How to Die a Good Death with Sarah Friend
While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Sarah Friend,an artist and software developer from Canada and based in Berlin. In 2023, she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, studying the death of protocols and published a paper on "Good Death".
We discussed her findings in her research on how and when protocols are considered dead, how different human cultures view death and the silliness behind the longevity movement.
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Transcript
I am very pro death, but we'll get into that in a minute.
Life forms are NFT based digital pets that die if you don't give them away. And I launched summer protocols was happening, most of the life forms had died. Blockchain makes all of these claims about time, makes claims about the ongoing immutability of this data forever. It will continue to exist. And those claims may not actually be founded in practice.
Yeah. When does a blockchain die? The I mean, the main thing that comes up in my head is the obvious the obvious kind of example of, like, the Ethereum hard fork with the DAO. Like, could could we say that that was a a a death and rebirth almost of a different version of of Ethereum that was brought forth because of the DAO hack.
Death is the ultimate number go down. Right.
That's the downest a number can go. Nostalgia can also be a form of capital.
If I believed in an afterlife where I would be judged and also simultaneously that I had been a bad person, I would wanna live forever too. Death is a decision and also a product of cultural consensus.
Hey, guys. What you're about to watch is one of the many interviews I took during my time in Thailand for DevCon twenty twenty four. I was in the country for a total of over a month and got the opportunity to meet a bunch of really cool people and interview them in person. DevCon itself was an incredible and interesting experience and you can find my full review of it on my Patreon. So if you like the content I've been making and would like me to continue going to these kinds of events and improving, then I hope you'll become a patron starting at just $3 per month for access to loads of bonus content and Blockchain Socialist merch at patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist. Hi, everyone. You're listening to a much better production version of The Blockchain Socialist. I'm here at DevCon in Bangkok, in the year 2024. And I am here with Sarah Friend, who is Hello. An artist, but maybe I'll let you introduce yourself. We're gonna talk about some of the research that you did during the summer of protocols about death, which I am very pro death, but we'll get into that in a minute.
It's a insane way to begin a conversation, like but we'll follow Yeah. I'm Sarah. I'm a artist and software developer, who's been working in the Ethereum space since 2016 in a variety of capacities. So we first met when I was working on this project called Circle CVI, I believe, but that was some time ago now. And most recently, I was one of the core researchers of the 2023 cohort of Summer of Protocols, which was put together, by Tim from the Ethereum Foundation and Venkatesh Rao to, try to uncover if there is something generalizable about the theory of protocols. And so my research proposal for that, program was about death.
So death is a that's a big topic, to choose to talk about for do research on for just a summer. I guess, what is the, I mean, I'm curious. What is the what was the start of your research? Because I imagine death you're talking you were researching it in the context of, like, the death of protocols. This was the summer of protocols, and that was, like, the main theme of the research. But, I mean, we were talking a little bit earlier, and it, of course, expanded into much more than just the death of protocols, but, broadly, the thing that we all experience at one point
until except for Brian Johnson, maybe one day. Yeah. We'll we'll see if he gets his wish. So I initially started with the subject because I had done a, started with the subject because I had done a art project, an NFT edition called life forms. And life forms are NFT based digital pets that die if you don't give them away. And I launched this project in November 2021. And so by the time that Summer Protocols was happening, most of the life forms had died. And I was kind of thinking, what does it mean? I'm responsible for so much digital pet death. You know, and one might argue the life forms never lived at all. So what am I even saying when I say that they died? This was one of my starting questions. But then, you know, in the context of protocols, protocols, I thought that it was interesting to think about this with blockchain because blockchain makes all of these claims about time, makes claims about the ongoing immutability of this data forever. It will continue to exist. And, and, And those claims may not actually be founded in practice. And so I thought there was maybe a general question of, can a protocol die at all? If we say that a protocol can die, what do we actually mean by that? What do we mean in general when we use death as a metaphor in these digital contexts? But it's true that once starting to do this research, I was kind of like, what do I know about death in general? What do I know about human death? And as is so often the case with big, big research subjects, once you start to learn more about it, what you realize very soon is just how little you know. So for example, you might imagine, do we know when a human dies to be a simple question? But, in fact, no. The answers to that question are different in different cultures, have been different in different times, and can even be different, from different perspectives within the same place now. So, yeah, I I I had enough time to learn how big this subject is, in our short research fellowship.
Nice. Yeah. So I was also a an owner of a life form for a little bit. It unfortunately died. I'm sorry. Because I Many such cases. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I would like to think that it lived still a a happy life during the the the few months that it lived. I thought it was a really interesting art project is why I bought it because at the time, I think I think it was, like, maybe kind of during, like, NFT bubble craze time. So, I mean, I was just, like, you know, happy to see the arts receiving a bunch of money through this way, but was kind of, like most people who are sane, kind of annoyed by the way that it was happening specifically through, NFTs at the time. And so something different. And so I think what is, yeah, I mean I mean, really interesting about thinking about death as well in the art space because this I mean, there are other art projects like, Plantoid from Pimavera de Filippi and a couple of others that I'm probably forgetting the names of, but, like, of thinking of, like, basically all this technology coming to life as well. I think that has to, like, happen first, and then you have to consider it dead. But, yeah, I guess maybe to start off sticking to, like, the the the technology or the protocol side. Do you have any, like, interesting tidbits or stories of, like, protocols that have died and how they did die if we're, you know, sticking with this metaphor of death around protocols?
Yeah. Many. All examples. I mean, the one that really started to make me think that the death of digital things was a bigger area than maybe a digital pets project, in general was these MMO, that's massively multiplayer online game, apocalypses. So these worlds are sometimes inhabited by many players creating sort of community together, and but these are maintained by Like World of Warcraft, Runescape. Exactly. Exactly. But they're maintained by companies, and these companies, for a variety of reasons, can stop wanting to support the MMO. So they will announce, oh, on a specific date, this world will go offline. But, you know, people have entire lives in these worlds. People get married in these worlds. People actually hold funerals for their dead loved ones who were players of the game in these worlds. And so I encountered these MMO apocalypse streams that people have made, and I was I thought, oh, this is very interesting. And it kind of reminds me in a macro sense of maybe the context of a digital pet death, but for more people at once. But then there's also many social media platforms that I think we can say have died, and I see them as a very parallel phenomenon. A social media platform to me actually is an MMO by another name. So I looked at some of these. And, you know, of course, there are dead blockchains.
Many. A lot of them. Yeah.
And so I looked at some of these as well. In particular, what I what I looked at was, there are are some self appointed organizations who act as registrars, for the which blockchains have died record keepers in a sense. And I looked at how they go about setting their criteria which I felt was very important. We can talk more about why, if that seems, like a good direction.
Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So when, like yeah. When does a blockchain die? The I mean, the main thing that comes up in my head is the obvious the obvious, kind of example of, like, the Ethereum hard fork with the DAO. Like, could could we say that that was a a death and rebirth almost of, a different version of of Ethereum that was brought forth because of the DAO hack? Ethereum class I mean, Ethereum classic, I guess, continued to exist. Mhmm. I feel like it's probably dead now. I don't really keep up with that one. But, I guess it depends on what is the definition of a blockchain and whether or not it needs more than whatever five nodes or something to to be considered alive.
Yeah. So I can't can't say I looked at Ethereum Classic specifically, though that was certainly pivotal life event in the Ethereum ecosystem, that first fork and maybe for the blockchain ecosystem more broadly. But so each site that maintains these lists has a different set of criterias for when they would call a blockchain dead. So but some examples are the things you might imagine. When the price has gone to zero, when there hasn't been a transaction sent in a certain period of time, when no nodes are pingable, when the there is no company Twitter account or it is no longer active. Signs like this, and they're all none of them will call a blockchain dead when only developer activity in the GitHub repo. It's a pretty important one, I would say. We'll call a blockchain dead when only one of these is triggered. But at some threshold of having enough of these, these organizations will say, yeah, it's gonna go on the dead coin list now. And the criteria are a little bit different on each of the lists. But this is very interesting because we actually do the same thing in a medical context when we're, diagnosing the death of a human body. It's not as though there is only one sign or symptom that is looked for. A doctor will observe several things. There's sort of a list of them that they might look for. And when enough of them are met, death will be diagnosed. And I've actually found texts describing the death you might look at, human death, you might look at, you know, does the eye refocus when light is shined in? Are they breathing detectably? Things like this, but they're all observed independently. So it's actually kind of interesting. And one of the things that I named as the output of the research is that I think that death is a diagnosis. I think that it's a process that doesn't happen immediately in an instant. And also that I think it takes the criteria that have to be met before we transition something, in our sort of ontology of the world to deadness. And I think this is true of both blockchains, MMOs and humans.
Right. So I found it really interesting the, the the data points that you mentioned that people checked and whether or no, a chain is dead or not, like the price, and things like that. One of the things that has been, on my mind that I don't really know how to, like, fully articulate yet maybe is that, I mean, one, the kind of mental framework that I like to think about, capital is as like an egregore or like a thing that is, like, put that that is made into life. And, you know, we are almost like bodies doing its will by accumulating more capital and therefore creating it. And, therefore, when I think about the blockchain space where, I mean, proof of work, proof of stake, most of these consensus mechanisms are embedded with this assumption of, like, you're going to make more money if you keep it alive. It's like a it is like a a literal physical digital manifestation of, like, an egregore of us, like, coming together and, like, we will will this to be because we're all making money off of it. Mhmm. I don't know. It's like, there there's something there's something, like, blending together of different complicated things that I don't know how to articulate quite yet of, like, capital being alive, but also this being therefore a metaphor or a mental model in which we think about life and death itself often in ourselves. So, I mean, this getting to the point to the longevity freaks. I'm sorry. People who are really into, living forever or, like, finding ways to extend their life. I mean, broadly, I think it's fine to extend your life and, like, have a healthy, happy life. I think the the part that, at least for me, gets a little bit goes a little bit too far is, like, thinking about immortality as, like, a goal for something that people should, strive for for everyone, I think, is maybe something that needs to be questioned a little bit more. But so, like, I think part of the, I imagine part of the research, like, why you went after it as well, is also because there are not just a lot of, a lot dead blockchains, but also, like, a lot of dead DAOs and, like, other types of projects that people, I think, try to like, do you just there's just, like, oftentimes these groups, like, a few core people who, like, want to keep it going and keep it alive. And then, I don't know. And we tend to create these groups and organizations in which we have no plan for death. Like, when like, I just listened to a talk from Left Terrace where he was saying that, like, there's in that talk too. Yeah. Spicy. I I kind of I mean, I I agree to a certain extent of what he said about, like, making an organization or a group that has a goal to do something, and then it dies. But that is something that is, like, seems very antithetical to the way people make organizations broadly in the crypto space. And I think in part because of investment logic. Investment logic is that you you portray a future in which people in that future are going to be wealthier than they are today or better off than they are today. And therefore, it can't if if you know that it's going to die at some point, then you can't invest in it.
Death is the ultimate number go down. Right. That's the
downest a number can go.
Yeah. I think that, yeah, all these things are very related. And I definitely thought about this during the summer protocols season because yeah. I mean, in the in the blockchain industry, there's all of this talk about time and permanence, and it's so clearly fallacious. And I was like, why? And I don't think it's a coincidence that there is so much attention on or or participation in the longevity movement, from the same community. I didn't dive into this in too much detail in the paper, but one of the things that I was considering is, you know, we often talk about technology as an extension of the body. This is coming from Marshall McLuhan. All technology extends the body in some sense. And what is the maximally extended body? If we could extend the body as much as possible, you know, the it would surely be immortal. It would surely be an immortal body. So to some extent, like, is the ultimate endgame of the technological project of the West, immortality, you know, under this framework from which technology has perhaps been developed and conceived of for some time. And this is very interesting and questionable. And I think it's absolutely an economic assumption, that needs to be made that things will continue to exist because if we didn't believe that they will, then, you know, we have no reason to believe that they will continue to be valuable, at least under the current assumptions of our economic system. I also think it's really interesting that you spoke about egregores, because one of the accidental questions that I revealed to myself in the research was, you know, if you're gonna talk about death, all of a sudden, actually, you're talking about life. Like, what is life? What characterizes life if we're talking about a digital thing, like a social media platform or a video game? Like, what is the nature of that life? And one thing that I thought was lacking in many of the blockchain descriptions of this is, the thing that gives the blockchain or MMO liveliness using it. And two of the things that I looked at that are, I think, part of this are, people using it in unexpected ways, socially. So, you know, marriages on the blockchain, memorials on the blockchain, people sending each other small messages that aren't actually about capital at all. That is one of the best indicators of life that I could find. And one of the other ones is, discussion of the system that may may or may not die in places that are not obviously about it. So are there active community forums kind of separately and completely outside of the protocol itself? You can tell if an MMO is alive because so many people are posting on Reddit about it, not even if they're logging in every day. And and so there's, like, this intangibility. Like, the the life of the protocol or the world is not even in the world. It's somewhere else. It's outside of it. And I think that it's very difficult to name it. Clearly, we only see it in glimpses. And, I I don't know. Edgar Gore is, like, a good framework for thinking about this. It's it's it's loved into existence, perhaps.
Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot there's a lot I want to pull on there. I'm trying to pick, like, what is what is the right one to go on. First, I mean, like, yeah. I wonder may maybe, funny anecdotes that maybe I just wanted to put in there because it's funny. But, I my I love a funny anecdote. My my very first I think maybe my first or maybe first, second or third, girlfriend was from the game, the MMO Club Penguin.
Did you meet in the game?
Yeah. I was 13. And, and she she told me I was her boyfriend now. And I was like, oh my god. And I remember, like, and then, like, we and then afterwards, I think we messaged, like, Yahoo Messenger or something like that. And then, and then we've rendered each other on Facebook, like, many years later, and I've never spoken to her since. But I think it was there was something very, like, I remember watching the at least a recording of the stream of, like, Club Penguin ending and, like, the the feeling of, like, like, a bit of my life happened there. Yeah. Even though it was, like, kind of a kind of a very silly thing that happened. But, yeah, I remember, just feeling it was like us. And then and then thinking about, like, other the other platforms like Myspace, of course, I I had that as well, but then, I I think I think they lost a lot of, like, people's data or something like that or profiles. I I don't know. I think they did too, and I'm personally glad about this. Oh, I'm very happy about that. But, yeah, I missed the I just kinda wanted to look at it one more time before it went up, but I haven't yeah. I remember I had the whatever the the music player on the thing. But anyways, like, a lot lot of our lives happen in the digital now, and they are inextricably, at least for the most part, like, tied to capital and someone else making money. And as soon as someone else is not making money more or less, then our lives are at least the record of our lives are gone for better or for worse. Yeah.
I mean, this touches on so many things that are relevant to the blockchain context. I mean, I don't know if you are have heard the apocryphal story of why Ethereum was created at all. The the Warcraft one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this whole thing that we're sitting at may have been kicked off because or or or, began because, Vitalik had a Warcraft character, and the game rules were changed in some way that he did not like. And, you know, a system should exist such that this could not happen. And it's true that in the case of many, at least, centrally owned worlds that die, it is a question of capital and profit. Like, some company was no longer profitable to maintain this thing anymore. And there's definitely a question there of ownership and governance. We are all part of this thing. We the the any the profit that is made off of it is made through the users who are having these emotional experiences inside the world, yet they have no stake in the final outcomes of it. This is a question I think many people at this event would want to be addressing with what they're building. It's not one that I was able to take on more thoroughly in the context of the SOP research. It was a short program. Another thing that I think is well, again, I thought of so many things as you were just kinda giving that little anecdote because it's exactly the kind of thing I was collecting stories about during the research fellowship. Yeah. But when we're talking about the death of a world, we're kinda inevitably talking about digital archives too. Yeah. Because, like, here's the thing. Like, that world still exists probably somewhere, like Club Penguin, the the the world map as of apocalypse, you know, like, that's And the but it's kinda interesting. Like, what is the meaning of that data in relationship to the world that you participated in? Because, you know, you could possibly emulate the entire system and reload it and go there, but your girlfriend when you were 13 wouldn't be in the game. Like, you wouldn't be able to log in and wouldn't be able to log in and have the same kinds of interactions you had. And so I think it really speaks to the failure of a lot of archiving of digital places and spaces, which I think is very interesting. And then there's maybe a follow-up question, which is touched on by the Myspace example, which is, that the question of deletion. You know? Mhmm. Or maybe the flip side of it might be memorialization. So the opposite of the longevity movement is probably instead death acceptance. And within the mortuary industry, you know, there are practitioners who work to try to help patients, you know, yes, surely live as long as possible in the healthiest way possible, but when the time comes to die to do so, in a way that, you know, is aligned with their own desires for that. And so there's a lot of talk about, like, the right death or a good death, for example. And the and so maybe the digital world context or or version of a good death might be like right deletion, deleting the right things at the right time, turning off or shutting down protocols intentionally when they're no longer serving their use case. And I think the opposite impulse to just stash all the digital data somewhere, first off, becomes a increasingly heavy privacy concern. Yeah. But also kind of indulges this that the thing could be recreated, and that is not true.
Right. Right. I remember I mean, the one thing that comes to my mind is, well, I guess, no. Shit. I was gonna say Pokemon cards, but they've kind of come back.
I drank a Pikachu green tea today.
No. But I guess you mean I mean, in those cases, yes. Yeah. I'm just thinking I I remember when my, I remember I just remember in, like, the early two thousands or, like, late nineties, people being like, these Pokemon cards are gonna be worth a lot one day, and they kind of are again. Yeah. But I don't know the thing is with that, at least, I don't know if anyone actually plays the game. Mhmm. I feel like it's mostly just the it like, I feel like it only came back. It only reinstated itself because all those kids who got the Pokemon cards in the beginning have become adults and have money. Mhmm. And they're, like, now just purchasing nostalgia. Mhmm. So, like, I think now we've come to a point where, like, nostalgia can also be a form of capital, for better, for worse. And in some ways, it's kept a lot like, capital is like this, it is this, like, a form of, like, will to power that is, like, also an egregore that then also everyone else, like, I don't know. Capital just it it you know, if if there was no making of money on Pokemon cards, I wonder if Pokemon cards would have come back in the same way that they have now.
Good question. No idea. But I was chatting related question, which is how in the fashion cycle, we're often reliving, like, twenty years ago. You know? Mhmm. And they were proposing that the reason is that, we now have, young adult consumers who were children at a certain time, and they're able to enact the fantasies of how to Right. Dress and be that they weren't when they were kids. Yeah. So that's why we have this nostalgic 20 fashion back cycle. I don't know if this is true. It's certainly interesting to think about.
Yeah. Very so the actually, the next question I wanna get at is, my feeling is that a lot of this is related to perhaps the way that we view death from a very, maybe, Western point of view. Mhmm. Or just that for whatever reason, at least it seems to me on my little research on, yeah, on the way that other cultures perceive death is that, there is this kind of, like, fantasy of, of, immortality, I think, rooted in this kind of, like, major fear and death that comes from probably just Western history or context and maybe even Christianity and religion. I think, like, if you are someone like, the question that I would love to ask people who are, into longevity and, like, immortality is, like, you know, what do you think happens when you die? Because I think if someone thinks that that if what happens after they die is like eternal hell, maybe that's why they want to be their their, like, striving for this, longevity or or immort immortality in some way. Right. Yeah. And then so I think I think this this mentality or, like, framework around death then, like, is imbued in itself in all these, like, technological products and everything else that we're building. And therefore, you know, because we have this overall unhealthy view of death and, like, fetishization of of youth maybe, that we then, we've gotten to this strange point of, like, not wanting to kill anything.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, I guess if I believed in an afterlife where I would be judged and also simultaneously that I had been a bad person, I would wanna live forever too.
I also wanna run away from my problems.
I guess I will say that, you know, there are many, cultures in this world currently and also that have existed, and they have all experienced death. And death is very differently understood in many of them. Yeah. And I am not an anthropological expert in the wide array of of ways that death fits into culture in different places. But, But one well, I guess two things. One example or category of of, understandings of death that I thought were particularly interesting, were understandings of death that are extremely decoupled from the death of the body. So, for example, this would be within religious practices where death is maybe not understood to have happened perhaps many years after a person's body has died, as we would name it today in Western medical science. They're not really dead until a whole variety of rituals have been undertaken, which require time. And I thought this was most interesting because, it's kind of a limit case on how death is a decision and also a product that person will not actually be referred to with language as dead until the final set of, you know, activities have been concluded. And this is kind of extremely interesting in terms of unpacking this, medical understanding of death. Like there are also these social and religious layers anthropologists who actually do study death rituals in many, many different places. Anthropologists who actually do study death rituals in many, many different places. And what they said that I found really, really powerful is that there's a incredible diversity of, death rituals and And it is specifically the lack of the diversity of those death rituals that speaks to the universality of death. And I found that to be extremely, maybe comforting, you know, as as as we might be experiencing death in our personal lives or death of worlds we loved or things like this. There's a tremendous scope of responses to it that, have precedent somewhere.
Right. Yeah. I've definitely I've definitely done it. I've yeah. I minored in anthropology. I don't know if that counts as a thing. Did you study at any point. I mean, it it came up. Definitely. And, yeah, I think one of the things that I found really fascinating in these other types of, kinda just whatever, different indigenous cultures in various places is that they viewed, viewed I mean, not just death, but, like, a lot of different things, of course, very differently than, than we do today, including, you know, and things that would be seen as, like, very strange for us to, like, to do with our, like, our ancestors that have or, like, whatever, like, our loved ones who have died. Like, we wouldn't probably do some of the things that, many of these cultures would do, but in their, like, mental model of the world is what makes sense. And, actually, what's very strange is how often very sanitized the way we try to look at death is as something that, like, we keep very separate from us or, like, keep such a distance often. And, I mean, what I'm talking about specifically, like, you know, death of loved ones and death of relatives. Mhmm. Yeah. But maybe to kind of, start rounding it off, what do you have any, like, suggestions for how to how to have a good death in protocols and, like, and how to plan for that? Because I think also, I think part of the issue is that because we don't we don't imagine things dying often, so we don't even really, like, plan for that potential to happen, which is, I think, what causes many, like, big messes in the in the crypto world probably is that, like, people are like, you know, we have this plan for going to the moon, but we don't have a plan for when number go down. Yeah. A few.
And, I mean, first off, like, what is a good death is a question that you can research. I mean, first off, like, what is a good death is a question that you can research, but you're gonna encounter many different answers Gotcha. For it. Many of them say, though, you know, to know that it is coming, to set an intention And so I think both of those aspects of the ways people sometimes talk about the death of a person can apply to a protocol as well. I think that if, the system has a decision maker in it of some kind, be that a company or maybe it's a DAO or maybe it's some kind of more complex governance process. It might be useful to interrogate or consider before the death moment or even before there's an existential threat to the system. Could that governance process, face the kind of ultimate question? And if so, how how would that look? I think that, you know, I've I've heard people describe, the ultimate test of a governance system's legitimacy be if the system undertook an action that you personally did not agree with, would you still believe that the action was undertaken legitimately? Questions like this, are worth sort of another thing I think would be to kind of consider the life that is in the protocol, or the world. What is it? Which parts of it need to be remembered? Which parts of it would be better forgotten or memorialized in some other way? People write wills about where they want their belongings to go. Actually, this is a a thing that I think will be very interesting for protocol researcher to look into further because, in the Ethereum world, we have many DAOs. These DAOs are organizations. They absolutely can die. Many such cases. But they're kind of an interesting case study for two ways. They have this decision making process that can either live up to or fail under an existential threat, but then they also have very real resources that may need to be dealt with appropriately. So these are some of the things that I think are good questions to have in mind. If you are sort of in the position of governing a protocol or working on it. If you are only a participant, I think that it's maybe more to understand that the ecosystem of protocols, does contain these forces of life and death in this sort of metaphorical sense that we're speaking about it. Yeah. I think just having that would be a helpful change.
Yeah. So I just wanna be clear. On this podcast, we are pro death. And I think that, yeah, at least personally, I think that's, it's just a thing that we have to be realistic about and contend with that we cannot have the hubris to think that everything we do is going to last forever, that we're that, like, everything is that that anything ever really does last forever. I was doing some hike. I did a hike, the other week and, you know, still, I was, of course, in awe by, like, the how long those temples have probably been in that place, for centuries, if not millennia. But, of course, I think what is interesting is as well, you know, those things were created and they are going to die. And, yeah, I think, the being in the in the cultural context in, I think, in Thailand has been interesting for me to just to to juxtapose it with the usual kind of, yeah, the the Western cultural context and how, death is often seen as, like, very, like, just very hardcore. I don't know. In some way and, like, I don't know. With g with the image of, like, Jesus on the cross in churches, I always feel like that has something to do with having the difference between having Jesus on the cross constantly in our church versus, like, the Buddha is someone who is, like, always relaxed and, like, and you're praying to someone who is, like, praying themselves or, like, in meditation mode. I think those things are all related. I don't know how to say it in better words
words than that. Definitely, Christian imagery can be pretty gruesome. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Thanks for coming on. Is there any, plugs you would like to leave with people before you go? Oh, wow. I didn't prepare plugs in advance.
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. I've only shared a little bit of, what I looked at and thought about. So I guess the main thing I would plug is if this was interesting to you, there's a longer and probably more coherent version in a paper that was released, in August, of this year, and that's available on the summer of protocols website. And, there's actually a lot of other really interesting research, different aspects of protocols covered, protocol fictions written by other participants. So I think there's a lot of really great work that's come out of the program and has been, new, not engaged with fully. So definitely check that out.
