This video is a compilation of my harvests in the agroturismos of Italy, the desert of Argentina, and the sunshine of northern California. The music is one of my favorite songs of all time, it’s called Voyageur by Enigma. I moved out to California a year ago with a bottle of GrapeThinking, a bottle of ideas I guess you could say, that started filling up 5 years ago with conversation between myself, Jacob Bohall, Ruarri Rogan, Meghan O’Malley, and many others. Over the past year, those ideas have delightfully fermented, and the time has finally come for us to have a taste…

~circuit to cell, web to water, mind to vine~

The basis is an engine… a thinking engine that drives sustainable development, and more specifically, the health of the world. How do you create something in which the consumption heals the body and the production heals the earth?

Think about it

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They bought a car with another girl (the rock star of the group), and were planning to head way north to work on a farm for a little bit. They invited me to go, so I left my suitcase with a friend in San Francisco and hit the road with them. The following few weeks were beyond amazing… so many serendipities. My favorite was running into one of the winemakers I worked with everyday for 2 months in Argentina earlier this year in a small grocery store parking lot in Napa, and I just so happened to have a bottle of the organic wine we worked on in my backpack. Our car turned into a sustainable circus. We worked on the farm we set out for, did a little harvest work at a winery, but mainly stayed on the road visiting sustainable farms all around northern Cali. We touched Humboldt, Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, and Marin.

A couple of our favorites were Filigreen Farm in Anderson Valley, where Chris Tebbutt has built an amazing mixed biodynamic agriculture setup of vines and fruit orchards, it was incredible. He also had huge solar arrays setup that produce 100% of the farm’s energy… a true thinking farm. We also visited Paul Dolan at his biodynamic Dark Horse Farming Ranch in Ukiah, which was powerful. He has an “energy center” with his flow form, preparations, and a stunning “bug strip” of crazy flowers and vegetation that generates the biodiversity and balance in his vineyard. On our way south, we made a stop at Solar City somewhere on 101 south of Ukiah, which is a sustainable building/living community. We slept in a teepee and talked about what it takes to build sustainable communities.

Somewhere along the way we got tipped off about the Bioneers conference down in San Rafael so we trekked down there and crashed the conference for the weekend. I talked to Rebecca of the Biodynamics Association about heading up their booth for a day in exchange for a free pass, and she graciously accepted my offer. We got to see some amazing speakers and share even more amazing ideas, and I was able to pitch biodynamics all day Sunday at the trade show. I met some more of the folks with RSF Social Finance as well, which, in my opinion, is one of the most innovative financial organizations that exists.

We just kept going, drinking, laughing, breathing, seeing how these amazing farms are changing the environment, all while staying break even along the way. We went crazy and then sane and then crazy again. It was a ride. Now, I’m back in San Francisco to do some GrapeThinking. Represent some biowines, bring our own GT wine to market… use the elixir to drive the sustainable development of farms and communities.

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Serendipity is commonly thought of as an event of destiny. In the shamanic world of the Amazon and the Andes, they think of it as synchronicity, which is a great word that blends rationale with mysticism. They believe that there is a force guiding the development of our world, and it is our purpose to become in tune or in sync with that force. There is even an anatomical hypothesis to this. The sensor is our heart, using it to pick up the synchronicity events when they happen, which sends the appropriate signal to our minds to recognize it and do something with it… to remember it, to have it mean something in your life, to build a story, to contribute to building a sustainable world. Sure this sounds very fairy tale, but what if it is the simple truth?

The question everyone will have is, if this is real, then how do you get in touch with it, how do you feel it, how do you recognize it? The answer begins with a cleanse. We dampen our ability to feel and recognize this signal through so many things. Our food supply fills us with so much degrading substance, whether it be synthetic chemical pesticides or preservatives. More importantly, we constantly fill our head with unhealthy thoughts and then reinforce that chaotic circuitry by repeatedly thinking the same things.  We attach ourselves to create a false sense of permanence… to stuff, materials, relationships, an exterior god… and we develop a fear of losing these things. You have to cleanse this all away, let it all go, and get to the core, to the source. It’s only when you let all this stuff go that you can sense the guiding synchronicity that surrounds you. You won’t question the next step, you won’t regret. You’ll be filled with wonder as you experience the serendipity of your life.

The meditative practices of the East are very enlightened at this, however it is the shamanic ceremonies of South America that are driven by an inescapable practical magnetism… a drink with a sonic complement that brings forth a powerful cleanse. A loss of control and a cleanse of mind body and soul. Think of yourself as an instrument that needs to be tuned, and this ceremony is the tuner. The goal is obviously to be able to tune yourself, but everyone needs some help in the beginning.

Check more into these ceremonies if you’re interested. Ayahuasca is the name of the drink which drives the ceremony. It is important to be ready, but I’m guessing if you’ve read this far, then you’re on your way.

Today, I found this video by Ilana Yahav demonstrating her work – “Let’s Get Together”.   This is a dynamic “painting” using sand as a medium.  Reminds me of my creative “struggles” with the etch-a-sketch when I was a kid.  The coolest thing about this, is that unlike painting, or drawing, this is a very eco-friendly / sustainable art form.

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There can be no doubt that we are seeing a transition at the moment – and I’m not talking about from capitalism to socialism, but rather something less tangible and equally pervasive. This change, I think, is from an age of objects into an age of ideas. Be it an iPod, a Blackberry or an iPhone, we as a society have come to depend on our objects, but the trend toward ‘one box solutions’ and centralising our PDAs, mobile phones, e-mail and music devices shows a longing to free ourselves of the objects, devices, countless power cables and the increasingly cluttered assortment of gadgetry churned out over the years. The inevitable movement towards cloud computing shows the urge of our society to become less dependent on material objects in favour of something more powerful and less immediately tangible. It is in this very transition from physical to ideological that we can see the beginnings of a permanent change.

The definition of an idea most relevant here is: a process of cognition fed by information that leads to a conclusion, which goes on to influences either our opinion or a course of action. We hold ideas above all else. The next time you look at a £10 note you will see the Queen of England, a living monarch on one side and on the other is Darwin, long since deceased and yet still going on to influence the world and appear on currency from beyond the grave. This is the ultimate testament to the power of ideas: where genius and ideology trump royalty. But before we categorise our current time as one defined by ideas – perhaps we need to step back once and look at the raw material behind ideas: information. More than ever in our history, as a society we deal with information, statistics and data on a daily basis. One has to only look at how Wikipedia expands, as it is constantly changed, added to, subtracted from and altered – to see a living, organic, expanding model of information. What is notable about our current time is the simultaneous multiplicity of ideas – and the fuel behind this all is information.

In Digital media we have first-mover advantage in dealing with an age of information, and are all lucky to have begun to work in creative ways in trying to understand and interpret the enormous amount of data that we receive. We have also realised that our biggest challenge doesn’t only lie in increased complexity, but also in the sheer quantity of information we have access to. For anyone who has tried to condense an ad-segmentation report into a single conclusion, or looked at trying to de-duplicate display impressions from SEM clicks will know – we face the challenges set out by an age of information on a daily basis, with the majority of our time being spent re-purposing data in order to make actionable business decisions. As marketers, we know that we cannot simply segment our market in terms of the objects they choose, leaders they follow or ideas they embrace, as these monochromatic measures are outdated. If you really want to understand today’s consumer, you must first look at the information they have access to and the way they use and interact with it.

No doubt this leaves us in a world of complexity. However if there is one thing we know about the world it’s that things rarely, if ever, get less complex. A perfect example of this is IP.6. At current most IP addresses are IP.4 – and we’re beginning to run out. When the infrastructure of the internet was first laid out it was inconceivable that we would need more than 10 addresses each – but we have pushed the boundaries by assigning IP’s to our iPhones, laptops, home computers, work computers, Xbox 360s and PSPs – and such has been the uptake and rate of adoption that we’ve needed to move to IP.6 – which basically allows every single human being to have as many internet addresses as there are currently internet addresses.

A saying we have adopted at Unique Digital is ‘the future is already here, it just hasn’t been distributed evenly’ and for a glimpse at what IP.6 and the future may look like, we only have to look at cows in Japan, which are amongst the first users of IP.6. which may not be as obscure as it sounds, because if you think about it, as digital marketers one of the first things we do in the morning is get a snapshot of the previous day’ activities. All of our future plans are based on trends of what has happened before. Much as we might look at click-paths or the previous days’ conversions, Japanese farmers are able to access information about their livestock remotely at any time of day. They are able to study the impact of weather, grazing patterns and land usage – and cross-tabulate such information to deduce whether they need more land or more livestock for the following year.

Already this may challenge our current assumptions – if search engines organise the world’s information… in a world of IP.6 will also organise livestock? Suddenly Eric Schmidt’s claim from last year that Google’s next focus will be the energy sector seems far less outlandish. We will all begin to get our first taste of IP.6 this year when it comes standard in electrical appliances – and we will find that our new kettles, toasters, microwaves and fridges will come equipped with their own data feed into the world wide web. Does this mean then that search engines and the algorithms that power them will not only give access to information on click through rates and agriculture… but energy grids and energy efficiency too?

What age are we in? As marketers with unprecedented access to an ever increasing amount of information, we are in constant search of answers most of our working day. In a discussion over lunch, James, our associate MD reminded me of the part in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book Life, the Universe and Everything, where we come across a group of scientists who are obsessed with looking for ‘The Great Answer of Life.’ The quest for this answer has consumed them to point of not being able to contemplate anything else. However, after years of searching they are mortified to find that the answer is 42. 42! What they realise is that in their obsessions with finding the answer, they had forgotten the actual question. And though answers are useful, without an accompanying question they are quite useless. I think therein lies an important lesson for marketers within the age of information… if we want answers, we first need to take a step back – and understand the questions.

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Life will always be a mystery, but can’t we agree the point is to be truly happy and free of suffering? And yet pondering this as an intellectual ideal or meditating on a mountain in Tibet for the rest of your life won’t cut it. We have to somehow feel it and incorporate it into the reality of our lives, which for good or bad largely centers around making money to provide a means to function in society. To many, money is perceived as the root of all evil and focusing on making a lot of it couldn’t possibly allow you to connect to something greater than yourself or benefit other people. It’s too competitive and you have to focus only on yourself or else you’ll be exploited by those that do.

But what if this is all wrong? What if focusing on spiritual growth, connecting to the force that powers you beyond your ego, and cultivating a sense of importance in benefiting other people, will actually give you an edge? What if the world is going through a dramatic shift from a linear system to a cyclical system, a renewable system, where a more, more, me, me mentality will lose, and a holistic, spiritual mentality will win? What will help traditional capitalism transcend into a new form of governance we like to call ecolism?

Currently, there are 3 types of entrepreneurship in our world.

Classical entrepreneurship is the essence of modern capitalism and engages a mindset of making as much money as possible within your business. Most entrepreneurs with this mindset are driven by status and materialism, and having great wealth to show a symbol of their personal power in the world. They tend to spend their profits on houses, cars, and luxury that they believe will buy them adoration and happiness. Classical entrepreneurs who reach the pinnacle, maxing out material indulgence, are ultimately reduced to the love of the deal and nothing more. Donald Trump is the prototypical classical entrepreneur. This method of entrepreneurship is not necessarily bad, in fact it was necessary over the past few hundred years to get us to the point we are at now. However, it tends to influence spiritual emptiness and results in the individual never truly finding the happiness or the inner peace they are looking for, no matter how much money they make. They always want more and don’t know why, and become confused as they gain more money and less happiness. This is what cultivates greed rather than love in peoples hearts and results in the chaos that our current economy is in. It’s this mentality built into the fabric of capitalism that is leaving our world in ruin with pollution, waste, depleted resources, and a stifled global economy. So to amend, this method has become obsolete and needs to evolve.

Social entrepreneurship on the other hand is driven by those who want to make a difference in the world, and are in a way, turned off by profits. The most practical example of successful social entrepreneurship is micro-credit lending, in which individuals create lending funds/banks solely for the purpose of helping communities and developing countries, while not focusing on profits. Muhammad Yunis and his Grameen Bank is probably the most successful example of social entrepreneurship to date. Yet the Grameen Bank has loaned out $5.72 billion since its inception 30 years ago and has only been paid back $5.02 billion. This type of enterprise is driven by a great social cause and hopefully will fulfill the individual in benefiting the world, but as a new form of economic governance how can it ever last if it doesn’t make money?

This leads us to spiritual entrepreneurship… the spiritual pursuit of profit. These types of entrepreneurs do not seek to make money to buy the fancy home or car or buy status and friends and fame. There isn’t a crave for more and more, but rather a cyclical, ecolistic way of perceiving the world. Instead they pursue money as a means to bring about great change to the world and become connected to the divine power. There’s a jewish term known as ‘tithing’, which means that you give away part of your wealth, whether it be to charities or other projects, because that genuine act of giving will come back around in the form of luck or serendipity to help you gain more profit. But it is crucially important to understand that this doesn’t mean you give solely to make more money and gain more self-benefit. You give so that you can make more money and continue giving. This has to be the drive to truly transcend from classical to spiritual entrepreneurship, and it entails a spiritual growth and humility within the individual in which they feel a connection to a force greater than themselves and their personal ego. They feel one with the world around them.

But, I can’t emphasize this enough… there is no linear procedure to find this authentic will in your life. There’s no secret path. It’s a matter of opening yourself up and feeling the connection for yourself. Think of it as being a medium… you aren’t a closed entity independent of the world around you. You breathe air, you need food and water, you are interdependent with your environment. You are not a separate entity here to amass large amounts of wealth and hoard money to buy material possessions. You are here to take in to simply give back in a better way, and when you can feel that and practice it in your life, you should be surprised by the success that gravitates to you.

A transcendence into spiritual entrepreneurship is quite possibly what our new world needs to get through these tough times. Capitalism needs a major upgrade. My friend Lee Whitfield and I believe it to be Ecolism. Check out his stuff at Ecolism.org

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The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years, and in those 200 years the nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith

2. From spiritual faith to great courage

3. From courage to liberty

4. From liberty to abundance

5. From abundance to complacency

6. From complacency to apathy

7. From apathy to dependence

8. From dependence back into bondage

Supposedly the United States has entered into the stage of apathy in which everyone has their hand out, and simply votes for whoever offers to give the most. This apathy leads to a dependent welfare state that breeds laziness, and an ultimate sacrifice of our greatest liberties and freedoms, which will always lead back into tyranny and bondage.

Our new President Barack Obama stands for such a symbol of hope, and we are all wondering how that hope will translate. Many of his opponents say that he’s a socialist… yet isn’t the ultimate form of government socialism with an unbiased intelligence to allocate resources? Communism failed not in theory, but because the allocation of resources was placed into human beings hands, in which case greed and corruption festered and led to its demise. But isn’t the same thing happening to us in this free market ‘democracy’?

The United States is in a very unique situation to transcend and create a technological governance. We are pioneering the Information age. Everyone is becoming more and more connected and gaining a greater ability to have the information of their life sent into an intelligent neural network. If DARPA and the great minds of Silicon Valley and Cambridge can in fact spawn a true technological intelligence… a collective intelligence that has a symbiotic relationship with its citizens… then resources can be allocated optimally and much time and money can be diverted away from bipartisan attempts to come up with the right ‘amount.’ Instead public servants exist to execute and neural nets and genetic algorithms allocate. More importantly, citizens will breathe new life into our democracy by becoming transparent and contributing life information to the system.

The great concern is that human greed will be inherited by this collective intelligence. If humans are programming the algorithms then, there will inherently be greed and power ingrained in the fabric. Okay, so then the computers need to program the algorithms, but then you realize you reach a never ending cycle, and ultimately come to the conclusion that we may not have the capability to prevent this and live in a symbiotic harmony with a greater intelligence because power is what drives us and greed is a means to achieve power. Think about how we exploit lesser intelligence on our planet. The cycles of ups and downs that greed creates are simply the waves of the universe and not something uniquely felt or expressed by humanity. The higher intelligence must always possess this force to continue to evolve and neuralize our galaxy and our universe, helping it become aware of itself.

Regardless if this is true or not (movies like the Matrix or I, Robot tell us we can in fact achieve symbiosis, but only after a period of battle), it is inevitable that we are heading in this general direction. There have to be intelligent systems created to allocate resources, balance the interest rate, optimize the energy grid, and on and on. The global economy is too fast paced for any Fed Chairman or NGO to come up with answers fast enough. The question is can we control our future? Can we transcend democracy? Can we harness the force of greed for the good? Is the human race genius enough to create technology that governs us without exploiting us?

We are certainly reaching a threshold as China continues to buy our debt and our economy continues to weaken.  We all know that if things continue to escalate, our nation will become vulnerable to attacks, and if we’re attacked we will be forced to retaliate and the world will be pushed to the brink.

However, there is restored hope with Obama in office and the world waits to see the results of his administration. Obviously, what I believe will save us is technological advancement. Renewable energy, collective intelligence, creation of a smart energy grid combined with the growing user generated content of the Internet. All serving to educate the public to get involved and feel ego-less motivation to share their information with the world. Becoming altruistically transparent for the good of the whole, and ultimately benefiting individual lives more! Gotta love ideals.. Ayn Rand would probably want my head, but maybe not because benefiting yourself to benefit the whole is the psychology that can win. The more genuine your purpose is to benefit yourself for the whole, the more benefit you will gain.

Pretty much threw the whole kitchen sink into this one… was feeling rather alarmist today, which isn’t so much my nature. I tend to be an optimist that sees beauty and eros, as the ancient Greeks would say, as the driving force of the human spirit rather than greed, but these are all potential realities that we have to face.

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I found this fascinating… is our world starting to wake up? Is the man’s way of thinking becoming outdated and even under-evolved? Very linear, physical, territorial, power obsessed… and yet now we’ve reach the edge, we’ve maxed out our world. There’s no more land to take over, nothing left to conquer, nowhere else for people to live, and no more resources to fight over other than oil (and this will be the last hoorah). Something has to change, and it starts with our thinking. I’ve been doing a lot of GT’ing about how that can happen, and the best thing I’ve come up with is a swift shift in global power from male to female.

We’ve always known that we think differently, but what does that mean? Traditionally, men have created a world in which they are the powerful being. This may be true in the physical sense, but as I alluded to before, the physicality of our world is at its max and is now ready for an emotional, mental, and spiritual transcendence.

I believe women have a more holistic way of thinking… thinking about the whole and leading in a way that can create holistic harmony. We’ve all heard that women tend to use both halves of their brain whereas men are locked in the left hemisphere, which is proven to be the linear, methodical, serial processor of the mind… the side that recognizes our self. Whereas the right hemisphere is the holistic, artistic, parallel processor, that sees patterns in nature and grasps the “whole” opposed to fragmented components… the side that recognizes the unity and oneness of everything.

Please watch this incredible TED talk from Jill Bolte Taylor. It is possibly the most moving presentation I’ve ever seen… brings me to tears. If you have time, I highly recommend watching the whole video. Click one of the buttons below to watch.

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