 This is the Neo Books Call for Monday, January 15th, 2024, and yeah, we were just talking about how real the unreal stuff is, and how increasingly real it's going to appear, how much it's going to invade our lives. I'm just sending a note to Jesse, because I think she wanted to join, but she may not have the right link. She probably does, because I just realized that my new link that works is the same link as the old link, and I don't really understand what Zoom is doing, and Pete, I have not created separate Zoom links for each of the meetings yet, but I got sort of halfway, because now I don't have to go in and change settings every time I open a Zoom, but I like that. And it turned off the continuous chat. I think that's probably best for them. Yeah, yeah. Hey, Stuart. Good morning, gentlemen. How you doing? Hi, Rick. Excellent. Any updates, thoughts, just sort of come back into our pace here a little bit, hopefully, and where are y'all? There's Jesse. I'm working with a team of folks writing a one chapter per person. We're writing a little anthology about AI stuff, AI and creativity, more or less. So in a different life or something that might actually be called a new book, but the first publication is going to be Kindle KDP, and then after that, the next notional milestone is making a video of your chapter. And some of the, at least one or two of the people, I think, will be pretty good at making a video, AI-ish video. None of that is new book incompatible. What do you think in that? In a way, it's kind of a new book, because the idea after that is to keep making different assets out of each chapter. Some of the direct kind of relationships are this is an effort led by Cindy Kuhn, and she's done a lot of KDP, and she has a designer who helps her with her KDP stuff. So we are, most of us, I think, are writing Google Docs, but I'm pretty sure it's going to get saved to Word, and then the Word is going to go through KDP stuff, and then I don't know exactly where some other format will pop out. So it's in the mix that I'm going to have at least a passenger view of KDP. I've done KDP stuff myself a long, long time ago, like 10 or 15 years ago. So it's not like it's totally new to me, but I'm here for about 30 minutes, too. Thanks, Rick. The other news I have real quick is one of the things that Google Docs has always bedeviled me with is if you have links in a Google Doc, it wraps every link in a Google search. So when you export it to HTML or something, like if you're moving it towards KDP or massive wiki or whatever, you get these weird Google search links. So I've got code now that strips that back to reasonable links. Sorry to be all techy, but the techy stuff, aside from that, there's another interest I've got, which is collaboration. I could tell a bunch of stories about the CyndiKun AI project and the way that we're collaborating and the terror that we've had from deadlines and stuff like that. But another time. And I was in the, go ahead. Pete, is it a good story or a bad story? It's a human story. One of the big lessons of the whole thing is since it's a book about AI and AI stuff, image generation and text, everybody is all in on using ChatGPD to help you write without being ashamed about it or weird about it or anything, because they're really conversant in it. So a lot of the reactions have come back and it's like, okay, well, I used the bot, and then I had to tear all that apart and write it myself anyway, stuff like that. The other thing is we're trying to go pretty fast and write individually, but it's turned out that even leakage-wise, it's been really important for us to stay together as a team. The idea that Cyndi had is, hey, everybody just have fun and do a thing, dash off a quick 5,000 words, which wasn't quick for me. Dash off a quick 5,000 words and we'll stick it all together, call it anthropology, push it out. It doesn't have an overall narrative arc or didn't intend to. But as everybody writes, we've been having weekly meetings and everybody looks across the desk. My thing isn't working out or when I went through your stuff. Thanks so much for the comments you made for me. For me personally, I actually sent Cyndi an email mid last week. This previous week was getting close to final deadline. I'm like, I'm two days away from the deadline. I've got this vision and it's not gelling on the page and I'm going to have to bow out. I'm sorry. That was enough to cause a couple people to get in and end on the group call. Hey, Pete, we support you. Do it this way. Do it that way. Blow up the target and just turn in. Wendy's idea was just turn in a picture screenshot of the small piece that you wrote, the 1500 word piece, X'd out. Just turn that in and say, this is the process. Things get weird and stuff happens. So anyway, the big story is that working with people, even when you've got a lot of AI assistants, working with people is the magic sauce. So that's like the overall story. Yeah. You remind me by sharing that story. One of the elements of my agreement model is renegotiation. You know what you know when you begin, you don't know what you don't know. And as you go down the path, the shit gets revealed and you've got to deal with it effectively. And it's easiest to do that with other people's emotional support and in negotiation with other people as it is a lesson for me. That is a foundational piece along with trust. Without that, you're not going any place. Cool. Thank you for sharing. Thanks Pete. I'm back here in Southern California where we used to live for quite a few years. And so I'm meeting my church friends and got into a discussion on biblical meaning and context. And it just inspired me to have a conversation with the AI on pattern recognition which because I believe that the scriptures to a large degree define patterns in human behavior and in group behavior. And so I just went through an exercise there and I thought it was it came out pretty interesting. In fact, I would love to pursue that further and see if anybody is interested in in engaging in a discussion like this because I mean clearly the spiral dynamic spectrum blue is dominating the discussions out there. When you look at the conservative Christian movement and their beliefs and what they are embracing this there is a lot of confusion into what it means. And then of course what happened since I since I wrote this all of a sudden my youtube channel is sending me all these these conversations whichever way that happens. Where you had some some some fascinating scholars explain in biblical history and the research related around it and how messed up it really is. So anyway I just I send it over to Pete maybe someone is interested to pursue that conversation because I think it's absolutely fascinating and the depth which which the AI engages here is just really incredible. Because you get such a broad feedback on state of the art thinking about no very specific subtropics. So anyway but since a couple are leaving early I wanted to see if Jesse could give an update on where she's going with her project you know also with David here that's a good opportunity Jesse do you want to crap it and and share. Yeah thank you class I'm I just this is the time where I just come out of a workout and I'm sweaty and just you know I'm just not wanting to get on a call. When you're talking about spiral dynamics I definitely want to get deeper in that and I was trying to I actually planted a question to you in the community that I invited you to class. I don't you didn't bite but no one else bit either so I'm just interested in applying that to the food. The industry of food so whatever that looks like if you want to invite us to a call I'm there or maybe we'll talk about it tomorrow when we talk. My update I really don't know exactly what the purpose of this meeting is I haven't really been paying attention too much in terms of it's about writing and new books and it could be anything around AI I'm thinking but I'm I'm still trying to figure that out I'm just putting that out there being transparent that I'm a little ignorant right now of what I'm into but I do love the idea of integrating spiral dynamics in that that red to green kind of leveling up of eating from the sad diet this the standard American diet all the way to the glad is what I I call it the good lifestyle and diet and trying to use AI to help support people to to transition over time and some gamification maybe so that's that's really and integrating that into the app and the community itself through Slack so that's where I'm at I would love help with technology I'm also very much into figuring out how to visualize the data that I have for in Kumu when it comes to my hometown and what food is like and just a micro level just trying to visualize how people how connections are being made from the the grocery store to the the food co-op to the farmers to the to the consumers it's just it's fascinating and I just started out last year and that with the SDGs and called good strings and trying to visualize that on a small level to be able to to support the SDGs on a on a small level but the the reason why I'm here today is because I've chosen food as a way to impact SDGs from one angle one topic and just really stays very focused because I've been very divergent all my life and I want to stay focused I hear you have you gotten real conversant in Kumu or how are you what is how is your relationship with Kumu these days well I did an entire database last year and then I came back to it this year and I'm like what what how did I do that it's just like someone else did it for me it was weird and I've been talking with Wendy's right hand person what's his name um the gene bellinger now someone else no Vincent thank you oh okay Wendy McLean yeah cool so maybe get a little bit deeper into it jessie so jessie is developing an app that can run on on on your phone and it can help you to to to structure your your meal plan and also your shopping list in ways that supports your personal health but also has an environmental consciousness so so it means that you will see the environmental impact of your decisions not in real time um and and so that's how to frame that up I mean jessie feel free to grab the screen and show and show the what the app looks like but that's sort of in a nutshell and of course we would like to get the attention of of students primarily here you know there is a lot of uh I'm connected with uh the Sophie Egan who is the founder of the menus of change initiative at Harvard and Stanford uh and they are also working you know on on getting students to understand the impact of food on health and agriculture so it's what it's that heaven so it's it's it's go ahead jessie I'd be happy to share um the the experience um I think what I'm finding is that community is where really the experience is at people want to um be not due to this alone there's a lot of uh opinions when you're saying I'd like to go healthier like even let's just say vegan I'm not I don't say I I want to help people go vegan because there's a lot of unhealthy vegans out there but um what when someone says in a family structure I'd like to change my diet there's a lot of pushback and it's really uh it's if you have the discipline to be able to stick with it despite your peers or your family not doing it that seems to be the most the biggest indicator if you're going to change your diet not the app but community that you know that other people are going to support you through the process so I'm really trying to um build this community up so that it helps people know that they belong and so I could share my screen really quick to show you both if you want just maybe take three minutes that'd be great yeah okay I'm on my phone so this will be interesting I've never done it on my phone okay so plant powered is it's it's a web app but it's not you can put it as a as a app on your phone so that's what you're getting is you can have both different experiences um so you start your day and um and then it's really an educational app so yes it's not about tracking calories or nutrition um although you are going to um meet your nutritional goals if you actually follow this list so you don't if there's a reduction of a food anxiety every single day trying to figure out what should I eat what should I eat where the anxiety shows up is how do I make it there's a lot of people who just don't have time and we'll just ask for something to be delivered so um working with partners to figure that out on how to do this but to log it as if you buy something and you can log it here so let's say that you ate some blueberries you can log it and I had a half a cup and then you meet your your you could see under the blueberry the berries section you met it and it's very much like Dr Gregor is kind of um 12 if you if you've known about that but it it helps you actually learn about the foods a little bit more and then you can see as you go farther up the level goes up from level one sad diet all the way to the green plant power so you can look at today's log and see where you're at um but then if you go on the foods you can look up pibiscus tea or farro and let's just say um you were interested in chickpeas and you understand what the nutrients are and high and you can look into the video of Dr Gregor I pulled that in here and and then somehow we're going to integrate like you know meals somehow but there's recipes here and how to make hummus and if you could log the recipe you can how much macronutrients if you're very into that and then um if you are wanting some guidance you can put in your birthday your gender how how much you weigh and how much you want to be and how active active you are and it shows you how much you should be eating for calories and protein and so forth only for those who really are saying hey how much protein should I be eating and it and it does back it up through USDA although not everyone believes the USDA is the accurate source but I understand that but yeah there's a lot of different um it's a beautiful app that's educational is set up as an educational app so that you can learn I have I have a few users who went from flexitarian all the way to 70 plant forward diets and they feel so much better that about the foods they're eating because they've been learning about each food and what the impact is on the on the environment um there's also even a food medicine section and I'm trying to build into the community and have conversations around so if I look up the black channel and food is medicine um we are discussing what that looks like here and I like to invite people that are doctors and the food is medicine and health practitioners to represent and then when you see the kitchen I'd like to invite chefs that are plant forward um like chef friend and rouge is a plant forward vegan vegan sushi chef so have people you know be represented and use this as a platform to educate and increase awareness and then actually lock arms to work on initiatives together that's that that's awesome I'm so glad that demo worked so well that was a good debut good debut thanks Jesse um I'm one of the things that I mean that interests me a lot in vegetarian vegan cooking is just like sort of in the recipes section but a lot a lot of us lack imagination on what to do with veggies and there's a bunch of interesting ways to sort of solve that that I'm interested in but Pete's got his hand up thanks jessie it looks awesome like totally totally awesome um I wanted to I wanted to butt in with an AI thing you might have heard about open AI's GPT store it's not quite ready for primetime yet because you still have to be a chat GPT plus subscriber to use any of them which I think is a crazy thing but I think they're going to fix that in in a matter of months so the hotness right now is to have a GPT so I think it's really obvious in 2024 if you have an information app like that or a website or a book you also want a GPT you're going to be distributing the same information as a chat bot called the GPT through open a store maybe other other stores so that's something to kind of keep on the radar and and to think about they're not hard to develop but there are some kind of gotchas and the other the other weird thing is going to be figuring out how to get through the cut through the noise of millions of other GPTs clamoring for your attention but I'm really convinced that it's going to be you know at the end of 2024 you know it will be like insanely obvious that you have a GPT more than you have a book or a website or an app or something like that um the other thing real quick uh Jesse mentioned uh community I wanted to kind of validate that I had a great experience uh with a co-founder um who was the idea person uh I was the CTO uh we built an app and this was like 10 years ago so it was right when apps were first I think 10 or 15 years ago um Zach Lynch and I had a company uh for a while called Cash Coach and we had some other names but the idea was uh you to if you wanted to change make a big life change like lose weight or quit smoking or something like that um we figured out how to um recruit a team of your friends and family around you uh to help you meet that goal and in the testing of that app um it was just like insane off the charts it was super successful um and we kind of fell down um based on um you know marketing and stuff like that and stuff that wasn't part of the way the app worked the the good slash bad news was the way that we got that recruited that team around you was that people would pledge um you know five dollars ten dollars fifty dollars towards a goal of yours you know I want to I want to go on the special vacation or I want to buy a laptop or these these awesome shoes if I lose weight I'm going to buy these super cool shoes or whatever and it's it it startled us how effective that was um because it turned out that not only do people kind of like people in our our culture you know for better or for worse are have to kind of be driven by money you make uh financially driven just uh choices but there was also like an insane amount of compliance when grandma puts in her you know hard one 25 bucks into your thing there's no way that you can disappoint grandma and give her back her 25 bucks right it's like you don't do that so uh it it was a way of kind of locking in um engagement around a a tough goal so um so it'll be really cool just say to see you start to have community stuff built into your app as well as uh as well as you know individual information based stuff the community stuff it's it's super super uh important thank you Pete I took a lot of notes down and was inspired by your idea of um supporting getting a supported by a group so thank you you're welcome thank you both um Pete do you want to riff for a moment about the possibilities of a GPT for Jesse's app because part of what you said was I think we're moving into a world where we'll probably be talking to GPT's not so much apps and it seems like there's a natural fit there but you're deeper into it you're both deeper into it than I am in in lieu of doing that um uh Jesse if you'd be interested I'd love to show you how GPTs work and and things like that and then maybe yeah I'm meeting with Klaus tomorrow he was so kind to meet last week for um showing that what the 4.0 experience is versus 3.5 it's smarter for sure but how to integrate it into the app it seems like I have to pay extra money to and I'm just like I have to first make a um this sustainable somehow as um making money for the app so it's paved for itself so I can put in GPT I know that that's just going to level it up for sure there's for instance like you can choose all the ingredients you have and just say hey what make three meals out of this and I just I do that on my myself manually and I love it integrating chat GPT GPT for into an app through the API calls is actually pretty cheap so so it may be worth it may be worth kind of activating that earlier than you think it's it's pretty cheap um it gets expensive at scale of course but you know by the time you have scale that's a different problem um if I may just be ran one test um where Jesse gave an arbitrary list of ingredients in her refrigerator and I ran it through the AI and says write a menu with this now for three days and it's just boom instantly it converted the ingredients in the refrigerator into menus yeah I you can also do things like snap a picture of your fridge and say what can I make oh my gosh I have to send this pick this thing where it's a WhatsApp chat GPT all they did was they took a number in WhatsApp and you just text it called text rex or did someone in this group tell me about this don't remember that okay um it's called text rex look it up um try it out what what they do is they create an you can take a picture of your food and it will immediately take and in their text we'll say this is 30 protein and if I can figure out how to do that with this app it's not that yeah it's not that hard um the AI you know stuff or it's sorry the API stuff for that is not not that hard so so then there are two different things one of them is integrating GPT for so um or GPT for V the V stands for vision so that people can you know use natural language instead of instead of something else separately from that there's a thing I got text recommendations out of that what does he say separately from integrating the GPT for is creating a GPT and they picked a generic name for marketing reasons or whatever so it's confusing but a GPT is a custom version of chat GPT which has extra information that you supply and then it's it generally stays within the domain space that you've you've nominated for it so so um in the domain of uh you know personal nutrition and and food and stuff like that you can preload a bunch of information into its brain that's different than the general information that it could get off of a web search and it will use you can tell it to use mostly that and be a wizard for you know interacting with people based on on that knowledge base so that's called a GPT and then the reason it matters at all is because chat GPT is has decided that the way to productize chat GPT is not to have a general purpose bot that can do anything for everybody which is what we've got now because most people don't know what to do with a bot that could do everything for everybody so if you say I have a GPT that will help you build a formula on a race car or I have a GPT that will give you tips and tricks on learning how to do photography or I have a GPT that knows all about environmental concerns and sale health and and personal diet choices and things like that so you say that I have a bot that does this and their their marketing push and their hype push is all around compartmentalizing chat GPT into specific bots that that have a thing so so it's I don't know if this will work for people but there was a time on Facebook when Facebook allowed people to start developing apps and for like two or three years if you were developing an app for Facebook you were golden because you know it was this whole new way of interacting with with information in the world and people and stuff like that so it's kind of the same thing you get the the reason to do it is partly because it's practical and partly because if you're a teenager nowadays you're going to be talking to bots rather than any you know books or people or anything like that it's just going to be the way that people do it in a you know six months a year and then the other reason to do it like get on them back and now and learn about it is because there's a big hype machine you know that's partly open a and partly everybody's thinking about chat GPT and opening on AI in general that's driving everybody to look at GPTs so the flip side of it is there's literally millions already but it's it's it's it's a it's a really practical thing it's a really useful thing it's more useful than a website or a book and then also right now it's also the new caucus so okay yeah if it's cheap enough I'll do I do you mind if I reach out if I have a question please do I'd love to show you more right on thank you very much and Rick when I get Netflix I'll be looking at that because I've heard about it over and over but thank you thank you so much Pete you're welcome Jesse um and I apologize all I'm gonna I'm gonna drop off I have a good call and Rick had to drop off his phone thanks Pete see you around so yeah I'll take a minute to share um so I've started to take my manuscript and share it um in different places um uh and anything I do with it is um it's not mutually exclusive in terms of um the neo book context but I shared it last Friday um in the society 2045 slash radical um call and had a lot of positive feedback about the overall gestalt of it and um and some specific recommendations and and things to do so I was pleased with that and I'll continue to do that um also with some people that I know in in my network um and so exactly where it will all go I'm not sure but I'm still excited about the prospect of um uh doing a neo book um and seeing where that goes that that being said just listening to um to Pete talk about GPT um I was I was kind of and the conversation with you Jesse I was kind of when I heard the notion of take a photo of the refrigerator and get recipes you know um or menus you know spit back at you that's one of the most fun things in the world for me um on retreat about this is about four years ago I ended up cooking for 25 people um and was confronted with just what you're talking about and though it involved a lot of mental capacity and creativity it was so much fun um to do so I'm just kind of sitting with that that was kind of a little bit of a negative impulse but on the positive side I thought about um the whole notion of feeding all on the knowledge that I have around conflict and collaboration into a GPT and and creating it's kind of like it's something I never did I always thought about doing an app um but this seems like a next generation of what an app might do so um that's uh that's about all I have to say right now but interesting possibility to open that up with neo books I mean and and Pete's statement of um oh you know young young people won't be interacting um with books at all they'll be interacting with with bots I mean it's uh it's a world beyond my current understanding or thinking now I have an inkling that is a really interesting question of the idea of our do these GPTs and things like them do chatbots basically make books obsolete because you can you can talk with the idea and the idea is creator in some magical interactive way yeah boss babe doesn't you think that's going to be a thing I think people are telling me it's going to be a thing I should get on board closest definitely I mean he's kind of gave me an introduction to it and Pete was able to speak to it um so I'm interested in learning more I know how to make apps I know how to make communities I if I could figure out how to integrate those two I can maybe not have to go back to a corporate job help other people do it there is there is a huge gap you know with people who have just heard of AI and think and heard so many negative things and all the evil it's going to do and so on and then some people who have tried working with it but just really don't know how to go about it and there is a skill set that you need to develop in order to query the AI and I mean Pete has been a terrific guide and you know when you followed the threads on our discussion thread there were a lot of articles that came across where you know how do you how do you train your AI how do you talk so I mean in this paper about the revelations chapter two that I just wrote clearly the AI didn't have a pre-formatted opinion on it I had to guide it with my questions towards where I wanted to take it meaning is there a pattern is there a recognizable pattern right that is being expressed here that has that can be that can be seen across eras and so because it actually when I when I put out a hypothesis using the church in Nazi Germany it says yes those patterns apply to churches in Nazi Germany but this is really conjecture you know you can't really base a theory on that so then I asked it so are there other such eras throughout the history of the Christian church that are similar in nature and it instantly came back with oh yeah here they're like five other examples so there is a pattern and then you can ask the question by the people who are in this mindset how do you how do you penetrate how do you communicate with that so you have to train the AI along the the hypothesis that you have now and then you verify whether the AI will support your hypothesis or shoot it down now and and it it's very objective in that regard I've had a lot of high of ideas that we're going nowhere because it just wouldn't support it now and and conversely I had a hard like like in this case it just boom puts a frame around it that's just incredible and that would have taken me you know forever I mean with my god the research involved in in in this which is be amazing yeah yeah did you did you fact check the responses to make sure that they all were actual eras or events that happened in history I'm familiar with every single one of them well I mean yeah I can kind of immediately see the notion of of starting to program and starting a movement you know who wants to be a peacemaker and not only not only you know content that I've developed but just you know including as you teach someone as you know including the wisdom of the ages in that and and creating a movement around that moving people away from right wrong when lose fault blame thinking into a new way of of interacting with the world in situations where there is conflict yeah and and you know multiply you know using technology to multiply the efforts of those of us trying to create a little create a different world yeah next door and it seems like we're hitting those kinds of questions all over the place these days yeah it would be useful to have better tools for that better yep better means um Dave any thoughts on the are we gonna stop reading books and start talking to books and authors thing yeah I don't you know I assume I said we all old technologies survive in some form right but um uh but I haven't I mean I guess the way I'm inframing a similar question is is kind of around I mean so I've been talking about this how do we build a stack for regenerative landscapes right and it's like what's the stack well it's it's knowledge organized right so I think what you're saying is are we going to come up with different ways of interacting with knowledge in some sense I mean I'm assuming I'm not going to read my fiction by talking with a bat a bot I'm still going to read fiction but what I'm trying to do is think when I'm trying to accomplish something while I do it in a different format and you know so I was thinking that well my stack is kind of like a library right because I'm just trying to organize it's a dewey decibel system for how do I do something and I've got all this information out there and I'm trying to organize in a way that people can can find it except I'm trying to do you know I really want the stack to to achieve a particular purpose I want it to get better and I wanted to get larger so there's a dynamism that's built into it uh which I suppose is also kind of what we think of platforms right so so you know the I don't know how to tear this all apart but there's something about the staticness of the book if the book is static then you don't get that dynamic component and you know that's why we have like the first I don't know I'm even slowly learning that the first place you go to to try to figure out how to do something is YouTube right so you know watch the videos so that I can repair my toilet um but um but yeah anyway so I it's a Jesse I got a I don't know if we've actually met but uh nice to meet you that really interesting stuff and I was kind of as you were talking I was thinking about like how do you have different lenses on this stuff you know because I know I've played with the like the Atkins diet so like oh well if the app gave me carb readouts and helped me with the diet you know could you could do other things with it kind of and I don't know if that takes you to a good path or a bad path when you do things like that but the other the other one I was thinking about if I don't know if you've met Bobby Fishkin no I haven't Bobby's been doing a bunch of work over the last number of years on medicinal plants and he's got this really kind of rich database of uh what what maladies different plants can create and he's done a ton of background oh my goodness I would love to have that connection because I was thinking how this you know it's only a whole food plant based so the idea of more plants on plates could actually be um reaching out to what you're just saying right now so I would love to connect with that yeah happy to happy to connect to here I'll stick uh uh just I just put his link in in the chat it's great um and yeah David David and I are both longtime friends of Bobby so oh he's and I know he's been trying to build the bay app around that around that thing but I don't know I don't know the current status of it really but um but yeah just kind of the you know like I think the issue for me has been how do we well you know one question is we said how do we not be reductionist right once it looked like to be regenerative and not reductionist and so how do we which I think kind of one of the questions is how do you solve more than one problem at a time which then it just gets complicated it's hard to do products and stuff so maybe it's a silly question but you know one of the perspectives to me is this lens notion it's like well okay if I can look at diet you know from so many different perspectives you know um you know how do I how do I build something that you know can grow and improve that it supports all these different lenses and then I think you just I don't I confused myself to say enough boiling the ocean a little bit yeah well I'd love to speak to that really briefly just so that um I meet people where they're at so whatever their their their belief system is or whatever their culture of food is wherever they what their goals are from one place to another I just I just want to help them close that gap and then educate them along the line that more plants are better and if you can get more plants on your plate um throughout if you're like at a level like when you sign up you say if you're allowed a level one two three four five if you can get to a six great you don't want to go from a two to an eight um or maybe someone would like I did and there are people like that but just meet people where they're at help them close the gaps and help them understand the foods that they eat um that are closer to nature are better what I've been coming at the food you know what industry from this regenerative economy perspective where what I care about is soil health or you know like classes in classes language or uh biodiversity or uh you know there's all these dimensions that you're you know like you kind of want to reinforce but you want to be people over the head with so really interesting because if you take things like legumes legumes in the body by really interesting sort of biochemical roles and complete proteins and all that kind of thing legumes in the soil play a different set of really interesting roles in the soil and soil health right as nitrogen fixers and whatever else like you'll plant legumes in a field after growing a regular crop in order to sort of restore the soil even in traditional architecture uh agriculture that's funny um and it would be fun to be able to access these things in some sipable way that still had to still retain the insights and the connections I'm really interested in the connections between these things I like I like the pattern that legumes are magic are different magic in different realms but that they contain a lot of magic magic that they're kind of unassuming little little sort of round and oddly shaped things uh that perform miracles I we just made some kitchery we just learned how to make kitchery recently which is mung beans and rice and a bunch of spices and some other stuff and it's delicious uh stew it you're muted thank you I spent a year on a raw food diet many years ago and the fermented um sauces um that were part of a community that I was part of for it was were just amazing I mean I would literally come out of a communal meal saying to myself I don't know what kind of drugs they're serving in these sauces but this stuff sure is good and it sure makes you feel good oh yeah and I always think about the um um the NFL team can't remember which one it was at one of the players was on a vegan diet and had more and more players on the team joining the idea that we don't need proteins to have strength there was an article recently about vegetarian athletes which I will find in the times I think uh yeah the game changer actually there's a documentary app called the game changers that just a 2018 I'll put a link in the chat yeah we just talked we just talked about it last week that's right yeah we just talked about last week and um the lot a lot of people who are athletes or yeah you're speaking to well am I going to get enough nutrition to certain certain set of people and then there's another set of people or am I going to get shamed so it's like there's these as long as we can go deeper into what's going to stop them and hold them back from going forward that's kind of the conversation I would like to have with people how to do that I'm sure there's a chat tpt to help me do that it's interesting jesse because you're bringing up am I going to get shamed is one of the questions am I going to get bored is another one of the questions yeah that's a really good one yeah there's a couple of these very simple very fundamental questions and then addressing those is really fun like that that's a fun conversation to be in and I'm wondering how how do we open these conversations with people so that they can experience that maybe shift their shift their thinking a bit yeah mine is am I am I going to um am I going to have enough time so yeah those questions should be I should I should start like capturing those I will do the same thank you I'm starting a meeting tomorrow which is a workshop and with some very senior level people are for example the CEO of Lando lakes is going to be there you know the chair by board of the chair for the bio nutrient food association so the the owner of a company that works that is a subsidiary of Siemens so the the intent is to bring people together from different parts of the supply chain so there's a couple farmers in there who we have worked with for some time sort of like Paul is sort of a philosopher farmer has a very diversified program and the idea is to bring to get the discussion going where people on their own realize that they are working from within the silo and that there's all kinds of stuff going on around them that may be of benefit um simply coming out of the introduction so we're going to start a brief I asked everybody takes three to five minutes to just introduce yourself and tell us what you want to accomplish in 2024 and then let's have a very brief very fine question then move on to the next and they are so diverse I mean there you know you have one guy who is a seed core and we had him on a webinar before and he does very specialized seeds that are uniquely suited for like wet climate or tri climate and that sort of thing so he is completely intrigued because the business opportunity for him you know with customized seeds are incredible but how do you get into the market you know how do you how do you get traction and so on so I'm I'm just like gosh I have to like really just sit down and chill out and meditate to get to get ready for this but it is it is if we can pull it off it's an amazing opportunity you know to get some some I mean like land or lakes for example also owns trotera this guy is also the CEO over trotera and they have hundreds of farmers I mean several million acres of of land which are in their network to supply dairy and to supply feed for dairy yeah so there are so there's a lot of reach in this and the there's one guy who who has signed up two million acres of farmland with multiple farmers to establish a low carbon intensity score for their crops now so many ideas that are thriving but then you know if you have these low intensity crops what do you do with them how do you sell them into a market that is willing to pay a differentiated price for it yeah so that that will be that will be an exciting that will be my next chapter of my new book you know how do you avoid you're muted let's do it no I'm not maybe my brain was muting me but what I what I wanted to say with a certain level of excitement it's very interesting one while we were sitting here I just plugged into chat GPT and I have been a resistant person I said to chat GPT how do we create a more peaceful world and it fed back a dozen of the things that that I have written about so all of a sudden it's okay how do we use this tool and and it was really interesting you know to to notice as opposed to being you know resistant from an ego level how do we actually use this tool in a more amazing way because the idea that it could spit back you know a dozen of the critical high points in an instant it's like wow this is this is amazing how do we how could how do we use this technology that's that's all I wanted to say with the level of of excitement and I think it's going to be fun exploring what I'm hearing often is instead of dismissing the you know generative AI the first thing one should do is try it out enough one has an experience like you just had Stuart it's really interesting go ahead Jesse sir yeah um I'm glad you tried it out because I think there is a camp of people who are very you know don't want to have tech in their lives and then there's a camp that want to lean into it and I experienced that actually last week so much that um my I will not go into it but it was very emotional for a person who didn't want to receive a technical invite invitation to the world of tech and it actually there I have to say she was she was looking at the world as it was threatening when technology came to her and the more and more I get to understand that and go deeper I'm noticing that they they think that technology is going to bring them into a different world that they don't want to be a part of they don't want to feel that way but I've noticed that if you just speak to not about peace or like that's actually what I what I would love to do is to how do we have a more peaceful world it's really to help people sit down and really feel and listen into their bodies versus acting reacting they're responding being responsible so it starts with the plate of food and um and I and I just I just wished that before we even got into this context of like back and forth talk about technology I wish we would have just talked about food because you can't argue with that where you're like you want to be feeling the food that you're eating and um listening to your body as you're eating that you can't argue against that so meeting people where you can't argue about a topic and then opening them up a little bit more going to the next level is a beautiful thing and I wish I would have gotten there but um that I just want to say that I'm right there with you I want to help make the world more peaceful and I and I really do think it starts with feeling and listening to the body rather than thinking and doing so much absolutely Jesse but you you um surfaced one of the um critical challenges and that is to move people off of the the frame of you know right wrong yes lose fault blame because as soon as you start using that analytical you're in a whole different conversation then can we talk about this because in so many phenomenons it's not about right or wrong it's about exploring it's about learning it's about curiosity it's about all of those things and and so you ran right up against the thing that I think prevents progress in so many different arenas and um it's also something that the you know that are our media perpetuates and our politics perpetuates for sure for sure it just made me understand that um people are very threatened it's heightened right now I mean I couldn't speak from a thousand years ago but I feel like people are more threatened these days than 20 years ago I just feel it yeah partly maybe that we're we're so submerged in information that we see everything so quickly that the news cycle has fed up so much that it feels like we're under more pressure there's a lot more going on etc I think there's always been a lot going on the world has always been pretty complicated but our experience of it now is much more overwhelming and immediate and our ability to sort of clear the decks it takes it takes a concerted effort and a lot of energy to step out of the stream of news media or the social media or your friends emails or whatever else and you really have to work to sort of isolate yourself from it and that's really hard but it also brings to mind spiral dynamics again to engage people to where they are at you know so Jesse for example this corp now is a group of techies very you know but I mean very advanced corp so it's different it's a so it's okay to talk about technology and and and take the the this approach but in other ways you may have to reach the heart first before you can get to anything else and and the the opening it's interesting from all the I've written like I don't know there's 15 newsletters or something like this all in all and the one that resonated the most is the one on biodiversity that really Ethan Neal you know from Belgium joined in on that conversation I mean it really hit a chord that the the idea of home you know the the land around me the land that I'm connected with so there is there is a very strong need for people to feel and to emote you know around this whole concept of what are we doing this nature you know what's going on around us particularly for people who live in cities and don't have any kind of connection with the natural world so that's an important introduction I mean also for the app right I mean you have to you have to have like an opening statement that that resonates first of all on the heart level you know emotional level before you get into you know here's the reason why we built the app to do what it does now the the the the the emotional link is now we want to know it would be really interesting to say for your app if one of the opening things you did was asked people do you have a picture of your family eating together that you like that you like either from you know Thanksgiving meal or just a really nice dinner if you don't why don't you take one next next time you have to get together take one but make that your wallpaper in the app or make that make that some persistent artifact that reminds you often that the social nature of food and the emotional nature of food is so important but it also asking people to reflect back on that or even just asking them as an exercise to think back on their favorite last social meal is good because it sets them it primes them into that space very good yeah yeah just to say that slightly differently the context that you create that people can then hang the details of information on is just so important for the way the brain takes in information yep love it David where are you with us with your projects you haven't been haven't heard from you in a few weeks yeah we've mostly been traveling we just got we got moved into Berkeley so we're we're now back in the bay and hopefully things will get a little bit better organized from now on out and yeah with the with the landscape stack notion I I'm gonna try to continue to socialize I guess it's the next step really so I'm gonna try to find a couple organizations that are in the space and just get a better feel of whether it's you know how it fits with the concepts that they're already working with I guess and yeah and and then I think I was I want to go back a little bit I don't know Jerry we tried an email a week a couple of weeks ago around this around I mean it was Schmidt project or something around funding for you know what what do we know about open source I guess and I still feel like that's really rich and I'd love to come back into that and how it works kind of I just feel like I just I pay a little bit of attention that don't feel like I've seen enough stuff about how the dynamics that make it successful basically we know in what we don't can work in a few instances so I was going to try to at least kind of these things overlap a little bit I think but if the notion is the system has to get dynamically better what is the driver behind that dynamism you know which I think is kind of a business model would be a metaphor but right somehow there's an ecosystem that improves this thing so how do we create that ecosystem I like that I'd love to I'd love to sort of provoke that some more it fits very nicely into neobucks and you're kind of this is a tangent but I'm seeing recently there's been backlash against a bunch of things that were exciting a decade ago five years ago like Advil there's pretty strong backlash against agile and you can each of us could probably name three or four things that suddenly have been somehow either poisoned or debunked or just attacked and are slowed down and open source went through a couple attacks early on like you know Bill Gates was going to try to get rid of it so was Steve Balmer and so forth when they failed then they ended up having to use a lot of open source and that's okay but I would love to see a refreshed updated and realistic sort of like usefully critical view of open source like here when you crack the dynamics of this project is what broke and what worked and what is sort of needed here are some lessons we can distill from a couple decades now of open source of open source work I think that would be really terrific and then collecting up some of the you know the leaders of open source projects and saying hey do you agree with these results or this thesis or what advice would you add would make an interesting interview series and connection with it so maybe starting with starting with a study and finding out who's already done some work and doing it just a lit review and then some thinking about what this is but then backing that up with because we're connected through two degrees we can get to everybody in the open source community practically it's kind of weird but like it's such a rich dense community that would be really fun to do and we could even you know put out a call for opinion videos about open source and say hey you know we'll answer answer any one of these six questions and we'll sort of drop you into the playlist yeah there you go that would be pretty cool well okay so let me try this one on you since we see how better we can get how fast but one of the one of my insights from driving cross-country uh this this last few weeks was uh you know having way too much time to think but I was reading through John Fullerton one of his emails about the capitalist capital institute and reinventing economics and you know he starts out with his introduction about where you kind of crash the dystopian world and and you know there's always this implicit there's always that will not sometimes it's really explicit that like these evil people set us gave us this bad world and now we have to fix it you know and I'm kind of like man I just can't believe there were all that evil you know what but but anyway so somehow we've got capitalism and capitalism is really horrible and I'm never quite clear what part of capitalism people don't like you know I don't know what they mean by it and stuff like that so I you know but but the open source thing so what I was trying to do is like capitalism I guess means management of capital which is I think you could translate capital to be assets so we have assets that we want to grow and improve and if we grow and improve them well people are better off right so we have businesses managing capital and hopefully they manage capital ways to make things better you know so United Airlines manages a bunch of shit and they get new places better than they used to then might actually think they do you know so so open source is a strategy for managing capital right that takes it out of private hands and puts it into something else and one of the things is I don't think we well define what that something else is you know if it's the Linux foundation what the fuck is that um right it's not government though it's not private hands and it's not government it's the commons kind of is the linux foundation the commons I don't know I mean I don't think the linux foundation is a large business uh designed to bring together a whole bunch of open source projects built around linux and then create mechanisms to promote them uh make sure that they're like like that they're healthy ecosystems there's a whole bunch of sort of subdivisions to it but they're trying they're there's kind of a 800 pound gorilla in that space right they're managing the ecosystem or they're they have a license that we call the commons right I mean they kind of own the asset um kind of but the license has made it harder to own right so it's changed you know like I can they can somebody can still fork it right which makes the ownership less anyway I don't know right there but but so if we had a much more open source world the intent would be much more of the assets would be what in the commons or wherever it is these things are which is a transition in capitalism right it's it's we've got you know and if we if that's big I mean does that I mean do we how big is that have to be before it matters I guess this kind of the question how much of the world has to be open source to be for you effectively deep defanged capitalism love that and I think a whole bunch of this is about ownership and rights uh because normal capitalism uh basically says it's mine not yours and I will sell it to you so that you can use it where open source is like hey it's a common asset we might both make a living off it but we share the asset so there's there's very different lines drawn and assumptions made around ownership and access because one of the big things in open source is everybody can see it which then creates these knock on effects about how functional is it how many bugs does it have how many new features does it get because people just rift on it and then suggested a pull you know things like that it's it's really like like the ongoing dynamics are fascinating and I think it makes it at least you have to you have to have a different set of talents to make open source extract it right I mean you know so it changes the extractive modalities I think right and there's an argument there's an argument that Pete will make now and then that Microsoft is trying to buy up open source because they bought github there's a whole bunch of sort of movable pieces here that Microsoft is playing with strategically um and it's unclear that they're they just have this benevolence about all those assets it's uh you know Microsoft's historic strategy is engulf and devour and uh there's there's not that many reasons to believe that they've suddenly turned into the the best stewards possible for commons no and well and excuse the explanation weird from one of the Microsoft guys was that um their biggest their biggest revenue generator is the cloud and they're um and they want as much they want to they want to sell as many cycles as they can in open sources and easy way to sell cycles which are like well it makes some sense you know but you know there must there can be other things I mean I wouldn't I think I you'd never you would you would never trust any of these people very as if humanity will be extracted if given the opportunity I think so you keep having to like you know put it back to the box that's the spiral dynamics I suppose that's like yeah what's kind of for me listening to this is um the whole notion of um capitalism's okay but then you get into um how people go over the edge with it or go over the top or or when anything phenomenon starts to bend back on itself because um what started off as good becomes not so good I I'm I'm I'm I'm grappling for words here but the analogy that came up was at some moment in time um you know you've got the all the antitrust legislation in the U.S. as an example that organizations can't get too big now I'm not an expert in that area but now you can't have monopolies that are in restraint of trade those principles um that create some limitations I think apply to capitalism in in general and what popped up in my mind is so what would happen if the government for example said um no individual can accumulate more than uh 300 million dollars or some number all right um what impact might that have um in terms of people operating on an absolute value of you know accumulation is good or agreed is good and let's keep going on that um and all of a sudden you have some government regulation that says uh well it's good to a point and then it's not so good I'm I'm I'm thinking out loud okay I'm thinking out loud there is this there's this book series of the uh the middle ages the British how the British churches uh got founded in the first building of cathedrals remember that part in this book series is talking about how the church controlled markets so in other words you know there was in the middle of the village there was a marketplace uh it was inside the wall and the church had soldiers out there they protected the integrity of the market you know you couldn't go in there steal uh you you couldn't harm each other so the the church a big function of the church at that time you know in when were the first domes built like in the uh 800 900 so I mean in the middle ages they were in the dark ages actually and and so but the church made created a a reason for being there that means that really maintained a functioning market economy now so so any farmer now could bring their wares to the market the toolmaker could bring their wares to the market and what has happened and throughout history the the fight the food fights were always over access to markets you know who controls the markets who takes a bite you know for every transaction and so on and so on and the beauty of an open market economy is that it incentivizes you know people to to do better and more and and and engage and um the what what has happened and the antitrust laws now were primarily designed to prevent oligopolies and monopolistic practices from wiping out markets and preventing access for new entries because that stops the creativity of the market as well now so right now what we need to have is a decentralization in the market so you can have innovators and innovations gain access to the market and and uh and scale and the markets are just are just clocked up now but what happens if um everybody has enough everybody has enough so what function are our markets serving i'm just you know speculating here and throwing that out as an idea so the the normal dichotomous the normal false dichotomy presented is that any kind of centralized planning will allocate resources so that everybody has enough very poorly and that markets are the absolute best way to do that which i think is as i said a false dichotomy um and i think there's plenty of other interesting ways of distributing or of creating and distributing what people need but we don't we lack imagination now and we lack good examples of that actually functioning in other places for those of you don't know the ogm call last thursday was about governance and uh we're gonna this coming thursday we're going to do a regular check-in call but then next week we're going to go back to governance which bleeds right into capitalism so dav if you're interested like you know two two thursdays from now at eight a.m pacific uh if you if you'll join us i'm going to try to recruit more souls into the call uh we also all made a pledge which i'm just remembering now to bring somebody who is not in our demographic to the call so that it's not all white guys which happens a lot on our calls but uh we'd like to dive you know way deeper into these questions but but let's do what you're pointing at some of the fundamental things people are criticize capitalism and socialism slash communism for and there's a misunderstanding of all the terms uh you know we don't all agree on what democracy is on what capitalism is all those things are are squishy and fuzzy in in what is to me a fascinating way i mean these these systems have so eaten our lives and we live we are so immersed in them that our lack of solid definitions for them and an understanding of what is in and outside the system i don't really fully understand like like our consumers capitalists so if capitalism is about owning capital then it's the owners of capitalism who are the real capitalists consumers are just the the ponds that are making capitalism work they're they're the raw materials that are buying up the products but are they really capitalists maybe when they own own shares of stock which is the way you own the means of production in a capitalist society but that's really nobody nobody outside the company of any tiny scale has any say in how the company runs period you might get to benefit in the shares of appreciation of that stock is it that's it period right so it's really messy and complicated yeah well one of the questions i would i've been wondering about with the open source so we got to go back and visit indonesia this uh last year and i had we hadn't been there since the mid 90s right so i've been about 25 years three years i don't know long time and uh it it's quite different right the country just changed dramatically in 30 years and it's it's just a very kind of self-confident kind of inherent you know kind of you know at least at least the big islands and and i felt the same way in thailand and vietnam and certainly singapore and you know your big chunks of india and it's the transformation that we've gone through in our lifetime i think it's really remarkable and this has been a transformation driven by i think a lot of the you know the washington consensus i think work basically you know i don't i don't know i can't in many ways the you know the i you know i can't get away from the idea that you know poverty levels globally have dropped dramatically and you can see it you know it's it's it's real um that doesn't mean there's no more poor people out there but but it's quite different than it was when we were kids and i've wanted a little bit i somebody's must have done some numbers but like how much did that did open source matter in all of that right how much development is going on in india or vietnam or jacarta uh because the source code's available right all the stuff can be changed in all kinds of formats you know everybody's got a got a uber delivery competitor are they all running off of the same code base how many years did we save people or essentially you know in problem solving by opening up all these intellectual assets uh globally right uh people who didn't never contributed back to at the beginning or maybe still don't i don't know um and i don't i don't know if it's again i know it's a big number or a small number but i've got to i've got it mattered some i don't know i don't know how much so so david to that i say was that a good thing or a bad thing which is another you know that's a that's a question yeah they caught up in some ways but is that a good thing or a bad thing because a lot of the conversation now is looking back on more indigenous practices and so did they you know leap ahead uh only i didn't get a lot of the conversation about white people i know is looking back on indigenous practices i did not hear a lot of that conversation amongst the indonesians i was talking to they weren't okay yeah all right now it's true that there's like i mean i and we didn't spend any time in the jungles in kalimantan or anything right i mean we were we were uh so so there's all kinds of different contexts but i mean i personally feel like there is a little bit of romanticism of some of the you know of indigenous life and i'm still skeptical a little bit of some of the the utopian perspectives on you know how well the bushman lived and all this and stuff but um so i mean some point whether you if we have to decide whether the change is good or bad as an external actor i don't know where we go i don't i don't know somehow the people inside the action probably have to be able to decide that i don't know but but from a from a point of view there's a hundred people on the street that i think is an unqualified improvement yeah i i agree which it just raises the the complexity of all of the things that that we're talking about i think yeah interesting i'm glad we opened up all these condors boxes on this call yeah you know i always leave with more questions than answers jerry it's a complaint of mine yeah yeah exactly good good good question really good i leave for the whole bunch of open tabs i then gotta go figure out what to do with yeah i have a really mixed feeling about this indigenous conversation now maybe because of my european background um i really we talk about and and because i've been grappling with the ceo club and you know the club of ngo's forum for the future and so on and they're very very focused on assisting uh you know minorities that that have been so disenfranchised and in particular the indigenous courts i mean it's just incredibly shameful not just here in canada in australia you know um africa my god i mean i've been some really i mean it makes you really think uh what kind of a horrible creed we are you know the europeans really that perpetuated that brought all this misery onto the world i mean this whole thing in the middle east is basically you know remnants of white european domination but conversely the japanese indigenous people they have lived on the same land for those thousands of years and they haven't screwed up their soil now they haven't screwed up their water they keep feeding themselves the germans the french the italians right i mean the creeks the spaniards i mean all of these cultures have lived you know for hundreds of years in some cases for thousands of years on the same soil right and they were able to keep going and we have managed to kill 40 percent of our top soil since world war two there is like there is something that is captured in the notion of a call a colonialist mindset i think in that this notion that i can go to south carolina and start farming and five years burned my farm out and then just go in another couple of miles and do it again and that is somehow captured in the notion of colonialism i think and so i don't know i do think i mean i'm not saying there's no insights in in the understanding of indigenous peoples and i've learned a ton more than i ever thought i would uh but i'm just saying that there's also i think there's a glorification it's probably a warrant you know that that's like it wasn't utopia either you know this kind of but there's a lot we can learn there there are little pieces of the answer every place and and claus i think what you're uh pointing to the the distinction between the u.s practices and the european practices is for some reason the mindset in the u.s was oh land is unlimited where you know europe has got a great history of of wars and wars and wars over over land so and people had more of a a sense of how valuable it was and that it wasn't an unlimited supply well they also started they had some periods of hunger because they did school up yes they saw it you know like a thousand years ago there you go the land right up right there's oh what happened now and uh so they learned the hot way for sure yeah um i love these questions they're my brain is a little full um so thank you for for bringing them up uh shall we wrap our call for this this week yeah thanks everybody great talking to you everyone thank you very much thank you