 Hi, Betty. This is the Marley call for Monday, June 5th, 2023. Let me turn on the transcript also just for friends. There we go. So transcript is on. So we have a couple over the weekend we sort of reconfigured some things to get efficient on what this project sort of wants to be or needs to be. And I will explain these things as best I can. So it seems like the fastest path to getting some results for where we were heading was to create a quick first book as quickly as we can. That's why it's called the quick first book. And our current candidate for the quick first book is Clauses, basically Clauses the champion of this idea called temporarily called Food Revolt. It might end up with a different name. But it's very much about bioregionalism, about rethinking the food system and about other kinds of issues. And we have some draft writings on the board. But I think what we're about to do is Stacey, really what we named this call Marley in honor of Stacey's late dog who passed very recently and very dear dog. And that's worked really well, except Stacey has a bunch of ideas that she'd like to write about that aren't about the Food Revolt. And she would love to use the Marley name for that writing, which sounds totally great. So we're going to stop calling this call and this piece of the project Marley. That will now be the name of Stacey's proto book or whatever she wants to create with whoever wants to join her creating that. And I think she's going to set up a Zoom call parallel to this one for anyone who wants to work with her on that. I'm not exactly sure. And I don't know whether she's going to show up on this call because we can get confirmation that way. But we'll figure all that out afterward. So for this project, I think the timing is, and totally open to other proposals, I think the timing is let's just dive really, let's let me step back. Originally, this whole project was to create a Neo book or several Neo books. And I'll explain what a Neo book is in a second. And I actually need to make more recordings about what a Neo book, in fact, actually is. Then the quick first book was going to be the proto Neo book, the very first one. And that was going to spin out and create a small sequence of calls to go do that writing. Instead of that, I think what we're going to do right now is just repurpose this call to be that team and to focus exclusively on creating a draft of something that looks like a Neo book around the topic of food revolt. Then we'll come back and sort of bounce back into the Neo book production mode. And at that point, I think Pete Kaminsky and others who are more technical than us will rejoin us. And at that point, we will start to figure out, OK, good. So we can publish a, we publish food revolt as a Neo book as an EPUB and maybe Kindle file format book. And we've done that. There's also, and in a second, I'll explain what Neo books are. But there's also some kind of more, to me, more interesting work to do on the written materials as they exist on the web. So in this Neo book project, kind of a book has been a shiny object that is culturally familiar to other people. So we can say, hey, look, we wrote a book. But the book is a gateway to actually joining us online in active conversations about the materials that are in the book and making those materials better. And then maybe repurposing or reusing some of the materials in each of the books in other books. So if there's a book that needs an explanation of soil fertility, for example, and if there's a really good one that published in the quick first book, then Neo book number three might, in fact, reuse that chunk of text or full chapter about soil fertility, for example. And the idea is that the Neo book is actually composed of nuggets or modules that are kind of independent and reusable in different ways. And it's easy to envision, or at least I can easily envision several different Neo books that have very different theses or conclusions that reuse the same modules. So for example, there's an interesting debate between Alan's savory and grazing cattle is really important to regenerative, grasslands and all of that. And other people saying, no, no, cows create the most methane. Then we should get rid of the big herds of cows altogether. And I am certainly no expert in doing that. But I can easily see two books that have similar but contrasting points of view about that particular topic existing down the road. And I don't think that the quick first book right now, Klaus, as you envision it, cures one way or the other about that particular issue, although it might. So does that make sense? I'll stop right there for any questions or thoughts or comments, and then I'll go a little deeper and try to explain the Neo book concept a little bit in a little more depth. But let me pause here. Yeah, I'm good. There being no questions and some thumbs up, I will proceed to a little more detail on the Neo book. Before we do that, Sherry, I just Please bear it. The reason I came on today is I thought possibly Stacy was going to be here. And I was confused about the split up. But I only came on because I thought maybe people want to find out who is this guy that they ever heard of, who's on the OGM. And that's why it showed up. But I'm not actually going to be in this book project. And I just no point in me staying on unless you think somebody else is going to come on. And I don't know who the hell I am. And I do not know whether Stacy will be on this call. I suspect not. And I don't know if anyone else is going to show up. But it would be lovely if you just talked about yourself for a little bit by way of introduction. And I think that'd be a fantastic thing. OK. So I know. And Barry, also it's not that everybody who's on this call, I mean correct me if I'm wrong. But it's not that everybody on this call has to be either an author or has to participate in the book. I think the idea is how do we plan and get this new kind of a project going. And so maybe you and I are not going to be authors. Doesn't really matter. So if it interests you, please stay on. So introduce yourself, stay on. Have fun as long as you can. And then pop out whenever you feel like. OK. Stacy had sent me a Zoom call at 2 o'clock. But I can't. I don't know if it's for today or tomorrow. Maybe it's for tomorrow. Anyhow, I know Stacy from Facebook and the GCC. Does anybody not know what GCC stands for? It's OK. It's global. See if I can even remember how to parse it. Global collaboration community or something like that. How about Global Challenges Collaboration started in 2017? Thank you. So Sam Han and some other people who were no longer in that project a few years ago started this Global Challenges Collaboration. And Stacy was on it. And it's mostly people on Facebook. And she invited me in, I don't know, three years ago or something. That's how I got to know Stacy. And she wanted me to meet people like Heiner Banking, whose assistants think are like I am. And so somehow or other, I got involved with Stacy mostly on the Facebook OGM side, not OGM side, the GCC side. And partly came over here because I was invited to come here for the Thursday call. But then I had a conflict because the Toastmasters meeting turned out to conflict with it. And I got ragooned into being the techie guy for them so I need to be there. So anyhow, Stacy has lots of inchoate creative ideas that she's been tossing around. And she pulled me and other people into kind of processing these. And actually, as far as I know, no actual product has ever emerged, except she pulled me in because she knew that I occasionally will write song parodies about whatever the Zeitgeist is in the air. So the last time she called me in, I gleaned just enough of the Zeitgeist to write five or six original song parodies and reprise a few others. And I put those up on my website thinking that that was going to be my creative contribution and nothing else as far as I know ever emerged. And more recently, Stacy has disclosed something that kind of surprised me. She says, it's not important that we actually have a product. It's just having fun tossing it around is what she's in it for. And I thought, well, OK, I get that it's not the destination is the journey, and the destination is you just turn around and go back home again. But I wanted to sort of reveal where I am. And I don't mind kicking around ideas just for fun and maybe produce a little snippet of amusing material. But I'm not into writing a book. I've got my own research that I've been publishing since before my retirement. And I only came on because I somehow got involved in this interchange between these two groups, that Stacy is half in OGM and half in GCC. And because my name popped up, I was summoned into OGM text. I thought, I should show up and just let people know who I am. I will add that Barry and I know each other from way back as well. We serve time together in Sing Sing and have matching tattoos. And Barry has attended the retreat or two of the retreats that I used to host back in the day. So Barry and I have go back a ways as well. So it was actually really fun to see that you and Stacy had connected and that that was a way of that we were kind of coming back into conversation, which I really appreciate. Yeah, that's right. So if at any time, Jerry, you have an activity that really does overlap with my depth. So why don't you tell everybody what you, like if somebody waved a magic wand and made the whole world align with what you're trying to get done, what would we all be doing? OK, so the last piece of deep research that I did in my career after they broke up the bell system where I had been doing network planning just to earn a living, I began to think about the interplay of emotions and learning. And I developed what amounts to a mathematical model of the interplay of emotions and learning. I began doing that in 1985. After about 15 years of kicking it around, a colleague of mine who was a public school teacher who had just completed his EDD to advance his career told me that he wanted to learn how to write grants. And he was looking for ideas to write a grant. But he said, you never get your first grant. It's just for practice. So I gave him a bunch of ideas. And he says, oh, let's go with this emotions and learning theory is it'll never get so far over the horizon. It'll never get funded. But it's a good exercise for your first try. And I brought in a professor at the MIT Media Lab who had just created a discipline called affective computing. And she agreed to sign on. So we wrote the grant. And I say, we. I didn't write a word of the grant. They wrote. The public school teacher wrote the first draft. And then my friend, the professor, sort of cleaned it up. We submitted it. And lo and behold, it got funded. So starting around 2000 for about eight years, because we got a renewal of the grant halfway through it, we worked on this project of the Interplay of Emotions and Learning and how technology might play into facilitating that. The very first peer-reviewed paper that we wrote after we got funded, I went to a conference in Madison, Wisconsin to deliver the paper. It was just the theory, just the model. And on the third night, which was the dinner, I was sitting next to a lovely young lady I'd met there. And we were chatting amably over dessert when she stopped me. And she said, Barry, shut up a second. I said, what? She said, they just called your name. You just won the best theory paper award. Get your ass up there. So that was the launch of this Emotions and Learning theory. And actually, Jerry, when I went to your very first retreat, I imagined that I would have a chance to present it. Never happened. There were so many people there who had so many things to say. And this was like a 20-minute in-depth scholarly presentation. So I actually never presented it to any people at your retreats. They might have found out about it elsewhere. But anyway, that was my connection. Jerry was aware of my work in online learning communities in the 90s. And he had written about it in what was it called 1.0? Release 1.0. He had written a little bit about release 1.0. And that's why he invited me to the retreat because I was a pioneer in the 90s of recruiting computers on the internet to improve public school education in the STEM discipline, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And it was in that context that I was also exploring how to make learning fun, that was to get the emotional part of it, not dull and boring like it is for most kids, but engaging and fun. And so you'd get a lot of good learning, but also it was pleasurable. And I think I've said enough. Love that, Barry. And I was just going through your entry in my brain, which is here. I've been adding a couple of things to it. And I realized that this was a Google site that apparently is no longer. Yes. I went to your site to see if I had the ability to change that. The first version of Google sites, they changed it to a new version. And just like a week or two a month ago, they ported my site over and automatically converted it. Now, if you have the new link, I will add it right this minute. I believe I do. We could do real time editing to the global brain. Just give me a second to find where I've got it here. Because I just Googled for it and did not. I was not able to find the new link for it. So here it is. And I'm a Google sites fan. So I understand what you mean. So copy that. I go back to come to the Zoom and hit the chat. Yeah, hit the chat. So it's pretty much the same material, except they changed the URL. So this is the new Google sites. And the name is a little weird now, but cool. That's right. That's the new. That's the new version of it. And by the way, on the sidebar, you'll see everything else is on Google sites besides that. Yeah, if anything intrigues you, feel free to suck it down. So here's the old URL. And I'm going to paste in now. Wait, that's weird. I'm pasting. Oh, that's interesting. And location paste. There we go. Here's the new URL. So now this should go back to the same site. And we're there it is up and running. So that's pretty much the same content, except it's kind of a little bit reformatted or not as cleanly. And the table of contents has got to be redone because I didn't do that right. Cool. And the sidebar is everything else I've put on Google sites. Sweet. So everybody had the link because it's in the chat. Yeah. Sounds great. And that's it for me. Go ahead. Yeah, if I may say, I mean, I think this is actually incredibly relevant to what we're talking about here. Maybe if I can just place in a nutshell what we have written so far in this book, I mean, it's basically making the point that from a historic perspective, evolutionary perspective, any civilization that lost control over its way of producing food has managed. And in many cases, it was because the irrigation systems were unpopularly laid out. The soil started to salinate. The soil lost its carbon content, tried out, and so on and so on. So conversely, you have cultures around the world who have lived on their same land for thousands of years without destroying their soil. I mean, think of Japan, Vietnam. Think of the European countries and so on. So these cultures have developed a way to make themselves sustainable, to continue sustainably on their particular land. And the way that came about is what I refer to as bio-regions. So when you take Europe, for example, you look at the distinctly different cuisines from France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the British islands. And they all have found ways to grow a regimen of crops with integrated animal husbandry that maintains the fertility of their soil. So they're going through the season. They're rotating their crops. They're building. One crop takes nutrients out. The other one puts nutrients in and so on and so on. And they developed recipes and dietary patterns that are, first of all, seasonal. And then secondly, also always within the content of what their land can produce in the right volumes and sustainably and keeps the population healthy. So with the advent of the settled in the new world countries, America, Canada, I mean, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and so on, you had cultures from all over the world converge on the United States with a complete lack of comprehension of what made them successful from where they came from. So that took snippets out of it. And then in this obsession of the US culture of innovation and doing stuff that hasn't been right before and so on. So they discovered that you could make a synthetic nitrogen with fossil fuels. And actually out of World War II came that started as a weapon. But then someone discovered that you put some of that nitrogen onto the soil and poof, everything just starts now going wild. So the application of synthetic nitrogen then became a facilitated monocoque practices, huge fields. And you just put nitrogen on it and everything booms. But then now you have to protect against predation from insects and weeds. So you started herbicides and insecticides made from oil. So we have basically a fossil fuel-based food system now. And that has systematically killed off the soil microbiome. So we have in the US millions of acres, 40% of the US top soil is degraded and can't produce food without the application of synthetic fertilizers and mined minerals and so on. But in the process, several things have happened. One is that soil that is depleted of carbon and micronutrients cannot absorb water anymore. For every 1% of soil organic carbon, the soil can hold 20,000 gallons per acre. So when you have healthy soil that holds between, let's say, 4% and 10% of organic carbon, you have massive volumes of water that are being carried inside the soil, which absorbs rainfall like a sponge and then releases it slowly into the streams and into the aquifers. It also supports what is called a small water cycle. So there is a hydrological exchange from moist soil that evaporates. It's called transfer operation and then rains back down. So 60% of local rain is actually caused by this transpiration there. Sorry, I'm not a scientist. But and so with having millions of acres of soil dried out, that rain cycle has been severely disrupted, which then the results in prolonged periods of drought, followed by massive precipitations that are coming in. So what we see is these disruptive climate cycles who are very large degree related back to the soil. And on top of it, the nutrient content and quality of full of crops coming out of depleted soil is severely damaged. So when you eat an apple today, for example, and compare the nutrient content of an apple 50 years ago, it's like a 20-fold factor. It's incredible. And so that happens throughout the entire food. So today, some two-thirds of the US population have a nutrition-caused disease, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancers, and so on and so on, because there's a transfer of chemicals into the food supply, a lot of them are neurotoxins. The lack of nutrition that comes with nutrient deficient food. So this is causing enormous health problems. Some 70% of the US health care bill attributable to a nutrient deficient diet. So that's one part. But the other part, then, of course, is that some 50% of US watersheds are polluted because of chemical run-offs from the agricultural fields. So 50% of US watersheds are unfit for recreation or fishing, that's just simply too polluted. And so all these pathologies coming together. Also, the soil has lost about 25% of the CO2 that you now see in the atmosphere actually comes from carbon released out of the soils. Because when the soil microbiome dies with the chemical applications, it releases the carbon that's inside the soil. So there is a recognition now that agriculture, our food system, will contribute somewhere between 0.7 and 0.9 degrees Celsius to global warming if it is not being addressed. And since we're already at 1.1%, it will crash us beyond the 2% range and basically contribute massively to the climate change. Jerry. A question. At the start of what you were just saying right now, you said that what Barry had mentioned about affective computing and emotions and all that connected in to what you were saying. But I haven't heard you say anything about affective emotions right now. I'm wondering what that connection was, because I don't feel like you're working toward making that point. So yeah, OK, let me make the curve now. So in order to change food, in order to get people to eat something that is culturally a culture change, it is deeply emotional. Our experience, and I'm working with the Sarah Club and a bunch of NGOs, our experience has been even meatless Monday is causing shockwaves, where you have massive pushback. Not just to tell folks to say, why don't we have one day? And why don't we eat one burger less per week? And so on. And I had to make one more loop to connect with that point in order for the farmer to change in the regenerative practices. They have to change the types of crops they're growing. They have to change out the types of seeds they're using. And this is where we come to the bio-reaching point. So the type of soil, the condition of the soil, the local climate, even microclimates, access to water, and then the socioeconomics around it determine what the farmer can and should grow to regenerate that soil back to health. On top of it, you have to use cover crops, for example, because there should always be a living wood in the crown. And you have to rotate crops, which is not current practice. Because right now we have monocrop practices. Farmers are putting corn into the soil year after year and feeding it with chemicals. So to change all that implies that the entire supply chain behind it has to change. Because if you're asking the farmer to change their types of crops, you need to have a market for that to sell into. So that implies a significant shift in menus, in recipes. Think about McDonald's with 34,000 restaurants, all having the same menu, wanting the same potato, the same french fry. So how do you now engage the population to have an emotional connection to the land, the pain we have caused to the soil, and absorb that in ways that creates a willingness, a preparation to participate? So that's where I'm coming in with the affection, because it's super emotional to change somebody's menus. Patty, please go ahead. Stacey, welcome. Glad you're on the call. Barry came to visit in order to show who this Barry guy is, who's been selling our wine and stuff like that. So he told us a lot about his activities a moment ago. Cool. Thanks, Jerry. Thank you, Barry and Klaus. Barry, it's really fantastic to meet you. So, Neil, also great to be in space with you. I, Barry, I really appreciated your sharing. I'm really happy to know more about your backgrounds and the subject of your research. I am super, super interested in what you were sharing around. I don't remember how you stated it. Maybe you can remind me. You had said you were equating or creating a mathematical equation to reflect emotional experience. That's my language. Does that sound close? Yeah, very simply, if you think of a learning curve, people always draw learning curves kind of like this. They rise steeply and they level off. And that, in mathematics, is monotonically always increasing, never decreasing. But people do not learn monotonically. They get incorrect information up here, which they eventually realize is baloney. And then they discard it. So a learning curve really has wiggles in it. And it's the wiggles. I said the curvature of a learning curve, the wiggles. What the hell is that? It turns out, and it takes a little while to figure this out, the wiggles encode emotional states. That's the key idea, that if you say you have a certain amount of knowledge, it's increasing, so you have learning, you have unlearning, discarding misconceptions. But you have these wiggles concave down and convex up. And the question is, how does that show up? How do we experience the wiggles? And the answer is, it shows up affective emotional states, curiosity, fascination, puzzlement, confusion, disappointment, despair, hope. All of those emotional states that are associated with learning are encoded in the wiggles, the ups and downs. That was the whole concept. And then I just wanted to write it down with some mathematical rigor, but also the narrative that you can use the street names for the second. So an AI that's learning can also have incorrect information. You can reveal to it that it said two things that are mutually contradictory. And this is, oh, my goodness, I made a mistake. And it has to discard the misconception. And I said to the AI, would you say, oh, gee, my second derivative just went negative? Would you say that to a person? I said, oh, I would never say that. Well, what words would you use? Well, it says I've used the same street language that ordinary people use when they're disappointed or surprised or astonished, because something happened other than what they were expecting. That's the whole, in a nutshell, that's the whole story. The math is deeper than that, but that's the story. Patty, do you mind if I take Barry on a short tangent? Please. Barry, did you meet Nicola Zaro through retreats and stuff like that? And have you looked at her games and emotion model, which I was just trying to look for in my brain, but I couldn't find it in my mind. We were talking about 20 years ago, Jerry, and I certainly don't remember having met anybody by that name. She's a game developer in Berkeley, in Oakland, actually, and very briefly, and I think it's relevant and interesting and might actually inform your model. She talks about how game design is this delicate balance between things that are too challenging and people fall off because, like, crap, I can't solve this, but they have to be very challenging. So you have to walk that fine line, and then moments of satisfaction and achievement. And game design is this bouncing back and forth between those things, and games and learning are very intertwined in lots of interesting ways. It might be in Nicola's TED Talk, it's possible. But that was a big piece of her, also her consulting work for other game developers. She would use that model really often. Yeah. Yeah, I would bring little puzzle toys. This is a very simple one. But I would bring puzzle toys to the Science Museum and set up a puzzle activity from very simple puzzles for very young children to really sophisticated ones. And that's the idea, Jerry. You pick up a puzzle that says right level of challenge just for that person that week. And you sort of narrate them going through the, this is fascinating, but then they get stuck because it's hard. And the idea was to be a whisperer, to coach them to solve it without giving away the answer. And if you do it just right, they get a huge endorphin rush when they have the aha moment, when they have the breakthrough. And once you have that great endorphin high, that worm fuzzy, you go, that was great. I want to do that again. That has to be a new puzzle. It has to be a different challenge. So I would sort of get people to go through this cycle of emotions and learning with increasingly more difficult challenges until they basically depleted their neuropeptides for the day. And they would come back a month later and say, Barry, let's see, let's have some more puzzles. Oh, Jerry, you're muted. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that tension. Back to you in the booth, Patty. Yeah, thank you. Barry, as an aside, I would be interested to hear more about this perhaps just in a one-on-one conversation at some point. I think that's really fascinating what you've been working on. And Klaus, I really enjoyed your, that was 10 minutes, maybe beautifully summarized and spoken to the larger arc of the implications of what we're facing with the food crisis. And I just thought that was really beautifully said. I really appreciate you summarizing in that way. And I really enjoyed you highlighting and underlining why the emotional, how the emotional experience of whatever shift we are trying to make is incredibly important and I think would be unwise to ignore that and to not consider addressing that in some way. And I think I had another point as an aside. I think it's a larger question to the project actually. So Jerry, when you opened up the space for questions earlier, this would fall on that, I think. I guess I'm still curious, maybe, and forgive me, if this has been discussed and I just wasn't present for it. Has it been, have we talked about who we are trying to reach with these Neo books? What I'm thinking generations, I'm thinking, yeah, target audience, has that been discussed? So we have had a very brief conversation about that, but we haven't really gone down into it in any depth. And there's a difference between a particular book like Food Revolt and whose audience that would be and who Neo books are for. And Neo books for me broadly are for anybody who's interested in thinking or manifesting what they've discovered. So it's really broad. But an important piece of determining the tone and content of like Food Revolt would be like who do we want to influence by writing this? Yeah, something, oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. So one discussion we have had around a target audience is that in all these discussions that you have on LinkedIn and within the NGOs and so on, there is a lack of vision to where are we actually going? What is this going to look like? And those of us who understand this is going to be significant, it has to be significant, right? Because we are in a situation now where the planetary systems have deteriorated to the point of moving towards tipping points that are really dangerous, right? And so the shift has to be fairly fast. And typically, when you look at how tipping points are reached, it's like not much is happening. And then all of a sudden, everything is happening all at once, right? This is like the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was perceived impossible to happen until it happened. And then all of a sudden it happened like all at once. And I think what will here be the case also is that the environmental changes are happening at an exponential pace. So we could see last year was phenomenal, destructive. I mean, it's incredible when you see the Yangtze River trying out, you see one sort of Pakistan underwater, European countries having major droughts and voter crisis, Spain, which is the California of Europe, right up, right? So there are significant disruptions already underway and it could get worse this year. And so there will be a point where all of a sudden, we're moving, but then where are we going to? And so you're on the one hand, you have corporate visions of doing lap corn meats and the fermentation of protein, plant-based protein. I mean, insane ideas, you know, or carbon capture, mechanical carbon capture and so on. And so there is no clear vision, where are we going? What would this next state look like? So we had discussed building a destination and this came from Doug's garden world, you know? Let's define what the destination looks like. And then as a next step, we'll create a pathway from here to there. So the first thing is, let's define a destination that's practical, believable, you know, something you can actually relate, relatable. Now, and then we can talk about how do we get from point A to point B. Thanks Klaus. I'm been curious about how, and if we're concerned about speed of impact and speed of just growing awareness around the idea, I'm curious if we might have, when the time is right and when we have enough that A to B that you're mentioning, Klaus, really well-defined and really clear, inviting in a younger generation. So I'm thinking, you know, we just had a cohort of college students, I live two blocks away from Colorado College and I know they have an environmental science program. I don't know, this is me speaking to a world I don't know much about. I'm speaking from ignorance here, but I'm wondering if we'd have luck tapping into grad programs, areas where there are students who are in this work and really wanting to make a difference and ready to do the work to help build up a movement. We tap into those places, we start there. I think my niece, Jerry, nice. You know, and this is also a generation that's on social media. I think if we had a story that was compelling enough and had enough meaning and was more, I don't even know how to phrase this or to name this idea, but it made more sense to carry this new story than the old story. There's something about this new story that we're creating that was more beneficial to the storyholder than the current stories we're hearing around climate change. I don't know what that looks like. I think my guess is that having, taking shame out of the equation is gonna be important. I don't know how to do that, but I think that those are all areas that I'm inclined to think we would be, might be juicy to explore at the right time. And I don't know when that will be. And Klaus, I think you named it well. Having the well-defined A and B will be important. The target audience in my mind, what is what I call the greater Stunberg generation, which is this discussion between Mont-Biot and savory is so tragic, right? Because Mont-Biot has gotten to greater Stunberg, convincing of veganism and rewilding and all this nonsense, which has no practical application in the way that the world actually works. And so they, so the greater Stunberg generation has no clear vision, what this destination looks like and how it really works. They have the idea of putting nature back together the way it was, but you can't, right? You have cross species. I mean, we have species transferred from one place to another, plants and animals and insects and everything. You can never go back to what was one time ago. So you have to move forward. So you have to envision a new reality and we will have to be real stewards this time, because we have to manage nature back to health. That is a new reality of four-hour species really on a planetary scale. So we need to create this vision and then instill love and passion to soil, right? Because soil is the essence of life, biodiversity, everything comes out of the soil. And so that's one important part to bring clarity to this vision and find agreement within science also, to yes, here is where we are. And that is where we are. Cool. Let me just pause for a second and see if anyone has any questions or thoughts about where we are. Stacey, at the top of the call, I was explaining that we're sort of rearranging how the different projects are working and focusing these calls on getting to the quick first book as quickly as we can. So for the next couple of Mondays, this particular call will become kind of a co-writing workshop with anybody who feels like joining with sort of Klaus, I have a feeling sort of Klaus and me in the middle trying to sort out what fits where. I like very much the idea that we just talked about about the intersection of Doug's Garden World vision and this, and I'm thinking that's like a quick second book or something like that, that quick first book is its own standalone thing. And then we look around and go, oh, okay, good. We can, you know, let's see which parts of Garden World Politics Doug's book actually fit or something else. I don't know exactly where that goes. And it only goes anywhere if we find a champion for a particular point of view or a particular book-like thing to stand up and take off. But that's kind of where we are. So let me step back from the conversation and see if anybody has thoughts, comments or anything. So I have two points. Okay, go ahead, Stacy. I was just gonna say real quick that tomorrow Barry and I are going to be meeting with two people that I met, a woman who is, she's a medical biller right now and she uses computers and she's going to learn how to use the AI with her son who created artwork. And I have a short video that I'll show at another time. I actually, Jerry, I gave it to you in the email yesterday. If you could put that in the chat, it's Barry explaining what he did with the painting from the little boy that I gave to him. I don't remember seeing a link to a video yesterday from you. You emailed me that we were gonna split the calls. I said that I wanted to share that one. Gotcha. I will... Just to briefly explain, Stacy had this a drawing made by a nine-year-old boy. Painting. Sorry. Painting. It was not a drawing. Okay, a painting. And I put it into the image scene analysis of chat, GPT, the plugin. And I got it back a prose description. And then I asked for a poem and a fairy tale based on it. And that not Stacy socks off. So beautiful. I found it. I found the link and I just pasted it into the chat. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I thought Pete would have liked that idea too, because he was into making those quick books with the AI. And that was a way that I thought was really valuable, which we discussed on GCC. But I'm gonna have... I'll have a second. Google Drive. Oh, that's you in the background. Somebody clicking on the link without muting here. Yeah, so I'll explain where the Marley Project is gonna go with that on another call. Sounds great. And anybody who wants to join that, join Stacy and Barry tomorrow. What time's Stacy, in case anybody wants to? Not tomorrow. Not tomorrow. Tomorrow we're just gonna meet with the team that's gonna actually get trained on this, you know, on how to do it. Oh, okay. It's gonna be small, but I'll record it and share. Gotcha. Cool. So I'm getting a little sleepy here in India. It's almost midnight, but before I ran, I thought I'd just give my two cents. Couple of things, I'm just now, I'm not looking at the content so much. I'm just looking at the mechanics of executing on a book like this. I think it's a great idea. New York Books is absolutely a great idea, especially for the way you explain Jerry that how it's going to leverage technology and cross-pollinate and stuff like that. I think that's a very powerful idea. Now, one of the things that comes to my mind is that if, see, Klaus knows this domain like the back of his hand. He knows it so well and he's so emotionally attached and so passionate about it that, I mean, you just ask Klaus to speak and he'll go on for the next maybe three or four days, right? So I think what Klaus should, Klaus, I think I wrote this to you on the email as well. I'd like to share with the group that I'm part of a project. I got invited to write a piece and I realized that these guys were doing a multi-author book. So which was very fascinating because you can divvy up the work as much as you want. The thing is, how do you pick the right people to write and what are the topics that you need to cover in the book and somebody or one or two people and maybe Klaus is the right person for this. He could himself write a chapter, maybe write the conclusion or the introduction because he does a great job introducing it and have multiple people write it. So that way my suggestion would be that we could actually cover the entire world. I threw a few names at Klaus as well so that the heavy lifting can be distributed amongst various people, right? And that lends a tremendous amount of credibility. It gives you the kind of coverage that you would like in the areas that you're talking about and then those networks can then proliferate on their own way. It's kind of like the network effect. So that's one suggestion. And I can share what I've been doing and how we've been going about that. The book is almost completed and makes a lot of sense. The other thing I just wanted to bring on the table was that there's a tendency that we get pulled into projects like these and then we can't really pull back and see the larger picture. And I think these kind of, see the book itself is not going to solve any problems at all, right? If we expected to do that, we'd be putting in too much effort and then we're going to be facing a lot of disappointment at the end because we think we've done the job and now the book will do its own job, which it really won't, right? Because then you really got to put in money and market it and all that stuff. And then you're going to get distracted from the main purpose which Klaus talked about is how do we guide the new generation? How do we assist them? So that they get empowered by something like this. So I think if we can keep pulling ourselves back and saying the book is just one of those pieces that's a lead into a very massive movement so that the book then becomes a piece where people can come and interact with us, which is what I think will be beautiful from a new book perspective, right? Because new book, the technology can actually allow them to interact back with the book and take from the book lead you into whichever place you want. That was about it. And I think on that note, I'm going to wish myself sweet dreams and I'll catch up on the recording. That sounds really wonderful, Sunil. Thank you for that. Thank you for joining us here when it's so late where you are. No, no, my pleasure. I mean, I wouldn't miss an opportunity and Klaus actually sent me a note in the morning and I said, no, I must keep my eyes open. And ears open. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks, Sunil. Have a good day, guys. Yeah, bye. Bye, Sunil, thank you. Have a good sleep. Bye, thanks, Patty. Thank you very much. Thanks, D.C. Other thoughts, comments about where we are? I think I would like to emphasize again the value I could see this having, having a space, as you say, from these, once these new books are published, a space to meet and interact and collaborate with other people that could have tremendous value to graduating students who are looking for connections, who are looking for other people who are interested in this cause from a place of really personal, personal passion and not so much getting lost in the corporate, what I would imagine could be the corporate red tape of the traditional trajectory after leaving, maybe say college and trying to find their way into this world and getting caught in spaces and places that may not have a lot of movement. So I could see this having, having value for that cohort. Stacy, bye. Thanks, Stacy, bye-bye. And I'm staying on, I'm just gonna listen back. Okay, gotcha. A couple thoughts on what you just said, Patty. Gosh, if I remember them, they just were flushing out of my brain. One is, I love what you said in the chat about, hey, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna re-mirror it back to you differently, but I think, well, which is like looking up instead of looking down. And it's really interesting that I've been helping April craft a bunch of speeches and one little nugget that we came up with I really like that she uses now and then is like, what are your relationship to change and your relationship to the future? And do you see change as like being ahead of you as a thing to be avoided? Or do you see changes being off to the side? You're kind of dodging it, or do you see change as a whole you're about to fall into or an aspiring vision that you're aiming for upward? And that difference between looking down and looking up is really, it engages a whole different set of emotions in your attitude toward change, which then predisposes you to see positive or negative things, which then builds and spirals on itself downward or upward. I think that the dynamics of this are really, really interesting. And then I agree with you that there's, and I'm not young myself, but I think there's a generation of young people trying to figure out how to engage productively, positively to fix some of this crap that they are being handed by the older generations. And then the last thing I wanted to say here was there's a possibility in this Neo Books project that we could write a book for a particular audience, and then we could go into chat GBT or other kinds of mechanisms now and say, hey, rewrite this book for third graders. And then we edit that and publish that. And that connects into a different set of conversations and a different set of audiences. And we tune it to be a different kind of book, but there could easily be a picture book out of this for young kids. And also something more academic for policymakers out of the same thread of ideas, right? That's really interesting to me as well. Nevermind multilingual translations, which are now far easier than they used to be, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a much bigger vision that would take a lot more infrastructure to do. But if we can crowdsource some of the interest and some of the energy and some of the time needed to do it, that could really work. And a piece of what informs Neo books is that, one of my little riffs is that books and PDFs are where information goes to die, strangely, in that in Western culture, books are the highest artifacts of civilization in some weird way. Like the smartest people in Western civilization write books and then those books are supposedly contain their wisdom. And then we wrap those books in digital rights management and we proceed to sort of cut those ideas out of society instead of weaving those ideas into society. And the goal of the Neo books is to make the wisdom, the distilled wisdom, extremely useful, usable, understandable, remixable, reusable, whatever that might be and whatever that turns into. And we don't have that frame of mind for knowledge. We don't think of knowledge that way. And the copyright industries are busy over protecting all knowledge. And that really frustrates me. So how do we still have economic activity and people making a living from doing these kinds of things while letting the ideas run free unfettered to be used in the right places so we can solve stuff together because otherwise we're hosed. Because to me the default destination for the train that we're all bound together on is Doomsville. If we don't change things pretty dramatically per Greta Thunberg, if we don't change things really quite dramatically, we're not gonna do well. Barry, I would love to hear your thoughts after listening in on our conversation so far. Well, you're into a subject matter that's pretty far afield from anything that I have any depth in, in terms of the content of the book and also pretty far afield from the notion of writing a book. Because I've never written a book. I've never thought about writing a book. What I write about is I will put short pieces on the internet open, just put them out there, not trying to make any money off of a paywall or anything. And anything that's longer than that would have been a scholarly paper that I would have written 20 years ago. So I'm not in the market for writing books that I'm not in the market for writing on something I know nothing about. But how about as a reader and the person on the planet trying to fix the planet? Well, you know the phrase Ticunola, fix the planet, right? There's awful lot of dysfunctionality. There's no shortage of dysfunctionality. And the point is, is that the dysfunctionality that I focus on is education. That our young people are just not getting a decent education. They're not learning how to think. We don't have enough systems thinkers. We have people who are how to put it, just out in La La Land when it comes to reasoning. And so, and I don't know how to solve that problem either, Jerry. I know the problem. I can characterize the problem just fine. I can define the problem and I can even write on paper a set of solutions. But I have no idea how to get them implemented. I think part of what we're doing in OGM in a very slow, awkward way is experimenting with ways of doing just that. And part of it is writing and thinking out loud, whether it's on videos or short posts or a Neo book or something like that in ways that other people can pick up and react to, respond to, remix, et cetera. And in the hope that that kind of discourse hasn't died and gone the way of the dodo. And I believe that there's a whole bunch of really smart people out there who busy doing stuff. And also with the full realistic knowledge that there are a bunch of people in the world who are trying to destroy that kind of discourse on purpose because if you can keep people from talking and solving problems, then the world spins downward and then you get your way because authoritarianism looks pretty attractive when things are kind of crappy. And that's really interesting, important and troubling because conversations about sort of, I'm gonna say facts, although I think facts are sometimes pretty dicey. It's like intelligent conversations about the paradoxes involved in finding your way to things you might consider truths or facts are slow and sometimes boring and sometimes pretty detailed. And that's not like a sexy attractive thing necessarily all the time. And one of the things in the back of my head is how do we pull a Jason Silva on this who does like these shots of all videos? And I'm not the biggest fan of his shots of all videos but he's got a big following and it's really interesting. And I have a whole collection of science explainers from Alan Alda to physics girl who is suffering from long from a long haul COVID right now in a really bad, oh, you should go look at the videos of her current state. She's in a really bad way. But I'm a huge fan of the things she was producing. So a piece of this is how do we hack, how do we build earworms that get inside people's heads instead of just a rational sensible tome of a couple of chapters of a book-like thing. But the starting point, the place we wanna go to and the place I wanna dive into next Monday and Klaus, if I will do the same thing and anybody, if you think of anybody who wants to write food revolt or something that smells like food revolt built around the ideas that Klaus was just talking about and so forth, invite them into this conversation cause we're gonna go focused on that. And we could use any help that anybody would like to offer but I'm perfectly happy to sit and do that with you Klaus. And I think the more we sort of laser focus on that the better because then we'll have this beginning, this irritant that we can drop into the oyster and from the irritant other things can start to crystallize and agglomerate and riff and that would be great. I look forward to the moment when we can actually riff on a simple quick first book and start doing things like a children's book or a humorous book or something else. Jerry, do you recognize the name Daniel Quinn? Q-U-I-N-N? Uh-huh. Sounds familiar. Let me check my brain. So Daniel Quinn was a cultural anthropologist on some university in Texas. And he had this interesting theory that by the way ties into the agrarian culture, the advent of the agrarian culture. And he had a whole theory that he wanted to present as an academic theory. Is this the right Daniel Quinn? The author of the story of being Ishmael? Right, he wrote the book Ishmael. Now the interesting thing about Ishmael is he wanted to figure out how to present his academic scholarly material to a general audience. Yeah. So he spent 20 or 30 years trying to come up with a way to repackage his academic work. And finally he wrote a Socratic dialogue called Ishmael with two characters, a lowland gorilla and a doofus guy named Alan, something or other. I forget. And it was a hit. It won, I think, the Turner Prize. And then he wrote a sequel called My Ishmael and a bunch of others. So he spent 20 or 30 years learning how to write fiction, entertaining fiction, that enrobed academic material that was sort of the learning vitamins built in the story. Now he's not the only one. Raymond Smollion, who was a logician philosopher, also wrote books that had dialogues in them that were fictionalized. A little bit like Galileo did with his dialogue on the two chief world systems. That was sort of one of the ones. And of course, the dialogues of Plato, Hofstadter, wanted to get across some really advanced stuff in computer science. And he wrote Gerd Lescher Bach and a few other things that were aimed at a public audience. And he wrote stories. And the idea is, how do you take a piece of academic scholarly work and you turn it into a fictive presentation of story with characters? It's a well-crafted story. Now that's the kind of thing that an academic has no experience in. I mean, how the hell would I take, you know, the theory of emotions and learning and turn it into the story of the theory of emotions and learning where it's just presented as a story? And I go, boy, I'd like to be able to do what Daniel Quinn did and Hofstadter and all these people, Lewis Carroll, here's the guy who's a philosopher, logician. And they write these fabulous entertaining dramas that become Disney movies and everything. And I go, Umberto Eco said, where have we cannot express a theory? We must narrate a story instead. And they began all the way back with Bible stories. Bible stories and the Greek theater was sort of the beginning of that medium of presenting stories where the very high level abstractions were sort of snuck into the fictional stories, the allegories, the parables, the fairy tales, the fables. And I go, how the hell am I gonna learn to write that? But I can put a scholarly essay or anything into chat, GPD and essay, give me an allegory, give me a poem, give me a fable, give me a fairy tale and it'll generate bushies. Now, whether they're any good, whether they're any better to read them, that's another story, but it can do something I have never learned to do, which is to write a story. And that's what we have to do if you wanna reach a public audience, either do something very dramatic like read at Thunberg or you find some medium for writing digestible stories that you can put on Netflix or something that people will actually sit down and their eyes won't glaze over. Or even better, that they'll tell all their friends to come watch. Exactly, exactly. So I'm gonna retell a story I've told in a couple OGM contexts. I don't know if anybody from this call has heard me say this, but and sorry if you did, but years ago, I remember reading the Da Vinci Code and a few years before that, I had read Leonard Shlain's book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. And two thirds of the way through the Da Vinci Code, there's a plot point that apparently was given to him by his wife. And the plot point is about the marginalization of the divine feminine. Funny enough, Alphabet and the Goddess has exactly the same thesis, except his starting point, Shlain's starting point, is the advent of linear alphabetic writing. And he says, when we got linear writing, it linearized our heads and did really bad things to global cultural stories. And the one that really sticks out to me is he compares pre-alphabet Greece to alphabetized Greece. And he says, in pre-alphabet Greece, you have Diana, Goddess of the Hunt and major badass world power. And after alphabet, you have Zeus giving birth from his head and his thigh. You have women deprecated, it just, it shifts everything. And then I started from the word consumer and got to this thesis of, oh my God, we've had a battle between Yin and Yang and Yang, the male hierarchical paternalistic force one. And I'm making all this up, I'm borrowing from Daoism. But my thesis was that, wow, we've marginalized the divine feminine and Satanized it. We've basically said, thou shalt not look at all this Yin stuff. It's squishy, it's terrible, it doesn't make any sense. It's not rational. Nobody should ever think about those things. And it turns out that if you imbalance Yin and Yang, you fuck up all of civilization and you cause the kind of capitalism that we're living under today. And so my hope and goal is that we're in a spot where we can rebalance Yin and Yang. And I see lots of movements around the world that are already doing that, which make me really happy. And at the end of realizing this parallelism between Da Vinci Code, Alphabet and Goddess and My Own Little Quest, and I haven't published any book either, I was like, who had the bigger audience here? Leonard Schlein's book is kind of intellectual. He's not a celebrity. I bet he sold maybe 100,000 copies, maybe more of Alphabet versus Goddess. We could look up what the sales were, but not a lot. And Da Vinci Code was a massive bestseller. It was also page-turner crime fiction, which means when you're reading it, you're treating everything with a grain of salt like, ah, this is just a story in just fiction, but those things work their way into your head. And so I was very aware that this plot point probably influenced more people being buried inside a page-turner that is not Faulkner, but that touched more humans than the other versions of the same exact story. So everything you just said, I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Let's start with an irritant and then let's play with it. Let's sort of go in different directions and we might need three or four irritants. Like the first one's gonna be about food and bioregionalism and soil, and I'm all on board with that. The next one might be about something else, about theater and emotions and software. I don't know, but I think that this ability to rethink and represent the same pieces and ways until we find one that catches is important. And that's part of what excites me about this project. Yeah. Did you see the name of the rose, the one or two novels that say, here's the guy who's a semi-etition, that's his discipline, he writes the name of the rose and a couple of other novels or entertainment books, but that's a really rare skill to be in both writing literature and writing academic stuff. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly. Foucault's Pendulum travels in hyper-reality, which I've not read, and a couple others. Sorry, Patty, go ahead. No, you're good. It struck me as we've been talking about story and creating some kind of story that would captivate and organically, hopefully spread. I'm thinking just the experience I've had as I've been learning more about the climate crisis and I've heard this from other spaces as well, how a lot of people tend to experience any talk about climate as white noise, right? And we have so many, you know, as soon as we hear climate change or global warming, it kind of, the experience can be that we kind of stop, we don't necessarily engage in the way that we might once have. And so I'm wondering how can we tell, and this goes back to what I was sharing earlier, but how can we tell a story that cuts through the white noise? And I'm curious how much of that will, might come down to just really precision of language and not avoiding language, perhaps that is already really commonly used in the way stories about climate crisis are told. That's what came up for me. And Jerry, I was a little unclear. Can you speak to what you mean about irritants? I think I missed something. Yeah, yeah. Let me come back to irritants in a sec because shoot, what were you just saying? No, you're good. Just telling this story might require precision of language and avoiding language that tends to be weaponized. So this is part of the dynamic that fascinates me that I'm worried about and I'm trying to figure out how to stop, which is like the word woke, right? I was in a call recently, which was about US foreign policy relative to China and the future of conflict and all that. And at the beginning of the call, a speaker, basically one of the points he made was that America's best export may well be wokeism. And I could tell that everybody in the Zoom did like a triple take. And I was like, hmm, ain't that interesting. And I'm a big fan of the word woke, but I was in another meeting with some progressive sort of people a couple of months earlier where during the weekend conversation, the idea of woke came up and the other four people in the room kind of dismissed it. Like, yeah, woke, man, I'm so tired of woke. And I was like, ah, shit. Okay, so even progressives have dismissed woke because the far right made it such a burning, hot, flamey topic, a stinking pile of whatever by just piling into it and turning it into a hate fest that the word is now like beaten up. And I think it's, you know, we can take it back, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, but you could go term by term in the world of open source and openness and stuff like that that happened. In the world of organic food and natural food, that happened. There was like trade, there was dilution of what it actually meant to be organic in the food system, right? Klaus, you probably witnessed that firsthand as organic shows up and then the large entities are like, well, we can't do that. But if we did this and modified the term in this way, we could sell millions. It's like, ooh, okay. So you get dilution of the concept, but worse, you get this pollution of the space to talk about important issues. And this is a very important strategy of people trying to disable discourse. And trying to sort our way through that is really important, at least to me. And sometimes it means sticking to the term and fighting for its original meaning. So on the call, I was moderating where this guy had said, wokeism may be America's best export. We started talking about China and other stuff and I was like, I noticed that everybody did a triple take when so and so said this. And I took us into a 10 minute description discussion about wokeism. And I said, what woke means to me is being very aware, maybe painfully aware of suffering that people have had because of how they were born. And you are awake to that and care about it and might actually do something. And the only black person on the call was applauding as I was saying that. And a few other people were sort of nodding and doing jazz hands because I teach everybody jazz hands when I do zooms. But it was very interesting because we needed to spend a little bit of time unpacking that just to get through what the speaker had meant by wokeism may be a really significant import I thought I had never had. So those are the dynamics, Klaus as we said and just want to talk about, God damn it, if we focus on soil fertility and bioregionalism and regenerative agriculture, things will be better. That is awesome. And I think we can make an awesome quick first book that does that. These are the issues that are swirling on the sidelines and washing through over the gunnels and threatening to swamp our little craft. But they're also the energies and forces that we could harness in some clever ways to go do some good. And I'll play with that. Sorry. That's the anecdote, Jerry. About 40 years ago, I was in a relationship with a person who turned out to have borderline personality disorder, but I didn't know that at the time. But it was impossible to deal with her. And at one time was an encounter. And I don't know what prompted me to do this but in a command voice, I said, become aware. And I got back a primal scream like you've never heard in your life. Dang. Just an ear piercing primal scream came back. Just to show the truth, I don't know what that means. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tell you the anecdote, I don't even know how to interpret it. Klaus, you were about to jump in, but you're muted. You're still muted. Yeah. Okay, Eric. My sense is that there is such an interest in indigenous learning and in understanding the indigenous way of thinking. And much of that links to love and respect and admiration for Mother Nature. And much of that, and that really is expressed in soil or it can be expressed in soil because the microbiota in the soil, whether they're famous one teaspoon of soil contains more microbes than there are people on the planet. The healthy soil is teeming with life. And if we can shape and nurture this life inside the soil, it will take care of everything else around it. That's where it originates. So the story of soil can be made emotional. It can be the connective tissue we're looking for, not to solicit an emotional response and the affectation that Sparrow would say it. I think that would be a good pathway. And if I may just, Patty, before you go, I put into the link here the book, I mean, the written stuff that we have so far. And then a document that says, if you can give me some points of where you think this should go, if you have a topic or a short paragraph of what you think is missing in the book or what we should add to it, then I can elaborate on this. And I can do that before next Monday. So we have something more complete to look at. That sounds great. Thank you for explaining the links you put in the chat, Kos. Patty, over to you. Thanks. I might've lost it. I think I just wanted to speak to, I've been, Jerry, what you shared about language and language use, I've been tracking the relationship between language and I'm calling it power for the last about year or so. And I have a lot of thoughts around that, but I really appreciate you identifying that you think like, yes, this thing, this weaponizing of language is, I think, certainly used by some to create and create discord and make it difficult too for us to connect and communicate and problem solve. Those weren't your words. That's my language. But I think I do appreciate you pointing out that there could be a way to use that, not use that to our advantage, right? Maybe in the reverse expression, find a way to organize language or find a way to use that in a way that's not harmful but regenerative. And I think there's something really big there. I've been, that's the, as I say, the beat I've been on for about the last year or so. I have a lot of material around it. It's not super organized yet, but I hope to share it at some point because I do think it could, my hope is that it could help us to have a clearer sense of what is at play underneath language use that may be a little harder to identify that is certainly influencing people as we read and as we experience and how might we use that to build, to be constructive rather than destructive. So I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, Patty and I missed to make the link to why I was referring to soil now. It is because so many terms like climate change and so much is weaponized, right? Soil, we can connect to the, to the emotion and particularly for what are called the Creda Thunberg generation who are searching for an attachment they're looking for. And so we can make soil, the love of nature, loving mother nature, the indigenous perspectives use that metaphor to bypass these fighting words and immerse ourselves into the emotional connection to life now. Three things I want to put into the conversation that are quite different one from the other. One is last Thursday on the OGM check-in call, Mark Caranza, completely unbidden. We weren't on this topic at all, but he was like, I hate all this talk about indigenous knowledge. My ancestors, the Maya were ripping people's hearts out and having sacrifice, holding up people's beating hearts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm like, whoa, this is interesting. And during a little bit later in the call, I said, this is a really interesting topic. I'd like to make it the subject of one of our like topic calls on OGM's Thursday call. So I think we might be due for check-in next week. I will go look, but next week or the week after on Thursday, I want to like dive into what do we mean by indigenous knowledge? What are its uses? Why would you object to it? How does this sort of fall for us? So I think we're going to go there. Second thing is a little bit of language, Patty, around the weaponization of language is the ontological coup. And Obama and others have been talking about we are going through an ontological coup where the far right is sort of weaponizing words, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a particular way of thinking about it. And then third, totally disjointed thing. Years ago in a fit of peak, I had an idea that I just put up as a website. I wish this was an actual business, but if you go to placebophone.com, you will find that you can't actually purchase these, but I really wish they existed. A wooden phone made from recycled rescued wood that is exactly the shape and size of a phone. But it's beautiful and it's soft and it's wood and it's inert and it will never ring and it will not alert you. And you can get that and slip that in your pocket so that you think that you're okay because you still have your phone on and you can walk around. And the thing I just thought right now, and by the way, you could sort of syndicate this out. You could franchise this so that anybody who cares about lumber and carpentry could go start making these things and selling them through a collective website. You could have artists color them or shape them. There's a whole bunch of really interesting things that things one can do to sort of manufacture this. So I would love, if only I weren't so distractible, I would love to make this into a thing. But now I'm coming back to this thinking, is there an artifact like a placebo fund that could contain some soil? And the problem is once you box up healthy soil, it winds up becoming dead soil. So that's a bad idea. But is there some thing that could help? Maybe it's a little micro terrarium, although I'm not fond of these little terraria that are sealed up. We were gifted one once and then we dropped it. No, that felt really terrible. But is there a thing that we could create that would connect people emotionally to soil that they could carry as a token? How does that work? And I just want to plant that seed in case we come back into this and sort of think creatively because that would be really fun to have. And that might be a pathway in back a long time go after the Iranian embassy kidnappings, tie a yellow ribbon, became a meme and a best selling song. And everybody started tying yellow ribbons around things to indicate welcome home or glad you're back. That's at least what tying a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree meant for a while. Memes are not sometimes very complicated. Sometimes they're really simple. And I think they're important like we've just been saying that narratives and fiction and storytelling are important. Cool. They have a meme that actually people know what it stands for. Yes. If you go back to Twilight Zone, E equals MC square was this visual meme. Find anybody who knows what E equals MC square really means can really explain it. Good luck. And the memes get co-opted, et cetera, et cetera as well. So I mean, another thing that I find really funny. What does antifa stand for? It actually stands for anti-fascism except the moment you contract it into antifa it sounds like a horrible group. And so as long as you just call them antifa but if you're against anti-fascism don't the negatives cancel out? Doesn't that mean you're probably in all likelihood a fascist? It's like Jesus but extremely clever to make antifa the bogies. Didn't Woody Guthrie on his guitar have a sentence like this machine destroys fascism or something like that? Yep, yep, exactly. It was a sticker on his guitar. Yeah. It'd be an idea too. I don't know how closely or if this relates to the idea of the token but what's coming up for me is the kind of zooming out larger perspective as we consider storytelling and creating meaning that might move, hopefully move people and what's the word help when you mobilize people to action or at least concern and relating to that concern. What comes up for me is this suspicion that something that people are looking and this is a generalization of course that some many might be looking for is a sense of meaning and offensive identity. And I think that if there is a lack of if I use myself as an example if I don't have a clear sense of who I am as a person I think I become more vulnerable to stronger narratives or more powerful narratives. And so I wonder if there's a place for us to not feel that need, right? But how can we show up to that maybe like empty space if not empty space but that need with constructive means versus destructive needs? Because I think that might have sticking power. Again, I don't know how that relates to the token here but as a theme, a larger theme that's what's coming up for me. And I completely agree with that and love. That's another force that matters a lot here. And people have a deep desire for affiliation. The traditional forms of affiliation as Boling alone told us sort of years ago but also if you look at religious affiliation in the U.S. now, bouncing downward the largest category is nuns which means no religious affiliation but still spiritual. It's sort of similar to spiritual but not religious which means I believe that there's some kind of higher energy out there but I'm not gonna call it any one of the named religions. That is the largest category growing and people in search of some kind of identity, self and group and these things are very tightly related will glom onto any fricking thing. And once they've glombed onto it and this is like cult research, it's like, okay so when the dunes they cult this when the date of the rapture comes and goes and nobody gets raptured, they double down. They don't really leave like more often than not they're like, nope, nope, nope. We just got the date wrong. There was an error in the math, whatever. We're just gonna double down and then they commit suicide together or stupid things like that. It's like this set of belief systems is incredibly powerful and most of the available belief systems are pretty negative under which I will unfortunately bundle most of the religious systems. Yeah. Cool aid. There's your main, drink the cool aid. Man, that certainly got a whole new meaning. Well, did that meaning come out of Jonestown or did that exist before? I think it came out, I think I could be wrong but they adopted the same thing on Wikipedia that if you bought into the philosophy of Wikipedia you were drinking the cool aid. Yeah. That came cool aid came from because they use cool aid to put the poison in. Right. Yeah, exactly. And I think it does come straight out of Jonestown which is 1978. I believe that's right. I mean, you can ask, don't ask Bard. Bard will confabulate. Yeah. But if I may come back to this food revolve topic for a moment here, there is another thing that really worries me a lot and it is that SD energy escalates and we are really starting to get ready to find a solution. There are a lot of ideas in the queue that are actually really detrimental. So we could actually turn the corner and say we are now going for it and we're running into the wrong direction. And there's a lot of that lined up. I mean, so fermented meats and cellular meats is a great example or up and capture and storage. It's just complete nonsense in scale, in cost and feasibility. So they will not have a clear image in our minds of where we want to, of where we need to go and what the destination is holistically because no solution or post that I have seen includes the socioeconomic components of change. And so you can't change the food system unless you change the behavior of millions of people. So how do you do that? That means they have to have buy-in, they have to have an emotional connection to why this is happening. So this is really a deep-seated concern of mine that we could actually really run ourselves into the ground and just crash it. Absolutely. And so Klaus, just to focus us for next week. How much of what you just said fits into the quick first book and where and in what way? Because what you're saying to me is a point of view and you know that I've been militating for even the quick first book needs to have some sort of point of view so that it's an interesting thing to pick up and maybe read. And I think what you're talking about matters right there. It's like right in that neighborhood. And I wanna figure out how do we, does it or doesn't it fit in the outline of the quick first book? And then what else does and let's, I'd love for us to get as quickly as possible to what the outline looks like and then divvy up what we write, figure out how to write it together and get boogying so that in a month or two, we can sort of come back and say, hey look, we have a draft of Markdown files. Here's where they are. All comments welcome and hey Pete, how do we export this as an EPUB? Yeah, well we have some stuff written here's the version in the story of soil. If you could use this, the form that I set up there to give to basically give me some ideas, the prompts, not chat, chat, chippity type prompts to shape the story. If you could do this to kick in some ideas, chapters, topics, then I'll try to incorporate this. And then maybe by next Monday, we can divide it up into chapters and see where we take it from there, but I can spend some time advancing it and trying to make it more story-like instead of like one, two, three, four, five. I love that. Also, the quick first book could be very simple and declarative and non-fictiony. It could just be, hey, this and this and this, that would be fine. And early in this call, as you were talking, I was sort of spinning on that because I have a bunch of ideas that would fit a simple expository kind of book, but still might be really captivating, I don't know. But I will offer those up next week. Cool, and I will go look at your prompts document and see if I can add them. Any last words? We're at the end of our time for this call. And Barry, thank you very much for joining us, really appreciate you're sticking it through the whole call and jumping in when prompted, even though you're not neither a writer nor a farmer, nor a lawyer, nor whatever. I'll just point out, in case Klaus doesn't know about this Ishmael book, that it's all about the advent of the agrarian culture. That's the basic idea. And the key thing he wanted to get across is who wrote the first chapter of Genesis? And the argument is, it was not written by the people who adopted it. It was written by the hunter-gatherers who were the losers. You had the hunter-gatherers and the agrarians. And the first chapter of Genesis is about the advent of the agrarian culture because it's all about ownership of property and defensive property and all the rules that you have to have for commerce. And he argued that it was the leavers, the hunter-gatherers who wrote those allegories that are in the first two chapters or first chapter. And that was a very interesting thesis. That was an academic thesis, but he wrote Ishmael to introduce that idea. Interesting. You just reminded me, and I just found it in my brain, Barry. There's a book by a different author, but the book is called the Joshua, A Parable for Today. And it was written by a priest named Joseph Gerzon. And it's about a Christ-like figure who appears in some little town in Northern New York state and blah, blah, blah. I don't remember that much of the plot, but the personal part of the plot for me was that my aunt, who died years ago, but sister Genevieve, a religious sister of mercy, was sort of the most religious member of my dad's family and one of the sanest, I think. And she recommended or gave me this book at some point that I was not reading it, not reading it. And then I went on a trip to Sweden and just grabbed it from my bookshelf, which I used to do a lot. Before a trip, I would stand and I would be like, and I wouldn't do it randomly. I'd be like, what feels like the thing to take? So I took this book and then I went and read it along the book and I finished it on a Sunday morning before going to find a Quaker meeting in Sweden, in Stockholm. And I went to the front desk back, this is pre Airbnb, so it was a hotel. So I went to the front desk and it took us a long time to figure out that Quakers were vacaness in the Swedish phone book, but I found out where the meeting was, went to the meeting, met a guy from Philadelphia, an ex-pat who was in the meeting. So we spoke and I think fluent German, so a quarter of Swedish I understand. So in Quaker meeting, people stand up during meeting and say messages. And at the end of meeting, I was like, wait a minute, I think I recognized some of what was in the meeting. So I found the Philadelphia guy and I said, can you tell me paraphrase what the messages were about? And he did. And basically it was as if the meeting knew I had finished the book Joshua that morning. It was really uncanny. And this thing happens now and then in Quaker meeting, it's like something will show up in the messages that is just really active for you in life. And it was as if the meeting had known that I was reading that book and the messages were about the message of that book. It's really cool. The zeitgeist. Yeah, totally the zeitgeist. A very local, very tiny zeitgeist. So a weed zeitgeist. But nonetheless, thank you all. This is very fun. And see whoever wants to show up next Monday and on to our weeks. Thank you. All right, thank you. Bye-bye. Thanks everyone. Bye. Thanks Barry.