What would a Holochain Vegan Economy look like?

Welcome to Paz de Mai Podcast. This is a production of Acon Oak Studio. And the music is made by Benjamin Schletz. My name is Virginie Glaenzer, and I'm your host with a million questions. For those tuning in for the very first time, 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.

Thank you for having me here. Yes.

The first time I heard about Holochain, I heard about a mission which was to give people the freedom to connect. Now the more I dived into Holochain, the more I realized that in addition to giving people the freedom to connect, Holochain is also giving people the freedom to constrain, which might sound paradoxical. I mean, And it's not. As soon as we live in a community or just with someone else, there are constraints, and you can call them compromises, negotiation, fairness, choices. But having the freedom to choose my own constraint sounds very appealing to me. So today we're going to explore a Holochain vegan economy with you, Jean-François, and you'll help us understand how Holochain can empower a compassionate economy model. Now, of course, we're using the vegan lifestyle as an example of Holochain possibilities, and this is going to be a 3-part series. Today, our first discussion, we will start by busting the vegan myth and we'll dive into veganism. But before we start this conversation, let me introduce Jean-François Nobel, our speaker. From Homo sapiens to holosapiens, Jean-François Noubel explores the next consciousness and collective intelligence as an open-source Earthlink, you live in the gift economy and you help evolutionary leaders build enlightened organization 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. Your new path allows you to accompany evolutionary leaders and train humanonauts, those for whom the term go hack yourself designates a way to exist. 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 are working on the next crypto technologies that will soon enable the rise of super smart distributed organizations. Again, thank you for being here, Jean-François.

My pleasure.

So let's begin and bust the myth. What is veganism and what are we not seeing?

Hmm. So I guess most people understand veganism as some kind of diet, like people not eating animal products. But you cannot reduce that to food. Actually, veganism means that you want to respect sentient beings, you know, beings that— who have a sensitivity, a self-awareness, who can raise and educate their kids, who feel pain and joy and emotions, who have their own intelligence. That means you recognize, you acknowledge them, you see in them something like a person. Not in the, you know, Walt Disney kind of thing, not, you know, trying to make them human, but seeing the person. For instance, if you have a dog or a cat, you see a person. That means a personality. You see a being who has feelings, emotions, its own, or his or her own intelligence and sensitivity, and maybe, you know, ways to address life and the sense of self, you know, all those things. So if you understand that what you see in your cat or your dog, and hence for the reason why you have such a profound mutual relationship with those beings, why should we consider that you don't have this with a pig, with a cow, with a fish, you know, maybe with other beings that have a very different kind of intelligence. So I think today we could also call veganism sentientism. That means sentience, you know, the, the fact that you expand your own consciousness to acknowledge, to understand that other forms of consciousness exist around you, other beings, and therefore they deserve equal consideration. So veganism starts with, I would say, a shift in consciousness. The depth of veganism means that your consciousness becomes able to embrace other beings than just humans. Just like, you know, some white Western people declare themselves as the top of evolution and considered, you know, other human beings as inferior because of some kind of ideology that of course would give them some advantages. And you could see, we can see today the flaws and the horrible things that this ideology, this segregationism, has. We operate exactly the same way with non-human beings under some kind of random ideology that of course always gives advantage to those who dominate. So veganism or sentientism means exactly that, that you escape that kind of ideology. You free yourself from this kind of segregation. Now, many people may not start with this kind of expansion of consciousness or expansion of compassion. Some of them may start with more like rationals, you know, like, hey, you know, eating animals destroys the climate because, you know, intensive animal farming destroys the planet, and we have all the possible evidence that it has become the number one factor of destruction on the planet. And so some people say, I will become vegan because of this. They may not have yet fully connected to the animal world. They go more from, you know, a rational perspective. Some other people may want to do it for health issues, because now even, you know, the most conventional research organizations like the American Dietetic Association, for instance, and many others, they do say that a vegan diet or vegetarian diet, including a vegan diet, will give you better health, including for pregnant women and children. So they, so they become very clear and very explicit about that, and we have all the science on this today. So some people may start with those rationals, but in the end, you can really talk about veganism as a shift in consciousness, as a wider embrace, compassionate embrace of reality. Does that make any sense?

That does. What's interesting is I think a lot of people think of vegan as a diet. So it's really me choosing what I eat. And there's a lot of rationality and based on our childhood, what we believe to be good or bad food, right? What you're talking about is shifting this idea of our diet, choosing our diet, um, to more a relationship question. What kind of relationship do I want to have with animals? Who are they to me? And it's almost like, I think at some point you mentioned about speciesism, this word, you know, species. Once you disconnect yourself with what you think is good for you from a food standpoint, and you can expand the way you look at the world from a different angle, from a relationship angle, I think it makes a big difference. And we know that veganism or vegan, being vegan, there's so many paths and different, you know, ways of arriving at a point where you actually consider whether it's health or, you know, being in a community or having parent example But I think what you're talking about is really more this shift of a relationship, understanding the relationship we want to have with animals and other living beings. I mean, the route for me, for vegan to arrive as— and it's a journey to become a vegan, especially when you're French and you're being raised with good food and meat. And it's really a journey. But I've arrived there because I saw a number of documentaries documentary that were just outrageous, and I was like, I don't want to be part of that. And it's just hard when you buy meat, even if it says from a happy cow, uh, is it really? I mean, I don't trust brands for that, even the eggs, you know. So I'm— I made my mind, but it's been a journey. Um, you mentioned you use the word compassion. So what is a compassionate economy for you?

Well, so maybe— yes, thank you for this great question. And maybe I should start with those two words, compassion and evolution, because I cannot disconnect evolution with greater compassion. And of course, I take responsibility for having my own understanding of evolution. I don't think we evolve if we don't have, in the end, a greater compassion. And of course, lots of people talk about evolution either as, you know, having your latest iPhone in your pocket or biological evolution and all those things. But if we look at, you know, a wider and deeper spectrum of evolution, then we can see an evolution of consciousness, at least on our planet, and very likely in the universe. Like the universe kind of structures itself and creates, you know, new living structures, more and more sophisticated. And it seems we have a relationship between the level of complexity complexity of beings and the societies that those beings do, whether we talk about a society of cells that makes a body or a society of beings, you know, like ant colonies or human societies. And when they complexify, when the complexity increases, it seems that consciousness also increases. So we can probably see a link between the evolution of consciousness and the evolution of complexity also in this world, like if it captured some level of consciousness, a new level. Now, from an inner experience, I can see for myself, and I guess for other beings that I see, that we evolve when our compassion expands. So what do we call compassion? I would say I become more compassionate when I become able to integrate and to embrace, not just to accept, but to embrace in my consciousness something or someone different than me, the other than me, another idea, another ideology, another being, because this being doesn't look like me, doesn't think like me, does not behave like me, doesn't have the same worldviews as I do, doesn't have the same body, but I become able to connect with that being or with this ideology. It doesn't mean I agree, But for instance, you become more compassionate if you become able to speak with a Nazi person, for instance. It doesn't mean you— that doesn't make you a Nazi person. It doesn't say you agree with Nazi or white supremacist or whoever, but you can start to understand the journey of this person, what happened to this person, what kind of consciousness, what kind of events in this person's life triggered that. And then you become compassionate. You know, you understand, you embrace in a bigger encompassing reality in your inner self. And again, it doesn't mean you agree. It doesn't mean you don't want to do anything about it. You know, I want to fight, you know, supremacism or domination by every means, but I will do it because I understand it, because I have compassion for it, because I understand the people. About that. So to me, we've done a great step as human beings when we started to become more and more universal between human beings, like saying, look, it doesn't matter your skin color, your social origins, your gender, your sexual preferences, and all these things. I consider something in you, regardless of external differences we have, and I consider we have something in common more than something different. But if you keep on this journey, then you start doing that with non-human beings as well. You, you have this capacity to connect. It goes in your guts, in your heart. And then you start to understand, okay, we cannot build a society on this earth just between human beings. We cannot continue, keep on this apartheid, you know, just between human beings, and then with the right to enslave to rape, to kill, to torture any other forms of life. That just doesn't work if your consciousness keeps expanding, and that means your compassion. Does that make any sense?

Absolutely. Yeah, it's interesting how a lot of people are familiar with empathy, this ability to feel what someone else feels, but compassion is really going into the action. Is, and I've never thought of being able to sit with someone who has an opposite viewpoint or worldview for that matter, and being able to listen to that person, that is compassion.

Yeah. You know, just to finish on that, I believe or have this experience that compassion starts with myself. That means to, you know, to embrace all the blind spots I have. And why do I feel upset or angry at someone's opinions or behaviors and all these things? Why do I want to react? Why do I want to tell the person something or even, you know, become violent and all those things? So if I don't have compassion for myself, for my own, you know, own limitations and belief systems and blind spots and all those things, how can I have compassion for others? So So I can also observe that my lack of compassion, my own lack of compassion towards others, I just have to look at myself. What do I dislike in myself so I can't accept it from others or embrace it from others? So it really goes in all directions in the inner subjective self as well as the outer objective world. It goes together as kind of mirrors, you know, looking at each other's, I believe.

It's almost in a way that what you're saying is that people who are harming others, deep down, they must be really, really hurt themselves to impose harms on others. In a way, maybe. I don't know. But anyway, yes, it definitely makes sense. So now I want to bring that conversation back to Holochain. And before we started this conversation, I was telling you how much I appreciate the community of Holochain because I've met people who are taking the time to speak, to listen, versus other communities that may be exciting, like I was comparing to the VC and startup tech startups where everything is exciting, exciting, but you know, you're pressurized to go fast, you're afraid that someone will steal your idea, and so there is a lot of competition With Holochain, the people that I met really took the time, and that's what we're doing today, is to take the time of bringing forth values and ideas in order to engage in a conversation where we bring technology for various reasons. So I want to be like the Little Prince in the book of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And I want to ask you this: paint us a picture, make us imagine what would a vegan Holochain economy look like?

Well, first I think let's kind of break it down into two things. What would a vegan economy look like, and then why would we want to choose Holochain as the underneath infrastructure that supports this. Because once you have any kind of value system, like if you decide, let's have democracies and let's declare equality between people, between human people, okay, good idea, nice. But we have to design some level of technology to make it possible, not just writing a constitution. You may want to have political institutions, bricks and mortar things, and ID cards and schools and education systems and a tax system and whatever. So you need to build infrastructure to support this ideology, whatever this ideology looks like. It stands true for Nazis as well. You know, whatever you want to build to embody in the world, we have to build infrastructures behind that. Hence the very important thing to me in my work, and of course in everyone I work with, we think of design for emergence. What can you design so that it emerges, so that you don't have to control in a top-down way, you know, to enclose people in some kind of behavior? You want to do a very different thing, just like the difference between agriculture and permaculture. In agriculture, you kind of burn down a forest and you will plant, you know, soy or wheat or things like that. So you have a very predictable, enclosed kind of way to look at the world, and you put, you know, that amount of fertilizer, that amount of water, and then you have a very predictable outcome. But if you do permaculture, you, you think in a very different way. You look at the forces present in the world, you know, like plants want to grow, plants like to make alliances between— or plants or animals like to play together and collaborate in some way. How can we use the existing forces in the world so that it benefits everyone. Something grows out of its own strength, out of its own nature. So back to veganism. First, I don't think veganism or a compassionate society and economy will happen because we write policies and new laws and all these things, kind of, you know, United Nations way. It just doesn't work. So the question we want to ask ourselves: how can we support the emergence of a culture? How can we make it more attractive to you, to me, to anyone, to go in a vegan economy or a compassionate economy? Because you want it, because you have an advantage going there. And maybe in the end you will integrate that deeply, but first you feel attracted by this. It looks so attractive., and you see more and more people around you wanting to go there. You have more and more conversations around those things. So you don't have someone telling you, you know, what should you— what you should do right and what you should do wrong. And all this thing doesn't work this way. So a vegan economy means that what people create as forms of wealth, goods and services, and relationships and experience, it operates with more compassion towards themselves and towards all forms of, uh, all forms of life, all kinds of beings. We do not want to go into something with a line, you know, vegan and non-vegan. It doesn't work. Just like, you know, human rights— you cannot have, you know, human rights on one side and not human rights on the other side. You want to think tropism. Or a magnet, like you, you tend to that, you want to go as close as possible as a compassionate life. And sometimes you fail, and sometimes you don't know because, you know, we live in a complex web of interactions. But at least you do your best and you get incentivized to do your best. Today, in the current economy, you don't get incentivized to do your best. You get incentivized to do negative externalities, like, you know, to lower your costs in the scarce currency, that means someone else will pay for the dirty water, someone else will pay for the low wages that you want to pay to people, someone else will pay for the poor education that you don't want to pay for, someone else will pay for whatever you put in the air or the suffering you create around you. That means, you know, negative externalities You get incentivized all the time for these things. If we think of a compassionate/vegan economy, that means you want to ask yourself this question: how can we incentivize you, me, everyone to do something good for others? How can you get incentivized for not extracting things or not enslaving other beings? Today we get incentivized for enslaving other beings all the time. Okay, so a vegan economy means that, you know, the everyday thing that, okay, yes, I do buy products that do not kill animals and enslave them, do some medical tests on them. That means the easy part on that. It also means that I don't buy or participate in any kind of services that also will enslave kill, torture other forms of life around you as much as you can, of course. But it doesn't stop here. In a vegan economy, for instance, I'd rather go, you know, have my haircut to, you know, a vegan haircutter or barber, because I'd rather give my wealth, my time, my attention to that kind of person than another person, because we care about values. We already do that in the world. We want to build things with people we share the same values with.. So in the vegan economy, we have a web of people kind of mutually recognizing that, you know, themselves as vegan, or whatever they do, it serves the compassionate/vegan economy. It works this way. And all the infrastructures we have, the currencies that we use, the tools that we use, help us do that and incentivize those kinds of things. So how would we get incentivized? We have to go very pragmatic here. You see, when people migrate, for instance, from a war zone to, you know, maybe Europe or even France— we have two French people talking here— I don't think they migrate because of just pure ideology. They've run away from war zones or poor areas because they just want to have a decent life. So their move from one place to another happens because they have an immediate advantage for that. And maybe later on they will embrace the values of that new place, they will internalize that. And I think it will happen the same way when we have, you know, a vegan economy with millions and millions of vegans and having, you know, a much better economy, much more attractive economy. Like, you have a better chance you have better health there, you have better schools, you have, you know, more compassionate people, you have better communities and all these kinds of things. And maybe you want, or I want, to go there just because of that reason, maybe not because for animals. But in the end, I may get into this culture and realize, huh, what did I do before? I live in a racist slash, uh, you know, segregationist society. So now I understand also the value system, but in the first hand, maybe I did not understand that so much. I just went there because I felt incentivized to go there. So I'll stop here before I go into the Holochain part, but I want to check with you if you have more questions or feedback or thoughts to share about what a vegan economy would mean.

I love this picture that you're painting. One thing that I've heard from people as I was sharing this upcoming conversation was that they were saying, well, this is very exclusive. 'If I'm not a vegan, then I'm not part of it.' What would you say to them?

Well, I would say yes and no. Yes, let me take an example. If you see yourself as a racist person, you don't have— or, you know, as a white supremacist, you may have your place to live in the US because it allows it, but you don't have any place for you to manifest that in Europe, for instance. So Europe has made the choice that if you operate as a racist person, that means you have to go out or you have to change or get out of here. You cannot play with us. We disagree. So we remain exclusive because we embrace, you know, human rights. As much as they can. Of course, we still have so much to do on this, but at least on the paper, if you disagree with human rights, yes, get out of here. Don't stay here. Make war somewhere else. Okay, do your mess, but not in our territory. So what, you know, what most non-vegan people don't understand, you just think, okay, we should have, you know, the choice. But what if we say the same thing for human rights? You know, like, yeah, let's live together. You know, those who wants to respect human rights, and those who don't. And those who don't, you know, sometimes they do those terrible things that we see sometimes, you know, enslaving others, killing others, torturing them, whatever, exploiting them in whatever ways. We don't say, hey, we have the choice. No, we want to impose those things. So you see, we have a little bit of a conflict here, something not easy. And I think it will go through some level of conflicts. Now, on the other hand, I say yes, inclusivity, because you can't just work with lines, so then they're like vegan and not vegan. You don't have a border. I can't even apply that border to myself, you know. Maybe even if I do my garden in the back and plant my salads, you know, I maybe not respect some other animals who could have used this piece of land for themselves and 'Maybe I'll kill some snails,' or, you know, and all these things. And I could say, 'Hey, what about veganism?' It doesn't work this way, you see. So we still have to explore, you know, people's journey. You said it, you see it as a journey, you know, going towards something. Hence why reputation systems work much better. Like, you know, how, you know, what new steps did you have? You can't ask people to just operate, you know, on or a thing, it just doesn't work. So as you know, reputation mechanism, peer-to-peer reputation mechanism, will certainly work much better and operate as the catalyst for building those more compassionate societies. Now some people may say, oh wow, reputation, you mean like China, like a group of people controlling everyone? And I say no. If we have a peer-to-peer distributed emerging thing, which we can talk more about. Just like in small communities, we have reputations among one another, although no one decided which rules we should apply. But if the reputation system remains in the hands of the few, like in China, or like in old ideologies, like churches and religions have kind of created containers for people from external oppressive infrastructures, then I have a problem with that. But when it becomes a free choice and emerging peer-to-peer culture built among people, then I feel very attracted about that.

And that leads to what kind of technology you want in order to do that. Right. I can definitely, I can definitely see the new generation, and I think it has been exacerbated by COVID. The new generation are going to look, are going to move to a state or a country that supports their belief and their culture more than, you know, I was born in the US, I'm American, my family lives there, therefore I'm going to stay there. I think we're going to see a lot more choices based on the culture of a place, I think, in the future. So I know that we wanted to keep this conversation short, and tomorrow we'll really dive into Holochain, again taking the example of of vegan collagen economy, looking at, you know, different aspects from a technical or strategic standpoint. But as we come to the end of this first 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 action. This is a time of action and no longer waiting for other people to tell us what to do. So in regards to becoming a vegan, and this is for the curious mind out there, and I know there's a lot, what can we do to take the next step?

What I observe, you know, when people start to just investigate thoroughly this question, like investigate climate change and the impact of animal agriculture on climate change, investigate the health, investigate the rationals, that will lead you to having a plant-based diet as a first step. And now, if you start also to investigate your own cognitive dissonances, then that will take you to the next step. You know, for instance, if I, if I ask people people who eat meat, meat eaters, if I ask them, well, you know, you have a pig or a cow or a rabbit in the room, uh, do you want to put your teeth on that being? Or do you want to even kick this being? Or do you want to stab this being? And people say, no, of course I don't want to do that. Of course they don't. Most people would say, no, I don't want to do that. Okay. Um, would you like to torture this animal for your own pleasure? Ah, of course not. I don't want to do that. I would never do that. Well, don't you think— and then the other question: do you think you need— your body needs this flesh inside? You know, do you need to eat that? Do you need animal products to exist? And most people today say, well, no, we don't, we don't need it. So that means we eat animals for pleasure. You see, we have lots of cognitive dissonances. And so my invitation goes into just investigate, believe nothing, don't believe me, don't believe anyone, you know, look at all those reports, there's documentaries, go into the contradiction debate, and then you will eventually turn yourself into a vegan person. It just takes courage, it takes time. Same thing for global warming, same thing for you know, eating organic and all these things. It requires the time for investigation. You don't need anyone else than yourself for this. It takes a little bit of courage and relationship, of course, a support system for that, I would say.

Remind me, cognitive dissonance is when we have conflicting belief or desires, or is it when we have beliefs that are not respected in our behavior.

Cognitive dissonance means when you find yourself in the situation, for instance, of saying, I know that I create, you know, lots of pain in this world on one hand, and on the other hand, I keep doing it, and I have all sorts of support system that will, you know, 'Well, the whole society will support me in this and give me— and the doxa, the general belief, will support me in this.' And so I have this kind of cognitive dissonance because if I just tried to use reasoning, if I tried to use rationality to explain my behavior, then I'll go into some inner contradictions. That proposition A contradicts a non-A proposition exactly the way I shared it. Like, people don't want to torture animals. People recognize, you know, if you have a cow in the room or a pig, you want to bind with this being. You feel a person inside that being. You have the direct experience. The cognitive dissonance will make you speak about pigs or cows or chicken. You will thingify them. Thingification means that the common language we speak will create a semantic structure of separation. Of making those beings, transforming those beings into resources, into meat. Meat means a thing, you see. So we have a whole social matrix that will keep you into a belief system, whereas your own investigation will take you to a completely different space. And then you have a cognitive dissonance because we both live as a collective being and as an individual person, and when those two things don't match, then we suffer.

You got to make a choice, right? So we're constantly being in opposition to who we are truly, and that can cause— I mean, that's causing anxiety. So thank you, Jean-François, for this insightful conversation. We'll be sharing this recording on various podcasts, and we'll write a blog post at the end of the 3 conversations for those who enjoy reading. I guess I will see you tomorrow for the second conversation, again on Holochain, but a little bit more technical. You painted a picture, and now is the time to talk about the technical aspect, again, as an example, what would it look like?