are okay. Yes. Thank you. All right. So welcome. Welcome everybody and good morning. Good morning to all of you as well as the learning students who are who have joined in to who will be watching the lecture later. Hello to all of you. Good to have you here. You know, we're two months into our course. And so we're midway, we're halfway. And we just have another half more to go. So hope this these lessons are helpful. And you're able to use some of this. Even in your ministry to others, maybe just, you know, meeting people and talking to them, just trusting that, you know, these, these classes and these skills that we're learning are in some way helping you. Okay. All right. We'll focus back on on where we stopped. We've been we're on week nine of our course. And we've been doing counseling skills. We looked through we started it last week talking about the importance of having a toolbox, how to work with or how to help people. And this is the counselors toolbox. And we started off with the first micro skill of attending. And yeah, so anyone quickly would like to do a recap on what we covered the last week, a quick recap, but what we covered. Okay, Chai says micro skills. What were the basic foundational skills meaning how and when to use Okay, so what was the first micro skill we learned last week? What is the first micro skill we learned attending? Yes, we did skills and attending. We looked at three, three kinds of attending. We did. We looked at non verbal verbal, we said the three Vs plus the B, we spoke about how you attend by listening, how you attend by observing. Okay, so these were the three main things that we spoke about today. We're going to be looking at the next skill, which that you will probably find a bit of a repetition with what we did last time on attending, which is responding. So if you look through certain, you know, certain textbooks, they put responding in attending, but I kind of spaced it out a little bit. Because I just feel that responding is is something that sometimes gets the most difficult for us to do. And I thought what we can do today is in our first hour, we can we'll have a bit of a learning and the second hour, we're going to have a more practical exercise. Okay, and this is where all of us are going to be involved. Now you may ask me how I'll tell you that in the second hour. Okay, I'm not going to let out the secret right away. So come back for the second hour. It's not going to put any of you on a spot.  So, so don't don't be nervous that okay, what if I'm chosen, everyone gets a good fair enough turn without feeling without needing to feel uneasy about it. Okay, so we will, because I think, you know, the only way that we can do this is by practice and no better place to practice in a classroom where you can do all the wrong things and all the things that are that, you know, that that a counseling skill doesn't have. So this is where we're learning. Okay, so this is a learning environment. It's a free environment. It's a non judgmental environment. So we're all going to learn through that. Okay, so we're, we're looking into the second micro skill of responding. Just give me a minute. I'm just going to display my screen. All right, so this is just a quick recap of what we did the last time. And that's what we were talking about. We're going to be looking at the skill of responding. Okay. So, sorry, just a minute. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to be looking at the skill of responding. And so what is so where is responding skill used? It is used through the entire counseling process. And especially in the early stages of the of the exploration phase, it is definitely used throughout, but more so in the early phase where there is a lot of exploration that's going in. And okay, it's I think as we as we look at as as you understand more, you'll probably figure out why is it that it is mostly used at the initial phases. So what is the purpose of these of responding skills? To, to, to make it to help you understand that that these are responding skills are is something that helps the counselor to encourage the issues or the stories of the counseling. Okay. And this is so even as you are responding to the counseling, it is a great skill to teach the counseling themselves when responding to each other in mediation, you know, like when they are mediating with somebody or they are talking back to you or with another person, it is a great skill that they themselves tend to pick up just through the way that you have modeled it for them. So responding skills helps the counseling to know that he or she has been heard, has been understood, has been cared for, and also has been supported. Okay, it also gives the counselor a feedback on what he or she said and how it has come across. So you're actually giving when you, when you give the counseling your feedback, it helps them see how it has come across. It allows you to also check your own accuracy in hearing what the counseling has said. So when you respond, or when you reflect, now these words are responding or reflecting are interchangeably used to get they, they are classified under the same thing, you either reflect or you're responding is the same thing. So you may see it being used interchangeably. Okay, so it allows the counselor to check their own accuracy in hearing what the counseling has said. It also avoids the illusion that that of understanding that you have understood something.  It also prevents you from that, you know, that that being in that space of a mental vacation in which a counselor may be inattentive during the conversation.  Okay, so that's what it helps. So it makes you also a little bit more responsible of paying very clear attention and not drifting away from what is what is happening. It helps the counseling focus on venting out on sorting out those issues on expressing that feeling and dealing more effectively with the emotion. So that's what it helps them do as they can, as you respond, it continues to help them to be in a place of venting. It also allows the counseling to move to a deeper level of expressions, or of more in depth of what they're going through at the pace that they would like to go through. Okay, so as you respond, it helps them to move through that. It moves from being superficial into being some into being more authentic, like for example, your counseling may start with something that is very evidently wrong in their lives, maybe what what can what is manifested on the outside, right? Like what they may be experiencing, or what they what kind of struggles they're having with somebody. But as you continue to as a counselor response, it gets to become a little more deeper. There is meaning that is attached to maybe the situations that they see, then from that meaning, they go down to what it means for them, or what kind of struggles they are personally facing as a result of what they say. So it trickles down to something a lot more deeper, but there are deeper levels of understanding and expression that takes place when there is good accurate responding that happens from the counselor. Okay, it also helps the counseling to think and articulate more clearly. And the more that you respond, the more the more ground that they get, the more clarity that they get, okay, they are able to read the map much better. It also helps the counseling very often to arrive at a solution of their own, right? They as you keep responding as you keep helping them explode those thoughts and feelings, they themselves can come up with a certain solution or their own problem. It also helps you to clarify what you need to do, what kind of a role as a counselor you're playing there. So through the response of the counseling, through the sharing of the counseling, they will bring about expectations as you continue to respond. And of course, it helps the counselor deal effectively with the problem or the specific needs that that the counselor raises. So when you look at this skill, it's one of the most important skills through counseling, because if we lose it here, our entry into the next few steps can be compromised. So to really understand how and what and just building up on this practice of how do we how we can get there. So in responding skills, what does the counselor do expresses what all that it is, is it's not really a huge thing. If you actually boil down to what it is, it is just the essence of what the content that is what is the content of what they're saying, and the emotion behind it. That's in short, that's what it is. You are looking at the content. And you're also looking at the the the mean, the feeling that goes within it. So when you look at it, responding skills is something like, you know, it's a checking out process. That is, you are expressing this essence of the content and the feeling that has been communicated to you.  So it's important to check out and verify your understanding your perception of the segments of what they are communicating to you. So every segment that they are talking about is capturing a thought, it's capturing a feeling, it's capturing a meaning, or all of this fit together with some theme and which are being connected in some way. So whatever chunks of information they're sharing, you are capturing this back for them, the thought, the feeling, the meaning to it, and you're bringing it back. So in in respond in responding, you're listening to certain bite size pieces of what the counselor is telling you.  So they may like it may be certain paragraphs and you know, you kind of walk in and you kind of respond to that and push back. So when you're checking this communication, it also permits you to actually take in some workable piece of content and feelings. Otherwise, it's so much over the place that even for you, it becomes like a web, you know. So when you break down the conversation in this way, it allows both the counselor, counseling, as well as the counselor to focus on on these manageable segments of a of an entire communication. So that's that's what responding skills does. Now there are five categories of responses of responding skills. And there are five ways that you can do this. And let's just take a look at each of them in detail. And you can actually this these are something that you can, it's not that you have to do all five together. There may be sometimes you do one of them. Sometimes you may do two of them. Sometimes you do something else at the end of the session, you may do one. So it really changes. But it is to know that there are different ways that you can actually bring about a response or a skill of responding. So let's look at the first one. The first one is called the acknowledgement responses. Now what are these? These are brief, you know, your usual one, two, three word statements, or they can be even nonverbal gestures. What do these responses do? It demonstrates to the counseling that you are following the conversation. Okay. And something that we all do, that when you're talking, you say, Oh, okay. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so that's that's a very helpful technique to know that the counseling is being listened to. And there are very certain examples that's there, you know, that that we may say, or, you know, even as you are conversing, you may find that you do use this. So these are called acknowledgement responses that you are at the pace of the counseling, you are going with them. Now, these may look really simple and really silly, but these are very, very effective in good listening. It helps listen better.  All of that really helps to to express to the counseling that you are part with them. Okay. Are you all with me? Everybody is there with me? Yes, please. Great. Okay. All right. So, so that's the first one. That's acknowledgement responses. Now, we're going to be looking at another one of responding skills is reflecting content. Now remember, for anyone who joined in late, reflecting and responding are used interchangeably. Okay, so don't let those words throw you out. These are, these are words that you use together. Okay. So, reflecting content. Now, what is reflecting content mean? Here, you are listening accurately to the to the counseling and you are reflecting the essence of the content in your own words. Okay. That's all that there is. They're saying something. You're listening carefully and you're reflecting the, the essence of the content to the, to the, to the counseling. So, what you're doing is you're focusing on the content of what the counseling is saying to you, which includes, now it matters what they're including. They may include thoughts. They may include ideas, facts, data. So, in content reflection, when you're doing that, the focus is the thoughts and ideas of the matter or the subject of the particular communication. If you look at the example here, here, the counseling says, my brother and I have been like cats and dogs. All right. So, you're, and the counselor says, so your brother and you have been fighting a lot recently. Right. So, it's the same content, but using it in a different, different, in using your own words. Now, why is this useful? One, it enables you to check your understanding of the content of what is being communicated to you. So, like for example, let's suppose the client, the counseling is using this. I have been like cats and dogs. Now, I know it means certain things, but there can be very many times that counselors may not even understand the meaning of that, you know, and may say it like maybe in his house, he's got cats and dogs that are very friendly. I don't know. Okay. So, what you're doing here is you are reflecting that content and you're changing it, especially when they use jargons. And there are times that, you know, especially well-read counselors or those who are very, very highly intellectual, literal, literate will give you philosophies. You know, they will not come to the point, but they will, they will make it into a philosophy so much so that, you know, you really have to break it down to simple language and bring it out, you know, and make it as simple as, you know, so they may give you like a story or they may give you like an anecdote or an example of something like a parable and then you'll have to actually break that down. Okay. So, this enables you to check your understanding of what they have said.  It also reduces repetition on the part of the counseling because you are able to confirm that you have understood. Okay.  Okay. Something like that if he says it and you haven't responded and you're looking very blankly at the face and then, you know, they may continue to repeat. So, that it avoids that. Okay. It helps you as a counselor give the counseling feedback on how they are coming across, which sometimes is a, is very insightful to them because, you know, as you're listening, it gives them insights about how they are communicating or about what they are saying or about what they're understanding. So, they may say something like, oh, maybe I wasn't really clear about that, but, you know, this is what I was trying to say. So, they may become very, they may be very cryptic, but when you're actually reflecting this content, certain things that they, that they would have wanted to say, but they didn't really specify, generally comes out at points of time like this when you are reflecting that. Okay. It also helps the counseling have some direction and work towards a solution to a concern or a problem. So, reflecting content is very, very important. Just, I mean, it looks really, really simple. It looks really straightforward, but the effect, the impact it has on the counseling is massive. Okay. So, let's do a quick example here. All right. And see how do we reflect content in this, in these examples? Okay. So, I've put two examples. So, the counselor is saying, this is probably the worst, the probably the worst class I have is literature.  Okay. And they're talking about their literature class. So how do you respond with this content? Okay. This is practice time. Okay. So, everybody jump in. Really? Go ahead, Che. Oh, you said really? Is that what you said? Okay. Really? Am I correct? That's the, that's the acknowledgement response. This is the reflection. You're reflecting the content of what the counselor is saying. Anybody, come on.  Please, please join the gang. Okay. Literature is a difficult subject for you. Okay. All right. You mean the class is boring? Okay. All right. Okay.  I thank you, thank you for bringing that because see the way that it sounded to you is that it's boring. Right. And when you're actually reflecting your understanding, they will come back and say something to you. Okay. Good. Good. Keep trying. Good. You really don't like literature, don't you? Okay. You don't seem to like your literature classes much. What other classes are bad? Okay. Good. Good. Well, sorry. Go ahead. I didn't, didn't hear the whole thing. It seems you do not like the literature class. Okay. Good. Okay. So this is fairly very simple.  So good. You know, say all that you're doing is just reflecting back. Let's look at the next one. This has been a really rough year. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Am I on the right? Yeah. Okay. This has been a really rough year for me. How would you respond to this one? This has been a rough year for me. Has anyone responded? You mean things are not going well with you this year. Okay. Good. Good. You seem overwhelmed by the complexity of this subject. Okay. That was great. Great. Okay. So yeah, I think, I think you, you'll have lots of ups and downs this year for you. Great. Good. So you've got the idea. Right.  Right. Is this anything? Is there anything? Is there anything? Is there anything that didn't go well with you? Okay. You're reflecting content here. So the best thing to do over here is avoid questions. Okay. It really helps to avoid questions. Now, I mean, statements are fine. Like, I think one, someone's written lots of ups and downs this year for you. I mean, that's like you are reiterating something and they may say, yeah, that's right. Okay. But avoiding questions as to is this, you know, is there anything that else that didn't go well with you? Stay with what the person is talking. So that's what we follow in responding, reflecting content. So let's go to the next one. Reflecting feeling. Okay.  Reflecting feeling is you're listening accurately and you are responding to the feeling component of the communication that the councillor has said. So it is listening and naming the emotional state of the other person in your own words. Now, this involves stating a feeling word that really captures the emotion of the councillor. So what it means is it involves expressing in your own words those essential feelings that are stated or which is implied. They may not state it, but they may imply it in some way in their communication. Now, the purpose of reflecting feeling is to bring vague feelings or expressions of feelings into very clear awareness. So, you know, very often others talk about their feelings as it or them as the feelings were not a part of themselves. So what you're doing is to really help to bring into a complete awareness as they are talking or as on what they are feeling. And I think this is very important for us as those who are in the ministry of helping to have an understanding of the different kinds of feeling words. Often we have these three upset, upset, sad, depressed, maybe two, three, excited. Okay. But there are so many more. And you know, you just look up listening, I mean, sorry, the feeling words, you will find a whole lot of a spectrum of that. And it's good to know, it's good to keep, to build your vocabulary on that, because it really works to reflect this feeling. Okay. Now, when you reflect feelings, it also, what it does is it assists the counseling to own their feelings that this is my feelings. Now feelings are often very central are more central than the content in the other person's conversation. Okay. Now, even as even though they're giving you a lot more content, it is laden with emotion. Okay. And 80 to 90% of counselors will not state an emotion will not state a feeling. And that is our job to be able to bring out and respond to what you think is that they are feeling. Okay. So, and, and as they are becoming more aware, you know, either of their both their positive or their negative feelings, it is important that they need to express that, especially when they have strong emotions. And this reflecting exercise allows the counseling to repeat and participate in this process. Okay. So look at this example, it says, the counseling says, it seems that no matter how hard I try, or how much I do it, I cannot get comfortable with cold calling. Now, this is someone who is, who's a, what do you call them? A telemarketer. Okay. Yeah, telecollar, a telemarketer, who does, you know, who just needs to call people randomly for the business. So it says, she says, it's just so icky to me, but I know that I have to do it to acquire more clients. Okay. And counselor says, and that's frustrating for you, because it's a big part of your job right now. And you wish you could feel more at ease doing it. So here, the, the counseling has not said anything about what they feel about it. But through the sentence, you can, you can deduce that it's something that she has to do, but something that's so hard, and it's becoming very, very frustrating or very annoying, or it's very disturbing to her. Okay. And this is, this is what the counseling expresses. Okay. So that's what listening to the feeling would mean. Okay. Let's, let's, let's look at an example now. Oh, sorry. Okay. So what do you do in, while you're using these feeling reflections, these are, these are some ways that you can begin your response.  It's helpful to understand this, because it, it helps to, you know, how are you going to begin a certain sentence? Okay. So it's just some help on how do you begin the sentence? And these are some ways that you could start, you could begin a sentence. Okay. Yes, Christopher, I think you have a question. Oh, yes. No, actually, I just wanted to make an observation on the, on the previous, on your previous slide on, on cold calling, I think the, the feeling word probably, at least it came to me was this feeling of being icky, you know, you know, that the person was expressing.  And she was expected to get clients by, by calling up companies and in actually not even revealing who she was and which companies she was actually, you know, representing. So she actually had to lie. And that's what actually made her feel, feel quite very, very icky. If that's the right word to use. And that was actually the, the reason why, you know, she didn't want to make these calls, or she didn't actually want to work at this kind of in this, in this company, because she was actually expected that she was trained to lie and, you know, call these companies and, you know, try and get, get an understanding of, you know, some, some prospective clients who could, you know, be candidates for, for certain positions. Yeah. So that's good. So what happens here is like, like Christopher was saying, so let's say the counselor brings in a statement like this, and that's frustrating for you, because it's a big part of your job. I mean, she says that, and then the counselor would probably say, you know, say, yeah, you know, I'm very uncomfortable with it. And maybe then it's where you explore a bit more, what frustrates you about cold calling? Okay.  Could you flesh that out a little bit for me? What, what do you feel when you're actually cold calling? So that, you know, when you're doing that, that really helps to it builds a lot more depth about, and they're able to also articulate, okay, this is what I don't like about cold calling. And, and they will find a lot more of, you know, depth into what is going on. Yeah. So yeah, so that's, that's, thank you for that. Yeah. Okay. So let's take an example. So your counselor says, this sure has been a horrible week. Nothing went right at the job. And my wife and I argued all the time. So how would you like to reflect the feeling in this? Okay, you can put down your responses on the chat. So how do you reflect the feeling in this one? You sound upset. Okay, it looks like you had a tough week at work and on the person in front, or you sound disappointed. Okay. Good. Good. What about the rest? Some more, some more responses. You must be feeling messed up. Okay. Okay. Good. So, so there, there again, you're getting the flow. Okay.  So, so, you know, they will, they will learn to explore that a little bit more. Okay. Good. The fourth one is reflecting meaning. Now, what does this mean? So we went through reflecting content. Is that a question? Yes, Samuel, you have a question. Thank you, Pastor. Pastor, in the previous one, so there were two, the, the councillor was giving two things, saying two things. One was rough week at work and fighting with the wife. I think it would be, I mean, I was connecting the two. And is, is that something we should avoid? Or like, because the councillor is clearly saying two things, like he's saying, I had a very rough week at work and I also had a fight with my wife. And so it was more like, you know, is it because the rough week at work, which led him to fight with the wife every day. So I was about to make that connection. So that would probably be in, in the next one that we're talking about, about reflecting meaning, where you are connecting something together, right, where you are reflecting, you're not just listening, but you reflected the content and the feeling. So you, that's what you're doing. And that's what we are going into. Okay. So that's what you've probably, when you've fit the two together, connected the two together, you've made some kind of a meaning out of that. And that's what you are reflecting to the, to the thing or you're saying something like, you know, you feel, you feel quite tired out because these things aren't going well for you. And you feel one feeds into the other. So you've made a meaning out of that. Okay. And that's what this would mean. So reflecting feeling is where you are listening carefully. And you are combining the feeling and the content. So you're reflecting the essence of both the content and the feeling. Now, reflecting meanings is, you know, often the content and the feelings are usually tied together. And that's where you use words like because or when, okay. And if you, when you connect, you will use those words like because or when. So this involves understanding and reflecting the feeling and the related content in your own words. So the formula that usually, that you see that, that usually that take places, you feel really so, so here the counselor says, I just don't understand my boss. One minute he has one thing to say. And the other he changes it completely. Okay. So you could say things like you feel really confused by him, because he seems so fickle minded. Okay. So I'm sorry that I hadn't put that up. So the general formula that you will use is you feel something about something or you feel something when something or you feel something because something. So this is the way in which you put it together. So listening well involves the reflecting meanings. And if you can use all of these that we describe together, you know, it really helps to reflect the essence of, of what your counselor is saying. Okay. So let's look at another example on this. Okay. My supervisor is always after me, micromanaging me. He just has no clue how hard I work. How would you reflect meaning in this one? What is he trying to say here? Okay. So try and make meaning just not the feeling. Okay. So don't just say, okay, you seem to be upset, you seem to be, but use the because or the that or something where you're attaching the meaning. Yes, Shay, please go ahead. It looks like your supervisor doesn't believe in your strength, in your competence. That's why yeah, it looks like your supervisor doesn't believe in your competence. That was that's what I would say. Yeah. All right. Okay. That's good. That's good. So there's another one you feel your supervisor doesn't trust you enough. He's keeping a close eye. Okay. Remember feeling and remember, you know, try and use the formula as best as possible because then, you know, you're sure you won't really go wrong there. Okay. So so something that you could also say, you know, you feel it's it's very important for you that your supervisor recognizes your hard work. So here he hasn't said that, but you're making meaning to it that, you know, it's really important for you. I just sense that you feel it's it's important for you that that he recognizes your work. I mean, although you're frustrated with what he's doing, you are still hoping that he will recognize your hard work. So you've kind of made a meaning to that in order to help them understand, you know, that's why you also tend to build a goal on on on on what they would like to work on. Okay. Probably the goal is to maybe go talk to the supervisor and and and that's that's when you when you're reflecting a meaning like that, it helps to build that up. Okay. I think some more responses. It seems you think that your supervisor's on your tail and that he doesn't see the effort you put into what you do. Yeah. Excellent. Good. Good. Good job. Okay. So let's go to the next. Okay, I'm just going to skip that. The last one is reflective summarizing. Now, what is this? This is you are listening accurately. And as well, you are reflecting the main points that is usually reflective summarizing happens maybe at the end of a session or at the end of, you know, a big part or a big size piece of the communication that they're saying. So it really reflects the main points of what what is being said. So summarizing really condenses all that a person has person has said in two or three statements. And this process requires that that you have heard those manageable segments. So when you're able to kind of, you know, like let's say, it's a 15 minute conversation. And every three minutes, you've kind of now this is just for our understanding, you don't do it every three minutes, you do it as in when, you know, you do find a need or, you know, there are important thing pointers done. That process of reflecting requires that you hear that. And following each of those segments, you are actually expressing your perception of that entire segment and checking that accuracy with the with your with the counseling. Okay.  How do you figure out? How do you do it? What is the process of of responding? Is there is there a specific, you know, does it involve something? And I just put this down because I think it really helps to understand. So there are four processes to it. Okay. Or this is the way that you would do it. The first is you're taking in cues. And as your counseling is talking, you listen and record cues in these three areas. One is the content that is what they're actually stating or the content of what they are stating. The second is the feeling that is the feeling that is stated or implied. They may not really say the feeling, but they may imply the feeling and the context is the is what you know, or or you're aware of that is related to the, to the conversation, but maybe isn't communicated where communicated very well. Okay. So, so the, so these are the three things that you would, you would bring up the content, you take the cues of the content, the feelings and the context of what they're saying. Okay. The next you do it, you sort it out. What are you doing? Sorting is you are going through these cues and you're arriving at a certain understanding or let's say a judgment about this particular chunk of information that they've shared, so that you sort it out. Okay. What is important? What should I take? What, what is it that I need to bring back? The third is you come to a conclusion. You're determining what the essence of this communication is and you formulating a certain sentence about what you think that the councillor is trying to say. I'm sorry. And the last one is expressing it, where you're expressing the essence of what you have, of what you have understood.  And you're reflecting this, this as well as the word.  So, in short, this is what you do. You're taking in cues from their conversation.   Now, you need to be careful of something that is called as high risk responses. Now, just quickly, we'll just quickly go through this. These aren't in your notes, but I'm, but then I just, you know, this is just added extra information for you all to understand. Now, what are high risk responses? These are, that is when you're listening to a statement, when you take off the focus from, it is when you take the focus off the councillor and generate negative feelings towards them. These are interfering responses that are inappropriate, especially when the councillor has a very strong need or when there is a specific strong problem or a strong feeling. So, usually people use high risk responses when they are not, when they think they are listening. Okay. Now, the communication, the process of communication is generally frustrated and blocked when you as a councillor use these high risk responses because they are experienced by the councillor as an interference and inappropriate when they have something else that they would want to talk about. Now, these fall under three categories and this is the first one is evaluating and judging. It is what you're doing here is you're changing the focus of the conversation by shifting it from the councillor's concerns to your own interpretation or to your own judgment or your agreement or your disagreement. So, the subtle message is what is being sent. Okay. And the, that subtle message is, you know, here there's something wrong with you and you don't know what you're doing. So, evaluating or judging changes the focus from what they want to share to your own diagnosis or your own interpretation of it. And that is what is called a high risk response. Okay. And some of those, some of those examples that we can look at is, I'm just picking up my examples that I've written here so that I didn't forget. Yeah. So, you may, so certain evaluating or judging would be when you're making evaluations of the other person by disagreeing or agreeing or criticizing or blaming. Like, you know, you're saying, I don't agree with that. Right. Or you're, you're not right on that. Or even for the fact that, you know, you're saying you're absolutely right. Okay.   Or, you know, I don't think you did it right there, isn't it? You know, so that becomes more of an evaluation or a judgment. Okay. The second category is solving. Solving is side tracking your counsellor's communication by moving it to a solution that is generally offered by you. So either, you know, your questions, your advice, or your threats, or your moralizing or problem solving can generally interfere with the, with the counsellor, exploring their thoughts and feelings that lead to solutions which actually address the heart of the matter.   So it puts you up on a one-up position and these responses are inappropriate when, and it can bring the counsellor to be in a place of defense or in a place of quietness and, you know, not really feeling the sense of having brought out whatever has been bothering them. The third one is withdrawing. Withdrawing is distracting the counsellor from their agenda by assuring them that nothing is wrong or everything will be all right or diverting them to another agenda. Okay. Let's, let's talk about this one today. The subtle message that you're giving is, you know, I'm, I don't know what to do with what you have just said over here. Right. That's what, that's the kind of message that you give when you say, no, I don't know why you're feeling so bad. It's, it's absolutely okay.  You've been doing such a, such an excellent job. So what happens in, in this sense of withdrawing is you're, you're reassuring. Okay. Trying to make the other person feel better. You know, you're, you're talking them out of their feelings or you're tending to divert it by, you know, changing the focus by kidding them or doing, we usually do that with children, right?  Now, all of that is what we call as a sense of withdrawing. Now, these are certain responses that we have to be extremely careful about. Okay. All right. So this is part of responding, understanding what responding is. Now, is there, is there, is there any, any question here? Any, any specific question before we stop for a break and come back? Okay. All right. So what we're going to do is we're going to come back and I'll tell you what we're going to do once we get back. So you can get a nice hot cup of coffee, some biscuits.  Meet you in 10 minutes, 10.53 on my clock. We'll meet at 11.03.


Welcome to Social Media Strategist. My name is Debbie Fierst and I'll be your instructor. I've been working with social media platforms since they were first introduced. Every day, I consult with small businesses all the way through corporate Fortune 500 organizations as they work to create successful social media programs inside of their organization. During this course, I hope to help you make your social media endeavor successful as well. Let's start by defining social media. When we talk about social media, we're referring to any form of electronic communication like websites through which users create online communities and relationships and share all sorts of information from personal messages, ideas, news, images, videos, any type of content. And there are hundreds of social media sites, but they tend to fall into some broad categories. The categories that we're going to look at are currently defined as the most common types of social media sites. However, there are additional types of social media sites that we're not going to be focusing on. For instance, there are social gaming sites and virtual worlds. This is where people do everything from role-playing games to playing poker, multiplayer online world games, a simulated environment, and there we do see people sharing information and we do see them building relationships, but we're going to be focusing on the types of social media sites that apply most in the business world. So let's start by defining blogs. A blog is where an author will post an entry that could be anything from a news article to a personal opinion piece. And with that entry, they usually include images and videos. Blogs are an environment where readers can read these blog entries and then post comments and give their opinions on what the author posted. The most common blog platforms that we see today would be WordPress and Blogger. The second type of social media platform would be Microblogs. A microblog is similar to a blog, but of course, micro means small and so authors don't post long entries into a microblog. These are short status updates, often with a link to some longer content perhaps, but they're designed to be up-to-the-minute thoughts or trends. And a couple of common microblogging sites today would be Twitter and Tumblr. The third category of social media platforms that we see today are image sharing sites. This is where users upload, share, and comment on images. Two popular image sharing sites would be Instagram and Flickr. Another type of social media platform would be Social Networks. This is where members can connect with other people and share personal information, their interests, photos, status updates. Two common social network platforms would be Facebook and Google Plus. The next type of social media platform would be Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites allow users to create, annotate, edit, and share actual URL bookmarks to other content on the internet. Could be interesting news articles, any links that someone finds interesting. Once these links are shared with the community, they're tagged and organized and sometimes voted on. Some examples would be Dig or Delicious or StumbleUpon. Let's talk about geolocation sites. This is where users note their location and this allows them to find nearby services such as stores or restaurants. So I let the system know that let's say I'm in Detroit, Michigan and I'm looking for a theater and the site will bring to my attention all of the available theaters within a certain distance. Not only can I share my location and find services, but I see other users' reviews and who is sharing information about that service. Another type of social media platform would be Video Sharing. This is where users upload, share, and comment on videos and two common platforms would be YouTube and Vine. We also see a category called Podcasts. With podcasting, users download and listen to audio recordings and content is often syndicated and streamed on a regular basis like daily or weekly. So you can follow a podcast of one of your favorite podcasters. Two very common podcasting platforms would be iTunes or SkyDrive. Now let's talk about social news. In this category of social media sites, members actually submit stories or links to news articles and other people vote on the value of the content. Two popular examples would be Reddit and Newsvine. And then finally, we have Knowledge Sites. A Knowledge social media site is where users post questions and answers and people vote on the best answers. Two examples would be Ask and Yahoo and people can post questions and answers about anything from technical questions to health issues. So these are the most common social media platform categories. But within these categories, there are dozens of sites. I'm only giving you some of the most popular. In order to understand social media, you need to have an understanding of each one of these different types. We'll be talking about some of them in more detail later. Let's talk about the evolution of marketing in general. In the past, and not that long ago, social interactions were primarily face to face. Your audience was local and it was difficult to scale beyond your local environment.  People were focused on their local barber or their local pharmacy. People didn't travel and they weren't as connected as they are today. And so if you own one of those businesses and you were trying to market, you primarily marketed to people who could actually walk into your door. Currently, our social interactions are more virtual. The audience is global and because of the internet, it's easy to reach. So let's talk about the types of engagement marketing-wise that we saw in past generations. If you think about it, if you wanted to market years ago, you had to put up a sign on a billboard or broadcast over whatever your current technology was of the day, whether it was the radio or the television. But a lot of your advertising was done in physical print, newspapers, magazines, brochures, and things that you mailed to people's homes. We call that traditional marketing. Then we began to evolve into what we call digital marketing. As we became more connected and computers became a part of everyday business, people started to advertise in ways that reached beyond their local community. For instance, when email became popular, we had a mechanism to send out email blasts and you could start reaching beyond your local market. As websites began to emerge, you started to see people advertise with banner ads or little advertisements alongside of a website. And as people started to create their own websites for their businesses, they started to do things related to advertising on search engines. But this was not really as global as we see today. Currently, because of social media marketing, marketing has become very highly engaged. We don't just place a banner ad on a website and hope that somebody sees it and reacts to it. Instead, because of social media and how personal social media is, we have ways to interject and weave marketing into the social media sites that people visit every day. I mentioned blogs when we talked about the types of social media platforms. So let's say that someone has a blog about eating properly. And let's say that they're into paleo diets. If you like the paleo diet and you go to a blog every day and read about that, you might begin posting things about articles that you read on Facebook. And Facebook is a platform that businesses can advertise on. And as they begin to see that you have an interest in paleo diet, they can start to feed you very personalized advertising that might be interesting to someone who enjoys paleo eating. This is highly engaged marketing because these are personal relationship communities, networks. Not only are you targeting very individual needs and preferences, but you are beginning to have access to each person's extended network. So marketing has evolved from a very low engagement traditional marketing all the way up to what we see today. Social media marketing. What are the benefits of social media to organizations? Let's start by talking about an expanded online presence. Businesses have had websites for a long time, but social media offers multiple avenues for getting your audience to access your information, products and services. Ideally, you want to increase the number of links to your organization's website by posting news and articles, images and videos in all of these social media platforms that drive that traffic back. By having all of these different avenues, you can reach more customers. Another benefit would be building your reputation as a thought leader. Every business wants to be known as the expert in their industry. And you want to use as many opportunities as you can for demonstrating your expertise. Social media gives you a platform for posting articles, asking and answering questions and providing new insights and quality content that is going to allow you to gain a following of people who find you intriguing and helpful. Another benefit of social media is the ability to conduct market research. Social media platforms provide a plethora of information every day. People are posting their comments, their opinions, their reacting to other people positively and negatively. They are up to the minute responding to things that happen on television and on radio. Just sitting back and listening and watching would allow you to learn what is important to your audience and in turn, your customers. You can watch and analyze your competition to see how people are reacting to them and moves that they make.  Another benefit of social media to a business would be just the general increase of marketing, advertising and sales opportunities. As I talked about earlier, launching a targeted campaign to people who like paleo diets versus putting up a billboard and hoping that people who just drive past it, one or two of them are going to be paleo likers, that's very targeted marketing. It gives you an ability to be very specific in your advertising and social media is rich with those opportunities because you have customer profile information at your fingertips. You can reach audiences that have been completely unavailable in the past. The goal of social media in terms of advertising is to get people to like you so much that they become a fan or a follower. You might even be able to pull away customers from your competition. Another benefit of social media is the ability to just build brand awareness and brand advocacy. Now your brand of course is your identity, your image, all of the things that surround what you offer as an organization. And so social media is going to allow you to expand your online presence and drive traffic to your websites, to your information and as people read things that you post, like things and share things, that's going to increase your search engine optimization, the number of links that are out there for Google and other search engines to index. What you hope is that you're going to generate all of that traffic related to your brand into positive feedback and peer reviews and gain what we call brand advocates.  Another benefit of social media is the ability to improve event management. Now what do we mean by an event? It could be anything from a book signing to a convention. It could be that you're having a launch party for a new product, a ribbon cutting, any type of business related event. Social media gives you a platform for putting out your event details, updates, and resources that would be valuable to anyone who's going to be involved. You could post frequently asked questions, you could provide support, directions, and as the event takes on a life of its own and unfolds, you hope that the audience is going to like it so much that they'll share photos and status updates and give post event feedback that drives more traffic to your brand. Another benefit of social media is that it gives you another avenue to provide customer support and relationship management. You want to make it easy for your customers to gain access to technical support, information about your products, if they have a problem or need to return something, you want them to have a mechanism for getting the information they need. The days of calling an 800 support line or writing in to a company on paper are long past. People are already on social media, and so if they have an issue, they want to be able to take their issue to you on social media. This platform allows organizations to respond quickly, escalate issues when they need to be escalated, and think about it, you could post questions and answers in online help that clients can access 24 hours a day. Essentially, unmanned technical support. Another benefit to an organization would be to engage and motivate employees. This is something people don't commonly think about related to social media. They're thinking about their customers, but you have people who work for you and they want to feel connected. They too use social media. And so by getting involved in social media, you show your current employees and even prospective employees that you are keyed in. You're involved. There are benefits to working with your organization. You enhance employee motivation because they feel more connected.


Sensory processing sensitivity, characterized by deeper cognitive, sensory and emotional information processing, has been previously related to several mental health problems. However, the studies are rare, and an integration of the obtained findings needs to be addressed. We conducted a systematic review of studies using scientific databases in order to integrate the available information about sensory processing sensitivity and its consequences in mental health. Thirteen studies were included and analyzed in the review. According to these studies, high levels of sensory processing sensitivity might be related to the appearance of several mental health disturbances, such as anxiety or depression. This article was authored by Borja Costa Lopez, Nicolas Ruiz-Robaldillo, Rosario Ferrecascales, and others.


That was like a breakthrough for me. I was there and someone showed up as I'm working at the plancha. It represents this multi-billion dollar real estate company. This guy said, do you want a restaurant in Malibu? I'm like, no, I definitely don't. He's like, what do you have to lose? And at the time, I had just saved up like my first ever $20,000. I'm like, I have that to lose. They pitched me on a summer long pop-up inside Malibu Village. Ended up having a couple of conversations with their team. I was like, all right, I'll see if they bite. Had a Zoom with their executive team and they're like, yeah, we love it, but you have to do it in like a month. That was the stipulation.


Oh, hi, Andres. Oh, thank you. Yeah. So hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me. I'm Ying Tong. I'm a research scientist at the Ethereum Foundation. And I also work part-time as a quantum computing research assistant. So today, I'm going to tell you about succinct proofs for scaling Ethereum. And if this title makes no sense to you right now, then you're in the right place, because it's going to make perfect sense at the end of the talk. So before I get properly started, I'm just going to go high level and ask a show of hands who has heard of a blockchain. Yeah, pretty much everyone. Who thinks they know how to describe a blockchain? Yes, Ilya does. OK, cool. Well, so Ilya, correct me if I'm wrong. How I describe a blockchain is basically a replicated state machine on a network of peers. So what a state machine is, it's basically a program that maintains some kind of state. So for example, a list of accounts and a list of balances in each account. And it's able to update this state when it receives transactions from the outside world. So it's able to make a state transition from one state to the next. And what Ethereum does is it takes this state machine and it distributes it across a peer-to-peer network so that every peer in the network has to maintain the same copy of the state machine and has to update it with the same transactions. And when you have a bunch of transactions and you put them together, we call that a block. And when each block refers cryptographically to the one that came before it, you call it a chain, so that's a blockchain. Is that right Ilya? Cool. So the thing about peer-to-peer replicated state machines naively is that they don't scale very well. And this is because basically there's a lot of requirements for a full node. A full node needs to maintain a full state, number one. It needs to maintain the full set of transactions. So like every block that comes in, the full node needs to respond to it, take note of it. And lastly, this is also a real kicker. The full node needs to make sure that all the transactions are valid. And the only way to do this really is by re-executing all the transactions as they come in. So this is a lot of work and this puts a limit on the transaction throughput. Basically, it's limited by the computational power of the weakest node. So if we make the block sizes too big, we try to process too many transactions per block. We're gonna get a lot of weaker machines just dropping out of the network because they're unable to handle that kind of throughput. So yeah, so this is the scaling bottleneck and this is the problem we're gonna try to solve today. So the first, the most fundamental approach to solving scaling is called layer one scaling. So this is not the topic of my talk. I'm gonna just skim through this really quickly. So layer one scaling, actually you guys can talk to Ilya about it. Layer, yeah, he works at Zilica, which is a sharded blockchain. So basically it splits up the network into different shards and so nodes on each shard only need to basically validate transactions on their own shard. And you run into all kinds of interesting problems. For example, how shards talk to each other. Yeah, and we can discuss this later after my talk. So this is trying to increase throughput on layer one itself, but a different strategy to scaling. Oh, this is Ethereum 2.0, the basically our vision of a sharded Ethereum, coming soon, anytime between now and 2022. So that's layer one scaling. Another strategy for scaling is called layer two scaling. So instead of trying to increase throughput on the chain, what we do is instead move as much as possible off the chain. So we wanna move all our difficult computations all the heavy workload somewhere off chain. And how this works naive, the most naive way to do this is through a side chain. So if this is your main Ethereum blockchain, you would first want to somehow transfer your assets to somewhere off chain.  And from then on, it's understood that you're entering this off chain world. And on this off chain world, you don't need all the peers to agree on everything you're doing. You don't need to pay people to maintain like a replicated state machine for you. All you need is one operator to perform your transactions for you. So this could be a visa. This could be like my computer, and the thing is that this is gonna be cheap because it's just one person doing it. And at some point, once you're done cheaply performing all the transactions you want, you at some point want to commit the results back on chain.  But what I wanna ask now is, can anyone see any problems with this naive approach? Do I see a hand? Yes. And then if it's like, then it disrupts the whole chain. And also you come in? Yeah, yeah. Basically like the idea is correct that what happens off chain is really, like it's the wild, wild West because you don't have the security of all your peers in a network validating every single transaction that the operator is claiming to make. And so at the end of the daily operator can commit some state on chain. But how do we know? Oh, right. But how do we know that this result was arrived at through a series of valid and legal transactions? There's no way for us to verify that. So that's the problem we run into in layer two scaling. How can we be sure that the state transitions made were all valid? One way to do it is to simply, require that the operator literally publishes all every single action that they made on chain. And then once that's on chain, then we can verify that on chain. But you see, then that's totally missing the point. The point was that we did not want to do all these transactions on chain where it's expensive. So what we would like, so yeah, what we would like is some way to verify that they've performed valid transactions. And there are two classes of solutions broadly that try to provide some certainty for layer two computation. The first class is called fraud proofs, or informally it's known as plasma in the Ethereum world. And basically, plasma involves an exit game that allows anyone to challenge what they consider an invalid state transition. So for example, if I've made some transactions off chain, but I don't see them being reflected on chain, then I can send a challenge to the smart contract and dispute the operator's actions where it matters. The second, and this happens, but note that this happens after the state transition has already been made off chain. The second class of solutions is called validity proofs and more informally it's called rollups. So validity proofs take on a different strategy in that they require the operator to prove that their state transition was valid at the time of making it. So it's not the case that the operator can do something illegal and then be challenged or not challenged about it. Validity proofs make it such that the operator cannot do anything illegal. So validity proofs are gonna be the strategy that I'm focusing on today. Right. So like I said, it's informally known as rollup and what it does is requires each state transition to prove its validity before it's accepted on chain. So how this looks like in a picture, we have some state one on chain and we have a bunch of transactions that happened off chain and we would like to go to some state two. But in between, we want to be able, we want some kind of proof of these transactions here, some kind of proof that they were processed in a valid way. And more precisely, we want to be able to verify this proof on chain. So if you recall once again, the point is that we do not want to do a lot of work. If the naive way to verify it is simply replay every single transaction. We don't want to do that. So if possible, we want to verify this proof as efficiently as possible. We want this proof to be as small as possible. So we're looking for a succinct proof, a short proof that can be efficiently verified in a very short time. And what if I told you that for any program, any arbitrary program, there is a way to produce a constant size proof. Like how much shorter can you get than that? A constant size proof that takes constant time to verify. Well, you can do that. And oh, by the way, if anyone has any questions at any point, please stop me. Okay. So yeah, how do we get a constant size proof that can be verified in constant time? So we use ZK-SNARKS. ZK-SNARKS stands for zero knowledge, succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge. And we're gonna break this down right now. So I'm gonna talk specifically about graph 16. It's a ZK-SNARK construction that's the most efficient known one, meaning it produces the shortest proofs that we know of. What do you mean by constant size proof? The constant size proof means that no matter how large your program is, you only need a constant number, a constant size information to prove that it was performed correctly. So we'll get more concrete later on, but in this case, for graph 16, a proof consists of three group elements. And that's never gonna change no matter the size of your program. Yeah. So, right. So what a ZK-SNARK does is it takes a circuit. So this is any arbitrary program you want. It takes some public information about this circuit. So some public inputs and a public output. And basically, from then on, it's a game between the prover and the verifier. The prover must somehow convince the verifier that they have a solution that satisfies this circuit. So a solution meaning they have a set of intermediate gates and possibly some private inputs that the verifier doesn't know about, such that when these are put through the circuit, they map the public inputs to the expected public output. And it is key to note here that it is key to note that the verifier cannot know the intermediate gates and the private inputs. By the way, gates, I will explain it later. Gates are basically how we do computations in a circuit. But yeah, it's zero knowledge in that all the verifier knows is the public inputs, the public outputs and the circuit. And the verifier has to be convinced that the prover has a correct solution. And as we mentioned, this proof must be succinct. It has to be verified efficiently compared to how long you took to compute the proof. You must be able to verify it way faster than that. And we also want soundness and completeness. So completeness, first of all, it just means that for every correct solution, you must be able to convince the verifier. So you must be able to generate a valid proof that is accepted. And soundness, it just means almost the inverse that for an incorrect solution, you should never be able to produce a proof that convinces the verifier. Well, it's important to note here that DK Snarks only give you probabilistic soundness, meaning that there is a negligible chance that someone with a wrong set of inputs could still produce a proof that convinces the verifier. And we'll see how that happens later on. As I mentioned, this is a constant size proof and constant time verification. Any questions? Yes. I have a question. So when you talk about circuits as a computational model, how expressive can we compile the program into a complete language into a circuit? Yes. So there's actually a theorem that any program can be reduced to basically a circuit, basically addition and multiplication gates over a finite field. But the caveat is that this field has to be large enough to basically contain like your computation. Yeah. Did I skip a slide? I did. Oh, right. And so this is an example of what we might want to do in a circuit. There's a little preview of what rollup does and how it works. But I just put the preview here so that you can see roughly the structure, how there's a public input and public output and some private inputs that must not be known to the verifier. But we'll go through the logic of this later on. How am I doing on time? I'm doing real. Okay. I'm doing half a period. Okay, cool, cool. So yeah, I think by this point, everyone knows what a circuit is. It's a series of addition and multiplication gates. So for example, a fan in two-circuit just takes in two values and either adds or multiplies them and gives an output. And you can basically generalize arithmetic circuits. Oh, what I'm doing right now, by the way, is taking you through very quickly the construction of growth 16. So ZK Snarks are also known as like moon math, because a lot of people think it's some kind of magic. It's really not. And so you'll see exactly how unmagical it is. So right, we all know a circuit, boring. So right now what we're gonna do is generalize an arithmetic circuit to a system of arithmetic constraints. And you can convince yourself by looking at this system of linear combinations that they are general enough to express anything that you might wanna say with addition and multiplication gates. Once we have that, we can, from a system of arithmetic constraints, we can generate a quadratic arithmetic program. So I wouldn't worry about this too much. It's basically another way to represent the same information. Did I wanna say anything else? No, I guess that's it, yeah. So from a quadratic arithmetic program, we can then generate a non-interactive linear proof. So this, actually this step is one of the more important steps, because this step is where you introduce the probabilistic part of the construct. So basically the non-interactive linear proof, you lose like your 100% certainty and you're only left with sort of a very high probability that the proof that you're accepting is for a valid witness. And basically this is, this makes use of something called the Schwarz Zippolema. Oh, was I not supposed to move? It's all right. All right. The Schwarz Zippolema, which is a statement about the nature of polynomials and how many points to distinct polynomials can intersect it. So basically it places an upper bound on the probability of someone finding a valid proof, even with a wrong set of inputs. So there's only so much probability that you're gonna be convinced by an incorrect input. And from non-interactive linear proof, we then do this final compilation. So this was an information theoretic sort of compilation. And from here to here, it's just a purely cryptographic compilation. So we use this trick called biolinear pairings to intuitively move these computations up into the exponent of our group elements. And the reason why we want to do this is basically to shrink the size of our proof. And what we can see in this construction is that we can shrink the proof down to just three group elements. Actually, I do have slides for that as well. But I think I'm just gonna skim third is really fast. So like I said, the proof size is three group elements. And what the verification entails is just checking that these group elements, when put together, fulfill a sudden equality. So it's a pairing product equation in the biolinear group. Yeah. Very nice question. So could you please give some information why conducting the verification with this given circuit is actually cheaper process than just propagating this computation and taking the output of this? Yeah. I think intuitively you can think of it. So these, this class of constructions, they're called pre-processing snarks because basically a lot of the work is being done beforehand by the provers. So in the setup phase and in the proving phase, actually most of the work is done here in multi-exponentiation. So that means that we are minimizing as much as we can the work that the verifier has to do by shifting it to the prover. Okay, then another question. So prover is an adversarial entity, right? So how can we make sure that the prover actually gave us a correct setup? Oh yeah, no, that's a great point. So yeah, actually that is a problem with ZK Snarks is that with the setup, a malicious party could actually generate bad proofs. So that's why in ZK Snarks we call this a trusted setup. And yeah, it is completely possible for a prover to break the soundness of the scheme if they choose to abuse the trusted setup. Yeah. But is there a cheap way to validate the former setup? Just not pre-do it in the same thing, but. I don't know of any way around this trusted setup. I don't know that proof-carrying code for example, so the prover need to provide a certificate to the construction that they have done in actually following the rules. For sure. I might be knowing what I'm talking about and just asking how that can be prevented. I do have a slide at the end talking about exactly this. Yeah, about how we deal with the trusted setup problem. Yeah, but it is a problem. So I think that's all the math I have actually. Yes, that's all the math I have. So now that we have hopefully some intuition about ZK Snarks and Groth 16, basically taking a large computation, compressing it down into a small proof, we can start thinking about how to apply this such that it's useful on Ethereum. So basically if you recall our problem statement, we wanted the ZK Snark here, right? We wanted some succinct proof that represents a larger computation such that the work that we do on chain is just constant time verification. So this is where the ZK Snark will sit in our scheme. Yeah, so this is an overview of how we're doing it. So like I mentioned before, it's kind of like a mini blockchain. So we do maintain a state of accounts and balances and information about these accounts. And then we accept transactions that change the state of these accounts. And we want to prove with each batch of transactions that we followed certain rules, that we followed the protocol. So, and we want to prove this in a second. In a succinct way. So I will take you through an example because that's the easiest way to explain it. So consider accounts A and B and consider a transaction from B to A of $1, right? So I'm gonna take you through basically what our circuit should enforce. So first of all, our circuit should check that the transaction was signed by the sender. And we can do this using signing and verification algorithms. Secondly, our circuit should check that the sender account actually exists in this state. So what we can do is actually put all the accounts into this construction called a Merkle Trink. It's a kind of accumulator that basically commits to a state using a very short route. So what we do is at each level of the tree, we perform a cryptographic hash function of the two children, the two child nodes. And we go up this way through the tree until at the top we're only left with one route that commits to all these children below. So if we want to convince ourselves that some account actually exists in the tree, all we need to do is provide a path that goes from this account to the top of the route. And in this case, we need the sibling node here. And we get this inner node. And then we need its sibling node to get this inner node. And then finally, that sibling node. So we're convinced that B has signed a transaction that this account actually exists. And we can move on and go ahead and update the state of B. So we debit $1 from B's balance and we increase the nonce of this account. So it's made one transaction. And then we use the exact same path to this time to alter the state route. So to reflect that the state of B has changed. And we get a new state route. Afterwards, we basically do the exact same thing for A. So in this new state route, we check that A exists by again giving the Merkle path. We update the state of A. And then we hash A all the way up again to get our final state route. Yeah. So that's what the circuit is doing. So, yeah. This is exactly what we just went through. Seven, no, eight steps. And we can generalize this scheme to take in multiple transactions at a time, not just one transaction. All we need to do is provide all the intermediate state routes between each update. Any questions? Okay, cool. So yeah. And now we're back here and in this diagram and I hope it makes a lot more sense now. So we are sending in some transaction from a sender to a receiver for some amount. And this has to happen with reference to a certain state route. And at the end of it, we hope to get out our new state route, our final state route. Yeah. And what we can do as well is remember all the proofs and Merkle paths and signatures that we needed to convince ourselves it was a valid transaction. We can push all of that into the private inputs. And you might wanna do this for a number of reasons. First of all, you just might not want somebody to know this information. But secondly, private inputs actually reduce the cost of computing a proof. So the more stuff you can push in here, the better. So why not just push everything in here? It's because we would like to have some information be publicly committed to the Ethereum blockchain. So we do want all the deltas or all the changes caused by the transactions to be made publicly available. And this is so that anyone looking at this record can essentially backtrack and recreate the latest state. So we're not held hostage by any one controller of this data. And if at any point the operator decides to leave or cheat, someone else can just look at all these public inputs and reconstruct this thing and pick up where he left off. Yeah. Wrap up. Okay, I think I'm almost done. We have another construction that pushes more things into private inputs and that comes with its own trade-offs as well. Yeah, I think I had a few slides that go into, oh yeah, that go into like this particular design that I was part of implementing. But instead of taking you through that, I'll just play a little quick demo. Oh, or will I? No, I won't. Oh man, forget it. Come to me after this talk for a demo. And yeah, I think actually that's all I had. I had some considerations and I did mention trusted setups and some research that's going into working around that. Some future directions to basically generalize this construction. And yeah, that's it, that's it for me, yeah. Did that make any sense? Okay, good, good. I see like careful nodding, hesitant nodding. Yeah, it's pretty technical. I think Purnima told me to keep it high level and I was like, okay, I will. I think I started off trying to define the problem and if there's one takeaway from this talk is that there's a bunch of different strategies that people are trying to scale blockchains and to basically increase the number of transactions we can process on blockchains. And these each have their own trade-offs and their own intricacies. I just personally find this one one of the more fascinating ones because of the math behind it, yeah. Yeah. Will this solution ever be sort of hybridizing multiple approaches? Because you mentioned there is that layer one, layer two, is that ever? Yeah, a hundred percent. For example, between shards, to communicate between shards, you could use some variant of roll-up. That's one example. For example, you could do recursive roll-ups as well to basically compress the history of your chain. Yeah, combinations of layer one and layer two solutions are like, it's one of the most exciting places to be, I think. Yeah, yeah. Where are you hoping to take your research into? Yeah, so we want to get a demo out ASAP and then hopefully look into like at scale productions. And for me, actually, the part I'm most excited about is generalizing it. So instead of just doing transactions in your circuit, what you can do is verify a snark proof in your snark circuit. So it's one layer of recursion. So you're proving inside your snark that you have a snark proof that is valid. So what this would entail is for each account to have a verification key and for each transaction to provide a proof to the verification key that is verified in your snark. So that's like the one layer of recursion that intrigues me the most right now. Yeah, is Andres? Okay, yeah. In practical terms, when do you think you will release something like? Right. So actually, there's this demo already by a company called Matterlabs. And there's also another company called Starkdex who are doing similar things. But I don't think either of them are open to the end user yet and they're not on mainnet yet. And a lot of this is because like, we're figuring out kinks in proving times. We're figuring out like what we think about trusted setups, things like that. So yeah, it's hard to say. Yeah. That's all? Yeah, that's my time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.