention and expectations that the dialogue has attracted, we know that it will be not the last. The next six in Glasgow will need to look into this discussion and make sure that countries have the means to continue discussing and developing tools and identifying opportunities to protect the ocean to the adverse consequences of climate change in the context of their NDCs and the implementation of the implementation of the Paris-Paris Agreement. 2020 will be marked by COVID, but also by how governments in the world are taking action to recover in a holistic way, taking into account social, environmental, and economic aspects. In this context, we must reflect on how we incentivize action, including through public-private partnerships to protect and restore marine ecosystems and strengthen ocean resilience to ensure a healthy ocean for the future of humanity. I wish you a successful event, and please count on Chile for contributing in this important debate. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to you, Minister Alamandis. It is great to see you and to speak with those words of example, because Chile has been doing an incredible job on, as you said, protecting the ocean, mobilizing everyone in the same way to actually take care of what we have and we have 84, I think it is 1,000 km2, long if you count all the islands and everything. It is an impressive place. I also want to thank the Chilean government for bringing on the COP25 the oceans as one of the key elements. But also, I want to thank today to the WEF, who have been providing incredible platform and in particular the people that are behind there. I want to say thank you to Elena, who we have been working hardly on this for a long time already. And I want to thank the champions, the champions who have bring so much ambition. It has been growing. Nigel and Gonzalo, as the minister said, incredible people. And we have also many incredible people talking to today in this panel. And I want to start presenting some of them. I'm very happy to have Madal Sarr giving us and she is from Palau, a beautiful country who also have done incredible job on trying their best to protect the ocean, their best to protect their culture, the link they have with the ocean is incredible, all the stories and everything that is around that and the political power to that have been put into this small country in the middle of the ocean who have actually a huge fact knowing to protect this, this beautiful part of their, their, their, their soul basically. She has been working with the communities in, in Palau. She's been working also in innovation and possibilities to finance also more sustainable user and livelihoods and also for accelerating, you know, the protection of this ecosystems. She's been studying in different universities of the United States in Washington State University and University of California, San Diego. And she have incredible resume. I'm very, very proud to, for her to, to having her here. Then I'm going to, I want to introduce to Brandon Pasisi, who's actually will be joining a certain point of the conversation he has been having some issues. And so there's a little bit of a shortage and energy shortage there and so we will be potentially not already there. I think it is maybe already there back. Yeah, Brandon, good to see you here too. I'm very proud father and, and, and, and a husband to his marine biology. He's been working in the government and also in the private sector for a good fishing for sustainable fishing in new a who actually also another country who's been giving incredible examples of or examples of this conservation of the ocean. We also have Alex Perry Alex Perry is, is a good friend and it's very incredible active person who's constantly, you know, talking with the grassroots groups and not just in the United States but also in the, in the whole region of Latin America. And from the Paragonia company who, you know, have an incredible commitment with not just with the with the with the environment itself ocean land protected areas and everything, but also with what they are, they're doing they they make close but they they make they make sure that actually it's close that having the, the lowest impact possible and so they're thinking more holistically. Actually, how to also invest on on people so he's an outdoor see person for sure. Good runner good surfer. And, and so pleasure to having you here Alex, I'm very, I'm very glad that we're together in this. And we want to introduce also to and Rick Salah and Rick Salah you all know he just publish a an incredible book to the nature of nature. I think it's, it's more like a letter no and Rick that a letter for nature from you and for you from your work, his National Geographic Explorer in residence and he also direct the program Christine sees who actually also have been part of this incredible accelerate marine protected areas creation around the world, and in particular also put, you know, thinking about this 30 by 32 and, and how do we get there also with strong high, highly and fully protected areas which is a very important concerning for marine protectors and for that 30%. So you know him for for TV and it's incredible Explorer and scientists he just good papers that he just published with other scientists and Rick and so maybe we can talk about that too so good to having you here too. And then I'm going to go with Sylvia we're going to, we're going to do this short because you, you don't need much presentation, her deepness as they call, they call her. She's going to be giving us some remarks at the end of the conversation. Sylvia is always a great pleasure to having you here and to to be working with you pretty much every day. WRI people to Sophie would and others that are joining us to, and again for the web and the champions team to to be here together. Remember, you can go to Slido. And when you go to Slido, hashtag race to zero and you can put your questions your comment. Anything you want, please go and participate be part of this conversation you should be part of this conversation. It's good that we're all connected, and we're hoping you're interested on on on this topic for sure. You should be because the ocean, it's probably the most important topic that we should be talking every day in our life. I want to start with you and Rick, talking about those papers that you just published, I think it is very key what you've been doing in terms of trying to bring also economics into into the equation. We've seen the wardrobe study, just not long ago, like a month ago, now also some related with with fisheries and also food security, etc. We're always when we're working and I know you probably get the same questions too. We're always trying to find a balance know and, and I think between protection and extraction. How effective is that balance. What do you what do you think how effective that balance could be or is there a balance between these two parts, or is just a myth. Yes, and hello everyone. We are out of balance with nature and the balance is in favor of exploitation. Today, less than 3% of the ocean is fully protected, which means that 97% of the ocean is open to fishing oil drilling mining and other damaging So if we have to have a balance sure let's have a balance you know what about 5050 now that would be that would be a balance and there is also a myth that we cannot protect more of the ocean because we have to catch more fish to feed 10 billion people that are coming but you know that we reached peak catch in 1995, which means the fish stocks have been declining globally for 25 years. 82% of the fish stocks are over fished, which means that we are taking them out of the water faster than they can reproduce. So we are not going to get more fish by fishing more know and there are some local fishers that are well managed using traditional knowledge. Some industrial fishers very few that are not the putting the stocks, but most of them 82% are over fished. So the solution to get more fish is not fish more it actually fish less and create no take areas these highly and fully protected areas that you were mentioning Max. And the science is very clear the science is telling us that to restore marine life, no take areas are the most effective thing. If you don't kill the fish, they take a longer time to die, they grow larger, they produce many many more eggs and help to replenish themselves and the areas around them which also helps local fisheries because local fishermen are doing better in places where they have no take areas that help to replenish their fishing grounds and also in some of these areas ecotourism brings helps to create jobs and brings in economic revenue that is much greater than than business as usual. So no take areas have ecological social and economic benefits. The idea that we can have protected areas where we allow fishing and that is going to be sustainable. It's the same as not creating this protected areas. So the science and economics are very clear in that regard. Thank you so much that is, you know, it is crazy to think about that is about like 2.9% that is probably protected only and highly and fully which is the areas that actually can deliver know what we need really for for conservation. And you said it so well, you know, more than 97% it is actually for for selling. Let's put it like that no and that's that's very, that's, you know, kind of change your mind about what we really doing and the efforts of conservation that we need to accelerate to and and I want to, you know, going to model SAR, because you're coming from from Palau which actually did an incredible job on protecting a huge part of the of the economic exclusive zone. And so then you have, you know, some more of the example and you've been working through this to how difficult could be that kind of different views. So the question is, what is needed then to ensure that conservation efforts and to make them effective and from your point of view from from what you guys have been doing there. Thank you, Max. I just want to pay respects to Minister Amman and all the organizers and thank you for this opportunity. So just some background I work with a nonprofit organization when we worldwide stewardship. We are based in Micronesia, the northern Pacific, and we work with many community partners and so from our perspective I think effective conservation really requires equitable partnerships with communities, indigenous folks who have relied on the ocean and the environment for their very survival. And there are a lot of traditional knowledge and practices embedded in their cultures that perhaps we can learn from and combine these with science technology and conservation investment to really make a stronger impact on conservation initiatives. I've worked for many years in various capacities with other nonprofit organizations and, you know, after about 15 years in this sector I wondered, you know, what is it that you know isn't making the big impact that our communities are really striving for. And I think a lot of it has been this top down approach where, you know, there's a lot of great intentions with donor funding coming through these communities towards ocean conservation. However, perhaps their misguided approaches to these initiatives and I think many of the communities indigenous peoples who live in ocean spaces actually have had a very clear understanding of these environments and ecosystems and how to come close to balance I think is what Enrique is saying and embedded within their cultural practices are systems and processes for carrying these types of conservation efforts out. So what Palau has done in terms of establishing a national marine sanctuary is nothing new from, you know, our perspective, we've had what we call a bull. This is similar to a moratorium that we would see in other places where our chiefs would designate specific areas MPAs no take zones, or they would designate certain species off limits. When they have noticed perhaps a shortage or a decrease in stock so these things that have been in place for indigenous communities are really critical for us to consider in the larger scheme of ocean protection and I think that's one of the things that one reef has really tried to harness and perhaps combined with other partnerships and networks external to these island spaces. Thank you so thank you so much for your answer I, you know, I think one of one of the things always when I when I am talking with people about marine protected areas actually it seems to be like a new idea, but going to Palau going to Polynesia you know they're they're similar to the other kind of ways to protect the resources and in areas have been in place for thousands of years. I mean they have been proven again and again and again and we keep proving it you know papers and books and everything. And some people still kind of keep saying that you know that they don't believe on marine protectors. Well, there's extensive information and there's extensive information from Palau from this countries and and from new to know and we have here the project director of the new ocean white project Brandon thank you so much and also, my little star before you you're also I leave you I thank you so much you it's like 3am in Palau right now so thank you so much for connecting at this time of the, of the in the middle of the night basically. And thank you so much for that. Brandon, it's so good to having you also because I know you've been having some issues with the energy there but I think it's good that we have you here and we have you right now must be also very late for you. So thank you so much, Brandon. Let me ask you, what is one of what is the the most difficult challenge that you've been facing, you know, management sometimes it could be extremely people think that you know it's kind of like okay you put it in place you can say right a law or something and it's done, but it's so much more than that.  Thank you and good morning actually it's, it's, it's okay the time is good here it's the morning here in Newie and the challenge has been the energy as you say the island is experiencing shutdowns from north to south so apologies for coming in late but I'm really glad to be here and to contribute towards this really important and exciting meeting today. I think yeah the challenges that we have usually this national level challenge obviously to the governments and revenues dealing with issues like energy as we're experiencing this morning and help and all those other things. I think so they have a national interest in terms of using the ocean space and resources, and then you also have the communities who rely on the immediate the adjacent ocean and resources for them and so I think the challenges that we've had really have been. First of all working out what the status of those resource design I think we have a challenge where the new generations now are seeing a different baseline and when they come on board. And so, trying to explain sort of where we've come from. We have a portion of the population that is is more mature and are the ones who really are just telling the story about how it used to be. And then as we move forward now into the younger generations the challenges are different. I think also just in terms of the cultural aspects. It's trying to understand all the users who are using it and what they're using it for how important it is for them. Also, our cultural and traditional systems. I think that sort of look at it as as being on a continuum where you have very strong traditional and cultural and traditional management and conservation measures, you can utilize those very well. And I think earlier speakers have talked to that, but I think we are in transition. Everyone aspires to a higher standard of living. And, and that means, you know food security income generation and those sorts of things so as we look at that. The change from the past to now in those traditional systems we've been trying to put our finger on it, and it's the technology. So in the past, some of those traditional methods of management stuff work very well. They were using more primitive sort of technology I guess in terms of fishing power and resource exploitation whereas now you have, you know, quite simple things in some cases but the technology now linked together with very good knowledge and experience of those cultural and traditional systems means that they can actually exploit the resources well so it's a, it's a double edged sword and I guess coming back to Enric's point about balance. We also have to look sometimes inside the systems that we have. I think in places where you have very strong customary and traditional practices that still hold respect and power that works very well. In other systems similar to Newey where you have a transition and a focus to move to more, what we know is more conventional Western management systems with laws and regulations and rules like that. It's trying to bring those two together to get a balance that really works for everybody. Yeah, so I think, you know, and then after that it's about sustainable resourcing of that and so what we've looked at and tried to do something totally different for our case here in Newey is to actually try and find a sustainable funding mechanism because two really important things is that communities, once you engage with them, they have to have resources available in the time frames that allows them to continue to do it. Our failures in the past have been that we've gone in, engaged with them that being very interested and on board with doing it but we haven't been able to maintain our presence and continue that. So the same thing happens with large projects externally. They come in, it does a great amount of work and then it comes to an end. National governments aren't able to pick up the slack and then it just stops and communities have many other challenges on their hands. And so they will put it to the side and if it's not a timely intervention and a sustained intervention, then our experience is that it has great challenges and benefit. Thanks. Thank you. You touched on a couple of very key elements, how fast our societies are changing and how we can probably also use those things. I mean, like you said, the young people use technology that maybe older people might not know exactly how it may be both together combining cultural knowledge and this new technologies can do a good work and we've seen a lot of new technology coming in to help dearly on the conservation of the ocean and so I think that is a very key element and then financing. That's something that I always, you know, we're thinking about how we actually bring more interest and more investment into ocean protection. There's not enough. There was just a report on the organization of developed countries that about one person, less than 1% of the total budget of these countries are actually used on conservation, marine conservation are even much less than that. So we have a huge gap in financing actually these activities which brings quality of life, wealthy for some people and for most people actually for big communities that actually need that so very, very important things that you're mentioning. And I want to go with with Alex, Alex, you know, this is something that is striking me because it's also, you know, you don't see this very often companies don't invest that much on on the on the future of the earth even though they're, they're using all the resources of it. And you guys have been taking so much care of the, you know, the ocean and and the land. Why, why is it that I mean why why you, Paragonia have taken that decision to begin with.  And from that concept, we go and we built a mission statement, and our mission statement is to save our home planet. And, you know, we see, we see the degradation of the environment and we see the ways that your marginalized communities are being affected most and we, we see that the current system, especially in the private sector the current system of capitalism is a broken one. And really speaking, what we aim to do is, is really find ways to innovate and update. I love the conversation around technology and finding new ways that can not only cause the least amount of harm, but rather find ways to to toward a regenerative path to the environment. And one area that strikes me, you know, personally here is the work that we're doing to build products with use in otherwise would be discarded fishing nets actually down on the coast of Chile. And so what we've done is partnered up with local fishing communities. And this is to your point about how we make we really invest in it. When we pay premium we buy fishing nets that would have been thrown away, often just tossed out to sea or left on the coastline in the beaches. And we turn that into products that we sell. In fact, the hat I'm wearing I wouldn't otherwise normally be wearing a hat is made from old discarded fishing nets. So as we look to reduce our own footprint, you know, one thing that Patagonia really looks toward, you know, and this is a message to all that are watching in the private sector. It's not necessarily just philanthropy it's a true investment there's a return on protecting the environment, and investing in conservation. But to us to find new business models. And I think it's easy to come up with an excuse that you know quarterly earnings reports require us to return. You know the most profit the shareholders, you know, that model is going to eviscerate the whole next generation of consumers. You know what might seem revolutionary to most to us is common sense. And so we're going to continue to find ways to invest in regenerative solutions to how we build product and how we're getting it to stores and consumers. So that ultimately then more people can go out and enjoy the outdoors which is the industry that we're in. So, you know, finding new business models is something that is, it's exciting to us and it frankly is the most common sense thing to do. You know, they say that by 2050 a quarter of the world's carbon emission is going to come from the fashion industry, the clothing and a parallel industry. You know, we have to get ahead of that. Again, that's a quick way to have no more business to be done because the planet will be dead. We're finding ways to, you know, create a business model around used clothing around repairing clothing and giving more life to what you're using. And those are the kind of notions that we often go back to and we rely on and we hope that others start to begin to see. That is a great example. I mean, I remember Yvonne Trinar, the CEO, once in an article he said like, don't buy another Paragonia jacket. They're so good that you don't have to buy another one because you actually can keep using it. I mean, the same CEO of the company kind of saying that people don't buy just for buying, you know, like, it's such a great example. And then I remember even like Paragonia went almost out of business when they decide to invest in new technology to transform bottles, plastic bottles into clothes. And that was, that was incredible. I mean, like, they, they totally just say like, look, we're going to do this, we're going to do it right. And they're like, we're going to go out of business. And I think that this example is so great. So thank you so much for for leading with with that example.   What is resilience for you? What is resilience for the ocean? What is resilient for communities? What is what is resilience for you? Going back to Enric, Enric, so you've been writing a huge amount of information for all of us to digest for people to take the right decision to. We are in a very weird time, no? I mean, we used to see each other in different places in different meetings around the world. And now we happen to see each other only by Zoom. On this pandemic, this pandemic that we probably also, we did it in a way, no? We caused it. Do you think we can learn something out of this crisis? Do you think there's something that we can maybe in the future use out of, you know, out of learning it's there, the pandemic teaching us something? Please tell us. Yeah, I think that pandemic is teaching us two main things. Number one is that nature has an extraordinary ability to bounce back. People have been fascinated watching these videos at home of humbug whales coming into marinas or mountain lions coming into the streets of Santiago and Chile and many other examples. This is a very powerful message from nature saying, look, if you give me some space, look at what I can do. And the second important thing that the pandemic has shown us is that we haven't been building for resilience. We've been building for growth for hyper leverage unfettered growth, but not for resilience. PAs are a great example because many of them are dependent on economic revenue from tourism, but tourism went from whatever it was to zero during the lockdown. And countries like Ecuador or Mexico are cutting the budget of the national parks agencies. We're using the money for economic recovery to prop up the industries of the past that industries that destroy our life support system, instead of investing in industries that employ a lot of people and are the necessary condition for the support of many people, especially coastal communities that have high reliance on on a healthy ocean. So if we have learned one thing for a government is when we build back, we need to build back better, we cannot go back to what was normal because we really don't want that we need to be building by thinking about how to build resilience how to make communities potentially more resilient, which in turn will will make this money particularly as more resilient, creating this feedback loop where everybody benefits. That is, that is a good example. I've seen it too in several places in Latin America you know that going back now, like kind of, you know, people are struggling economically that is understandable many places that you said, tourism is good it's been going down. Really, I see some communities going back to the ocean and say like, let's, let's go get more let's, you know, let's, let's take the protection protection now and I guess that the thing that I kind of I tend to to think of, it's like well, the, the, the fact that we've been managing this area or the fact that we've been managing this area is in a better way actually allow us now to have food to have food security that food that is not now not coming from the the selling from the other business that now are not working. So how important it is to actually save for the future, it's saving for the future, and the future that continuously showing more and more uncertain so thank you so much for for that, for that answer. And Rick models are communities we always talk about like we were just talking about the communities how you know communities are part of this how you know, and we say many things about it but actually, what do you think about how the communities, you know are benefiting from this conservation conservation from the things that we're doing and how much part of the decision making process are really in from your perspective. Thanks Max I really appreciate and we can and Brandon and Alex's points before so I will answer your question but I think you know just to give a very specific example about communities I was working with for separate communities who share a terrestrial border. You know, and they're they're racking their heads because of course allows main revenue stream is through tourism and that has gone from, you know, to well it's zero at this point so they're wondering how they can continue their mandates of patrolling their and you know we had this conversation and I said why don't we think about the different technologies that are available and work smarter not harder. So now they're considering a drone technology that can help them monitor this huge terrestrial space that they all share. They don't have to look for funding to purchase fuel that's you know contributing to carbon emissions, because the status quo was to drive up and down their terrestrial areas and look for poachers. And now they can sort of use this technology to to share the load and also create cost effective. You know initiatives amongst themselves and I think, you know that's where conservation investment really benefits these communities. And by really creating space for us to think innovatively about what we're actually doing. You know what is, what is the objective here, and I think previous to cove.


Hi, I'm Sam Meruzga. I am a physics major. Hi, I'm Latila, senior physics major. And I'm Aspen, a junior physics major. I'm Matt Alstom. I'm a geography major and environmental studies double major. Hi, my name is Ashley Neunfeldt and I'm a statistics and financial economics double major with a mathematics minor. This summer we're looking at multi-spectral cameras. The cameras each are going to see different colors of light, red, green, and something slightly below red, almost to infrared, and each of those will be able to tell if a farmer were to fly a drone, if they're flying a drone over their fields and they're able to see, you know, certain colors of light from their crops, if they see in a certain patch they're missing this kind of light or it's a different color, it's going to indicate certain things about the health of their crops. We are researching on astrophysics like detecting gravity waves in the atmosphere of planets. Essentially what we are doing with the detection of these gravity waves is we are taking the temperature profile of the atmosphere of a body and we are sending it through a sort of filter to pull out different wavelengths of oscillations of the air in those atmospheres. This summer I'm researching landslides in Minnesota, specifically from Mankato to Chaska and the Minnesota River Valley. I am using GIS to digitally analyze landslides in our area so it's an easier way to speed up the process of field checking. This summer I'm researching Major League Baseball Plate Discipline with MCS faculty Laura Bainbach and we're trying to define the optimal swing decision-making strategy for all Major League Baseball players. As a student, the opportunity to research here for the summer has given me the chance to experience how it's going to be working professionally in the industry, such as in an engineer or even grad school research and postgraduate research. As a student, this opportunity to do undergrad research really provides me with a way to use the skills I learn in the classroom out in a real setting and to gain experiences that I can bring with me for the rest of my academic career in undergrad school. Being an international student and coming all the way from India to here, it's a really great way of knowing the culture of doing undergrad research, seeing research and science in a different perspective. This opportunity to do undergraduate research has allowed me to be able to combine my passions for sports and my knowledge of statistics and I've been able to apply all sorts of concepts that I've learned in all my statistics courses to a real-world example that I'm interested in. My best day, my most memorable day, was by far the day that we went to Duluth. We had a two-day conference up there with eight different schools that are in this one research project that we're in. And on the second day, we spent eight hours out in the field and I was able to totally learn so much from all these senior geologists. They were all just collaborating and that was by far like the most memorable moment. My best experience from this summer has definitely been when a thermal camera started to work and I began to have control over it so I'm able to take the image, look at it, process it and interpret it and that really was just a great experience. The most exciting thing about our research was the day when we actually compiled our code. It was amazing. Yeah, you gotta say when you're working on computational work and everything is just not working and you're looking for bugs, I mean the day when you finally get the results you're looking for it was just incredible. I think we got some weird stares with our celebration. Yeah. The most exciting moment so far of the project came recently when we were finally able to run our optimization that imposes these swing strategies and it's been very interesting to kind of see sort of the plate discipline approaches I've been taught as a softball player show up in the data because I'm able to impose a different strategy so I'm able to kind of put in what I've been learning as a softball player and see that those strategies actually do give a good result and so everything I've been taught is kind of being represented in the data in a very interesting way. All right. Go Gusties! Go Gusties!


Hi and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher here at the Barnes. Today we're going to go upstairs to gallery number 23 and look at one of the weirdest and one of my favorite pictures in the collection, entitled the Mysterious Swan. Here let's go in just a little bit farther. The Mysterious Swan, painted by Greek born Italian Italian artist George D'Aquirico in the year 1934. And he may have actually joined for a discussion of this picture, the rose tower that the same artist had painted 21 years earlier in the year 1913. Let's take a little bit of a closer look at the Mysterious Swan. Here we go. And it's wonderful, isn't it? So at center we have this multicolored swan of yellow, red, blue, white, a little bit of kind of purple at the bottom. Looks like it's got its eyes closed and it's so strangely psychedelic for something that was painted in 1934. And it's swimming or floating in this brown zigzaggy water. And it's these stilted structures at kind of odd slanted angles with one ladder kind of going up. And to start to delve into the mystery here, let's take a look at the artist himself, George D'Aquirico. Here he has painted himself two self-portraits, one as a younger man in the 1920s, where he's pretty clearly compared himself to the Greek god Hermes over here. And so we already get the sense that he's got this flair for the hermetic. And then this one I think is just fabulous, a self-portrait done in 1948 in the Baroque style when he was really challenging the kind of canon, streamlined canon of modernism. So in what way I think we want, what kind of myths are self-mythologizing? Is he creating in the mysterious swan? Here's a picture from the same, like, mysterious bathing series that he created that might help it make a little bit more sense. And we can see some of these elements repeated. Here's our swan. Here's its zigzaggy water. We've also got a beach ball, ladders, a new man down here, two more, but also a dressed man in a business suit opening the door to this little structure. And so what D'Aquirico has painted is a scene from his childhood in the Greek city of Volos. And the story behind this is that his dad was an engineer for the Thessaly Railways. And when D'Aquirico was a boy, his dad had supervised the building of a tram line from the city out to the shore, which was very near where the Anavros River entered the ocean, and also had built these changing cabins, individual changing cabins, where a person could go in, take their clothes off, and then descend these ladders to go swimming in the sea. And this shift from this clothed modern self-presentation to primal nudity fastened D'Aquirico, he even thought that these changing cabins reminded him of masks that both like concealed as well as revealed. And he even had stuff to say about these ladders. I'm going to read you a quote that he wrote. He said, I remember that the beach cabins always disturbed me and gave me a sense of dismay. Those few steps of wood covered with algae and mold immersed less than half a meter underwater seem to say they must have been descending for leagues and leagues down into the oceanic darkness. So kind of complimenting the nudity of the people who've taken off their clothes. The water itself has got this sense of like pre-Luvian primal nature about it, and that picks up in his depiction of the swan as well. So here's an image from D'Aquirico's favorite childhood book called The Earth Before the Flood. And it seems like he copied this image of a plesiosaur as inspiration from the swan. You can see kind of the weird eye and the curve of the neck alongside this, I guess, if the athaur. And so like the nudity, like the water, he's trying to signal to us that let's see the swan again. It's not really a swan. And I think that the sort of neon rainbow colors that he's given us are these like big signals telling us, like look beyond just the shape of this animal, and perhaps even the weirdest key way that he's painted the bottoms of the changing cabins are also a signal to say, there's something hermetic here. Let's look beyond the picture surface. And then this zigzaggy water too. There's also something going on there that I'm going to read you. So here we go. If it reminds you of a parquet floor, a wooden parquet floor, you're precisely right. So, as an adult, there was an encounter D'Aquirico head and then here's another quote. He wrote, the idea for the mysterious baths came to me once when I happened to be in a house where the floor had been polished with wax. I watched a gentleman walking in front of me whose legs reflected in the floor. I had the impression that he could sink into that floor like a swimming pool that he could move and even swim in it. Then I imagined strange swimming pools with men immersed in a kind of water parquet. So it seems this vision dovetailing his memories of the seashore of Volos prompted this whole mysterious baths series. And here's the first a series of 10 lithographs that he did in Paris in 1934 to complement poems by Jean-Luc Coutot. So you can see the title is mythology and there are many elements that we recognize from our painting of the mysterious swan. We've got the changing cabins with these sort of strangely static flags, the man in a suit, the nude men. But then we also have like leaping centaurs and a colossus and also this like D'Aquirico called this element over here, the source of the water park, water parquet, meaning a sort of metaphysical first principle or even kind of delving into this idea that everything flows, something that the Greek philosopher Heraclitus had introduced and modern philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche had modified. And so this is something that truly did interest D'Aquirico is in a world where he believed there was not necessarily any external meaning. How can you create your own myths and because Volos and the Anaphras river in the seashore were so very mythologized as the site, for example, of the saga of the Argonauts or myth of Lida and the swan, it made a certain sense that D'Aquirico would look back to Greek mythology as a way of kind of constructing his own memories and self myth. And here's this. So that was the beginning of the mysterious bathing series and here's its triumphant conclusion in the year 1973 in three dimensional monumental form in the city of Milan. And again, we see this source of the water parking up here with real water coming down in it. Here's our mysterious swan in all its polychromatic glory. We've got the swimmers and I love that the water parking is actually sculpted up around them and then you can see the zigzagging at the bottom. And so the series I think is is funny is playful. It's a great way of D'Aquirico talking about how, say, memories and myths can actually shape perceptions of self of place of the past. But there's one more thing I'd like to think about before closing, which I do find pretty fascinating is check out this image over here. An exhibition of 1936 called Recent Paintings by George D'Aquirico given in New York City and you can even see that Albert Barnes wrote the preface. So here you might have noticed this, the parquet waters shown back up and so as a man in a suit, now he's behind this also very liminal device of a curtain. And we see several more elements repeating in this painting here that you can also find in room 23 at the Barnes. So the same room is mysterious swan entitled Horses of Tragedy. So we've got this curtain, we've got this viaduct that's repeated over here, aqueduct or whatever it may be the horse that's submerged into this sort of pit down here. And so one of my colleagues at the Barnes did figure out, this is Kaelin Jewel, she figured out that these four horses are the horses of the apocalypse, issuing in a certain destruction and you may even be able to see this Roman soldier chasing away a philosopher up here. And it seems to be an indictment of the destructive mythmaking of fascism as a kind of corrupt version of the Roman Empire that Benito Mussolini had issued in. And I think that this is the connection with our mysterious water where we see that D'Aquirico has made this mysterious path as a kind of personal self mythologizing. But I think he's saying that occurs on the same spectrum as mythologizing that can be political, ideological, cultural, and so when we look at the mysterious swan and perhaps think about this idea that everything flows and everything recurs, maybe we can think about how do we these days construct our own myths and how do those intersect with those of the wider wider world. Thank you so much for joining today and I look forward to seeing you back at the Barnes and that's it for today's take out.


Explaining yourself, explaining is often fear, preparing its case for when you're going to be on trial soon. I've lived seasons of my life explaining myself to people. Some of you live like that too, always explaining yourself, justifying yourself as if you are going to trial. And the explanation is your evidence in support of your behaviour to convince them that it's not what they think and you're not who they think you are. And I want to say to you today that you need to stop explaining yourself. You are not on trial. And people around you that love you and appreciate you and see the good in you don't need you to put yourself on trial by explaining yourself all the time. And if people can't see that about you, then they're the people that you shouldn't be bothering with trying to explain yourself to anyway.


I am Karl Flirsch, and I am here to talk to you about not just optimistic things, but optimistic roll-up. This is Ethereum Layer 2, the last talk, very inspirational, talking about how we can make Ethereum great and, you know, not suffer from the massive economic divides. And I'm just going to tell you how to make the user experience a little better. But I think it's very important, nonetheless. So of course, PG, that's Plasma Group, shout-out represent. Don't forget about Ethereum Layer 2, it is extremely, extremely powerful. So first I'm going to talk about trees. I recently started growing plants, and by that I mean I recently started killing plants. And it has been a wonderful experience every time I look at my plant, I see mathematical constructions with, you know, the golden ratio and these, you know, fractal branching patterns and just unbelievable, unbelievable complexity, emergent complexity, in fact, you know, that whole emergent thing was definitely not planned and very, very convenient. It's because it's about self-organization, all of these things coming together, all of these different pieces, you know, adding up.  And of course, as I'm staring at my plant, I start to see crypto economics. I'm like, wow, it's the same thing.  And then people start wearing hats as long as you've positioned your plant right and you've, you know, watered it correctly. So it's this emergent phenomenon, both of them. And this entire community is this emergent phenomenon. It's really quite amazing. And so this is my plant is very, this is all what I do to think about how to not think about this very sad dying plant. But nonetheless, nonetheless, we continue on, very sad. So as I was, you know, preparing for this talk, of course, I, you know, stumbled across a Vitalik presentation as I often do. And one thing that he said was JavaScript was the foundation for innovation. He was introducing his new JavaScript framework.  And he said, you know, that is what I hope to bring to the world of cryptocurrency. I want to set the foundation by creating smart contracts, the ability to program smart contracts and use that to grow an ecosystem. And so, you know, Vitalik and many others worked really hard to bring us smart contracts. And it has birthed this incredible community. So many people that I am, you know, everyone in this conference is so great. Anyway, getting choked up about how great people are, but, you know, it inspired me to talk about crypto economics, right? In my DEF CON 3 talk, I was all about crypto economics. I was describing these mechanisms which we can create, hopefully, you know, driving good incentives and avoiding the bad ones and building the, you know, just the right mechanisms and learning how to, you know, design them in such a way that we actually promote good outcomes. And in fact, the kind of subject of my talk was Uniswap, because it felt like a very good, you know, crypto economic mechanism that would drive economic behavior. And, you know, thankfully that seems to have panned out reasonably well. But the dream, right, this dream of crypto economics and building systems with, you know, cryptography and economics and giving us all superpowers that we can all program our smart contracts, that dream became a little bit of a nightmare, right? Because when I actually used our systems, unfortunately, I would be presented with these, like, very, you know, 69-digit, you know, expansions and this, you know, crazy thing where we approve all of the tokens to be transferred on, you know, on our behalf for a random smart contract that we don't really know about, right? Like these crazy user experience problems and pending, you know, we're waiting for our transaction to go through and waiting, waiting. And no matter how much I'm metamask, I press speed up. It never gets faster than 15 or one minute or even 10 minutes sometimes. This is horrible, horrible situation, which I, you know, hope to remedy. Anyway, all of this to buy my crypto kitty and spend 30 cents on gas, right? This is the experience, the plight of the incredible dream that we have. And really, honestly, we have come so far.  Anyway, so this caused me to kind of talk about scale and how do we solve some of the big problems that face, you know, the, the Ethereum ecosystem today.  And so how can we actually build our system so that they resemble those and we can get that massive adoption that we need? And so, of course, you know, myself and a few others, you know, Jing and Ben are in the, in the audience here today for Plasma Group and, you know, tried to solve this, solve this usability problem using Ethereum's layer two, right? And so we could upgrade Ethereum using layer two, using only smart contracts. The actual, like, ability that you have to, you know, impact change with smart contracts is massive. And so just superpowers, right? These smart contracts are incredibly, incredibly liberating. Such power, much wow. And so a couple months later, we, you know, released this test net and we, you know, scaled thousands of transactions per second with Plasma and it was this amazing thing. But then, like an annoying parent, I would hear from people like Hayden and others, but can it run Uniswap? Right, you talked about Uniswap, you love Uniswap, but can it run Uniswap? And the sad truth is no, it couldn't at the time run Uniswap.  However, yet again Vitalik was like, but can it run Uniswap? And once again, the sad answer was no, it cannot. We did not have smart contracts. We did not have the unstoppable smart contracts of Ethereum Layer 1 using a developer experience like Solidity that people are familiar with. And so that was a real problem. And to kind of demonstrate this problem, here is a little graph which shows the different ways that we solve the validity and availability problems of Layer 2. I won't get into the details because there's only, there's only some, you know, so much time, but for those in the know, on the right-hand side, you have put all data on chain. That's rollup. On the left-hand side, you have Plasma. And on the top, right, that's how we provide availability. So either we put it all on chain or we use this availability game. And on the top, we have optimistic validity proof. So that is essentially this kind of, you know, the classic Layer 2. It's only, it's correct. We assume it correct if there's a timeout that occurs and, you know, no one has challenged it. And then we can also use fancy math to solve the availability, to solve the validity problem using zero knowledge proofs. And so there's a whole bunch of Layer 2 solutions on this kind of map.  That was definitely missing from my conception of Layer 2. And, you know, very, potentially very interesting. And so before I go into what that section is, here, generalized, these are the kind of benefits of each system. So generalized computation, when you have one of these validity games enforced with crypto economics, you can do general computation. And on the bottom, you have objective proofs up front. That means that we can prove to the main chain validity immediately because it's succinct enough to be verified. And here on the rollup side, we have no data withholding, which means we don't have to deal with the same problems of a plasma operator going offline or whatever it may be. But here, on the plasma side, we have infinite transactions per second because we don't have that availability bottleneck. But of course, there is this blank open space. So what is that point? Well, we're very clever. And so we came up with the name Optimistic Rollup. And so it turns out that within this trade-off space, you can get general computation. And you can get the no data withholding problem, the kind of unstoppable nature, the liveness properties of Ethereum.  And that is a huge, huge deal from a developer user experience perspective, which is honestly a user experience that is often neglected, especially in Ethereum and other places. Now, notably, this kind of trade-off space had not been explored before. Not not been explored before. In 2014, Vitali came up with Shadow Chains, which is essentially what this is.  And so this is a kind of work expanding on Shadow Chains. And so now I'm going to give an Optimistic Rollup overview in two minutes. I was told that my talks, I was giving a slower talk, and they were like, I want a really fast talk, Carl. And so I was like, OK, how fast can I make this fast talk? And it's just way too fast. So you're not going to understand it, but you'll experience it, and you'll love it. You'll love it. So bam, oh yeah, I was going to do that. Bam, that's another one. All right, so we have Ethereum, right? That's pretty straightforward. We have an Ethereum block. We deploy a Optimistic Rollup contract to Ethereum. There's our Optimistic Rollup chain. It's deployed. We have an aggregator. They are bonded. In fact, we can have multiple aggregators. Anyone can submit new blocks, as long as they have a bond. Now, we're going to enter the chain pretty straightforward. We can send a transaction to the main chain and deposit in. Or you can just receive money on the chain itself. Either way works. Now, the next thing is we can send transactions. So remember, that block down there, that is an Optimistic Rollup block. And so we're going to create more of those. So Alice is going to send a transaction to the aggregator. The aggregator is going to create an updated state root. They're going to calculate what the actual state root is. Notably, this is an account model, not a UTXO model, that is kind of more familiar in Plasma, because we can do that with this technology. We're going to commit to these transactions and intermediate state roots so that we can prove invalidity in one step. Then we are going to submit that as a block to Ethereum. Submitting the block to Ethereum, we're going to create a Merkle Tree of that block, which is probably the most confusing part, because we're doing a Merkle Tree, and a Merkle Tree, and a Merkle Tree, and a Merkle Tree. There are four layers of Merkle Trees here. We're going to then add it to a smart contract with a large number of blocks. It is constant size, and so we get to save a lot of gas. We'll talk about the exact transactions per second that we get later. And now, we're going to submit that block. Great, we've done it. And so we can download that block off chain, calculate our off chain state, and we are set and good to go. Now, we're going to interact with the smart contract. Pretty straightforward. Someone deployed a smart contract to Ethereum. The same thing that you do, that there you do an optimistic roll-up. It goes off chain. Now, someone sends a transaction to Uniswap off chain. The Uniswap balances get computed. Any smart contract execution gets computed, and we compute a new state route, and we're good to go. We submit, we commit to that new state route. And now we submit all of that in a roll-up block, and we are set. And we, of course, update our balances once again. Now, we're going to do something bad. The aggregator is going to be evil, evil, malicious. So now, what is going to happen? Well, we're going to create an invalid transaction. We're going to create an invalid state route, compute that state route, and we're going to place it onto the main chain as a block. Oh, are they going to get away with it? What's going to happen? Well, everyone's going to notice that this thing is invalid, from either scan to you, to your infura, to every full node that's running in a full node optimistic roll-up chain. And they're going to challenge that invalid block. Notably, this challenge is not interactive. That makes it a lot easier, because honestly, these programs, these protocols are too hard to build. They're way too hard to build. I've done too much work, and I haven't seen enough progress. But now, they're way easier, because we made simplifications. So now we submit this validity proof. I'm not even going to explain it, because it's just so ridiculously complicated. But you can read the smart contract, and we will have it formally verified, because formal verification is important. But that verification is not validation. You should read about it. Now, also, we're going to burn the aggregator deposit, because this is a totally, totally attributable fault, and we all have a challenge successful. So great, we can delete that block, and we can continue moving. The aggregator got screwed, but there's another aggregator to take its place. Anyone keeps going, great success. You know, it's very good. So if you don't understand what I just said, which no one did, then you can just think, we put a blockchain on the blockchain. It's real easy, everybody. Put it in, the in, the in. There's the Fibonacci, there's the golden ratio. Breathe deeply, okay. But can it run Uniswap? Yes, my gosh, of course it can run Uniswap. That's why we did it. It's very, very hard to do. Oh, oh my God, I'm exhausted, whoa. Okay, well, not only can it run Uniswap, but we built it in the past month and a half or something, we worked very hard. Shout out to everyone, Will. And the Uniswap team, so sorry, we collaborated with the Uniswap team, us Plasma Group, them Uniswap, and we created Unipig.exchange. Everyone in this audience has used it, I heard, right? If you haven't used it, you have to go to Unipig.exchange and support the team Piggy. There are two tokens, one Pig, one Uni. What you do is you get AirDrop to Piggy and Uni and you dump the Uni, that's the game. No, I'm just kidding, you can dump the Piggy if you want. And notably, we're doing this and we're solving those horrible UX problems that I talked about in the beginning. For instance, there's no approve all tokens. Of course, you can solve this on main chain Ethereum and you should. Don't do the approve all things. It's just very scary, unless you're really confident. Maybe don't do it anyway. Another thing is we get pretty good transactions per second, we're not at plasma infinity scale, but we can get easily 200 transactions per second, put, bump it up a little bit more. This is, by the way, based on the availability bottleneck that I'm talking about. And then additionally, we can get way, we get a 2000 if we optimize with something like a BLS signature, but that's also pretty hard and definitely we'll get to 200, 400 that area and then we can hit the BLS optimization if we so choose and then we get way more with Ethereum 2 or any availability oracle that we choose. If we make the data available and we trust it's available, then this scheme works. Additionally, probably my favorite thing, I don't know, is how fast these transactions get confirmed. We get really, really fast transaction confirmations and this is basically, you can tune the optimistic roll of parameters and get either fast confirmations and anyway, we can go into that in another lightning section of one of these talks. So this is pretty cool. It is a user experience that kind of rivals centralized stuff in my humble opinion and also is a secure Ethereum DAP. I'm very, very happy. So Unipig.exchange, shout out to all the people who made it. It's really, really amazing that it came together and Team Piggy, y'all Team Piggy, get it to represent. So back to Vitalik. We're setting the foundation for innovation and part of that foundation means giving users good user experience so that when they use Ethereum, they're using, they're feeling good and they're not dropping off after the first two minutes and we hopefully can provide the same, we can provide the same smart contract development experience that we know and love about Ethereum and we'll know and hate but we'll get better, we'll work together to get better and make Ethereum smart contract development and experience even better. And so back to this wonderful tree. I don't remember how I tied this in actually. I made these slides very recently. So just pray for my plant. I just hope it gets better. I just hope it gets better and grows into, that's right. It's gonna grow into this magnificent plant because right now the soil, the lighting, the watering, definitely my watering is sub par and so hopefully with the right circumstances it will grow into this amazing thing and so we can use cryptography, we can use economics and really achieve the global impact that we want and notably remember that whole, the debt discussion and that stuff that the last presenter was talking about. That's a very real thing and I'm very worried about that as well but once again, this is a humble talk about user experience. Thank you very much. I technically should have a two minute, one minute, something like that for questions if y'all want. Everybody wants. Is there just one aggregator at a given time? Great question, in my diagram there was but it's a very goofy, it was accidental to be honest. No, so there are different schemes but probably in all of them essentially there are multiple aggregators. Because we have this property that we can detect in validity and like attributably destroy it, it makes it much easier for a bad aggregator to come in, submit an invalid block, we just prune it and then we go on with our day. So it's not this kind of, you need one aggregator, one system that we have in off-chain systems oftentimes because the actual, the downside of a really malicious aggregator is huge. We've kind of reduced the bad things that they can do and that gives us the ability to have many. Do you also have denial of service issues where I could know who the aggregator is and take them down? If we're all talking to one central server, could I like to ask them? Oh yeah, 100% and I heard this person say that they feel like we think a lot about clients but we don't think enough about aggregators because aggregators are going to be like real targets for denial of service. Now how we solve denial of service, of course there are fees that's clear but also just general like our traditional DDoS vectors will have to employ standard techniques and we actually have employed standard techniques on our Unipig.exchange to kind of protect the aggregator. But don't mess with our aggregator. Cool, thanks, it was a fun talk, thank you. Oh thank you, I appreciate it. Can you get that down to one minute for next staff gone? I'm planning on investing all of my time and energy into telepathy so I can go on stage and I can just go and then leave. So next time. All right, great talk, man. Can you explain more about the verity group that you have used that it is complicated? So how can I prove that the state transition is going wrong? Great, so I'll answer it from two perspectives. The first perspective is pretty simple, from a client perspective, all I do is I take all the transactions, I run them locally, I compute the state route and I compare the difference and I say if the state route is different, I know something went wrong and I can automated easily send a transaction, proving fraud and delete the prune the block. Now from the kind of formal verification of the smart contract side, this gets into a whole nother area of how do we make sure that we sandbox our state transition environment? How do we make sure that we don't run into out of gas issues? How do we make sure that we are doing all of the hubbub around formal verification and of course auditing? However, thankfully this is a closed system built in a smart contract and it's so it is very isolated. One of the real problems that we faced with layer two constructions oftentimes is how do you audit this multi-agent, multi-party distributed system where everyone is adversarial? Turns out to be extremely, extremely difficult. So doing that is quite hard and doing an audit for a smart contract state verification game is at least more tightly scoped. So that is the hope for why that is significantly easier. And actually in fact, we know it is significantly easier to do the smart contract style stuff because if we were to think of, for instance, building a order book exchange on optimistic roll up, technically you can do that, but doing Uniswap was way easier because everything is on chain, everything's in a smart contract, there's like, it's much easier to kind of manage conceptually. Anyway, a little long winded, but that's that. Thank you.