 This is the Neo Books Call for Monday, February 19th, 2024. I should probably do the transcript before I do the call, the way Pete does. That'll save me from the janky moments there where I do that after. Great to have you all here. Pete and I had a conversation on Friday where we got into sort of what, like are we a publishing house or not or whatever else? I wanna report back on what we kind of discovered in some sense, because it affects how we do things here in Neo Books. And I'm probably gonna forget half of what we came up with. So Pete, I'm gonna ask if you will like help complete the things that I screw up along the way. But part of our conversation was about how do we, in response to our conversation last week about, hey, let's just get busy and like publish a book. And Pete has had a longstanding question about, wow, I have three Stacey's now on. I think Stacey, I think you're having trouble with your phone or your laptop or whatever. It will work out, but you're just multiplying us. It's good. You never have enough Stacey's. That's right. That's our guess. There we go. Yay. But Pete has been raising the question of like, hey, are we a publisher or what are we here? And becoming a publisher of books means a whole bunch of things, including one would hope having the resources to actually edit properly, standing behind the books that are published and creating an imprint of sorts with some character or some nature to it or whatever else. And all of that is kind of beyond the resources that we have right now. And there's other things that we can do that we're actually maybe more focused on or that are more important to us. Most notably, if the book part of Neo Books is meant to be the attractor, the thing that makes people understand, oh, there's a book here, but maybe there's more. The part that we're really, really interested in is the more part, is how do we get people to interact with the ideas inside of books? And how do we make that a fulfilling and useful experience that may even affect industries and do other kinds of things. So I think the place we wound up with is that we can help people publish books by DIYing it, meaning help steer them toward Lulupress and through a process of inputting their own, their manuscripts in and so forth. Or also we can recommend that people find some partner that has an imprint as a small press or whoever else, who is willing to pick up a manuscript and go further with it toward having the book show up, but that we don't have the resources to be Neo Books publishing comma ink or anything that would smell like that. And that that's kind of off-center for the thing that we're aiming at. And Rick and Dave kind of came in in the middle of what I just said, Rick at the end I guess, so maybe I'll repeat it. Rick and Dave, Pete and I had a conversation on Friday where we were being realistic about what we can do as a publishing house. Are we a publishing house, Neo Books, because we want to publish Neo Books? That's one of our goals. And where we ended up with is we were likely overstretching ourselves to think that we're a publishing house. What we can do is map a course to DIY it, which is probably the route I will take, which is take pieces of a manuscript, roll them up, turn them out and put them into the Lulu Press or Kindle Direct Publishing KDP engines that then have your book turn out at least as an e-book and maybe even as a physical book in different places, but that otherwise we don't have the resources to be an imprint, to basically steward and edit, properly edit, properly form up book books. I'll just say that since sometimes you have to form a background in once you get new variants and new versions, like Coke Classic was only named Coke Classic after there were too many flavors of Coke to track and you had to say no, no, no, the original one, the one with like actual sugar in it. So, Pete, what have I forgotten from our conversation? Something else. I don't know, let me give a different take on it. Okay. So for me, I guess in a way, Jerry, you're kind of the champion for new books. So ultimately, what you say about new books is gonna be true. And if we want that to change, then we may have to lobby you or help you or something like that. But for me, there's two different things that new books might be. One of them, I wouldn't say a publishing house, I would say a publishing press for some reason. One of them is that it's a publisher, a publishing press. Another one might be that it's a process. So then the new books project might be both actually. The new books project might be a press. It might be a project that is documenting what a new book is, how it works, the idea of negatization and things like that, the some tips and tricks and process stuff for publishing a book. I think it could be either one of those or both. It's interesting to hear you say that we can't do X, Y, Z because we don't have the resources for it. I look at it a different way. If we wanted to be a press and we don't have enough resources for editorial work or something like that, then it's like, well, the press figures out how to get those editorial resources or how to emulate or fake it until we make it or whatever, right? Maybe we're over concerned about editorial process and we should just publish the books anyway, see what happens. So I don't think of it in terms of we don't have the resources for X, Y, Z. I do think that we have a identity crisis about what we are and what we want to accomplish. So maybe we're a press, maybe we're not. If we're not a press, then obviously you want to connect the new books process to the act of publishing. And for new books, publishing means getting it out there. It doesn't mean necessarily just a book. It means making a wiki. Maybe it means making a chat bot. Maybe it means setting up a discourse forum or something like that. Anyway, if there is publishing to be done and you would think that as a pig travels through the Python, it's gonna need to get published at some point, whatever that means in new book terms. If new books doesn't have a publishing arm, then it should figure out how to help people either self-publish or help connect people to publishers or whatever, right? I don't, in my observation, there's nothing that a couple individuals can't do in the publishing realm except maybe marketing. So if people want a paper book, that's pretty easy to do. If people want an e-book, that's pretty easy to do. If people want a website, that's pretty easy to do. If people want a discussion forum, that's pretty easy to do. The thing that I observed that is hard is distribution, what I'll call distribution, and I also mean marketing in there. How do you get 10,000 people engaged with your information? How do you get 100,000 people engaged with your information? That's a secret black box, which I don't think many people have cracked. Even the big publishers who can do that, they can do that in onesie twosies for particular authors. They can't do it for all of the authors in their stable. So that's a different nut. But the way I see it is maybe if new books isn't a publisher, we want to help people become their own publishers and probably you want to have more than one person doing that. I think all six or eight of us here self-publishing a book is less efficient than having one or two presses where four of us get together and publish four books or eight books or something like that. So then I think maybe new books, if new books is just the project of, how do we produce new books? In the scope of that is let's also set up ways for publishers to get instantiated and publishers to get existing publishers to get listed. And so part of new books' projects from that, even if it's not a publisher, is to help the publishing process with different presses. So back to the presenting question, is new books a press? Is a project documenting the process of new booking? And I think what I heard you say is it's probably not going to be a press. All of which has likely raised a bunch of questions. So please ask away. Sorry to join late. I was out for a bike ride and I miscalculated the wind. It was really a bitch getting back. Glad you're here. Me too. I don't have as many questions as I have. Well, maybe I have two questions, but they don't expect an answer. Defining the term publisher, defining what a Neo book is. So somehow here in Utah Pete, you made it, to me it was complexified by your conversation. I see it as a lot simpler, okay? And here's the way I see it and what I came away from last week's conversation with. So in some ways we're curators of content, meaning somebody comes with a body of content and we kind of through some editorial process decide if this is worth messing with, okay? And then we get it up in some vehicle and I'm far from the technologist. We get it up there as a starting point. And then through technology, we kind of mess with it in different ways. We talked about breaking it up into little pieces and also give people the ability to comment on it. I assume in one form or another, that's doable. At least that's what I've heard in the technology conversations. In terms of publishing, if anybody wants to have a hard copy of their book, yeah, there's lots of self-publishing houses out there that we could affiliate with in some ways. And so I think the real pieces is critical pieces identity. And by that I mean how we position OGM as someone who is putting out really leading slash bleeding edge content in some ways. So that's my two cents at this point in time after listening to you speak Pete and however the conversation started. Thanks, Stuart. Pete, go ahead. Thanks, Stuart. And I apologize for complexifying things. It comes down for me to, is there some entity responsible for content or not? And I think OGM or Neobooks is not set up to be responsible for content. And I think we're not all on the same page with that. Like maybe we should be or something like that, but I don't see it having the structure for that. So then the question for the folks here who want to publish stuff, publish whatever that means in Neobooks terms, it's like, how do we either create a set of, create an organization maybe which might be one or two people. I don't mean something big by organization. How do we create an organization that is going to be responsible for content? Or failing that, find an organization that assumes responsibility for content. Yeah. Before I go ahead and ask a question. No, Pete, when you say responsible for content, I assume that you mean some kind of editorial function, decision-making about, is this quote worthy or not worthy for being a Neobook in terms of the identity we want to create in the world? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So for me, for instance, Neobook is a aspirational description of how content works. And it has no responsibility for any kind of content. Not that I would love it if it did, but I don't think it does. And then scrolling back just a tiny bit for what Pete was saying, Pete, and this is something we talked about on previous calls, Pete has been part of two actual successful book publishings. One is an edited volume sort of created and stewarded by Cindy Kuhn, which turned into a softbound book. You can go purchase on Amazon today. The other is through his work with Jordan Sukut, who with whom he figured out how to use Lulu and I think KDP, and then Jordan surprised him by pushing the button and actually producing the book because they were kind of on the edge and didn't do it when they were conspiring together. But there are books that have been produced. So I think that the simplification Pete just offered and the question you just asked to it about is there an entity that can say is this a book? And will we stand behind this book is probably the missing piece here. The other moving parts are very all doable and aren't these days a huge lift, as you just said. Yeah, so just by way of my own personal experience, okay, I've served on editorial boards in the American Bar Association in terms of making assessments about whether certain things are, they wanna publish them. And I don't know, I don't see that as a big deal. I've also published with a quote, real publisher and I've self-published and I've done multi-author books, edited and curated. So I've got a pretty broad experience I don't see where editorial is, is that? It is not hard at all, but it requires somebody to say, here's the name of the publishing press and I get to decide or we get to decide whether or not it's in or it's out. And as far as I can tell, Neo Books does not have that function and OGM does not have that function and won't. Why do you say that, Pete? Why do you say won't? Historically, OGM and Neo Books, the project writ small. It hasn't done it yet, right? And I mean it's possible that it will, but it hasn't. And as you say, it's easy to have an editorial board function. For me, whether it is an editorial board or not is actually not so much of a question. When I heard about Neo Books, what resonated for me was this idea that is a platform, not a gatekeeper. And so the idea that it's a platform that I can participate as a member and I can get other members to support me on it. And as we come together, if it works, maybe I'm a lone wolf and I do it by myself, fine. And I do what I can and I get done what I can get done. Maybe I can get a bunch of people around on the project and a whole bunch of people participate and that's even better because the quality will improve and all of those other things. But I don't think that it's one or the other. I don't think that somebody should decide whether my code, and I'm just gonna go to GitHub mentality for a second. It's like, no, you can't write that piece of code. Well, screw you, why can't I write that piece of code? I wanna write that piece of code. Now, if somebody goes and forks it, that's because they think it's good. And if nobody does, then they think it's bad and that's good, that's the way it should be. But I think once you have a group of people deciding whether what I wrote is good or bad, then that we're taking it down a path that I personally didn't think that that's where we're going. As for building a platform that does that from a system structure perspective, from a communal perspective rather than a top-down perspective. In other words, the fact that people do get to participate and do get to say, hey, I really like what you did. Let me contribute to that or let me use that or let me help you with that. Then I think that that's the process we wanna see which gives us the legitimacy and or the backup that we would seek from an editorial board. Thanks for that. I think that's clarifying to me. And I think part of what's been happening is when you say, are we a press or an imprint or a publisher, all the baggage of each of those kinds of entities that are quite related shows up. And then it's like, ooh, that's a lot of people. Back to linguistics again. Exactly. And part of what we're doing, I think, is deconstructing, that's a bunch of roles and tasks, some of which we're actually happily doing, others of which were, you know, it's DIY, but the way you just put it was clarifying for me. Rick, then Klaus. Yeah, maybe just to build on what you just said, I tend to agree, if it's done the spirit of open innovation, then you don't have to be worried about whether you're a book publisher. If you think about it as a digital platform, a collaborative digital platform where people can come and share their content, whether it's formally published or not, to me, you have to think what's the ultimate outcome and of what you're trying to achieve here. And I think we focus too much on content curation, which is important. We have more than enough content, we have more than enough of this stuff. The question is, what sort of learning communities are we trying to create? And I'll mention David's work with GRC as an example. You know, he's got this community out there. And one of the things that I think is and this is where, you know, I'll be very interested in, what is the best collaborative digital platform there that enables us to be able to create not a static book, but a living book, something where people are constantly, it's based upon the notion of process innovation where you're constantly trying to improve what you're doing, different angles, it's organic, it's emergent. And at the end of the day, a book is only as good as the number of people who read it if they do read it. And you should be having the marketing mindset is how are you gonna create a learning community so that they access some essential content, but more importantly, how do they have a process for actually doing something with it? That's what I'm interested in. And, you know, I think what David's work has, he's got the infrastructure for it, but I don't think that's what it's doing. And not only that, I would argue that this should be out there, open. It should be available. It shouldn't be on a Slack channel, we have to subscribe to. And, you know, even with, you know, I can't keep up with all the emails that go through or that sent out with Open Global Mindset. I periodically jump in and miss stuff and whatever. And if there was some sort of platform or it was curated, so if I wanted to go in there and say, I wanna say what's anybody's done on this and I wanna get that, you know, have a tool that could, you know, scan all that incredible information that's shared on emails, but, you know, it's not accessed very well. So anyway, that's what I'm looking for. Thanks, Rick. That resonates really well with what I'm looking for as well. Thank you. Koss. Yeah, we've been trying to convert of emails several times and somehow it never really worked. We're defaulting back to sending emails. But my sense was that creating a platform that provides access to these new books and allows people to engage with the material takes care of content creation, right? I mean, if you write something that someone finds is just wrong or needs to have some sort of a correction, that will happen there. And so I don't know that we need to curate this so that we need to have like an editorial board, because the interaction with the material will sort that. But we could have a really creative platform that provides, I mean, first of all, the disclaimer. We don't take responsibility for any of these contents here. Please engage with the material if there's something objectionable, please state so. No, you can do that as an entry, but then we can create subchapters, no? And every new book has a different way to present itself. You can add a chatbot to one if you want to. You can make the information interactive, allow queries. So I thought that would be an opportunity to really showcase the creativity within the group to have multiple topics and so on. I love that and agree, Klaus, and also the conversation that Pete and I or that I tried to take us into a couple of weeks ago about what is the taxonomy of ways of contributing, communicating, which sort of didn't really work here, was an attempt to say, how do we simplify but make really powerful the kinds of interactions you were just describing? How do we make it really easy for people to contribute, collaborate, comment, do whatever else, without overwhelming them with way too many platforms, too many tools, too many things to understand. And we still kind of have to do a little of the work on that. Jose, Pete Stewart. Yeah, just as we're talking, it's occurring to me that I think the brand we'd want to use, assuming Neo Books is the brand, would be one of a new way of doing it, not one of an authority who's doing the publishing. And so a book that gets printed with a Neo Book description, something that says, this is what a Neo Book, this is how it works, this is how you can interact with it, this is how you can play, and this is how it was different in its creation. That is to me the imprint that I'd want, because then it's talking about a platform change, a new way of seeing the distribution of information and print and or other means as the unique part, not that there's yet another publishing house or another imprint. Like that to me is not at all valuable, but the value that's brought to the table by this new invention, I think helps to change the way we interact, helps to change the way we actually work with one another. So that to me would be the value. Thank you. So it seems like using the words press or imprint doesn't help us here at all. And we need to reconceive whether this is a process or a project or whatever else, but a platform. But I agree with everything. A platform, absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Pete, then Stuart. I apologize for using big sounding words that apparently didn't convey what I meant. I'm all about collaborative distribution, collective knowledge. That's what I build. That's what I do. So it sounds like Nia Books is a platform. That's great. Where is the platform? Are we happy with what it is now? How will we make it better? Yeah. And it seems that making those things explicit, like what does it mean to be a Nia Book? I'm happy to work on that because that's central to I think this whole project, but we need to publish those things as blog posts, whatever. But we need to get that out there so somebody can walk in and go, oh, okay, this is what's different about a Nia Book and why I would like to be part of this community. And I mean, especially one of those questions, very literally, not as a rhetorical question or anything. Where is our platform and are we happy with it? Because I think what we've talked through is the platforming parts of this, whatever it is, are not the hard thing. So do we have a platform? Where is it? How are we going to make it better? And my quick answer to that is by default, at least for me, the platform right now is Massive Wiki. Well, and more specifically, it's the OGM Wiki and some part of the OGM Wiki. Correct. So let's put more of our work there. Let's collectively think there are more. Cool. And if we're not happy with that, let's make it better to where we're happy with it. And Pete and Jordan and I are in a conversation to take some few remaining funds that I got a couple of years ago to fund some improvements to Massive Wiki that would help solve some of a few, a couple pieces of those questions. Stuart, please. Yeah, just a few thoughts. So there's a word, there's a way in which Marshall McLuhan's words come to me. The media is the message. And the word evolution or emergence of both content and the platform, okay? Evolution of the platform. In other words, we are not static. We are, you know, yeah. I blanched a little bit when Klaus said, no editorial content, anyone can come and play. I don't know about that, okay? I think we need some kind of filter. Otherwise I'm just concerned with what we might get. You know, I mean, I'll give a glaring example. I don't want, you know, I wouldn't like to be affiliated with someone who was publishing Nazi propaganda. Sorry to any, apologies to any Nazi-leading folks on the call, but that's the kind of thing that pops up in my mind. That really pisses me off, Stuart. No, I'm just kidding. And there was the end of Neo Books. No, no, that's illegal mind speaking. That's what it is. No. At least the legal mind and recovery. I once tried to say that I was recovered and got booed down. If I may interject just with that on, Stuart. I think my sense would be that what we need to do is set up a platform that does that, but not by making decisions after the fact, but that the platform itself has, the second I create something that isn't, the tiniest little thing that isn't in keeping with the spirit of what we're doing, then that gets questioned. Not that at the end of it, somebody goes, we're going to editorially review what you did. Yeah, no, got it. So we set up some criteria. So is participation our metric? Basically my point as well. Okay. Is participation our metric? Because the thing we want is for people to engage with Neo Books in this new way, where we're co-thinking as opposed to, for a publishing house, sales of an artifact would be the metric. Like, ooh, we had a best seller. And here we actually want to have a hot community interaction that's fruitful and useful. Cool. When I post something on LinkedIn, my newsletter and I instantly have 2,000 hits on it and so many likes, I know I hit a home run. Otherwise there's like, oh my God, I got three likes so that didn't go so well. So you get instant feedback, but I understand what you're saying as you want to have some kind of a filter. But I think filter may also already exist by who gets to post, right? And so who has access? Sweet. Stuart and Dave. I'm done. Thank you. Well, not Stuart. How about Dave? Yeah, so I guess we're kind of going back to our first principles again here, right? In this conversation. And I was just listening to this title of Cohen in this podcast and that's where the link to his Goat book came up. And part of the conversation was like, what are books for? What are people doing with books? And so it was kind of interesting. So he wrote the book and then he also put it into the bot to discuss with it. And I think part of his thesis was people don't really read books. They read parts of books or skin books. The bot allows you that more easily. You can still read the book if you want, but the bot really wants people want. And what's the service where you can pay money and you get like the 15 minute versions of books? So it feels like there's a whole set of things around books that are interesting. And they're, I would say user reader oriented, right? So if you're really doing a platform, it feels like we've got a reader orientation, which is trying to please them. You've got an author orientation. Like, I mean, I think I got it to the NIO books because I want Faus's book to be successful, right? Kind of, I want the store, the message that he's got around agriculture to get out there widely. So that's kind of my interest, but I'm not particularly interested in writing a book. And then there's another category of the author. What are they doing? Do they want prominence? Do they want to get their ideas better? Do they want to make money? So it's a multi-sided platform and you got to cross the incentives in a way that makes the platform successful, I think. This is kind of how I'm thinking about this. And so then, you know, Jerry, as the convener of the platform, you got to be weaving the incentive structures so that you get something that you want to keep doing out of it as well, right? Agreed. And there is a question sort of floating in the background, which is, does chat GPT or do LLMs obsolete reading? Which... But it was like Cohen was having, they were going to do a voice sample so that the bot could do the narration of the book. Right. Then the audible version would also be coming from the bot. So, you know, there's going to be the bot version, the audible version, the print version, you know, you could probably do an abstract version. Yeah. You know, it's kind of all part of the same package. So I think that what winds up starting to happen in my head here is, what is the wrapper or what bunch of ideas do we want to wrap in what way so that people can get access to them? And our book's too narrow for that because if you were to take one book and make it the corpus of a chat bot, a really smart chat bot, one of these new GPTs, is that less than you could actually do if you gave it the corpus of the author's entire works or entire thinking over their lifetime and career? Let's ignore the fact about how many tokens can a corpus be and all those kinds of things for right now, but right now what happens is a person writes several books in their lifetime perhaps and each of those books takes a different slice out of what they're thinking. And sometimes one of those has turned the person's master opus because that is like the big culmination of their thinking or whatever else, magnum opus, sorry, their masterpiece or magnum opus, but often we take sort of different slices out of it and why are we, why are chats trying, sorry, are these chats going to be functional when they're narrowly focused and that's good or are we really going to want chats that just represent thinkers? Like there's a public intellectual over there, Zanef Tufeski, and she's going to have a chat bot with which you can ask her about anything she's covered and anything she's done. And isn't that a lot more interesting and potentially powerful than having a chat bot that's connected specifically to a book that she wrote? I mean, I guess it's a my point I was trying to make is that I feel like you don't want to do this that with a view from nowhere, right? You got to do it with one of the sides of the platform. So as an author, do I want to display my corpus or not? As a reader, right? Do I want the author's corpus or not, right? I mean, I feel like we kind of need to, you know, serve your market there. And so you can ask that question in a very clear way, you know, Klaus, what do you need from this kind of, and then you, Klaus has got a fear and then we've, somebody's got to fear what Klaus's readers want as well, right? But, you know, I don't think we should be asking the abstraction, let's ask the concrete. And one of the second order questions that spills out of this is, oh, hey, so the chat bot said something interesting and I got a really interesting reply from somebody using the chat bot. How does that person actually improve the corpus? How does that person connect and comment or reuse or repurpose or what, all the stuff about the dynamics that we're talking about when it's there's just a chat interface. Now, I can envision a chat interface that is trying to incorporate wisdom from anybody who uses it back into the corpus and give credit and things like that, but I'm not sure that's in current designs for any of this stuff right now, but that would be kind of interesting. The other avenue is something like what I think we've been about all along, which is like, hey, you're, you're think the thing you're talking about right now exists over at this nugget over here and you could engage with that nugget in these ways and go crazy, but that takes you back to the thing called writing, which may or may not be obsolete, right? So there's lots of ways maybe to solve for this problem, but I like the idea of how do we improve our interactions and our co-thinking as some part of the overarching umbrella here? Kind of all of that just kind of got me lost a bit, but. Sorry about that. No, that's all right. My brain was kind of going left and you went right and that's like, that's what happened to my dad one time in Africa on a train. The train took a right turn at like 55 miles an hour overnight on a sleeper train and there was no door on the doorway or even a rope. He went to reach for a breath of fresh air and he went left out the door and broke five ribs in his pelvis and was found the next morning by real workers and survived to tell the story, which got more elaborate each time. There were more vultures over his head every time he told the story. Anyway, now I've probably seriously distracted you. Now you went backwards. Now I've got like. Now you have to look at the longer bifurcation. And spend twice in place. I was looking for the definition of chatbot. That's how, what a lot I am. I started thinking, well, if the aim of what we're working on here is to get down to first principles and in the platform that we're talking about, then maybe the way we designed a platform is through first principles. And so the first principle is, are we trying to publish authors? Are we trying to get more readers? Are we trying to, what's the thing we're trying to do? And my book, by that I don't mean a book, from my perspective, the aim is to get more people seeing the same thing. That there is more consistency and the way that we tell stories, the way that we see the world, the way that we see what's right and wrong and more consistency and all of that. So Neo-Books for me is a platform to build consistency, to build starting points and secondary and triasharity and so forth points in a map of our world. Is consistency the word you mean? Is it the best word for what you're trying to say? Do you mean resonance? Do you mean harmony? Do you mean improvement? Do you mean some? Except for maybe the last. I would say that consistency and that folks could glom onto something that does resonate to them but that it has never been positioned in the way that they could resonate because it's always been clouded in some other thing either through manipulation or it's deeply buried in a book and never really clear to me to understand it that there isn't an easy way to consume what could be resonant to me. Thank you, Stuart. Yeah, so this has become a terribly loaded word but to kind of paraphrase or give my own thought in terms of what we're doing, it's to awaken. More and more people to certain progressive ideas. And those words are, my own words are just words. But there's so much more. I know and you need to break them down in some ways to be able to articulate what it is that you really mean so that people understand you know, otherwise they can be tools for manipulation and argumentation. So... They're an extension of the OGM calls in some ways. What we're doing is an extension of the network. It's another vehicle to engage more people. So I think I have two little problems with the way you express this but I'm in general agreement with you and awaken implies other people are asleep and that you're awake and you're going to do them the favor of waking them up and I think that's part of the talking down to people that's not working out there. Awareness of content and ideas. And I'm not sure where, well, perspective, I don't know what the right word is, I'm hunting here. But then the other thing is about progressive ideas and for me the label progressivism just like the label MAGA and the label everything else are really tainted and weird and I'm sort of the wrong framing in different ways. And in some sense, I think what we want to do is I'm going to use another terrible word, liberate people from frames that are harming us as we try to puzzle through how to make a better life for lots of people. How about shit that's important for you to be aware of in the year 2024? That's great. See, you've just taken away the loaded terms and it works so much better. Thank you. And that we co-discover that. Yes. That it's not us doing so for someone else but that part of the process is a co-discovery process, not a talking to. And that's key. And like if people are along for the discovery route then they will appropriate the ideas and change their world in some substantive way and then they'll stick with it over time because it makes sense and they want to do it. My change model, my amateur primitive change model for society is basically taking someone by the hand and introducing them to something cool that they should try. Because it might actually stick and it might not but not showing up and saying, oh, we just studied 500 cultures around the world and we came up with 16 things that if you do these things exactly you will have a better society because that's never worked. Ask Earth Island Institute and a whole bunch of other researchers and attempt to do this. That doesn't, it doesn't stick when you show up and say, I've solved this problem, just do exactly this. Which means this is a merchant which means this is a series of conversations which means we have to express the ideas with some clarity which means we have to make our way through other people's attempts to cloak everything in mud and obscurity because that's a really viable tactic for avoiding these conversations, right? One of the real problems out there is what I call denial of discourse attacks which is different people's conscious attempts to undermine trust and discourse in the world. And Stuart, I think you're done talking so you can put your hand down and I'll go to Jose. So for some time I've had this idea and I just realized that maybe there is an intersection between these two ideas. The idea has been that text is actually, in some ways, the way that we do text today has actually increased the inability for us to have discourse because it is a, it's a dispassionate way of communicating. I'm not looking at your face. I'm not saying words. I can write all this negative stuff really quickly, hit send and proof the world's got it. And nobody's there to look me in the eye and go, really, really, that's who you are, that's what you wanna be. And so the idea has been that what if we didn't allow for written comments but we only allowed for spoken comments, you know, video comments. And that would be a way to do dialogue. So I would make a comment, it would be a video, my face is on it, my voice is on it. I feel a little different about that than I do just writing sort of a nameless, faceless comment somewhere on Twitter or something. And then, so then I started wondering, what if you combined that with a chat GPT to actually do the work of writing things and analyzing things to turn it into a new book structure but that the creation of the content is done verbally in some way. I'm not sure that it means anything here, but it's just those two thoughts kind of collided as we were talking there. I love how you're thinking. There's a difference between anonymity and pseudonymity and full ID. Anonymity means you can't tell who wrote anything. Pseudonymity means you don't know exactly who this is but you know that that other post over there is the same person than this string of posts over here because they have a pseudonym that is persistent over time. And if Bill Gates wants to go post on Reddit, he probably needs a pseudonym. And then- There's another piece there which is, it's not just that it's my name or not my name. It's just that- It's just that impersonal text. Impersonal- Impersonal- Emotion of speaking. Emotionless text. Yes. And so maybe we should just purge all text from the world and the world would settle into a more peaceful zone. Should we try that? I'm not sure that that was the answer but okay. Just playing your argument down. Well, but I think to some degree when we reduce the humanity in communication, we do reduce. I totally agree. But also I brought up the pseudonymity thing because when you can't suffer the consequences for your words, that's a problem. And it's way too easy to bomb conversations and leave and just like, ah, that was fun. And we need to reduce moments where that can happen. Rick, Pete, Stuart, you're muted. Sorry about that. Yeah, just a sort of poppery of comments really, echoing what Stuart's talking about, the dark side, so to speak, of what can be written. But on the other hand, the flip side of that is having some sort of call it what you may, credo, manifesto, whatever. What is the ethics of the organization that it's to help people become open minded, truth-seeking, virtuous, free thinkers, to collaborate together and solve the world's problems or whatever it is. And so that if you do have your negative deviants who get under the radar screen and start running afoul, there are mechanisms where you can address those issues in the public forum. So you're trying to raise the, I would say, we talk about civil discourse but I also think anything beyond civil discourse and generative dialogue, strategic dialogue, there are some very important subtle distinctions between them and we tend to put them all together and I think it's important for people to learn about those distinctions. The other one was the issue of a digital learning platform which I think is a much better frame. It echoed, I put the link in there. I just did a quick search about what are the best digital learning platforms and perplexity AI. And I agree with you entirely, Pete. Mighty Network sucks. It's not the platform. So we don't even need to discuss that one. But I was just curious to see what would come up and then it triggered for me a book that I remember reading maybe 10 years ago when Michael Hyatt was at his highest level of platform marketing, digital marketing. And he was a real maverick. I don't know if you're familiar with it but his book is now available free. Having what my recollection of that book was is that he's a marketer and he has a, I don't have a marketing mindset. So having people with a marketing mindset or learning from people with a marketing mindset is critically important. And then I came from a meeting where somebody gave a pitch and the take-home message I think is very important to this group, which is, you've got to co-create with your end users. So for example, if we were to take Klaus's book and look at this digital, this Wiki platform and we start practicing on it, how can, are people going to engage on it? And the take-home message of this group was don't even try and develop a map. I just go out and do it. You have to see who your audience, who's gonna help you co-create it. Because if you don't have people going to the platform, you're not gonna be able to develop a learning community. So I will, I'm glad that Pete's next because I'll push on him a little bit to say, okay, let's have a look at this, whatever's out there, maybe experiment. I think we need some experimentation, prototype testing to see, what's the experience like? Cause this is all abstract in a moment and let's see if we can let our feet touch the ground and say, can we crawl, run or walk? Over to you, Pete. Over to you, Pete. Thanks, Rick. A blunt answer to your question, I think right now the kind of the state of the art of collective knowledge and it's hard to even say the word learning because it has a really loaded meaning right now. It means a pedagogical educational system. It doesn't really mean learning. But anyway, kind of the best technology I know right now is discourse, which is a set of forums. And then it's not just the technology, it's the sociology of it. So you need a facilitation team and you also need kind of an information architecture team that's helping keep the information kind of in shape as people engage with it. I'd love to be involved with something like that. The basics of it aren't hard and then applying the consistent effort to build and maintain it is the hard part. To leave that topic for a bit, I'd like to talk about NIO books, accomplishing things. The NIO books project may be accomplishing things. In thinking about why I'm here, why I come to NIO books calls, originally it was to kind of explore the space of possibilities of what NIO books could be. I think we've covered that pretty well. So I don't have to come here anymore for that. And now the thing that I'm really looking for is to help the NIO books team or project or platform to create sociological tools and technological tools that do collective learning, collective engagement, moving ideas into the world. Dot, dot, dot, so that the world changes. So I'm really interested in seeing NIO books change the world. And I think to do that, it needs a way to sense or sense make towards its, I'm gonna say goals, which I'm sorry is kind of a loaded word, but towards its aims and to understand what it's trying to accomplish and if it's accomplishing it or not. And if it's not accomplishing it, how to move towards accomplishing it. So I think I appreciate the exploration of what NIO books means. I appreciate philosophical discussions about how we might make NIO books better. I'm kind of interested at this point in the actual nuts and bolts, let's change the world somehow. And back to if NIO books is a platform, we have a platform that exists. I don't think it's got very much stuff in it right now and I don't think very much of many of us participate in that platform. So maybe a thing that we need to do is to work on that platform more or maybe it's to spit that platform out and choose another one or something. But I hope that we can kind of get to where NIO books is setting up accomplishments that it wants and then a path towards those accomplishments. If I could just quickly respond to that and in response to host anything, what you were talking about, I think the question is, how can we create a blend, a high learning by then? I'm talking about learning in the frame of emancipation and not the traditional notion of education. The emancipation educational methodologies is something that I'm more interested in and how to help people develop their own sovereignty, understand their thinking, metacognition, yadda yadda. And that takes time. And it takes community over time. And work. So I have a bunch of sociological and technological tools at hand kind of. I think we should start applying them. We haven't very much. Yes, let's do a test run with something. I mean, I say, take something from Klaus, just try it out. Let's start playing with the tools to see what we think about them and see if we can do it. Thank you, I'll give you. It has hands, baby. Stuart and Stacey, then Klaus. Yeah, thanks, Pete and Rick. I wanted to, because what we're doing is it's emergent. And I wanted to punctuate what Jose said about text versus dialogue. The printing press was a great idea. In the year 1200 or wherever in hell it was, it ended. But maybe it's focused us in a direction that's no longer serving, completely, OK? In other words, it's not this or that. But there's a way that dialogue creates connection. Unfortunately, the media is all argument. So it's not a very good Roma. But real Bohemian dialogue is a very, very powerful tool for evolution of thought. And whatever studies have been done, the verbal aspect is a small percentage of the communication between human beings in a face-to-face setting. We see that here. And in some ways, just that concept and the possibility of having real dialogue as opposed to textual exchange is a great learning and possibility for an evolving forum for sharing ideas and evolving ideas. So we're actually doing it. And I just want to, I think, Rick is on the right path. Let's do something and see where it goes and explore. I don't think there's a downside to that. Thanks, Stuart. Stacy, you're muted. Oh, you're an unmuted man, but we still don't hear you. You can't hear me? Yes, now it's coming through. OK, I'm just interested in knowing, just with the aid of us, the distinctions in terms of what each one of us would consider the matrix of success and who we think of as the end users. So for me, it would definitely be participation. And the end user, what I would want, I'm the end user. I want to be the end user. And I'm just interested. I think that there would be slightly different answers for everybody. And I think that those answers and knowing what they are rather useful. And I echo Rick's idea of actually doing it. Because I think the answers to the questions that I just said and then doing it, I think magic happens in that process. It's the best way to say it. Thanks, Stacy. And then anybody who wants to reply to that or with your perspective, please jump in the queue. Thank you. And I'm getting some sound from, I think, your audio, Stacy, that sounds like there's a dog eating your phone or something like that. The sound's gone. Maybe there were aliens overhearing the call or something like that. But there was some extra artifacts on the audio coming from your phone that were puzzling. I was like, what is that noise? Anyway, thank you. Klaus, and then me. Yeah, also to what Stacy was just saying. Maybe if I explain for a moment how I look at my Neopope Volume 2 and how it evolves, if I may take the screen for a moment. So here is the stereo concept of leading from the future as it emerges. And so we are going through this process of understanding the system that we're working within. And so I'm traveling with a whole group of NGOs, but now also an increasing number of business groups who are really interested in regeneration and carbon sequestration and what have you. And so I realize their gaps, not because people don't know something, but because they haven't been able to put the dots together and connect information that they all have, but don't understand it in a systemic context. So for example, my last newsletter is focused on soil carbon sequestration versus soil regeneration. Everybody in this space that I'm working within, my partner, for example, understands every single component of this. What I'm now realizing, I need to spend more time explaining is that, yes, soil carbon sequestration is a primary driver, and that's what we're after, but you can't look at it in isolation because you can't change anything in the field unless you change everything around it. So to tell farmers they need to grow a different type of crop, that has so many implications in regards to where's the market? Who you're going to sell this to? Do you have processing capacity? Is there logistics capacity? What is the socioeconomic impact? Are people going to lose their jobs when you do this? Are you creating new jobs? The socioeconomics of it, so the understanding the system is the true challenge. So this entire, I realized I was stuck in the middle of this new book because nothing was moving around me. And then you just poke one step at a time where the gaps, where is the gap in understanding and knowledge that the group needs to embrace in order to advance. So right now, I mean, for example, and this is getting very technical, I'm sorry, but just to explain, the biofuel sector has created this low carbon intensity score, which is a wonderful thing, but it only works in the biofuel sector. And even there, it has implications which haven't been processed because in order to lower your carbon intensity score, you have to do stuff that alters the entire market access around you. So this kind of systems thinking has been alien. It's alien to any member of Congress. People are so embedded in their self-interest and in their own domains, they don't want to look out. So we are in silos. And I always compare it. Just climb out of your silo and look over the edges and see what's going on around you. So to me, that's what a neopold can do. It can advance systems thinking and embed you deeper and in whatever context. I mean, this can be in a social context, in a business context, in an environmental context, just connect the dots around you. And so that's what I'm working on. So this is the evolution of Volume 2, step by step. Thanks, Klaus. And also, I love what you said a moment ago about when you post something on LinkedIn and it gets three responses as opposed to a couple of thousand. That's your feedback loop, and that makes a lot of sense. Pete was saying, and many of us have been saying, OK, great. So let's build a platform where these things can work. What is our platform? And one of my hunches, and I'm not sure I'm just sort of saying this to stimulate the conversation, is that we will have a hard time generating a platform that a lot of people show up on that's really fruitful, that really is like juicy and so forth. But I'm pretty sure that there are some platforms in existence today that other people are hosting where this conversation is raging. And some of those, and I don't know how to tell which ones, might be very amenable to us showing up and saying, hey, would you like to try this experiment? How about this? How about this other way of looking at it? And presenting ideas someplace where the conversation already is happening, because you can't always attract all the interested or relevant parties over onto your backyard. You sometimes need to play in other people's backyard. That said, we've already set up a sub-stack club for this project. And one of our goals was to use it to sort of send out nuggets that were also living in the OGM Wiki or Massive Wiki. So we've got that. I put all these calls on YouTube. We've got a YouTube channel and more. So we could, in fact, say record shorter personal things and tag them up from our individual channels. Or I could post them into our collective channel or whatever else. And then Massive Wiki will hopefully get better and bigger. Dave, I think we're testing how do these nuggets of ideas become more social, get more participation, and get more interactive? How do they live online? Go ahead, Klaus. If I may share one more real quirky observation. And my wife loves to watch these game shows. And there is one called The Floor. And they have to compete about knowing social media companies. So these are one of the most. There's a game show for that already? So it's just, I mean, it's too much fun. You watch this thing and it just blows your mind. But anyway, so here are the two contestants. And one was a teacher. I mean, sort of professional people, but not academics or people who are working, whatever. Difficult to explain. I don't want to get lost. But the only two networks that neither one of them recognized was LinkedIn and ChatGPT. So they showed the icons for every one of these networks. And they clicked Facebook. They knew all of them. Didn't know LinkedIn. Didn't know ChatGPT. So what that tells me is that there is a hierarchy in what people see and observe. And LinkedIn is outside that spectrum. LinkedIn is sort of a more exclusive kind of club for professional people. And ChatGPT hasn't even reached the average person yet at all. So when we are looking at who do we cater to and who do we want to address here, I think that's really important. So we don't stay in our little bucket here, but instead reach out. If I could quickly comment on what Jerry said before Pete speaks. Jerry, I think you're talking about collaborators, which is some marketing function. But we've got to build what we have first, I think. We've got to build the Neobook concept and have it be something that exists before we reach out. But the reach out is real important. I agree. Go ahead, Pete. Thanks. I wonder, so some of us have talked about just doing something and how it might not be too hard to do something. I wonder if we can come out of this meeting or the next meeting with a shared goal, maybe. I have some, I'm going to put this in chat, but I'm going to read it first because it's not quite right in chat. So we could have some of us create a page on the OGM Wiki in the Neobook section. That's currently the Neobooks platform. So why don't we use our platform? Maybe it's the wrong platform. Maybe the process of trying to do that would convince us that it's the wrong platform or that it needs improvements, which would be awesome. Another goal might be to make a paperback or an ebook available through Lulu or KDP. Talking about shared goals here, too, I think each of us is doing some of these things separately. But if there's actually a Neobooks, then we could have a shared goal of create a page on the OGM Wiki, make a paperbook or ebook available through Lulu or KDP, have some of us post to the Neobooks sub-stack instance. And here's another place where we have a Neobooks platform already, but we're not using it. So either we use it or maybe it's the wrong thing. And by trying to use it, we can discover that it's the wrong thing. A more ambitious thing, but I think the best one that I've heard so far is set up a discourse instance where we can start creating a discussion space for ourselves and other people we might invite. And I don't mean these to be exclusionary. These are the ones that I can come up off top of my head. I think I wouldn't necessarily pick any of them for this to be a shared group. But until we have some shared goals and we're achieving them, I don't feel like we're a group. We're like a philosophy call, which is great. But it's starting to wear on me. It's getting a little tiresome. I want us to see, I want to see fingerprints in the world from the stuff that we do. So thanks. Thanks, Pete. And just briefly to elaborate on Pete's mention of discourse, one thing I didn't mention when I did mention sub-stack is that there used to be a discourse instance for OGM. And it wasn't sort of shaping up kind of properly. So freeze dried it, froze dried it. How do you say that? Frozen it. Frozen it. There we go. And so it's offline at this point. But one of the considerations is to add water and reconstitute it and basically put it back online. And then part of what Pete and I are conspiring to fund is his developing a way to use discourse as if it were the chat function on a nugget in Massive Wiki, which would be a cool thing. And then we could go experiment with that for a while and see if anybody else shows up and see if that creates the engagement we want. But I don't think that's a distant dream. I think that would be pretty executable in the relative near term. And what we would learn from that is that Pete can set up discord and it would serve as a chat. Yes. And that discord can both be discourse. Yeah, discord is entirely different. Discourse is more of a sophisticated, threaded forum with a whole bunch of bells and whistles. We'll say then Rick and then we're getting close to the end of this call. Oh, on that note. Go ahead. Go ahead, Senator. So you introduced, thank you, Pete, because I was feeling the same way, which is, yeah, let's get going. The idea of having more places, this feels dissonant to me. More things, like we could do it here and then there and then all these other things and sub stacks and more stacks. To me, it's pick something. If it doesn't work, pick something else. And let's try to do something. So yes, let's do something to let's not multiply and learn a whole bunch of different things that we could dilute our effort. That's my point. Totally agree. And the other thing I was going to say is, OK, if I have for next over the next week, if I have 10 first principles I want to put into the system, where do I do that? So right now, you would either post to the sub stack or you would add them to the OJ and Wiki. And decide that neither of those is the right thing and vote with your feet to some other platform. And also, I don't think you're set up to post to Massif Wiki or any of that. Correct. Not that I know of. I think I've been in there. But if I understand, the only way I can edit Massif Wiki is either through GitHub or through some other tool that I do not use. Some other editor like Obsidian. Yeah, excuse me. So I think that's part of my issue is even if I wanted to right now, it's not I don't see a platform that actually knows what a nugget is or a building block. I don't see a platform that actually knows how I can link those two things in an explicit way that says this is a nugget that supports this chunk of text. I'll answer that. But before I answer it with a technical thing, I'll note that Dave's got a great comment in the chat. You hear technological things from me because I'm a technologist and I'm here to build stuff. I'm not here to write stuff. That's not a value judgment. It's just who I am. So Dave said, hey, instead of talking technology and trying platforms in crap, because that doesn't really matter in the end, why don't we talk to customers and do something customer-focused and understand to Stacey's point who our end users are. That would be a great thing. My suggestions were technical stuff because I'm a technologist. My ask of this group is that we have some shared goal, like talk to somebody who's an acquaintance about what their understanding of a book is or what their understanding of or what platforms they use to read stuff or whatever. I don't care what we do. I think I would like to see us do something together. To your point, Jose, Massive Wiki and Discourse are top tools in my toolkit. And they are also excellent at nuggets. And they do excellent linking. And so they're not the easiest thing to use and they're not the hardest thing to use. And they're very capable, very practical systems. So again, this is Pete, the technologist, saying something. All of that doesn't matter more than end users actually reading our stuff. But we do have tools that are great at nuggets and need to get better. But they're already great. Can you help me if I come up with 10 over the next week? Can you help me document those? I love to do that, yes. I'll send you an email offline. I think our nuggets might create more engagement if we fry them twice. Because I think the single frying isn't quite creating enough crunch. Never mind. I found out on sandwiches of history that if you couldn't afford the fish nuggets, you could at least get pounded garbanzo beans and fry those up instead of the fish. I can never remember. Is it hotter first or hotter second? Is it the second frying that's hotter or the first frying that's hotter? I don't actually know. Having never double-fied anything, I don't know whether you turn the temperature up or down. I'm going to have to go look that up now, though. You need to have two different. Oh, two different baths, two different ducks. Damn, this is really resource-intensive. I thought making nuggets would be so simple. Steward then pass, and then we're kind of out of the call. Yeah, I would guess it's a lower temperature second. As someone who does play around with food. No, I was looking at Rick's comment, which I think is wonderful. And then I think we need to add to it in service of, and what pops up in my mind is addressing some of the complex challenges that we have as a species. Just everything you said, but serving that larger purpose. And then I started laughing because what I was laughing about was that. And that would be a wonderful definition because people who wouldn't understand it, maybe they're not the kind of folks we want to have participating in this endeavor. But that's just my strange sense of humor. OK. Just to dovetail on the last thing you said, Steward, I'm eager to have people like Steve Bannon participate in our same medium. And I am no fan of Steve Bannon, although I respect him as an evil genius. And I would want people with very different opinions to come in and play together with us somehow in a fair, fair place. I completely understand completely because there's no forum out there where people have completely different traditional, quote, orientations the way the media chunks them. There's no place where people are talking to each other. I mean, people used to talk to each other, I think, in the US Congress. They came up with solutions. I wrote a piece many years ago which attracted in the conflict resolution community. It was called Silver Foxes and the Order of Resolution. And it was about how wise people used to come together and discuss in a legitimate way so they could come up with solutions to solve some of the big challenges. I don't know any place where that's really going on today. So thank you for participating there, Jerry. And then years ago, it's just really funny, just a small anecdote. My stepdaughter and I agreed no Christmas presents this year, but she sent me one. She said I just had to send it. And it is a Silver Fox. And the first thing my late wife said to me who was on the editorial board that published that article was, you're not the Silver Fox. You're much too young to be the Silver Fox. Sweet words. Stacey, we're getting the alien artifacts from your line again. Why don't you go first real quick and then you can mute after that. And then I'll go mute. Thank you because with the ban in comment, you just gave me the courage to mention a project that I had been talking to Jose about just really quickly. I thought that a possible idea for this NeoBucks group to try out is to take small bites of the 2025 conservative platform. There's many ways we could do it, whether running it through a chat GPT and taking parts out first, but to have different ways to have small conversations about small pieces of it. Anyway, I just want to say that real quick. And I want to add to that idea. Have you got a look at the democratic platform for 2024 for this election cycle? A friend of mine, my friend who's a little more conservative than me pointed out that there is nothing practical in there. It is all about all the cultural war issues from the liberal side only. And it has very little practical stuff in there. It's kind of crazy and comparing the two might be an interesting exercise. Although that's larger than we can probably all bite off, but doing both ends of it might be really useful. Go ahead, Stacy. Yeah, I could just say rather than compare it, I'd rather pull out all the commentary totally and build on it because then it's that Aikido moves. They've put all the work into readying half the population. Let's take that momentum and make it, you know, anyway, I'm gonna mute. Get it, get it to first principles. Cool, I'll send Rick. Thank you for your patience. Pete, I just wanted to say I'm a marketing guy. And so for me, I need to put my hands on something is only so much abstract that I can follow. So the way I would go about this is grab a software that's weak, so whatever you want to use and then absolutely start pulling away or throwing away and doodling and put some ideas in. So I'm happy to engage simply from a marketing perspective. Who do we try to reach? Market segmentations, blah, blah, blah, and actually do something. You just have to pick whatever platform you want to work with, let's get started. Because there's nothing I can talk anymore that puts a picture in my head and to understand where this would be going. So I would need to see something on a real canvas. The trick is the shared part, getting more than one of us and hopefully several of us doing that together. I agree. Yeah, but this is a typical design process. That's how you do design stuff is within this kind of creative engagement. And it's amazingly fast. I mean, you can in an hour, you can set up. I mean, to do my website with my daughter took me an hour once you get going. Rick, you have the last word today. Well, it's just to build on what Klaus was just doing the go full circle to what Pete was talking about, which is I just came from a call where I was given yet another platform to go to. So they gave me an orientation to Notion, which I've never used before. So what I would suggest, Pete, as one small step towards a goal is for those of us who are not so experienced with it, is to give an orientation on how to use discourse. So maybe that could be something that could be done next week where we can have a little demo so we're all on the same page because I hadn't used that one. Thanks, Rick. Good, and I don't know that Pete has decided to reconstitute discourse yet. I don't know what that'll take. Have you already done it? Are you thinking about doing it? Do you need something to tip you over, Pete? I have not done it yet. And the... Are you inclined to? I am inclined to, but I need help, not so much technological help, but it's easy to set up, but it's... Well, anyway, my hack actually is to spend 50 bucks for the first month of a hosted discourse. And then if we like using that to actually set up our own discourse and continue from there. But this, by the way, is... I'm also got Ken Homer and Hank Kuhn interested in something similar. Yes. I didn't start with discourse with them and they're already talking about World Cafe and stuff like that. But discourse, I think... Ken uses Kiko Chat, I think, for World Cafe sometimes. But anyway. We will have to come back to this and elaborate on the future. It could also be Wix or it could be massive Wiki making a website or, you know... WIX Wix? Yeah. Class of suggestion. Okay. It's not a formal suggestion. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Just do it. Whatever it is. Just do it. All right.