 This is the NIO book's call on Monday, October 23rd, 2023, and we were just talking about Swift Dynamics and the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, but we have a NIO book to catch up on. And if we do so briefly, that's okay too. Stuart, do you have any new thoughts since you've had some time to ponder and reflect? Yeah. I mean, my only thought is that let's get, you know, I want to get this book out. You know, I don't have any particular details about how or what or, you know, and what we ought to do with it exactly, but it's kind of a representation of my life's work. And I guess the other thought that I had was, you know, reflecting a little bit on the, you know, on the Israeli war, you know, I hate to use this word, it used to be one of my favorite words, you know, trumping the Ukraine war. It's time to be an activist for peace. Really, as a critical phenomenon, I mean, the phrase, you know, which is often bandied about, you know, why can't we all get along? It just, you know, humanity is just being so stupid, you know. So maybe I've got something that'll grab people and maybe not, but that's where I want my head to be and the work I do to be and, you know, maybe this will grab some people. People pointed out to me that David Brooks is just publishing right now a new book. He's kind of gone deeply into, like, how humans and society work. It sounds like it might be an interesting feeder for you or something to go look at. I'll put a link to the title in the chat. But this is brand new. A couple of weeks ago, he spoke here in Portland and I went to see him. People couldn't make it. But I went to listen in and he was really interesting. He was raised in the opposite kind of Jewish household to the one many people think of as boisterous or harping and lots of, you know, whatever. He was like, we were like the Jewish but act British, totally repressed. And he spent his whole career trying to like unlock himself and figure out how immunity works and all these other things. It's very interesting watching him explore these things out loud in public. Yeah, he's he's he's a really interesting guy. His authenticity is, you know, there it is on his sleeve in terms of his capacity for self reflection and, you know, especially coming from someone who held himself out as reasonably conservative for many, many years. And I read I read I don't know if it was a review of the book or a recent column of his but I did read something of his while I was while I was away and was impressed by that. In related news, I have three volunteers to scan Klaus's book to basically give it not a deep read and not a line in it but just a hey what's going to make this an actual book. And so we're in conversation. I don't know that any of them can make this call. I was hoping they might, but that's that's kind of in progress. So we may want to do you want some readers for your draft or were where are you in the path. Absolutely. I mean, I've had some readers of not probably the current version, but I've had some things, you know, in the past for some of my musings, and and I've gotten some positive feedback. But as it as it in its current configuration, I'd love some thoughts and thoughts. Good and probably a good idea there is for you to point me to your favorite version they should look at and I can put that in front of the people who volunteered so far. Let's see if they want to want to give it a look as well. It's up on the Google. It's up on the Google Drive. That's the that's the that's the one Jerry and my my apologies. I'm in process of getting a new computer. My computer the short the short story is one of the texts at Apple kind of talked me into wiping it completely clean, which which since I use outlook for Mac, I have all of my emails and all of my files are in the cloud. So I really have didn't lose anything critical, except that I use the outlook calendar as a tickler file for day to day meetings and shit like that. And that's why I had to ask you for the the link this morning. I just I just pasted a link that I think is my most recent version of your manuscript. But I want to make sure if you can compare the URL or something. And so you're still on your recently scrubbed, but not replaced computers. What you're saying? Yeah, the battery is a little screwed up. It's really funny I went to the Apple store yesterday and the tech, you know, put my my my MacBook Pro on the counter and said, wow, this is wobbly. Your computer is is swollen in some way. I said, so what does that mean? Tech technologically, she said, well, you know, it probably is not not operating efficiently. And they they told me I need, you know, I need a new battery. And I'll tell you to tech folks, the short story. So I went online and there appears to be they've upgraded MacBook Pros from 13, 15 inch to 14, 16, but they're still selling a 13 inch with an M2 processor, whatever that whatever that means, which is probably more than good enough for me, my machine itself is eight years old. So rather than, you know, spend money on a battery, I'd rather invest, you know, next number of additional dollars and get a new machine. Small things, Pete probably knows a lot more than I do. At some point a couple of years ago on my previous Mac, it wasn't shutting properly. And I didn't think very much of it, but there was like a quarter inch gap, which just wasn't closing. And like a guy sitting next to me goes, oh, your battery is swollen. You need to like hurry up and get to get to the Apple store because it could be it could actually be dangerous. Yeah. And then and they swap they swapped in a new battery and they changed the keyboard because I had worn the keys off. Just as part of this. So hard. Yeah, that's what they said to me. It's part of that. And that worked well, except with such an old machine, it then got really slow. For me, the slowness showed up on the brain, not in word processing. And if what you're doing mostly is word processing and you're not editing videos, you don't necessarily need processor speed because the M2 is a fantastic, beautiful, magical device. Yeah. So that's that's that's what I'm going to do. And rather than go to, you know, a 14, which is like two thousand dollars, the M the 13 inch with an M2 is it starts at like a thousand dollars, which is 700 bucks more than a new battery. So it just seems stupid not to do any not to do anything else. Yeah, you'll be happy. You'll be happy with a new one like that. Yeah. Sorry. And I have a quote, Rube Goldberg rigged docking station, you know, where I'm talking to you from with a with a large monitor. Excellent. Do you have to like, do you have to like put toast in the toaster to start the Rube Goldberg Contraption? No, no, that's good. My dad used to draw like he would would invent and draw a Rube Goldberg contraptions to do something silly like like like hang a napkin on a diner's neck or something like that. Right. It sounds like you sounds like great fun. So one of the things that's in front of us and a good reason to talk to Pete because he's here is that when we are happy with manuscripts from you and Klaus and maybe me, although the thing I'm about to describe isn't necessary for me because I'm writing in chunks is to nuggetize your books to go through the Neo books process. And Pete, your feedback is like really useful here because this seems like like a long digression or an excursion to do something that could be done straight from Google Docs straight into an export to be an EPUB. But a piece of the Neo books project is to have nuggets that live as separate pieces. And if you're doing a piece about how we might be in relationship and about how to solve conflict and all that, the nuggets might be extremely useful as wiki pages, roughly, that live in community and are changeable and updatable. So that's the reason to break up a large manuscript into nuggets. So that would kind of be next. Yeah, absolutely. You know, three nuggets in the book, I mean, three, three nuggets, three broad nuggets, one. Yeah, three big ones and a bunch of sub-subnuggets subnuggets. I haven't learned that one yet. Yeah. Pete, thoughts about process, things, anything around that? By the way, just Pete, before you jump in, I actually talked to a few people about, you know, what we did with with Klaus's book, with chat GPT, because I thought it was just so beautiful, you know, how we used it and what what what the what the response was. Any feedback? Did they? Yeah, everybody thought it was, wow, that's really interesting as a use of, you know, chat GPT. And these were this was a bunch of educators, educational leaders, K-1 through 12 at a DEIV conference in Nairobi that has the most extraordinarily beautiful English-speaking school. Yeah. That's cool. I think language, conversational and writing engines like chat GPT are going to be increasingly important. And also frustrating when they get used poorly. So I think that's going to happen a lot. And then a lot of I think there's going to be some, you know, there'll be some backlash because of that. Another another interesting data point is a area that reader that looked over what class has got so far is like, wow, this chat GPT stuff. And this is somebody who really loves chat GPT. This chat GPT language is hash. It's junk. It's really poorly written. And I've talked to a few people about I think I know what that person means because chat GPT will just write stuff and it writes pretty good stuff. It's not, and what it does is actually magical. It feels magical almost every time I'm using it, but it's also not. I guess in my use of chat GPT, I've noticed that you want to rewrite a lot of what it says. So it's great for ideating. It's great for expanding your vision. It's great for even coming up with terms of phrases that you wouldn't have come up with. And maybe the output isn't exactly the one. I kind of wonder, I wonder maybe Klaus just wasn't sensitive enough otherwise or actually, I think he got so much out of it and it was doing such an amazing job and that he accomplished something that he could not have otherwise. There's another step there too, which is to go, okay, now I've got these ideas out and they're written a certain way and maybe I need to finish that a little bit. I don't know if that's finishing by hand. I think, I know when I write stuff in concert with Chat GPT, I talked to Jordan Sukut, actually the same thing. He does a lot of writing with Chat GPT, but you write with Chat GPT or you let it write a chunk and you go, okay, well, I like this part and this part. Can you rephrase these things or how would you change the way that's set up? So it's like a writing assistant and that's a really good one. I don't think it's quite a writer yet, finished stuff. I'm gonna guess also that it depends upon whether you're a writer. In other words, if you're not a writer, you're very, very happy to accept what it puts out. If you're a writer and you enjoy the process of the iteration of writing, then it doesn't bother you to use that as a starting point and you're happy. That's a great observation. I think also there's another thing. If you're an editor or a publisher, it's taken some particular editorial path or non-editorial path, I mean, it's just making stuff up kind of, which you might or might not be happy with then you might wanna get more into the, to go back to nuggets and also to mix in something else, Jerry. We had a short discussion with Bentley on Mattermost about his idea, which I ended up saying he wanted to talk about in the context of taking care of an aged parent, he wanted to talk about how you keep yourself or your loved ones healthy and the whole process of that, which is a big kettle of fish. He said, is this a new book? And I ended up saying back to him, it sounds to me like a reference wiki, reference encyclopedia and a set of new books. And I think there's, so, I think there's something to that. I think maybe there's a larger information system that new books have a big chunk of, but aren't the complete thing. I think you want a reference encyclopedia. I think at the other, complete other end of it, maybe you want a chat system with the author or the text itself. Now you can do a chat with the text itself with a bot. So maybe, and maybe new books is some wedge of that, but around the new book idea and interleaved with that nugget idea, there's probably other chunks, I think. I love that idea, Pete, of interaction with the author. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's one thing for others to add, annotate, what have you, but the idea of being able to contact the author is just, I think it's super. Yep. And the other readers. And people who, it would even be awesome to be able to be interactive with skeptics or people with different viewpoints or things like that. Oh yeah. Sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say that's a big interest of mine. Keep going. I'm inspired to tell a short story, a very short story, an experience I had earlier today where we were talking about the tech... Is it about the farmer and the horse? No, it's not about the farmer and the horse. And it's... The farmer's daughter. Just kidding. And it's not about my plumbing adventures either. Thank goodness. The... It illuminated something for me that I think we all kind of know, but never it was a bolt of lightning like, wow, that's a really big effect. This was in the context of Pro's Fusion where we're trying to figure out how to have a more capable collaborative writing experience using some simple tools, that come from the programming world. And so I was talking with one of the, essentially one of the students, like, okay, so remind me again why we're trying to do this thing because he got rubbed into it by a colleague. So he wasn't the one who was like, oh my God, I need to learn this Pro's Fusion stuff. It was another friend of his who he's been on writing projects with. He said, oh my God, we gotta learn this collaborative writing stuff and you're gonna join me. So the person who was really interested wasn't there. So I got to talk directly to somebody who was interested but still wondering, okay, so why are we doing this? And I'm like, okay, so in truth, if you're one person, you don't need a collaborative writing ecosystem. If you're like two or three people and you're writing 10,000 words, that's 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 words, Google Docs is actually gonna be easier probably than the thing that we're talking about. But if you wanna write 20,000 words with 10 people or 100,000 words with, God knows how many people or a million words, then Google Docs is going to be really painful, really fast. And so what we're aiming to do is to write like a six-member team writing 100,000 words, 200,000 words, 500,000 words. That's kind of where we're aiming. And my assertion is that the techniques we've kind of assembled won't, like it will easily scale to that level of complexity without any problem, unlike Google Docs. So then we talked a little bit about, so do we have a project that big that we wanna do? And the answer is no. Do we have a team of people that need to do that project but didn't know how to do it yet? And it's like, well, no. So what we identified was kind of a chicken and egg situation where the thing I'm thinking that we can do together has never really been something that you would consider to be possible. So it's like, I mean, it's been done, the OED or Encyclopedia Britannica or I think there was even some dictionary that was like some massive thing that was, but normal people wouldn't go, I wanna be on a eight-person team writing half a million words this year. And because that's like, and I'm like, okay, I've got Microsoft Word, I've got notepad, I've got Google Docs, none of those are gonna be able to do that thing. I don't see a way to do that, so I can't even think of doing it. And similarly, because there isn't a project like that, we don't have a bunch of writers who sit around going, I don't know what the project is, but I know that I wanna be part of that kind of team. And so it occurs to me, the reason I'm telling this story is it occurs to me that Neo Books is probably kind of hunting around with a vision of something that it could do that's gonna be different than anything we can imagine. And that thing that you can't imagine and you can't even describe and you don't have people to do it with because there isn't such a thing in the world already is kind of where Neo Books is out to. Thanks, Pete. Sort of to paraphrase what you were saying just to see if I'm understanding it properly. The things you're considering writing don't rise to the complexity of needing more complicated tools than Google Docs, let's say. So why, why? And that fits really nicely with the project that Bentley was talking about matter most and also I think Stuart that you're trying to do with your book, which is that there's a body of research, insight and knowledge that should exist in the world that some pieces of which could be manifest as books but which are more broadly useful and which could easily turn into a largeish project of great complexity if only the medium lent itself to that but instead the conventional mainstream media world we have spits out books which are inert and don't connect the audience to contributors audiences or potential other authors, right? That whole thing. And just to add to that, Jerry and the books that that mainstream media, the inert books are spitting out. Sorry, April, nobody reads them. No, the president of Barrett Kohler knows this as a result of research. He publishes this thing every year the 10 awful truths about the publishing world but the statistic is amazing about how many people buy books and never read them or read the first couple of pages. I mean, it's just, it's awful, it's awful. So if you compare we're actually kind of inventing what I think is a much more utile vehicle. If you compare the viewership of a Sam Harris podcast with a bestselling book, like The Mind Boggles and then if you go compare those numbers to how many viewers are watching CBS News, Evening News these days, right? There's still this incredible disequilibrium, like people using new media or their numbers are just through the roof. And then April and I wanted to talk to you about Taylor Swift a while last night but also Mr. Beast and a couple other phenomena. And I'm like, have you seen what Mr. Beast is doing on YouTube? And April wasn't really aware of him but he's a phenomenon. He basically create, he intentionally creates a massive audience called the audience. The more eyeballs we get on this, the more money flows into this game that I'm playing with you, which is about sweepstakes and stupid contests and sometimes meaningful stuff. There's a really nice video of him donating a thousand eye surgeries, cataract surgeries, which are inexpensive to do, et cetera, and restore sight, right? And in the video, this is a little bit of a plot spoiler in the video, he occasionally shows up to a patient who's just had their eyesight restored who is already very perfectly happy and opens a briefcase and says, here's $10,000 for you. And there's this very, very interesting massive audience thing going on around that. And somewhere in the mid space of a book that 10,000 people read and this crazy media sweepstakes thing, there's got to be a fruitful experimentation, investigation and co-creation of useful media that make the world better, no? And I think that's what we're trying to do. Well, let's do it. Yeah. Okay. I like it. What else did we talk about here and now with the three of us? Hey, did you, did you, I feel like I kind of talked at your question, but maybe not answered it. And did you, were you wondering specifically about publishing stuff or? I was sort of looking down the road a little bit and thinking like what we're gonna need next in order to think about it myself, queue it up, get the ball rolling lightly. That's all I was doing. But then we went on this digression about why the hell bother doing all that stuff, which was really useful. So I'm grateful for that. We talked kind of about nuggets and stuff too. I guess I think it's really important that people use tools that they're fluent with. So, and then at the other end of it, at the meat grinding end, you do actually wanna start talking about file formats and publication mechanisms and stuff like that. And we'll get there. Yeah. So I just had this little brain fart about co-opting the traditional publishing industry. In terms of real utility, real collaborative utility in the world today. When I, and it was interesting, I think it was 2008, I co-authored a book called Collaboration 2.0 with David Coleman. And there were some folks from Silicon Valley talking about making it a living book. Because they thought it was important enough to do that. And it never happened, partly because my collaborative partner was a really difficult guy. And that's all I'll say, who I didn't really wanna work with anymore at all. This was getting to resolution? No, this is a book called Collaboration 2.0. Oh, right, gotcha. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah. Yeah. So let's let that percolate in each of our heads because I think if we take more seriously the idea that we're doing something to upend traditional publishing models and create some new way of communicating through wisdom, I think new ideas will show up for us. And maybe we should probably not, but maybe we should approach Steve Piercinanti, basically the senior editor at Baird Kehler and say, hey, Steve, would you be interested in an experiment? And I think that going to a publisher and asking that question is probably like a suicide mission. It's not good, but he might actually be like, I've been thinking about this and how might this work? So I'm still in touch and friendly with Pete with him, you know, whenever I want, I have access, but also to some people on the board and their short responses, if they could find some other vehicles. And they would try them? I think that they would. That's interesting. As long as there is some revenue model attached to it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because they had a great run, but publishing is a tough business if you're in it to make money. It's so weird because here's Taylor Swift publishing and minting money. And here's Mr. Beast publishing. Yeah, tons of media comes out of his shop. Tons, tons of highly polished now. Oh, one of the really interesting things about Mr. Beast is that he hacked everything he could learn about how to get an audience on YouTube. He basically went in and did a B testing. He listened to everybody's videos. He watched and critiqued. He just kept iterating and testing, iterating and testing until he cracked the code. So his videos would go viral and it paid off like enormously, but a lot of his early work was just how to hack the algorithms, which I'm not suggesting we try to do, but that's how he broke through to build his weird new and different model. So yeah. The breakout success is the one end of the bell curve doesn't mean that it's easy to publish in music or on YouTube. It also doesn't mean that they're going to be in many Mr. Beast so that there might be that much room at the top of the curve. But is there a mesa or a plateau next to them that is comfortable? Because the amount of money both of those individuals are moving around is boggling, like seriously boggling. The amount of money a human needs to be happy having made a living and maybe having published a book because authors these days don't make money from publishing books. They make money from other things the book may cause for them, right? April's business model is not to make a living from the book it's to make a living consulting and speaking on what the book says. Yeah, book is a big business card. It's a business card for sure however you wanna hold it. It's a sad demotion, is it not? Yep, it is. It's like being fieldstrip of your rank, which apparently doesn't happen that often. Yeah. There are a couple of famous ones. Right, but you do it as a labor of love. I mean I remember writing and saying I don't care if this ever gets published. I'm learning so much in getting it out and getting it down and refining language and clarifying thinking. Yep. Cool. Pete I learned another shortcut for the Sonoma video things, which is this is the way to get, oh come on. Yeah. The laser light show effect. I don't know if you've seen all these, but this is, when you get your new machine you will also probably get, because they will install it on all the new machines, you'll get Mac OS 13, whatever, which is Sonoma. If I do a hard Sonoma, it's busy watching the screen and it won't do it for you because it's not a Zoom feature, it's a Mac OS feature. But whenever you buy your computer you will get these things bundled in because all of a sudden, like I didn't have to turn it on. Like I ran the OS upgrade and suddenly got these new new play towards, anyway. Anything else you wanna talk about here? Shall we wrap our call a little bit early? Yeah. Like we're good? No, I'm still jet lagged. Yeah, thanks for jumping on the call. But really, really glad to see you and hear from your adventures and all that. Oh, and the other thing, the only thing that I didn't mention in my check-in was meditating with the animals on Safari. I was just kind of blown away by how close these guides took you to dangerous beasts, to leopards and lions and you're five yards away and they're trying to get an angle. And it's not like you're in a cage. It's not in a cage. No, you're in a very modified land rover with eight seats and there you are and there's a lion right there or the elephant is walking behind you. Cool. Yeah, it's very good. I've done one day of Safari in my life, April and I went to Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, which was beautiful. It was really, like it's an impact crater. I don't think it's a volcanic crater. We're good. And you descend the lip and basically any creature born inside there is likely to just live its entire life only inside that crater. Well, here you are, watching a leopard drag an impala up a tree because if it doesn't drag it up a tree, somebody's gonna steal it. And then you've got all of these hyenas, waiting at the base of the tree for scrap. I mean, it's just, it's life. It's nature. The food chain viewed up close and personal. Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's cool. Cool. Okay. Thanks all. Enjoy. See you around. More soon. Thank you. All right, bye.