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Shawn Kemp: From Xbox to Facebook to Blockchain to Art to Non-GMO
7 Plays1 hour ago
In this episode of The Unfolding Thought Podcast, Eric Pratum speaks with Shawn Kemp, a product leader, startup advisor, and artist whose journey spans the worlds of technology, entrepreneurship, and creative expression. From his early days at Microsoft working on Xbox and Silverlight, to co-founding mission-driven companies and engaging deeply with food systems and transparency, Shawn brings a rare blend of systems thinking and emotional insight.
Shawn opens up about the impact of early trauma, the pursuit of success, and the ways he’s learned to prioritize meaning and presence over prestige. He shares his current focus on creativity—not as a career pivot, but as an honest way to process and express the messiness of life.
Topics Explored:
- Reconciling Past and Present: How early experiences shape identity
- Creativity as Meaning-Making: Art as a tool, not just an output
- Food Systems and Transparency
- Letting Go of Performative Success and Pursuing Fulfillment
Links:
- Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnkemp/
- Shawn’s art: https://shawnkemp.art
- The Non-GMO Project: https://www.nongmoproject.org
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls: https://amzn.to/45XbkW8
- Educated by Tara Westover: https://amzn.to/4e9aOqj
- J Allard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jallard529/
- Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lakshmigopalkrishnan/
- Bext360: https://www.bext360.com/
- Clarence Birdseye: https://amzn.to/3TsCg8O
- No More Gold Stars: https://amzn.to/3TsNJ8k
For more episodes, visit: https://unfoldingthought.com
Join the conversation by emailing Eric at: eric@inboundandagile.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Unfolding Thought Podcast. My name is Eric Pradham. Today, I'm talking with Sean Kemp, a technologist, startup advisor, and creative whose career has spanned product leadership at Microsoft, founding and advising mission-driven startups, and more recently, building a meaningful artistic practice alongside his work in technology.
00:00:27
Speaker
Sean and I talk about the complexity of identity, the tension between external success and internal clarity, and how childhood experiences can both fuel and complicate our ambition.
00:00:40
Speaker
Sean has done so many fascinating things, from being one of the earliest people to work on Microsoft's Xbox, to founding one of Facebook's biggest data and platform partners, to being an investor and advisor, running an incubator, and more.
00:01:00
Speaker
I wish this conversation could have lasted for hours because, as you will see, there are so many threads to pull on in Sean's story. And now, I bring you Sean Kemp.
00:01:13
Speaker
Sean, thank you for joining me. Would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself? Yeah. All right. Thanks for, thanks for having me. Uh, where to start? It's always an interesting, it's always an interesting conundrum of how, how far back to go or, or the context of, of the history.
00:01:28
Speaker
Um, you know, and for me and a lot of times so I have to put it into perspective of kind of where, where I started, like what informs my thinking. And a lot of that goes all the way back to my, my super early childhood.
00:01:41
Speaker
Um, So I was raised fairly atypically. um I grew up in yurts, geodesic domes. We had llamas. um We were involved a lot in activism.
00:01:52
Speaker
um But at the same time, my family came from... from affluence. Like there was, there was generational money. Um, there was underpinning that. So even though I, I grew up almost like a child of hippies, living off the grid or in an airstream trailer, um, in trailer parks, there was a, there was a sense of stability there, um, in terms of stuff.
00:02:15
Speaker
And so I think that's an important kind of underpinning for what, what, what powers me like i have a lot of stability and knowing that i come from privilege um and at the same time this element of creativity and experiencing things where all i had when i was a kid was hand me down clothes um and and we were you know out getting muddy and dirty all the time ah man i was homeschooled within that that environment So that's that's kind of my early childhood. And then I went on from there and, you know, traditional, graduated from high school, went to college, got a degree.
00:02:50
Speaker
um Industrial design was was the degree that I actually got, ah which you which that's lot of industrial designers design consumer goods. So like an iPhone the word the computer you use or the the soft goods, the the backpack that you might be carrying.
00:03:06
Speaker
ah um But I pursued more of the the digital side of those things. and So I went in into UI user experience um and then I spent some time at Microsoft developing a product called the Xbox, um which at the time this was brand new, but now everybody pretty much knows that as ah as a gaming system.
00:03:23
Speaker
um But a lot of what we did there was transform and revolutionize how people engage virtually with each other. So a lot of it was about community development and and how do you build kind of communities using that digital um stuff that was there.
00:03:38
Speaker
And then I went on to do a number of other things at Microsoft. And then I i went and did a a bunch in the kind of the social good space. um How do you use technology to to do to empower nonprofits or the social sector?
00:03:53
Speaker
And then I spent some time in in the startup realm, angel investor and business. kind of building, um, ah an incubator that, that managed and helped, uh, people bring their ideas to life.
00:04:05
Speaker
Um, and then I did some startups as well. So I had this whole journey of like, you know, from corporate to nonprofit to startups. And one of my startups actually focused on nonprofits. Um, and then we did a whole bunch of work with that. That startup was actually called action sprout. Um, and it was focused on how do you use Facebook and social media for causes and political candidates.
00:04:28
Speaker
Um, And we were one of the largest platforms sitting on top of Facebook. um And we were eventually acquired. and And I exited that, got into the art world, got into blockchain, got into generative art.
00:04:40
Speaker
And then now, fast forward. So there's a lot of different stories that are all mixed there. But Now I actually work at a nonprofit. um So for the first time in my career in life, I've actually been working at a nonprofit, even though I've supported them in the past.
00:04:54
Speaker
And that is a nonprofit that focuses on food, and it's called the Non-GMO Project. And it focuses on on transparency. So how do you have informed choice when you go to the store to determine what you want to put into your body?
00:05:07
Speaker
And the Non-GMO Project has a standard, ah certifying, um ecosystem that looks at products, determines whether they are not genetically modified, and then certifies those. And you'll see it. It's a little butterfly logo that appears on food.
00:05:25
Speaker
So I'll stop there. There's a lot of other stories we can we can we can tie into that, but I'll ah keep it there. Thank you. Yeah. And there is a lot there that i want to ask about. So there's some that I'll take at least initially chronologically, and then we'll just see if I get to the rest of it, of course. But with your upbringing, you know, one point or another, you said something along the lines of being raised by hippies.
00:05:56
Speaker
So The living in yurts or in an Airstream trailer or whatever else was the, i don't know, general ethos or belief system generalizable to the term hippie?
00:06:13
Speaker
Or was there something more specific that you feel like, I don't know, though the life that your parents wanted to live, that where that came from? Yeah. I mean, it was definitely, i think of it, I generalize it as that hippie, that hippie lifestyle, but it was really kind of the, the desire to drop out, um, was, was what underpinned a lot of it.
00:06:36
Speaker
And, um, it came mostly from my dad. Um, my dad was, it's interesting, like as I've gotten older, like I had a good relationship with both of my parents. Um, but my mom was definitely the more stable, um, one in the, in the thing. My dad,
00:06:52
Speaker
um It's in hindsight, um definitely had some undiagnosed um issues with depression and probably anxiety and maybe other other things as well.
00:07:03
Speaker
um But he was never satisfied, never couldn't settle down. And he was raised in a very. traditional like LA kind of, I mean, he grew up with a nanny. He went to a military boarding school.
00:07:17
Speaker
He got drafted into the air force. Um, and all of that he hated, like he was like, so, so essentially my early childhood was him, rejecting this life that the structure that had been imposed upon him. So it was, it was about dropping out and, and kind of resistance to structure resistance to the government, to what society wanted you to do, to what probably his parents wanted him to do to all those types of things. So that, that was kind of the thing it was. So was anything that was not typical was kind of what we were engaged in as a, as a thing. And so he kind of infused that into our lives and
00:07:53
Speaker
And, you know, what was, i guess, your experience with, I'm going to equate this to a belief system as if it's a religion or something for the moment, which there are only so many ways in which there can or should be overlap here, but just for simplicity's sake, what was your experience with or your relationship with this as you were growing up and The way in which I'm thinking about this, the framing in my mind is, you know, you grew up in this religion, so to speak, you know, it's very normal to reject it wholesale or to accept it and then have a oh ah wake up sort of experience and then move away from it.
00:08:44
Speaker
You going into industrial design, I could imagine if you gave me no more information, that I could interpret it from one perspective as, or make the assumption from one perspective as, you know, there's an element of creativity there.
00:09:01
Speaker
And perhaps that comes from having a freer childhood. There could be an element of wanting to understand how things work. There could be, you know, I'm not rejecting the the the world. No, I'm going to go and get my education because I do really value, like, I want a job, dad.
00:09:23
Speaker
And so what was your experience with this sort of general belief system as you were growing up? Yeah, yeah. It was, and mean, the the belief system is so funny because um i read, I've read, there's two books that stick with me that I've read that I've been like, oh my God, that was my childhood.
00:09:44
Speaker
But not. like so to qualify, in the two books, are there's one book called Educated and there's another book called The Glass Castle. Yes, I've read both of Yeah. If you've read them, you you know them. like they're They're pretty distinctive. and And as I read those books, I was like, oh my God.
00:10:01
Speaker
that sounds like what my childhood was like without some of the more extreme aspects of it or the religious aspects. Like we were not religious at all. Um, but just kind of the, the, the difference, like the non-traditional, like it didn't look like a traditional thing.
00:10:16
Speaker
Um, But underpinning all of that in my childhood from my dad was curiosity. It was this insatiable desire to learn and and do something new, like build a boat from scratch and that in the shed, in the in the backyard.
00:10:33
Speaker
And not just a tiny boat, like a trimaran fold up 30 foot or 40, don't even know, it's huge boat with like a you know full berth and you could sleep six people in it. and so he was Or we bought, I mean, at one point in time, he bought these hovercrafts and we would take these hovercrafts and go go down the Rogue River and these hovercrafts.
00:10:57
Speaker
So it was always something new, something that piqued his curiosity. And that was kind of the thing that that was infused in me as an early child was there's always something to learn. You go out into the wilderness, you go out and do something. he was always questioning. he was always pointing stuff out. Like, can we eat this? do you think this will kill us?
00:11:17
Speaker
sometimes informed by real things, sometimes informed by like, let's try it see what happens. Um, and never stifling that like always. So that was kind of the belief system that, that held through a lot of that.
00:11:28
Speaker
But interspersed through that was my mom who was, um, and I always use the analogy of she was, she was, she had a lot of German in her. She was of German descent.
00:11:39
Speaker
Um, and so there was this aspect that she brought to the mix of, um, kind of logic and um fortitude, I guess, if you will. And so wanting it to be right, wanting it to fit in. um And so that's kind of there. So I had this both creativity, wild, new ideas, inventing.
00:11:58
Speaker
i don't even want to call it entrepreneur. I really separate the the definition of an inventor from an entrepreneur. um And my dad was more in the inventor side of things um versus the business side, whereas my mom was much more about finances and you know she could have been a great bookkeeper um if she had wanted to pursue that and so that the i can so I had those two so those are the two but like creativity and unbridled anything is possible if you imagine it and It has to be structured and you have to have processes and you have to have the stuff that's in it. And so for me, industrial design was was actually the perfect marriage of those, which is why I was attracted to it, because it was about innovation, and kind of unlimited innovation with how do you make it? Like you can't just come up with stuff.
00:12:48
Speaker
You have to actually figure out how it's going to be made and manufactured and what does that look like? So that that for me, that was what led me to industrial design. And it's influenced most of my sort kind of career trajectory is I like the innovation. I love the creativity. I get really bored when it's just operationalizing.
00:13:07
Speaker
But I like innovation when it's mixed in with how are you going to operationalize it? I love templates and systems and and everything that's that's in there. It's interesting.
00:13:18
Speaker
i you know, I'm only going to spend so much time imagining what was going on in your father's head, because that's not particularly useful. But for the purposes of perhaps getting to some of where you have excelled, I think,
00:13:38
Speaker
It kind of sounds to me like if you're familiar with the big five personality, behavioral traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and agreeableness, and neuroticism, it sounds to me like your father was fairly high in openness, which is fundamentally openness to creativity and or abstract thinking.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yep. And might have been low in agreeableness and Agreeableness is, I'm not going to get the full definition here, but one aspect of it is how deferential are you to authority?
00:14:15
Speaker
And then also how much do you care basically about getting along with others? And one thing that doesn't give me a lot of confidence in this armchair philosophizing here is that he may very well have been moderately agreeable. He could have been highly agreeable for all I know, but I suspect that one thing that makes him sound less agreeable is that he may very well have been so high in openness that being put in situations where he had to conform kind of, you know, ah developed in him a desire to push back, which might not have been innate regardless.
00:14:59
Speaker
Oh, I think it probably was. and It it would probably like hearing stories from my, from his mom and and dad when he was even a little tiny baby. He was, again, how much did the the structure of the environment shape it versus how much was it just innate?
00:15:14
Speaker
As a, as a little baby, he used to bang his head against the crib and move it across the room. It sounds like your mother, at the very least, was a little bit higher in conscientiousness.
00:15:28
Speaker
Whether she was moderate or higher, you know, it's hard to say because there are also other aspects of being a human. Like where does so critical thinking, for example, come in? And then on average, women will be higher in neuroticism, which there are two aspects of neuroticism. One is anticipatory. So what might happen?
00:15:49
Speaker
And then one is, think the term is a ruminatory, which is the thing already happened. Now I'm ruminating on it. And some people are not necessarily anxious just because they think ahead and think, well, what might happen? What might I need to plan for?
00:16:10
Speaker
And so it sounds to me like then some of the things that have come out new much like your father, whether they were born into you or it's, you know, at least in part, a combination of your nature and your nurture is you seem fairly open wherever you are on agreeableness. I suspect that you are at least more agreeable than your father.
00:16:40
Speaker
And then whether you're conscientious or not, it's, or neurotic in the sense of anxiety, you know, it sounds to me like there is a fairly middle of the road or, or a balance ah between some of these things where, know,
00:16:58
Speaker
if your father were in your position, that he might've ended up a lot like you, where you, you had that freedom to explore. And I totally get what you're saying as well about those books. Like there, there in you know, I'll put links in the show notes, but the, the one that sticks out most clearly to me is educated because there's a very sort of different belief system that ah think her name is Tara Westover, if I recall correctly, the author she's brought up in.
00:17:33
Speaker
And, you know, hers is is described as being being very strict, you know, and it doesn't sound to me like you had that necessarily as much as perhaps we can focus on because of the fact that it was different, you were able to accentuate some of these personality traits that maybe your father had that in his childhood, then he was not able to accentuate or exercise those things.
00:18:05
Speaker
Yep. Yep, exactly. So you went on to study industrial design and then i think you said, and i I think I recall this from Just knowing your background because we've known each other for, think it's 18 years now.
00:18:25
Speaker
Something like that. but Almost 20. Yeah, that sounds about right. yeah So you you either went straight to Microsoft or no, I remember you interned at Microsoft.
00:18:36
Speaker
Wasn't that it? No, actually, okay, I'll give you i'll give you the the the quick story on this one. So no, actually, so I graduated um from college. um and actually dared I wanted to take a little bit of time off, on but I ended up starting a consulting agency, um kind of on accident, um because at the time there was a... um a new technology called flash, which nobody probably remembers anymore at all, but it was the ability to do motion graphics on the web was kind of the big thing around it.
00:19:07
Speaker
And I got, I got really into it kind of right at the end of my college career and was just playing with it, making games and motion graphics. And there was a, had moved to Seattle, um, after I graduated and there was a, an agency just down the street from like where i was living.
00:19:23
Speaker
Um, and a friend of mine was there and they were they were really needing to do some motion graphics um work and so my friend connected me with them and i was like sure i could do it so i took on some contracting work with them mostly banner ads for websites for casinos and like you know the flashing graphics that just sucked for a whole generation um of web stuff were you the one doing those ads where the people would dance around there were some of those in there yeah don't if i did the one you're thinking of, but there was definitely some, yes, those types of things.
00:19:57
Speaker
The most annoying, flashy of things. Oh, and then and then I actually got into Microsoft as a contractor. So while I was doing that, I was remodeling a house and wasn't really, I was just kind of happy. And I was in a temp agency with another friend um who was interviewing for a job. I just, he was, I would with him while he went in and I was sitting in the lobby.
00:20:21
Speaker
And um knew the the receptionist. She had gone to school with us. And so we were just sitting there chatting. And she goes, you like gaming, right? I was like, yeah, I'm totally a gamer. I got love. Yeah, yeah. so And she's like, had you ever heard of something called Project Xbox at Microsoft?
00:20:40
Speaker
I was like, no. then they yeah they don't have any good games. Like at the time, they didn't really have any gaming. I mean, they had a gaming department, but nothing. Like Flight Simulator was what they were known for. And she's like, there's this opening for a temp art director that just came through earlier today for this project. i Would you would she be interested? and I was like, no, not Philly, but yeah whatever. What the hell? Like, it's gaming. Like, sure. Yes. Yes, sure. Put my name in.
00:21:10
Speaker
It wasn't really even, I mean, I wasn't applying. I was just like, yeah, sure. That sounds interesting. I'm curious to know what, I'm curious what they're working on. was really more the motivation. Like, I wonder what it is.
00:21:22
Speaker
Went for an interview. Next day, got got a um ah job offer for our director on a dual project at Microsoft. So it was their shop.microsoft.com, which was like their direct e-commerce side of things, and this new project Xbox. wow And then from there, it was and ah ah kind of an agency like temp for six months, and then I got hired on full-time as a creative director on just the Xbox project.
00:21:49
Speaker
I guess, what did your timeline look like? You know, how long were you there before the Xbox actually launched? How long were you there afterwards?
00:22:00
Speaker
And what did it even look like inside of Microsoft as this was being developed? Yeah, this it's this is a fascinating case study, too, in in how a company...
00:22:11
Speaker
innovated internally. So how it did entrepreneurship internally to the the company. So when I started, when I first came in as as a contractor, I think there were There was probably no more than like two dozen of us that that had a role within the Xbox project. It was really early days. Like they were borrowing, they were basically borrowing the web, all the web stuff that I was doing.
00:22:35
Speaker
They were borrowing that resource from the shop.microsoft.com department. um The hardware they were borrowing from another hardware group. um And so it was this guy named Jay Allard, who um was a fairly successful um engineer at the at the company who had decided he really wanted to do gaming um and had convinced Bill Gates to basically fund a gaming department and build a console, like go after, go head to head with PlayStation and and Nintendo.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah. And and then as I came in full time, it became ah an official thing. Like there was this early period and then they and they built the team and it was um completely isolated.
00:23:18
Speaker
So I was a Microsoft employee, but we were moved to another building that was 15 minutes away from main campus. At the time, Microsoft, everything happened on main campus um in Redmond.
00:23:31
Speaker
And we were moved to this business park. And it was the Xbox building, but yeah we didn't even have a Microsoft sign. I just said Xbox. Um, our business cards didn't have Microsoft on them. We didn't have Microsoft.com email addresses. We had Xbox.com email addresses.
00:23:47
Speaker
Um, And we were basically cut off from the rest of the company. i mean, not entirely, but we were not encouraged to be part of the rest of the the organization and to to really break free and and do different things. So that was a lot of the culture was innovation driving really fast toward a launch and not have not be burdened with all of the kind of having to make it work with the rest of Microsoft's infrastructure or technology or marketing or you know you name it like not basically reinvent everything as part of that that effort
00:24:19
Speaker
how long were you there before you started to have a physical product? Because, you know, I have, i i used to live in the Seattle area, right? So I've known a lot of people who have worked at Microsoft. And at one point i knew one of the people that was working on the surface.
00:24:41
Speaker
And this was early days, you know, when the surface was like basically a replica of those tabletop arcade, you know, like Pac-Man or whatever, and with a projection screen. And I remember talking to like that guy, for example, and they would just go down to Best Buy and they would buy some TV or something and they would tear it apart to see how it worked.
00:25:02
Speaker
And i don't know what was going on with Xbox, but what what did the development look like? What were there challenges that you encountered? And then how long was it before you got to market?
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to remember. I think from when I first got engaged with the project and I don't know, i actually don't know how long it had been going on before I, I got engaged with it.
00:25:27
Speaker
Um, and then we launched, I believe it was September, of 20 or 2001, I believe was when we, when we launched the, the first, like you could go out and buy the first Xbox. Um, and I was there starting in 99.
00:25:42
Speaker
Um, so it was about two years like that. I was working on stuff before we actually had something that was in market, um, at the time. Did you feel like you were developing something or a part of something that was really exciting?
00:25:59
Speaker
Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the coolest projects I've worked on in terms of both learnings, like the growth that I did professionally and personally and the impact that it had, like in terms of, of what did it is. I mean, it's still around now. It's still like, i mean, it went from literally nothing to, i mean, I think at times we alternated between second, first and second in the console, total, total market share and, and games and revenue.
00:26:28
Speaker
Um, that side of things. So yeah, I mean, it was, it was really cool to be involved in that, in that thing. And I mean, that two year period that I was there, I think the organization, I mean, the organization grew really rapidly.
00:26:40
Speaker
Um, and I think by the time we launched, I think the company had spent a billion or 2 billion. i can't remember the exact number, um, on that. I mean, like basically between payroll and all the hardware and research and development and acquisitions of games, um,
00:26:58
Speaker
and everything he was a lot of money thrown at it so we had a lot of resources which was really fun to do like we didn't lack for resources or talent or people that wanted to work on the project or or anything on those lines and are there things you learned working on xbox that you continue to benefit from today Yeah. I mean, both good and bad, I would say.
00:27:22
Speaker
i mean, like neither good nor I mean, maybe bad's the wrong one. But there were there were things that I still do that I did there. um the The kind of continually reinventing stuff. So we redid the website when I was... i So I was on that project for...
00:27:39
Speaker
maybe four years total. um We redid the website seven times. We had seven different whole version numbers on that. So in terms like that would usually include like architecture and UI and user experience and design and everything on those things.
00:27:55
Speaker
So we were constantly iterating on something as we got more information, like it would get out, we get, we engage the community, we'd learn stuff from it. And then we would change stuff. Like we weren't, we didn't get married to the things we didn't get complacent with what's there.
00:28:11
Speaker
It was as soon as stuff was coming in and we had new information, we would, we would revisit it and and refactor it and review those things. So that's, I've kept that from, from that experience.
00:28:21
Speaker
Um, And then I i it really awakened my my sense of what does it mean to be a ah better business? So what does it mean terms of the employees, the people who work there?
00:28:35
Speaker
um And what might that look like? Which has led me to regenerative business paradigms, which is why I'm so so infatuated with those right now. Um, and by the way, because they feel right. Um, so I was involved in a lot of like professional development. I was on leadership ventures. So I was getting all this training. Like, actually, I think at Xbox is where I was exposed to ocean that, you know the big five, um, personality traits. Cause that was one of the things we use to do professional development.
00:29:02
Speaker
but it was super extractive. um And so we churned through people. Like people would come in, we'd you know we'd use them 80 hours a week and we'd burn them out and then they would leave or we'd fire them. was just this culture of just extractive management.
00:29:18
Speaker
And so... That really awakened in me a curiosity of what does it mean to actually build a team? What does it mean to be a manager or a supervisor or a leader? And how do you do that in a way that actually builds everyone's capacity and grows them, finds the right fit for them, and and and ultimately serves and provides value outside of the company?
00:29:39
Speaker
ah And so that that awakened a lot of that in me and has been a constant arc in my career. how do you How do you do that? How do you nurture and care for the people you work with and who work for you and who you work for as well within within the confines of business and and everything that's there?
00:29:57
Speaker
I realize I'm potentially jumping pretty far ahead in asking about this because the regenerative business practices to me seems like something that you've focused on, if I can phrase it that way, later in your career.
00:30:17
Speaker
Though it sounds to me like it was there in a way earlier in your career, but
00:30:27
Speaker
is that, you know, was there a did you recognize back then that, did you feel that there had to be a different way or that, you know,
00:30:43
Speaker
did Did it seem to you like the way that things were running, that that's just the way the business is done? You know, ah I guess maybe part of what I'm looking at looking for is what has been the evolution of your thinking towards regenerative, regenerative business practices?
00:31:01
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a, it's a really good question. and And I think the answer is I always knew, um, Like I was, maybe this is my dad showing up at me. Like I was always trying to recreate or push back against the things that were the norms that were there.
00:31:16
Speaker
Whether that was good or bad, like whether it didn't really matter whether I had liked it or not. It was more like, well, this is the way that I'm being told to do it. We should probably think about that and critically maybe reevaluate and maybe do it a different way. Um,
00:31:30
Speaker
Sometimes maybe for a good reason, sometimes maybe just because I'm not going to do it the way that I've been told I have to do it. ah So let's change it because somebody said that's the way it is. um But I also had ah really great ah mentor and manager early on um in that but that that area. um She was just absolutely incredible at I think she was a regenerative business paradigm. it If that had been a thing, that's what she would have been applying. And so she brought a lot of these models um for management and for really deeply caring about a team.
00:32:12
Speaker
Her name was Lakshmi Golpokishnan. um she's She does a bunch of organizational coaching these days. She left Microsoft. She was there a lot longer than I was, but she she has since left Microsoft and and does this. I think she's done some work with Brene Brown and and and those those side of things.
00:32:29
Speaker
um But she really gave me permission and the frameworks and... Kind of the encouragement to lean more into those things.
00:32:41
Speaker
And I don't know if I would have leaned as fast into it as as i would have if I hadn't had somebody with a little more experience and authority kind of pushing me into that and and making it okay to question the way Microsoft did management because it was very formalized.
00:32:58
Speaker
I mean, it was, there was no, it was not squishy. Like it was the whole, you know, there were binders and we had cards and we had our grids and matrices and, you know, curves and, and quadrants and, and everything.
00:33:12
Speaker
Like there wasn't a lot of room for creativity and how you thought about managing people. And I had that with with her. So that was, I really appreciated that. Skipping forward a little bit,
00:33:25
Speaker
You have invested in companies, you know, you had some in time in between Xbox and then you mentioned Action Sprout. And, you know, my introduction to Action Sprout was around the time that I was using Facebook fairly heavily for the nonprofits that I was working with.
00:33:51
Speaker
and But most of the work that I was doing as it related to Facebook was the creation of content at a fairly basic level and then advertising. And so when you introduced me to Action Sprout,
00:34:07
Speaker
I thought it was really interesting. And I suppose I'll give you a chance actually to explain what you were doing early on. But then where I'm going as well is you know, there were things like Cambridge Analytica and all that went that went on. And I think I saw Action Sprout get painted a similar sort of like color palette.
00:34:28
Speaker
And And I'm guessing there was some stress around that. So would you mind telling me or recapping for anyone listening a bit of what Action Sprout was and then what you were trying to do and what your experience was?
00:34:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So at a really basic level, um, action sprout was making Facebook work for nonprofits or specifically causes. That was, that was what we were founded on.
00:34:54
Speaker
Um, and it was me at myself and another co-founder who, who started the company. Um, and we both came from that kind of innovation and how do we make change?
00:35:04
Speaker
and And in particular, our you know, we cared about um probably what what would be labeled more progressive causes. So ah the environment, climate change, um food, um nutrition, um women's reproductive rights, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you you know, right.
00:35:22
Speaker
Um, and so that was a lot of, that was a lot of what we focused on, but we built an open platform um that anybody could come in and use. And we had no, no restrictions other than like, don't do illegal stuff, um, on the platform.
00:35:37
Speaker
And it did a number of things over its lifespan, but at the core of it was what we called our action platform. So the ability for people to do social petitions was was was the the key aspect of it. and So you could create a petition, you could post it to your Facebook page, and people could sign it with a single click.
00:35:57
Speaker
And that single click was then activated through Facebook and would pass back name and email address and whatever other information you wanted to to pass back to the nonprofit online.
00:36:08
Speaker
so that they could then do something with it. They could put those names on the petition and hand it to a ah representative. They could put you on an email list, donations. I mean, and we had the ability to to pay to promote it and different things. Which to be clear, you had to actually okay ActionSprout or Facebook sharing that information. So it's not like you just, or your clients just harvested it. If I want was a user of ActionSprout and I wanted to get your email address,
00:36:37
Speaker
you as a user would get notified that I wanted that and that you were sharing it. Yes, yes. And actually you as the user signing the petition clicked the button and then did the little like, yes, I approve it.
00:36:49
Speaker
And we always dropped the entire lifespan of it because we believed in people's right to their data. you could go in and delete or un unsign anything you wanted at any point in time using that Facebook login. So you your Facebook login was what you used to sign it, and you could use that same thing to see every petition you'd ever signed and undo them or delete any of your data out of our system.
00:37:13
Speaker
So it was very open in terms of the data and people's control over the data, but there was a lot of data that Facebook would just would you like to sign this thing? And you're like, sure. And like people, i mean, more than likely didn't realize the extent of the data they were authorizing, in a lot of these cases, um, and, or what would then happen with the data once the nonprofit had it, what are the political candidate at it, um, those side of things.
00:37:41
Speaker
Um, And we had a lot of data. Like Cambridge Analytica had a lot of data and it was a major news story. We never hit the news. Like nobody ever heard of Action Sprout.
00:37:52
Speaker
But we had as much data as Cambridge Analytica did. um We just weren't doing some of the more what Cambridge Analytica got in trouble for was the weaponization of that data and using it to manipulate in a very maybe nefarious way public perception or or spread misinformation or disinformation.
00:38:16
Speaker
um The company itself did that. Actions about our company didn't necessarily do that either. What the users of our stuff did with the data afterwards is, I mean, and know I'm not aware of anything, but they could have because they still have a data there.
00:38:33
Speaker
um And then we also had a bunch of other things that we added on over the years. um Stuff like um the development of content. So sourcing, listening to everything that's happening on Facebook, bringing back the stuff that's the important.
00:38:49
Speaker
impactful, most well-performing, allowing them to share that, um the ability to work in networks or collectives. So you could join, say, a climate collective and it would bring out the most viral content on a daily, weekly, hourly basis.
00:39:07
Speaker
And you could then reshare that and work together to amplify content. Because social media worked in this this aspect of an echo chamber. Like the more people that are sharing the things, the more it goes. So we had all these things.
00:39:19
Speaker
And then we had, mean, this is pre-AI, but we had really advanced um ads and comment management that was essentially using early AI to run ads, construct the ads, deploy your ad dollars and monitor and and ah moderate comments that were coming in.
00:39:39
Speaker
And then we were used by, i mean, at at our kind of at the at the most, I think we had about 150,000 non-profits, political candidates across 72 countries. So we were we were one of the largest. we were partnered directly with Facebook to support non-profits. We wrote all of the how to use facebook how to use Facebook as a nonprofit documentation. we supported them.
00:40:00
Speaker
i mean, I directly supported Mark and Priscilla in launching the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Facebook page. I was the admin on that Facebook page. So there was a lot of interesting stuff that we got involved in.
00:40:13
Speaker
So as a startup founder and someone that was deeply involved with that organization, and then having invested in startups, having run an incubator,
00:40:28
Speaker
Are there things that you experienced or learned from that that you would, you know, if I'm going to go out and create an application, a product today, that you would generally advise me to do or stay away from or keep in mind?
00:40:47
Speaker
but Yeah, yeah, absolutely. there's seven this And there's some things you can do even more effectively now um in that. So one of them was get out with the things quickly. So don't spend too much time developing features, functionality, or what what what I call value adding processes now. Like get those out as early as you can and expose to users.
00:41:13
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, back then, I mean, this was a while like ago. Um, it took a while. Like we had to actually do design in a more rigorous way. We had, i mean, we had developers and we had, i mean, it took a while. it took months to do this stuff.
00:41:28
Speaker
mean, now you can do it in hours or days. um and thing But that was that was definitely like get it out there and and see if it works. And then if it does, invest more in it. And if it doesn't, tweak it, give it a chance to to to work.
00:41:42
Speaker
Tweak it again, maybe, and then de-invest in it if it's not working. So we had a number of features that rolled out, got a couple of different iterations, and then we're we're basically sunsetted pretty quickly because nobody used them or nobody wanted to use them.
00:41:56
Speaker
And so while they were really cool, If nobody uses them, it's not worth supporting and doing this. So that that's that's the number one thing that I have taken away from that in a lot of the work that I do now.
00:42:09
Speaker
Do you find that when you've invested in startups or in your own experience as well, I suppose, have you grown from falling in love with your idea to being willing to let those ideas die? Because a lot of entrepreneurs, right,
00:42:29
Speaker
One reason they sometimes don't go anywhere is because the market or the times or whatever is telling them to change or they're telling is telling them no.
00:42:40
Speaker
And they have fallen in love with that idea. Have you let those things go? Yes and no. Um, Mostly, i mean, I've never, and this is maybe just a a bit of a an offshoot of, I like new and innovative and creative stuff and I tend to get bored with it when it isn't new and creative. um And so for me, letting go of an idea once I've kind of explored it isn't super hard.
00:43:09
Speaker
um I mean, my weakness may be ah that I'm more willing to let it go and move on to the next, but there might have potential there that I let it go too early. um but But you do fall in love with your your stuff like and you want it to work and and you want to you want to get it there, especially when it's tied into a team or it's tied into investors. Like once once we raised like oblinder a window to our Series A money,
00:43:33
Speaker
You know, there was, there was a little bit more of that expectations. Um, and so we held onto some things probably too long. Um, and so from that, yeah, I've, I've definitely, i tend not to hold onto things. So I've built in the last year, i probably built eight.
00:43:51
Speaker
new venturable web products. Um, and only one of them is still turned on, um right now because the other ones, um, either didn't get market traction or I got, I realized as I, as I started finishing it up that, yeah, this really doesn't add value and it's not going to, I mean, I kind of made the self-determination of, yeah, there's anything here on on that side of things with the exception of my artwork.
00:44:19
Speaker
That's kind of the one thing that I give myself permission to. It's mine. It's my creative outlet. And i don't, I do it for me and I don't really care if anyone else likes it.
00:44:32
Speaker
i mean, I do like there's a sense of validation. It is nice to have that, but But I will continue doing that irregardless of whether there is a market for that because I enjoy the process of doing it. And it's something that fills me with energy and it's a creative outlet that I can do at any point in time.
00:44:50
Speaker
And then I can, yeah, it fulfills me. like The fact that I finished it it was done is is for me, not for anyone else necessarily. I think this is going to be a little bit of a jump, but...
00:45:04
Speaker
I don't know how much you are still thinking about blockchain, but i recall that it really was not that long ago that you were telling me that you were involved in one way or another with blockchain technology and you were interested in it. And Maybe that comes into your art as well. I don't know if NFTs or anything like that is relevant, but what's your current thinking on blockchain technology?
00:45:35
Speaker
It's a really interesting question. I'm not really sure where my current thinking is on blockchain is these days. um So quick background on on blockchain. So i I did get involved with it fairly early.
00:45:47
Speaker
um I it was somewhat fascinated by the the the process of how the early mining went with they basically the idea of like solving a mathematical proof and that you could build a machine to do that. And so I i built in the early days, I built like Bitcoin mining machines that were sitting in my basement.
00:46:06
Speaker
um I mean, this is when there was no market for it. Like literally, like ah We, we had one running in our early Action Sprout offices, just me and a couple of the guys there.
00:46:17
Speaker
And we would, we convinced a, a waffle truck, like, you know, sound waffle sandwiches kind of thing um to take bitcoins. Yeah. in exchange for food, um which was a for us, it was a coup because it was like this. You couldn't do anything. You couldn't cash it in for money. And so we had convinced this like food truck to like let us spend our things that we were mining for fun and get tasty waffles out of it.
00:46:45
Speaker
And so that's that. So we were doing that. But um and then and then I did get into it from an art standpoint. I was really fascinated with this idea of generative art. Can you use code?
00:46:56
Speaker
To help me kind of not automate, but enhance my process of how I do my art. So my art is composed of layers that are cut out of paper or wood.
00:47:08
Speaker
Mostly paper these days, like thick paper, like a map board, like what you'd frame ah a picture with. um And each of those layers is a really complex vector pattern.
00:47:19
Speaker
and each layer is a different aspect of that pattern so that it creates dimensionality. Like they're not all the same. Like it's like 12 different doilies, all with different patterns stacked on top of each other, giving you this depth and dimension.
00:47:34
Speaker
Um, and it was super time consuming. i mean, it would take me a hundred hours to, to come up with one pattern for an artwork. Um, And realized I could lean into generative code algorithmic, not AI generative, but like algorithmic code to help me take my designs and create random entropy within those so that I could create a new piece, the vector shape from something I had hand drawn.
00:48:02
Speaker
with randomness thrown in so imagine like rays from a sun i can draw that once one way but i can use code to draw that with the rays being different widths and heights and lengths each time it runs and each one is a unique output that i can cut and produce so kind of leaned into that and then nfts came on the scene um in a really big way and it was really easy for me to go o I really like this blockchain technology.
00:48:30
Speaker
I've got this generative art that I'm doing and I'm going to create generative and NFTs off of my code that I already have. um And so I did that um as NFT. So that's kind of, I got re-back into the blockchain and then exploited it there.
00:48:46
Speaker
um And it seemed like it had a lot of potential, like the idea of an open ledger where you could record stuff. um There was some challenges, energy consumption, some other things that that I felt were being worked on that would eventually be solved.
00:49:01
Speaker
um And I really got fascinated with it. both So to two places where I had real potential. And this is where I'm like, I'm not sure currently on this. One was in um giving creatives the ability to instantiate their thing that they made, whether it's a piece of digital art or whether it's a song that somebody wrote into a ah public translation.
00:49:27
Speaker
transaction register that allows other people to own and and see that and transact with it so if i have something on the blockchain i can sell it to you because you can go and look and see yep it's there and then when i sell it to you it's now ah yours and it's there so i thought within the creative space there was a lot of potential there um And i actually did a startup with a former colleague of mine where we did that for musicians. Like we, ah we did a product that allowed musicians to record live shows, instantiate those live shows on the blockchain.
00:49:57
Speaker
And then, um, be able, then then after you watched it, so you could, you know the musician would live stream, you paid and you bought your token to watch it. And then afterwards you had a recording that you could then sell.
00:50:08
Speaker
Like you could only watch that live show if you had the token. And so people could then resell the live show over time. So that was one one area. And then the other was in things that were a public good.
00:50:22
Speaker
um And so in particular, the tracking and tracing where your food comes from. So the ability to actually have an open transaction register that shows you where that coffee bean was grown, what the practices were, who bought it, what factory aggregated it,
00:50:42
Speaker
where it then went, what ship it went on, and then what store it went to, and and eventually to your house. So to be able to actually have that in an open transaction register in the food space, what I was really attracted to that.
00:50:54
Speaker
um And I still think there's a lot of potential there, but I don't know. like It's all Wild West right now, and there's not a lot of momentum, and it's hard to to get traction and in that space right now.
00:51:05
Speaker
And there's a lot of negative stuff around it. Like, I think we need to like, think things can just settle a bit and there needs to be some, some more refinement and maturing of the technology.
00:51:16
Speaker
With the tracking of the food, you know, agricultural products, and I'm guessing you could apply this to meat products, perhaps.
00:51:29
Speaker
You know, when I say meat products, for example, a cow comes from a specific farm. goes through a slaughterhouse or whatever it is, and then is butchered or packaged in a certain way and goes to a certain store or distributor whatever, I can track all of that. And I suppose you could layer data on top of that. That is any number of things from the way that it was handled to temperatures, to
00:52:00
Speaker
I don't know what. So you have visibility of things of that nature that the end user would potentially be able to look that up rather than simply having some organization just verifying that the animal was treated in a specific way or was the the supply chain was managed in some way. Is that correct?
00:52:27
Speaker
Yeah, and it's probably a a yes and. like it it would allow for the it would allow for the more efficient tracking of the supply chain by all the parties involved in it. So if you're Walmart and you need to meet your yeah ESG goals, you need that data to be able to do it. So it allows for those players to be able to just have access to it as part of their normal way of doing business.
00:52:46
Speaker
ah yeah It allows for the certifiers to... Potentially do their certification at a lower price point because it's really expensive. Like for non-GMO, we have we have verifiers. We have these organizations that actually do the verification. we We as the nonprofit don't actually verify the products. We create a standard that says what it needs to be to be verified. And then there are verifiers that actually do the work. Yeah.
00:53:12
Speaker
though They might do lab testing. They might do track and trace on the supply chain. They do auditing. They do affidavits. You know, they basically do all the stuff. It's not cheap to verify a product for any any of the verifications, whether it's organic or non-GMO or fair trade, ah because there's a lot of work involved in getting that data.
00:53:32
Speaker
If the data was just all there, then those verifications and certifications might be more accessible. Like they might actually be cheaper for that verification to be done, which I think one of the problems right now is most certifications and verifications are a premiumatization, which is great.
00:53:51
Speaker
It's an incentive. Like, why would you get verified so I can sell my product for $10? more like we know that non-gmo verification generally results in the ability to sell a product for at least 50 cents more if not a dollar more so that's just a straight profit mark i mean that's a good good business practice right if i get it verified i can i can get a little bit more um that detail But it makes it so that now all verifications or all certifications are just a way to increase the prices on things.
00:54:24
Speaker
I'm really boiling down. I'm in super cynical and boiling it down. So how do we, how would, how could we change that? Maybe by making the certification process cheaper because the data needed to do that is already in a public ledger that's there and makes that cheaper.
00:54:39
Speaker
And then the last piece is, as as a consumer, I could go and verify it. Like, most people are not going to. But if you wanted to, if you were a public watchdog group or a person that was really interested in it, right now, you can't, there none of it's public.
00:54:58
Speaker
Like, you can look at a product and it says it's non-GMO or organic. And for the most part, there's no data behind it. It said, trust us, don't worry, somebody has the data locked up, you can't look at it, you'll never be able to look at it, um type of thing. But if it was public and if was on a ledger, people could then hold the supply chains to account if they needed to or wanted to, type of thing.
00:55:24
Speaker
Or public, or you know the fourth estate like press could do that as well. like It would be there and be publicly accessible. I think you said that there's not a lot of support or something like that for things of this nature right now.
00:55:41
Speaker
And if I was hearing you correctly, is what are some of the things that take away from that support? Is it things like pricing pressure?
00:55:53
Speaker
You know, that even if, if I don't have a non-GMO label, you know, let's put put that away. It's just coffee bean or piece of broccoli or whatever it is that even adding another scent to each piece takes away profitability to for the the sellers. Is it something like that? Or are there other factors?
00:56:18
Speaker
That's one. I mean, that is definitely one. Like anytime you add reporting requirements to a supply chain, um somebody has to do that reporting, right?
00:56:28
Speaker
So whether it's the farmer the farm, now they have extra paperwork. I mean, it's basically paperwork creation to a certain extent. And so, yes, I mean, that's definitely one of the one of the friction points in the system is There's no data currently.
00:56:44
Speaker
if you add a bunch of data that needs to be the system, who does that? Where does it come from? um Is there. The second big resistance piece is especially in in a lot of supply chains.
00:56:59
Speaker
and And food is no exception. Opacity is by design. So most of these supply chains... there there are intermediaries in between the farmer and the the store shelf.
00:57:15
Speaker
um And in a lot of cases, there the only way they can protect their intellectual property is by obfuscating who and what they get their stuff from.
00:57:27
Speaker
So a distributor doesn't necessarily want you to know the names of the farmers. Like it seemed from a marketing standpoint, it seems great. You like to see these things where it's like, here's a meat or farmer and you know, here's, here's Jane Doe and you know, she's whatever.
00:57:42
Speaker
But in, in a lot of cases that isn't actually desired. Like there's a lot of work that goes into obfuscating the data in a supply chain so that those intermediary players can make money off of the, the triaging of the, of the stuff that's there so there. So there is a vested interest in not having data flow transparently across all these different things.
00:58:06
Speaker
And then i would say the more recent one is the the technology. Like if there was this open blockchain where anybody could contribute to and there's lots of nodes that are holding that data so it's not proprietary.
00:58:21
Speaker
um The kind of the gold rush that happened around NFTs and people just making all kinds of money and the proliferation of these these blockchain technologies. kind of destroyed the trust in the premise that it could be this openly held thing that was not just seeking to extract as much. but there was There was a lot of scams. There was a lot of illegal activity. There was a lot of just straight up profiteering that I think destroyed trust in the utility of those things and how they could be used not in ah in a totally profit-seeking way.
00:58:59
Speaker
And so I think there's still a lot of bad perceptions when you say blockchain or web 3 or any of those things most people myself somewhat included and initial reaction is like oh god another ponzi scheme like what who's gonna who's what are they trying to sell me now um and in all of that i think there's a lot of misinformation about how these things worked or didn't work that we're still on that people are still having to untangle i i think we will come out of it i think there's underlying really interesting the aspects of the technology and it's it's being done in places now more tra like less in the news like people are embedding this technology and not talking about it yeah you know as you're talking about
00:59:49
Speaker
there being a lack of transparency between, for example, a producer and various levels or stages in the supply chain, but between the producer and the consumer.
01:00:02
Speaker
I'm trying to differentiate in my head between a product that is more difficult to source from a single supplier.
01:00:15
Speaker
Like I've worked a lot with soybean farmers And lots of things go to a grain silo. you know, corn very often, wheat, soybeans, certainly, you know, i could have 10,000 acres of soybeans this year.
01:00:35
Speaker
And still the amount of product that I produce is generally not sufficient enough to be sold to a single buyer. So it goes to a grain silo, then that gets put into freight and I think it's roughly 60% of exported U.S. soy goes to China, for example. Who knows right now, given tariffs and whatnot, but it's somewhere around there. And then I think it's 27% or so goes to Mexico.
01:01:09
Speaker
And you have food, certainly, but a lot of it goes to feed chickens and hogs. And then you have some amount of soybean oil.
01:01:20
Speaker
And so... you know, you ah you have products like that. It's not impossible. It's just harder for me to sell directly to someone who's going to feed their chickens. But then there are other products that are, there's still some challenges, but just easier to sell to the, if not the end consumer, the, you know, reduce, remove some middlemen and And yet, even for a product where it goes to a grain silo or there are plenty of coffee beans, you know, I have built now in my life two coffee roasters myself.
01:02:01
Speaker
And so I don't know a lot about coffee, to be honest with you. I know just enough to feel like I know a lot and I really still don't.
01:02:13
Speaker
And there are, it's actually pretty rare when you get like a single origin coffee bean for it to actually come from a single farm at a single elevation.
01:02:26
Speaker
And so you'll still get things that are shipped together, processed together and so on. And despite that, There are ways to apply this technology, I know, where, yeah, we can't know everything, but we can have high confidence that 40% of this package, for example, this 50-pound bag of raw coffee beans came from one location or was treated in a certain way.
01:02:55
Speaker
And so you know, it seems to me like the very simplistic, like if I flatten this all down, the simplistic vision of it is, oh, like you basically just want it to be like the farmer who goes to the farmer's market and I buy directly from him, which I recognize in a globalized world, things are not going to be like that.
01:03:19
Speaker
But it seems like There are products where we really could simplify things down and provide, ah remove middlemen and and have a lot of transparency and other products where there's just more transparency, but it's still a complicated supply chain, I suppose.
01:03:37
Speaker
Right. or Or use technology to to simplify that. Like coffee is an interesting example. um There's a really great and company um example that's that's doing this. The name of the company is called Bext360. B-E-X-T 360. Their focus is mostly coffee.
01:03:56
Speaker
um And they do traceability from farm all the way through the supply chain. They use blockchain. So most of the stuff is registered on a blockchain.
01:04:07
Speaker
Not completely open blockchain, but there's some aspects of it that are... aggregated and anonymized and obfuscated to protect the the interests of the ah the aggregators of the stuff.
01:04:19
Speaker
um And they yeah they use technology to make it really efficient for really small farmer in Peru who then aggregates their stuff with their farmlanders 12 neighbors as it comes down the hill, like literally like they're like bringing something, they're just each putting their bags into the thing.
01:04:36
Speaker
And then it goes to distribution and then it goes to, um, another distribute. I mean, it's just the, the coffee's a really interesting one. Um, and how many different aggregation points it has.
01:04:47
Speaker
Um, And they track it all through that with using technology, sometimes like a QR code, sometimes they're using satellite imagery, sometimes they're using other automated AI things to to fill in the data more efficiently um and more accurately too, um I will add.
01:05:04
Speaker
Yeah. and and then have that that full thing. And there's pressure that allows them to do it. So in their case, in a lot of cases, it's because the supply chain values stuff like d for proof of of non-deforestation, and which requires you to know where it came from.
01:05:23
Speaker
it It requires you to know 100% of the beans came from these things and had no deforestation practices that were happening. Specifically, like to get stuff into the the EU, it needs to be, you need to prove that it has something called EUDR, which means you have to prove that there was no deforestation. So their traceability tracking around that, chocolate is another one that that they focus on too.
01:05:48
Speaker
same Same requirements. Wow. it allows for that at a regulatory standpoint to prove the whole traceability of it, but also then to be able to expose that from a marketing standpoint.
01:06:02
Speaker
So the big coffee buyers who buy that coffee need to A, meet their regulatory requirements to bring it in. Like, can't sell them in France if it doesn't meet these requirements.
01:06:13
Speaker
um They need to be able to meet their reporting. Like in the U.S., we have ESG reporting requirements. So like Walmart needs to be able to meet those requirements and have those things.
01:06:26
Speaker
And then they can expose that to end users and be able to say, we are we are doing responsible things, whether it's greenwashing or not. They're able to to show what they're doing and back it up with somewhat transparent supply chain data um that an auditor or a watchdog group could look at and and yeah validate that they're doing the right things.
01:06:50
Speaker
This really interesting to me. Just for just one reason that this is really interesting to me is that it seems like with a non-GMO project, because that's a label, right? So like, I can just use that as an example, even though I know you said that you all are not at that point right now, or at least I believe, I think I recall that.
01:07:13
Speaker
You know, a lot of debate that seems to go on in society, sort of ethical to debate, is not real ethical arguments or debate.
01:07:25
Speaker
It's really just arguing over the meaning of the language that we're using. So, you know, if if we talk about, let's see, we're recording this two days after flag day, if I recall correctly. So there was, you know, the no Kings marches and i don't know what, what else went on because truthfully, I am not super connected to the news. So forgive me if there, there's something big that I should know, but
01:08:00
Speaker
You know, I've said this before and I'll say it again, that when you, when you remove a lot of the triggering words from your statements, or if I ask you a question, like, do do you stand for freedom or do you value truth or whatever?
01:08:19
Speaker
Then, you know, or do you think children should be able to get an education or that, you know, accepting some really odd circumstances should every child as they grow have basically as many opportunities as possible?
01:08:34
Speaker
You know, some, some of these general things, just about everyone is going to agree. But then when we have to start making choices, you will choose to value one thing.
01:08:49
Speaker
i will choose to value another. And yet we'll still say that we value the same thing because we tend to interpret the word freedom or truth or who knows what just in different ways.
01:09:02
Speaker
And so with things like you know, women's reproductive rights, I think was a ah category that you said you you were fairly involved with, with Action Sprout.
01:09:17
Speaker
You know, more that we start to get close to the terms that have been weaponized or used as labels, the more we start to
01:09:32
Speaker
simplify those down to, you know, oh, well, that's a, that's a Democrat thing or Republican thing. Right. And not just, well, generally, do you think people should be able to have some determination over their body? Or do you think that a fetus deserves to be born or whatever they the issue is? I don't want to wade too far into specific positions.
01:09:55
Speaker
But it seems to me like for the non-GMO project that while on the label, you stand for products, I think, being non-genetically modified, I believe, that anyone who might criticize you and say, oh, well, you don't fully uphold your own standards or whatever, that having this visibility would then expose you potentially to some criticism, right? If there are flaws in your system or whoever's doing the verification, but also then give you the chance to win someone over who the only way that they can continue to not agree with you is to just dunk on you for the mistakes that every system, you know, the flaws that every system tends to have.
01:10:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. and And a lot of it's... so what what drew me to the to the non-jl project in particular um was a it is actually a nonpartisan issue so there's just as much support within somebody who is you know in the u s who has deep red versus deep blue it ah for the for the issue of non-JML and what it stands for as an organization. So it's not necessarily, um it's ah it's about that informed choice.
01:11:22
Speaker
So it's not necessarily saying this is good, this is bad um type of thing. I mean, we can all draw our own conclusions on whether we think it is or not. And I would say like currently based on the body of research that I've seen coming out in terms of the impacts of genetically modified stuff,
01:11:39
Speaker
I would probably categorize as there are more harmful outcomes from the work that we've done around that than our positive net benefits from, from those things. Um, that's just my personal opinion. So, but what, what we're trying to do is create a, a supply chain and a, and a choice, um,
01:11:56
Speaker
so And holding that, holding account to it so that if people care about it, if they don't want to put genetically modified things or purchase or or have those as part of what they eat, whether that's because they think it's corporate greed and they don't like corporate greed and has nothing to do with their health In general, they just don't want Monsanto or Cargill to own all the seeds because they don't like big business.
01:12:21
Speaker
Or whether it's because they believe biodiversity is really important and and that we need more biodiversity so that we don't jeopardize our hour natural growing environment. Or whether it's because we believe that when we mess around and put the DNA from a fish into a plant, that that might not be good for us biologically. Whatever that happens to be,
01:12:45
Speaker
that you have choices. Like you can go to the store and you can make those choices. You can pick something. and and the other labels are similar too in that regard. Like you can decide i like organic because of these reasons and I'll purchase it or not or fair trade, but you have a choice. You have an informed choice. You know that there's a thing, you can trust it and you can pick it out and there's enough of it.
01:13:08
Speaker
But you're not just, you know, you're not like, well, I don't want to do that, but there's only one, i can only eat spelt bread and like, I don't know. I was gluten-free for a while in the early days before there was all kinds of gluten-free alternatives and spelled brand was my example of like, oh, that's all I get.
01:13:24
Speaker
There's no informed choice. It's not really a choice. And so that' that's a big part of that that thing. Yeah. And it also drives what we're doing, like our next, so non-GMO project right now accounts for about 10% of the U.S. food is non-GMO verified.
01:13:42
Speaker
It's a about, you know, if I had estimates, somewhere around $50 billion dollars a year worth of food that is non-GMO verified that gets sold in that in the U.S. It might be a little bit larger than that. It's hard to track.
01:13:54
Speaker
There's no unified data set that says this is all the stuff. So, yeah. And within that, there's other places where there's no choice. There's no informed choice, um, happening.
01:14:08
Speaker
Um, and by the way, non-GMO is the largest of the labels, like most recognized largest supply were organic and non-GMO or like the two big ones. And then it's just like way far away as number three the 100, um,
01:14:21
Speaker
one hundred um We took a lot of look and and where are there other places where people are not being given a choice? um Where might there need to be things? And we actually launched this year and it'll start appearing on shelves the beginning of next year, January timeframe, around ultra processing.
01:14:40
Speaker
So just because it's non-GMO does not necessarily mean it is healthy. It might be in in whatever your values is, it's healthier than and the alternative GMO version.
01:14:54
Speaker
but it's not necessarily healthy in other spectrums. Like you can have an ultra-processed, non-GMO potato chip, for example, or, you know, bar or whatever it happens to be.
01:15:07
Speaker
And so that that's our next big thing. How do we apply informed choice to other areas where there is no informed choice? So you just introduced a level of complication that makes my next question maybe harder to answer.
01:15:25
Speaker
but So I'm going to illustrate some of what you just said before I ask the question. So i have something. i have orange juice with the label non-GMO.
01:15:39
Speaker
And
01:15:42
Speaker
Maybe i I just bought that because it makes me feel like I am buying something healthy because of my belief system or ah something a doctor told me or it doesn't matter where it comes from.
01:15:56
Speaker
I feel like I'm doing the right thing and my kids are going to be healthier and all that. And then when I look at the ingredients, the first ingredient is something like orange juice concentrate, which if I understand, you know, how things, how agricultural products are processed, then orange juice concentrate basically means that the sugar has been separated from the actual orange, essentially, and then it's mixed with water.
01:16:30
Speaker
So it's really just sugar is what I got. I just got non-GMO sugar. And so if I don't know that,
01:16:42
Speaker
then, you know, orange juice concentrate sounds like orange juice, right? And concentrate good, bad. I don't know. just depends on the information that I have. And so there's, you really have to be, you have to educate yourself or you have to do a lot of digging that you didn't have to do 70 years ago, perhaps, you know, before a lot of frozen foods and many packaged foods and all that, which if you want to go back, if, ah you know, I don't know about you, Sean, but the, for anyone, anyone that listens to this Clarence bird, I is an absolutely fascinating person.
01:17:24
Speaker
He essentially invented frozen foods. And so I kind of go back to that time when I think of lot of processing it and as soon as you could freeze things and people actually wanted to eat them, then You know, you have a lot of possibility. So, okay.
01:17:41
Speaker
Things are complicated just with how things exist right now. We have artificial intelligence. We've been hearing for a long time about artificial intelligence being used to design solutions in very complex spaces to identify prescriptions, proteins, treatments in medicine, who knows what.
01:18:04
Speaker
And so I could envision ah future where whether it's labeled as GMO or not, that there is a product that is produced. There are may be many products that are produced that in one way or another, there a a way of producing them, a way of modifying that corn, it doesn't really fit in the category of genetically modified.
01:18:34
Speaker
I don't know how organic would play in here necessarily, but doesn't really it It can be labeled as non-GMO. But much like I said, you probably want to know what concentrate means.
01:18:49
Speaker
it seems to me like we would want to have some verification that this thing was, I don't know, AI modified. And maybe I'm so uninformed that I'm just misunderstanding things here.
01:19:02
Speaker
But one, if I am, disabuse me of this scary future, please, this Skynet food future. and Two, if I am not, then it seems to me that we are on the edge. We're right at the beginning of a change with artificial intelligence where I'm not saying that non-GMO is the best thing, right? But with what you're saying, just being informed.
01:19:33
Speaker
that we might want to figure out some of this transparency and this education of the consumer because it's it seems like in one way or another, it's just about to get more complicated for the consumer.
01:19:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yes, I think so. Um, it's so funny. Our, um, one of our researchers just got back from the, um, synthetic biology, uh, synthetic biology conference. So synthetic biology is like the, the scientific name for like a lot of what happened, like that is the the field of genetically modifying things. Um,
01:20:08
Speaker
And AI is, was all over it. Like it has shortened send bio development times down to hours and they can actually use AI to develop and 3d print.
01:20:19
Speaker
Um, it's completely synthetic proteins now. Um, which is just mind Like, so to your point, like, yes, like the complexity, like the amount and the variations of, is it, what is it?
01:20:35
Speaker
is going to become even more complicated. Like before it was pretty, it was pretty clear. You could test for it. Um, the strains were there. You can run something through a lab test and say, this is natural or this has been genetic genetically modified.
01:20:47
Speaker
ai is going to blow all out of the water because who knows? Um, Because the pace, like the the rapid pace of of change is going to be hard for somebody to keep up on.
01:20:58
Speaker
um Us as ah as a project, we do a lot of research so that we know all the genetically modified strains so that we can test for them so that we have lab baselines to be able to do those things.
01:21:12
Speaker
And that is all 100% changing. i So i'm one, I'm really worried about where AI is going to take the pace of innovation on things that we don't know what they do to us.
01:21:25
Speaker
like There's a certain amount, like when you put it into your body and it impacts our health, how new of innovation do I want to put into my body, not knowing what it's going to do to me my complex biological system um that's there?
01:21:41
Speaker
And at the same time, I think there's really interesting applications for where AI might actually help us to come into relation with some of this stuff as humans a little bit more. um And so I think there's there's a couple of of interesting opportunities. One is we're using AI and testing the ability to use AI to help...
01:22:02
Speaker
brands, food companies to be able to actually evaluate their products and get to better formulations that are more informed, say like ultra processing, to be able to actually look at and determine how they could make it less processed using AI.
01:22:19
Speaker
So to actually help augment their, because they have limited, you know, they have limited stuff and they have to use what's coming at them. And so can AI actually help them to do the discernment in ways that actually allow them to move to alternate that are not necessarily synthetic biology, but, but just are maybe a little more complicated, um, cause they're natural. They're trying to formulate something using natural systems.
01:22:40
Speaker
Um, and then also on the, on the actual consumer side, because it's so complicated, um How do we, we have this concept of what we call food integrity.
01:22:52
Speaker
So non-GMO is one petal of that. um Ultra processing is another petal of that. um The packaging that it goes in is another aspect of that. I mean, like the amount I could go, I could spend hours on how packaging, like,
01:23:06
Speaker
It doesn't even matter about the food. The packaging you surround it with has its all whole complex stuff as well. The impact on water and life sheds that it's grown in, the the well-being of the people who actually are employed in the processes of you know growing, ranching, processing, um distributing.
01:23:29
Speaker
I think AI has the... And all that's really complicated, right? Yeah. AI might actually give us some more ability to have discernment and and or augment our ability to make those decisions by by helping us to think through or enlightening us with the knowledge at the right times in our process of evaluating what we want to eat or feed our families or what we're going to purchase.
01:23:55
Speaker
going to round out this part of the conversation just a little bit with a question that I think I know the answer to, I'm going to label it as the Norman Borlaug question.
01:24:07
Speaker
So, know, Norman Borlaug did a lot of work around um making wheat and I think soy, if I recall correctly, grow in areas that they didn't grow before.
01:24:23
Speaker
And he's trotted out very often as an example of why genetic modification is ah good thing. And i think there's, from my perspective,
01:24:36
Speaker
a a very good argument to be made for why you know certain genetic modification is valuable because there are so many more people in the world who can feed their families either because they're able to grow and sell their product or because they're able to buy it more cheaply.
01:24:55
Speaker
And because of the work that he did and think i have understood what you were saying about non-gmo as you know the individual can choose whatever they want for themselves it you believe that and some portion of your organization or maybe the organization as an entity, the position is not so much about the good or bad of genetic modification as much as you, the consumer, need to know.
01:25:31
Speaker
you that You have that right to know if your food has been genetically modified or soon ultra-processed or maybe even soon after that, AI mo modified. Is that right?
01:25:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I can't really speak for the organizational, um, directly like what it would, I can speak for myself in in terms of those things. Um, then yeah, I think that's, that would be an accurate, an accurate aspect of it.
01:25:56
Speaker
It is about making sure that there is that informed choice and that people can make those decisions based on being fully informed, being fully awake and aware and alive, um, around those, those types of things.
01:26:11
Speaker
Um, and understand the trade-offs. Like, i think I think it is an interest. I did a lot of work back in my Action Sprout days with the Gates Foundation. And the Gates Foundation is one of the major kind of, the it's the wrong word, but kind of pushers or propagators of GMO, especially seed stuff, specifically for their work in eliminating hunger in countries outside of the U.S., where there actually is a, you know, there is millions of people who die from starvation.
01:26:44
Speaker
um And the ability to bring genetically modified seed stock that can grow in those climates has stopped that from happening. um And isn't this is an interesting theoretical thing to think about because, yes, that has allowed for the production of wheat into areas where it normally wouldn't have grown, which in the short term stopped hunger and people dying.
01:27:10
Speaker
millions of people dying. It did so at the expense of looking at the life shed that was there, what was its carrying capacity, what was the biodiversity that might actually have been growing there.
01:27:25
Speaker
um And so there's a whole bunch of other wheat alternatives that are not wheat, like they don't make wheat bread, soardom and millet and and all these other things that longer term might have been a better, more resilient, um biodiverse solution, but the genetically modified ones were quicker, faster, cheaper, and easier to implement and had a much faster short-term gain.
01:27:53
Speaker
And then, but what is the long, like, so it's, I think it's holding those things in tension and what have we learned over time? and this is something for my whole career, I take away. Like, just because you can do something fast now
01:28:07
Speaker
doesn't mean you just do it. Like how do we, how do we resource ourselves, our community and the people to actually think critically through what it is that we're doing.
01:28:18
Speaker
And the, the, so this is the regenerative thing is living systems. We're all part of a really complex living system. We are not a bunch of clocks that we can take apart and put back together We are really complicated.
01:28:34
Speaker
um And we try, our current system tries to distill that down into these really mechanical mechanicalistic ways of of breaking it down into things that we can reproduce.
01:28:48
Speaker
And it seems to me, longer I've lived, the more we do that, the medium and long term we realize, oh, we didn't think of it as a living system. We thought of as a closet. I took it apart. I took the animal apart and I put it back together.
01:29:02
Speaker
And it didn't work. It didn't start back up. Like, I can do that with a computer. I can do that with a robot. I can do that with with computer code. I can't do that with a living system.
01:29:13
Speaker
So that's that's a lot of my my current thinking is how do we resource people And the by way, this is one of the big reasons I'm at the Non-GMO Project is I think that ability to think, whether you want to call it critically or just think, requires us to be metabolically nourished to even be able to approach that.
01:29:35
Speaker
So if we are consuming food that doesn't metabolically nourish isn't ideal metabolically for us it creates issues that interfere with our ability to think at a fundamental level if and i mean if you really want to boil it down if you're hungry and you don't have access to food ah you can't it's really hard to think but if you eat food that doesn't nourish you and it creates health issues like say diabetes or that's that's a burden that's making it hard for you to think
01:30:08
Speaker
expansively and be awake and in relation to things. You introduced something that I was not expecting and so you might have sort of answered this question but I wanted to ask you to either predict the future or tell me what you think is possible for the future.
01:30:37
Speaker
So artificial intelligence is creating a lot of uncertainty right now in certain fields. There's either a lot of change already or you can tell it's just between one and five years away.
01:30:54
Speaker
And it really doesn't matter whether we're talking about being some type of accountant or a strategist or biologist of some flavor, whatever it is.
01:31:06
Speaker
If it's not there right now, there is uncertainty because you know it's going to to create some change. So however it is that you see things, do you have a prediction for, you know, the future of humanity, the economy, food, wherever it is that you are focusing, you know, and like, that's the thing that you want your children, for example, to know or be prepared for, or you want the world to be preparing for.
01:31:40
Speaker
What do you think is coming?
01:31:43
Speaker
I don't know. Like, I think, and I, and I think that's kind of the answer to like what I think. So I think we're entering a period of systemic destable destabilization.
01:31:55
Speaker
um I think AI is just one of those things. So I think there's there's theory, like in complex complexity theory, there's the idea of cascading system collapse.
01:32:06
Speaker
um And I think we're entering a period like that. um And whether I think AI is a contributing, will be a contributing factor to it. the misinformation, disinformation, political divisiveness climate will be a factor to that.
01:32:21
Speaker
um The climate and it's its kind of tipping point changes that are happening with wildfires and droughts and floods and all those kind of things will be a ah point of it. But there's is enough of these collapses that are happening.
01:32:36
Speaker
Usually a collapse will be contained within a single system. So it won't ripple out to the the other connected, interconnected systems. And we're seeing those actually ripple across a number of different things. And so if I have to predict the future, I think we'll we'll actually see some some significant cascading system collapses that span across the whole thing.
01:32:57
Speaker
Political, environmental, economic, And where we where where that leaves us is the, I don't know. But I think that's what we're we're going to see.
01:33:09
Speaker
Will it be fast? I don't know if those things, I mean, that yes, they are. And also our ability to perceive things and adapt to them quickly. Is it really interesting? Like we as humans have the ability to just rapidly adapt to stuff in weird ways. I mean, in ways like countries and stuff people have adapted to those things and we can look at it from the outside we haven't adapted and and be like how do people live like that and people that are there are living they're living um totally different um and so that that's my prediction is that i think and especially ai will be this massive accelerant in in propagating that systemic collapse across all the the sectors and and everything that's there
01:33:54
Speaker
I think I'm not hearing what you're saying as so much of a doomsday vision like i think it would be easy when you talk about multiple systems collapsing that it would be easy to hear that as ah doomsday vision i'm not interpreting it as much like that as you sort of saying there are many systems that depend upon one another and that because of whatever the the specifics are today that one system
01:34:28
Speaker
ah having a pandemic, for example, can affect the economy like that and can affect the supply chain. Maybe the supply chain affected the economy or who knows what I should throw in here.
01:34:41
Speaker
And I think I hear you saying that you imagine that it's just so much easier for one negative thing, i think, to have a quick and detrimental negative impact to the next system or the next thing.
01:35:01
Speaker
And I suppose, you know, at the same time that something's going down, something else can be going up. So it could be, you know, that our economy is really hot, right? But that increases inflation, which some people would say that's a bad thing, right? So it's not all necessarily bad, but.
01:35:18
Speaker
I think it's about things can happen so quickly and how do we have some forethought and and have some insurance or some crisis plans or develop solutions for these black swans.
01:35:35
Speaker
And what do we want to see come out of So, I mean, i think the the the upside to collapses or disruption is that it creates moments of change where like pretty significant change can happen.
01:35:50
Speaker
I think it's up to all of us to be awake and be able to think and and not be thought. Thoughting is like re they just regurgitating other things, but like actually able to think and take advantage of these collapses to kind of restructure it, to refactor it within what what actually is better for us, our future generations, the planet, the you know the whole the whole system as a whole, and for all of us to be kind of just aware and awake as these things happen.
01:36:19
Speaker
Because I don't think you can plan too far ahead. But they what things will get, check I think, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, things are going look really, really, really different.
01:36:31
Speaker
probably not in a Mad Max. or I mean, it could be. i mean, like, who knows? um But probably not. I'm not thinking Waterworld or Mad Max or, you know, like, apocalypse kind of things. But the people who are awake and moving it will have massive ability to influence what that change looks like and what it becomes because it will break down traditional power structures. It will break down the things that are kind of entrenched because it will become completely distaste. Like, things will become very destabilized and very disrupted.
01:37:02
Speaker
And so what does that look like as we come into it? Well, Sean, there are a lot of things that I want to ask you about, but you're always so generous with your time. So I try not to use too much of it. So I will largely leave it there with the exception of two questions. One is I'm going ask you if you have questions.
01:37:22
Speaker
lasting or final words of wisdom or things you want people to think about. And then before you get there, where you want people to go, whether people should connect with you on LinkedIn or they should check out the non-GMO project or whatever else so that I can put links in the show notes.
01:37:39
Speaker
Sure, sure. So if leave you with one thing, it's read Carol Sanford's book, No More Gold Stars. um i All of her books are really good, but it in particular is one that really just, it spoke to me and it was what I was seeking in terms of a lot of like, what does it mean to run a business in a responsible way um so that's i would definitely encourage that one um from ah leaving it there and then linkedin twitter i'm you know you can find me sean kemp on just about all the platforms um and it's me like i'm i was digital native enough to get it before the basketball player the two basketball players who also have the exact same name as me um
01:38:23
Speaker
So most of that digital presence is is me, but LinkedIn or Twitter or X, I guess it is now, are usually pretty good places to DM me. Awesome. Well, Sean, I appreciate you being here.
01:38:37
Speaker
And, you know, the last time we were going to record the internet and cell phone service went out around me. So, you know, maybe i think that's really one system, but I'm going to think of it as two systems going down. Who knows what could have happened? Thankfully, they stopped it there.
01:38:53
Speaker
So I appreciate you making the time. And i I would love for this to be twice as long. But again, I don't want to use too much of your time. So thank you for being here. Thank you, Eric. This is great.
01:39:05
Speaker
Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you got a lot out of today's conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe, and please share it with someone you know who'd appreciate this kind of information.
01:39:21
Speaker
If you want to bring this kind of thinking to your own business, check out mine at inboundandagile.com. We specialize in helping leaders with challenges around marketing, communications, and leadership so they can inspire real action in their people and audiences.
01:39:39
Speaker
Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll come back for future episodes.