Episode #21- Part 2: What would a Holochain Vegan Economy look like?

Welcome to Paz de Mai Podcast. For those who weren't here yesterday, Paz de Mai Podcast is about sharing different perspectives on various topics, not only to help us expand our understanding of the world, but also to explore new ways of looking at it. Welcome, Jean-François, and thank you for being here for the second conversation.

My pleasure, as you know.

So yesterday in our first conversation, we busted some of the vegan myth, although I realized that we never directly addressed some of the urban legend, such as vegan diets are not healthy, not suitable for children, you'll need supplements or even veganism is an eating disorder or is for hippies. But I will let— that's what I found. But I will let listeners go back to yesterday's conversation and listen to your inputs. What I found remarkable is what you see that many don't. For you, being a vegan isn't just about diet. It's a way to respect all living beings. So becoming a vegan, you said, is a way to expand our own consciousness into embracing other living beings. And it's a choice to be in relationship with animals. And I want to thank you for making this visible to us. When I listened again to our first conversation you painted a beautiful picture of what a compassionate economy would look like. So today we're going to continue where we left off, and we'll discuss more in depth the vision behind this Holochain or this vegan economy made possible by the Holochain technology. And before we start this conversation, I want to take the time to introduce you, Jean-François Nouvelle, our speaker, to some people that may not already know you. So for more than 20 years, you have worked in the field of collective intelligence, a modern research discipline that explores how living systems work and the evolution of our species. Today, you're working on the next crypto technologies that will soon enable the rise of super smart distributed organizations. From Homo sapiens to Holo sapiens, you explore the next consciousness and collective intelligence as an open Earthlink. You live in the gift economy and you help evolutionary leaders build enlightened organizations towards the post-monetary society. You live an experimental and evolutionary life. Several years ago, you left all your positions and mandates and you tore up your resume in order to free yourself from any etiquette and social status. With that, you won. Full creative freedom to live in the present millennium. So again, thank you so much for being here, Jean-François. And this time I have my pen and a paper and I'm ready to take some notes.

Me too. Let's take some notes.

Exactly. So let's— we never know what's going to come up, even though we both have prepared this conversation, there's a question and answer flow that will bring to life something that we might not be already aware. So let's begin with a broad question: what is Holochain technology, and can you give us a few key principles?

So the baseline and what you will see on holochain.org, you will see something like Holochain represents a framework for distributed applications or peer-to-peer applications. So basically what it says, it says whatever apps we will use, you know, those we usually use on our smartphones or computers, they all go, they all connect to a central server. That means to a central authority, whether you call this authority a bank or Facebook or Amazon or Airbnb or the nation-state, you know, or an administration or your company. You always have what we would call the middleman in the center. So in the past, you would have the middleman as an institution with, you know, before internet. And today the internet provides a server that will connect clients. That means your piece of software that you have on your smartphone or your computer. And every peer-to-peer interaction will not actually work as peer-to-peer thing. It has to go through the server and follow the rules dictated by the server. So I kind of gave a little bit of a technical explanation here because a distributed application means you don't have any central server anymore. You have direct connection peer-to-peer or agent-to-agent or node-to-node connection. And that means the integrity of the identities and the games we play and the data that we share remains good, remains maintained in a distributed way without the middleman in the center. And so maybe I should rewind a little bit in history, because when you look, you know, Plato and the Greeks and all philosophy, we have this very, very old question: how can we cohere together in big groups, not in small groups, but, you know, the scale of societies or or companies, corporations, like big groups. How can we cohere together without a central authority that makes it possible, that guarantees that you exist as you and I exist as me? So we have both identity and that we agree, we play the rules by the rules we decided to play, and that every kind of data that we have, we can guarantee the integrity of this data. No one can tamper that kind of data. So whatever we do together, you know, whether we play chess or rugby or bank, like, you know, sending money to one another, buying and selling stuff, or Airbnb or citizenship, every time we have some kind of game, that means we agree to play by some rules, you know, pluses and minuses if we just send money or making decisions if we live in the corporate world, or renting an apartment if we play by Airbnb, those kinds of things. Every time, in every situation, we have those three things coming up. As I shared, the identities, that means the agents. You need to make sure that A played that chess move with B and not with C, or that A sent money to B and so on. So you wanna make sure about this identity. And when I say identity, does not necessarily mean passport or social security number or driver's license in the nation-state way as we've seen it so far. Identity can— I can talk about relative identity, like, you know, my nickname as a gamer, for instance, you know, or how people call me or see me in my sexual community, or how people see me at my work, you know. So in every context, you have a specific identity, and sometimes it can match the authoritarian identities like a passport number and all these things, or sometimes we don't need that. Depends. Okay, so first, identity. You need to make sure that A has done some— has played a move with B. Second thing, the game itself, or the rules. I like to talk about games because we all play games. And so let's make sure that, yeah, if we play chess, then I've played by the rules of chess. Let's make sure that if we need to vote as a citizen, then I've played that move of voting by the rules of the game of voting. And if you take me from A to B as an Uber driver, then also that you represent the driver and I represent the customer, and let's make sure that it works. So that we play by the game, number 2. And number 3, the data, because data changes all the time. Reputations, coordinates, addresses, financial balance, you know, all these things, you know, game levels, all this data keeps changing. So identity, game, data. We need to find a way to keep the integrity of those three things whatever we do. And so far this question has happened for a long time, you know, even the Greeks asked that. Can we do this without a centralized authority? Now, the good thing about a centralized authority, whether we talk about a server, you know, like Airbnb, or a government, or a bank, or some kind of institution, the good thing, well, it works well. I mean, when it works well, when you have honest people, when you have clear rules, when you have transparency, and all these things. But we also know the limitations of those things. A centralized authority makes it a single point of failure. That means if you make a mistake or if you get corrupted or attacked, well, that makes a big point of failure. That means everyone will pay the consequences of those kinds of failures. And also that gives you a super concentration of power because all the flows of data and information and behaviors and stories, they go through you. So you have access to absolutely everything. And that leads to a situation like the internet today where where we've never seen such a concentration of power, whether we talk about financial power or political power, ever in history. We have today in our world a concentration of power that we have never seen before in history. So that raises lots of political questions and superpower structures here that can really eat our freedom, can stop evolution, and that can imprison lots of people in different ways, ideologically, physically, mentally, intellectually, and so on. So we have had this question for a long time: can we distribute the middleman function in the system so that we keep— we remain absolutely certain about the integrity of identities, the games, and the data without giving all this to one central authority or a few persons in charge of that?. And until a recent number of years, well, we couldn't do that. We didn't know how to do that. But recently with the rise of the blockchain, the blockchain came as a first kind of prototype response to that. They said, okay, let's just play with a very simple game called banking. Okay. We just do pluses and minuses and let's issue those crypto coins, you know, that, that have a one unique number. Each of them. And we can, with this framework called the blockchain, we can absolutely make sure that everyone can make transactions and we have— we keep the integrity of the players, the agents, the game, and the data. The blockchain did that, but for, I would say, a small number of nodes— sorry, for a small number of agents, and it's consumes a lot of energy and everyone needs to have the shared data and all these things. I won't go into the whole blockchain thing because we have plenty of stuff saying, talking about the limitations of the blockchain, especially on the Holochain channel. Basically, Holochain has taken this question, you know, of integrity of living systems by biomimicking what happens in nature. You see, if you look at your own cells in your own body, then every cell doesn't need to know what every other cell has done. They have some kind of agreement and coordination without the need of all cells to have a copy of all the transactions between all the other cells of the body. So it seems that living systems have found a way to cohere, to maintain their coherence and integrity without having to copy data, updated data, to every other agent of the system. So how does it work? Would you like me to go a little deeper into that, or Do you have any more questions before I go a little deeper?

So we might talk about more, go in deeper into tomorrow's conversation when we talk around currency, etc. So I think this was a good overview of what is Holochain and how it started. And that's kind of what I understood. I know a little bit about blockchain and why blockchain was really meant and designed to make money by reducing the intermediaries or middlemen in a transaction, by adding a way from a technology standpoint to do what this individual was doing. So the purpose of blockchain was to make money. Holochain, on the other hand, took some of those principles and capacity to, but really expanded into more looking at nature or living system, because in nature there's tons of patterns, and took some of those patterns with the vision and the principle to bring freedom to people, to bring people the freedom to connect, right? So I think I understand some of the principle, which is around identifying the agent, the rule of the game, and the data. So hopefully, as we go back and listen again, we'll have enough to cover this first initial introduction. Yesterday, and I want to move into another topic, which is yesterday you defined a compassionate economy as an evolved economy with a higher degree of consciousness. And you actually said that when we evolve, we evolve when our compassion expands. And compassion is when we embrace something different than ourselves. So Going back to this vegan and compassionate Holochain economy, what would be the rules of this game that you just described? What would be the rules of this new economy?

Well, I would say the first rule would say give people the capacity to generate their own rules because, you know, I don't know what some people in other parts of the world want to do together, maybe even as vegans, you know, maybe they want to have a different, their own way to define in their community, either we talk about a local territorial community or a community of value, they may have their own way to design their rules. So what we aim at here, you have to think of the Lego game. Lego game, you know, when, and when you have kids, and we all know that when we offer them, you know, Legos or cubicles, or when they play on Minecraft, they have something to compose. They can compose as many, many things, universes and structures as they want. And the more they grow and the more complexity you will see emerging, you know, a big difference between the first place and, you know, a few years later, and you play with them and you can see, you know, like, wow, this made incredibly sophisticated structures. We call this composability. And I feel more interested in giving people Lego games rather than ready-to-wear value systems, which the Western world usually thinks this way. You know, governments and United Nations, and, you know, they all build policies in an industrial way saying, okay, we should all behave or think this way with good intentions. You know, human rights and all those things, you can see good intentions in those things, but it has some kind of a one-fits-all kind of thing. But living systems don't work this way. They work by emergence. Look at language, for instance. Language— do you have someone right now checking, you know, those two Frenchies talking to one another, checking whether we make mistakes, you know, whether we should accept what we just said based on grammatical rules or semantics and all those things? Of course not. We may make mistakes, we may have our own words, we can invent new words. It doesn't mean we get excluded from the system, and the system evolves because people invent new words and have new ways to express reality. And in some parts of the world you do it this way, in other parts of the world you do it another way, and we can still communicate and create bridges between those places. So it works by emergence, organically. Language does that. You don't have a top-down structure telling you what you should say and what you should not say, what we should accept and what we should not accept. It just doesn't work this way. So designing a living system means you think differently. Rather than, you know, pushing rules onto people, you say, okay, maybe I will start my own rules. Who wants to play with me? Just like sports, a sports game, for instance. You don't force people to come to play with you. Maybe they enjoy that, or maybe they say, hey, I like this game, but I would like to play it a little differently, and I'll change some rules or some agreements. So you have an organic, you know, bottom-up emergence way for living systems to cohere. So back to your question on veganism, I may have my own way to think, huh, what kind of value system should we— or agreements, formal agreements should we have? And I can propose that and design that. We'll see a place where some transactions will happen, some reputations will emerge, and we can get into this kind of design later. But I feel more interested in also allowing other people to maybe design slightly different systems or very different systems also around the same values, but maybe they want to do it in their own way. Holochain provides the framework for people to design, to compose collectives to compose games, the games that they want to play. And if you play a game, let's say, in New York, you know, between— with your vegan community, and I play another game in South of France with my own community, well, maybe we feel interested in, you know, sharing our values. Or maybe I go to New York and I can bring my reputation there, or you come to my place, you can bring your reputation or your credits or whatever we've decided. Then we may decide to connect our systems together. So I don't know if I say something maybe too vague or too general, but again, we have to think about design for emergence rather than top-down kind of policies like, hey, we have the rules and let's see how the vegan world should behave. I don't know how the vegan world should behave. I don't know how the world should behave either. I know for sure that if you give people things to compose, then life will emerge and design new forms, just like DNA has done that job. You know, DNA may compose a fly, a butterfly, a mushroom, a tree, a grain of rice, a monkey, or you or me. DNA has created all these possibilities. So how can we do the same thing that happens in the biosphere and do that in the noosphere. That means in the world of symbols, in the world of the stories and realities that we share, and design those things. What kind of code or agreements can I design with Holochain? What do you want to design and how can we make that interactive? Does that make any sense?

Okay, great. Yes, so no rules is a rule, right, in a way.

No, I wouldn't say that because we need rules always. Let's take an example, okay? We go together or with a team, a group of friends on the field, and I come with the ball and I say, okay, let's play, no rules. And we'll look at each other and say, what? I mean, we don't know what to play. Okay, now let's say Another thing, and I come to the field and I say, okay, I put one rule, no one can move, let's play, and no one will play. So you see that some rules, I mean, no rules can just, I mean, nothing will happen, and some other rules may just kill the game, no game will ever happen. So whatever we design, we need to find the right set of rules Some of them allow you to do something and some of them forbid you to do things. And if you have the right balance of those things, then you can create amazing outcomes. Sports do that. You know, if you play soccer, it says you can't play with your hand unless you do the goalkeeping. And so you have a constraint, but you have other possibilities. And basketball does that, and so on and so on. So it creates an amazing, you know, burst of forms and possibilities. So I didn't say no rules. I say, okay, Let's give people a tool to compose the rules that they need so that I don't have to impose my own rules to the rest of the world, or you don't have to do so. You can say, hey, I designed those rules, who wants to come and play with me? And maybe, you know, 5 years later you have 20 million people playing with you, you see, without imposing that from a top-down structure. It worked in an organic emerging way. You see what I mean with this?

Yes, compositivity is one of the rules of this game. Let's focus on the how and actually go into example. How can we use the Holochain technology to build this vegan economy? Can we think of some example?

Yes, well, so maybe that will go more like tomorrow in the more technical things. I think, you know, first we, we first need to change our mindset, thinking— rather than thinking top-down design, go into supporting emergence. And that means I will think those things differently. So now some examples of how we can build a vegan economy. Maybe I can go more into the design, because once, once I have the design on the paper, then You know, I could do it on a spreadsheet, right? I could do it with a conventional server, but of course it will have, uh, it will change completely the things because if we do it on a spreadsheet or a conventional server, well, I have the keys, so all the information will convene to me and I'll, you know, I may end up, you know, making decisions for everyone and I may end up deciding who you can meet and who you cannot meet and all those things. So that gives me a superpower. And so in the end, it totally influences the outcome of those things, and I may make decisions more in my advantage than yours and all these things. But we can design those, you know, the integrity again in identities and games and data. We can use it with whatever platforms we have today, you know, centralized ones, spreadsheets, or Holochain. We have a choice. I think we should first maybe understand more the design itself and then say, okay, once we have the design, how do we use Holochain to support this design and make sure that, okay, the integrity of the whole living system now gets distributed in the system rather than in the hands of the few. But I would say this, you know, Holochain thing happens right in the end. Once we've understood the values of using a distributed, making it a distributed app, rather than the centralized server-client kind of thing. Does that make any sense?

Yes, yes. So let's go in the next 2 minutes into the design. I want to hear more. You piqued my interest.

Okay, so in this next way to understand economies, when we talk about currencies, most people think currencies or confuse currency and money. Because money, you buy and sell things. So if you've always used money in your life, then when you hear currencies, you see currency will just serve to buy and sell things. But actually, in this next paradigm, we'll talk about currency as a language of wealth, a language of wealth. So for instance, your reputation, we would call it a currency. If we consider, you know, clean air or drinkable water as some form of wealth, then that would— we would also call that a currency. That means every form of wealth that we like to write, to put on the record in our shared reality, then that becomes a currency. So hence, for instance, we have reputation currencies, and we already play with those currencies without knowing them. For instance, if you go to Amazon or eBay, whatever, or Airbnb, Well, we play with two currencies all the time. One conventional fiat money, dollars and euros and all these things to buy something or to rent something, and then reputation currencies, you know, the currency, the number of stars that you have. And then you know that you have a systemic binding between those two currencies because if your reputation increases, then it will also attract higher flows of buy and sell currency. Dollars and euros and all these things. So we already, without knowing it, have learned how to play with what we call a currency constellation. That means multiple currencies, you know, operating together, influencing one another, either in a loose way, like, you know, reputation will influence the flows of a buy and sell currency, or in a formal way, like, you know, a group could say, hey, the higher your ecological footprint, the higher your line credit will go, for instance. So you can formalize the binding between different currencies. And you can have two currencies or even millions of currencies playing together. I think future living systems will have thousands of currencies, most of them playing in the background. Just like in your body, you don't have to worry about your hormonal system or your heartbeats and all these things. You have plenty of currencies regulating the flows the currents in your, in your body. Okay, so living systems use currencies, and we need to understand those things. So now, how do we design a vegan economy? And I think the mistake that I see usually that people do, they start with the buy and sell currency. Oh, we want to do something vegan, for instance. Okay, let's create a vegan coin, and with that specific coin, that coin can only buy or sell vegan products and services, for instance. But that does not— that does not cover the whole economy because, as I shared yesterday as an example, maybe I want to have a haircut by you as a vegan haircutter, and I want to give my money to you. So rather than starting with the lowest end, like the buy and sell currency, I suggest we start to design with Reputation. Yes. Reputation. Reputation means that we can allocate a feeling, an experience to something or to someone. Okay. It may have some objective things like, did you do the job or not? Yes or no. Or, you know, or look at Airbnb. Did you see a clean apartment? Yes or no, you know, or 1 star, 2 stars, and 3 stars. So it has a little bit of objective things, but I can also ask you, did you enjoy the trip, or did you enjoy the place, or that restaurant? And that goes into a completely subjective thing. So reputation currencies kind of combine, you know, some part of objective reality and how you see reality, but from the subjective self. Okay, and we've done that all the time. Look at a village, you know, in the village, you know if that baker does a better bread than this other baker, you know if you can trust that person with money better than this other person, you know if you can trust this person for confidence, you know, or sharing reality rather than this other person. So everyone has a kind of multiple dimensional relationship to reputation, right? So building reputation, peer-to-peer reputation, for me, becomes more important to start from this higher end. Because once we know, you know, once a product has the reputation of veganism, or that person has a reputation as, you know, following vegan values, then the flows will happen naturally even with conventional money. I don't even need to use a buy and sell currency if I know where to direct the flows of buy and sell currencies. Does that make any sense? I started with a very kind of very basic thing, but you need to qualify the items in the system. Items means either the agents like a person, a company, or product, okay? And also the experiences that you have, the subjective experience that you have as well. That means the relationship that you have with either objects or people. You need to qualify those things. I'll stop here. You look at your facial expression, seems like I see lots of question marks here or unexpected things.

No, it's great. I love the fact that you're challenging this rush that all of us have to, okay, let's do this and talk about transaction, right? Because that's all we know. We have grown, we grew up in a world where it's all about transaction, from which repetition comes from, instead of going the other way around. And I love this challenge that you're inviting us to do and to talk about, to think of emerging design and what does that mean? And if we had a Minecraft, environment given to us for our real life, what would we want to build? And that's really what I found exciting in Holochain. So keeping the conversation short, which is one of the objectives that we had, you and I, as we come to the end of the second conversation, I'd like to finish this discussion by asking you one last question. The intention for this podcast is to help each of us to become the self-authoring leader of our own lives through meaningful actions. So for the curious mind out there, in regards to building a vegan Holochain economy or any intentional economy, what can we do to take the next step?

Completely change the way we look at reality. For instance, when we say economy, people talk about transactions. I wanna see economy where people write experiences and the transactional part, we may have a transactional part, but when I go and see you, maybe you give me a haircut and all this things yet, it may have some transaction, but mostly it has some experience. It has lots and lots of other forms of wealth that we want to see and acknowledge, you know, the relationship, the quality of things, what did we do to the world when we had, you know, this haircut and all these things. The other thing also in changing our mindset Let's stop this segregation by thinking the economy just matters for human beings. I want an economy that includes all living beings because they belong to the economy. You know, when I talk about compassionate economy or a compassionate world, I just don't do it out of ideology, you know, like nice thinking kind of thing, you know, polite, politically or spiritually correct. I just mean that we cannot not do it. I mean, integrated— how can we build realistic economy, something grounded, not a religious belief like today's economy, but a real economy means that we have to include all living beings as part of this. All of them have wealth to contribute to, have wealth to use for themselves, so we exist as a web of life and the web of living beings, so every living being has to belong to the economy, So let's stop thinking the economy just a human kind of thing.

Right. That's beautiful. I love that. That's a wonderful way to end it. And I just saw someone on YouTube saying credit score. So I'm tempted to ask you one last question, kind of separate from what you just said, which was beautiful. And I can't wait to go back and listen to it. Is credit score a reputation?

I don't exactly know what this person means by credit score. It means so many different things.

So, well, in the US, the credit score is when, you know, it goes from 400 to 800, and it's—

I don't know that.

Okay, it's given based on your ability to repay the credit cards in time, on time, not to have too many. But is it a reputation?

I don't know if you're familiar with this Okay, well, all banking systems have their own credit score in that, in that sense. I understand what you mean. Okay, well, you have a centralized authority with a few people deciding what makes you eligible for a credit under which conditions, so they have designed the rules for you. You don't have a word to say about this. You have to play by their games. You have not designed anything with this. You may not even know the rules of this. It remains opaque and in the hands of the few. So not credit scores in that sense. Now we may have some kind of— I mean, I don't say we should reject credit scores, but what if we have something distributed? That means we totally agree on the rules. We have transparent rules. We have the capacity to evolve that collectively if we think that we should evolve the whole system. So whatever reputation system, you know, let's talk about the one in China, for instance. I don't have anything against a reputation system because we've used them forever. You know, in your village, we have an embedded reputation system in our minds. We don't use high-tech for that, but we know about everyone. And hopefully, yes, we have a reputation system embedded in our culture. Do we have a good one or a bad one? Other questions, but we use, we've used always reputation. My question: which hand holds the hammer? If a few people like in China decide what makes you a good citizen or what rights you should have, I have a problem with this. If everyone, we agreed to play a game that has reputation in it, You know the rules, I know the rules, and we can also contribute in evolving the rules if needed. Okay, yeah, maybe I want to go and play with you. So let's look at which hand holds the tool.

It's a very good point. Thank you for adding that last piece. So thank you, Jean-François, for this insightful conversation. We'll be sharing this recording on various podcasts later today, and we'll write at the end of the three conversations a blog post for those who enjoy reading. We'll see you tomorrow for our third and last conversation where we're going to explore a vegan currency and how to identify agents or even vegan product. So again, thank you so much for taking the time today and see you tomorrow. And thank you for people on Zoom to participate and send us some good nuggets. So we'll see them tomorrow.