 We have to start the recording, so here we are. This is the fellowship with the link call for Wednesday, December 6th, 2023. You are discussing parasites, biomes, and the revolution. Yeah, someone said the word revolution and a recording started. I'm not sure if that was. Who knows what'll happen? Chris, we're not hearing you. Oh, that's right. You just muted. See, we're not hearing you when you're unmuted. So you've got a mic problem. How about now? Now it's working. Somehow my mute button on my microphone decided it was going to start working today. Well, that's good. Just to begin with, get all the revolutionary stuff on the record so that when the AI becomes sent in. So I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords for the record. You're repeating that no matter how much you believe it. Every session I'm in. It's a rational statement to make. Well, if they allocate power in the future government structure by who said that the most, I could be president. This is the duerlito brigao de vacilisque. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, don't be careful though. So go ahead. Oh, no, I was going to say you have to be careful. Eventually, the AI is going to understand when you're being sarcastic and then you're in trouble. I feel like we're at a far greater risk of the AI assuming from the content it's trained on that we're always sarcastic. Or that we're just stupid brutes and should be wiped out. I mean, really, remember the first broadcast that any aliens will see are basically Hitler at the 36 Olympics. That's the bow wave of our civilization's effect on other cultures. I hope they don't manage to catch that. They don't manage to miss that project. That was must-see TV. So on the sarcastic AIs or whether they will look at us as sarcastic. I guess you can imagine like AI being sarcastic or earnest, depending on the training data, precisely. And the reforming learning layer. And this, I wonder about this, maybe we will need both. I guess maybe sarcastic people will get along with sarcastic AIs and earnest people, earnest AIs. So it'll all be like an episode of Futurama with what's the name of the sarcastic robot? Bender. Bender. Bender. Exactly. I mean, yeah, I played a bit with Charity BTs. One of these GBTs, so the modes, I guess cut my prompts, which is like a 10X programmer. I don't know how you've seen this one. It's like someone who does a cold review in a very sarcastic and passive or aggressive mode. Or like straight, aggressive mode. And it's spot on, honestly. And I can imagine like people appreciating these type personalities in some contexts. It's funny. Yeah. So what's on people's minds? Has everybody uncovered cool new stuff? Hey, Michael. I'm trying to figure out how to write a Neo book, which has been really fun, how to think like a Neo book. And what that might mean. And in Apropos Books, April was just on a call this morning with her publisher. And apparently the publishing industry has been having a miserable, terrible, bad time. The books are in trouble right now. Oh, everything is in trouble in the publishing industry of all types of publishing right now. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I'll mute while typing, yes. I'll let your Amazon, maybe. Yeah. I'm curious. Why you got sorry? Oh, go ahead. Apologize, please. Because April probably has of the group here, and some I know the most recent book to come out. What kind of PR support, if any, did they give her? So her publishers, Barrett Koehler, which is not that big, headquartered in Oakland, they do really interesting books. They, most book publishers, at most what happens is every season or every sort of release, they'll pick one or two books to put some marketing energy behind. And the other 20 that they publish in that period get nada. So April actually hired a book publicist at launch before launch. And like the five months before August of 21, when she launched, when it became public, when it was available, were a frenzy of activity. I think she recorded more than 100 podcasts, interviews, et cetera, et cetera. She got some placement in media, which was good, and so forth. But if she hadn't done that on her own, it would have been pretty much crickets. She had to drum that up. And did she pay in the general range of $3,000 to $5,000 for her publicity for several months? It was expensive. It was at the high end of that range, yeah. OK. Well, it sounds like at least they generated something for her, unless all those podcasts were either through herself or through you. If they didn't generate enough stuff, usually you can say, hey, you did next to nothing for me, most of the stuff I got for myself, a kickback, a chunk of the fee. And usually they would. Yeah. She was happy with their work. They were quite good. So she went to 100 podcasts. I'm sorry, I got stuck on that. Yeah, yeah. Wow. She got interviewed more than, I think, it was more than 100 times. She kept a big spreadsheet of all the things, and there was just that shit tongue of sit down and tell us again, what was the idea of this book? It's like kind of crazy that you repeated over and over. Wow. And then I guess the other question happened. I wanted all the book, and I did just a link, and then I can. Oh, the book title? Sure. Yeah. I believe it's, I think if you go there, you'll see the book in its full blazing glory. Thank you. Also, another spend of money. So April's speaking business last year was great. Then the pipeline really dried up this year. So she has just now, this week, is getting final, final, final, final copy of a demo reel, which a few speakers have. But she worked with a video production house that's known nationwide, but happens to be here in Portland. And they were really good. And I think this demo reel is pretty awesome. So we'll be, she'll be putting it on YouTube, and I'll share it out to the Mattermost when it's available, just so you can see. But it's one of those sort of dazzle reels or sizzle reels where there's really nice footage, and there's now music in the background, the whole thing. Crazy. Sorry about that, let me go ahead. Just a quick aside, did it hit her radar that Dr. Hu had a villain named Flux, I think, while she was. I don't think so, OK? I don't think she knows much about Dr. Hu. No, I'm just curious if those two worlds collided. Yeah, it was taken over the whole universe. She might find that funny. I think so. Michael, I think you wanted to jump in when we were talking about books growing down the tubes. There's something we're publishing in trouble now. OK, you were part of the interrupt conversation where we talked over each other. Apparently not. Sorry, just a second. I don't even know if I'm mic'ed or muted. Oh, I am. We hear you from it. Yeah. Yeah, no. I might have been thinking as I, you know, to quip. But I thought only to myself, yeah, books are in trouble. I've captured them all up in here. You're holding them all for ransom. Holding them hostage. Nice. Well, books are broken. Books need to be rethought. We need to, like, that's this whole NEO book experiment we're doing is a tiny little sliver of that. But I'm excited about it. It's fun. So far as most of your NEO book, you writing or are there other collaborators? So we've got calls on Mondays that used to be the censoring calls, which Bentley had started. We kind of took over that time slot in the programming in some way. But we've been meeting. And there's four different NEO books in progress. But mine is the only one that's being written like a NEO book, meaning the other writers are writing books in Google Docs. And the NEO book conceit is that books are basically roll-ups of nuggets that are interesting, that could be written to be composable and reusable, so that I wrote a nugget about trust. You could write a nugget about chat GBT. And if that was a really nice write-up of chat GBT, why shouldn't that nugget appear in several different books? And there's kind of an unwritten rule of books that all the content in a book should be unique and new for that book. And I'm like, screw that. Books should overlap. And then the piece of the NEO book narrative is that books are just shiny objects that are well-known cultural artifacts. They attract people. But what's really interesting is where the nuggets are, basically alive on the web, as Wiki-like social documents. Then the nuggets can be improved. They can be reworked. They can be manifested in different ways, like in different languages easily now because auto translation is getting just better and better and better. But also you could say, rewrite this at a third grade level, rewrite this for a PhD. You could do a whole bunch of mess of stuff. And so partly what I'm trying to do is explore that and experiment with it. And what I'm also trying to do is write enough of a NEO book so that I can point to it and say, this is what it would smell like if it's starting to like pump. So doing that. So have the... Well, I guess the first question is then what licensing are you putting on the bits and pieces you're writing? So that they can or could be reused by others potentially? At this point, it's not actually explicit in the documents, but it's CC0 is kind of the way I'm thinking, because for me, and we've had several different interesting conversations about this. Pete Kaminski cares a lot about this and there's copy heart. There's a whole bunch of intriguing, but often incomplete licensing schemes, but I want to write for the commons. And it turns out that if you don't protect your writing, that's bad too. You have to actually actively apply some license to your writing, because otherwise somebody else can apply license to your writing and like, in some sense, appropriate it, which is not good. So then the next question after that is, are you aware of there's a huge space in mostly higher education in academia called, usually goes by the acronym OER. Yep, or Open Educational Resources. Yep. So what is that for you again? Open Educational Resources. OER. OER. So it's essentially most of it tends to be professors who are writing kind of open books, and they openly license it so that you can take paragraphs, pages or chapters and reuse them in other educational resources, so that if you're doing a class, instead of saying here's one book you need to read, you can go out and find chapters that you want your students to read and put it into a book, or some professors have been going out and taking stuff in the public domain, usually in history courses or reading classes. Let's find short stories or things we can put in and make our own textbook. And then at the end of the course, they've got the textbook with some footnotes and analysis that go with it. And then they package it up and say, here's an OER textbook that other courses could use or take bits and pieces of and go from there, which I think is fairly similar to where the open, or the Neo book idea is sitting. It's just moving that idea out of the educational setting into a broader cultural setting. Yep, exactly. And I'm really interested, for me, OER is sort of the leading edge of education, or one of the different leading edges of education where it meets the ideas that I'm working with on the Neo book project, because I'm really interested in how education, journalism, science, policy, politics, and governance can all meet at these documents. So currently, those are all sort of different siloed communities that happen to share articles or blog posts or tweets or whatever. And occasionally there's like an open database, but what if those things were more integrated and when somebody's making a policy decision, they could actually consult the research that researchers were working on that journalists reported on, et cetera, that students had improved, to all that. Oh, cool. Thanks for that article. This we've written about everything we ever talk about, it's good. Very, just so you know that the link, you can get to where you wanted us to go, but you get a sorry page doesn't exist yet when you follow that directive. Well, that's weird. Let me see what I used to link from my brain which might not be updated, let's see. I mean, I got to where I was supposed to go if I go into the, using the sidebar to navigate. Oh, you're right. Good. I think the name, oh, that's why. Okay, let me see if this works. Good, so what happened was I changed the page name in my obsidian from Neo Books Intro to Neo Books Introduction, and I thus broke my link. So. Thanks for that. I'm updating all of the proper places now. Appreciate it. There's the proper link. So you're working on four different Neo Books. Yeah, so on Neo Books. So, so far there's no separate Neo Books. So I myself am working on one Neo Book explicitly called Design from Trust, which is about that whole idea. But it, but I'm realizing that actually I have two or three other Neo Books in mind already. So I've kind of started tables of contents for those. Yeah. And so by myself, I can then weave some common nuggets across several of the books that I want to create. It's a major thing to do one book, never mind like try to write four books, but there ought to be a book about Neo Books that's totally true. Yeah. Well, I mean, I just saw Neo Books, parentheses, Neo Book in your... Exactly. And that's what that is. Okay. And the Design from Trust book has a double intro. The first intro is the Neo Books intro, and then the second intro is the Design from Trust intro. So first I say, hey, this is a Neo Book. This has nothing to do with Design from Trust, although it has a little bit to do with it. Here's what a Neo Book is. Then I start to sort of open up the topic of Design from Trust. Then the idea is that the Neo Books intro could be a nugget that is reused by any Neo Book. If they wanted to have an intro that explains what that is. Otherwise, they could just point to it. You know, they could have a sentence in their intro that says this is a Neo Book with a link to that page, and then they're not transcluding the text of that nugget into their book, but they're making reference to it. Either way would work just fine. And one of the things that Pete and I were talking about is how do we author, how do you author a path through nuggets with a table of contents, for example, that knows which nuggets to translude or include into the mainline text of the book artifact and which ones to ignore and just treat as links, right? And just to confuse things, if you put a bankmark in front of a link in Obsidian, it will transglue the text of the other page into the current page, which is a fine and handy thing until you start trying to think of the repercussions for what happens then when I publish the book this way. Does that work? And Pete's site builder that I'm using for the web presence of the pages I'm using in Markdown doesn't know how to do that recursion. So those just show up as links. So I don't get the effect that I'm seeing on the page when I'm trying to write in a nuggety way. So when I said at the beginning that I'm trying to write like a Neo book, I'm trying to figure out, years ago, my first job was at Disneyland and they had a funny little story of some guy who was getting a tour behind the scenes and saying, God, everything's fake, but it looks so real. Like how do you make a rock look so real? And the designer nods his head and he says, to make a good rock, you have to think like a rock. Oh, which I've always loved. And so I'm trying to figure out and this is a little bit like working wickily or thinking like a wiki or writing in wiki style, right? It's a little like that, but it's a little more because I want everything you get from working wickily. It's like, yes, yes, yes, I want that. Now I want repurposibility in other media. I want the continuity of narratives around ideas. I don't know why you bounced out, Francine. It's weird. And so I'm trying to write that way and it's challenging but not impossible and fun and it's a kind of hard fun. I'm enjoying a lot. Yeah, I'm very interested in like the problem of generating like the final artifacts from fragments. This has a little overlap with some of the problems or things I'm trying to explore with Yabra. So I think I found the source of truth. I think essentially this is the rule, right? So if you start. Yes. So the book ideally should be compiled from this. Bingo. This page is meant to be the playlist of nuggets for this book. Right. Yeah, so it's essentially, right. So I think that you, so there's two things media apparently, you know, it's like the concept of table of contents. We sort of means bring these and then take each one of the links and put them after, no? Because like the generator of the book and then the transcription. I mean, I guess you could do it with only with transcription. If the banks, the banks syntax worked, recursively you'll be set, presumably. I think so. Yeah, that's true. Good point. Yeah, more, you know, you know, any customization you may want to make because maybe in a nugget. I guess this, I, well, you're discussing, well, you are mentioning this. I thought of something that we discussed a few months back, I think, which is about the idea of like levels of text where like, you know, maybe you like all this fractal text approach over where like, yeah, you would like to like, essentially zoom in or out or like see more or less detail. There's a zippered lists. Ted Nelson had zippered lists, but he also had another one called, it was called stretch text. Right. We mentioned it on some of our calls before. Right, right. So maybe, I mean, and that would be sort of like Jerry on top to have some allowance for saying levels of text. I thought you said Jerry on top there for a second. I was like, ha ha ha. I mean, maybe I did because my accent, you know, Jerry on top is actually, I'm gonna use that now. And it's good. So, yeah, I mean, but just seem more like, yeah, Jerry's or Jerry's on top. Three takes, thank you. And any and all suggestions on how to write better, make a better NIO book, what to do with it welcomed. And also I'm realizing that as I get into it, limited by markdown and obsidian and the stuff we're trying to do, I'm probably getting too close to what I'm doing the way I'm doing it. And I'm forgetting or not able to think more creatively about what I could be doing or how, you know, how to play with it more. Cause I really liked the idea. And I'm trying to figure out how to make it compelling enough that other people want to jump in and, you know, write their own NIO books next door. And I want to make all the instructions for how to do that open source so that anybody can come in and do that. So I have a few questions about the possible mechanics of how to develop the new book, but I don't know if anybody else, I don't want to like a person. Let's see if anybody would rather talk about something else. There being no object. Wait, Michael's opening his mouth. Go ahead. Well, I was just going to, I think along the same lines, what's not insane, discussing things one might do and opening up the scope. I'm thinking in visuals and NIO books that were based more on the visual and potentially even how a video might be incorporated or other formats. Totally, for many of the nuggets that I'm writing, for some of the nuggets I'm writing, I've already recorded videos. I've got short videos of different kinds of explainers and those have the same rough content that would go in a nugget. So I'm going to put a link to the video in the nugget. And these interesting questions show up about, well, should that be in metadata? Or should that be a link in the inline text? And just assume that everybody's got an electronic text and I don't intend to publish any of these as physical books, but there are certainly print on demand services that would make that easy to do, but then you lose the links. Unless there's a link index that gets generated for those and then somebody can scan them or type them in or who knows what. So you get all these different kind of contextual questions about as you're writing, where do you put it? But then I also, I kind of want to have the book available as a web of videos in my brain, right? Because another thing I'm doing that I haven't done very well here yet because I've been generating a lot of pages in Obsidian that I haven't been mirroring in my brain. And it's not an easy task to go do because when I'm in Obsidian, I can't handily create a link to put in the brain. I have to actually push the page, wait for Pete's web builder to regenerate it, go to the website, find the page link and then add that to my brain. So it's a really like, it's a dumb, slow, roundabout way to build it, but I want the whole web of ideas to also be accessible in this strange little brain format. And therefore, there could be a web of videos or other visualizations linked to each other. And I'd be extremely happy if anybody else wanted to riff on the content of any of those nuggets, the way that Jonathan Colton will write a song and other, and fans will create a video animation of his lyrics in some other crazy animated way. That'd be great. Again, if there's any nugget that someone else wants to reuse, I would love that. And in the metadata for that nugget, one of the things that would be in the metadata is a link to other uses of the system and the same nugget. If you go to the Neo Books intro, yeah, click on that and then go down to scroll down a little bit. Yeah, oh. Go to nuggets are really powerful, which it should be transcluded there, but isn't, but it's a link. And go to here, I like this page a lot. And I've moved things around a bit trying to make them a little crisper. This is why I think this is really kind of fun and potentially really powerful. So here, yeah, this is very nice. I think this, I see this as a sort of like, I don't know if you have another page like this, but it is matching a bit what I was looking for, which is like sort of like nugget patterns. So which can, or in other terms, it would be like nugget types. So the other type nugget being like, this is not only like what is a nugget, like a name, like a topic, a chapter name, or like, yes, I don't know how you describe the defined self or the nugget title or whatever. And also a way, a recommended way to use it, because for example, like in this case, this is like a list of aspects in which nuggets are powerful, ways in which they are powerful. And then you can imagine, say, well, this is a type of nugget list. So then other people could add items to the list without having to necessarily go and edit the text. Maybe you can have like more like parallelating. You say like, you know. And that's sort of like an easier way to collaborate maybe because I'm thinking of this in our terms, this already would work like this. If I had a node called, sub node called nuggets are really powerful. It was just show up as a separate file, right? And up here, but we could have like in this ideal there, or in the hour, we could have like an allowance that actually collapses it into one list, right? So essentially we will be working on separate documents, but then rendering them as one. And I think there's a few of these, the parallel versions also like, I guess work with the allowances. Yeah. There's also interesting questions about, okay, I'd love to have conversations or interactions around any piece of any of this. Where to put those? Should the chat be around the nugget in Markdown? And should it be a plugin like discourse or whatever? Or should the chats be separate from, in some conversation space or on hypothesis or wherever else? And too many of these and they become dissipative so that there isn't a critical mass for the conversation. And you also lose track of them and you can't figure them all out. So I'm not sure which ones I even prefer. But I'm extremely interested in, and one of the things I think a really good nugget can do is it can point to anybody who hits that nugget toward where the conversation, the hot conversation is on that topic so they can go see it and maybe join. So for example, the nugget, this nugget for nuggets are really powerful might point toward fellowship of the link. Right, which I guess will be more like right here. So like adding a link like this will at least have that link. But yeah, interesting. And so the book itself is a simplified linear snapshot at a moment in time of a bunch of ideas. And that makes the ideas easier to digest because they're like ordered in some linear way. But it's also way limited compared to when you deconstruct the ideas and make them more useful. And then at the bottom it says software that instantiates the nuggets or where you just were. One of the last items on the list was software that instantiates what the nuggets say right above where you were. Yeah, I think we've had that conversation here before. I've been calling it instrumentation. That's not the right word. I just don't know what the right word is. But I have a feeling that some small percentage, maybe it's 10%, maybe it depends on that subject matter of course, but some nuggets are very amenable to turning into software. And they should and they should be easily available and they should find their way toward wherever they mean to be in the world. So I've got to explain that a little bit better there. But that's just one angle for what's interesting about nuggets. Definitely, I mean I will maybe, I get the way I'm thinking about this as you describe it. I go back to this notion of type. Just like if not for the final result or like set of patterns, just to help maybe think about like the scope of what we want to do here. And like for example, like software could be either a type of nuggets so essentially a nugget could be like a piece of coal or it could be like an output. So maybe you have not nuggets which have different types and you have outputs which are like things you can do with the nugget. Draft deformations and so on. Bye guys, right. Yay. Chris, I think you have a way of seeing the stuff that I'm working on and understanding it pretty deeply. And I don't know, curious what your thoughts are on this. One of the things I've always wanted to do too in playing with things like this, particularly in online spaces for books. And it's supportable even with small snippets of code. But if you're licensing it and allowing your thing to go out into the world, part of it is people will encounter it and see it and want to know where's the original, how often has it been cited, how has it changed, those types of things. And I think some of it is probably mentioned in that OER link, because usually in the OER space they talk about the five Rs for essentially portability and reusability. And the one thing they haven't gotten down yet is how to kind of heavily respect the original or allow the original to be seen and found so that instead of making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy that may likely have changed over time, what did the original look like versus the version I'm looking at now? And maybe I want the original. So baking in things like web mentions, which I've had examples of before. And I think probably the best one I've got even though it didn't require licensing or intent, but Andy Matushak took some material I wrote and put it into his kind of online notebook, which a lot of other people refer to within the note taking space. But because he put a link into his thing, even though he didn't support web mentions, somebody clicked on it once so I got what's known as a ref back. And my WordPress site treats that or takes those as incoming and treats them like web mentions. So I get a notification on my original that it has been mentioned in another book or another thing somewhere online. That's great. But it's, I know I had almost even for that reason, I could almost kind of like some of the more restrictive modes because it encourages people to at least credit the original even if they steal a whole hog so that you're more likely to get a link back to it to know, hey, this thing lives somewhere else rather than it just be hiding out there for all you know, you'll never know and never understand. But then doing it with, and if you're getting those, whoever reused it may add something to it that is super useful to the original book or playlist the thing lives in and you may wanna take those ideas and bring them back into your original and then update your original. And so things like, you know, GitHub or various versions that will allow you to do versioning of material like that can kind of be a more fun playground to like kind of mix the melting pot and a little more easily like this. One of the reasons to use GitHub is fork and pull also is that there is an explicit way to contribute. Yeah, that way if you wanna modify the original potentially you can do it there and then take your copy and use it. But yeah, it's all I find it all fascinating. So I'm thrilled to see people like tinkering around in that as a space, especially an online where, you know, it's much harder to do that with a physical book or even an e-book. So then just to like, to make sure I understood, that's very, who will Chris, you're always bringing these nuggets precisely of like knowledge from the universe space which are very applicable. So the idea here in a couple of new books will be that maybe use, we could use the one mentions to link nuggets, maybe to say like this nugget is a derivative of this one, maybe. Yeah, essentially at least it got mentioned or it got mentioned and or changed or whatever. So there are different types of metadata you can put onto the links that you use that will provide intent of what that thing is. So, you know, if I had an online book and you excerpted it and linked to it, I could get a web, the lowest level web mentioned would be, this thing got mentioned over here and I can show it on that page. There were, in fact, there was a, I don't know if the examples all still work or work in all browsers because there's been some changes, but there was a physicist named Kartik Prabhu, I think who created physical margin alias. So you could highlight something on his site and reply to specific lines and he would show it as margin alias and the margin of his posts. No. Kind of like the way that- So you should be able to see this. Yeah, Medium kind of does that where you can highlight a thing and then comment on a line and Medium will show it or if, you know, Medium will show the most highlighted passages in a thing, but he created UI using web mentions to show that kind of margin alia, which I thought was pretty cool. I think Still Boyd has also been playing with margin alias like in Obsidian and stuff like that, pretty intensely. Oh, that's interesting. Has he posted about that at all? I think so. Let's see if I can find it. He died easily, he's just saying. This- I was gonna say, I find it most interesting with respect to the framing and it existed as an idea before, but I think probably one of the better versions of it is the first volume of the great books of the Western world, Hutchins, wrote an essay essentially called The Great Conversation and, you know, he framed it as the reason you wanna read books like Aristotle and Plato is they started a conversation that we're still having, you know, thousands of years later. And ideally you read something and you take it and make it yours and improve on it and write something else, but in reading it, you're not just reading it and wholeheartedly believing everything they write, you read it skeptically and you write about it or you change it or you add to it and that becomes part of the greater conversation of humanity, but having Neo books that will allow this or allow changes through time or communication even of one book to older books, particularly if the internet is still the internet a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now, you know, there's, you can go find third century versions of the Hebrew Bible with glosses and writings in and around them and those things become more layered over time, but how do you see those layers so that you can see the original and see how they've changed over time? It becomes a fascinating. Of course, building a UI to make that obvious becomes a little harder. Doing it in text print is supremely hard. And expecting. Yeah, this is a very fun pond to play in. Thank you. Any other notes? The other thing I'm trying to do is figure out how to explain this damn thing in order to boost my Patreon takes. So I'm trying to rework my Patreon, but I haven't really gotten much progress on that yet, but I need to change how I'm doing what I'm doing because what I'd really love to do is be fun to do this thing, you know, and to connect this thing to trust and to connect trust to the world, the shit storms that are happening in the world, like all those things at once matter to me, but it's hard to sort of paint an impressionistic portrait of what these things are and how they fit together. So have you gotten a PDF or like a finished draft, especially full pipeline? No, so the closest book to publication is probably Klaus Mager's writings around soil fertility and regenerative agriculture and then how to explain these things through the prism or through the lens of spiral dynamics. Which is what he did. Now, he wrote that thing all in a Google doc, that Pete and I then met separately to export the Google doc and try to break it up into markdown files. And there's a whole bunch of messy codes that show up when you do the export, you know, and you go to plain text. There's a whole bunch of funny codes. We don't know what they are. So we got kind of stuck there because our export was... Sorry, did you use the print preview mode or just different thing? I actually don't remember how we did the export. I think I should go check that again. I'd be happy to, like, I don't know because I've done like an export and I have to deal with some stuff. So happy to, I will join the mother most. Yeah, thank you. That'd be great. That's a good place for that conversation because Pete's on there as well. And so the book that's closest to being a book and to be exported is that, but Pete and I have to kind of figure out what to do. And Pete has been volunteering his efforts to sort of go do different parts of this. It'd be great to be able to fund him to actually do a piece of this. So looking at that as well. But the idea then is to take a documentation generator or Pelican or something. I forgot what the different packages are to take the nuggets, roll them up and spit them out as an ebook or a Kindle file format book, which is the eventual goal. Right. I guess I was asking because once you have like a full end to end example, I think it just becomes way more understandable or readable. Exactly. Exactly. What I'm hoping to get to in the nearer term is a little nexus of nuggets that start to show the power of what this is. So that's a long ways from finished book on design from trust. But I really want to do too is publish a book about design from trust. So I'm eagerly sort of writing that as well. And I'm rescuing nuggets that got trapped in Scrivener and I tried writing in Scrivener for a while. It was okay as a writing tool. And then I discovered that it's impossible to copy and paste one chapter from one manuscript into a different manuscript. You just can't do it. And I was like, what a fricking stupid idea. So anyway, so I basically lost all fifth in Scrivener. Then when I went back to Scrivener, I discovered that my desktop version of Scrivener was corrupted somehow. But my manuscripts were still because I was thinking them were still available on my iPad. So I've been copying and pasting bits and pieces from my iPad into iPad Obsidian where they sync back to my normal Obsidian because I'm paying Obsidian to sync. It's really weird. Like it's this little roundabout tour that I'm doing. And then I feel like still a Nubian Obsidian because I know that everybody else is doing all these interesting explorations in Obsidian and I don't have time to nevermind read them nevermind go do all the explorations. Yeah, I will feel formal. I mean, Obsidian is cool, but it's not open source. So to me, I see it as a little bit, but you know, this way of respect to the CNP both were great, for sure. Thanks a little, Chris. Do you want to talk a little bit about it? Chris, do you want to comment a little bit on the link that you just put in the chat? Let me pull that link back up so I can actually say something about it. And maybe even better, I don't know if it'll. The Talmud is kind of the or hypertext. So I shared a link to a version of the Talmud that has an original text and then around it are, and it's the original is like a tiny chunk of text, but it's got commentary, they're not, they're kind of footnotes, but they're literally built around the original and center of the page. But you've got the Mishnah, the Gamara, Tosaphote. You've got a commentary section by Rashi and then some other additional kind of rabbinic commentary around it. And then also some index references to some of the legal codes. So it's, I don't know what, one, two, three, four, five, like six levels of commentary almost on a piece of text in a written page. I don't see it often, but in a lot of older manuscripts, you might have a full huge page, but the text only takes up a tiny amount of it. And usually you'll see handwritten rulings with lots of marginal space that was either meant for illumination that either happened or didn't happen, but quite often there would be a huge amount of margin space for readers to write their own notes and marginalia and commentary in on the page. In modern contexts, there are still a handful of Bibles that are printed that are called interleaved copies. And if you look on Amazon, it's probably the easiest place to find them. Finding them in bookstores is pretty hard, but you'll find a page of the Bible and then there will be a blank page inserted in between every other page of the Bible. So that as you're reading it, you can write down and make notes and your own commentary as you're reading the Bible. Super rare to find that with any other books. In fact, I've spent some time looking around to find, there are probably 20 publishers that go out and will take things that have fallen out of copyright. So let's say you're reading in a class a copy of Moby Dick for a course, you can go out and buy 30 different copies of Moby Dick at the bookstore or order them, but usually the margins are like quarter of an inch at best. But wouldn't it be great because you're reading it and almost always in a class, you're marking it up, you're underlining things, you're writing notes. You may take notes in it while you're reading it with a class, but publishers make it stupidly hard to do that. Probably some of the best versions are the Norton Critical Editions based on my measurements. Some of them go up to three quarters of an inch or almost an inch of margin space. So if you wanted to mark it up and write in the margins, those are better. I think every main press does kind of an okay job. The Folio Editions, the Folio Society has done it. Theirs have some really great margins, but usually those books are 100 or more if you can find them and they've even published those. But it kills me that in an era of print on demand, I can't go to Amazon and say, yes, Amazon, I want a print on demand copy of this book and I'm happy to pay the publisher whatever the cost was for the book itself, but make my copy have blank sheets every other page and I'll pay it for the paper and the process and then send me that copy so I can make my own notes in the damn book. But how that doesn't exist as a product, like just I don't understand. Well, this is kind of my beef is that the intellectual property over protection and capitalism have eaten ideas and have destroyed our ability or greatly hindered our ability to not destroy, that's an overstatement, to share ideas and put them to work in the world and I'm trying to reverse that, correct. Particularly though, I mean, what was saying that doesn't even deal with copyright so much, but as a designer and as a former columnar designer doing things that allow for, in book form and magazine form and other kinds of journal form formatting, I've done things with repetitive columnar templates that leave, that let the text all be one vertical column and leave an outboard white space area for images, quotes, footnotes, side notes as what I would have described in the link too. And it's a great design tool and it's not messing with the copyrighted copy, copyrighted copy and that kind of formatting is in a print on demand world. It's just like a template just the way, I don't know, somebody who's got a Tumblr or a Wordpress doc uses a particular skin, there's something other than a template that's usually used for that, I'm blanking. Anyway, but I mean, just using a particular template saying I want this book in that template totally should be a thing, it's super easy. And I would design one of those for every desired purpose and have them available. Yeah, the market. I just was wandering around in my brain under marginalia and annotations and stuff like that and the article I just put a link to in the chat by Sam Anderson from 2011, what I really want is someone rolling around in the text and I didn't have a chance to reread it but it looks like it talks a lot about like why are margins so hard to write in? I mean, it also seems like it totally should be an ebook then, you know, a Kindle option or whatever, you know, ebook you're using to, you know, look at a book in that way and look at your notes and the notes of others. So here I guess I do think that investing in the digital is a more likely option just because it is the hardest to prevent people from doing. It is the cheapest, you know, because you don't have to deal with like the issue of a kind of the scale and zombie printing or on demand. And we already have standards like the way rotation standard meaning like too many things to look into a standard more deeply is the one that hypothesis uses. Hypothesis is wool. We could just use hypothesis of the bad our own instance, maybe for like nuggets or ebooks in general, but maybe as well just like using the basic protocol to see how whether we can actually annotate anything with it. I'm not sure, I think we can. And maybe you could even say like, well, I'm annotating page something of these print edition, right? And that will reach the apps. Love that. We have gone past our hour usually we can roll into the next half hour if we want to but just noting it. And the recorder is still somehow magically on after an hour. Yeah, I think we turned it late. Well, I started it late. Oh, that's right. So the call's been going for an hour and a half, but not the recording. So it's about to die. Yeah. Actually, I just want to say it's ironic, but the New York Times web edition is one of the few places where a central column of, I mean, if you look at that very link to the Sam Anderson article, you have a text with a third of the page on each side. And as you scroll down, there are some related editors picks there, but those could easily be, you know, quote, quote, graphics notes of your own. Yeah. Form left.