Episode #21- Part 3: What would a Holochain Vegan Economy look like?

Welcome to Pass the Mic podcast. My name is Virginie Glaenzer and I'm your host with a million questions. Pass the Mic 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 our third and last conversation discussing the Holochain technology.

Not the last, I hope.

Not the last, yes. So yesterday in our second conversation, you described Holochain as a framework to build distributed and peer-to-peer applications. So unlike banks, Airbnb, Facebook, or nations who are using a central server architecture and therefore are the main authority, own the data, and decide on the rules, Holochain is one answer to being in relationship with others without any central authority while maintaining the integrity of our identity, the rules of the games being played, and the data.

Yes.

So in a way, Holochain is like the Minecraft video game where I can create a vegan world. And today in this third and last conversation, we'll dive into that world, this vegan compassionate economy, and I'm very excited. But before we start this conversation, I want to take the time to introduce you, Jean-François Noubel, to people who may not know you already. 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 Holosapiens, you explore the next consciousness and collective intelligence. As an open-source Earthling, 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 want full creative freedom to live in the present millennium. So again, thank you very, very much, Jean-François, for being here.

My pleasure, as you know.

So let's pick up where we left off yesterday. You said Holochain is a paradigm because it requires us to think differently about transaction wealth and adopt a global worldview. We need to change our mindset in order to understand the design of a distributed application and business. We ended up our conversation on 3 ideas for building a vegan compassionate economy. And I'm going to count in French. I don't know if you know, but in the US we say 1, 2, 3. But in France, we say one, two, three. Did you know that? No?

Absolutely.

So, three ideas for building a vegan compassionate economy. One, when we think of the economy and transactions, we have to adopt a broader perspective to include all living beings. So including all living beings, number one. Number 2, instead of starting with transactions, the design of a vegan economy should start with reputation. 2, reputation. And 3, we need to think of currency as a form of wealth. It's not dollars or euro. Currency is a form of wealth that we want to recognize and exchange in our new shared reality. And a currency, you gave yesterday the example of a reputation, clean air, or drinkable water. So now that we have set up 3 rules, let's continue. And my first question would be, how would we identify agents and qualify a product, a service, or a person in this vegan economy?

Well, so if we do it the old way, we would naturally want to name some central authority that would design— that would say, okay, you know, this product, let's qualify it as vegan, you know, or this person, let's qualify this person as vegan. And you would have to prove yourself as a vegan person to that central authority. So we have used that to do that this way, and we don't have yet the mindset to think that, huh, that could work in a more distributed way and in emergent way. So let's think about how we could design that in an emergent way, and maybe I can share a few slides, and I'll go very, very simple, like very basic ideas. Should I share my screen?

Yes.

Okay, let's try that. Let's see if it works. All right, I'll share my screen. Just let me know if you see— yeah, tell me if you— what do you see right now?

Just a Me by me.

Okay. All right. So let's think the vegan world, but that could apply to any, you know, any value system, but let's go into the vegan compassionate economy value system as our study case. So I could, as an agent of the system in my app, I could first express myself to the others, like how much a vegan do I see in myself? You know, and maybe I could say, okay, I see myself like 80% vegan, you know, maybe I still get a little bit of cheese sometimes, or I have leather shoes, you know, I haven't really fully solved the whole thing. So I feel, see myself on the way, or I could say 50% vegan or 0%, you know, but how do I see myself? How do I want to show myself to others, to introduce myself on that line of values? Okay. And if I interact with you, Virginie, you could also give a feedback and tell how you see me, and others could do that. And maybe they see me like, you know, 90% vegan or 5% vegan, you know. So I may want to confront how I see myself, how I acknowledge myself, and how others acknowledge me on that line of value like veganism. And first, you know, I could have an interesting feedback, you know, how it works with others, how others see me and do Do they see me the same way I see myself, or do they see me in a very different way? Now, when I say seen by others, that means I would have— I would need to have some kind of experience with you, Virginie Glaenzer. You know, I can't just ask the whole world to kind of rate me. You know, lots of people don't know me. They've never met me. I will never meet them. So we would want to go into some mutual kind of signature, which I will come back on that later. But so first, you know, let's think of that self-acknowledgement or self-presentation, and then how others see me. And so that would kind of define my public profile in my community. Okay, now let's go next. Now here you come, you know, so I wrote Lisa, I could have wrote Virginie on the right. Just look at the cliché, you know, me, big smile, and then the makeup of a girl. Okay, very cliché. Anyway, so we still We have the thing that I shared. So me seeing myself as 80% vegan and people looking at me at 90% vegan. You see yourself maybe as 100% vegan and also people see you as 100% vegan, for instance. And we could have any numbers between 0 and 100, or green, orange, and red, or we have many ways to represent some kind of values. And let me insist on those values of self-acknowledgement and acknowledgement from others. Most of it comes from a subjective thing. I don't try here to objectivize that, you know, to make sure to count, you know, things and just how I see myself and how others see me, both from some objective parts and some subjective parts. And it depends from, you know, one person to another. But if we have, let's say, some experience together, you know, you give me a haircut or we work together, or I go to your restaurant or whatever experiences, human peer-to-peer experiences we have, we may decide to mutually acknowledge and sign each other's acknowledgement. So I would, you know, I see, oh wow, Lisa or Virginie Glaenzer says, you know, claims herself as 100% vegan. I have that experience and I will also rate or acknowledge 100% and I will sign. Okay, I will crypto sign. I mean, we talk about apps here on our mutual apps. You know, my app will give a crypto signature on your app, and you can do the same thing with me. You can say, hey, I've met GF. We both agree that we met, that we have some kind of an experience together, and I will also, uh, Lisa or Virginie, uh, also acknowledge and sign. So you see, I guess you can just start seeing the emerging figure because people will do peer-to-peer acknowledgement. So you see, you don't have a centralized authority saying, you know, who has the right to say 100% or 80% or whatever. We just do it in an emerging way, and you can now start to see a mutual peer-to-peer acknowledgement, self-acknowledgement, and people acknowledgement. And we can continue in this direction because We don't have just people, we also have objects and services. I can also declare a relationship with some objects, like broccolis, for instance. I myself love broccolis, and I declare broccolis as 100% vegan, which seems quite obvious. But at least I can integrate an object in my sphere of objects or items or nodes in the system or agents in the system, and I declare I've linked that object called broccoli, a category, as vegan. Okay, and if you do the same, then we'll have, you know, broccoli as a category or as an item with lots and lots and lots of acknowledgement as a vegan thing, which seems quite obvious. Okay, but we can do the same with a brand. For instance, I love this French brand called Petit Veganne, They do vegan cheese, and I can also acknowledge them as that brand, that entity, as 100% vegan, or maybe 80%, because maybe I don't fully, you know, agree with that acknowledgement of 100% vegan, and I can, you know, rate that differently. And other people do that same thing to that object, so lots of other people will bind to that brand and also acknowledge that brand with their own sense of that brand. And some people may completely disagree, but we'll see what emerged as a pattern. And of course, in my galaxy or constellation of objects and people, I may have, you know, Lisa, whom we saw just before, or I can also acknowledge a service. So maybe, you know, this barber I go to every, you know, 3 weeks or month He does a special way, you know, he uses certain products, for instance, for hair cutting as a service, and most of them vegan, or they don't have animal products, but maybe they have animal testing on them. And I know that, and maybe I won't say, you know, 100% vegan. I'll say, well, you know, this service, I would evaluate that more like 50% vegan. So just with those simple figures, and I'll just stop sharing the screen now, but I guess you see that we can see the emergence of a constellation of relationships, qualified or acknowledged relationships between people peer-to-peer and objects. So of course objects will not do the acknowledgement. The broccoli will never acknowledge me, but I can acknowledge a broccoli. Some objects will just remain passive and receive acknowledgement from others, and some objects or items or agents will do self-acknowledgement like, you know, human beings, but it will also receive that kind of acknowledgement from others. We have something extremely simple here. We don't use any, you know, third party, although we could. We could totally declare this certification organization that, you know, comes with a whole list of certified vegan items which we agree and that we may want to also put in the, in the constellation of agents and agree that whatever comes that comes from a validation from this organization, is we collectively agreed to declare that as 100% vegan, for instance. You see, we can completely design what game we want to do and upgrade also the game, you know, because living systems, they evolve. And that means the games we play together, the rules that we play together, we may start with very simple rules, and then we may find, huh, we have a little bit of imbalance here. And we want to change some rules. For instance, maybe, you know, I have a bad reputation based on the past 3 years, but, you know, you just want to record the past 3 years and not the past 10 years or the past 5 years, you see, because maybe I won't— I don't want to keep that, or I won't keep that reputation my whole life. So we have to adjust, you know, those settings collectively and decide how we want to evolve the rules. And they will become more and more sophisticated. Now you see in this system, you notice that I've used currencies that we would call reputation currencies. I give a reputation to a broccoli or a haircut technique or a person, and people do that to me the same way. You haven't seen any flow or tradable currency. You haven't seen buy and sell currencies, but imagine yourself in that constellation. You know, like I've never met you Virginie Glaenzer, and Hey, you know, I want to check how you belong to that community. I want to check your constellation of objects and your reputation, which we do all the time. We do that at work, we do that in our villages, in our communities. So I just reproduce in a digital way what we already do in a peer-to-peer way. And then I may decide, hey, you know, I feel totally happy to do something with you, Virginie Glaenzer, like, you know, maybe we want to build a startup together, or maybe I want to buy some service from you as an accountant, for instance, because I also agree with your value. And accounting has nothing vegan or not vegan, but you as a person, I'd rather want to work with you and then direct some flow of tradable currency to, you know, other vegan persons, people I share the same values with, rather than any other person.. So you see this kind of constellation of people and objects qualified as vegan will totally help to direct the flows of currencies, and that can work with conventional dollars, with fiat currencies as well. That means we don't need to build, you know, another currency system on the top of the existing ones. We can already use this to induce, you know, the forces, the flows of conventional money to help them take a direction, that direction, rather than this other direction. Nevertheless, we could also decide to build maybe later on— let me just stop sharing the screen— yeah, we may decide to build in the future a specific vegan currency, vegan coins, or a mutual credit system that will only follow those flows, like to make sure that this vegan currency can only play with the players acknowledged as players in this big game that we've decided to play together. So I'll stop here. I guess you have other questions, but I just want to check with you how it feels. And, you know, looking— I mean, starting from a reputation system, I should say more than reputation, an experience system, like we share, we express, we acknowledge the peer-to-peer experiences that we have with one another, in which a transactional part can happen or not. But you see, we can't— we have to stop reducing the economy to transactions. That belongs to the market economy. Yes, economies have transactions, absolutely, but not just, not only that.

So how does it feel? What you just said is actually what I'm taking away. I'm trying to process the example that you gave, and I think Holochain is really an opportunity to rethink a business relationship from a different perspective. We're used to thinking of business relationships based on transaction first and foremost, and what happens if you push the transaction on the side. And I was thinking, well, Airbnb, there is already this element, this piece of peer-to-peer review. I rent a place, I give a review to the rent, to the owner, and the owner rent the place, you know, or rent or rate me. So we don't need, we wouldn't need an Airbnb company to do this relationship. We already have this relationship. But I think going even further, what you're talking is a feedback loop, a mutual feedback loop. It's not just I'm going to rate. So first of all, it's agreeing on the rules, which I've never agreed on Airbnb. The company Airbnb tells me what to rate and almost how to rate it. And I don't have a say. What if I want to include something else? In my experience, right? Same thing for the person who rents their place, right? So in that way, we're stuck. Um, but I also see that as a— as you said, the word emergence— it's like as we play the game that we've agreed upon, it evolves. With Airbnb or even Facebook, it hasn't evolved. They may have the feeling that it has evolved from their perspective, but not from my perspective. I've never had a say of, can we do this? And yes, companies will say, oh, but we do customer survey and customer experience to understand what people want. No, they don't. They just do that to confirm what they want to do first and foremost. So it's— and we all know that it's not easy to have a collective agreeing on rules, which is why if those rules are emerging, they're not a threat. They're not fixable. Or fixated, right? So it makes the whole process of emergence a lot more easy.

Yes, and sorry, you wanted to say—

No, no, no, that's it, go ahead.

You see, I keep hearing people saying, oh wow, so with those systems you do, you know, segregation, you play by your own rules, you exclude people, and so on. And I have to remind people, well, we do that all the time, you know. I can't just, you know, come in a company and sit at the desk, you know, and tell people, hey, look at me. It doesn't work. You know, we don't want millions of people to jump in our conversation right now. We decided to speak just the two of us. We put a membrane around that and we have some fantastic people listening to us. We could have set it up differently. Happily so, I will never get allowed to participate to this dentist convention as a speaker because I don't have— I don't qualify. For that. So we do membranes all the time. So let's stop, you know, getting paranoid about, you know, exclusion, inclusion. I mean, living systems have membranes. I have a skin, I have, you know, so not anything can go inside or not anything can go outside. And living systems work exactly the same, the same way. Now what feels interesting to me goes into the evolutionary potential. For instance, in the example I shared, I just talked about one value, you know, veganism. I didn't talk about ecological value. You know, I can eat vegan and completely, you know, put fertilizers and also pay terrible wages to the people, and I still qualify for veganism, right? So, you know, you may say, well, you know, this value system that, you know, JF has set up and this community, it doesn't seem enough to me, and I want to add another value, for instance, ecological footprint, you know, ecology or fair trade, you know, those kinds of things that also exist because veganism does not guarantee that. So you may say, well, I will also build a distributed app or a HAP, Holochain application, and then I decide to bind it to the existing HAP based on just, you know, basic veganism. We can do that with Holochain and maybe that will become the mainstream kind of thing. So rather than having, you know, one acknowledgement on veganism, maybe we'll have, you know, 3, 4, or maybe you decide to participate in 3, 4 values and I decide to participate in 6 of them. So you see, we have also to understand the very organic thing. And if you disagree with those games, you have the perfect right to look at the code and take it to another place if you want, because we want to play open source. So we don't impose something to people, we propose belongs to people, and if you want to evolve it, you have every right to do so, and if a majority of people follow you on this proposal, good, it will evolve. You see? So it really requires a completely different mindset in the design. First, you know, to stop thinking currencies like, you know, buy and sell, the tradable currencies, and to stop reducing the economy to exchange. Economy works a lot because of gifts, for instance, you know, people gifting things or giving one things to one another. Hence the feminine economy, 70% of the economy, you know, provided by the feminine side. That means, you know, mostly women, of course, but not just women, but there's the people giving, taking care of, you know, healing and all these things. So no tradable economy in the world could ever happen if we didn't have this soil, you know. So transactions can happen because we have this soil, this existing soil. The other part also, we need to include every living being, as you said, in this, in whatever economy we build. And not just because, you know, nice-to-have value systems, but just because of rationals. I consider economy today seen today as a religion. I mean, completely obscure, opaque, based on pure belief systems, has no scientific rationality at all. So here we talk about real economies with real people and with currencies that represent reality, whether this reality means how you see the world, or this reality says how we measure the world, and all the all these things.

It is definitely a complete disruption to think of a business through the lens of Holochain. I really feel it in my bones, and I've had a first small experience with building a co-op cooperative, which is not the traditional way of starting tech startups where you have a C-Corp or some legal entity that already makes a small number of individuals owning the capital and owning the result and just deciding of the rules of the game. And what I'm finding out is that when you come from a user standpoint into an experience, like if I had the choice to rent an apartment on a Holochain platform and I had only relationship with other individuals, it feels really fair. And fair is a very difficult and challenging word, but it feels right and almost easy because technology creates that sense of trust, even though it's not truly trust, but it's like, I'm in control. The relationship, there's a relationship. I understand I'm participating to the rule of the game. You know, it's not just about transaction, and it feels right. When you come into an application as the founder or as the leader or as the initiator, it becomes a bit more trickier because very, very quickly you're faced with letting go of control or the the sense of control, which is an illusion anyway. But that's what I found in the co-op is like, yes, I want to embrace everyone's perspective and vision and idea, but how far away are they from my own vision? But now that I understand that it's an emerging process, it's an emerging design. I'm not really letting go any control fundamentally.

Yes, you see, you keep your own sovereignty here. And by the way, you know, you have your, your own data, you possess your own data, your own chain, and that includes, you know, how people rated you, you know, or acknowledged you. That belongs to you, to your data. If you want to, you know, get rid of that or step out of the system Good for you. Also, you know, and what I, what I share, this kind of organic emergence, we don't have to start big. We can start with our neighborhood, you know, and maybe it will become super viral because people like it. Or maybe, you know, you start that in your neighborhood in New York and some other people do that in San Francisco or in Paris, and maybe they have a slight change in the code or in the way they do it, you know, the look and feel, the user interface, maybe different ways to express their values, kind of culturally based. Well, we can bind those things, you know. We can also say, well, you know, I come from New York and I'll go live in Paris, and maybe, you know, people in Paris do accept that your reputation as a vegan can also work in the Paris area. So you can import those things. They may say, well, you know, those chains in your, you know, private, your private chain we can integrate it in the Paris community and we combine those things. We have so many possibilities without any kind of top-down control, that evolutionary patterns. So we have to learn how, and that speaks also to how we operate as leaders in the future sense of this, or either the evolutionary sense. An evolutionary leader, we can call it servant leadership, You've probably heard about this term. That means you serve or you support or you walk along evolution. You empower, you allow things to emerge. And that doesn't mean you remain passive and you don't do things. Sometimes you gotta fight for things, you know, you have to stand up for things. But you can do it by designing new things, you can do it by, you know, raising your voice and all those things. Those things remain true.

I want to go back a little bit on the vegan currency, which we talked about as a being possibly a reputation. Because one of my takeaways and understanding of Holochain is that current transactions are being redefined. Currency is not just dollars and euro, but it's really wealth. It's no longer about accumulation, it's about redefining wealth. Now, what do I need to have a comfortable life? So my question would be, what would other type of vegan currency could look like in addition to reputation? Do you have any idea what kind of wealth?

Sure. Well, first, I, you know, we also need to stop thinking like a one currency, like a vegan currency. We should say a vegan currency constellation, because we will always use, you know, just like if you want to build a house, you don't use just a hammer. I mean, that will make a terrible house. You need multiple tools and you need screwdrivers and saws and everything. Okay, so same when we want to build a living system. We may start with very simple tools like, you know, a one reputation thing. Let's start with this. But then, you know, sooner than later we may decide, huh, okay, do we want also to play organic? Oh, okay, so let's include a measurable currency that measures, you know, the organic aspect of things, because that you can measure, you know, you just look at how much pesticides you have, you know, and those things. So we would call it measurable wealth as opposed to acknowledgeable wealth. You know, when we did the vegan thing, we acknowledged something from the subjective self, but we could add a currency, you know, based on organic, organic thing. And so this way we measure something We could also decide, as I said earlier, to add a tradable currency, a buy and sell currency, but maybe not so much, you know, the fiat issued currency by centralized authority, just like, you know, the dollars or euros, or in the Monopoly game where you have a centralized authority that has the monopoly of issuing and controlling that currency. We may decide, hey, why don't we create a mutual credit system?. That means with that currency everyone starts with a zero and I go for a haircut at your place, you know, and I'll pay let's say 50 credits. That means I go minus 50 and you go plus 50. And with those 50s you want to get some, you want to buy some food at the local organic store and they do also organic food and all these things, and you'll spend, you know, I don't know, 100 credits. So you have plus 50 You'll go minus 50 and the organic store will go plus 100 and so on. I guess you understand the thing, like you got just pluses and minuses, but if you add all the values of all the accounts, you have zero. That means everyone becomes an issuer of currency or a consumer of that currency. We all become at the same time a bank or a borrower, a lender and a borrower, and it goes up and down. So we've also distributed the money issuance in the system, and we may say, we may declare by rules that this currency can only go from one agent to another agent in the system. Let's say only those who the community considers as at least 80% vegan. We may decide this rule, for instance. If, you know, if people with, or items or services declared as 50% vegan need to interact. They can still do that, but they can do that with dollars, for instance, you know. But we could declare by agreements of rules of the game that we want to play together, we could declare, okay, let's have our specific currency. But you see, if we started with a buy and sell currency first without the reputation, we just do the same mistake again and again because a buy and sell currency has no intelligence in it.. It has no value system and it just serves for accounting, but you can't account anything. Now we need to account based on the value system which we want to build first and keep it simple at start.

It will sophisticate in the future. That actually gives me a few ideas for even our co-op. And it's funny, the system you just mentioned about the mutual credit reminds me of the PTO PTOs in the US, the paid time off, where you can go minus, you know, 10, and it's agreeable. I mean, it's agreed by organization. Different company has different policy. You can even trade or give your PTOs to someone sometimes. So it's interesting. Yeah, great. Well, so before we wrap this conversation, on a very practical level, What possible realistic scenarios do you see and expect for Holochain to be applied to the business world?

I'm curious. Well, that remains the usual unanswerable question because in the startup world, especially when you build something that has never existed before, of course people ask for, you know, timelines and rightly so, of course, but those timelines never work because we do an emerging business. It emerged just like if you had asked, you know, 130 years ago about people building airplanes, you know, when do you think we can start making, you know, postal flights or passenger transportation at a large scale? No one could ever give you something. However, We've entered, you know, Holo as an infrastructure and using Holochain as the framework has entered the alpha testing phase. So that means now we get into the product manifestation. I wouldn't say the product delivery yet, but at least the product manifestation. We can start playing with those things, prototyping. So I can't tell, and I think no one in the HoloChain and Holo ecosystem could tell you, swear, like by next year we have this and that. It doesn't work this way. But we could say in the next couple to 3 years we will have things working in our ecosystem, already working and operating. And I think it will go very, very fast because we have more and more communities wanting to create yearning to create code on those things. And the more we have, you know, the more it does the snowball effect. And so that means also people contributing to the code and improving it and improving the user interface and finding great ideas for communities and currency design. So, so hard to predict, but I really feel a viral explosion in the good sense of it.

Awesome. That's exciting. Well, Thank you for sharing that. And question about the future is always, you know, like throwing something, and then— but thank you for sharing your point. Yeah, exactly, tossing a coin. Yeah. So as we come to the end of this last conversation for now, with the intention for this podcast to help each of us to become the self-authoring leaders of our own lives through meaningful action, I'd like to do two things, actually two Two things, I'm all confused now. Two things. First, I'm inviting everyone to register to a free and interactive 2-hour workshop happening on May 27th for Asia Pacific, Australia, and the US, or on June 2nd for Europe and the US. This 2-hour workshop will provide a space to not only learn more about Holochain, but more importantly to brainstorm together on 4 possible futures. And I will share more information if anyone follows us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, personally, or Acorn Oak or Acorn Oak Studio, they'll be aware of it. And then the second thing that I'd like to do is I was wondering if there are any work that you're currently doing or that you've done or that you're currently working on that you'd like to share with everyone around Holochain and this, or veganism for that matter, that you'd like to share?

Well, I want to devote this year 2021 to kind of writing down and sharing, you know, on my YouTube channel and also in my writings and also on a TV show, working on a script on the TV show, all these ideas and research, you know, piece of work collected all those years. Kind of sharing it and open sourcing it with the world. And that also gives me time to wait for the operational and production phase for Holochain applications. And by 2022, I want to start supporting the development and involving myself in the development of a vegan, a global vegan economy, starting small and allowing, you know, lots of little pockets to start and then see how it percolates and maybe become a global economy very, very fast.

That's fantastic. Well, we'll put all the links that you want to share on the three conversations, which will be on YouTube and all the various podcasts. So That was really very enjoyable, not only to have taken the time 3 days in a row to really just give our time to think and reflect on those short conversations. I think I personally made a lot of progress, and I hope that other people will have found it useful and useful for them for their own journey. I will certainly put all those insights into a blog post and And then of course everything will be shared on VARI Podcast. So thank you very much, Jean-François, for this insightful conversation. It was a fantastic experience and I really appreciate it.

Thank you very much, Virginie, for creating that field, you know, opening this whole field and holding the space for sharing all this. I feel very grateful for you for that. Asking questions requires lots of power, which you have.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Take care. And thank you, and everybody who's on the YouTube, thank you for being there as well.

Support means a lot.