 All right. This is the Neobux call for Monday, April 8th, 2024. Eclipse Day, if you're in the United States, in fact, at 11.25 my time, so in an hour, a little under an hour, is when the eclipse will pass nearest to Oregon. We'll only get like 15 or 20% occlusion, so we get nothing. It'll look like a cloud passed overhead, but that's when it gets closest to us. So we get 91%. Really? It's right over me, yeah. Oh, man. Oh, okay. At what time? Do you have to figure out what time? Because I really don't care. I'm sorry, I really don't care. I mean, I do have skylights and I did open the shades, so I'll be in the vicinity if there's a dark. I am interested to see what the environment will look like, but not necessarily the sun. So you don't need to look at the sun. A really cool thing is any little pinhole outdoors will act as a pinhole camera, and on the ground, you'll see a projection of what the sun looks like at that moment. So if you start noticing it getting a little darker and go outside and look under trees, for example, you'll see little patterns of semicircles, which are basically the shrinking sun as the moon comes in front of it. And then at full, at totality, you should, I don't know what you'll see, but basically you never look at directly at it without protection or glasses, but if you look on the ground, you're perfectly safe. And as I said, any little pinhole acts as a pinhole camera, so you could take an index card, punch a little hole in it with a needle, take that outside and look through that. Don't look through that at the sun, look through that, let it shine on the ground. I mean, didn't they all learn that in kindergarten not to look at the sun and be real? Yeah. I've heard it said that if you take a colander, you could see like, you know, 100 images. It's very likely true. What happened to me was one day when I was in Manhattan, there was a partial eclipse that I'd forgotten about entirely and I went out to get lunch at noon. And as I step outside, I'm like, what is up here? Because it seems really weirdly dark and then everybody is collected around the trees and they're all around the trees looking down because all the little holes between the leaves are making pinhole semicircles on the ground and it's beautiful. So I bet you a colander of the right size holes does exactly that. Yeah. Not a pasta colander, but something's finer, mashed, I don't know. Who knows? How is everybody? We're good? I'm nice. Dude. That's right. The dude abides. I was just saying as everybody started showing up that I'm working on a presentation to explain what NeoBooks are. It's not the easiest going because I've got a couple other presentations that have priority and I'm pretty further along on those. However, I'm having a good time imagining how to explain these things to anybody. And I hope maybe by next week's call to have a demo and then I hope to take over one of the OGM calls to do the NeoBooks update that we were talking about recently. So that's on my agenda. And I'm also trying to make the NeoBooks presentation a bit of an example of a NeoBook, but not entirely. But it'll hopefully make sense once I've got it kind of going. Then all advice suggestions and in fact it might be interesting to ask each of you for a one minute try at explaining what you think a NeoBook is and I can incorporate those as they work. I think you can incorporate also some of the vision from the agreement. In the spreadsheet. Yeah. Yeah, this folks articulated what their vision of a NeoBook was. So I think there's enough meat in there. Good idea. I will go back to the previous ones. So if anybody wants to take a swing at that, that'd be great. Well, I just, I will share that I've been kind of doing my best to polish what I think is the my NeoBook, okay? Mm-hmm. And I think it may serve as a very, very good example of a NeoBook because there's lots of space there for experts in various aspect of what I have articulated as places that we need to fix, renew if we're to have a viable society going forward and I don't profess to be an expert in all of these areas. So there's lots of opportunity, I think, for that book to be very alive. You know, am I being lazy here? Is the question I asked myself or is there, you know, or do I wanna have room for other people's input? And I wanna have room for other folks' input. Yeah, I think that's a piece of the magic of what NeoBooks ought to be doing if they work properly is they're the result of conversation, debate, experiment, et cetera, right? And hopefully they get better over time as a result of those things. Yeah. I like that. Klaus, do you wanna take a swing at it? Yeah, well, I mean, just from my perspective, the topics I'm working on is systems focused, you know, and when you talk about a system as complex, a wicked system really like food, you get into an endless list of specialties and expertise required, you know, to understand these interconnecting parts. So all I can really do is provide a nugget that talks about water tables, talks about soil health, talks about nutrient quality and so on. But then each one of these needs a deep dive to explore that topic much more. But there is also a need to stay at the meta level, you know, and understand how these parts interlink. So my attempt with the NeoBook is particularly with the Volume 2 is to simply point out all these moving parts that are connected some that are deeply connected but each have life of their own, you know. So and you need to understand enough about each one of these individual nuggets to fit them into the bigger picture. So the statements that I'm making and I do it with AI technology assistance need to be accurate, right? Without going into any level of specificity, but at the top line, they need to be accurate because then you can use them. Then you know that the water holding capacity of soil is contributing to the hydrologic cycles. So when you make a statement like this, the science behind this is enormous, you know. And you don't wanna get into this because then you're confusing people and you're losing the point you're trying to make but it needs to be accurate at the same time, you know. So there's an interesting question in writing in general about when do you put in a link into what, right? Because linky text, the links can offer deeper explanations for any of the particular phenomena and at different levels of abstraction. So you might talk about the small water cycle and you might explain it at a very meta level but then you could add a couple links that say, hey, to go deeper, I recommend these three videos and those three videos might themselves have embedded links and research and point to actual research reports and whatever else. And that's great. And I think part of the question is to what level of abstraction does a NIO book want to be written? And in fact, it might be written at two levels of abstraction. You might have the summary NIO book that stays always at the meta level with a couple links but then you might include some of the pros from the explanations in the body of the text for people who are smart but aren't aware of the issues and don't know what the explanation is and that might be the same exact thesis except a more expanded book because it contains more explanations and I don't think those two things would be contradictory. They would just be like whoever wants to get the NIO book or read it would read it at the level that they understand or need for understanding. And I think we're in this era of linky texts and hypertext, we're still figuring out where are those boundaries and what is the right shape for the artifacts? But that's really critically important. So as an exam, I always give you like an example that gets into too much of the weeds but I have this running conversation with Foley from the project Ardham. So he makes this bold statement that we're going alpha alpha in the desert and so you shouldn't eat hamburgers. So he's linking going alpha alpha in the desert with eating hamburgers so you should stop eating hamburgers. Well, that has nothing to do with it. They're going alpha alpha in the desert to ship it to Saudi Arabia and to Japan and to China to feed dairy cows, right? And even here in the US, it's dairy that is being fed with alpha alpha. So here's Foley, Jonathan Foley making these bold, meta-level statements and it's all wrong, you know? And so he's confusing people and he's such an important guy and he's doing such good work in so many levels but when you make sloppy mistakes like this, then you're at opening yourself up to being ridiculed and getting attacked and being basically sidelined. So this neo-book concept is really important to have the meta-level data correct. Yeah. And Foley has a TED Talk from 2023 called The Climate Solutions Worth Funding Now and I don't know whether you would agree with most of it or disagree with parts of it or what. I don't know, have you seen that one? I have, but the postings that he's doing are sloppy. Simply factually sloppy. Gotcha. Good. And so how does the neo-book help or what are the questions you want the neo-book to answer to cut through that? Well, I mean, everybody writes in different contexts but the neo-book needs to be factually accurate or generic enough to not get into levels of specificity where you need so much more information to really get this correct. You can absolutely say we should eat less hamburgers. That's perfectly fine. But then you need to also understand that the majority of the part comes from K-force, concentrated animal feeding operations and 40% of corn being fed to being used as animal feed. So there is so much more knowledge required to get into such levels of specificity. So I think the meta-books, nuggets need to be very well thought through in the context of making your statements generic enough so that they can become useful and accurate on a major level if that makes sense. I think so. Dave, welcome to the call. I'm trying to do a presentation explaining what neo-books are so I'm asking, sort of we're doing a little round robin to see what everybody thinks a neo-book is so I can bake some of that in. And the question Klaus and I were just talking about was what level of detail, what level of meta or generality should we be writing at and what level of specificity and detail do we need to go to depending on how open people are to knowing stuff but to be accurate and to be able to explain the underlying phenomena. So we're kind of in that territory right now. Fantastic, thanks. Yeah, sorry to be late. No worries. Rick, go ahead. Yeah, just to build on what Klaus was just talking about I think there's different dimensions and I like to take a step back from this a little bit and I was thinking of a title. Now this title may not ring but it's just a first stab at it which is a meta-book on neo-books. And the reason why something like that put aside the language for the time being but we've been having these conversations for time and each of us are coming in with a slightly different sort of frame of perspective about what we think neo-books are. And actually I think we need to capture the diversity and so if there's gonna be a short book I would suggest that you actually do a co-authorship of it with a group of people and we need to include some women too to be part of it. People who have the aspiration whether they do or not to write a neo-book and run it by it because going back to Klaus's point when somebody gets too wrapped up in their own head with their own particular worldview that's where people can go awry because they're not really cross-checking it or cross-validating it with other people. And I think that's one of the features of a neo-book. I mean, I see it as a sort of an agile, adaptive, co-authoring platform for both process and content of varying degrees. I mean, Klaus, you've said this before different levels that it's written at so that if people want the sort of the basic level but if it has the ability to go deeper where if you have a content expertise and somebody who really knows and you can validate it then it can go off in a different direction. So how do you create it as a dynamic co-evolving process that doesn't really have a beginning or end? It may have a publication date but that's just the beginning. It should be the beginning, not the end. And how do you then co-op people into the process of becoming part of that learning community? And I'll just give you an experience. I just came from another group where there were lots of things being presented too much in short period of time. And I posed something to talk about and I had a small breakout group in it. And what was fascinating, everybody was attracted to this theme. And I said, we need to have these thematic conversations over time just having these random small groups here and there. It's like brownie in motion. It's not, there isn't any iterative process. And I said to them, why don't we try and create, using the metaphor of a tapestry and a thread? How can we create threads of conversations that are woven together that provide some sort of coherence in dealing with the complexities of wicked problems? So to me, the new book idea is just a platform for creating these, call them mycelium networks, tapestries, whatever it is. Because I said, I lampoon Margaret Mead's speech quote about, it's a small group of people who've always changed the world. I think that's bunk. It's absolute bunk. And we have to get rid of that because what we need actually is thousands of small little groups evolving over time. And we're not designing learning systems for that function. So I'm glad you're recording this and I'll be curious to know what comes out of it. Cool, thank you. I like what you said, Rick, about the publishing might just be the start of the conversation. But good to go back to what Stuart was saying, am I cheating by collaborating with others in composing? It could be that publication date is just a milestone and a snapshot of the work at that instant. But that the community has already been building because at pub date, I hope that you're not now seeking readers or participants. At pub date, I would hope that you have a community going. Yeah, exactly. And so, for example, I mean, as a sort of, we have to practice what we preach. So can we actually do this on a meta book, on near books, or a near book, on a near book, whatever you call it? Because we have to be able to demonstrate that we're capable of doing those things for ourselves before we can go out and say how this should be used. And each of us are gonna have differences. I mean, what I really like about Bios' work is, it's clear, it's content oriented, it builds on things, and that's great. Having said that, I'm more into the process aspects of things. And we need to think about different metaphors that we use for content and process things. I'll share the blog post that I actually used for the trigger of this small group. And it was basically asking people to think about ways in which we can use human and AI intelligence synergistically for good and for service of all. And the conversation was just scratching the surface. And I didn't say anything. I said, why did you come? What triggered you to come? And we just started having a chance. I said, do you want to carry on this conversation? Yes, they wanted to carry on the conversation. But it's, we live in such incoherent, atomized fragmented world that we don't create the ways and there's lots of things going on. I think we're in a sort of such a early stage of sort of exponential curve that we haven't, we're not designing things to really scale things up in a way that could lead to amplified or even better, still exponential impact. So that's my two cents. Thank you. And Dave, thanks for the t-shirt annotation of Margaret Mead's quote. Rick, you should follow the link that Dave just put in the chat. Stacey, do you want to take a swing at the... No, Stuart can go. Actually, Stuart has his hand up. But if I can come to you after, go ahead, Stuart. Yeah, I just wanted to say I had this little brain flash. And all titles, all table of contents are actually marketing documents to draw people in. And so the little flash that I had was Neobooks, okay? And nobody knows what that means in some great sense. So that's our job to be marketers, all right? But the subtitle that popped up in my mind was Neobooks, a place for people who want to contribute to a new world or something like that, okay? Something like that. Come contribute to Neobooks, a place for people who want to contribute to remaking the world, something like that. I like the flavor of what you're saying a lot. Good. I didn't intend it to be a wordsmith's piece, but just that the overall gestalt of that. Yep, yep. Dave. Rick, you're smiling. Oh, no, I resonated with that. I was also thinking about what you're really talking about is the attractor. And I think framing the attractor is critically important. I think I like the idea, but I think it needs to be developed. So the sentiment I think is perfect. Great. Cool. Yeah. And maybe that was kind of what I was thinking too, that there, I feel like we've had conversations in the past around like with Kenneth, I know I've had a little bit with this with Ken, but I think that's the point of discussion. Right. And I feel like there's a philosophy of folks who think the discussion is kind of good in and of itself. And for me, it's like, I don't care about discussion for itself. It's got to have a purpose. Like what, you know, what are we discussing for? And I think the Neo books concept may have a little bit of that issue. It's like, there's a notion that Nio books is good because it organizes information and information is good. And I'm not totally convinced on that. I feel like information means for a purpose then. So then it's like, well, what's the purpose? You tell me what the purpose is, and then we'll talk to you about what Nio books are. And so, and so one of the things I've gotten excited, like you come back to these meetings probably because I, I think I like the idea of the nuggets being embers. The purpose of an ember is to inspire somebody's thinking. So it's kind of, it's kind of got a learning component, but it's not to teach them anything. It's just to inspire the process of thinking. Right. So it's kind of provoke, I guess, that's the kind of a notion. So, so like I feel like I can come up with a purpose for the Nio book framework that, you know, I'm pleased with it. So that's great. And I can imagine, you know, like Wikipedia kind of, I think is to organize information in some sense, you know, the use of Wikipedia turns out, there's lots of uses, but I'm not sure that the producers, the producers like to organize information, you know. And so I think you could have, you know, some kind of motivation around it's, it is about to teach somebody to do something. It's to get them to do something. It's to, you know, entertain them. You know, it's to give them a community, right? I mean, you can have a whole set of kind of purposes, I think implicit in the Nio books conversation. One of the things I think is inherent is the, is the collaboration upon it. So it does keep coming back to somehow or another Nio books allow multiple people to engage in the content in a way that builds new content. I mean, that seems to be kind of a prima facie, but it still kind of leaves open the why, why are they engaging piece? As you had said something at the end of the last call around, you know, that your book is great because you've been able to reuse pieces of it, which I think is fantastic. But for you, the quiet, the test of the Nio book in my mind would be, will other people reuse the content? I didn't say it's great. But I mean, that's kind of, I feel like there's a design problem, you know, like, yeah, I can take stuff I've done and I can reuse it because I've internalized it, but the Nio books challenge is going to be putting something out into the world and somebody else uses it, right? And so this is, gets back to the reciprocity kinds of issues. What's their capacity? How hard does it understand? How motivated are they? You know, those kinds of questions. Yeah, but that's exactly what I've been doing. So for example, part of these nuggets, when I post them, I have hundreds of people engaging with it and you have conversations centering around it. And they are high level enough. I mean, for example, I've engaged with the Bionutrient Food Association to point out to them that carbon intensity scores may have a relevancy for them. You know, it's their nutrient density scores. So I wrote an article on that and that article resonated widely, right? And it's a discussion point. So now they follow up meetings coming out of this. And so they're there. And I think your work has been hugely valuable, but it's more on the lines of a book. You are a thought leader. You have developed these ideas. You own these ideas and you're able to promulgate them, explain them, present them to people, you know, you own them. And I think that's fantastic. And I feel like it's kind of what a new book is about, right? I mean, a new book is supposed to be some other kind of thing that's a boring game. And you don't need other people. You're able to do it on your own, right? Which is cool. Do it that way. Well, I use AI, you know, as an enhancement. And it just works. But I agree that you should have, at some point in time, you need a team of people to look at this in more depth and broaden the overall perspective, yeah. A traditional book would have editors and commenters and you would have early readers and stuff. You know, I mean, that's a good process. You end up with a better book. Right. But those readers and all that don't become a part of the community later on in some sense. They're just like, they're just part of the process of creating a book. And Dave, when you said you own that material, I assume you mean like you have mastery over that material, not that you have any intellectual rights over it, because Klaus did not invent the small water cycle. For example, he did not invent soil fertility or these other metrics. He's pointing to other people's work, but his integration of it and ability to explain it is his own. Is that a track? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's, he owns it to the extent that you own stuff. You put in a book too. I mean, kind of from a legal standpoint, I mean, he has copyright over whatever words he used and things like that. But yeah, the ownership in this case was really was, you're the one who can, you can reuse it because you conceptualized it, right? And that kind of ownership, I think it's critical. Whereas something like what I've imagined a nugget about is that somehow Jerry is able to present a concept that I am able to interpret and reuse. And that I think is really, you know, that implies some kind of absorption learning process that I've experienced, right? That I think it's really hard. So I'm interested in seeing the nuggets that Klaus's work decomposes into, because some of those, at least metaphorically, maybe also practically might be useful in books that I want to write. And then including them by reference basically, reusing one of Klaus's nuggets would in fact be completely possible. Even if Klaus's original intention was to say, here's what I've been seeing and thinking. Here you go. So I think, yeah. Rick. Actually, I was going to let Stacey go before me. Thank you. I was going to go to Stacey after you, but I can wait. So it's really hard to answer this, because I think it depends on like what confuses. So I'm more about the process, but I think that there's a lot of goals here. And if I can't know which goal I'm speaking to at the time, then I don't know if it's working. Like I think that what I'm hearing is that for some people, the goal is to help them write their book. For other people, the goal is to get communities together so that maybe more real-world projects will come out of it. Dave, I don't think you were on the call yet when Klaus was giving the example of him working with someone. And he was talking about how the book needs to be really generic. And you said, so the purpose of conversations are to weed those things out, because sometimes people agree on something, but they agree on it for different reasons. And those things get lumped in together. And it's only in conversations that you realize, yes, we should do this, but not for the reason we're all thinking. So like for example, people might not like how Biden is reacting to the Middle East, but for totally different reasons. So now you get all those people that disagree with how he's reacting, and you think they're all on the same page, but they're actually not. And it becomes impossible to move forward. So just as an example on the Society 2045, 2045, 2025, 2045 fall, 2045 fall, Jose had used AI to come up with the key insights that came out of the interviews that had all been done. And one of the people on the call had a real problem using AI. And I had asked him if he could ask AI to break it down to a fifth grade level. And after the call, I took 10 minutes and I put my notes in of all the places where those gaps could be. And I sent it to Michael and he totally agreed. There were so many things that if you really simplify it, you see not everybody would be thinking of it the same way. And on that one document, I could see where people would want to have conversations just to say what their viewpoints are. Even on this call, we might, I mean, one of them was like, should society be fair? Like, what does that mean? You know, simple things like that. But in the course of discussion, I do, you know, I don't have the right words. But again, for me, Neal books. My interest is the process. And because I'm less interested in the actual product of a book. I'm more concerned in when and how the weaving of discussions and groups and real world, how that gets designed into it. Thank you. Love that. Thank you. And I'm with you entirely. I'm very interested in the process. And kind of Dave to answer your question in part. There's a bunch of things about me. Once you start thinking like a Neal book, then you realize, oh, this is really a way of hopefully improving debate and getting people to change party platforms, getting people to change corporate strategies. Then there's another angle on it, which is some nuggets are instrumentable, which is the wrong word. But you can turn them into code that could actually be useful in the world. So in some sense, the nuggetization of ideas is a way of trying to release them into the world so that they might cause more change than they do when they're trapped in books. And I'm making this assertion that information is sort of trapped in books and PDFs. It doesn't have the freedom of movement and the engagement of community and debate that normally they need to have. Go ahead, Rick, then Klaus. Yeah, just to build on something Dave was talking about. I mean, it comes back to the T loss, the purpose, the why. And if you can really focus on the why, the why is, you know, is the thing that inspires people if you can capture that. But what I'm hearing is that people are coming with different angles and I'm thinking about, well, how can you create a sort of flexible, definitional framework where you may have a typology of different types of books. So some of them may be a little bit old school dish, you know, a more traditional book. Others at the other extreme would be entirely focusing on process, thinking about the metal level. So if you think about an ecological framework of learning, you know, you could think about different perspectives that people can bring to the table. So the question is how do you define it broadly enough that completely for people coming in and say, you know, I think I can fit into this framework and I'd be, I'd like to be part of this learning community. So I think one needs to think about the fact of elements or the writer development of the, you know, the people who are going to be involved in developing these things and then thinking about, well, how can that over time actually cascade to involve other people because they see it such so attractive. I mean, you know, David, I mean the work you're doing in GRC, I mean, I think it's evolving in that sort of direction, but I, you know, there's little subgroups, but the subgroups from my perspective and participation aren't that well connected. And so, you know, well, how do you then have cross-fertilization within an organization to do it? So I think there's far more questions and answers here, but if we ask better questions and that could be part of the purpose of the, you know, the near book is how do we ask even better questions to be able to, and I'll just put something in here, which is just playing off what Stuart was saying. Maybe I already put it in, maybe I did, but it's just a different, let me see if I can find it. Yeah, I hear, you know, this is, you know, co-create a fair free flourishing future on a healthy planet. Are people attracted to that frame? I have no idea. You have to go out and test the market and say, near books, meta tag, and then test it. See which one people are drawn to the most because, you know, Klaus has got skills in marketing and I'm sure we can put them to good use. Thanks, Richard. Go ahead, Klaus. Yeah, I wanted to come back to what Stacey was just saying. When we raise an issue, and let me come back to my Jonathan Foley example of hamburgers and alpha-alpha coin here. If Jonathan had raised the issue that 30% of water being used in Arizona is going to co-alpha-alpha for cattle feed, that would have been great. But then he added that you should stop eating hamburgers and that was just throwing the whole thing off, right? So if you take, I mean, right now there's a raging debate about the increase in minimum wage for California's fast food workers. And somebody posted, created a post on this and it elicited some really great conversations because it shows how uninformed, the average citizen really is about how government works and if you pay people less than a living wage then they need food stamps, then they need, you know, or they need social services or support structures. Who's going to pay for that? Where does that money come from? So I think if the meta concept is to raise complex issues and open them up for debate in a way that you don't preempt someone or you don't create a quasi-solution that then everybody wants to disagree with, right? So then they're focusing on the solution you're proposing instead of the underlying problem that you're highlighting here. So I think in that sense, so I've been really careful in offering solutions that just leads to unnecessary debates but simply clarify the issues. And in a better world than we have, the solutions that you're proposing would become factors for policy people who are like, oh, this is a nice way to articulate the policy we've been trying to figure out, let's adopt it. And then for journalists to come in and say, oh, we're trying to write about this thing, let's point to this body of work the cause is created and so forth. My hope is that some better clarity of argument shows up and some connectedness between a policy proposal and the science being done on the ground and the people trapped in between all of that, people like farmers, so that they can collaborate to make better decisions. That's the ambitious goal of deconstructing knowledge into nuggets and making them more alive. Stuart. Yeah, so my burning question at this point in time is, and in some ways I'm back to something that I articulated, I don't know, two, three meetings ago. And that is we don't know what we have until it emerges. We don't know. Okay, we don't know how people are going to respond to any platform that we put out until it starts to emerge and people starts to play with it. So my question is, you know, and Jerry, you're the orchestra leader here. What's your sense of a timeline and what needs to be done before we say to the world, hey, we got a platform. We're looking for content experts who want to start and contribute their NIO book to our platform. So what's your sense of that one? So I'm working with Pete to create a proposal to use the last of funds that I received and put in Lionsburg's Care in order to fund a couple of improvements to Massive Wiki, which would allow for some of those conversational things to be more obvious around nuggets, the way I'm writing them in Markdown, putting them on GitHub. That's a little bit complicated way to say there's a couple features that will allow nuggets to be more conversational that won't show up in their full all singing, all dancing version, but should be good enough for the demo you're talking about. Then I'm trying to create this presentation that both explains what nuggets are and how this world works, but also points to them and says, hey, here's a nugget. Let's start with this. I'm starting with a nugget, assume good intent or assume good faith. And because that's reusable in lots of different contexts, it's a really interesting place. It's a foundational piece of my own thinking and design from trust. I can sort of point to it as a reusable nugget of an idea. And when I get my explanation recorded and Pete has those pieces in place, I think is a really good time to go back into the broader community and say, hey, here's a description of what this thing tastes and smells like. And here's a working example that you can come play with. OK, follow up on question. So I have a plus or minus 140 pages of a Neil book that raises a lot of interesting questions. As a practical matter, how do I engage with what you're thinking? Because what I just heard was that I need to turn that into nuggets in some ways for people to engage with or close to people engaging with a broader book. Or is that something that will be some function of some software algorithm or AI process that'll take the book and turn it into nuggets. And I think I've heard something about that before. Yeah. So I'm actually composing in nuggets. Most of the rest of you who are writing a manuscript that we're sort of trying to work with are writing in Google Docs, let's say. And then we have the question of how do we chunk this up? Right. It is not a terrible idea to use AI to break it into nuggets. AI is very good at understanding context shifts and all that. And AI might even be good at generating the broken up files that we want to call nuggets. So this could be a very nice application of AI. It's like, hey, take this document and break it into nuggets by this definition of what a nugget might be. And then we see what happens. Other than that, it's a bit of a manual labor task to sit down and say, well, here's an idea. Here's an elaboration of the idea. Here are some examples of the idea. And for me, assume good intent is an idea. A case study of, hey, the internet works this way. And here's how, hey, Wikipedia works this way. And here's how each of those is its own nugget explaining this other nugget about the idea. So each of these, it's not that the nugget has to include all of the explanations and all of the case studies. It's that each of these nuggets can wrap up into a bigger story pulled by traversing several different nuggets, for example. So I think it's easy to see the deconstruction of a longer narrative work into these nuggets, these component parts. So another follow up question. So you've explained a couple of things that need to be done that you're working on. Do you have any sense of timeline for these? If we want to just throw this into the maw of chat GPT and see what happens, we don't need to wait that long because anybody with the time to go do that and the patience to refine it, because usually you have to do it several times. You have to figure out what your prompts are. Anybody who wants to try that, like awesome. And Pete and I could help with the technical part of it of, oh, here's a bunch of sub files. Here's what we do with those sub files now. Right? And where we put them. So that doesn't need to wait for much of anything. That experiment is easy to do for anybody who's willing to try it. Great. The manual labor part of it depends on all of our time, which is complicated because we're all doing too many different disconnective things. But there we go. Thank you. Sure. Rick, then Stacy. Yes, Joe. I just want to pick up on something you said about content. And it feeds into something that Stacy was talking about. I was talking earlier about the process. There is this tension between content and process. You can have all the best content in the world, but if you don't have the right process, you're not going to be able to do anything with your content. So the question then becomes how, you know, I'm still, you know, not, I don't look myself into one metaphor. So when I keep on hearing nuggets, it's sort of, to me, a nugget is something that's somewhat static. It's sort of solid. Whereas it's not organic, emergent, or, you know, as David said, his ambas where he wants to ignite things. So I think we need to have a, and I put this into that blog post that I shared with you, and I might use the amber metaphor. David, if you don't mind, I was just playing around with a metaphor. I have some reservations about it because of the concept, you know, that, you know, ambas and forest fires and the associations that you might have with it. But I do like the idea of different metaphors. We all have upsides and downsides. So my caution is not getting too locked into, from my perspective, a nugget as a content. And I'm much more, to me, the content is about what? What do you need to know? Right? Whereas process is more, as you all know, is about, well, how the hell do we do it? And then the other is why the hell are we doing it? Which is the purpose. I mean, that's just Simon Simmich's golden circle. So how can we touch on those different domains and ways that you actually create some synergy across those domains anyway? And then over to Stacy. Well, let me reply just for a moment before I pass to Stacy. So I see nuggets as very alive and very emergent and very everything that you wish they were. And I think maybe you're seeing nuggets as a shiny gold nugget, which is maybe the easiest metaphor to go for. Would it help if you thought of nuggets as like little bead bombs of extremely fertile soil or something like that? No, I think it's important to define it. Everyone's going to, in marketing, you say a word, people have a panoply of associations from negative positive. And then you have to say, is my target market resonating with the positive ones? I think you have to define it. But some people are more concrete about it and they'll see it that way. So you really have to come up with the definition. But if the definition is so far removed from what people associate a nugget to be, then I think you need to have different frames. So I'm not, I'm not wedded to one frame. Let's put it that way. And a couple of calls back, I think we sort of said, hey, we've had these debates about terminology several times. And I hate getting stuck in those sinkholes. And I'd rather go with words right now and stick with them for a while and then be flexible to change them later when a better word shows up. It explains the thing better, or that has more popularity and more, more catch with people. So I'd rather not get stuck in that conversation. Well, I understand that we had it before, but it's yes and, and you're presenting one frame. And so I'm saying yes and, and, and. So if you can come up with your definition of nuggets that has yes and, and, and, and show us your definition. I haven't seen one. And that's what I'm working on. Actually, I do have some pages that, that have some of this. I'll put links in the chat. Go ahead, Stuart. Yeah. So using the, using the meta, using the metaphor of regeneration. Klaus, you're going to like this. Okay. And I think, I think Rick, you just, you were just talking about nuggets of soil in some way, or nuggets of, and, and, or living nuggets. And to me, in some ways, yeah. Not me. In some ways, in some ways we're talking about regenerative books. Okay. We're regenerative bodies of content. You know, it's kind of this new way of, of looking at, at, at creating living bodies of content out of these seeds or nuggets or, you know, whatever we want to call them. That's what I'm hearing. Stacy, you fell out of the queue, I think by accident. Would you like to go before Klaus? Yeah, real quick. I'm not even going to give a complete thought. I'm just going to say that I would resist using AI to pull out the nuggets because I think for a certain segment of people, panning for nuggets could be an attractor. That's entirely true. We could try to crowdsource nuggetization. It could be good too, but then somebody, somebody who's familiar with the work needs to sort of oversee that and be part of it. Absolutely. So whoever owns the manuscript or created the original manuscript needs to be happy with whatever the process is and be involved. Or just to real quick, or both, like I said on the other call, I took AI and then I critiqued what the AI did, which was fun. I did it because it was fun. I didn't do it for any other reason. Yep. Agreed. Thanks. Go ahead, Klaus. Yeah, I just put in an example of how I'm using nuggets. I'm actually advancing the Neo book right now by writing nuggets and then putting them back into the book because it's just sort of a, it's an evolution of thought. You know, that where every week or so I, you know, what is the most common conversation currently taking place? Then I'm writing something on it, but I write it as a freestanding nugget and then integrate it into the book. Does that make sense? So the nugget is a completely, like in this case here, it's about biofuels, biofuel feedstocks. You know, what are you using for biofuel feedstocks? And by the way, sorry and corn, but the worst things, the most inefficient things you could use as a biofuel feedstock. And then so there is the AI generated an outline on what you could be using that doesn't compete Mr. Food Supply, that uses marginal land, you know, that doesn't take precious farmland for that purpose. And so that, I got a lot of resonance out of this article, but then from there, it goes into the book, if that makes sense. So it's sort of weird now because you can't, I mean, I'm not really thinking about writing a book. I'm thinking about stringing topics together that are linked under the part umbrella of food and agriculture as a system. And plus, the biofuel feedsstocks, which is really hard to say three times fast, that nugget is quite short. It's a page with some references and the second half of it is basically bullet points of different biofuel grasses or plants that could be used, which is great. It's very nugget-sized. The other one that you're using is much longer and is probably like a collection of nuggets along the way. That's volume two. Okay, good. So it's just a chapter in volume two. And it's fairly generic. It doesn't tell you how you should do it. You know, it doesn't get into any specificity on the implications, you know, for logistics and storage and processing centers and all of that. It simply says corn and soy are not good at competing with the food supply and it can't go on because it will end up not being able to feed people as the population continues to grow. So we have to exit and change. But that could become a book in itself, right? This could be the entrance of an entire book because when you get into the complexities of actually doing this, then you're dealing with having to build processing plants that do oil seeds instead of corn. Agreed. And I think there probably are some books out there or at least there are some good essays out there that you could find. There might be in the resources you said at the end that are already making this argument that, hey, biofuels of this particular type are a distraction and a waste of resources or whatever. Yep. I like that class use the word entrance because that's how I, when I think of Neo books, I think of nuggets as being like doors to like different places. We could call them wormholes. Never mind. That sounds terrible. Since we are watching the sleep body problem. Yes. Yeah, apparently the beginning of the three body problem is not very popular in China because they really don't like anything that says, hey, during the Cultural Revolution, we did some very shitty things. Yeah. You can check out some of our early stuff about slavery. Yeah. You know, the Nazis used Jim Crow laws as examples and motivators for what to do to Jews in Germany. They were actually working off our blueprints. Clark Gable. I've been going back, Jerry, I don't know if this, I don't want to take you too far up track, but I went back and looked at the, that old internet design paper from a, the notion of designing for participation seems like. Yeah. And I wonder actually maybe if nuggets need a little more, you know, there's granularity and specificity kind of the, and you know, like in software, you know, several layers of structure that allow things to be reusable. And maybe that maybe the nuggets actually could use a little more structure. Well, they likely, they likely will need to obey some standards and protocols and other sorts of things in order to be very reusable. So I completely agree. Like what's a nugget stack look like or something? Yeah. Yeah. And a piece of the conversation that's too geeky for these people that Pete and I have engaged in some is what metadata should accompany a good nugget and where do you put it? And how do you make it so that it's easy to add, but not visible so that it interrupts the narrative, right? And how do you make it so that the metadata hides, but is available technologically, but it hides when you compile up the book, when you roll a nuggets up into a thing that should read as a straight continuous batch of pros. And that we, those are unsolved things so far. And I'm willing to bet a few people out there have solved different pieces of those puzzles. So I think I don't think we're in huge trouble, but I think that that's the stuff that needs to be solved along the way as well. I mean, in some sense you're trying for footnotes version too, right? Finger. Yes. And hyperlinks, hypertexts, footnotes, references, inline callouts, annotations. There's a whole bunch of words and ways we've kind of done each of which serves a different kind of purpose. There's also things like hypothesis, which can attach itself to most any webpage and create a separate discussion that informs the webpage, right? That's there. And one of the experiments that Pete is hopefully going to do is to connect discourse, which is a full-fledged forum software, to a nugget so that the first post in a discourse thread could become the nugget and then the conversation and discourse is a fully-fledged threaded discussions forum. It's really nicely done. It has user authentication and IDs and all that kind of stuff. So that would be a great place for a conversation about a nugget, as opposed to somebody trying to offer changes to the nugget itself, which is a different task related. So a piece of what we're trying to solve is how do these things actually function and to not make them too geeky and too technical? And I'm not noticing the sky darkening at all. So we're way too far off the path of occlusion. Stacey, I want to know what time you're going to get dark. Very cool. Well, I'm stepping out episodically, and it's about a third at the moment. It's getting significantly darker here. But it's probably only 75, 80% in Charlotte, North Carolina, but we're not at its peak yet. I've just been popping in out with my glasses just to get a peek at what's going on. That's terrific. I can't see a damn thing. Love that. Maybe we should have an eclipse metaphor. It would be good. I know. 325 will be maximum here. 325. All right. So noon 25, my time, which is another arm. That's great. Well, that's pretty soon. I'm just looking at you. Are you sure you're going to be okay? Any other thoughts for this conversation on this call? If not, we can wrap a little early and let everybody enjoy the eclipse to whatever extent it comes in. Just curious, what do you anticipate? It sounds like you're going to write a book on Nia books. And what sort of timeline are you envisioning for that? Have you got something blank? Have you thought that far? It was a work in progress. Yeah. So my first priority is this presentation explaining Nia books, which will hopefully be a Google slides deck that maps to wiki pages and massive wiki with a video that explains it. And the thing that I'll show people is the video. I'll bring that back here. Then I'm actually writing a book about design from trust, which is a very substantive piece of work that I need to write a book about. So that's the first book I'm trying to write. Along the way, I'm trying to seed the writing of the book about Nia books. Because, in fact, that would prove the point of what Nia books are good at in that several of the nuggets that are in the first book are probably reusable in the Nia books book as well. So that's a ways away. I don't know exactly. It's certainly not in the next couple of months that I can develop all of that. Yeah. But that's kind of the path that I'm putting myself on. So I just had a metaphor for the eclipse. Okay. Oh, good. The world will take us into darkness. Nia books will take us into light. Nice. At least we don't have a three broadie problem to contend with. I'll tell you what happened to me on Sunday spontaneously. I was out. I was on a Zoom call and I was jogging and running and walking, whatever. And the sun was behind me. It was unbelievable. And so what I did, I said, let me give you an eclipse experience a day early. I had the sunlight over me and I moved my head in the way. It went dark and then went over this way. And I said, did you appreciate that eclipse? I thought it was quite an opportunity of serendipity to come a day early with it. Impromptu eclipse. I like it. It was improvisation. Improvisation. We need lots of improvisation. That's true. We really do. So many things are broken. I'm just reading far too many essays about the political situation and how screwed up Democrats and progressives are that they can't explain their way out of paper bag. It's bad. It's scary. It's very scary. Yep. That's what we need, David's embers to burn the bag. Right. It's actually incomprehensible how in the 21st century, a modern society like ours, you know, you have a bunch of rich guys go out there and just flagrantly violate every basic ethos, right? I mean, in supporting this guy, it's just, it just blows you away. Yeah. Well, actually, that's a good point. You might want to think about how you can, I mean, to me, it comes back to ethics, virtues, whatever. And how can you positively reframe that in a way that highlights ethics and virtues? Because we're in a downward spiral into the immoral abyss and nothing looks like it's reversing upwards yet. But what it said, you know, we have had previous discussions about moving into a better world and more enlightened world and all of those things. And I even listened to Elon Musk the other day saying, you look into the future and everything is the same conflict that it was in the past, no matter how far back you go, right? So you have Star Wars going forward, but it seems innately embedded into our nature, right? That we, you know, that we are always at the precipice of morality versus greed, you know? And, but it hasn't been as blatant as it is right now in a long time. It comes back to Stuart's comment about the light in the dark, the eternal vodka, right? I keep thinking that, you know, people are not going to change behavior until there are massive amounts of pain. And we haven't experienced enough yet. Which is a whole other thought. Because for the first time in our evolution, that kind of pain could be final, could be, could be, could be, yep. Yep. I don't sleep so good. That's why I spent six hours yesterday binge watching Guy Ritchie's The Gentleman, Netflix series. I've been watching that one. I had one more episode to watch. Is it good? I enjoyed it, but I, I, you know, what I enjoy these action with some level of violence programs that just, that's the only thing that grabs my attention. That is what civilization has come to. Yeah. Did you watch, did you watch the movie, Stuart? The Matthew McConaughey? No. And, and what's his name? Matthew McConaughey and the Brit guy. The Love Actually Guy. Hugh Grant. Ah, okay. So I should watch the movie too, huh? I, you know, same, same caliber anyway. Great. Okay. Good. Good. So I have something to talk to now when I'm done. I watched the last episode of the series. It's called The Gentleman. The Gentleman. I actually watched a Guy Ritchie movie yesterday too. And I was thinking, he really puts out good movies. Like I only knew his name from years ago when Madonna dated him. They were married for many years. They were actually married for many years. Were they? I didn't follow that much. But the point is he puts out good movies. He does. Yeah. It's a little embarrassing, but he does. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he was, he was looking for alimony from her. It's something like that. Yeah. If you, if you watch PBS, I just happened to watch the first episode by mistake last night. It was on, it was the postman. No, is Mr. Bates against the post office or something like that. And it's about the scandal. And I've read about it, but. Mr. Bates versus the post office. Yeah, that's it. And it's all about a computer era that put a huge number of small post offices into debt. And it went on for like a decade and it's, it's only just beginning to unfold. It's, it's just unbelievable. I mean, remember reading about it and superficial details and say, oh yeah, but watching this is, if you want to know how computers can go awry, you might, you might want to watch that. So my understanding of this is that ICL wrote a program called Horizon IT that got installed by the post office, which is the private postal service. It's not the Royal Mail. The Royal Mail still exists and is the public utility sort of postal service for Fringland, but there's a private thing called the post office fund founded in 1987 back in thatcher days. And they installed this software. And then it turns out that the software was faulty and was basically shorting some money, but they believed the software and didn't believe the subalterns or whatever the superintendents who were in the postal offices. So they started accusing and suing those people, four of whom committed suicide. And hundreds of careers were ruined. And this went on for 20 years before a couple exposés recently turned it out, including the movie that Rick just mentioned. It's unbelievable. It is just unbelievable. Anyway, I'm going to watch it because it's so, it was captivating about how it started. Anyway, you might want to take a peek. It's, it's heartbreaking. It's just, and it's also about over-reliance on technology. It's, it's very much about how nobody, nobody was really questioning the ICL software, but in fact that's where the flaw was. There's a great series that just came out on PBS. It's called Our Miracle Years. And it is about Germany 9 starting in 1946. So after the war and the rebuilding. And the, the complexity, you know, of people coming back from being in their roles of an SS schoolman, and a factory owner who produced, who used slave labor, you know, and all these things. And so how they're reintegrating themselves. It's really interesting. It's really well done. Hmm. So interesting. Yeah. So a wonderful year. Our miracle years here on PBS. There's too much good stuff to watch. You have to be very selective. That's the thing. It's, it's hard to find, you know. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm just saying there's so much out there that there's, you know, really good stuff to watch. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Enjoy your eclipses as, as you catch them. Thanks for another great call. Thank you. More soon.