 couple questions. Cool. So this is the Weaving the World Ops call on Wednesday, November 17, 2021. And I this week, a bunch of my middle of the daytime is being absorbed by an exo quest on learning. So that's not good for doing podcast calls. But that goes away, I think pretty quickly. And partly last Thursday's regular Thursday OGM call was so lovely, that I'm wondering what, how do I turn that into a Weaving the World call? Right? Because we didn't introduce it as a Weaving the World call, but it makes a really, really, really good one. You know, our topic was the metaphors, we went all over the place, I took copious notes. I actually, one way to do that is to book a follow up call and to do the Weaving the Fungus, feeding the fungus call about that call. Now after the fact, that's certainly one way. Have you looked at the transcript? I have not read the transcript, I've not looked at it. Would that help to maybe like look at it and just Yeah, and what I would do is I would post I would post the original call online and the transcript and all that so that anybody who wanted to go catch up with it. And then see from there. Let's see, I just read good at my computer. So I've got to Wendy's here. Oh, cool. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. How are you doing? I'm good. How are you? Excellent. I could a little underwater, but I can see that. Bentley. Hey, Bentley. Is that how you choose your background pictures is kind of like matching how you're feeling today? As the mood fits. Nice. The mood fits. And weirdly, on Monday morning, I chose the background from monsters, the haul from Monsters, Inc. I'll just I'll just choose it right now. So you see what I mean? Yeah. I chose to be where'd you go? Come on Monsters, Inc. I know you're right here. There we go. There. Nope. There. Okay. I wasn't actually told properly to it. So it shows this one just kind of mood fits, right? And I have a morning call with Leif and Hank in Northern Europe. And Leif was like, Oh, what is that? And neither of them had seen the movie. And I'm like, seriously, people, you've never seen Monsters, Inc. They had also not, they had also not seen Inside Out Bentley. Oh, it's another good one. They also not seen Inside Out. I'm like, dude, Pixar is working this magic on human emotions. And like, these are adult films as much as their kids films, like, do not pass go. Right. Are you, are you an animation, movie animation fan? Do in general? Yeah, I'm a fan. I'm also like, like a hero worship of Pixar and its creativity. And then a friend of mine, a physicist, friend of mine, is an advisor to Pixar. So in Wally, when Wally uses the fire extinguisher to fly outside in space to get back to the spacecraft, yeah, the physics of that are my friend, Steve, nice, that's kind of fun, big when the balloons go up and lift the house up and the balloons are all jostling each other. Yeah. That's my buddy, Steve. Nice. Yeah. So he's got he's got a good game. He's like the creative physicist. So I have a soft spot in my heart for that. And, and also just the, I don't know, the craft and love that shows up in these movies is really quite amazing. Yeah. Hey, Michael, we're talking about Pixar movies. My, my daughter's a freshman at NYU and the film and TV division of Tisch to become an animator. And she's been animating since she was in seventh grade. Oh, wow. She's she taught herself. Do you have like old, old flip books? No, no, no, digital animation. Oh, darn it. What happened? Yeah, the new generation. But 2D, so it's the same thing as the flip books, right? She's just drawing it on a tablet instead of drawing it on exactly. Yeah, she actually had to do a flip book for for class. That was the first animation I had to do. There was an app called squiggle vision that I installed but never quite used that did like squiggle graphics, which is the when you draw the same frame like two or three times over hand drawn, and then you alternate between them. So you get you get the little shaky kind of animation feature really, really cool. It is cool. Yeah, so she it's I've gotten more into the world and appreciated things more. So she'll say had did you ever see wolf walkers? I've seen the trailers, but not the film. The way that they use. They show that they show that they show the pencil under the animation sort of thing. It's a very raw animation. She immediately figured out in what situations they were doing that, what situations the lines were thicker and what where they use different saturations of color like for her that so as we're watching it, she was sharing that that's brilliant. It's something subtle from a from a novice, you know, to to the world and that's something I wouldn't have noticed, but definitely adds to the to the film and makes it makes you realize just how much went into the design overall. Anyway, it's neat. So here's so here's Wolf walkers. I'm going to share the link to to this trailer, the conceptual trailer, because they talk about what they did. Oh, yeah. How the how the artworks. She's probably seen it already. Yeah, I bet. And then here's the werewolves of ossary and it comes out of Irish folklore. And of course, there's werewolves, which are mythical creatures and monsters and a bunch of other stuff. Probably should have more on werewolves here, but like canthropy and then the game mafia, which is also known as the game werewolf, etc., etc. Interesting that that's where you went with it because for her, it's connected. Wolf walkers is connected by the by the company that made it. And she's a big fan of the company that made it. So yeah, so Tom Moore is the creator and he is a cartoon saloon. There we go. Yep. This is and this is the animation studio that made it. They also made the Secret of Kells. Yes, a bunch of other ones that are really. Yeah, they have a real style, exactly. Like Ghibli, like Ghibli has a style. Yeah, exactly. Right. So here's here's Pixar animation studios. Mighty Oak, Leica is really good. Where's Ghibli? They should be right here. And it's sorry to have Ghibli is over here. Oh, indie film studios. Why is it not connected to animation studios? Musk picks immediately. So here's Howl's Moving Castle, my neighbor tutorial, which April had never seen. So we just watched it recently. I have not seen that one yet either. And I hear it's amazing. I think it was you that told me to go watch it, actually. Yeah, it might have been. Yeah. Cool. So and then let me also explain that the background I've got showing right now inspired Lafe on Monday because they're thinking about positive cartography and different kinds of futures. You could use this lobby. This is where monsters. These are the doors. Monsters are assigned to drop into different kids' closets and all that to go scare them. This could also be a place from which you send people into alternative futures. To experience those futures in some simulation, in some way, in some place, things like that. So I'm going to be talking about that in different ways. Very cool. I know. Go ahead. No, it's good. It's a whole new whole new branch. I don't think we'll go. Whole new brand. Oh, OK. And I just started talking with Ceci about last week, last Thursday's regular check-in call where we picked Metaverse as the topic, you will remember, was such a fun, such a fun conversation and such a good conversation that I was trying to figure out what would it mean to turn it into an episode of Leaving the World? I thought that was a great idea. And it had been percolating in my head, too, as we were talking. It's like, oh, this is this is the kind of thing I would hope would come out of Leaving the World. So and then you said it. And I was like, there you go. OK, perfect. So so I think I'd love to think out loud with you all what I need to go do to do that, because I haven't done it yet. And I've had my my time in hijacked a little bit by a quest on education. Oh, good. Everybody's in motion, but listening in. Thanks, Michael. Are you on the Metro North? No. Where would you be? Who knows? Yeah, I'm so curious now. I know, I know. I'm like, train, American train. Do those still run? Oh, they're getting so much. They're getting a little bit of life support soon. Yeah, soon. American trains are so sad. They are sad, especially when you're when you had no funding for years. When you sit in a Japanese or a Chinese or a European train. Yeah, I don't know. I thought down. Yeah, I know. I used to briefly for the month of August, 1992, I commuted commuted from Fairfield into Manhattan when I first joined Esther Dyson, and she was in the Seagram building on Park Avenue. And I did say August, and that was the end of my commuting experience. I moved into I found a flat and moved into Manhattan. Because that was just brutal. It is brutal. And I grew up in Fairfield, actually. And Fairfield is like one of the last commuter, like you're beyond Fairfield. Not anymore, which I imagine now it's like too bad. Yeah, yeah, they created a whole new train station in Fairfield. And yeah, oh, my God. I used to be a little walk. I was walking distance from the Fairfield train station. Damn, very cool. OK, so Master of Aggressions. So I'm trying to figure out what it is you want us to hold space, ideally, right, so that you can so we can start fleshing out if we wanted to use last Thursday's call. How would how would that shift into a Weaving the World podcast? Right, exactly. And and that gave me a couple other kinds of thoughts also. But but so functionally, what does it mean to take a recording that doesn't begin with, hey, welcome to Weaving the World? So so the most primitive thing I can do is record an intro that says, hey, welcome to Weaving the World. In this in this session, we're dropping in on a conversation of open global line, blah, blah, blah. And then an outro that kind of does the same thing. Fortunately, because we use the because this is one of the Thursday calls and we're still in collective next collective next Zoom, we have an order transcript of it that I haven't looked at. But that should be a pretty good transcript with speaker ID. But I have to open up the transcript and go take a peek. So it would be pretty simple. And I've been I've been catching up with Pete about the stuff that he's automating in what we call Project Proud. Yeah, in love. He's trying to automate the process where I received notification from Zoom. Hey, you have three files ready to download or however many, all the way to how many of how many of the steps to producing video and audio podcasts could be automated. Yes, Ben. Oh, I was expecting to interrupt that quickly. I know that worked really well, though. Yeah. So, yeah, so using that episode yet, first of all, yes, I think that's really common to have an introduction like that, like oftentimes podcast people will be on a panel and they'll just do a quick intro saying, hey, I'm on this panel and I wanted to share this with my listeners. The second the other thought I had was we kind of weave in the world has several potential content packages for the podcast or the video, vidcast, if it's a video or whatever. But no one uses that term yet, but I'm trying to get it to work. Which term, what term, vidcast, vidcast, vidcast instead of podcast, especially since pod means air pod or not air pod pod. Anyways, Apple's. Right, I thought I thought I thought ironically, podcaster named after the iPod, which doesn't exist as a product anymore. And Apple doesn't use Apple podcasts anymore. So they they're stopping to use the name too. It's interesting. Yeah. But legacy communication. What you were saying. Yeah, that so I really kind of think of weaving the world. You know, so there's if you're the standard kind of loop, you were thinking about where you do an interview podcast and then there's a whole bunch of people working on it. And then I suggested, I don't know if you actually ended up liking this, but then there's a lot of people mapping and weaving it. And then I was thinking of a consolidation video that shows the shows either the results of the weaving or some of the weaving and it's kind of an edited, you know, kind of presentation of the original content in with the weaving in context, either being done or showing the results. So kind of like a kind of like a travel log of the journey with as a summer. Yeah, or more just a summary and then with links out to all the weaves so that we can so that they can explore more. And so I really kind of think of that as the content. And then the interviews you doing is one of the potential inputs to it. So I don't know thinking about the the way we're expressing weaving the world to people is the interview show. Or is it just any other any show? But it still feels like it's like if you're doing the interview show, that's really feels like an input to the weaving as opposed to the weaving the world itself is what it feels to me. So I don't know if there's a way to say maybe we have some episodes that these are these are individual inputs. And then you have the behind the scenes, weaving, you know, kind of live participation or recordings of that. And then you have kind of the the summary media that that kind of says this is this this is the sources. This is the result. And here's the weavings and stuff like that. But you could say weaving the world podcast will just be those summary videos, which could be an hour long when they say summary because we're weaving hundreds of things together. Right. Right. Or or it could be just your but I guess it is a bit confusing when it seems like right now, weaving the world is your interviews and potentially other events like this. But it's not actually the weaving, except you're talking about you're talking to weavers. Great. So it'd be nice to disambiguate all of that, which I guess is what we're doing here. But perfectly. So let me let me refund that for a sec, because I love what you just said. And I'm starting to shift how I'm thinking about the podcast. So originally, first the first blush was OK, we create some original interviews, which are either one on ones or small group, fishbowl style or whatever. And those are produced to look like a podcast sequence of episodes. Then we have these shadow episodes where we weave the content from the first ones and hope and assume that people have watched the first episodes or were in the audience of the of the primary episodes so that we talk about that and then just try not to wander too far off topic, but but clearly the high-fave will reach other places and we're pretty distractible, you know, so it'll go other places and to have some of these shadow episodes and then and then folding in the idea of occasional periodic summary episodes that say, oh, here's where we've been over the last four calls. Sounds really cool. Now I'm thinking now I'm thinking to sort of lean less on original interviews, but still do original interviews, but then not make them. Hey, let's have a call booker. Let's have a show booker and a producer so that we have a guest on an episode and like like like it's Charlie Rose, but more. We just had a fantastic conversation on Thursday. Let's turn that into an episode of weaving the world ex post after even as this happens. And then one of the things I did recently was I took one of Jim Rudd's shows. He did an interview with Robin Dunbar of the Dunbar number. And it was, you know, it was an hour and 15 long call with a nice, nice transcript on the website. Actually read the transcript more than I listened to the call and it was great. And I filled lots of stuff in my brain and I learned what I kind of got updated on Dunbar thinking because he has a new book about about there were Dunbar numbers and different layers and all that. And I was like, there are tons of really good existing podcasts out in the world. Partly what we could do is digest that matter and weave it into weave it into the world. Right. So so it would not be a bad thing to go take that Dunbar thing and do a weaving the world episode just to take. Hey, there was somebody that are really good. And in this case, we could then go to more controversial things like Joe Rogan show or whatever else that we could even do subsets or sections so that we're not making people go listen to, you know, hour and a half really, really long, slow things. But we could say, we're going to take this 30 minute segment that's really juicy and then we weave it into the world. And then I'm sitting here thinking metaverse was a terrific topic for for last Thursday's call. It took us a lot interesting places. It's a really timely, terrific topic to go on for a while. And maybe the format, maybe the package, I like what you said about potential content packages a lot. Maybe the packaging is that there are themes. And we run with metaverse for for a month or something like that. And that means that in between, we might be inspired by our thinking and our weaving to frame up an op-ed piece, which we write and then and then contribute to a publication or just post online on medium or whatever, and that that becomes a piece of weaving the world as well. And then as we discover things in the calls, we invite some of those people into the conversation conversations. And so a theme winds up carrying us for a while. Until until we feel that there's a neighboring theme or we jump to a different topic altogether or something like that. But but I really like the idea of staying on something for a while to do the weaving, because that gives us this ability to look back over five or six calls and say, here's where we started. Here's what happened then. And then each of the calls has a list of resources and links. We're doing the the buzz saw. I mean, we're doing the chainsaw of the call so that all the resources are easily at hand as we go. And when we're doing the retrospectives, we're just plucking selectively from the high points kind of along the way. And then we would shift and I would, you know, a second theme could easily be a big question I have in the back of my head. How do we blend the best of the old and the best of the new? How do we blend indigenous wisdom with this modern damned inner tubes thing and what's going on? And that and we could find a couple of really good podcasts and start there. We'll start mining with like standing trees in the forest, like, oh, there's a juniper and there's a redwood. We're going to go weave those in together. We're going to listen to the episodes and then sit down together to do the weaving parts. And then we'll battle that'll help us figure out who else to talk to and how to bring them in. And to make the package be a rolling conversation that has a lot of continuity, a lot of integrity, but still goes in lots of different places and is juicy because we're busy, you know, exploring. And then just to complexify a little bit, as other people stand up other shows and decide to weave whatever they create into what we're doing, or as some of us participating, start creating media and maybe running with it in a different way, those become kind of the different mycelial threads that cut across and keep going. And we can, of course, include them by reference. And then if they're really juicy, they could become the focus of part of our conversation, et cetera. But I like the feeling that the sequence of conversations winds up resembling the metaphors we're using. That it feels very wood-wide web, very mycelial, very organic. And then I keep thinking now because of this metaphor that episodes that we generate are the fruiting bodies, you know, the mushrooms above ground that you can kind of eat that are consumable because they look like an item of food, but that the really interesting work in the chemical exchange and the nutritional exchanges are happening below ground. Does that all make sense? Does that smell? Yes, you want to take what has been the kind of conversation and thinking that usually happens behind the scenes and put that up front. That usually happens maybe at dinner parties and, you know, in other sorts of private conversations. I want to bring it up front and I want to annotate it, mark it up, map it, connect it. And I want to, one of the things that I'm subconsciously attacking is my hatred of traditional media where the artifacts are so overprotected that we don't go back and do anything with them. You know, I'm thinking these days of books as small prisons for ideas because they're protected behind DRM. It's really hard to share out that the ideas are actually not easily woven into the world unless the author chose to make the material openly available and then did something interesting. Besides the dam, you can download the PDF of the book over here, which is like, hey, PDFs are where information goes to die too. Like that's not that useful, right? But if you were to research journals are even worse. Exactly. But if you were to create a Fed wiki or a Tiddly wiki or a massive wiki or this is for me exactly what I want to use the interface to unlock, right? So, right, because even what we're talking about an in-between step for me, and I'm just going to get a little philosophical for a second, we're talking about an in-between step where we are going to help to, we as a group of people are going to help to orchestrate and enable this process to happen, right? We're going to handhold it quite a bit to force it to happen in some ways, hopefully happily and joyfully. And then I would, I envision a step where the process becomes easy enough that people can do it for themselves, right? So this is a great opportunity to help start drawing the people in who kind of love thinking this way anyway, who are interested in weaving anyway, who aren't talking to each other and who aren't cross pollinating and all those things and to start to create that cross pollination. And I think not only is it something truly missing in the world, but I think people will gravitate towards it as well. And I think the marketing of it will be a key component here, and I so appreciate Bentley bringing up, like, what is the focus? Because that will be an important piece of this is communicating it well. What is, what are you doing again? How is this what? Is it just another podcast and people have a preconceived notion of what that is? So maybe changing the name of it makes sense too, from just from that sense, not using the word podcast, right? So Weaving the World, of course, is a great name to, to, to that continues to be a perfect name for what we're talking about. So I think all of this makes sense. If the, if the process is what people are getting, we can market that, right? It's not necessarily an output they're used to, right? At the end of this podcast, you'll gain these three things you can bring back into your life, right? It'll be learning about this process and gaining access to, hopefully, a knowledge repository or, right? Like, so that to me, it becomes my next question is what is the thing and making sure that we're not bogged down by whatever thing we are, we are trying to weave into? Absolutely. Whether it's Jerry's brain or whether it's massive wiki, but that needs, for me, I think it's okay to have it be fits and starts at the beginning, but eventually we'll need to settle in to kind of something that's accessible to people and that people find pretty easy to navigate. It doesn't have to be the best thing in the world because I think the first initial... It's going to be ugly up front. It's going to be ugly up front. It's okay, right? And that's kind of the point. Maybe that's, that's half the conversation around a little bit around that. So I want to pull out one thing you said, you said a lot of really good things. One of the ones I want to pull out is that I hadn't thought about at all is to make it really easy for somebody to go from being a spectator to being a participant and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're putting their work out in public, that they're busy sharing into the big fungus or anything like that. It might mean that they're not taking in Rome at home, but that they start a practice of knowledge management of some sort and of creating a memory and preferably they would be inspired to do that collectively. And I'm going to be... There's a CDW conference coming up December 1. I'm on a panel that looks a little bit interesting about personal content mapping and whatever, but I think that the panel is partly hosted by Athens, the Athens Project, which is an open source Rome knockoff that is more interested with multi-person memory making than Rome is. And that's really interesting because it's open and because... And so what we could do is invite some Athens people in as participants in believing and see how the tool works and what's going on and there'd be some geekery that goes on at the margins, but if we saw how different people process knowledge and map it together, that would be super, super, super interesting. And with this goal of leaving behind this trail of knowledge that's permanently, whatever permanently means anymore, but that's persistent online, I did an ode to persistence years ago, I did a short video that was like one of the things in the old days of telecom, if I called you, we would have a call, it might be really exciting. And when we hung up, there was no artifact left of the call. And these days when we do all this kind of stuff, we're leaving behind artifacts that are persistent in space as long as the website stays up or the inner tubes don't die or whatever. But that's really interesting because persistence then allows us to go back and connect and learn and digest and do all these other sorts of things. Yeah. Yeah. And just to add to that, as soon as you said persistence, I thought of it in humans and you're talking about it and applying it, which also makes sense to how for how long information persists, but it brought me around to the idea of grit because Duckworth's concept of grit is both persistence and passion. So now we have the persistence of incredible amount of information, untold amounts of information, uncategorized like credible amounts of information and no sprinkling of passion, which in this interpretation would be what are people most interested about in the volume of information? That's the weaving to me, right? The weaving is, yes, the information, but a lot of that information, a lot of the information already exists. It's about weaving. This connects with this and, right? And and I'm really interested in knowing more about this. I wasn't a year ago, but now I really want to know what this is about because there's something going on with this. And so we all kind of focus in on on trying to make sense of that together and what other things connect and did that. And then does the conversation Peter out, which is fine? Or does it lead to the next cool thing that to me is the fun of of putting these two things back together? Yeah, yeah, I love that. I was talking to Pete yesterday and how did this show up? I think it was was it just yesterday's conversation? I think it might have been yesterday's conversation in the morning on Building OGM where I was inspired. We turn Pete turned it kind of into a game where we sort of introduced each other and ask questions. And one of the questions that came to me was like if you had a single idea to put in the world like what would it be? And I'm paraphrasing the question badly, but I was like designing from trust. Like like I would like the world to design from trust because if we all map things together and walk forward and do kind of just the weaving thing, that's interesting. But I don't know that it's going to change things necessarily directly. Like our ability to see how we each think and to manifest more clearly our ideas and all that could go somewhere good and I hope it does. But without something more directly about trust I think it's not there. Anyway, the whole conversation made me realize that I've got a bunch of stuff like buried in Scrivener documents that I'm not going to publish and here and there and everywhere. And I'd like to do what fungi do because I was reading that fungi, you know, an octopus can digest a clam by inserting its stomach into the clam. It doesn't need to open the clam and go eat it with the mandibles. It basically just like externalizes its stomach, digests the clam and then brings its stomach back in. Fungi basically secret enzymes that go into whatever environment they're in dissolve the minerals and nutrients and then reabsorb them. So in some weird way fungi have an externalized stomach. So I said to Pete, I kind of feel like externalizing myself. Like I don't know when or if or if ever I'm going to write a book by myself but I would love to take all the bits and pieces that I've got and put them in the world in some way in some consistent way. And that might be a way that I start using obsidian for example because then there would be in a consistent repository that would be linkable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I say all this partly because it kind of feeds into the process of figuring out what we believe and how we believe and how these things fit together. And then I that would enable me to start telling narratives in a new way and it might enable us to publish, you know, mutual books. It might enable us to publish collections of books at the same time where a book is a snapshot in time of a bunch of thinking and that goes into the world as another fruiting body as a conventional object people would recognize. Well, look, here's a book called What If We Trusted You? And that would be really, really cool. But then separately a thread that I have a funny feeling wouldn't be that hard to follow would be to fund a lot of this through NFTs. And basically I look around the world of NFTs and most of them are ugly and stupid and funny and they're not functional. And then I look at NFT gaming like Axie Infinity which I learned a little too much about a couple weeks ago. And I'm like, wow, there's a whole bunch of people trying to make a little bit below minimum wage by playing a stupid ass game that has fake axolotls, you know, competing with each other. What what if we actually created games for learning and what if we actually had snapshots of the evolving collective memory that we then auctioned as NFTs that would send some value back every time they got flipped and sold for higher value that would then that would create a way to fuel the community of us busy doing this. I think that's really good. So so you're muted. So there's a couple of conversations I'm in with people including some of us in OGM. But an old friend, John Borthwick has been doing a bunch of stuff in this and like we have enough expertise on hand and my old retreat community we have a whole bunch of expertise on hand where we could stand up an NFT platform and then participants would participate in that if they wanted to and we could link that to the work that we're doing in different ways. And there's dangers there of starting to monetize what should be happy shared shared work, right? I mean, yes. So what I was seeing was there needs to be a middle ground because I came to the same conclusion a couple of years ago and it's just for me recently maybe the last couple of months woven into the NFT movement as well. So I always thought, hey, why just like music why don't we have low price point downloadables of content, right? So I created a presentation but I did it five years ago but it was really good and I put a lot of information into it and now I don't do that work anymore. So let me post it up and for five bucks you can have my presentation as a starting point, right? Why? That seems to look so easy. The only reason why I wouldn't do that right now is because there's no platform for it, first of all but even after that maybe there's enough of my expertise in there that I don't just want to give it away for free, right? So I kind of want to get a little bit of something for it that makes more sense to me or it makes the friction and sharing less, right? It encourages me to share but at the same time to your point I think the sharing needs to be kept to like a $5 max or $8 max or something that's low enough that people don't start using whatever this platform is as their salary for the year, right? To me if you've got enough content that you're gonna put it on Coursera which still should, right? You're gonna make a course out of it you're gonna be selling your book all those things should still exist this should not replace that so to me it's that in between space I have a presentation I have a handout I have a white paper I have something, right? And it might be useful to someone else it's not really useful to me anymore and then of course there's moments where hey, I have something that could be actually that's useful to me right now that I'm actually currently working on but I'm happy to share it, right? There's all those different variations of a theme that would encourage people to share especially if they could make a little money and then it's a volume game. Yes and I think this is the start of a longer conversation on this particular piece of the whole model I'm really interested so there's public intellectuals who basically write essays and they get paid by the New Yorker magazine or they get a fellowship at a university or whatever else and then they make a living putting all their ideas kind of out in this packaging that then gets pay walled or becomes a book or whatever else and I'm trying to figure out I'm trying to figure out how to maximize the amount of a person's clever ideas that actually make it into the world openly and one of my beliefs is that packaging up the same ideas in a much more convenient wrapper like, hey, this looks like a Kindle book is actually all by itself an act that's worth some monetary reward so, you know, hey, all this information all the information in this Kindle book is available on these awkward like Fedwiki pages like it's all the same stuff except I've made this pretty for you and it only costs three bucks right and I think I think that people will still pay those things and I think also patronage models where if you like this information you can send a tip over here I would love to see if somebody studied what the last 10 years worth of tipping and patronage and Patreon have done for creativity because it's done something I just don't think it's like it's clearly not solved the problem but it's very different from what it was 20 years ago before these websites existed and there've been a variety of different tip jar movements and other sorts of things along the line none of which really particularly flew but they're interesting and so I'm trying to figure out and then there's this second problem which is a piece of what I think we're doing and a piece of what I know I do when I read a good book for example or see a good video is I'm trying as and I'm reasonably good at synthesis and be, you know, deriving pithy nuggets from some work I'm actually trying to deconstruct and make visible and useful the ideas that were in that work on purpose and an author who's extremely protective about their ideas will not like that right and if I'm and an author who has access to the current channels that exist for which they can get their workout also sees no benefit right or sees less you know it's for the people who have great ideas who don't have the platforms for or or or don't have the platforms with outside their discipline right it could be that they have what or or maybe they have a platform and have a big audience but they but they are of a mindset of I just want these ideas to be really widespread so I'm thinking here yeah David Graber who passed away but who is a good a good anarchist and when grow his colleague and I don't know when grows frame of mind but if I were them I'd be like I just want to infect the world with these great ideas and we happen to have written a book that's getting a ton of attention right now which is just awesome I love that but I would I would think maybe that when grow be like if you want to just take every idea and let it loose on the world and make it manifest in lots of different ways I'm on board and I think that our journey could tip in favor of people who think that way and want to work that way and that would be one of the factors that dictate where we go and along the way we would sort of try to swallow foreign material like a Joe Rogan podcast and say what is Joe Rogan saying why how does his attention work what is going on what are the dynamics here and sort of listen with respect and figure out what's going on there and see who we can engage in conversation and by the way there's thinkers on the far alt right who are probably really open with their intellectual property you just want to infect the world with their ideas too right Bentley the interrupt is working really fast today isn't it yeah yeah so I like all of this all of this thought I do also like to periodically focus so I just want to think about what I'd like what I'm thinking is or suggestion is that one of the mycelium nodes the mushroom that's popping up and the attractive one that is supposed to bring in people that are normally just walking around lost in the forest right would be the weaving the world YouTube channel and I think the main kind of budding flowering thing would be a recurring video that is these I don't like the term summary what's what's the name for a aprici a rug that's hung on the wall that has normally has a story in it there's a castle tapestry yeah tapestry I don't know why that word could completely left me right yeah so I what I would see these is these are weaving the world kind of video tapestry right so this is taking a whole bunch of stuff and and putting it in a slight story and doing things so so even if like you would do a video with an interesting person put it on your own channel so I'm I've got I've got this woman's project that's just the story of petroleum basically the story of oil which is a tapestry story just like you're saying yeah so doing doing that and I I think so one of the budding things would be the video form and then that would be you know a bit of addictive substance to get that's better way to look at it but it would be a lean in right it'd be a lean it'd be it'd be a a open door for people to then get into all the other budding you know or surfaces or or or just to get into the network right because in the description you'd have links to all the different woven things woven into that tapestry video and I think that that being the main content of that channel would be a clear concise thing that people could go to and have an expectation and and kind of see and then it would weave them into the element that's my thought I know I love that that's a great thought part of what I want to serve in some way is I was struck years ago when I was reading up on how public policy making process works and there's often like a 90 day window for comments and what happens when what happens in a highly productive and fruitful thing is that somebody will commission a white paper and then round up some citizens and they'll create a citizen's commission or a citizen journey or there's a bunch of names for different kinds of group process for this form of deliberation and they'll do a whole bunch of work over one or two weekends maybe and then sort of caught that back over to the legislators who are busy trying to do this public policy work and it struck me like why are they writing a whole new white paper why is this done de novo as a special thing when when you know when if we had a shared memory and we sort of understood the issues I mean I was like there's a there's a very decent Wikipedia page about zoning policy and you could do lots more about that for example and and water management and aquifers and what and what not there's already a bunch of really interesting content that could be worked on and improved on in layers so that our policy discussions are kind of ongoing and don't need to be started from scratch and then we can we can then embed polling and other kinds of ways of figuring out people's opinions and markets ways of figuring out where people are willing to put their money on different kinds of things right all of that could be kind of folded into the substrate as part of the way of working forward and so for me for me this is a I would love to be first we're just sort of having a conversation this thing that doesn't exist yet but in my fantasy future we're we're infecting public policy making we're infecting education we're getting scientists to share our data and make the results more accessible and more meaningful because pre-publication servers is cool but these things are still studies trapped inside of PDFs right and the raw data isn't being shared openly all the time failed studies aren't being published so that the data can be reused none of that's really happening well yet and all of that could be a really nice feedstock for this collective collective mind yeah and for Michael's kind of bringing up that you know it's always going on going the way I'd see that happening is I I still kind of like the idea that even the initial video on a topic on in that channel is a woven thing there's one or at least one or two things woven together but then at the end or even at the beginning there's an invitation hey we're going to revisit this topic and Jerry like you said it could be in the row or you know we don't even have to hold ourselves to that so it could be you know and in six months we're going to do another one of these contribute your weavings to this for other content that you want to do and we'll create another summary video and that'll lead them back into the whole thing exactly exactly I just want to read Michael's post from earlier out loud because I don't have time to pay attention to our conversation and actually read his participation so to pull this down to the mentality of the form of the weaving how to make it participatory totally endorse the idea of weaving both new weaving the world branded podcast episodes and other podcasts like rogan books white papers articles plays yes it seems important we watched the making of the comfort no why the why I love the constitution I think it's a one woman to show with a couple of extras brilliant I learned so much stuff about the constitution so like let's weave the sucker it seems important that the weaving of the subject be ongoing ever improving and always there as opposed to another episode which is just a snapshot of that weaving work one that you can't interact with precisely and and for me I now think of souvenirs as sorry I now think of books as souvenirs books are snapshots of a bunch of thinking in time linearized because that's what a book forces you to do a word has to go before after all the other words and hopefully a good book summarizes things and makes them pithy and you can annotate it and all that but whatever is in the book for me should be more interesting online it should be connected to all the references it makes because in even on kindle it's hard to kind of follow references out to the web it doesn't really work integrated with what it's writing about often there's footnotes in the back that are mystical that aren't even links like like you go to a modern e-book and you go to the bibliography and it's not actual links seriously people like really why don't we have to go do the work of googling this like you you had the research you've got the links why is this god damned index not actually linky right it's like PR press releases 20 years ago it's like every press release should be very linky so that when they mention a product you can go to the product page when they mentioned the previous version of project the product that this new one obsolete you can go see all the articles that were written about the previous product and and even even negative reviews of it and all like like PR could be creating a public service that would be more interesting and actually readable instead of this blank piece of text with no links that's like hey we've announced the new thing just not credible so maybe we can infect all these kinds of things in different ways and in fact I kind of mean inoculate in the way that ants use fungus to inoculate new pieces of leaf matter and then metabolize it into the fungus so that it can create food for the hive so by in fact I kind of mean this lovely this is why the mycelium metaphor is so so lovely is that when you inoculate matter it starts to sort of dissolve into the entity yeah maybe we should have a leaving the world X like Ted X yeah yeah it's like go do this and and we'll post it you know even like so people could either send stuff you know video snippets that we can include in a future call back to another souvenir I like the way you said that yeah this these video things are not the weaving it's it's just they're the fruiting bodies right and the mushroom right the attractant right and the mushroom was just a way for the mycelium body to reproduce itself and to get found in the world cool and and it's built on purpose so that critters will come by and eat it and move the the spores to some other place etc etc cool and these are recognizable bodies but they're not the actual interesting artifact they're not they're not where the work of the of the of the thing of the entity is happening but I do like us kind of focusing on that because there's so many ways we can go with this idea and so many ways to weave that if if we you know that this is something we can take a step in and kind of old world I mean it goes all the way back to doing plays in front of the fire right so we're just kind of doing that bit and then we'll I mean I think eventually it'll be a website with a feed and people will be able to go through and when you go to the videos it won't be the static video it'll be interactive and you know the links to the different readings will show up and so I'm sure we'll we'll build all that but I think the first kind of baby step is just creating these chunks and you just got me excited because we're not that far off I mean that's what Vincent and Jonathan Sand and I are working on too which is providing a platform right starting to embed the videos that are related in a card that's connected to a node that right we're trying to do all that now and work on building a plugin that at least will work for Trove right so this and I know massive wiki and I know the brain can all do similar things we're not that far off we're really not that far off and with a lot faster we'll be able to do this too and factor yeah right and I agree with all that I just think also we need that that fruiting body first that that other people already know how to interact because all that stuff that's why I've been pitching leaving the world as a video podcast and that's language people understand and I found I'm excited about all that as well and I found my way to video podcast as terminology for it which I don't like it's like that that was the best phrase I could find that would describe something you know what we're we're standing up in some understandable way yeah that's instantly recognizable yeah well because vlogs seem to be more personal blogging seems to be like like almost like personal diary stuff where podcasts and video podcasts are more produced more for audience or whatever else yeah tell the thing what did they guess yes sorry I'm just finally in a place where I can actually speak so if I can if I can jump please cool um so yeah I just wanted to to throw out the idea I mean thinking of ways that people already know how to interact you know whether it's even something as dull as a Google doc the idea of of ongoing annotation of a transcript of anything just seems like something that we should be experimenting with from the get go and whether it's on massive wiki or trove or you know factor or or or whatever whatever thing can do some version of it or ideally that it's somehow interconnectedly interoperably you know available in all those places but but backing up to the basics you know maybe it's a Google doc you know maybe it maybe it's just something that people can get into via you know some permissioning that that gets better and better and more and more connected to other other podcasts in the series other books that are referred to you know somebody refers to a book in one of the podcasts and then you know we you decide hey that deserves to be its own node to be woven in rather than just a link in the you know in the margin of the transcript of this of this episode and you know it's linked to another weaving instance that is not that that can gets the chance to start off as as something you know just by virtue of the fact this book has been mentioned and somebody wants to make it a weaving instance a document is started for that that has stuff that people can add to about that it's not doesn't have to have the promise of being a videoable episode or right right right podcast or for entity of its own it's just a piece of weaving yep so I just want to get that idea across if it wasn't wasn't fully clear thank you I like it and when when Pete croved the OGM call from a couple weeks ago not last week's but he did this like 12 days ago or something like that right and he poured a whole bunch of energy into it and he went and created a bunch of markdown pages and he created a markdown page for each participant which was just a stub page it was like hey more more information should go here when in fact each of us has you know profiles and representations online we could have used or could have linked to or whatever else so any stub page could connect to sort of larger other kinds of contexts and be the launching point for other sorts of things I mean right and this is one point from my use of the of the brain that I I don't understand how to explain because it's so I've internalized it so much that I just take it for granted and I think other people don't have ever the experience of hey this thing shows up and I want to link to it and I already have it in my context it's in fact rich and wealthy with it is it is like dripping with fruit right now because I've been paying attention for a long time and as I connect this to the idea of you know indigenous people didn't have to work very hard for food there's a whole lot of other materials there and you can that you could then go spin and turn and get dyed deeper and go see other kinds of stuff and hold on okay I need to switch locations and hold on a second keep talking okay my question was for Jerry so hold my my question but what he what he just said sparked for me and I'm curious if other people are in the same space that other people don't see how it's all networked together I guess right like so there's definitely I learned in art class there's definitely a division between people who visualize things and 2d and people who visualize things in 3d and to me this is one of those 3d abilities visually and are in our heads right which is then and it's it's kind of like building a website it's kind of like building a lot of things so any architecture or anything you kind of have to be able to see not only what the front is going to look like but what the depth of it's going to look like how everything's going to move inside how if you put a wall here that that that inhibits now flow it's not necessarily bad you can still put the wall but you need to understand the flow is not going to be there and what's that going to how's that going to change you know traffic patterns and people walking and whatever right so to me I always saw it that way and and Jerry this might go back to there was a there was a moment when you wove in something that I shared with you and I said oh yeah I completely get where you put that that makes total sense that's really cool and your response to me was oh I want to understand why that was easy for you to see when it's hard for other people to see and so I'm bringing that back up here because you kind of just talked about it and I and I I think this is a very important conversation to have for weaving the world because if we can figure out a little more about what this is then we can help make it easier for people because to me everything we've talked about today is stuff I have already thought about myself this is and we are trying to now manifest it in a new way in the world which I absolutely love and the more points of friction that we can remove the better this will go and so I think this is one of them I think there are people who see it and there are people who don't how can we bridge the gap how to explain these things was there a question in there for me I started off explaining because you you got up but you have a question would be I know could you what more can you say about your experience with obviously the E there's an E is for you and and doing your your brain but have you started to codify or understand for yourself what the resistance is for other people and maybe that's was the nature of your question yeah you're not sure you know and which case that's the question for the whole group what is the nature of that resistance to other people here on this call feel that sometimes if so do they have a sense of what that is or does anybody have any ideas for how we can lower the friction I have some ideas but they're they're not well defined yet and I don't know and and I love this space and I'm trying really hard to figure out how it works and what where the value is because people love Rome and there's a cult of Rome is that hey you put square brackets around a word or phrase and suddenly you can pivot around it and you see everything connected to it and that's like isn't that so freaking cool why couldn't we do that before and I'm like yes but you then see everything you connected to that word or phrase and you don't have a lot of choices about how that works and as I'm working in the brain because my display is visual I'm actually curating and I'm doing much more like you hang ornaments on a Christmas tree it's like this doesn't look here we need to move the light a little bit it's not just that I said Christmas tree or I said orange ornament it's like I put things in different places on purpose to try to remember things better tell a story pull you know pull out the the facts that are there and that's a different act from simple backlinks and I haven't had that conversation any place with anyone but I'm really interested in how all these different forms of representation kind of meld into a more common space where we can flip between the different kinds of tools both for the situation at hand and for our personal preferences right some people will just love love love love outliner some people love calendars some people love to-do lists some people love slightly visual presentations that I call the brain two and a quarter D because I can't handle 3D information like floating through an information space I've not seen one that works for me but but managing this abstract two and a quarter dimensional space is magic for me and that's just me and I don't know how many means there are I don't know if I represent 1% of the population or 15 or 30 right and I would love to set up experiment I mean that there's a whole quest we could go into here about trying to figure out what are the more or less canonical subsets of perceptual mapping that people fall into that that would be a really fun thing to to to discover someone doing research on and pull them in and participate in their in their experiments you know treat treat us all of us as like a test bed for for answering those kinds of questions and then I just want to one last thing over time I've had multiple people over the years of ping me and tell me how valuable they found my brain and then I've had other people say I see your brain and it's just a tangle of stuff I can't make my way through it I don't get it and I don't know the difference between those people so I might go ahead yeah and and I think that that point about the fact that different representations of the same information are are valuable to some people and not valuable you know to others is is important to think about how we can do something non-proprietary and and and you know that that let sort of let a thousand interfaces bloom and and also filtering abilities and I know Bentley like this kind of I think speaks to some of your work that you know we want people to be able to you know as you say you know you get the Cult of Rome where you can see everything that relates to that bracketed term but you want to not see all of that that's an overload in certain cases and what you want are the filters that work for you and the filters might be like I only want to see what you know people with the affiliation OGM relate to this word and it might be you know chronological or or or geographic or whatever whatever filters apply in that instance and I think the coming back to weaving the world specifically the idea that we want to take these things that exist in the world whether they've just been created by a podcast being produced or they've existed for a century as a book or or it's you know Hamilton or you know whatever whatever you want to make part of weaving the world that you know we're we're taking a small test group to see how these things can be linked to what you know these are the nodes and we're we're potentially adding other nodes to them but but really we're we're putting edges into the picture and that metaphor might not work for for everybody on the street but but the fact that you're looking at a thing and there are footnotes to it if they can be easily linked to is a graspable context concept and then what what skin we can put on it whether it's a map whether it's a you know list whether it's a you know a document seems like there there's the opportunity for creativity and different people's creativity but making it as adaptable as possible it seems important but just want to riff on that I think you said edge and making it graspable and when I first started explaining OGM almost two years ago I talked about OGM as an estuary as a meeting place for lots of different kinds of currents and people with experiences and how estuaries are these nutritious rich vibrant ecosystem locations and I talked about putting handrails in the estuary or scaffolding or something basically some structure that gives structure that lets people hang on and know where they are and gives people or a sense of orientation a sense of structure all of that so what we're painting here I think are those those aspects of the rhythm of our work together of our collaborations that give people a place to hold on and to understand like where North is and how they might fit things like that Wendy? I have too many ideas running through my head right now awesome awesome I try to take notes in the chat so I remember that Dan thinks that go through my head so I know I'm trying to do the same yeah I think for those of us who are deep thinkers who are willing to get to dive into the muck and swim around in there are pretty and are pretty comfortable being there and getting lost in our own thoughts and stuff like that we don't need as many handrails I don't think or we found ways to provide them for ourselves so we don't get too lost but I completely agree that if we're going to start throwing ideas out for the for the general population to to fertilize you know more ideas there need to be these scaffolds and their need to be and a lot of this conversations reminding me too of just the learning that is required for any and I'm I'm going to say interface but I don't mean website because of course that's true I mean more how we go about thinking about something or how we go about organizing something so something like a map a street map which we all used to have to learn in school which isn't really taught anymore which which is also a really interesting kind of side conversation in and of itself is we used to have to learn this is how you read a map you're going to need this capability for your whole life we don't really need it now so it's interesting to me that my girls really don't know how to read a map and and I think what we're going to be asking people is to relearn how to read whatever sort of map we are presenting to them and that's not necessarily bad we just need to understand that that's what we're asking for even if we don't make it explicit we need to understand this is where people need to start you know the onboarding is part of it but then even when they're in the middle of it people as you're all saying people think differently and to me that's the beauty eventually in my mind to like the future vision providing an interface that isn't really about the content it's about the navigating to the content so the navigating can stay the same and then once you have a topic in the middle it doesn't matter what the resources and I know you've all you're all in the same I'm preaching the choir here but I think that's why that's so important because people then can learn the map and figure out how to get to where they're going then once they get to where they want to be then they can explore in whatever way works for them whether it's a graph or it's a book summary or it's a whatever it doesn't matter after that and the more we can separate the data from the visualization tools as opposed to having silos of data that fit a particular tool the easier what you just said is because then the data becomes reliable distributed and viewable and you can think of an app as a view graph on top of a set of a collection of data that you're working on cool we've gone over an hour a bit this is really juicy I'm sort of thinking this is in fact like a Weaving the World episode where we're building the plane as we fly it this feels like that kind of conversation and we did a lot of explaining of what the hell we're talking about here and Stacey I hope our conversation hasn't made your headache worse and has in fact helped to that yes it was good to listen I just my head is just pounding sorry so and I've got a whole bunch of things flying around on my head but I'm thinking we should probably wrap the call but concluding thoughts when did you want to spill any more things that were swirling in your head into the conversation nope Bentley Michael we're good Bentley go ahead I just just say I think I would like to see I think we're to the point where we can take a little bit more action I know that you've been trying to take some steps so I'd like to work on concrete steps let's work on Weaving the World channel on Mattermost just to open up this conversation and talk about steps I'd love to I'm trying to figure out I'm overwhelmed by the different things I need to do and I need to pick my path through them more judiciously and then just get those things done so that we have the the emerging scaffolding of this that you know starts existing in the world properly if you want to list those out in the channel I can make suggestions sounds great thanks Bentley Michael tell you what to do Michael yeah I think this was was rich and really just yeah I'll I'll I'll wait to look in the channel and see what what comes up there and comment more I won't I won't try and do that here with a PA system in the background sorry sounds awesome arriving on track four exactly here you coming to you from Graham Central Terminal are you in Grand Central now yeah yeah awesome I love Grand Central it's a beautiful place if you're not trying to carry on a conversation on a cell phone and get back and forth between texts and and chat and exactly turning your mic on and off Mark Helfren wrote a novel years ago a fantasy novel that had part of its plot occurs above the ceiling in the Grand Hall of Grand Central and so and then part of the plot actually goes right up the Hudson and I'm forgetting what the name of the novel was but it was like that stuck in my head so whenever I went through Grand Central I would look up at the stars on the on the ceiling and go oh I wonder who's back there yeah all right all right friends I'm gonna jump thank you very very much and Michael thank you for sticking in there and and through your commute really appreciate it sure okay talk to you guys soon all right bye everyone bye