 This is the Neobooks call for Monday, October 30th, 2023, and Klaus was in the eye of the hurricane, so to speak. Actually, not the eye, the front face. Yeah. Yeah, it's very scary. Cool. Any thoughts, progress? I know that Bill Anderson has looked at your manuscript and has some comments for you that he's going to post shortly, I think. And there are a couple other people who have been helping review it, so we've got some progress in there. And then Pete and I have done some thinking about what happens next and where it goes, but we've got some more thinking to do once we get a little closer to that goal. Any updates from either of you, any thoughts? Well, this volume one has been really useful so far. I mean, the astonishing discovery that climate models have not incorporated the hydrologic cycles was just a stunner. And I got into a conversation on LinkedIn between Mon Biot and Savory. I actually had an exchange with Alan Savory on LinkedIn, and then he responded in lengthy tirades, wanting to explain himself. And I ran this through the AI because what I realized is that Mon Biot is a pride orange guy where Savory is pride green. So when they were combating, they had set up this conference where they wanted to battle each other's position. It was a total failure. Because Mon Biot, the same experience that I had with the Sarah Club when I published a couple of papers where the way that Mon Biot talks, it's just deeply offensive to Savory. And what Savory talks about, Mon Biot doesn't even capture, I mean, he doesn't even process what Savory is trying to express. So what I was able to boil it down to is that Mon Biot looks at soil recovery as a balancing act between greenhouse gases going in and out. So he's basically declaring a rotational crazing of failure because the total contribution of methane, gases and CO2 generated is at best zero and it may actually be positive. Whereas Mon Biot is Savory is saying the success factor that you need, the measurement you need to use is the recovery of the soil microbiome. Because when you recover the soil microbiome, you diversify biology and you regenerate the capacity of the soil to absorb an old water which restarts the hydrologic cycles. So they're talking like, you know, two planes crossing by each other about completely different science. But it also exposed that Mon Biot really doesn't know what he's talking about. It just doesn't make sense what he's saying. So I was able to use this AI to first of all crystallize what is the difference between these two arguments and then which one makes more sense. Love that, really interesting. And did Savory go along with this? I mean, did you interact as far as what you're explaining right now with him? Yeah, he made a comment saying this is really very interesting and this level of intelligence supersedes human intelligence. I mean, he failed that the way the argumentation was put together is something that he couldn't have done, in other words. Wow, that's super interesting. As a small side note, yesterday, the Oregon Micrological Society had their annual but they haven't had it in several years because pandemic exhibit over nearby, like seven minutes away at the Oregon near the Oregon Zoo, there's a bunch of buildings. And so I went I'll post an album of photos of mushrooms because one of the things they do is the whole bunch of people go out and harvest mushrooms nearby and there's this in stain variety of mushrooms on long trays all freshly picked in soil with like bark and leaves and tree stumps and whatever just to make it look beautiful. But a lot of them, most of them identified with sort of a genus species edible not edible, we don't know. And it was beautiful and really, really interesting. And then they have the US Forest Service, mushroom ID, emergency services for poisonings. How do you cook mushrooms? A bunch of other sorts of things related to mushrooms. So all about soil health and all that. And it was really fun talking to some of those people about some of that stuff. Sorry for the tangent. But I thought you didn't enjoy the vicarious visit. And again, I'll post some of the pictures in the chat in a second. Stuart, go ahead. No, I was going to ask Klaus if you could just frame what it was that you guys were talking about. Okay. That was one and two, I'm feeling a little lightheaded. So I'm just not sure about how long I'm going to last on the call today. Yeah, I was just saying that there has been some real practical benefit coming out of this volume one book already. One was that the discovery that the most major climate models have either underestimated or completely omitted the impact of the hydrologic cycles as a contributor to climate change. And that's very dangerous because there is an acceleration taking place caused by the way water reacts to temperature changes. And importantly, we let the interact, the interrelationship between soil and water. And then we came to talk about this conversation I had that I got into with savory on LinkedIn, where he commented on an article that I had posted in an AI generated article on the impact of soil and water. And he got really interested reading this because he was saying there is an intelligence here that is beyond mine. I mean, he expressed it differently. But he basically saying I could have not put this together, this line of reasoning, the way this AI does it. And then he proceeded to communicate with me through some really lengthy diatribes that he was posting. And I took his postings and ran them through the AI and I said, translate that into an orange language. Because in his like combative exchange that he had with Monbiot, who is this British journalist who is very outspoken about we have to all become vegan and Monbiot and disputing savory assertions that rotational grazing practices have the capacity to restore grasslands back to health. And so then it became really obvious that the difference between Monbiot and savory is that they're talking about something completely different. Monbiot is talking about the exchange of greenhouse gases now that you would get putting cattle on grasslands. And so he's counting methane and CO2 and sequestration capacity and all of this and establishes a net balance of those two. And then he declares this a failure because the net balance is at best break even whereas savory is talking about something entirely different. He's talking about the restoration of the soil microbiome. That comes through the introduction of biomass when you put animals on the soil. And then when you do that, when there is a direct relationship between the biomass, the soil microbiome in the soil and its capacity to absorb and hold water. So savory is saying that the depletion of biodiversity, the depletion of plants on the soil is a root cause for contributing to global climate change and the destruction of the biosphere. And savory to add some detail is a particular champion of holistic planned grazing, which has I think many different names, but basically that livestock on the land are really important for land health. That's his mission. And Monbiot's not a fan of livestock on land, I think. Well, he is arguing that it's actually destructive and it's just intuitively strange that he would say something like this. And then it turns out that he has these completely mechanistic understanding of life. And so he comes really from a bright orange viewpoint. And he doesn't understand the sanctity of life and the interrelationships, the connections within life, within soil and the living world. Very interesting. Thank you. I don't know how this relates at all, but I watched a chunk of the first episode of Ken Burns' recent documentary about Buffalo, about bison, about how quickly it was decimated. It became like a gold rush during the 1800s. And I didn't really know that much about it, but the numbers of slaughtered bison and how decimated the bison herds were, but they were grazing the grasslands and the plain and had been the life force of Native Americans for many, many centuries. Forty American bison, sir. The doctor's title, the American Buffalo. It was kind of like a gold, it became kind of like a gold rush, where all of a sudden these people were heading west and engaging in decimating the Buffalo herds just to harvest the skins. Actually, the government or the military, I don't remember which, I don't know if he goes into it in the documentary because I've watched it, basically put bounties on it and they did it to extinguish the livelihoods of the Native Americans who lived in the plains. It was an Indian removal policy and then it became a hobby and people would go out, you know, Buffalo Bill, notably. Yeah, it's absolutely horrendous. These are Buffalo's cults. And it was done to basically take the life support from the Indians. We are not nice people, huh? Amazing. No, no. And in some ways, you know, the analogous is, I think, you know, destroying the biosphere for commercial purposes. So by 1889, Bison numbered in the hundreds. And there's a book titled The Extermination of the American Bison, which was written a long time ago in 1889. Yeah, it's astounding. Amazing stuff. Stuart, you had sent me a comment, you had made some annotations and comments to your manuscript. I haven't had a chance to look at them. Any thoughts, reflections on where you are and what you're thinking? Yeah, I mean, it's ready for people to take a look at and let's see what they have to say. I mean, the piece that I added was a little piece of the future and the agreement that, you know, the fantasy of the agreement that people came to agree to to move forward into the future. You want to say just a little bit more about it, just to give us more flavor? Yeah, it's kind of things got so bad that essentially it was realized, hey, we don't have much of a choice here. So let's see if we can create an agreement about how we might move forward as a species, given that the current notion of nation state governance is not going to work to get us out of the morass we're in in the future. And so enough of the sovereigns agreed to have a different reality going forward, their attempt to save the human species and to say, yeah, yeah. A different reality, meaning a different set of facts or goals or assumptions. I'm not clear on which particular, there's so many like weird agreements that have been struck in different societies in different places around the world. I'm trying to narrow down which set of things you're working with. Yeah, a different set of agreements going forward for how we're going to govern how human beings act going forward. The notion of nation states, you know, people realize we're not going to get very far. And we've got to change. And so that's the essential agreement. There's a new, it also includes a new form of quote, 10 commandments or 12 or whatever the number is, you know, for how we're going to be with each other going forward as human beings. So those few things. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Pete, any reflections on the process and stuff we've been talking about as it relates to the manuscripts coming up and stuff? Yeah, we need, I don't know, in my terminology or my cosmology, we need a little bit more of an editorial team and project plan to move towards publication some more. We got from A to Z. Yeah, or whatever. Okay. Yeah. So Pete, in the ideal world, what would the editorial scheme looks like? I know, I know classes book a little bit better. So I can kind of talk through that a little bit. Kind of an analogy to a typical publication process. You'd, an author would be working with an editor at a publishing house. And the editor would, the editor and his or her team, along with a publication kind of process team, would take care of getting review copies or actually pre-review copies. They would, they would be in charge of project management of getting galleys out to people to kind of do fact checking and getting a diamond in the rough, more polished and more ready for publication. In there, there would also be just proofreading, looking for typos and grammar checks and things like that. Towards towards the end of that, there would start to be a process of going from roughs to camera ready, you know, nicely types out pages, insertion of diagrams and figures, copyright clearance for that kind of thing. And then the technical work of getting the print ready pages bound and shipped and all that kind of stuff. So I kind of imagine a similar pipeline. It would be shaped differently or collaborate differently, but there's a process where I think somebody like Klaus or yourself should not necessarily be in charge of the Neobooks pipeline from, you know, hey, I've got a diamond in the rough to something that's, you know, turned into a saleable ebook, maybe print on demand copies, turned into smaller nuggets to be reassembled into other Neobooks, set up on a Neobooks website, kind of a virtual bookstore. So I think we, you know, the larger idea of the Neobooks concept, it sounds to me like kind of a, in a way, maybe open source or community, community led publishing process. And it doesn't go to, it's not really meant to go to paper as much as it's meant to go to wikis and ebooks and things like that. But conceptually, it's still the same thing, right? You need the Google Docs version to turn into Markdown and HTML versions, Markdown or HTML versions, maybe. And then those need to turn into EPUB, and they need to turn into websites and wikis and things like that. So there's, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of a chicken and egg process. We talked about this early on, and, and there wasn't anything to publish, so it didn't make sense to have a publishing pipeline. But now we have something to publish, and we need a publishing pipeline, more or less. And kind of the question is, we're not a publishing house, but how much of the publishing pipeline can we sort of successfully put together and how much of it, what are the essential parts of it? I mean, at this point, we're probably not going to create an index, for example. And it may well be that indexing software is simple and easy to do, but that's a piece that would normally happen in a book that we're likely to just let, you know, let go for, for this. There's other stuff that we could do. The replacement for an index now is, is a chat. Can I chat with this book? Right. And we could do that. And what, what do we need to do to make a book's corpus or content's chat friendlier or accessible? Because we're publishing openly anyway, which means that these things will be available for search or for feeding into a chatbot or an engine, an LLM. But what else could we do that would make it easier to chat with a book? It's a good question and no longer, longer discussion. Open AI just like today or last, last yesterday or something like that. ChatGPT is now going to have native PDF, you know, upload this PDF and chat with this PDF native to ChatGPT. So maybe there's not much to do. Maybe there's, it would be lovely to do that, to have a fine-tuned model that you publish on Huggingface that, that represents the, you know, the book basically or a collection of books even better. Maybe the new book and, and some of its reference material, whatever open reference material, you know. So it's something like that. In the olden days, you would have made an index and the new days, you'd publish a fine-tuned model to Huggingface. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. So just posting to the Huggingface would be a step we would add in. Yeah. And, and it's not like we, you know, if the book is, is open license, it's not like we've precluded that, but we've also not enabled it either, right? So the, I don't know, I don't know if this sounds like a lot of busy work or not, but, but it's clear to me that assembling a book is not the same as having it be accessible. Assembling a book and I put it in a public place is not the same thing as making it accessible. And I think if we haven't made it accessible, then we haven't done our job. Do you want to roof on that a bit? Because I think I totally agree with you. It's, it's kind of, I, I've, you know, pretty much said it all already. I think, so it's, it's kind of an odd thing because I don't know that any of us really volunteered to be the, you know, the, the thing that I said, it's kind of like Neobooks or the Neobooks pipeline or the Neobooks community is a publishing company. And, you know, that, that seems heavyweight, but I don't, I don't mean it to be heavyweight. I just mean it to be completionary. You know, there's not a lot of reason to create a Neobook if you're not going to go the extra mile somehow. So I think, I think somehow it's incumbent on somebody, and I don't know who to build that community that's doing the work of, you know, that whole pipeline. The different parts. A couple things. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to back up a little bit and ask that Pete, could you elaborate a little bit on hugging faces role in the ecosystem at this point and why it's important to, to. Yeah. So a big caveat. I am not really a hugging face user. I've, my, my, my LLM and image stuff has been away from fine tune models, but as I understand it, hugging face, you could think of hugging faces. I don't know if this is going to work, but you can think of hugging faces the GitHub for AI models rather than source code or text someday. So it's, it's a, or maybe another way to think of it, and this is something I'm even less familiar with, but there's open access scientific journal hubs. I don't know if SI hub is wanted or not. And, but it's the same thing. It's or slideshare, maybe a slideshare is a thing that you could think of as in business terms. It's a place where somebody collected a ton of PPTs, you know, so hugging face is kind of the same thing. It's, it's a place where everybody goes to post and download fine tune models. Thank you. That's really helpful. I, since while I'm, while I'm talking other places that you would want something to go to is however you meet up with the library face of the internet archive, you know, you want, they've got a process and I don't know if they even do it for individual like ebook kinds of things, but you know, whatever open libraries and things like that, maybe even project Gutenberg or whatever, you know, there are places where free tax have ended up, you know, like, like, like tumbleweeds drift out and, you know, piling or bison skulls, where they've, you know, ended up with a huge corpus of open tax. And so we should make sure to publish to those too. Thank you. The other thing I want to say is that the Neo books thing is my idea originally, and that means that I've signed up to be the lead on figuring out how to do the process and how to, you know, how to form up some semblance of an editorial and production process. So it's sort of in my lap and I'm not, I'm like, I'm not exactly sure how to complete it, but I appreciate your detailing it and us talking about it. And we've made some, we've taken a couple bites out of this, but not, we've not sort of figured out how to digest the whole thing. And again, and that was by intent to, you know, okay, there's a thing, let's start taking bites and see where we get to. And so now we've got a great milestone. And now we can uncover more milestones in front of them. Exactly. And just thinking out loud, we could skip a couple steps to get to something we can publish to get something out in the world that looks interesting. And then it might have some typos in it. And, you know, we might kind of reverse some of the steps in the sense of one of the conceits of the Neo book is that versioning is easy and important in Neo books. And the first version might not be a very polished version. And the third version might be like really good because we managed to sort of connect with enough people who cared about the issues and the way they're being expressed to join in and improve the different nuggets that compose the work. But that kind of means that the first thing out needs to be attractive enough to do that. And for a lot of people, a manuscript with a lot of typos and janky text is just a bounce, they just they just will stop reading right there. For other people, a series of good ideas clearly expressed up high enough that they get there might be a hook that that captures them and says, Well, gosh, this this is really messy text, but I could help make it a lot better because that's my skill. And then we're off to the races. But and I don't know where that balance is. But I fear that I fear that and I think we all don't want to do this, but I fear that holding ourselves to the standard of a published book from, you know, Random House at this at this stage is like way way be sort of beyond our reach and also not intentionally where we're aiming right now with like the quick first book. Does that make sense? Yeah, I wouldn't worry so much about typos because the software is pretty good to prevent that. But the it's more about the flow now and maybe in some cases, unnecessary repetitions and so on and so on. So I think it's more stylistically, you know, to make sure this flows. And then the other thing, of course, is, you know, to make sure that all these statements are defendable. And so we don't have some boo boo in there where the whole thing collapses because someone was able to contradict like one thing, you know, and know you lose secret ability. Or because chat GPD hallucinated something that doesn't actually exist. So I think in this conversation, we're realizing that fact checking is going to be a big thing. Yeah. So the same is all for me in a slightly different way. Whatever we decide that we want to put out there as our quote, initial finished product, credibility is a word that I think pops up as important. Because if whatever it is that we quote, publish doesn't have credibility, you know, people are not going to want to innovate, create, add to it in any way shape or form. So it's got to be credible. I mean, that's the word that pops up, you know, doesn't have to be perfect. But it needs it needs to be credible. The other thing and what I thought I heard Pete was that you said the iterations going forward should not be not controlled, but the original author should not be so engaged with that. And I would push back on that a little bit, because I think the the initial author may have some sense of, you know, where this might go and how others might iterate, contribute, because essentially we're trying to create something that's creative. You know, that I don't disagree. And it was the way I said it. That was weird. The way I said it was a consequence of Jerry and I talking about some of the next steps in class going, but I just wanted to write volume to I don't know, you know. So there's just some fairly mechanical stuff that needs to go on. You know, how do we get more people involved? How do we, you know, I don't know, even the project management of that doesn't necessarily have to be, I think the you're entirely right. The the original author should be involved in the evolution of the book, you know, from from diamond and rough to v1 to v2 to v3 to v4. Totally agree. And if it's left, if all of that work, if all of that is the responsibility of the original author, we're asking for a unicorn kind of right, somebody who has subject matter expertise can do the writing and then can do all the community management and and technical publication stuff that, you know, so the the way I tried to the the analogy I tried to try to draw between typical book publishing with an old style publishing house and paper books, bound paper books, there's a that is not something that most authors do. They don't do that whole process. They don't, you know, and and that's all I kind of wanted to convey was that, you know, there's there's a bunch of fairly mechanical stuff that needs to be done by by the community and not by the author. Hey, Jay. Yeah, yeah, just just to add two thoughts one. I know that the original author to add a bunch of reflective questions based upon knowledge of the of, you know, the big overview, I think that could add a lot to the to the to the creativity going forward, you know, pointing in direction to the the the idea of the editorial process that that Barrett Koehler uses, and I think that Jerry will understand this, it's a little unique in that as opposed to having one editor manuscript is is is, you know, is read by three, four people. So I remember kind of sitting there with three, four people commenting on the manuscript and then, you know, sitting there scratching my head a little, but it really does but it really does make for, I think, a better outcome in terms of having, you know, the different perspectives of different different people. Yeah. Go ahead, Pete. I even still I even a Barrett Koehler I I don't know much. Well, I know more than I should and probably not enough to even say this, but when you have an editor at a book publisher that he or she is not going to be the only person that even looks at the book, right, that's basically your contact person who's managing a team of people, all of whom are, you know, there's people looking at the book, there's people like, you know, thinking about how they're going to get it on paper, etc, etc. So I totally agree. It should it shouldn't be, you know, an editor. It should be an editorial team. I another thing in here, and it's buried so deep in my consciousness that I probably don't even say it anymore. But it's apparent to me that a new book is going to be more like software than a paper book in in the sense that it's going to continue to evolve afterwards. So if you think of open source software, what happens is you you make a release, you give it a number. There's actually a specific format for the numbering scheme you use with the three digits. It's called semantic versioning. So you give it a version number 1.0.0 or whatever. And you put it in a place where people can make comments on it. And then pretty soon you go, Oh, whoops, I need to add this. So now it's being 1.1.0. And now, you know, somebody else has come in and they've changed full sections of it. Now it's 2.1.0 and you know, and so on and so forth. So I think we should expect new books to have version stamps. And for the version stamps, we fairly fine grained and for there to be incremental evolution of the thing over time involving, you know, the author and the editorial publishing team and larger communities around them. Totally agree. Wait a minute. Hold on. Fine. I'll hold my thought. Thank you. Pete, are you saying that that, you know, it would be kind of like, you know, first edition, second edition, third edition? Much more fine grained. Because my conception is that it will be much more alive and evolving. Yeah. Much more fine grained. That's what that's what Pete is saying is that software can change day by day, right? Or even like intraday, you know? Oh, wow. We've we fixed four bugs today, you know, and there's four different version numbers. Okay. So Tesla, when it makes one of their electric vehicles is making mods all the time to the software and every vehicle ships out with a digital twin in archive of exactly what version of everything they ship that car with hardware and software. But they're making constant changes where normal car makers make a bunch of changes every two years or something like that when they sort of cycle the model and do whatever. So Tesla has completely changed the game on how cars are modified. And it's a little bit analogous to what we're talking about here where when anybody decides to get an ebook, so what one barrier we'll have here is that posting a book on Kindle, for example, will mean will be a process we probably won't do that often. So those would be like major major revs or major releases. It would be lovelier to be able to have a perfectly updated version of whatever the latest version of all the approved nuggets are rolled up and spit out whenever anybody were to go acquire a book on Amazon, a Kindle version. We might be able just like Pete's massive wiki will regenerate a website whenever you make a change to any page in that website's massive wiki page vault. It might be possible to create an ePub, not the Kindle upload to Kindle kind of version, but the version that somebody could buy or download or whatever from a website that could be completely up to date. And that might be a really interesting change to the process and how people perceive the process. And then the semantic version version would be really important because you'd be like, oh, okay, this is precisely where all the nuggets come from. But I like that idea a bunch. And I think if we make that clear, with the introduction to the Neobook, it may take a little bit off from the pressure to be perfect, right? I mean, it's basically saying this is as good as we got it to this point, knowing and understanding that modifications will have to come. I mean, the reason why I wanted to close down chapter one, because there is sort of a functional shift in how I look at volume two. And that actually fits in really well with this conversation that we just had about the adaptability. So can I just show you for a moment what I've done? Okay. So I'm titling it, leading from the future as it emerges. And that is the, of course, that is the bigger, that is the theory you concept, right? So we have sort of collectively reached the point of presencing where everybody understands how much trouble we're really in. So we don't talk so much anymore about the evolutionary concepts of agriculture and food systems and what have you. But we have reached an understanding, but now we are connecting to the source, we are engaging collective creativity. And then we're working with an open heart, open mind and open will towards finding solutions. And the reason why we are saying, leading from the future as it emerges is that we don't want to define the future in the absence of really knowing what that should be. Because we are exploring and we don't want to land on any concept that fixates us towards an outcome that may actually not be achievable or maybe the wrong thing to wanting to achieve. So then I wrote this, I mean, I prompted this forward here, we need to rekindle our broken bond with the biosphere in a changing climate. So we have lost our connection to life, to Gaia. And so we need to restore this, the dichotomy of abundance and deprivation. So we have this unparalleled scale of being able to feed billions. But in the process, our biosphere is gasping for breath. Now as we are depleting the soil microbiome and motorcycle school haywire, so the earth has enough to satisfy our needs, but not our greed. And then from science to societal change. And I'm getting increasingly frustrated with what we understand as science. Because it's mechanistic and it misses the linkage with life as an entity. So this technological solution, while technological solutions are essential, they aren't everything. And we will explore in this new book, the solutions also lie in the realm of social engineering. Spiral dynamics helps us understand this complex issue by breaking down the collective psyche in different colors. Orange thrives on competition and achievement. Green wants to see community welfare, holistic views and shared resources. And then so a call ahead. So this is an existential call to action. And honestly, I mean, I know you all keep watching what is happening out there. But we have passed some tipping points that you can't put back into the box. And most of them are related to water. Trillions of gallons of fresh water streaming into the oceans are disrupting the Gulf streams and slowing down already. And so there are things happening that are just pointing towards a very challenging future. But so it says with 95% confidence here, to reconnect our bond with the biosphere with Gaia is not just a philosophical issue, it's an existential issue. So this is actually, when you think about this, it's a crazy statement to read that the AI with 95% certainty is talking about an existential issue for humanity. So then the unsustainable quantum industrial agriculture is fraying the fabrics of earth ecosystem. So then I'm going through the topics that we are just briefly touching on an exhausting cycle, soil depletion, water resource depletion, disrupting the web of life through a high yield monoculture paradigm, a clarion call for change. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive from Albert Einstein here, and nowhere is this true than in the sphere of food and agriculture. Now the undeniable truth, the current tragic toy of industrial agriculture is untenable. As we dive deeper, exploring holistic and integrative visions of even global systemic solutions, we must rethink how we grow food. It's not just existential but immediate, a change catalyzed both by technological innovation and a renewed social consciousness, it's no longer a lofty ideal but a pressing necessity and it was 98% certainty on that statement. So from harmony to homogenization, the evolution of agriculture and its impact on bioregional diets, that we talked in the first edition about the needs for bioregional approaches to restoring biosystems and displacement of our evolutionary knowledge, ancient wisdom. So now I'm starting to transition into what does this actually mean in practical terms. Well, the first step is we need to reduce animal protein consumption. Now this is the most immediate, the most practical, the most impactful change and adaptation that we should take. And so from there then, multi-crop farming, case for integrated multi-crop farming is a sustainable alternative to monocoping and CAFOS. So I'm explaining here the caloric efficiency environmental benefits just to set the stage. So this is how as far as I've gotten just to set the stage for what does this mean in practical terms? Now how do you operationalize these transitions? And that's in virtually every conversation that you have on LinkedIn or with specialists and scientists, they all talk about solutions, but you don't get a practical pathway that gets you from point A to point B to point C. And so that's what I'm trying to lay out. And this is explorative. And so I just connected here in Bend with a group of locals, farmers and so on, because I need to learn myself. So I need to explore how does this really function. And then as I, in every conversation and in every interaction, I get a new idea and I'll then spin that into the book. So thank you, Klaus. My take on what you just said is a beautiful example of I think where we're trying to head in terms of framing. In other words, the piece that you added at the beginning was, so here's the crisis we're in. Okay, here's the absolute crisis that we're in. Here's my expertise about what we need to do. And then it's a step of, you know, what do you think? What can you add to it? What flaws or holes do you see in my suggestion? That's my take on what you've done so far. Thanks, Jordan. Thanks, Klaus. It's nice to have a preview of what you want to write next and where that's going. A couple thoughts. And then I'll go back to the thought I was going to say earlier. I have a feeling I have no exhaustive coverage of books on sustainability and how we might fix all these problems. But I think that there's a bunch of books that are specific about, hey, we need to replace capitals with regenerative agriculture. Like I don't, I have a feeling that there's already multiple books out there that are doing what you're just saying, what you're saying here, they may not do it in this way or in this structure. But they recommend these sorts of things. This feels familiar to me. It's certainly from blog posts, from lengthy blog posts. Second thing is, the thing I wind up thinking is, well, great, all we have to do is reduce protein demand, like animal protein demand. That is a gigantic unrealistic thing unless somebody hacks the human psyche in some really clever way. And maybe that means, and I'm just making this up, maybe that means you drop poison in the beef supply somewhere so that people are suddenly like, oops, won't touch beef because it's bad. Like all beef seems to be tainted. What are we going to do? And this gets into the territory of ministry for the future where people desperate about what's happening to them wind up taking underhanded means to actually achieve very rational things that nobody's actually doing rationally because it involves painful and large-scale behavioral change. So I'm particularly interested in any kinds of hacks or strategies to change people's minds at scale to do those kinds of things. And I haven't seen that much creative work on that front. And that's like the next piece of text after that. It's like, hey, we've been, many people have been saying these things for a long time, but how do we actually get there? And I think that that's a big hurdle and a giant thing to achieve somehow. And then I want to go back, having said all of that, I want to go back to the thing I was going to say earlier, which is an alternate path to getting the first book out is actually to publish it serially as blog posts. Going back to Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, a whole bunch of people used to write books serially. And they would publish in newspapers or magazines. And then the book would come out at the end and everybody would be waiting for the next episode of the magazine because everything was slow and that's how it worked. And in our world, the way we're thinking about this, setting it out as blog posts gets each blog section vetted and improved and critiqued as they go in the good crowdsourcing way that blogging will do if it gets enough attention. And then we roll up the blog posts into a book and march off to town. And the blog posts would be equal to markdown files on GitHub. It's just that we would copy them and paste them on Medium or some other place where they would get more attention as blog posts. So that's back to production strategy. But that would be a very familiar production strategy for anybody online. And there have been books that are basically compendiums of blog posts. That's not a novel thing. But the challenge is to get enough people. There are actually a lot of people out there who are interested in engaging. I was doing a presentation last week to the climate reality project or the Al Gore thing there. And I had an opportunity to explain the hydrologic cycle and how that is linked to the soil and so on. And I got so many emails, what should I do and how can I interact with this? And there is plenty of stuff out there already. I mean, you're right. I mean, all of these programs exist. They're just not being acted upon at scale. So the thing then is if we do have one activity that says let's reduce meat consumption, then you go and develop a chapter. What's out there? Don't create anything because anything you could think of, somebody has done already. And so let's just embrace what's out there and see which one of these things fits to your particular community and interest and capacity. Before going to Stuart, one of the virtues of the blog post version of this is that anything you wrote about the hydrological cycle of the small water cycle and the large water cycle and how they fit could be posted immediately at a blog post you could just keep pointing to. And now it's like, hey, I wrote this, everybody go look at this. And then later we roll that up into the larger narrative of what's happening. But one of the nice parts of the blog strategy is it lets you have things you can point to and work up some enthusiasm over time immediately. So my understanding is that substack would be the way to go here. Very like that's one interesting way. And Pete might recommend ghost or something different, but a substack pub is one way of getting seems to be the most popular here. And also it has the capacity to to travel extremely fast. But I have no idea never touched it. So I mean, if I could get some help setting something like this up and creating this linkage, you know, maybe maybe doing it through OGM, you know, that OGM has a substack that maybe linked to new books on specific topics, you know, then me as an author, I have something to just throw into that would not be I don't think that's a high heavy lift. Pete, what do you think? It's not a heavy lift. That's a great idea. There's some discussion to be had about substack versus ghost, right? But but I can envision a substack that is basically a serial publication queue, where it's not always the same thing. And we say so. It's like, hey, hey, this substack pub is basically a way to generate a series of books, they're going to have different topics. And you'll see them come out, you know, dripped over time, they might actually interlace as different authors are doing different pieces. But with each one, we'll basically say this is functionally chapter two of this book over here, here's a link to it. You can go see the skeleton of the book now, whatever, whatever, so that as the pieces show up, they have their contextualized individually. And that I don't think that would confuse too many people. I think that would probably work. Do you put in mailing lists into substack? How does that work? Substack is the mailing list blog, comma, comma. And so is ghost. I have huge mailing lists now. I don't think I don't think substack works like MailChimp, meaning I don't think you load substack up with a bunch of emails you have of people you'd like to send it to. I think what you do is you use MailChimp or just a bunch of email sends to say, hey, come sign up for my substack. I don't think you can pre-sign people up for substack. I would say it differently. People subscribe to your substack, which is essentially an email list. But you can't force them into your substack by just... I think you probably could. I could go look. Really? Oh, that'd be interesting. Okay. I think people have to voluntarily sign up. A big reason you use substack instead of, for instance, ghost is because they have a lot of distribution power already. So they get your content in front of people who are going to subscribe to it. What happens inside substack is that people who read this substack also read these others. You get a lot of cross-fertilization that way, and they do that inside of substack. They also get people who make comments and notes. Those get forwarded, and those become little artically post sort of things as well. So there's traffic or flow inside of substack, sort of like the traffic or flow that happens around code on GitHub, only pretty different. Go ahead, Stuart. One thought that I had as we're talking about this is for want of a better term, and there might be a better term, but publishing some kind of guidelines, ground rules, suggestions for folks that will be commenting, iterating, you know, adding ideas. I don't know. I really don't know what that would look like, because I don't want to kind of confine it too much, but I think that that might be an important piece about what it is we're looking for. That's a great idea, and it's really typical in an open source project to have contributory guidelines. You know, here's the things you can help with. Here's the ways that you can be most productive when you're helping. Here's the things that are counterproductive. Please don't do that. It's really common and smart. It's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, you know, say it in one phrase, you know, don't be an asshole. Yeah. It goes from contributory guidelines. A bigger open source project will actually have community guidelines as well, right? The bigger open source project turns into a community of people, not just an iteration of the content, but an iteration of the whole community evolution. So real quick, the Substack Ghost thing, they're very similar. They're what medium wanted to be, kind of, and they're a replacement for blogs, and they're also a mailing list. Substack is the more commercial and maybe a little bit more exploitative one, and Ghost is the open source underdog. So you go to Substack because it has that great cross feeding thing. And in some ways, it's like GitHub that way. In some ways, it's completely opposite of GitHub because the reason you come to GitHub is for open source community. For Substack, it's a commercial gain, basically. And on Substack, you can set price points and let people contribute to the project, and you can determine what they get for free or what they get when they achieve certain paid levels kind of thing. It's like Patreon that way. Ghost is the same thing. So there are reasons to pick Ghost over Substack, and there are reasons that you'd be less happy because you weren't getting as much traffic. Aside from traffic, I think you would hit other drawbacks, Pete. Aside from what? Aside from traffic, the traffic benefits of Substack versus Ghost, I think you were using Ghost for the Plex, bi-weekly Plex. Are there any other drawbacks that you can pick? They're very similar. Substack has a more productive business model, which is the way that capitalists say things if you think about it. Substack has a more productive business model so that they are able to spend more money on making Substack a little bit fancier. Substack is fancier and fancier. Ghost is plenty fancy for what we need, and it has a community, you know, contributory feel to it. So Plex is a ghost thing. I've also got a couple of Substacks too, which I don't, those Substacks I don't charge money for. But it's a bit of an ecological statement, which one you're choosing, as well as a market benefit thing. And let me go back to what I posted in the chat a little bit ago, which is, are Substack and Ghost now replacing blogs as places people post? And they're replacing Medium, too. Medium blew it. That sucks. But yeah, Substack is the, Substack is what Medium was wanting to be, and it's also the new way that you blog. And so the good news from my perspective is that a Substack newsletter, missive blog, modern blog post, has a permalink that looks reasonably tidy when you go to Substack, but not really because there's no, you know, you can kind of go through an archive. I guess it's there better than that could be. And the problem I have, like Cory Doctorow sends out his newsletters, and he'll do articles that are in line to a way long newsletter, and the permalinks are weird and flaky, and like I get, I'm trying to sort of chronicle and curate the really good stuff that he writes, and he makes it extra hard because the nugget size and the permalink versioning in the letter are kind of janky for me, anyway. In one sense, it's a great blog post, and in another sense, it's not nuggets, so you can't deeply dig into. I have a standing request to Pete to create permalinks to each post, each article inside of a Plex newsletter. So Klaus, sorry, you were trying to jump into the conversation. No, no, no, I'm good. I'm just following. I mean, one thing I heard about Substack is it has the capacity to communicate to a million people in a very short period of time, which is why it's being used now by organizations and groups who communicate, want to communicate out in large volume. But only if you get a million people to sign up for your Substack, or if you get the Substack people to forward to a million people, your Substack subscribers. So you don't automatically gain that big an audience. Like on TikTok, if you figure out the algorithm and TikTok puts you in front of a whole bunch of people, you will get a giant audience really quickly, and they can't actually, as far as I understand it, they can't subscribe to you to make sure they get everything you do. They're just going to get what the algorithm puts in front of them in TikTok. And so everybody's trying to hack the algorithm in TikTok. But the possibility of getting a giant audience is there and right in front of you. There's no barrier like I just described with Substack. And Pete, I think, is checking to see whether I'm wrong about what I'm saying, because it could be the Substack works differently from what I imagined. But that's what I think is happening. Say that again? That on Substack, you can only send to people who signed up for you. You can't force it. Conversely, they can assertively, affirmatively, they can affirmatively subscribe to you. Yes, but they have to. Unlike TikTok. Yes. Right. Exactly. And on TikTok, you can't, you can't make sure you see everything that a particular creator creates, which is weird. Kind of the same with Facebook, actually. Yeah. That seems like a strange thing to me. Algorithm of Barales. Man, we live in that. We live in the age. That was a lot of good stuff. Anything, anything else about where we are? So it seems like a Substack or a ghost for nuggets as we write them is a good idea. And we all kind of like, that sounds pretty good. I would, I would expand that a little bit. It should be for blog posts in general. So sometimes it's nuggets. Sometimes it's, you know, a call for participants. Sometimes it's, you know, hey, we've released a new book or, you know, something it should be blog posts. What we people of this age think of as blog posts. So one way that that could play out is that what gets composed as the bi-weekly plex is actually a rollup of blog posts that went through the modified ghost or Substack stream. Yeah. And then they would have individual links. Yeah. The problem with that is, well, then you've got to decide, I guess it works, you could, you could post a bunch of stuff that doesn't get into the email blast, and then you can do a rollup that's the email blast. Yeah. For some reason, I have a sense that a Substack, just because of the way I've experienced it is something that you sign up for, slash pay for to become part of it. Now, maybe, maybe you don't have to pay for it, but there is some, there's some, there's some business problem. Yeah. It's got that. Yeah. It's kind of like Patreon. You can think of, depending on what you do on Patreon, Substack is a replacement for Patreon. Yeah. So the way it works is, you can have, in the olden days, you used to be able to have one Substack thing. Now you can have multiple ones. So I've got two Substacks. I have a Substack, and I'm writing about stuff that I think is important and people can subscribe to it. I can choose to have free content and paid content. So some people, all of their content is paid, except for maybe some teaser stuff. Other people like me, all of their content is free. You can do it either way. Just a lever to set. Okay. Yeah. And so from Substack's point of view, the free content that I publish is a loss leader for all of their paid content. Substack wins when they take a cut of somebody's paid content. And they want you to do that. So they're letting me freeload, which is nice of them. But it's also anti-nice of them because they're building a publishing empire that now Ghost has to compete with. Does Substack do anything strange with intellectual property rights? Not that I'm aware of. Are there any complications for publishing through them? No. Okay. There is some controversy about the biggest controversy I know is that in the early days they kind of promised that, you know, hey, publish on Substack will monetize your content. And in the back end, what they were doing is getting some of the best bloggers or whatever of the time and paying them a lot of money over, you know, over on top of whatever circulation income they were getting. And they kind of hid that fact. So it looks like, oh, wow, everybody, every writer who's writing good content can get rich from Substack. And that was true for a few people who are getting Substack's VC money. But, you know, there's still a good utility. But at the same time, they're also part of the extractive capitalism world, unlike Ghost. And Ghost and Substack are very similar in capability. No offense, Substack folks, I don't mean to cast us versions on you. There should be a Substack pub named Casting Us Versions. There probably is. But if we can set this up, Pete, you know, I would love to take a look at it and see if I can incorporate this in part too. Because there are a lot of nuggets in book one that stand individually. And actually, if you try to frame them within the book, they just get lost. It's just too much information. I mean, for example, the Spiral Dynamics, there's one chapter talking in colors. Yeah, you just release this and it's like a wow. And then people want to know more. But if you get the whole Spiral Dynamics section, people don't get it. It's too much. Which is one of the big reasons for Neo Books to exist, that nuggets are really interesting on their own. Some of them deserve like to have a fruitful, growing life over time. And this is an attempt to provide an environment that does that. Jerry, are you kind of editor-in-chief or publisher of the Neo Books? I was going to say Substack as a generic term. And I want to encourage us not to do that. So the generic term would probably be email newsletter. Which sounds like the 1990s. Instead of Substack or Ghost or something like it, we're cementing a company that wants to be a monopoly. Again, Noa's version is Substack. So since I think that's a little bit counter-mission, I think it behooves us to think about whether we want to use Substack or Ghost and wrestle it out to the ground. But anyway, Jerry, are you the publisher of the Neo Books email newsletter? I think I'm the publisher pro tem until somebody steps in who really, really, really wants to do that. And we're like, hey, sounds great. Or are you the first person on the stewardship committee or something? Whatever makes sense that gives us enough control or presence to do it that way. But yeah, I think that's me. The technical part of setup is almost trivial. Yeah, I don't think there's that much to do except to write some pros to describe it. And even that's kind of optional. So the thing that I would think would hold this back, hold setting up an email newsletter back is actually just this governance and community form, which we could finish in the next 14 minutes. You mean choose governance models and other sorts of things or what do you mean? Yeah. Or we could defer it for another call or something like that. Well, I was thinking we could do a little homework between now and next Monday and then just like block everything and then unless we want to march ahead now. I mean, what I want to do is go say look for some posts or videos that say like sub sec versus coast, pluses and minuses and just absorb some of that to see if there's something that I'm that I that I'm like, wait, what? I think that's valuable. Yeah. That's what I was gonna gonna try to do. But I think then we've got to go ahead. Another question. Another homework question is trying to think of a good way to say this business model. Since the platform, both platforms support paid access, I think it makes sense to think about what paid access means. I will offer Plex as a great example. Plex has paid subscribers and free subscribers and they get exactly the same thing because whenever I push send and it says send this to everybody or send this just to paid, I always pick push send this to everybody. So that's one model but one potential model. We could actually have tiered content too or something like that but I think I think it makes sense to start from the from the get go with with some paid offerings even if it's even if it's like Plex where the paid is doesn't get you anything extra. I agree totally. So why don't we sort those things out and talk about it on Monday next and then we can make those decisions and start something up. That sounds good. And then one of the things this may just be me but I would love for any post going through this channel to have some context ahead of it that says this post is chapter figuratively right now chapter two of this manuscript over here and we should have a page up somewhere on one of the massive wiki pages or something like that that is the spine or the table of contents of that Neo book so that if somebody wanted and all the other pages might be like empty pages like hey this this chapter is going to be something about this that's totally fine because we're trying to sort of show that these things have context and they're going to turn into a roll up and whatever else and that way as the topics vary of what's going through the channel everybody will be like they'll be oriented as we go through that story you're muted that that can also have the the effect or impact of this the serialization we talked about earlier and getting people oh I can't wait till the next chapter comes out because I'm I'm kind of engaged in this this particular topic yeah yeah right I'm going to be in Nashville with my daughter next Monday I tried to make it I'm not sure what the program is but she has three little girls who are actually I called them my little terrorists you know the rather radical little girls so we'll see that should be fun yeah we'll cross our fingers that you can make it into the into the call yeah okay thank you very much thanks everybody very productive yeah thanks all all right thank you bye bye