EP 032 Frederick Schilling

Frederick Schilling loves chocolate. He is the founder of Dagoba Chocolate, AMMA Chocolate and Big Tree Farms. He's made a career out of launching products that are not only delicious and luxurious, but also environmentally and socially responsible. When he founded Dagoba, he launched the organic chocolate category. When he founded Big Tree Farms and AMMA Chocolate, he changed the lives of farmers on two continents.

Today, we talk about:

• How he got interested in chocolate while a religion major at Ohio Wesleyan University.
• His first big breaks in product development, distribution, suppliers and media.
• Why cash and people are the scarce resources needed by any founder.
• Visionary experiences with the chocolate goddess. (The plants have an agenda, as Michael Pollan and Gordon White like to say.)
• Terroir of chocolate. Subtypes of cacao plants. 
• Impact of witch's broom disease on the chocolate industry in Brazil. (see also the phylloxera pandemic that hit the wine industry)
• Breeds of cacao trees: Criollo, Forestro, Trinitario.
• How cacao spread with colonization.
• Coconut nectar/coconut sugar.
• How coconut sugar improves the lives of coconut farmers.
• Fair trade and organic designations as an essential business advantage.

Startup Geometry Podcast EP 010: Nicolas Cole

Today, I talk with Nicolas Cole, a Creative Director with Idea Booth, a branding consultancy and think tank. When he was a teenager, he was a  highly ranked World of Warcraft player and blogger, spending hours online as an Undead Mage while skating through high school. Now, Cole is a Quora Top Writer, author, fitness model, and marketing expert. In this episode, we talk about how he physically and mentally transformed himself over the last seven years, and what it takes to overcome the limitations you impose on yourself.

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Show Notes and Links

Fresh Guacamole - PES

Oscar nominated short film. Tasty.

Lest You Think Your Thanksgiving Feast Too Large

In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, Parisian actor and gourmand Yves Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. "And while I think of it," I once heard him say, "we haven't had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace — no more '34s and hardly any '37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative."
-AJ Liebling
Between Meals

Ficino on Honey

It is pleasant to remind you again how Democritus, when he was at the point of death, to gratify the wishes of his friends retained his spirit for four days by the smell of hot loaves; he would have kept his spirit even longer if only it had pleased him to do so. There are also those who say that he did this by the smell of honey. I think that if he used honey at all, he poured it, liquefied with white wine, into the hot loaves. For the odor of honey is not to be scorned; for it is the flower of flowers; it nourishes considerably by its very sweetness; moreover, by its quality things are kept for a long time whole from putrefecation. And so if anyone knows how to eat honey, even as a food, so as not to fill up his passages with too much sweetness nor to augment choler with its heat, he will possess a sure support for a longer life.

-Marsilio Ficino

De Vita Libri Tres

Three Books on Life

Book II.XVIII

as translated by Kaske & Clark

Links for later

1. Interview with Alinea's/Next's/Aviary's Nick Kokonas
2. Nick Kokonas, part 2
3. DNA origami for metamaterials

Links for Later

1. Jaron Lanier profile
2. The Day Borders Got the Wobblies
3. Scott Sumner on the War on Drug Users
4. A candle shaped like Morrissey's head
5. How Groupon affects the Chicago startup community
6. Rick Perry's Fed Up is Effed Up
7. Joshua Walters is a bit bipolar
8. Alan Richman gets good food, weird response from M. Wells
9. 50 tips on writing
10. Republicans + Islamists = Christian Dominionists
11. Diary of a Revolutionary Guard conscript

Links for Later

1. Patrick Bateman's New York
2. NPR is looking for the 100 best SF/fantasy novels/series of all time. The long list is a pretty good starting place
3. Best practices in VC deal sourcing
4. Elvis' fried chicken recipe

In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, Parisian actor and gourmand Yves Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, "we haven't had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace — no more '34s and hardly any '37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative."

-AJ Liebling

Between Meals

Vegan Black Metal Chef Makes Pad Thai

Devilishly delicious.

(via Devour)

Links for Later

1. Novak Djokovic goes on gluten free diet, wins a lot of tournaments


2. Michelle Bachmann thinks the government can't (or shouldn't) regulate it's own expenditures


3. Edward Tufte profile

Aviary

Just your average neighborhood bar with cocktails made by rotovap and liquid nitrogen.

Chocolate eclair recipe from Raymond Blanc.

Links for Later

1. Algorithm for flocking (or swarming) behavior
2. Barbarous hair for Argentinians
3. Helmut Newton on appropriating photographic style
4. Coffee: how to make a flat white
5. 11 lessons from economic papers (via mr)

Links for Later

1. Banh Mi recipe
2. Thinking "in more memorable ways"
3. Lakoff: What the assault on unions really means. Budget deficits as ruse.
4. Garance Dore and Scott Schuman
5. Krugman: Wisconsin Power Play

The Coca-Cola secret recipe revealed by This American Life?

Links for Later

1. Trends in self-publishing

2. Really great bread recipe

3. Guardian journalist caught in Egyptian police roundup of protestors

4. DOD press office incoherent on Bradley Manning detention conditions

5. Good places for angel funding

Links for Later

1. The Untamed Prince

2. Technomads

3. Diary of a returning soldier

4. Freakangels on the difficulty of communicating without temporal anchors

5. Jeffrey Steingarten tries to avoid becoming a coffee nerd

6. YouTube time travel

7. James Franco interviewed

8. Frank Lloyd Wright house up for sale, used as set for Blade Runner, Angel, others

9. Celebrities with unusual features

10. TSA bullying travelers into 'optional' full body scanners

11. Black Hotels (and goldmines) for money laundering (via Felix Salmon)

12. American economic inequality growing

13. "Who's funding these radical Christians?"

14. Adam Smith by Nicholas Phillipson (via marginal revolution)

15. "At the bookstore later in the day, my son stood in front of the Sci Fi section and said, in a very loud voice: 'Mom, this is my new gender.' I bit back 'genre,' which is something I also try to do when I am alone."

16. The shaving cycle of men

17. Why Chesterton doesn't make any sense in his Christian apologetics

18. Spontaneous badassery (via linkmachinego)

19. B vitamins protect against senile dementia, brain shrinkage in early stages

20. Shakespeare's face recreated in 3-D from death mask

Jamie Oliver Teaches Kids about Food

Jamie Oliver sorts out people murdered by food, 350-pound 16 year olds, and first graders who don't recognize a potato. Entire school lunch programs are redesigned for $6500.

Anthony Bourdain vs. the Ten Year Old

(via Ezra Klein)