 This is actually the Weaving the World Ops call on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022. We were just sharing trials and tribulations with infrastructure. And Wendy, this might be a really good moment to go talk type form. Yeah. We could sort of borrow this time and type form would be helpful, not just for Picturi's brain, but also for Weaving the World and a bunch of other stuff because I have a funny feeling. I should become at least a brown belt in type form to figure out how to translate, how to create some entry paths. Yeah. And type form feels really powerful that way. So, and I haven't gone and done like the tutorial videos on type form. I wanted to do that before we spoke, actually. But if you wanted to just talk through a little bit and or show your favorite features or a favorite type form that somebody did or anything like that, that would be fabulous. Well, yeah, here's my one email back to you was like, I'm not an expert, but I'm happy to collaborate, which means I've literally spent maybe three hours on type form. But I've done so many other similar thinking projects. I'm really good at Gantt charts. I'm really good at flow charts. I'm really that it's not complicated for me to figure out, but I haven't yet figured out, oh my God, this is a great example. Like I don't have anything to show you. Okay. But I think if we go into it together, we've figured out faster together. Now, the other way to handle this and it's harder because I'm not yet aware of what magic lies in type form. I'm really interested in what the paths are, how to design the paths. Yeah. Like what are the paths of inquiry or the sets of questions? What is the decision tree that gets people sort of into the pseudo conversation with me in my brain, for example, for pictures brain? And that was one of the big goals for using type form, I think. Yeah. So they have a nice, they basically, they have a logic path, right? So they have a tab that allows you to look at the flow of all the questions and how they relate to each other. And you can create logic loops or branches or skips, right? So you can go back to a question, you can skip forward to a question depending on how they answer. So, and in that, it ended up being a little restricted for what I was trying to do with the tapestry because the tapestry has so many interconnected questions that type form, like after about three hours, I realized type form was not gonna be able to do what I needed it to do. And yet still I kept using it to try and fake it out and at least get something from it and realized it's just not gonna do it. So I actually moved over to, that's why I moved over to bubble AO. I started expressing to Jonathan and Vincent both, hey, I see limitations with type form, am I wrong? Like, and then also, and as soon as I started saying like what the leading edge was there, they went, oh, just do it in bubble AO. And I went, okay, I cannot really think I wanna start where Jonathan goes, no problem, I'll teach you in about a half an hour. He had me up using bubble AO. And then Jonathan took a look, I'm sorry, Vincent took a look and said, I said, oh, I can make this for you in 20 minutes. So later today, he's gonna show me the prototype of what he built. So I think that's another interesting thing to think about, but I don't think that for your needs, you need to go there because you're really just trying to increase engagement and interest and curiosity enough to have someone say, yes, I wanna talk to Jerry Moore or yes, I wanna sign up, right? So I think that's pretty simple and I think we could get through that, no problem. Yeah. There are a couple, and then to answer the other part of your question, there are a couple templates on, like they offer up templates that you can then just modify where the tree, the workflow and everything is already set. So I actually use that as a way to, as a tutorial because I learned best from, you know, from stuff being modeled than I do and trying to create it myself often. I'd rather just modify something that's there. So very quickly I learned, oh, it's this kind of question that feeds into that kind of, you know, so I've already learned all that stuff. That might be a good place to start, especially if you're there, they have a couple of templates for generating leads, for example, and that would probably be the first kind that I would grab and then we could just learn from it or we could just start blank, but I think it's easier to start with something. And also one thing that was dismaying was right across, I'll screen share my empty dashboard on type form, it says, hey, just to let you know you can collect 10 responses this month for free or upgrade. And it's like 10 responses is nothing. Nothing. Nothing. So view plans basically says, hey, then if you don't want to do that, then you get to pay us 83 bucks a month. Oh wow. Which is ridiculous. Like how many, and here's 10,000. I don't need 10,000. I'm just trying to filter people, you know, here, 1155. Well, here's, you know, well, basic is 100 responses. Here we go. Here's 100, and only 100. So 10 responses, 100 responses for 25 bucks a month is sort of. Wait, why does it say up to 750, oh, total. Yeah. How many, I mean, if you're just trying to gain some interest, right? If we're going with the first idea of see how Jerry's brain connects to, you know, what you're doing, do you think that would be an easy, right off the top, more than 100 responses? If it works, it's going to be triage for visitors and I'm hoping to have a bunch of people at least poking at the site and or me and figuring out if they'd like to use me. So if it works, it's the opening part of my funnel, not the closing part of the funnel. And that means there could be thousands of people trying it out and I would love that. Like, you know, if a thousand people poked and a hundred people signed up for an hour's consultation, that would be pretty fabulous. Okay, so part of. So I think this pricing actually is not functional and I should maybe stop thinking about type. I'd forgotten how expensive it is. Yeah, I didn't realize either. And in my mind type form, ooh, cool background. In my mind type form, oh yeah, I wouldn't, if. So I have a Chrome plugin that gives me a new Google satellite picture every time I open a new tab. Oh, that's kind of fun. It's a Chrome extension. You just go into Chrome extensions, find Google. Except that's like a mining pit. Well, some of them are exactly that. Some of them are horrible and some of them are gorgeous and you're like, wow, okay. Wow, yeah. So here's the bubbles pricing. Free core platform features don't know and then it quickly bumps into 25 bucks a month. Yeah, this bubble IO is like, there's also a programming platform. It's meant to help people who are not programmers build apps. So it's the only reason why it works for me is because I'm for two reasons. One is Vincent's building on bubble IO. So it's an instant integration with everything that he's doing and he and I are working on so many other things that makes sense. The other part is that the thing that I'm working on could potentially, if I wanna build it out, be a standalone app for other communities. So that makes more sense to put in the time. You're really building the whole database in the background, you're building the logic. It doesn't make, I don't think that makes sense in your case. You don't need that complexity that that gives you. So another way to think about this, you certainly have plenty of people at your fingertips who will give you advice on what kind of plans to use and what's worth it. If this questionnaire were to give you a tremendous amount of business, it would certainly be worth the $83 a month. I'm just pointing that out. So one thing to try is essentially to try it. Do you know what I mean? You could even try it at the free level. We could see how hard it is to build out what you want. If you're not liking the build or if it's taking too long, we stop. If you like it and up five people that you send to try it out the first time that are your close friends, like it and think it's an ad, you could pay the basic and see what happens. And then if it's taking off, you could either decide to do the business or go back to your network and say, what's an even better way to move this? Move this, I don't think it's that hard to move. You copy and paste some texts, you redo the logic. Yeah, and the logic is durable. I mean, certainly, I could take a logic diagram and replicate it someplace else. Pete, just to catch you up. The conversation about using some kind of automated or a chat bot, by the way, would be interesting as well. But using some kind of automation to have pretend conversations with me in my brain or at least to do a little bit of, hey, this is kind of what it's like was really intriguing to me. Typeform seemed to be the place to maybe go try that. So I went and looked and then Wendy, what you just said makes a ton of sense because I'm allergic to anything that I pay more than $10 a month for because it's like, holy crap. But if I were paying for lead gen or if I were paying a commission or anything like that, that would be a lot more than 83 bucks a month or 25 bucks a month, right? However that is. And the reason, the cause for my dismay was looking at the free plan that basically says, hey, you get 10 responses a month, in the free tier, which is like nothing. And I was explaining that I was envisioning Typeform as being the beginning of my funnel in terms of anybody might come poke and say, hey, maybe I should try this. And that could be a thousand people a month. And so I could very rapidly blow away the $25 a month section, maybe, if I'm lucky and get that much attention. But again, Wendy, what you're saying is like, give it a try. And then I go over to bubble and this feels like I can't tell what this is, but 25 bucks a month, 150 a month. So we're sort of into the same kind of thing. And it feels like I don't need to go to bubble, but do I? I don't know. And are there other platforms I might do this in also? And I'm also a giant fan of chatbots. And it would be really fun. If there was something like Typeform behind a chatbot, and I think there are, there are basically conversation engines of different kinds available as well. And I could pretend, I could have a Jerry's brain bot that shows up on the website and says, hey, would you like to try this out? And that would be a different interface altogether. And I am a huge fan of chatbots, but I've never programmed one or looked at the results of one. So that's kind of where we are. I'll stop the screen share for a bit. I haven't thought about chatbots. I'm not a fan of chatbots. And so it just made me wonder if the people you're trying to attract to Jerry's brain are the people that don't think like you. And that's why there's a benefit to talking to you that maybe chatbots wouldn't necessarily be the right one. It's a little more like I need to... I have to figure out what I need to ask in order to get an... Right, there's a little more of that instead of guiding me through. And so it's just a thought to consider. Yeah, yeah. And I'm realizing that when I show up at sites where the little bot automatically populates in the lower right corner and says, hey, would you like to chat? I'm like, eh, not so much. I'm thinking more of very interesting and useful chatbots that I've bumped into in other places and other ways that are like really pretty astonishing. And at one point I started trying to think of like, what would an Alexa skill look like? Because an Alexa skill is kind of like a chatbot. And could I design... And anybody can go create an Alexa skill and try to put it in the marketplace. Could I create an Alexa skill that would do something like this and my brain couldn't wrap itself around that whole thing? But that, you know... And I think all those avenues are potential good things to try. I think the question for today is, which one feels like the one that you could do in a day or two and get something up? Cause one of the other things that I'm learning to and doing the tapestry over just anything else I've worked on, I'm sure you've had this experience too. You get it in front of other people. And the learning that happens about gaining that feedback and going through the thinking process of, oh, right, so what do I really wanna ask here? And why am I asking it? And you know, what would really be good is if I had a video to go with it. And you know, all the things that get generated from the thought process and the thought process is free. So whether you end up using that on type form in the end or somewhere else, you'll have had the thought process. So to me, the question is more, what platform enables you to have that thought process and start there and don't worry about whether you're upgrading, not upgrading, where you're going to it. Use type form right now if that's your answer to just start laying it out and seeing where the loops are. And if you lay the whole thing out, it was super easy, like even better, right? And then you start showing it to people, tweak it a bit and you're done. And then you could decide what the best platform is over the next couple of months or weeks, you know? And if you hit a bunch of sticking points in type form, then you know just from that that it's not the right platform. It's not doing what you want it to do. I like everything you said. The only thing that nags in the back of my head is that I would blow through 10 responses in early alpha testing of anything. Like I would just ask people to try to take it and then like, boom, 10 would be gone. And suddenly I'm in a paid tier and high and dry. So I really like everything about figuring out the logic and all that. I'm like, I'm gonna exhaust 10 responses in a second. It feels like a really cheap trial tier. But it's only $25 to upgrade to the, I think it was. That's true, to up to 750-ish or something like that. That's a good point. To 100. Yeah. It was, yeah. Again, it's you're paying for the learning, right? You're paying for the feedback. And then so that you can make the next right decision for you. Cool. It's not perfect. Yeah, but that makes sense. Pete, any thoughts? Yeah, a couple. If type form is too expensive, should we shop around for others? The whole forms might be okay. And it's free. Yeah. And the logic here on type forms, if it generates leads and stuff like that, it's worth its weight. So that's a really good point. I found it both, it's always free and it's priced. But anyway, it doesn't have to be a type form. It can be a bunch of other things. Right. The other thing is, you could probably, I don't know if you want, you could probably find a free web chat bot. And if you wanna just play with the branching structure. And certainly Bentley's been playing with Gully Bot. So he's probably got some experience. That's useful. I also found this in a quick search. I don't know if it's useful or not. But this is a thing. It looks a little bit like a game. Interesting. And actually a lot of the steps are like small videos. Mm-hmm. So there's a tools question and then there's a, hey, what would make good paths of inquiry question, which I haven't sort of settled down and figure that out. That's probably the first thing to do. And you can basically pencil and paper that. Right. Oh, and one other thought is that the H5P thing was a little bit fancier than I thought. The first thing I thought was just find an H5M presentation engine that has branching logic in it. Well, I imagine that all educational sites or curriculum pedagogy sites, et cetera, et cetera, need some kind of branching logic engines under them, practically all. And so this is a common feature of a lot of different places. Yeah. The trick would be finding something that was slight enough weight that it wasn't a learning management system. Exactly, exactly. I just want the logic driver and the sexy UI, which Typeform definitely has, like whenever I hit a Typeform UI, I'm like, ooh, this just feels good, which is really important to the experience here. Cool. When the question came up of what would a simulated conversation with me and my brain look like, did anything perk up in anybody's head? Or I'm interested in exploring how that might work. Hi, Michael. Where Michael were in an earlier call, the great idea came up of would it be possible at picturesbrain.com to have some way of testing or just walking down some automated way of an example of what a path of inquiry or what a conversation with my brains would be like? And so we were just looking at Typeform versus other kinds of things to create some kind of branching logic and hopefully both amusing and useful kind of examples. So that's kind of where we are. And partly the variety of domains that I'm happy to have inquiries into is pretty broad. And I think I know where my limits are in different kinds of ways. So if somebody was asking about technical things about web servers, I'm like, that's not me. If somebody's doing life science and anything sort of that depends on understanding life science, well, I'm like, I can do this, but not this, et cetera, et cetera. But the spectrum of possible sort of kinds of inquiry is big, which is why the list of things on picturesbrain.com that I put, the bulleted list is long. It's like you could be creating a science fiction novel and looking for plot points and I'd be happy to consult on that. You could be coming up with strategies for getting people to do something and happy to offer advice on that. Oh, so Azure has bot services. And do any of us know what Bentley used for Gullibot? I don't think I've asked. I think it's just coded. Oh, okay, just hard-coded. Well, I wouldn't say it that way. Soft-coded? He's probably got an engine and a script, more or less. Or configuration, maybe one clause. One thought, Jerry, off of what you were just saying and I don't know if this has come up as a question, but I wonder about the initial length of the list of things you're game to do, as opposed to focusing it around an area like let's say, you know, social regeneration, you know, just something that's particularly close to your heart that you feel like you can offer top-notch service, get clients that, you know, are really on your wavelength that you can really deliver for and expand from there, kind of on the order of like you go into a restaurant and they have a huge menu, you almost figure they can't do everything well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If there's like a 13-page menu, you're like, hmm. You know, and sort of focusing around your areas of strength in what you say, I mean, you can add, you know, this is my focus, but I can deal with other things if you wanna ask or something like that. It may shrink your net a little bit initially, but it gives you, you know what I mean? Just a certain, like not trying to be all things to all people. Yeah, so that's a great question and I wish I'd thought about it sooner and thank you. And the reason, and one of Pete's critiques of the earliest sort of picture he's been a website was, hey, that long list of bullets is too long. It's like too much. And so I started thinking about things like, well, could it be just a rotating gallery where there's like idea, flip, idea, flip, idea, flip. And I was kind of there when you started saying what you're saying. And so kind of the approach I've been taking is a little bit of stump the band, where, hey, there's kind of a strange experience here where I have a whole variety of things I could talk about. I kind of know only inside what my limitations are and I'm happy to carve those out and say, oops, that won't work. Which is why I set up the multi-stage process of, please do this simple Google form to say what you think your initial statement is. And that initial statement should give me some clarity on that. I could easily go into trust or a whole bunch of issues that I care very deeply about or the regenerative economy or politics or a bunch of other stuff where I've got my own conjectures and my own strong feelings or education or whatnot, on schooling, for example. And I could easily create six juicy topics and rotate those or three juicy topics and say, hey, if you're interested in these kinds of things, I'm probably especially helpful. And that's interesting. And I think it would absolutely narrow down who would show up and knock on the door and ask questions. I think that in fact, there's sort of a risk of becoming a narrow domain expert. So there's kind of a difference between subject matter expertise and having a big context within which lots of stuff can happen. And you've just opened that door and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'm not sure where I land. They both- One way- Yeah, what I hear you saying is like, let's start the funnel wide, right? So before we narrow it down and somehow give people the impression that this isn't for them, right? We wanna make sure we capture. To me, that starts with the first few questions and how you frame it, right? So before I ever, before, if it were me, before I'd get to the category in the list, kind of the kind of people are coming in and I'm kind of assuming that the audience would be people are both either have been teed up and know you and show up at the site or show up on a landing page that gives them a link to this questionnaire and this form or whatever. And therefore I'm sort of already thinking along the lines of something that I wanna talk to you about or I could have just be somebody that happened across it, heard about it, somehow came to it. I think it's wise to think about both of those possibilities. Somebody already has some knowledge of you and the brain. Somebody who doesn't really have any knowledge of you and the brain. So those are the kind of questions I would ask first, actually, right? Do you have, it helps people understand also at the same time what your service is. So if one of the first questions was something along the lines of, are you looking for an in-depth discussion with Jerry about a topic he is already world first in? Are you looking to explore and use his brain of 400,000 plus pieces of information to see what research has already been curated on a topic of interest to you? Like having those and there may even be a third one then they get to pick and they are narrowing down. Then you have, if they've answered this question then I can already given the list of things that I'm super, super expert in. If they answer this question then we're exploring together then I can ask them an open question about what kind of topics are you interested in discussing and I can get back to you kind of thing. Yeah, long ago in the early days of browsers and search engines somebody made the astute observation that a lot of people on the web are either on a cruise or a mission. And the people who are on a cruise are just sort of looking around seeing what they bump into. Serendipity is good for them. The people who are on a mission just want to narrow down and find the right answer quickly. And I could ask a question like that upfront if that made sense. Like if you know, are you on a cruise or a mission and I could have a little explainer pop up or something else show up that says, here's what I mean by that but that could be the first layer or something like that. Go ahead Pete. I wanted to, so you could actually just do the branching stuff in Google sites actually. Oh really? Yeah, I mean, you have a button that says, do you want to do a blog or do you want to do a blog or are you interested in, you know. And I could actually have three buttons each which goes to a sub page. Yeah. Yeah, so I could do hard coded logic as sub pages. Yeah. That makes total sense, yeah. And there's no reason not to strike that way. The links I put, the last couple links I put, there's a, it's a blog that's from BotPress. They're all AI chat bots which is an interesting kind of way to, I mean, when you say chat bot now you mean an AI chat bot. So that's an interesting approach. But if you just want a kind of a branching thing you don't have to do that either. Yeah. I wonder if you think of a funnel you know, and each step is divide by four or something like that or divide by 10. You have to start with a large number of people up at the top of it to get any people past the first few gates. And that means, so I wonder what you're thinking about driving people to the site as we say in the biz. So the other thing that's top of mind right now is the marketing plan for pictures brain and figuring out like how to, you know how to reach out and what to do. And as a small side note, actually this is maybe a big side note because it's fresh and it's interesting. So I just recorded a video podcast with David Al on the getting things done guy who I've known for years and years. He's a really nice guy who's a brain user. And so a bunch of our conversation right away is all about use of the brain. I do a little bit of screen sharing in the call but not a ton. But they just posted the video. So a colleague of David's produced the video and posted it inside David's community which is called GTD Connect. And they gave me a pass into GTD Connect and I went to it and I couldn't figure out how to start talking there. Like the platform didn't let you talk where the video is. I'm like, wait, what? So that was interesting in and of itself but they also gave me and a couple of other people Dropbox access to the raw video and said do with it whatever you'd like. So I just uploaded it last night. The last thing I did was uploaded to YouTube and I didn't yet hit publish and make it public or anything like that because I'm like, oh, okay. This is the beginning of marketing pictures brain among other things. And so I kind of need to figure out what rapper to put what to do, how to use that as a launch vehicle. Then he looped two other people in on his reply back to me or David Allen did originally after the whole session. He said, oh, Dave Pell and Jim Fallows. And Pell has written the newsletter forever and ever and ever back in the day we course on the wee little bit. So we're familiar to each other but Jim Fallows has written about me and my brain in the Atlantic twice. And as a brain fan, he's a Tinder box user. So that's his acts but he totally like appreciates the brain and then he and his wife Deb flew around the country, wrote a book called Our Town created a sort of a PBS documentary around it and now have the Our Town Civic Foundation. And he wrote back saying, hey, Jerry, what you've done is like really like what we're trying to do for cities. We're trying to create resource lists of how cities could dig themselves out of trouble. And so I wrote back and I said, if there's some way I can be helpful in this I would love to. And if I were a paid grunt behind the curtain at Our Town Civic Foundation doing that using my brain, I'd be like the happy guy and that probably would generate enough cash to be pretty content doing that. So I'm exploring that path but there's other possibilities including maybe Jim writing about me and my brain again in the Atlantic for example, because he's done it before it's gone way further. Now there's OGM and a bunch of other things and I don't know if he's gonna be up for that conversation but Jim has been generous and lovely and is really smart about these things and has a huge audience. So that's on the table as well. And that's pretty exciting and that folds on top of, okay, what's a basic mark let's pretend that didn't happen what is a basic marketing plan for this thing look like? But that's got me like. Yeah, it's all very exciting. Yeah, yeah. And the conversation with David Allen was just sort of lovely. It was unscripted, unprompted. We just kind of went in different places. He's very good at that. So I'll post it unlisted shortly and send everybody a link if you wanna watch it. It's 45 or 49 minutes long or something like that. It's good, it worked out really well. I've been very happy with what's in there. Yeah, so and now to me you're talking about the difference between like B2C and B2B too, right? So if you have and that to me is just the website. I don't need a questionnaire or any extra funnel for me when we were talking about it to me that the questionnaire was to take people who are relatively new to the site, right? And new to the experience and go, what is this? And can I benefit, right? It's really to take those people and funnel them towards some what they wanna do next so that it reduces the friction and doesn't just make them leave and go, I don't know, I'll save it, you know, I'll put it on my tab, it'll sit there for a month and then I'll forget why I was there, you know one of those. So that to me was what the questionnaire was for. If you have qualified leads like that, they are not, they don't need, in my opinion, don't need to go through a questionnaire what they need is a landing page or part of your website that clearly defines if you're looking to use Jerry's brain to support your business or to support, you know, a government organization, here are videos, here are references, here are, right? It's the kind of standard set of here's businesses I've worked with before, here's a testimonial and that would be all I would need to reach out to you and say, oh, this looks like, you know, it helps to, it's like the staging of walking into a house that's for sale, right? It's like, tell me how this would look and work. Oh, I get it. Like, I don't think you need a questionnaire for that. That makes a ton of sense too. Damn it, so many interesting conversations to have just planning this thing. No, seriously, thank you all. This is like the collective brain is so much better than the lone brain or even the lone brains. And it dawned on me that I should probably buy picturesbranes.com as well because technically that's what's happening here. Just in case somebody sort of mistypes, I could sort of typo, you know, have the typo go back to the regular site. But it occurs to me partly that we're coming back to a couple of things that really matter here, one of which is anybody can pick my online brain for free right now. It's arcane, you're gonna have to figure out the tool, but it's completely open and I don't wanna close it. I have no intention of locking it away and monetizing access to it. So the freemium model of picturesbrane is, hey, I'm gonna help guide you toward some interesting landing places inside the brain and what I could easily do. And Stacey has been gently nudging me and I still don't have any habit to do this to create short snippets of stories. And Pete said this like two years ago. Hey, Jerry, it's really good when you do little tours. You should maybe like do more of those videos. And I have a bunch of short videos. I did one on the history of the potato. I did one on Nikola, why Nikola Tesla is so cool that tries to build on the oatmeal's amazing infographic or cartoon about why Tesla is so cool and so forth. But I could easily create, I could hard code into Google sites, a small sprinkling of videos that are the end points of a couple little questions. Are you interested in this or this or this or this? And each of those could be like a little bit of an explanation and then a link to that note in the brain and say, go here and nose around. And here's a really nice starting point. Go crazy. And then hire me when you need the guide or the storyteller. And so like the piece that I love and the piece that I want to be doing and the piece that I'm trying to steer people toward is bringing me in to tell the stories behind why stuff is in there and how and where the skeletons are buried and what the insights are and how it connects to the larger context and all of that. And that's like really happy territory for me. And partly there was a little fear in me as I was thinking about what to say right now. And well, do I want to give away the revitalizing city's note in my brain where I collect up all the stories of how to revitalize cities that's full of really good stuff because that's kind of where you're gonna take people, right? I'm like, well, sure, that's okay because they're gonna bump into it and go, oh God, there's a lot of stuff here. I'm not quite sure how to get there. Some of them will find terrific resources and go and do their thing. And that's awesome. And that's a public service. But I think that showing people that there are really interesting and possibly useful nexuses, nexusii, nexii in the brain is a good thing. Not a bad thing. I'm not giving away the secrets. I'm actually showing people that there's a bunch of substance in here. And it's not just collections of, hey, here's 50 books about the city of Venice or the Napoleonic Wars. It's different from that, right? Sorry, I'll stop there. But that's really, really interesting because it seems to be getting us closer, or me closer, to what I think I'm good at and where the value is from the survey that I ran and stuff like that. Did that make sense? And so in terms of building out the simple site and helping triage people, but helping lead people in, I think I need to dramatically change it now again. First, I think the first thought is, hey, you can pick my brain for free. Just go here and here's a little sorting tree. Here are a couple paths you can follow into different parts of the standing brain as it is. And the links will take you directly into the brain at that spot. And then each of those landing spots says, okay, now you have a taste. Now go to this other page that says, here's what I do, maybe. Because at some point, if somebody's gone and tried it themselves, I want to grab them by the collar and say, now wouldn't you like me to give you a guided tour or do you need more help? Or can we be more specific or what's your more specific question or something like that? How would anybody else map that? And I could create a practice of doing short videos and people could subscribe to that. They could be a separate channel or a playlist on YouTube that alerts them when a new video shows up and that could be a way that I stay, that could be my equivalent of a newsletter or something like that. That would work. That's simple enough to do. And as I start doing sessions and because I'm recording them all, unless somebody explicitly doesn't want them recorded, I could take some sort of best of snippets and turn those into some of these shared recordings as well. So if that's understood in some of these sessions, I need people walking in to know what the terms of engagement are for the calls and the degree of privacy or not for the different pieces. But if I can sort of get thumbs up to use little bits of storytelling, then what I have is an editing process, not a new generation process for some of those little snippets that go out. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Does that all make sense? Did I just go do that? That made sense to me. That's why I tried to put it in chat for you. See you. Yeah, thank you. And it feels comfortable to me. And Michael, the question is this stumped the band or is this subject matter expert? It's kind of like how I see the question you brought up and I'm still wrestling with that. I'm still trying to figure out, I really like stumped the band. Like I honestly really like, there's an amateur's thrill of knowing a little bit about too many things that makes me happy when somebody mentions something. I'm like, oh, I already had that in my brain and here it is. And by the way, it's connected in interesting ways to these other things, did you know? That's like happy making for me. Whether that creates a lot of value for anybody I don't know. I think the fact that you can play stumped the band is great and you can say that. I'm just thinking about like to carry your metaphor forward. If I go to a piano bar and the post pianist can do or the house band, whatever it is, can do stumped the band, cool, but are they a ragtime band? Are they alternative rock band? Are they a Glenn Miller? I mean, it's just like, what's their sweet spot that they're coming from that draws me to go to that place? And then it's cool that I can do, it's great to hear the alternative rock version of taking me out to the ball game or whatever weird juxtaposition of styles there is, but there's something to get me there. But if you just say, featuring tonight a band and without any description of like what their basic rough genre is, it's sort of less of a draw. So some notion of sweet spot I think is beneficial. That's just my, I mean, and I'm also speaking from a little bit of the experience in my consulting myself and also branding work with other people, but specifically with myself, I'm kind of a jack of all trades. I formerly was a design guy who specifically you would call to redesign your, well, specifically print publication. And that was a lot easier to like get business from than just saying, like, I do a little bit of everything for anybody, and I'm not pressing that, I'm not like working to get freelance work. So it doesn't matter so much, but it's definitely true. And it's a phenomenon that I've encountered with other people. So you can be a jack of all trades, but also be, you know, a master of not one, but, you know, so that's still my thing. Thank you. And so I just created a question for myself to answer after this call, which is, what are the juiciest places or questions that I'd like to answer or topic areas or domains or whatever you wanna call it, but what are some really, really great questions but, you know, what are some really, really great places where I know that there's just a whole bunch of stuff to talk and think about? Yeah, and again, those could be videos, right? Or those could be, right, you could do a quick and then say here, I'm exploring the basics here. And if you're really interested, if this isn't enough and you want more about this topic, I mean, that's a win, right? If they get to the point where they've watched that video and they want more, you know, like that's gonna be a paid person right there. Then ding the bell if it's on the counter and that will show up. Exactly. Schedule as soon as possible, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Schedule services now. I'm more seeing a flow than a questionnaire, right? Of like the different audiences coming in in terms of based on their needs, right? And then what kinds of things do you wanna show them and what kind of things do they wanna see and trying to marry that up using all the content that you already have. And then also recognizing the new content you could flow into those particular paths. And then, but I like, you know, where Michael's going to is those, and I kind of, the reason why I wrote it the way I did is I saw him as three different things, right? All three paths, there might be people who really wanna dive deep and people who just wanna riff with you, right? And so I saw that coming later, you know, like get them in and get them interested and then ask, were you looking to dive deep or were you looking to just riff with me? Cause I can do both, right? And if they're really looking to dive deep to Michael's point, not really pre-qualifying them and trying to make them believe that you could go deep on any topic is not smart, right? However, communicating that you can both riff with there's a lot of information on there, I think is an asset. So it's communicating. I think it ends up then this strategy ends up doing both which is lovely. It communicates that you can riff on just about anything or happy to riff on just about anything. And yet if they really wanna dive deep, they really need some rich expertise, you know, the hero of the topics, right? So that- Yeah, that's really interesting. And also, I'm realizing that one of the things that I love doing and do well is pattern finding, pattern matching, pattern, you know, pattern creation. Another one is sort of analogy or metaphor creation. And just yesterday, the day before, Stacey, I'm forgetting which call it was, but maybe it wasn't with you. I think it was on the mind meld that did at Zebo where one person showed up on Zoom who it turns out, I've talked with before, he showed up for these mind melds that I do before, but I suddenly discovered all this interesting stuff about him that I didn't know before and we found we had like all these common things. And at one point I said something jokingly. I said something that was sort of a nearby pattern as completely as a punchline, as a quick, funny thing. And we wound up going back to it because it opened up a piece of conversation that wasn't present with us before. It was really like, it was great. And I love it when those things happen because really, really often when we find a good idea, we wind up trying to narrow quickly. And Kevin Jones long ago, I don't know how much I agree with this, but Kevin Jones long ago said that I'm really useful early in a conversation when you're trying to broaden thinking, not when you're trying to sort of narrow things down and get things done. And it will amuse you all that 10 minutes into the conversation with David Allen, I say, hey, as I was thinking about this conversation with you, I realized I'm kind of the anti-matter to David Allen. Like you personify getting things done and efficiency and like boom, boom, boom, boom. And I've just got like all these things all over the place, scattered all over the landscape. Yeah, and you can use that to your benefit using words on your site to describe things like expansive or research into or explore this topic or right, it helps to people to understand what they're really doing, right? To come to Jerry's brain means to explore into information that they haven't that they may not know that may help them then they can take that, combine it and start to apply it in their own and whatever it is that they're doing. You're not, what you're saying is you're not about the application so much as you are about the exploration, the research, the expansive thinking to help then feedback into a better application or a better result or a better, is that right? Yes, and also, so a new little thought just occurred which is maybe I'm coaching people to use my online brain. Maybe a piece of what this is is, so I'm realizing that my brain, my external brain still on the brain's web servers and still in the brain software because we haven't managed to free my brain but that thing is on duty 24 seven and I know a bunch of people use it. It does what it does. The thing it does, which is a little crusty and needs to be gotten accustomed to is on duty all the time and they're very good about keeping it up and when it seems to go down, I ping them, they like bring the servers back so that's sort of working still. So a piece of what I could be doing is a coaching people to learn to use my brain better on their own and so you ping me when you need me for 15 minutes to talk you through what's going on and maybe the bite size is not the 60 or 90 minute session of Pick Jerry's Brain but it's something else or alternate model. The brain's available for free, you're welcome but you could sign up for a monthly fee and I could be available on a chat, you could then join a chat service or a Discord or something else where you just drop questions in and I will show up and if need be, we'll turn on the video and quickly go through and diagnose and I'll tell a story and then I'll get off but again, I'm playing with the bite size because in order to try to simplify things, I was like, okay, is this a 60 minute call or a 90 minute call? Let's just fix it. Let's just pick one price and then offer discounts in case you are one of these categories. So that's kind of what I've got going on the site right now but I don't know that one size fits all bite size simplification is necessarily a good way to go and this other way of being of just if I pay attention to a place where people are asking questions and then I step in, that might actually be good and if people were willing to pay $10 a month to be on that channel, that's really interesting because that's annuity revenues instead of one-off revenues, huh? And then there may be only two people on the planet who are willing to do that who would sign up for that kind of service. I don't know. I mean, what kind of... That's maybe a tough question but what's your experience with Patreon and if that worked for you at times? So Patreon has been a complete lifesaver revenue-wise. I've been on it for five years but it's been, it's kind of frozen in time because when I created my Patreon campaign it was really all around trust and support me in my quest in the trust and I was doing a bunch of different things on trust and that's when I started the mailing list on design from trust which turned into the mailing list and Zoom calls about Inside Jerry's Brain which turned into OGM. There were kind of different phases just hosting these conversations and so my problem with Patreon right this minute and I created a Maya Culpa video a couple months ago and posted it only to my patrons on Patreon and I don't normally do that. I don't like velvet roping anything. I'm trying to work as much in the public view as possible but I just wanted to say, hey patrons you've been essential and really patient and really lovely. Here's all the stuff I'm into right now but I didn't then take the time to redo the Patreon site because what it ought to be is really like this conversation we're having and OGM and a bunch of other stuff anybody backing me on Patreon is in fact backing all those different kinds of efforts and thank you so much. And so my support level really has bounced down a little bit and it's kind of leveled off a little under $500 a month and because I haven't redone the site and gone and done any marketing around it it stays there and I would love it to go up that would be fabulous. Like that would answer a lot of my questions. If I for five years now I've said if I could add a zero to my Patreon income I'd be done. I can do everything else in the world for free. So I like it and I would like to redo it but I haven't taken the time to actually sit down because redoing it then means changing all the tiers and the descriptions of what the support tiers are re-reverting them, shooting a new video rethinking the entire site and approach. I'm just wondering if there's a baseline of your victory's brain offering that is Patreon subscription supported. So you have that base of existing and whether you literally use Patreon or not or you're transferring to something else that those very warm leads, your existing customer base transition to people who get some ongoing access service, something in the brain land, victory's brain land and then the a la carte special service that is the business you're trying to build might come a little bit from those people but they also are word of mouth for it and just framing it a little bit more that way. I like that a ton. And certainly I was gonna route people back to Patreon if you'd like to support me but what you're saying is more intricate, more useful, I think more specific. Also you lit up the idea that I can do the thing that many of my contemporaries are doing right now which is start a sub-stack pub, basically go to sub-stack or ghost and basically start a publication which is kind of freemium or not or intentionally not, intentionally you have to pay to get the content and the stream of video stories that I need to start doing would show up on sub-stack as a sub-stack pub and I could do a transcript of what's in them and I could edit that. One of the people I support on Patreon, Rebecca Watson does videos and then publishes the transcript and the video and she's got interesting opinions that I like and I usually just read the transcript. I usually don't watch the video but at any moment the video's right there and I could go watch her and more entertainingly talk about these things. So given that automated transcripts are now more easily available, now then I have to sort of edit things down and I could also do this without. Wendy's got to go, yeah. But that's a possibility too. I would just point to the fact that a sub-stack makes you a content creator, content brand as opposed to subscription service. I mean, your subscription content as opposed to a subscription service which puts the onus on you to produce some set thing at some regular cadence as opposed to it being, I'm not saying you shouldn't do sub-stack that sort of leads people to pick Jerry's brain but for the subscription service, Patreon likes subscription service be access to the platform, pick Jerry's brain and custom services extra. Yeah, so I'm mentioning sub-stack partly because there are all these astonishing power tools that are just easily at hand, Patreon, sub-stack, chatbots, all these kinds of things, some of which cost some money but really they're like all at hand and it's insane how close they are at hand. You are completely right in that it is different in other people's perceptions if I were to be running a sub-stack pub or versus having support me on Patreon versus having a paid retainer service where you sign up, you pass the velvet rope and now you're in a Discord server where we're answering questions or whatever like that. I mean, those are very different things. What I'm kind of trying to do is say, hey, if I'm going to start this very, I think useful habit of short snippets of brain storytelling, if I'm gonna start that anyway, why not wrap it in one or several of these high tech rappers, any one of which could generate a revenue stream of some sort. And I run the risk of creating market confusion which is what we're playing with here but I also run the risk of generating a bunch of different revenue streams which add up to a reasonable income which would be terrific, I'd be thrilled. So, and then I've been a content creator like I spent a dozen years writing newsletters for other people, I've done that. And in some sense, my curation every day of the brain is content creation that I'm not getting paid for. And if I externalize that in this way or some other sorts of ways, that's okay with me because I think I am in some sense also a content creator as well as a storyteller and guide or concierge or conciliere or what have you, right? Those all kind of worked for me, unfortunately. Pete. I think the, as an aside, I'm trying Ghost for the first time with the Bailuki Plex Dispatch. Seems fine. I think, you know, I subscribe to, I have a couple of sub-stacks. I subscribe to a bunch of Patreon folks. And now I'm looking at Ghost. Michael's got a good point that they're kind of different and yet they're kind of not. My Patreon, the difference between, you know, subscribing to my sub-stacks as a sub-stack person and a Patreon person is that on Patreon sometimes I get YouTube videos, you know, it's the feed is YouTube videos or the feed is astrophotography photographs or something like that. So it's, but you could fulfill that basically in sub-stack or Ghost. And then I think, like Drey said, you know, you have the main community wherever it's so cited either one, you know, any of those. And then you also have a discord for everybody that, you know, is part of the Patreon or the sub-stack with it. I, yeah, Patreon is kind of the least satisfying out of those for me. And even sub-stack is kind of, yeah, so maybe I'm going to end up in the same place with Ghost, but anyway, I have on a completely different topic or a completely different observation or whatever in a tough love way, Jerry, you need to either hire or partner with a business manager. So there should be somebody who's, I mean, you're doing the business management, which means that you're, you know, kind of half-fulfilling everything and not doing any of the things. If you had somebody's brain who was a quarter time or half time or something, quarter time would be fine actually. So what I'm imagining is some young kid in the Philippines or something like that where the exchange rate is such that, you know, they would go, yeah, for sure, for splitting the revenue stream with you, I would be happy to work quarter time or half time or whatever. But anyway, however it works, there's just a bunch of business stuff that needs to kind of manage and you're doing business and creative and it's really hard, it's really, really fricking hard. And it means that you're not doing the creative part well, it means that you're not doing the business part well and, you know, it's kind of all just melts into a puddle. So Weaving the World Ops is kind of a way of, you know, office hours, business manager, advisor, you know, folks. It might help a little bit, but it's also kind of just bandaging over, you know, the fact that, so if I were your business manager, I'd be like, okay, dude, you know, this month it's gonna be warming up the Patreon thing. It's like, oh my God, you've got, you know, $500 revenue stream right there and all we have to do is like double that and, you know, we should be able to do that and, you know, or whatever, right? It's any of those things. So I've been in and seen the situation a lot where you've got two roles, two roles who are usually fulfilled by two people. And it's just really, really, really hard to do. Another, my favorite one is engineering manager and I forget what, engineering manager and product manager. When they're the same person, it's just like, you know, and when they're different people, you get so much done so much faster. So much faster is so much better, so much more fun and that kind of stuff. Thank you. I would add on what Pete was saying, I think it's okay to, you know, I think one of the things that you were talking about earlier about how being the, you know, other extreme from David Allen in a certain way where it's like, oh, but what about, you know, this tangent that you hadn't explored and this, you know, how this relates and, you know, an aside about, you know, historically, you know, as you do in a conversation in OGM, like, you know shit and you open stuff up and you like open up new avenues and when you are pursuing business stuff, I think that same, you know, gift comes out as, oh, but I could also do this and I could also do that and I could also try this way and what if this was part of it and it gets diffused and if you had somebody you were working with who was a little bit more blinders on, you know, obviously, you know, not functioning at cross purposes with you, but like really staying on mission on just one little, you know, facet, it would be a very, it would be a great compliment. Yeah. You know, your branching-ness. My branching-ness. Yeah, exactly. I feel like, oh, what's the, oh, there's a model organism, Plenaria, where you cut their head in half and they grow like two heads. Anyway, so I feel like yes and no from my perspective in that it would be really easy for me to just narrow down and just do a sub-stack pub and just try really hard to be Heather Cox Richardson and I don't think that would work well and I don't think that ends well, but then it feels like, but I could create a stream of materials that could go into a sub-stack pub as a simple side dish to creating a stack, a stream of stuff that people could subscribe to that gets the word out that serves as end points in the inflow, like here's the kind of conversation you could have or here's how to get to certain resources. I mean, like the same set of resources can be multi-purpose in ways and I don't, and I run the risk of either brand confusion or end user confusion or market confusion or something like that, but it feels like there's a rich, it feels like I need somebody to work with me who understands that side of it rather than driving me back toward one thing and just get one thing done. Does that make sense? I get what you're saying and I don't mean to be, I'm not really conflicting with that. I'm just thinking that somebody, whether they're picking off, okay, here's what we're doing with your warm Patreon leads, here's what we could do on sub-stack. Let's model that out. Here's what your, this would be, I mean, just very, very focused on the business possibilities, what order they should come in, execution on stuff and just less exploratory and more... I could certainly use the business discipline and somebody who's sort of doing some of the lifting on the business side of it, that's for definite, absolutely, sure. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to limit the possibilities just like put the, you're looking at the map and deciding where to go. Yeah. First of all, is pulling the rickshaw, I don't know. It's really funny, a small side note, but the guy who produced the video, his name is John Forester, F-O-R-R-I-S-T-E-R. So he and I kind of made a little bit of friends in the interim as he was editing the videos. And then in sort of the last exchange, he told me a story, he said, I ran into David Allen in 1983 at a seminar with him and two other people, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then became his employee several years later. So basically this guy's entire life span and now there's like, I think there's five employees for the David Allen company at this point, but it's his whole professional career and you go look at his LinkedIn page, he's got white hair, he's a nice guy and like he spent his whole life like being kind of the business dual, I think, in part to David Allen and helping him like run the whole business. So it was really, it was cool. Okay, when we've run over our hour and this has been for me incredibly useful. Go ahead, Michael. I have a question for you that I don't like. I don't know if it's relevant or not, but when you were working with Esther was Daphne? Oh, yes. Part of the picture and what was her?