 But this is the build OGM call for Tuesday, October 19th, 2021. And here we are in cyberspace, again, doing our things. So thanks for being here. I'm trying hard to focus on the podcast on leaving the web, but tomorrow's morning call is really the workspace for that. In the meantime, the hour after this hour is a little prep call, and then the hour after that is the beginning of this ExoWorks set of events that are going to eat some of my time over the next month or two. So let me explain that briefly. And if you want to get involved, you can. And it's interesting in different ways. So let me explain what it is. Hey, Pete. Yay. Pete, I'm just starting to explain the Exo project that's about to start just so everybody's got some context of something that's going to eat my time for the next month or two. So Exo is exponential organizations. I did a bunch of stuff with them in 2018, which was kind of my last good year in recent memories. And it was started by Salim Ismail, who was the founder, the founding dean of Singularity University, was the head of Yahoo Brick House, which was Yahoo's sort of idea space or new startup space. Yahoo kind of had a black cultural thumb for startups and new technologies. And I think a piece of that interaction led him to write later when he was with Singularity with two co-authors. This book, where one of the standout features of exponential thinking, is that most organizations have an immune system that kills off good ideas. And so exponential organizations, or Exo from here forward, developed a sprint methodology, which takes 10 weeks, which they've sold to a bunch of companies. And I, in 2018, one of the things that made 2018 good was I was a speaker, the disrupt speaker, in the middle week of the 10-week sprint. Each week had a, the first week is a wake, the fifth week is disrupt. And then teams form up and you go through a little startup culture kind of things. You create prototype, you assess your market, you run surveys with your buddies and other sorts of people to figure out if there might be a market there, et cetera. You go through, basically it's a little startup bootcamp. But it worked pretty well. And inside corporations, they got CEOs to show up with the meetings and they got CEOs to second 80 people to the process for 10 weeks, plus with a promise that if one or two ventures came out of this, it looked promising that they would be funded, that these people's careers would shift into these new ventures, et cetera, et cetera. And that worked pretty well. They also ran a slightly longer process for cities, which they called FastTrack. I don't know why they didn't have the same name, but that was one of the problems with the exo sort of cluster is that they, they wound up making too many little businesses that didn't all kind of hit their numbers. They've managed to, they had to contract in 2018, but they've managed to make it through the pandemic and they're still going. And back in 2018, one of the things I was planning was a quest into education, future education. And Salim had said, hey, why don't we, you know, Jerry, would you sort of plan this? Why don't we collect up the 20 top names in education, force them to create a roadmap for the next 30 years and then go, you know, run our lather, rinse, repeat our process on that kind of thing. And I was like, you know, the top 20 people in education are going to be not, are not actually very cooperative. You actually want to plan this differently. So I created a relatively elaborate plan. And one of the things that I invented as part of that plan was this thing called story threading, which is showing up this week in a separate story I'll tell in just a second. So anyway, so, so I designed a quest which had a whole bunch of interesting different aspects and then didn't get fuel, we couldn't fund it, it didn't get started. And then recently Salim said, hey, I think I have some funding. So would you help us design and run a quest? So we started planning a regular quest and then what happened in the process. And here the backer is Latin Leap, which is a venture fund for Latin America that is trying to leapfrog Latin America in different domains. And the quest that is just beginning now is intended to leapfrog Latin America in the field of education. So they might actually do some in energy later, who knows, but they're looking to have an education fund that goes out and does things in education. That's the goal of the next couple of months process. And it's turned into a couple of months process because the quest is now front-ended with two swarms. And the swarm that's starting in two hours is basically an attempt to get sort of a baseline understanding of the socioeconomic situation across Latin America as feeder for the education quest. The second swarm will be about education in Latin America to get a sense for what's up where. And Latin America has countries like Venezuela and countries like Chile in it. It has countries like Guatemala and countries like Uruguay in it. Latin America is crazy, sort of varied, is the most unequal continent on earth, apparently, has historically had systemic problems with education systems up and down the stretch. And then just recently we were talking, and I mentally was not including the Caribbean as part of Latin America, but officially technically it often is bundled in. So usually Latin America means central, southern, south and the Caribbean, which winds up being 33 countries in total. So it's a whole bunch of different things. So that's launched kicking off today. Each of the swarms will last kind of four days, but then November 4th is when the actual quest kickoff is, and then we've got some guest speakers coming in who've been kind of separately interviewed and are part of the mix. And we're trying to get an interesting conversation going about first, the socioeconomic situation in Latin America, second, education in Latin America. And then just broadly we think learning. And if you've spoken with me about education, you know I don't like the word schooling, teaching, or education, I'm really fond of learning. And if you've talked to a guy named Mark Prinsky, he doesn't like learning, he's really fond of achievement and I haven't gone there. So at some point, and if you want to participate in any way you are welcome to join the swarms or join the process and, you know, ping me separately. And then so, and that's going to eat a bunch of my time in the next few weeks, which is really lousy timing because I'm also standing up weaving the world right now. And this is like bad timing the way it's shown up. Yes, Mark Antoine? Um, what I understand, you're speaking about conversations very much and quests and basically collaborative sense making if I'm not mistaken. We, uh, I think we should spend time discussing what I've been working on with Jack, the kind of, you know, the gaming, gamification of IBIS. It's not ready for prime time, but it's coming at a good pace and maybe maybe we could have something awkward ready for the fourth, but then we'd have to fast-track and discuss how to do that. But I think I want to discuss this. Is it ready for like a backstage preview behind a dark curtain? Yeah, with the understanding that the UX is a bloody disaster. I'm not doing the front end. I'm not necessarily good at UX, but basically Jack is relying on the voluntary labor. And I think he got a competent front-end coder who doesn't have a good UX instinct as far as I'm concerned. And maybe we can crowdsource a good UX designer who'd like to take a swing at something more functional. Who knows, there'll be lots of people with some coding experience who are in the mix. So let's, so let's book a call with you, you, Jack, and me, and anyone else who's interested, I think. I think it's relevant at this point. Sounds great. Thank you. Could you give a little more context? I'm familiar with Jack and familiar with some of what he's done, but I'm not familiar with what you were talking about, Mark. Absolutely fine. Yes, he's been interested in collective sense-making and his inspiration was very much, he says, World of Worldcraft meets collective intelligence because World of Worldcraft has been known to have the right social dynamics to get people working together. So what he's trying to do is a kind of system whereby people congregate in gills, which are really teams rather than gills because they're supposed to be diverse unlike communities of practice, right? And teams compete for making test moves on co-constructing IBIS conversation. You're familiar with IBIS, right? Yes, so basically we have an IBIS tree and then people propose nodes to the IBIS tree and right now it's a bit wizard of us, somebody evaluates the moves and says, this is a good move and we accrue points accordingly. That's something we definitely want to work on, but the notion of we have you registered to a quest, like somebody sponsors a quest with a starting question and then the gills propose links and when they propose the link it becomes visible to the other ones and then you keep building and the basic point system is basically you get point when you're, that's not done yet, when your node sparks a lot of conversations or to a point by the weight of the underlying tree. You're muted. If I understand correctly, a number of people get together online, there is an IBIS- Common Space Canvas, Common IBIS Canvas and the conversation about the quest builds nodes and structures within this IBIS Canvas and this IBIS Canvas can be sort of automatically point rated by its, by certain dimensions. Yeah, exactly. Okay, thank you. Thanks and you're reminding me and I think this will be interesting in the mix, you're reminding me that this swarm process up front is going to use howcast, sorry, house base and if you go to that link, you may have to register for a free account but house base and you can also just go to housebase.com and see house base uses AI to do some text analysis on what's being said through a conversation and at this point, I don't have that much experience in it. I don't really know whether it works well or not but it sounds a little bit next doorish to what you're talking about, Mark Antoine and maybe even like interesting feedstock or structured space or UI for what you're building. So not sure, but I think that's really worth a part of our conversation. You're muted. Thank you. Yeah, definitely worth looking into. I'm not familiar with house base and we haven't done any AI in this, definitely something we should do but it's not our story, isn't it? It is indeed. Any other questions about the EXO stuff and so forth? And again, if you're interested in helping rethink education and want to form part of a team, LMK, Marie Birida is going to be involved in the education parts of this and I'm excited to form up a little ninja team to go work with her and whoever else is attracted to our conversation to just figure out what is an interesting venture palatable set of things to liberate humans to learn. And then when I say venture palatable, I mean that the outside framing of this is to create an appealing fund structure and thesis for Latin leap. And I don't necessarily need to live inside that framing. I'm just interested in education in general and ventures but I'm interested again in learning outside of the educational bureaucracy, not in improving the educational bureaucracy. Mark Atuan, you just unmuted. Thanks. Sorry, I should. Yep, that's okay. I figured it was accidental. And any other thoughts or questions about that? Hank? Yeah, I missed the very beginning but I just clicked on the exo-quests. I see it already started and you're quite active throughout the thing but I'm going to be in Berlin for about eight days and when I come back beginning of the end of October 31st beginning of November, I might be able to take part but what do I confirm my interest in? I saw on the homepage, swarm one and two were fully staffed. There's four quests. Where do you fit in? Where might I fit in? So I'm kind of one of the lead facilitators. Lars Lindvillabek is really kind of the motive energy behind the quest. He's the producer of the whole event. He's been doing a great, he's been building this website and doing a whole bunch and basically herding cats to bring people into the whole thing. Hey, Michael, nice to see you. And so I think that it'll be more clear as we go where people's roles fit in and so forth. At this point for the quest, we were looking for people interested in Latin America. Some who have sort of strong, one of the people is a major reporter for Latin America who's been doing editorials about the condition of Latin America for years. There's a couple of other people like that kind of coming in and then there's a couple of general purpose people like Neil Ferguson is sort of involved and a few others. So, Salim is really interested in getting kind of big names involved to give the whole thing some heft once the fun goes out. But I think if you just ping me, I can figure out as we, as this thing on roles for kind of baking it more and I'll have a better idea of how you can play. And I'm totally jealous you'll be in Berlin for eight days. So have a great time. I love Berlin. I lived on Ulanzstrasse when I was 13 years old for 10 months with my grandparents. Ah, great. Okay, I'll do that. So I assume I can also join quests once there on their way. I believe so, yes. And I will make it so because that's easy to do. We'll do, because two of them look interesting to me. Great. Thanks, Hank. Awesome. Any other questions about this part? Okay. And then quickly, the other thing that starts next week is last year I spoke at Unfinished, which is this little Romanian event. And last year I told them about story threading and they thought it was interesting. So this year they've asked me to story thread the Unfinished Conference. So, and they've paired me up with a graphic designer named Emma Schmidt and she and I have been kind of getting our brains together and listening to the recordings. And this year's Unfinished is going to be a series of conversational kind of conversational interviews. It's not going to be plenary speeches or anything like that. So we've been getting the raw video of those speeches. You know, they're not produced and finished for the event which is a week away, but pretty close. And from those, we're busy doing some story threading which just a brief explanation so everybody's on the same page. I came up with story threading for the original quest design because I've been to so many conferences where I saw really interesting things happen at the beginning of the conference where little embers of like, oh, that person just said something way cool. I want to talk about that. I hope that makes it into our final plan. And then I watched as over and over reliably after a while, group process techniques and facilitators would stamp out those bright little embers that showed up at the beginning and they would be lost on the cutting room floor to mix metaphors, but and then I'd be like, what the hell happened? Why did this turn into a boring event or why did we come up with such vanilla conclusions if there were such hot ideas in the room? And I was starting to blame group process and many of those events had in them a graphic facilitator. In fact, this was almost a staple of these events. Would there be somebody writing on a huge sheet of paper on a wall or on big phone core boards? And they'd be doing, and some of these graphic facilitators are friends of mine and are really skilled. Eileen Clegg, Anthony Weeks, Leslie Salmon-Jew, there's a bunch of them that are very good at this, except at the end you get these inert paintings and the job of a graphic facilitator is to channel what's being said and catch as much of it as possible on their map. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a different role in the room? Somebody who's listening for those embers and picks them up and blows some oxygen on them with their own background and their own story and their own point of view with no expectation that they're faithfully recording what's happening in the meeting, but rather a mission to go run off in some other direction and say, hey, this was cool, but look at what happens if you play it out, for example. And then the story threaders would have very different backgrounds. One of them might be a super game designer like Jane McGonigal, another one might be a simulation designer like Nicky Case, another one might be a poet or an artist or like Peter Vanduora who is kind of a corporate artist and writer and creator and event designer and stuff like that. Another one might design a deck of cards that would be useful in the process. I don't know, I'm just thinking, like give people a lot of license, a little bit of budget and then ask them to listen for those embers and then go riff on them. So I have license to do that now at Unfinished. There was a little controversy because there is a knockoff event that just happened in the U.S. called Unfinished Live. And if you Google for Unfinished Conference, you will very likely get Unfinished Live because it's funded by Frank McCourt Sr., who is like, or Jr., who is like this very wealthy guy who owns sports teams and it sounds like a bit of an asshole, but I got sort of, I managed to get a little bit of controversy going by telling Mika Sifri, dear friend and great journalist about the controversy about the struggle and he wrote it up in a piece that I'll post right now in our chat. And so last thought on this is, and I'll share right now my first story-threading attempt. Of course, my axe is the brain and so my story-threading will be based around the brain and the way that I like to tell stories around the brain and collect up things. So you will be able to see actually, I think I can actually give you access if you want to, I can give you access to the raw video that I'm story-threading and then the story-threading video that I created and then the brain map for all of you above if you're interested. But the last thing I wanna say is that this story-threading exercise is cool because it stands up story-threading for the first time but also it feels a lot like leaving the world. So one of the things that I'm trying to think of is how to make what the effort I'm putting into this story-threading of this event this week and next, we're trying to do all of the videos this week so that they just play them next week and we can then be involved in the chat or whatever during the event. But we're hoping to not have any actual production of videos and story-threading happening then but I'm starting to see that story-threading will be this ongoing layered build of what we do and then weaving things together and making connections because one of the things we're starting to see is there's some common themes coming out during these interviews and I think the common themes will be really, really interesting threads to play out and refer to visually and in other kinds of ways. And Mark, I totally agree. There's a humans wanna kind of agree but also I'm surprised that the lack and I haven't made a strong diagnosis of this but I'm surprised at how often really smart facilitators kill good ideas. Like it's very strange. I don't fully understand the dynamic but it happens just all the time. And the moment when I usually see it happen is when the facilitators all gathered during the break to cluster the post-its that got done in the last brainstorming exercise and they then circle them and put a collective noun over them and then they give everybody dots and say here you have five dots to put on whichever post-its you really liked and all of a sudden you have goo. And that process has never turned out anything good that I've ever seen. But that process is standard in these kinds of workshops. Yeah, yeah, no, no, that's a very important point. This process is almost designed to destroy outliers. It's about getting the consensus view. It's fine. It's got a function. It's important to understand the consensus view but you need a different process for understanding the dissensus view and what it's about. You need both. It's kind of like a champion for the minority report is a more formal way to say it, maybe kind of. Totally. We've been having this argument in the Canonical Debate Lab about somebody was trying to introduce the idea that it's interesting in terms of knowing you've really understood a claim well that there's been both pros and cons. And we're like, yeah, I'm not sure. Sometimes something is just obviously good or bad and it's fine. So it's good to go through the straw man of the other side just for completeness sake and to force yourself to think further, right? I mean, that's the bono hat. And I think the bono hat is a better process that way about getting people to come up with the non-obvious opinions. But the, sorry, I may have a thread. It's important to go, yeah, we were saying it's not the number of arguments. It's how well, which ones were unopposed. And that way, I think that's what's really important about these minority opinions is that nobody really replied to them. They just, the point is that they got lost. The point is that nobody had anything to say about it. And this is why it's important, precisely. If it was a real fringe nonsense idea somebody would have bothered to shut it down. If nobody did, it's like, okay, this is a missing piece. Thank you, Marc-Antoine. Anybody else with thoughts about that part and about story threading in general? Very, very interested in equipping the story threading energy as part of Weaving the World doesn't feel quite right to make one of these story threading conversations the first Weaving the World episode but might actually happen. That could be a really nice sort of double word score. But also there's an awful lot about Weaving the World in this activity. It's extremely weavy. Marc? Yeah, if you could go more deeper or post links to the story threading idea it sounds a heck of a lot like Ben Stein wants to be able to surface the digital objects of the Internet Archive into some way of allowing people to narrativize a memex thread. How they get from one place to another, what their learning experience has been, what they want to show other people. And this is the first time, well, maybe not the first time I've heard story threading but certainly I raised my hand in ignorance. Hey, I don't know, I want to understand. And I'm just realizing I need to finish at least some preliminary text and probably an explanatory video on the website that I just posted in the chat because I did buy storythreaders.com some time ago, I think 2018 probably, but need to sort of explain in part what I said here there a little more nicely. I'm sure you have a story threading in the brain somewhere. Do I have what? Story threading in the brain. Oh, of course. Which sounds like a condition, doesn't it? Yes. It is. It is, it is. So here we go, here's the node in my brain and let me actually give you a brief tour in my brain. So here and here. Excuse me. So I have it under 21st century job titles. These are, I'm thinking about the future of work which this is not connected to and should be in thinking about the future of work and thinking, hey, there's an interesting thing how might that turn into a job description of the future I have too many things called future of work and I have a slow device. Pete confessed to me that he just ordered one of the new Macs. Pete, do you mind if I out you? Okay, you're muted, but... So did I? Yeah, oh really? Damn, okay, I'm completely and totally jealous and need to figure out how to fund one of the new, for those of you who don't know MacBook Pro. So Apple just announced yesterday the MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chipsets starting at $2,000 and then going rapidly upward from there as you add memory and other kinds of processors which are golden, delicious, fabulous looking, tasty, snacky, like if you're a geek and this is, I think this is a review by Marcus Brownlee. I don't think I curated it well into my brain because that shouldn't be split like that but he gave it a review which I watched last night which was just like people like me, meaning him have been waiting for this device and Apple took away all the crap stuff they've been putting on the MacBook Pro for years like the funny virtual touch bar is gone, ports are back, a whole bunch of other things have happened. So sorry for the digression and back to story threading unless someone wants to wax melodic about the new M1 refresh and Apple had just refreshed to their own chipset called M1 just this April, May and everybody was like, wow because the performance jump from them controlling all of their own silicon was gigantic like the performance of the original M1 was better. This is apparently twice as fast as the M1 or something like that on some basic benchmarks. So this is just a terrific, terrific upgrade. So story threader inspirations include some of these, I'm forgetting here but oh so for example, I'll post this in the chat the oatmeal wrote one of the greatest info graphics ever why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek whoever lived which I shall, let me just stop share because it's easier for me to share a link if I do that, but this was one of the inspirations for story threading which is like, wow the oatmeal sat down and gave us this thing as good and tasty as anything I've seen any book I've read about Nikola Tesla trying to explain what he invented and all of that, so I connected it up and what I didn't connect it to that I'm realizing so here's Nikola thought I had a separate thought about the things that Tesla invented, but I don't so I'll have to come back and do that later but he was experimenting with remote operated vehicles wireless power transmission through the ionosphere which he died not having completed there's a project called the Warden Cliff Tower in Long Island, et cetera. So here's where I'm story threading the unfinished conference, here is the link to my first story threading actual attempt and it is a story threading of this interview and they, so this is Jessica Hartsell who works at Esalen who is interviewing, oops, wrong link over here who is interviewing Aida Benedetto who is a user experience expert, teaches at the D-School and we used to be at Stone Yamashita and it's an interesting conversation the theme for the whole event is midnight kind of like the doomsday clock we're like one minute from midnight and what do you do in a moment of crisis? And so crisis and how do we cope with crisis came up a lot so the place that I went and the place that I went with my story threading was really how do you, how you react to events is incredibly important and the word grace that was what I pulled out of this and ran with for my video. So I'll add links to those things and I'll stop the share now before I eat our entire call doing this. But thanks for asking. Other thoughts, questions? Yeah, grace is cool, like, yeah. Go ahead Pete. Thanks, Jerry, tangentially watching your brain reminds me I picked up and posted a Nick Milo post from a year ago and it's a really interesting post and Jack and Bill and some of the rest of us have been thinking about the implications of it. It's a comparison between Obsidian and Rome and why Nick Milo is a personal knowledge management guru who actually gives away a fair bit of his knowledge and then he also sells an expensive course to help you operationalize the stuff that he's been saying. Anyway, he's thoughtful and interesting and doesn't suck. But anyway, the video talks about why you would use Rome and why you would use Obsidian and he identifies a couple of different kinds of personas, what you're doing as you're doing your, organizing your information or trying to sense make or whatever. And that has been a really generative lens, I think. He identifies, I think, four different kinds of things that you could be doing and I'm not gonna try to rattle them off. Bill Anderson actually did a great job of capturing, he did a great summary that's posted on one of the massive wikis, I'll put a link in when I stop talking. Jack has also added, okay, so I get those personas and I'm actually kind of something a little bit different, but thinking about why you're using a tool and I guess it seems like a little bit of an epiphany in a discussion that we've been having for a year and a half about PKM in that once you understand how you're using a tool and why you're using a tool, who you are as a person interacting with a tool for thought, a lot of stuff kind of made sense to some of us. It was like, oh, that's why I like this instead of that. That's why this part of the thing that we're doing with Obsidian makes sense because, so I guess that's it, I kind of recommend the video. It's got a click-bitty title, Jack noted that it's got kind of a click-bitty title where he says, this is why Obsidian is going to overtake Rome and it's like, yeah, okay. He was pretty fair-handed in the conversation. He goes to that persona thing, which I think it's the meat of it. At the end of it, he also says, there's a bunch of other things that Obsidian is just good at that Rome doesn't do very well. For instance, having easy files on your computer that you can lift and shift away from Obsidian if you ever wanted to. Anyway, I'll link to the video and to Bill's summary of it. Thank you. And actually, Jack, I'm really happy you're on the call partly because I'd like to pull on what Pete just said a little bit in the direction of something you posted in the Mattermost, which I now can't find quickly to get back to, which is one of the problems for me with Slack and Mattermost is that I don't remember in which channel exactly something got said, but you said, and I don't know how to use search properly in those tools, which I guess I should learn, but you were talking about my use of the brain and you characterized it in a way where I was like, that sounds like one sliver of what I do, but really not the whole picture at all. And I wanted to understand better what you were describing my use of the brain as and then just have that conversation a little bit more. Sure. Apologies, I'm still in bed. I just turned the dialysis machine off. And so I'm just, it's really cold here and I'm having a good time under the covers. Excellent. You said up, down and left, if I recall right, we're the three attributes. And I thought about that for a long time. You didn't really, you didn't really explain them. You just said up, down and left. And so you left me licensed to interpret it any way I chose and I chose to interpret it the way I would interpret a webpage where above this webpage is my superset and below it is my subset and to either side are my relations. And so that reminded me of exactly what, what the index of a back of a book does is it gives you a topic, the page and then it will have all of the relations including the up and down all but they're all underneath it and the occurrences and the occurrences are the page numbers and the only relation you actually really get is see also. And so that reminds me of why the topic map was invented was to improve on the index of a back of a book. And it was invented at a conference. I'm going to say it was in Oklahoma but I don't recall exactly that O'Reilly convened to deal with the new documentation and Steve Newcomb showed up. And that's where he invented the topic map because he had just done SGML stuff where he had invented a relational language for music and with SGML. And so he took that relational language and turned it into a topic map. And so that's where he did it. And it was at some conference. He listed in the book that I created but my memory won't allow me to bring it back as to where it was but it was an O'Reilly convened documentation event around the new documentation. And so that's what I saw in what you said. And so then I accused you of using the brain that way as a topic map and so that's where it came from. Love that. And thank you very much for that explanation. It makes a ton of sense. And indeed what you described is one way that I use the brain and it's a major way. So when I catalog startups, when I talk about when I talk about Expensify, which is a startup, oh my gosh, I don't have who funded them but I have them under time and expense management. They're also a local company. So I have them under Portland Techie organizations. I have their principles and their offers below and usually I would have and hear my damn computer is beach balling already and I just restarted it this morning, damn it. Okay, jealousy is increasing. So I would usually have their funders or their PR agency or whatever sort of next to them and time and expense management is a category as you just said and under it should be other companies that they compete with. And then neighboring categories because some people call themselves something a little bit different. It's sometimes difficult to figure out exactly who competes with whom and I try to be a little, I try to link a little too much. So here's a subcategory called project time tracking which has freckle, ability, nozbi, toggle, et cetera, et cetera. Toggle just came up in conversation recently because someone was saying, hey, we should use toggle and I'm like, I don't know but this is a cool Estonian company that's kind of attractive, et cetera, et cetera. So I also use the brain to tell stories and a bunch of other things and I don't know that we need to eat time on this call to enumerate, but one of the points I just wanted to make was when I talk about up down left, it gives me what I really like a term of Arthur Brox which is expressive capacity. And so the up down left without telling me how to use it lets me do a whole bunch of interesting things. Like for example, I'm collecting up what we're talking or this is how I take notes during our call. I create a thought for our call. It's connected to all of the calls we've had. Here's the rest of the build OGM calls since we reframed them as from being Stewarding calls. Here were all the OGM Stewards calls. Every little red icon is in fact, a link over to YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. This is kind of a category thing as well except I can sort of go from here and go to story threading which I don't think is what you just said. And so the story threading that I did to talk about this then turns into a video that I connected here and I'm trying to figure out how to form better bonds, more interesting bonds between the video I created and my mind map, but right now it's just a link in here, right? Anyway, I'll stop on this but I'm really interested in the description about all that and did I just confuse everybody or does that make sense? No, not at all. One of the things that I've been trying to figure out is working with Jerry's brain data is basically how to categorize a number of different things. So when I categorize things in my MX, I basically type in the category and then a colon and then the title. So in the alphabetical search, I can just type in book and I have this alphabetical list of books. Boom, there we go. And the link I posted, Sanka Aaron's a wonderful talk about how to take smart notes. The nature of the Zettelkasten as he describes it was created, you know, self-created by the creator of the Zettelkasten, come on, Mark. I should know this, but basically to do writing and it was a purposeful engagement with his mind tool that was incredibly rich. And boy, should I know the Zettelkasten guys, it's not coming to mind at the moment. Oh, wait, you wanna know? I'm trying to guess. Sorry, Peter. Oh, well, sorry, I got excited. Do you mean who created Zettelkasten? Or it's a Luhman, Nicholas Luhman. Yeah, Nicholas Luhman, who's an amazing writer, wrote about so many different things. And when he died, they had a room full of his Zettelkasten, like 30,000 cards all indexed up with his system and all that. He wrote a shit ton of books because he was really organized. Incredibly organized. And this kind of purposeful, I mean, I look at these brain tools, I used to think of at least what I was trying to do as a intelligence or thinking, what is a blender? A blender is an appliance, that's it. So Don Norman's notion of an information appliance, it does one thing, you turn it on, you turn it off, boom, it's so dead simple. It's easy to use. To me, what I do is so dead simple because I just simply link one thing to another billions of times, or millions of times, say. But there's this incredible difference in how somebody is using a tool to create a particular outcome. And it's that, I'm so glad you foregrounded that, notion of purpose or instrumentality in these tools. It's fascinating trying to think about how I do things differently than you, Jerry. And certainly looking at a very well-documented and thoughtful use of a brain tool, the Zettelkasten. Peter. Thanks, Mark. I, jumping back a topic, Jerry, you've got a video in which you walk through, it's a good kind of capsulized. Here's the gestures I use in the brain more or less. So I think of that video as not, I think of it as unlisted or something like that. It is. It's one of our early free Jerry's brain calls. I'll post, I'll connect to it here and add the link to the chat. But we did an early free Jerry's brain call where I just said, these are the few features that are essential to me in the brain and kind of how I use them. So that as we move me out into some other burden pastor, we would know what to do. Is that FTP call okay to make public? I'm increasingly inclined to make our FJBs available in some better ways. So for me, yes. That's kind of my question. And the context for it was basically, I think of it, this is what, isn't what Jerry said, but kind of in the group collective of FJB, it was kind of like, if you could make it do this, I could move over to a different tool. So it's kind of a minimum use case and capitalization of Jerry's brain. Exactly. The reason we didn't want the public is to not scare. Harlan, so then Reminder of the motivation. Yeah, I think that's mostly the reason. I just posted the YouTube link to that call in the chat and connected it to the thought for today's call. Although the original call is hidden, it's a private thought. So when I synchronized, only people logged in as me, which means me, we'll see it. So the question now is, do I reveal? Do I uncloak? Buried in this brain is a thought that might be dangerous to national security. Do I uncloak it or do I leave it secret? It's a question. Other thoughts? So I will also, I just got yesterday a very friendly note from the unfinished producers saying, hey, if you want to invite other people to come to the conference, the event is free. You have, they've got this really interesting thing where they want to make the event free, but also they want people's investment of time as their contribution to the conference. They have a very different ethos about how to create events and so forth. That this thing used to be held or is usually supposed to be held in a castle in Bucharest, like a palace that sounds really cool. They've like the physical space that this event has always been in for the last, I think it's eight years old, something like that is really neat. But since they've gone virtual, they've tried to sort of virtualize the space which sort of works sort of doesn't because we're all in the same little mess of bits and in virtual events. But I will post to the broad OGM list and invite to join unfinished, feel free, and just say, you know, I'm part of Jerry's posse, or I know Jerry and they'll let you right in. Joan Rivers? So interesting, Bob Hope. And do you all know that George Carlin used to destroy his materials every year? George Carlin, genius comedian would just get rid of his jokes every year, force himself to start over, which inspired, what's his name? He was a big inspiration for Louis C.K., who has been now banished to the lands of abusive men. But Louis C.K. also destroys his work every year inspired by Carlin. So any other riffs or thoughts? I'm particularly interested in at this moment in the practical notion of turning some of the story threading work for unfinished into episodes of weaving the world or somehow else nourishing the weaving the world thing that is now growing. I've got kind of parallel. So not the same subject matter, but parallel process. I'm kind of with folks in the greater OGM Keekalab ecosystem. We're kind of starting to form little teams, little project consulting teams. And I think as we do that, we'll try to document what's happening, but it's interesting to see, maybe we're kind of starting to get some work and starting to organize. And it's interesting to see that start happening and wonder where it's going. I don't have much else to be able to say on that, but. Sounds great though. Sounds great, thank you. I guess maybe the thing is, as all of us do that or as many of us do that, we do that. I think we should have a meta conversation where we do continue to keep together and exchange guilds and team process stuff. Marc-Antoine? Just thinking about weaving the world a bit. I'm totally, sorry, story threading. I don't really see the point of making curated narratives out of individual stories. And I'm curious about the fabric that is the intersections. When does a story snippet get reused in different threads and what does it mean? That would be something I definitely want to have a UX for. And I'm reminded of the SenseMaker tool of Snowden, of Cognitive Edge where it's more about quantitative slash a kind of mixed quantitative qualitative research on story trends. But I'm thinking, is there a trend about a story that gets reinterpreted a lot? And there's certainly something to study there for me. This is purely speculative thinking at this point. But the notion of reuse, I think is extremely important as a way to understand what's happening with the story and how it's permeating the culture. Jack stumbled recently on SenseMaker-like tool. You may be aware of it. Cool. NeraFurma. Never heard of it. NeraFurma, funny name. So it's the work of Cynthia Kirsten, Kurtz and Paul Fernout. Cynthia was Dave Snowden's partner when Conefin was an IBM property. And whatever happened, she split away from Dave and she and her husband, her husband is a software dev and she put it together. I've been a follower of their GitHub for many years. So I'm aware of it. And it's a Node.js project. Is it open source? Yes. Apache 2. It's on GitHub, fabulous. Okay, that's really, okay, that's fantastic. Thank you. And so, you know, of late, I've become interested in looking closer at it. Cynthia Kurtz holds the IBM patent on narrative markup language, according to Dave Snowden. And she's been a prolific writer. You can, you know, she has a good Google scholar. And what's her last name, Cynthia? K-U-R-T-Z. Where's Cynthia? Is this the right Cynthia? Can I have them, Senator? Yep. Okay, great, fabulous. So I will connect her to NeraFurma. She was at IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management or maybe still is, actually it says IBM. I don't know that she still is, but she was, keep in mind that Kenefin was originally an IBM property. Yeah, yeah. And then she did something called participative narrative inquiry that I've totally forgotten about that sounds really cool as well, which is apparently the foundation for NeraFurma. And she's written about sense making in real time. Whoa. Yes. Okay. Do you know Cynthia personally? No, I've actually never corresponded with her, but you have to understand that I met Paul in something called the Unrev 2 email list that followed Engelbart's 2000 Stanford lecture series. They called the Unfinished Revolution. And I was in it because I got invited to speak and Paul showed up in the trailing edge of it, which was an email list that ran for a couple of years till about, I guess, 2002. And that's where we became good friends. Super, super interesting. Thank you. If I were designing this stuff, I would totally try to have the kind of database of story interpretations. Like, what is this story telling you? What is the claims you're making from that story and connect those to kind of more claim level with the story level and find the links between them? And Jack, this goes back to something else. You also just posted about on the MetaMouse, which is the difference between storytelling and sense making. And I think also sense making is one of those words that if you asked five OGMers, what sense making is you'd get eight answers that would all be kind of interesting. But for me, storytelling is a form of sense making because stories don't always have to make logical sense, but it helps when they do. And story assumptions might be fantastical and completely nonsensical, and that's fine. They're just stories, they're just narratives, but you want there to be a chain of events that seems plausible in some sense, which is a form of sense making. And sometimes storytelling is completely metaphorical or something you pulled out of your ass because you're trying to get a point across, which is a really important part of sense making. And then finally also, storytelling is to me one of the most memorable forms of sense making is that stories, humans love narrative. We just love a good story and we will retell stories. Jay Golden, who's been here in OGM, talks about retellable stories as like gold. That's like the most important thing is, is this thing something that you will be able to retell later? Is it, and you can talk about memes, you can talk about whatever, but I think that that's really important in all of this. Pete, thank you for all the quotes you're posting in the chat and Michael. Just off of what Mark Antoine just said and Jerry giving a little bit back to story threading and then the question of consensus. The idea that granular items of fact or links or things be connected by the stories they are woven into so that you can search the items and say what story is this part of and how do people from different points of view spin it? Like if you're in a conference and you have all the links to all the stuff that was said, transcripts, whatever. And then the story threaders are the people who might be from very different points of view that would not agree with the consensus that can say, I mean, it's easier to think of in terms of like politics, like here's a bunch of facts that have been thrown out here. Here's which one's a libertarian cobbles together and makes a narrative out of, here's what an anarchist does, here's what a neoliberal does, here's all these different things. So the consensus would be, well, here's the stuff everybody can agree on which is gonna be mush and you can link out from there to see these things, I can triangulate my truth from the way these things are used or ignored in these different narratives but maintaining that ability to access the granular things and see what they connect to, it's really like that. Thank you, that's super interesting. And also you just did a really great job of reawakening me to the idea that story threading may well have alternative points of view that we're really not crazy about and that represent the very different point of view. And to me, one of the interesting things is the invitation in story threading to kind of show your work or to show why you believe this, even if it's based on like, very contrarian points of view. And so that's I think kind of dangerous territory but super interesting territory because we rapidly get sucked into the maelstrom of, hey, that story threading maybe is exactly how the alt-right is spinning narratives that have got a third of this country completely trapped in Q, for example, right? A Q is an ultimate reality game that is a collection of stories that are nonsense stories that are not based on actual facts but based on little pieces of facts that creates suspicion that, and then there's plenty of good reasons to be suspicious of the large institutions. One of the pieces that came out of the interview that I just story-threaded that I didn't call out but it was like one of the alternative paths, a strong one was they say, Ida says basically, hey, there's tons of people who have lost complete trust in big pharma and big government. And I'm like, oh, that's right. I'm in that group. And so they're, you know, vaccine skeptics are some of those people. Like, what do you mean big government is telling me to go take a big pharma thing? Like, I hate them both. I don't trust any of them, any further than I can throw them is a reasonable narrative to have. And yet I've been sitting here during pandemic saying, hey people, the science is pretty damn good. These are really effective vaccines. Just go get your shots. And ignoring, and I'm realizing the parallels when Trump wins and Hillary loses, I realized that I was about to vote for the first woman president of the United States or did vote for the first woman president of the United States mentally unconsciously setting aside all of my problems with the system that I wanted redesigned from trust because I knew unconsciously that she would be a shepherd or a steward of the status quo. I didn't have any hope that Hillary would actually cause any large scale change. And that was like, that was a difficult realization for me. And I'm realizing it's top of the art. I'm supposed to join a different call, but I'm going to be late to that call because Jack and Pete have their hands up and I'm dying to hear what you have to say. So I had this ODARC 30 epiphany that I did a terrible job of talking about storytelling yesterday in the group. I do not deny that storytelling is a form of sense-making, but I go back to the whole spectrum of data definitions of sense-making from when I was doing my thesis research. I mean, after all, if you're swimming with the sense-makers, you ought to know what they're up about. And so I got in and started reading all the deep, the deep literature on sense-making. And it summarized in the same sense that you would summarize the left-hand side of the theory you as you're coming to grips with that which is going on. And Thierry, you take it much further than the university people do because the university people will stop at gathering the facts and organizing them in spreadsheets so you can analyze them so you can do all theory. You go one step further and suggest that you also know about yourself and how you're a member of this problem space and what your biases are and you have to have them. So I didn't see storytelling as the totality of that, but storytelling is a totally legitimate way of sense-making. I'll stop there. Thanks, Jack. And you reminded me of something I wanted to put in the conversation earlier that comes up now and then for me, which is I see a lot of sense-making and mapping and et cetera, et cetera, this whole field starting from abstract ideas and propositions about structure, whether it be the four causes from Aristotle or what have you, or Ken Wilbur's integral quadrant or what have you. And from my personal experience of using the brain, I realized that had I started from anything like that, it would have eliminated a bunch of ways, creative ways, useful ways in which I use the brain. And I'm leery of, but interested in, philosophical models that form the massive structure of some tool. But I realized that very, and Jack, that's why I wanted to dive further into my uses of the brain, is that I feel like the brain has this minimal structure that I've been able to use in a variety of different ways, which are logically kind of a mess. My brain is clearly not as elegant as if you had sat down and said, your brain must have propositions and arguments in this particular way. And if it doesn't, they don't fit in the tool, I would have been hosed and the brain wouldn't be as rich as it is. So the brain is messy in interesting ways because I'm appropriating it, I'm kind of tweaking it to do different kinds of things in different kinds of places and sometimes simultaneously sort of have overlaid on one another, where I'm the only one who knows that this node is playing this role in this set of thoughts and this other role in this other set of thoughts which are a story, for example. And those things are hard to pull apart for anybody just visiting, but I know, and Pete has made this point multiple times, but I know where the stories are buried in my brain, but they're not evident to a visitor. So I just wanted to put that back in the conversation. Pete. Thanks, Jai. Real quick, since Kenefin came up in conversation with Wendy Elford recently, Wendy's works with Cognitive Edge and I know the folks. She was explaining recently that when you used to think of Kenefin framework and Cognitive Edge, I started thinking of dollar signs basically. It's Dave and Cognitive Edge do great work, but they get hired by governments for, you know, for mucho bucks, which I guess I'm a little bit jealous of, but, you know, more power to them. Anyway, she explains that within the past couple of years, that has kind of changed. Dave's been able to set it up, Dave and whoever else have been able to set it up so that they're doing more out in the open and can actually fund, you know, social good, community good kinds of things. I'm going to drop a link in the chat real quick. I think what she was talking about was the Kenefin Center programs which are linked here. I'm not exactly sure, but she says that if you've got, you know, social good application or situation where you need, you know, the full weight of Kenefin framework and whatever else, you can get, it's not too hard to get a program set up and get it approved by Dave and get cooking. So don't be scared away from that kind of stuff. If you don't have bucks, figure out how to, and Wendy would help make the connections if needed. That's really good news. That's great to hear. Thank you. Cause I've always been frustrated. It's like Paul Stamets. I watched his Ted talk about mushrooms and Stamets is all about locking down his IP and trying to make a buck from what he knows about mushrooms. I'm like, God damn it, you know, can we just do this together in the open? And still I'm happy to help Paul make a living I will route people to him to hire him for whatever, but can we just share this brilliant stuff? Cause mushrooms can fix the world. I mean, we'll just replace all of us with the fruiting heads of mycelium and we'll be fine. That wiki, by the way, it looks like it would be good for folks here. So it's a participatory wiki. Awesome. Love this. Any other closing thoughts for this call? This has been really wonderful. I thank you very much. Really, really appreciate your being here and our joint efforts in developing whatever the hell it is we're developing this new mycelial form of life. Just hi to Stacey. Yeah. Hi Stacey. We see you. Love to hear you. I actually had a lot of thoughts but I could save it for another time. I do want to say that what Mark Antoine was saying what really struck me cause it was so much in here but those outlying thoughts and the fact, he mentioned how there's no strong opposition to them which says something but the fact that they're left out that's what the right takes advantage of. That's what anything will take. That's what messes up sense making because even if you're looking for that dot of yours and it's not there and that goes to something else that I notice a lot that sometimes, you know which has to do with the first best answer is accepted as that there's no more that follow along. So. That's a great point Stacey. Thank you for that. When you can't account for the pieces of the argument that you believe in when they don't show up in the other person's argument you start to suspect that things are wrong. I keep saying this like this game this thing called chopped, it's a cooking show. And the whole idea is that you have to use every ingredient. And I think that's a thought we should keep in the back of our head. Like I always try to weave in something from everybody on court. And one more thing I wanted to go to that conversation but when I went there it said it already started come back next week. So how do I hear that conversation? The exo conversation? I will find out shortly. I'm right now about to sort of parachute into the beginning of the whole process. And yeah, so I'll ping you back. All right, thank you. Bye everybody.