00:02:34

Roarke Clinton: I know that you were in it just for a second because I saw you. I think you're in the Google Meet. Yeah, let's go jump in the Google Meet because I do have it running there and it's just not running here, so.

00:02:47

Corey Cleland: Thanks. Hey, we got Firefly and Roark.

00:03:24

Roarke Clinton: I actually can hear you a lot better for some reason.

00:03:27

Corey Cleland: Cool. Change.

00:03:36

Roarke Clinton: I'm really excited to learn about Endemic from you. I've been looking at your website and getting kind of into the weeds on it a bit and just so, I mean, it's a beautiful platform and system you guys are working on.

00:03:55

Corey Cleland: Cool. Yeah. Yeah, you've. Yeah. Tell me, tell me what all you've checked out. We've got a lot of different things going on.

00:04:09

Roarke Clinton: So I've been reading up on the main page, looking into the main gist of like sacred societies building villages, working in design for community. Creating in a way that brings people together, that makes them. The talent feel. Feel good.

00:04:34

Corey Cleland: Nice.

00:04:35

Roarke Clinton: Yeah. And I guess there's like so much here. It's. It's way. It's very dense.

00:04:41

Corey Cleland: Yeah. Yeah, we, we want to come back to redesigning the. I have a vision for redesigning the main landing page. That's very simple. But, you know, we'll get there.

00:04:57

Roarke Clinton: I mean, at the same time, it's so, you know, having that amount of density shows the. The, you know, the commitment and this thoughtfulness around it. But I'm. I'm curious about. Yeah. What that looks like eventually.

00:05:12

Corey Cleland: But, yeah. I mean, have you. Have you checked out the Divinity School website?

00:05:19

Roarke Clinton: I have, and I've got it up, actually.

00:05:23

Corey Cleland: Yeah. I mean, that's an example of, like, I really like a user experience where people have to opt into complexity, and I feel like we did that well with the Divinity School. There's things I want to improve about the Divinity school flow, but, yeah, that's basically like, with the Endemic landing page. I. I want to, like, run with that same principle that, like, you kind of give people just enough to get them to, like, take the next step and then it, like, opens up to more complexity. Yeah.

00:05:59

Roarke Clinton: Progressive disclosure.

00:06:00

Corey Cleland: Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's my preference. And I like. I like a lot of. You'll see with the Divinity School, especially, I like. We. I like. I like playing with, like, both a lot of spaciousness and a lot of text. You know, like, we're. We have a lot to say, so I. I don't think we get to get out of having a lot of text. But I. I like the. I like the play between, like, big fonts and spaciousness and dense text and, you know, kind of feeling like you're opting in along the way. So. Yeah.

00:06:42

Roarke Clinton: That'S awesome. Yeah. To have. To have a way for people to learn about what's going on and then build from there and then also be able to access at the level of complexity at which they're expecting again, you know, if they've done something or learned something, then jumping back into it definitely needs to be quite, I don't know, reactive dynamic. But, yeah, it's. It's an interesting place to be in. In a life, you know, it's like, very cool.

00:07:24

Corey Cleland: Yeah. Yeah. Tell me. Tell me a bit about you and how you. How you like to work and how you fit into IRIS and how we might collaborate together best. Yeah, you know, I don't. I don't actually have any insight. I did look at your site, so I have a sense of, like, how you've, you know, presented yourself to the marketplace world. But, yeah, I don't necessarily understand yet how it fits into the IRIS system or how we. How we best collaborate. Yeah.

00:07:59

Roarke Clinton: So when I reconnected with James and I went to college together at Syracuse. We studied architecture.

00:08:06

Corey Cleland: Nice.

00:08:07

Roarke Clinton: And when I reconnected with James, he was. He. He's been working on quite a few projects through his agency and he's, he has all these interesting, you know, platforms that he's supporting and kind of world changing, making things better alignment with these communities. And it really struck me that I wanted to work on in that space and on those things again and not really work on the things that I've been working on and I wanted to bring all the things that I've learned from the place that I've been into this space. So like helping really turn what we've been doing through the different methods that James has been using and start implementing some methods, product management methods specifically into the practices that we're doing here.

00:09:04

Roarke Clinton: Making sure that we're tracking user stories and understanding not just the client's asks but the client's users needs and helping the client manage and prioritize those needs. And then you know, talking about backlogging, you know, different tasks that we can push off into the future and prioritizing things that we can get the most bang for a buck now so that it's a lower cost to create something more valuable in my experience it's about helping over month over month is like helping a company learn and lean into their users needs and build the least like complex thing and making the most, you know, also the most valuable thing. So it's like trying to measure those and it's about helping our team keep a rhythm each month and it's with one client or with many.

00:10:09

Roarke Clinton: It's just making sure that our team has a certain amount of work in progress that is on their desk and it's not overwhelming them. We don't want to have talent with essentially like a ton of micro tasks going on so that they're just, what is it called, you know, doing many things at once.

00:10:32

Corey Cleland: Yeah.

00:10:32

Roarke Clinton: And yeah we want to have them have a certain amount of work in progress and be able to accomplish the tasks and do it quickly and efficiently and focus and in a way that everybody, you, them and our other clients can predict. So sure my kind of my like overall goal and like the general idea and then I've been you know, working on the product to do that with Iris in the background and actually building the platform for it. I've always been in, I've actually have a background in UX design and interaction design and website and apps and building things having built like interfaces for Johnson and like you know, who's to say what the company is good for but like the organization needed a.

00:11:37

Roarke Clinton: So Johnson and Johnson needed like a supply chain system and we helped, I helped design as like the main designer, a system to track all of the things from production, from resourcing materials to shelves and giving a one page system where a layman person could go on and say like, hey, this thing just came up in the news. Where did, where are all the other things that we just sent out to different stores and where did it come from and where, you know, where are the lines of information going? So they can essentially track it and take it off the shelves and also adjust things going on in their workspace.

00:12:23

Corey Cleland: Nice. What was your role in that?

00:12:26

Roarke Clinton: I was building an information architecture of their system, also doing the wireframing of the system and then prototyped it.

00:12:37

Corey Cleland: Nice. Cool. Cool. Yeah. My other work, I have an international development company called Prosperity of the Commons International also. And we're building a lot of tooling for mostly tracking. Like ultimately it's tracking the increasing well being of laborers across a supply chain. But it requires a lot of items, specific tracking and mapping so that the data can continue to get passed on as the item moves more and more towards the consumer. So yeah, maybe, you know, maybe there's things for us to talk about there in the near future also.

00:13:33

Roarke Clinton: That's really interesting and cool to hear that. That's the goal.

00:13:39

Corey Cleland: Yeah, we want consumers to be able to see that their purchases are actively increasing and decommodifying labor at the end of the supply chain.

00:13:50

Roarke Clinton: That's beautiful. Yeah, I'd love to check that out as soon as you guys feel ready.

00:13:56

Corey Cleland: Yeah, yeah. Let's set up another call in a couple of weeks and I'll share with you where we're at with that. Sounds like you have a lot of relevant experience for that. I haven't. I worked with a different design team on that website. James has done a little bit of tinkering with us on that, but I would love to work with James. I mostly on it. I would love to work with Iris and y'all and you know, whatever. I have the experience of James usually feeling a bit underwater with all the work. So I've been, I have a few different design teams that I work with across projects and try to keep James in Endemic world. Yeah. But I know he keeps trying to add efficiencies.

00:14:53

Corey Cleland: Like, you know, I'm sure this is a moment with him working with you to add efficiencies to the team and grow the team.

00:15:00

Roarke Clinton: Yes, it's that moment. It's exactly that moment where we're working very hard to make sure that, you know, we're changing his model actually entirely. His model used to be in a way, sell like talk to a client and sell the client on a specific thing. And it could be blocks of time or it could be, and that could be used at any time or it could be like a particular project and then the scope kind of grows and whatnot. But it also could have been billable hours at the end. We're transitioning now and has James told you anything about our model that's coming up?

00:15:46

Corey Cleland: He, I think he may have actually sent me a document and asked me for feedback and I may have been a bad friend and not done that. Oh, so. So I don't know. I think the answer is yes actually. And I need to like look back in our history. I recall like maybe two months ago he sent me something.

00:16:06

Roarke Clinton: Okay.

00:16:07

Corey Cleland: So I should, yeah, I should check that out. And yeah, I think I didn't get into it.

00:16:14

Roarke Clinton: Well, let me bring, I guess summarize it because we'll, if we end up, I hope we end up working together on these projects. The, the way that we're going to be moving or offering our services is through what we're calling an initiative. Actually. He's, he said let me just look at the paper just on making sure that I'm following what he, the gist is it's an administrative management system or a product management system. And we're often offering three scales. Prism scale, flow scale and momentum scale. And essentially we've come out, we figured out how to define our creative units per month that are worth a certain amount and what we can give to different clients. So we, at different scales, we say like our Prism scale is almost $2,000 and then our flow scale is almost, it's like $3,600 and our momentum scale, $6,900.

00:17:25

Roarke Clinton: And I guess I missed the fourth scale which is, you know, basically coming soon and not available yet. But it's somebody who just wants us on their team, being their team. So it's, that's going to be like a twelve thousand dollar thing where we're just the team and we do all the work and we're, we don't take it on other clients in a way. And so I've helped him transition from a place where he's offering, you know, he's selling each time each new project thing and essentially building a subscription model. So, you know, like a client like yourself would say, hey, I want to be at the Prism scale.

00:18:06

Roarke Clinton: And then for a month, you know, and then next month we'll be at the Prism scale, and then the third month down, we'll say, well, we want to move up to the flow scale because we've got more work coming. And then we want to move down, and then we want to say, you know, we're going to take off for three months. It just gives us a way to predict how much work is coming and from which clients. And then, you know, we're talking about initiatives now instead of like, specific things. And we'll be meeting on those initiatives at the beginning of the month and then looking through and trying to weigh the initiatives with our team, our dev team, the people who will be working on it with you.

00:18:48

Roarke Clinton: The value, you know, I was talking about product management taking into consideration like, the value of a specific thing and how much effort it would take and then prioritizing it against all the other initiatives you have, your users. So that's kind of the gist here.

00:19:08

Corey Cleland: Cool. Cool.

00:19:09

Roarke Clinton: Yeah.

00:19:11

Corey Cleland: Cool. Yeah. I mean, that's great. It's, you know, my experience has been that, you know, it takes probably like six to eight times as long than James and I expect to actually complete sites and builds. So I'm, you know, I'm curious about being able to both speed things up with, you know, Yalls new, you know, team and management and systems, you know, is. Yeah. And yeah, just like, you know, if you're moving to a subscription model, basically, it will lead to, on both parties, us being better at, you know, actually like executing and getting things done and not letting things draw out.

00:20:11

Roarke Clinton: So, and it's, you know, it's in our interest to hit those time frames and to say, like, you know, if it's taking six to eight times longer than it should, something's wrong. We don't have the right talent on it or we don't have, you know, things, and you're not going to want to continue subscribing. So it's in our best interest to really stack our team the right way.

00:20:36

Corey Cleland: Yeah.

00:20:37

Roarke Clinton: Hit those milestones every month and say, you know, get. It's a. It's essentially like meeting expectations monthly and just building a system where you and us have like this pace or this rhythm that's like, okay, here are the things that we want to work on. Here are the, you know, the people that we can work with or we can bring more people on and, you know, we can start using new technologies and jump into executing and finishing those on time, so.

00:21:07

Corey Cleland: Cool. Cool. And, yeah, I also, like, you know, Endemic is, like, kind of complex. You've got a bunch of different things going on as you've. As you've seen. It's. You know, I think that being able to plan right. Right now, like, being able to plan something like, two months in advance is probably doable. I think anything more than that would probably, like, a lot of. A lot of opportunity kind of emerges as things come into form. That's been. That's been my experience and seeing, like, the difference between, you know, what I. What my vision is and what happens, which is, you know, not a good or bad thing. It's. You know, it's not necessarily worse or better or anything. It's like. It's good. It works. But, yeah, you know, there's. I do experience.

00:22:04

Corey Cleland: There's a difference between, like, the projection that I have of what will. What will build and what actually happens. So, you know, that. That also leads to a lot of, like, cool. Let's. You know. Cool. This is. This is what happened. It's great. That means, like, these new possibilities or these alternative possibilities. So I think that my. My sense is that's something that we'll be kind of playing with along the way in trying to, like, do better planning and. And management. Yeah.

00:22:40

Roarke Clinton: Yes, absolutely. Being, you know, working to accomplish and be able to accomplish the expectations that you have are key. Being able to make sure that we're not only building the thing that you expected us to, but aligning on the thing that we're talking about and then building it and then making other things that could be cool, too. Yeah.

00:23:04

Corey Cleland: Yeah.

00:23:04

Roarke Clinton: If you want.

00:23:06

Corey Cleland: We always end up aligning. That's the thing. We always end up aligning with the goals. The vision is often different, you know, which is good. It's. It's fine. You know, it's just. It just leads to differences in what comes next sometimes, like, minor. Minor differences, you know, or new opportunities that. That I didn't see before. So that's all. Yeah. But, yeah, you know, overall, I'm excited that y'all. That, you know, that Iris and y'all are becoming more structured. James and I have been in this conversation for years about Iris becoming more structured, and I know that he's. He's tried a few times, and I feel. I feel in getting to meet you, I feel the most hopeful that I have so far. So that's good. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:11

Corey Cleland: I feel, I feel that you're trying to actually sense into what we're up to and that's good. And yeah, I like the, I like having the feeling of a longer term relationship because again, like what we're up to is like pretty deep and complex. So it takes time. Yeah, Yeah, I, I feel that way too.

00:24:41

Roarke Clinton: And I've been, we've. I've been seeing the changes ever since I came on and James and I had a call maybe like six months ago, just like getting into what things were going on with his organization, how his clients were working, what I was up to, and it just started feeling good and it was an interesting place to be and I knew that I was going to connect with amazing folks. So I just wanted to see what I could do and I'm here and I think that James has, you know, some. James is somebody who has the magic and he's definitely like tuned in and I love it. And I, I've. I thrive when I'm catching up with him or when we're working on different things together and also when I just see what he's up to and what he's working on.

00:25:44

Roarke Clinton: Recently, ever since I met him, he's been like that. And it's just been a cool thing to be back in the swing of things or reconnecting and working on things like this. So we're going to see if it really feels, and I think at this moment it feels long term. So I'm just interested in making that happen by producing this initiative management system. You'll be able to like log into it and see all the initiatives that we've got and then from there jump in directly to kind of the initiative. If, let's say we have 10 initiatives or one initiative, they could be like super small things that are just, you know, jumping into, fixing, tweaking the interface a little bit or a large initiative. And we'll base those on different amounts of creative effort units.

00:26:44

Roarke Clinton: So those will have their, you know, we could have three initiatives that have a lot of creative effort units or three that have just three or less. And it'll help us manage those and be able to identify which, how much work we have and what's coming up and.

00:27:05

Corey Cleland: Cool.

00:27:05

Roarke Clinton: So. Yeah.

00:27:07

Corey Cleland: Cool.

00:27:07

Roarke Clinton: Is there anything that you could share with me that just kind of grounds me in the work that you'd like to do with us right away?

00:27:17

Corey Cleland: Like, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've gotten really used to like not sharing too much in the future because I found that it, like, is a bit too much to take in. So I'll, you know, I'll still not do too much of that and yet. And. But yeah, the. Basically the next things are to improve the way in which we operate the Circle platform and make it easier for our users. So that's really simple tasks. You know, it's not, like, creative. It's not very creative. Things like the single sign on. Things like setting up workflows and our emails and potentially a course. And all of that is stuff that.

00:28:13

Corey Cleland: Except the single sign on is stuff that I could do but would want you all to be aware of in case you're like, oh, we can add components or custom code or whatever and make it way better. So, you know, I would. I would. I would put together a brief about that work and then get your feedback on how y'all would be involved and what opportunities y'all see. So that's the thing, the Divinity school, it doesn't do a very good job of targeting our audience yet. So there's a creative, like, experience that I want to land, that I want to add to it on the landing page.

00:29:01

Corey Cleland: That specifically is like a, you know, some kind of, like, moving network of the emerging fields where we want to identify candidates and people ideally would hover over those fields and then our definition of that field would show up. So the Divinity School is, like, trying. The goal is to target people at the intersection of the two tracks. I don't know if you got far enough to see the tracks, but can.

00:29:36

Roarke Clinton: You tell me about it?

00:29:37

Corey Cleland: Yeah, yeah. So the tracks are the horizons of biological intelligence and naturalizing machine agency. And we're basically saying that there's new. There's new possibility for machines to extend the agency of nature and for nature to be more powerful. There's a scientific view on this. It's a very scientific view, like creating LLMs that operate more like biological systems. Like, that's a. And that's a blend of technology and science. And then there's an engineering view on this. And that's like making machines that feel more natural and understand relationships in their context, in their place in that more like a natural organism would. So that ultimately, so that we don't build worlds that accommodate machines, so that we continue to build worlds that accommodate humans, but even more so than we have done so far, that also accommodates ecological systems. So that's the, like, core things.

00:31:12

Corey Cleland: So we're trying to attract the students that are innovating in these fields, and we're Basically saying this is a. This, this requires to be able to actually do this. It requires a particular religiosity. So we're focused on training people to be leaders, to be able to activate the right partners, to be able to communicate rigorously, to defend their position rigorously, and to do it in a way that motivates this feeling of free energy in the collective to act on these things. So that's. That's the Divinity School. Yeah.

00:31:56

Roarke Clinton: I've never heard the word religiosity or that is such a cool word. I'm very interested in words.

00:32:06

Corey Cleland: Yeah. Yeah. The way that works us too. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, the Divinity School, it's not theological. And that's part of the problem right now. People read the Divinity School, they read Leadership, you know, and most of our target audience is like, this is definitely the right thing, but they're not like, this is for me, you know, So I want to. I want to close that gap by just naming. Naming these emerging fields. I have. Have a list of about 25 fields that are all with. With active projects. Most of the projects are, like, very technical and quite small. And I've defined them in the way that I view them, basically. And yeah, I want to make some kind of interactive art that. That's where people start from so they can be like, oh, interesting. This is, you know, this is.

00:33:04

Corey Cleland: For me, this is targeting me, basically. So that's. That's the next big thing with the Divinity School. I have some vision for that, you know, and my anticipation is that we would start with like, you know, naming some examples of similar things, similar, you know, design elements like this in the world, and then kind of playing around with figma or something to, you know, see how. See how it might come together. Yeah.

00:33:44

Roarke Clinton: Well, that sounds like a really fun project and something to help out with. There's. So I was just, you know, imagining the. I'm.

00:33:54

Corey Cleland: I'm just.

00:33:55

Roarke Clinton: I just caught a lot of what the projects are that you're working on. So essentially, improve the way Circle's going. There's some technical stuff that can be done. Sso workflows, courses, support. Is the work. The Circle platform, the thing that you're logging into through the Divinity School.

00:34:17

Corey Cleland: No. So originals. Have you checked out originals?

00:34:23

Roarke Clinton: I don't think I have that pulled up.

00:34:25

Corey Cleland: Cool. That's Endemic.org originals.

00:34:28

Roarke Clinton: Okay. And originals, like, it's like I said.

00:34:33

Corey Cleland: We'Ve got a lot going on. Yeah. And it's like. It's like, not really findable as a Whole. That's part of. It'll be.

00:34:43

Roarke Clinton: Yeah, yeah, so I'm on the originals, but it says okay, buy the Divinity School.

00:34:47

Corey Cleland: So.

00:34:48

Roarke Clinton: Okay, yeah, so that's, that's what. Okay, so if you hit join there. That's what I was meant. Meaning if you hit join on this page.

00:34:57

Corey Cleland: Yeah, that goes to.

00:34:58

Roarke Clinton: Okay, so.

00:34:59

Corey Cleland: Yes, basically, yeah. So we have like a little over 50 members that signed up this past month for originals. It's a forty dollar a month membership. We've, you know, so far we've given basically everyone a 50 discount. And the platform, I, I mean I can actually, I can just share my screens and I, I imagine you haven't seen inside of it. Sounds like. No, I haven't seen inside of the platform. So let's see. And this is it. So. Okay, see, so this is the platform. Interesting. Beautiful. Here we go. So you're seeing my like admin view. So like this users wouldn't see this and some of the other things in here that you're seeing. But see, so the main thing. So basically over time we kind of adopted in the platform the brand of the Divinity School and Originals.

00:36:23

Corey Cleland: Originals has a slightly different brand than the Divinity School, but they're pretty similar. And we basically adopted that. We've made this art, this is all AI generated art that we had our friend Micah Daigle produce. I'm hoping that y'all can pick that up moving forward and we might have some art that we need soon. We have some new interviews coming up. But yeah, so we kind of took on the brand of the originals for the whole platform. Just to keep it really simple. Over time, the, this will, this box will remain this brand. The rest of the platform will change. We'll end up having other schools in here. We're working on a couple other schools right now. Also INTIMAC as a whole is the, you know, I'll send you a way to get in here without having to pay for it.

00:37:22

Corey Cleland: But after our call so you can check out. You know, we explain a bunch of stuff in here about what we're up to. But yeah, so this is people's experience when they sign up. And there are certain things in here that. Yeah, I mean especially signing up could be a lot better. I think that we're getting friction on sign up and logging back in. But yeah, this is, let's see, this is our most active post so far. Yeah, I got eight comments in here. You know, but the basic thing is that we're the rest of the platform is going to end up being like four members for free. You can sign up to get a membership, you can come to some community calls, you can come to some study groups. The, the things in this box are going to remain paywall blocked.

00:38:36

Corey Cleland: So we're about, we're approaching a moment where we're going to scale the Endemic community more and you know, start doing more freely available content to start enrolling people, you know, in the original and Divinity school and in the future, other schools that are in here. The. I started building out a course and we are actually probably we're about to start working on a course that is for Endemic, that is teaching people to source data for GIS systems and map that data and create associations with that data and then to as a second part of that be able to create 3D models and place them in Unreal Engine.

00:39:40

Corey Cleland: The person that we're going to work with on that has like 3D, like GIS, like it's like a tool that is incorporating a bunch of different data sets to be able to design new architectures using real world data in Unreal Engine. That's going to be the end of the course. I'm expecting James to be excited about this and potentially contributor to the course and it sounds like maybe you as well. That's the thing we're working on. That's an Endemic thing. We're expecting that and it will be paid. Expecting some of those people to be people who are interested in originals in the divinity school. But we're wanting to like start making these differentiations more and more so that, you know, Endemic doesn't feel like originals. But I wanted to show you I started building this course.

00:40:47

Corey Cleland: We were working on this course with some partners. Yeah, see, I can't even show you. I'd have to log in as someone else, which is annoying. Let's see. Oh, but they're not yet. They're not going to be able to see it actually. I don't think. Yeah. Anyway, I started building out this course in here. It was really unattractive. So I hit it basically. So that's the cor. The, the Amazon. Amazon Futures. We started this. We're basically building out this course to align different stakeholders, especially funders working on Amazon Restoration, like the Amazon Jungle Restoration. And yeah, I think we had like 24 modules or something. We, we may come back to this course. But anyway, the UX in here was not very attractive.

00:41:56

Corey Cleland: So it, you know, it has me feel as though in launching any Course we're gonna want to talk about that to make it. I, I know that there's a lot we can do in here to make it much more attractive.

00:42:12

Roarke Clinton: Yeah, well, I think overall it's really interesting the style that you have done it in and I know that it would, it will change as our work continues. I'm really interested in seeing those, there's other schools that you're talking about and how they will play against or not. Maybe not against, but with the originals in here. So that it becomes more apparent that, you know, there are multiple schools within the system, you know.

00:42:42

Corey Cleland: Yeah.

00:42:43

Roarke Clinton: And by different, you know, by different groups and how that all works. I, when we first started looking at it, I was kind of like trying to see the difference, but because there's only one school at the moment, it probably makes it feel like it's just that. Yeah. And yeah, I'm really fascinated by the grouping of education that you're bringing together. The people, those, the values. That's fantastic.

00:43:12

Corey Cleland: Well, look, the overarching goal for Endemic is to basically build schools that attract the kinds of talent that we need to build the futures that we want and then to leverage the value creation of those schools to underwrite the building of an actual campus to have it in place somewhere. Yeah, that's, you know, that's the. So, so a lot of the like, so there's like a connecting thread there, you know, like one of the next schools that we'll do is going to be a whole systems culinary school that will teach people, you know, like, similarly robust. The divinity school is a 500 hour, one year program that is half of the credits required for a master's degree. And we've structured it that way because we're in the process of getting accreditation, which it will take years.

00:44:35

Corey Cleland: But you know, we want to be able to offer a master's in leadership. The culinary school is basically going to train people in things from like soil health and you know, growing and sourcing ingredients that are nutrient dense to like building your own, you know, like ovens and your own kitchens and infrastructure and cookware and all of this kind of stuff, you know, and obviously the, like actual chefing and different methods of chefing, but focused on feeding collectives, chefing for feeding collectives. So not like single plated, you know, like. Yeah, it's like how do you feed 30 to 300 people kind of like roasting whole lambs or you know, like big cuts and then. Yeah, also getting into the economics. There's a lot of value that can be generated in like thinking vertically about the supply chain to, you know, to feeding people.

00:46:07

Corey Cleland: That creates a lot of value for farmers and creates a lot of value for this kind of cooking. But I tell you this because, you know, if we're going to have a school, feeding people becomes. If we're going to bring people together in place, feeding people becomes really important. So, you know.

00:46:26

Roarke Clinton: Absolutely.

00:46:27

Corey Cleland: So we're basically like, cool. We'll create a school around it. Like, we're basically just like, you know, there are things that we will need.

00:46:35

Roarke Clinton: You're, you're giving it importance that I feel like cooking often misses. Like, people don't see that always as the most important thing or the focus. And this gives it value, you know, having a whole school around it.

00:46:50

Corey Cleland: Yeah, it's such a beautiful idea.

00:46:55

Roarke Clinton: Yeah, you're building a whole system, a whole. I guess you're working to fill out several schools in a way that the community that's participating can be well rounded. I wonder if there's a way that you could, you know, everybody has their genius in their space, in their place and figuring out a way to source that raw talent from your community and be able to nurture it in a way which provides you with new well rounded courses that you can kind of move in the direction that you think is, you know, the Endemic's plan might be an interesting opportunities so that you guys aren't doing all the heavy sinking and lifting for sure.

00:47:59

Corey Cleland: Yeah, we're starting something in that direction with these study groups. We're basically enrolling people in our community to lead these and they're going to be, these are going to be publicly available. They're just like one call. One, one hour call. But yeah, you know, basically we're hoping this will be able to like be in the direction of involving our community and building this thing instead of, you know, just us doing it all. So. Yeah, that's beautiful.

00:48:38

Roarke Clinton: Right on. Well, thank you for bringing me deep into it and helping me understand the better. Can you, can you tell me just for, you know, to bring me back to the beginning, like Endemic. Was that the beginning? Was it like something that you named because of a certain thing or what was that, what was the inspiration.

00:49:05

Corey Cleland: In the, in the word Endemic or in all of it?

00:49:11

Roarke Clinton: Wherever, wherever you want to go.

00:49:12

Corey Cleland: I mean, it's a bit hard to say, like Yeah, I, I grew up farming, I grew up raising goats. I feel like that is in this, you know, like gardening and raising goats and, you know, drinking fresh milk. When I was 19, I poured intentional Communities with a Buddhist band singing songs of peace, love and justice. I played bass in the band and we specifically went to Intentional Communities and they hosted us and we, you know, would play music for them. And that was kind of like, it felt like a bit of a anthropological study into communities. And then, yeah, I mean, I started Thistle, this direct consumer healthy meal delivery company when I was 21. And it's done very well.

00:50:24

Corey Cleland: But my inspiration for that was both to make healthy food more accessible, but really to give a marketplace for farmers that were doing practices to have their, you know, their agriculture be healthier and better. That wasn't yet being appreciated by the market. And. Yeah, and then I don't know, like, soon after that, I started coming up with these ideas about how like economics could work better in communities and how there's a lot of like extra cost in the system, unnecessary cost in the system. And I shared that with my friend Daniel Schmachtenberger, who maybe, you know, maybe you're familiar with Daniel.

00:51:27

Roarke Clinton: I'm not.

00:51:28

Corey Cleland: Well, yeah, I, I shared that with a friend and he was like, he was basically like, these are all good ideas to be able to like change the system. Like, this is really naive. If you think that you're going to like actually change the system, you have to work with people who have institutional power. And he referenced this guy, Nelson Del Rio Sr. Who is now the chairman of Prosperity of the Commons, this other company that I work with, and that's an international development company. We do like large scale infrastructure development, like clean energy and waste treatment and this kind of stuff. But we have a model that protects communities from predatory capitalism. So the equity and wealth creation structures are optimized for wealth creation for communities. And that equity and wealth creation stays in the communities. So we've been doing that.

00:52:37

Corey Cleland: And around that time I was also part of a team that was looking at several hundred acres in British Columbia, Canada to create a new community. And I kept it just gave me the opportunity to think about like, where does like a healthy city emerge from like, you know, thousands of people? What are the like fundamental things? And it basically felt like a blend between this like ownership question, like how does how things get built and how does, how do things that get built, that generate wealth reinforce the well being of the community instead of get extracted or lead to significant wealth asymmetries and how do you attract the right kind of talent? Because ultimately the most value, I think the most valuable thing is well coordinated talent. So. And then that became education problem.

00:53:58

Corey Cleland: It's just like, yeah, it's like, how do you train the skill, skills that we will need in this future and train the kind of characters that can operate in that space and not get corrupted or, you know, bring energy that corrupts the space. So that's part of why we're starting with character development school that, you know, is also focused on really big hard problems in the world. So yeah, ultimately I just want everyone to enjoy my goats. Too many people in the world don't get that opportunity. So I'm trying to create a space for that.

00:54:54

Roarke Clinton: I love that to, to bring it all together like that. It's so beautiful to have the goal and then to listen to the community learn that if you don't want to, if you want to reach it, you have to build the foundation, which is what you're doing with this character development school and building the kind of the infrastructure so that you can lean back on it whenever there's pushback and you can show, you know, anybody or you could take people who are really accelerating in that we're showing impetus to gain access or to, you know, who just feel like they are aligned. That's really cool. I haven't built that in my mind yet, but that's a sweet idea. Thank you for sharing that.

00:55:47

Corey Cleland: Mm. Mm. Yeah. And, and yeah, it's also, it's like, it's not just for the community or village or city or town or whatever it is that I'm visioning it. This is, this is one of the core things that came up in the project that I was working on in Canada. They were really interested in kind of this. It felt like very hierarchical and like you kind of had to like pass a bunch of tests and like it was like very secret, hush. No one tells anyone anything. Like we're building our little pocket. And that felt really bad to me the whole time. And I kept like, that was like, I kept ending up getting like arguing with these people about this all the time.

00:56:35

Corey Cleland: So I was just like, look, like we have to build systems where people have the option to go wherever they want to go and move between spaces. And I want the talent to be everywhere, you know, I want all the best talent to be trained to go anywhere and everywhere. And I Want existing towns and cities to be rejuvenated. And if we play this game where, you know, we're training our talent and then it's like, it like starts from this energy of like us against them or something, you know, and this weird like hierarchical energy. So, yeah, it feels like getting to build schools with that, really lift up practitioners, like Benita Roy, you know, like, I'm not the teacher. Like, that's a big thing. I don't, I don't want to be a teacher. Right.

00:57:32

Corey Cleland: I want to like build the infrastructure that like lets these things happen. But getting to like align these teachers and align faculty around these teachers, it's like I'm basically like, you know, getting. I'm, I'm getting to like align a bunch of people who have the capacity to be responsible for these things without like all of the extra complexity. So all of a sudden, you know, as long as we keep being successful at this, we'll just have like, you know, incredible wisdom and capacity to actually, you know, ground it in a place or in many places. And. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, you know, that's how we end up doing it. It's, it's like way more of a, like, yeah, many people taking responsibility for the thing versus like me or you know, in this case, these other people in B.C.

00:58:44

Corey Cleland: Being like, yeah, this is my community and I like, you know, I like structure the hierarchy and you know, how people get to participate. Yeah, there's obviously like curation and curating a lot of people, but you know, when the time comes, there will be many of us.

00:59:06

Roarke Clinton: Yeah. Including me.

00:59:09

Corey Cleland: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's great. We're just. Yeah, there's no, like. Yeah, it's just like, we get to just be like, cool. So let's build the next step and you know, we're here for it and it'll just keep getting closer and closer. You know, we don't, it's not like a far away thing. We're like, we're doing it. We're doing it already.

00:59:31

Roarke Clinton: Yeah, it's remembering that it's happening presently.

00:59:35

Corey Cleland: Yeah, yeah.

00:59:37

Roarke Clinton: There's, there's so much here. Thank you for sharing. You know, getting into the weeds with me. I, I wanted to also touch on, you know, just you made a quick ask about the SSO thing and if we can do that, and I have high confidence that we can do that for you. That's something I think I could even do. But I Want a developer to do just to make sure it all works?

01:00:05

Corey Cleland: Yeah, I guess my question. That's great. I'm curious if I need to set up the IDP for that and then, like, give y'all access. You know, you don't have to answer this now, but there might be aspects of this that I should be setting up and then giving you all access. So just. So just let me know. Let me know if I need to. If, you know, assign me a task, you know, if I need to, like, set up a IDP or something that, you know, just let me know.

01:00:39

Roarke Clinton: Awesome. I think that there's probably a little room for connecting. You know, I need to connect with James again just to make sure that we're offering the right kind of levels here, the prism whatnot. And I want to get his opinion on the conversation where we can go with it. And then also, then we can send you kind of, like, options to pick from. And if. I'm wondering if you want to get started in March, what you're. What your. Like, when do you want us to start engaging and really building asap?

01:01:21

Corey Cleland: I would. I would love to. I would love to basically scope, like, what are the circle improvements that we're doing together? And then I would love to scope this design element to add to the divinity school. And, yeah, you know, it'd be amazing to be able to get both of those done, you know, as soon as we can. So, you know, I think. I think I have the clarity that I need to be able to package that to, you know, be in the conversation with y'all.

01:01:56

Roarke Clinton: Awesome. Well, let me touch base with James. I'll share our meeting with him, and then we should get back to you probably early this week.

01:02:11

Corey Cleland: Cool.

01:02:12

Roarke Clinton: Yeah. Really a pleasure to meet you, Corey.

01:02:15

Corey Cleland: Yeah, likewise.

01:02:17

Roarke Clinton: And, you know, I just wanted to say that the things that you're imagining and drilling down into and facilitating resonating, and I've. I've actually, before meeting j. Meeting up with James again and doing all this, I've been doing my own work on this stuff, and I'm really interested eventually to catch, you know, you bend your ear on some of them and experience, you know, get your feedback on them. But eventually, that would be something I'd really enjoy doing, and it might be. It might be in alignment with what you are. You're working on here. So I. Yeah, I'm excited. Thank you for connecting.

01:03:02

Corey Cleland: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Just let me know. Let me know when you want to set up another call.

01:03:08

Roarke Clinton: All right. See you. Have a great weekend.

01:03:10

Corey Cleland: You too.

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