 Hi everybody whoever's watching this. This is a this is an ad hoc weird serendipitous event Given my world out there Who you see on the other side of the screen is a guy named Jerry mccoskey. I'll let him introduce himself But I'll first say a couple of words Jerry and I met Two or three lifetimes ago, I think I Think I think Jerry you you took some months in or you ran across me But we both ran across the brain now. I don't know if you did it first and turned me on to it Or I did first turned you on to it. I didn't matter but You know, anyway, that's a lot of what we're going to talk about but Uh and and this is going to be unique to those of you who are familiar with the brain Or who might be interested in the brain as a piece of software and we'll hear Jerry's story about that Jerry. I you know, I could have turned me on to hear your last interview that you did that was quite in-depth about You know, why you're still using the brain after all these what 20 years And uh, and and why but but even beyond that whether or not you're interested in that software but but Jerry's brain is very uh, fascinating in terms of How he's knitted together and sort of managed his Oh, I'm going to stop Jerry. You could tell people Much better than but but I was fascinated by that and fascinated by the the whole idea of how do we now manage The information world that is so thrown at us. I mean what's changed is the speed of change and and the volume and And intensity of data that's coming at us that is available to us So surfing on top of that staying sane about that is obviously a huge sort of gtds kind of topic You know, no matter what So i'm going to hit the tennis ball back over the fence Jerry tell people Who you are why you think they might be interested in what you have to say Oh, thanks. Um, it's really nice to to have a chance to chat again. It's been it's been forever Um, and I think probably I turned you on to the brain because I was on their first press tour and Weirdly, so I used to work for Esther Dyson I was writing a news a monthly newsletter and I had chosen the topic strangely about bookmark management and mind mapping And those two things don't normally go together on people's menus But I was busy trying to figure out my urls seem really important Why are they so hard to manage like the the bookmark feature in your browser sucks? You put a hundred things in there. You've lost everything. It's it's impossible to manage So what else might you use and I was totally frustrated with everything I'd seen and then this little company sends me a An unsolicited email because I was on the press tour for anybody who was launching or launching some software because my blast ester Had a big audience and everybody wanted ester to write about them and I was at the front door going Hello, I get to write about you And so I'm totally frustrated because the companies I found Just I didn't like what they had and then this brain thing shows up and I'm like The moment the inventor opens his laptop sitting next to me. I'm like this thing I somehow my brain works like this thing and I started using it and I'm still using it to this day And I'm approaching by the way. Did you meet did you meet harlon back then? Harlan was the demo he was he he uh, so harlan had met a movie producer who became the ceo of the company at the time and so Doug block I think he was at the head of the table And he's thumbing a deck because this is in the days of like paper deck where people show up the pitch He thumbs the deck and he looks at me and he says he has this great intuition. He says I have a feeling we should go straight to the demo And harlan's sitting to my left with his laptop and opens his laptop and starts demoing the brain Which does not look much different right now. One of the beefs against the brain is that it looks like windows 95 and yep check That's that's so totally true And he starts demoing this thing, which is a mind map and and you and I are Intimately familiar with it As are I don't know dozens of other people on the planet certainly thousands but not you know It hasn't eaten the world, but I found that I could really speak I could express myself in this tool Started using it still use it today and have never had a second brain file So one of the oddities here is that I've been feeding a single mind map for 24 years And it has almost a half million thoughts in it each note is called a thought connected by over 900 000 links I'm approaching a million links all put in by hand by me. I don't do any automation I don't I don't sick it on a website and say crawl this thing or anything like that and so So that's just a piece of the background and that that's like our big overlap because I've been thinking about this call for a little bit And I I kind of wanted to say really early that I feel like I'm the anti-matter david ellen Like where you personify getting things done and efficiency and productivity and all of that I am just nowhere in that space. I am you know, I have a whole series of initiatives My brain is like this space where I'm curious about everything and if you wander around through the half million things I put in there It's everything from cocktail recipes to why donald trump is donald trump and how he works to Completely, you know apolitical things as well By the way, let me stop you right there. Yeah, people people listening or watching this right now Again, it's a piece of software called the brain current editions of the brain the brain 12 I believe And it's something I've been using for I got 20 years, I guess since jerry we we connected and I probably have about 10 000 entries in there Jerry's got you know, he just said that that many in there and I haven't used it as a rigorous tool. I do as a fun serendipitous tool Which has been very very useful in random moments Just to see who else lives in Dayton, Ohio? Let me look And you know, there it is or at least I've where I've been able to capture it and I've input the less stuff and I'm still using it So it's still a very viable part It's a you know, I hit Whatever and I hit the brain and it shows up and and I can add stuff to it. So The pieces the software itself Well, let me let me toss it back to you jerry That's that's what we're talking about is that piece of software that actually tended to map How our brain tends to work the the creator harlon You know was he said I need to create software that that thinks the way I think and he did Which is that thought reminds me of that thought which reminds me of that thought. Oh, by the way, that turns into that thought Well, wait a minute. I had that thought before What else is related to that thought? And he designed an elegant tool, which is still highly functional in that regard So let me toss it back to you and say okay now now maybe more people that are not necessarily aware of what this piece of software is Uh, you can tell them what's unique about it or Why you're still using it? Happy to and I think it makes sense for me to Screen share just because we're talking about a visual thing, right? Yeah So here's you in my brain and I I don't think I've updated you very much Since back then but somehow I learned that uh, john roger was one of your inspirations He was also one of ariana huffington's inspirations apparently That you talked a lot about open loops psychic ram, etc. So I've got a bunch of things in here and then Here's now I always have up at the top. There's a pinboard anything you put up there stays there And this is like the winter of our discontent that we're living through right now and I've been tracking the covid Problem here's the delta variant. Here's amachron. Here's lineage b Dot whatever the amachron variant, etc. This is this is the thing we're talking about Anywhere you see a little fave icon attached to a thought that means there's a web link And if you click on this particular web link it launches your browser to that page Wherever it is on the inner tubes. And so this is like this this great memory map for what is going on in the world So I'll stop the screen screen share there just just to have put the brain in the conversation One of the one of the unique unique things about you and this is just about you jerry Is you just made your life transparent to the world because I publish my brain for free online That's right. So I tell people as long as they're They may hop off right after this and go surf you but so how do people get online with you which would be awesome So so I own the domain jerry's brain.com funny enough I also own inside jerry's brain.com and pick jerry's brain.com for different reasons But if you jerry's no no no no apostrophe just an no apostrophe. No space exactly and jerry with a j Um, but at jerry's brain.com it says launch jerry's brain click on that It'll open a new tab and then take you into the brain and there's a little search field And you can just type in whatever thing you don't have to traverse the brain It has a really nice search engine although on the web server that little search is a little slower But I've been publishing my brain openly For I don't know at least 15 if not 20 of those 24 years first, you know Since harlan started making that available And it's really interesting because I feel kind of like I'm vulnerable in showing exactly what you can certainly derive my political inclinations and everything else and what I care about I'm sort of protected by obscurity because nobody really knows I'm out there But it's a really but it's a lovely exercise in So the thing my passion project now is called open global mind And it starts from the thing you just pointed to which is thinking in public and putting my reasoning in public And I wish more people did this Not in the brain necessarily because the brain doesn't work for everybody like lots of people look at it And they just see a bottle of twine of words Right um other people love kumu. Some people love rome research. There's a cult of rome going on right now That's pretty active that settled custom is another way of organizing your thoughts I'm trying to figure out an open global mind What does the space look like where all these tools can meet and collaborate What does the conversation look like where somebody else has elaborated Why they think what they think and what they would do right now With some evidence and some logic and some choices and some whatever like how do we model that for each other So that we can think together in the public space And why this yeah, and why this so rang my bell back in When did I do this? 1991 I think I drew a sort of an ideal scene mind map for myself And part of that was just I just drawing pictures using colored pens and one of it was I drew a picture of the globe And the world connected sort of electronically with the small towns I thought if the small towns could sort of get what I teach Or what they teach what they've learned How do they manage their own small community and share that with all the other small communities? And I've waited for a long time To watch whether something like that would actually show up or not And I don't know what all the barriers have been economic political Cultural Yeah, why why all of that is not there That's why I think you know yay jerry What do we do? How do we get you know every small town? You know either onto the brain or to find some collaborative tool to say look here's how we handled Sewage in our town. Here's how we handled diversity in our town. Here's how we handle transportation in our town Here's how we handle whatever and everybody's got all those resources they could use if they were interested I said I could probably get it now. I mean any you know No, it's a It's a it's a google world, you know So you could probably find a lot of information if you really if you care about that But to have a community that's sort of built itself around the sharing of that kind of information That's what turned me on of that that last Uh podcaster heard you do jerry. Thank you, which I just don't see I don't see it yet What do we need to do? Well, it's funny the brain has perennially had this uptake problem people see it and they're like Oh, that's cool. And then not that many people stick, right? I I saw it and I was like a duck in water I really didn't need any coaching. I was I was often running and I'm I'm I'm weird that way, right My one of the questions in the back of my head is hey There seem to be billions of people who are really comfortable using tiktok and snapchat and instagram and tumblr and pinterest and facebook And they're really smart at using hashtags and hashtags are sophisticated metadata That's really cool. Like that's really rich except what they're doing is they're showing you like The the makeup haul they got from the store or the toast they had this morning or whatever and I'm like, okay Okay, we've and my whole journey for the last 30 years also starts from me realizing. I don't like the word consumer And so we've consumerized our interests and our attention and all of that when we actually need to be citizens again Instead of consumers and come back into sitting together to figure out. How do we solve our problems together? Engagers Exactly exactly. And so I have a there's a thought in my brain called revitalizing cities and Here I collect stories from all around the world of cities, you know bogota Curitiba, brazil, barcelona, wherever Todd mordan So, oops, let me click up here. Todd mordan Uh in england where they have edible landscapes because Pam or or hers to did a ted talk Way back in I don't know what year. I'll look it up But she talks about how they revitalize their city by changing all of the rose bushes into edit like like Lime trees and that's really interesting. It's it's a resource It's a story to tell that if people in small cities around the world go like just if they had an easy possibility to go sift through stories of how other cities have revitalized themselves They might go nope. Nope. Nope that one And how do we do this who else could help us? Hey, is the person who did this available to talk to because it costs nothing to talk through the inner tubes All of that if we can make that available I think we can sort of help people work their way out of whatever whatever situation they're in By the way, do you know jim phallus do you in jim? I do I know he's written about he's written about me and my brain in in the atlantic several times Oh, yeah. Well, you know his book our towns You know is all about his wife flew around in their small plane and visited cities and he had never he had never great So I assume you have that That resource, you know connected in there. Yeah, okay I haven't thought about going back and talking to him right now and at this moment, but it makes a lot of sense So what do we do about this right? We're both. What do we do about this? I at my age jerry come on 76 just turn 76 and they're not that many things I'm that interested in You know in in the world that you're still quite, you know Rigorously engaged You know in terms of all of this stuff and what it could mean and what you could do about it All I could do is recommend the brain to people that could that they could start on the same kind of journey for themselves You know, where do I put a recipe and and oh lettuce. What about lettuces? You know, I know a certain kind of lettuce being And then people actually get engaged in doing I think one of the reasons people that there's no uptake is it's it actually requires Sorry anybody listening or watching this it requires thinking Thinking is hard work People think they're thinking all the time. All they're doing is mentally rehearsing a bunch of stuff They're not actually thinking and so this just requires you to think well What would that connect to and why would I need that and what would be interesting about that? You know people are thinking like like what's interesting is people you think are dumb are actually when you hit the thing They give it in about whether it's baseball and baseball stats or cocktail recipes or or how to make a great yard They're encyclopedic. They're analytic. They're like they they dig they've they've done their research They know what's going on. They're working hard at at the thing, right? The problem is that when they then come up against some forney problem that looks immovable in society or in their neighborhood or they lack resources or whatever They're not interested in tackling that problem and they don't see that other people are around to tackle it with them So they go back to the baseball thing because it rewards the mechanisms, right? So a piece of this is is not that humans can't think It's that we're not tuning our thinking sort of in in the right ways and part of my narrative is We're also we've turned into consumers by being treated as mere consumers We've just turned into consumers who want instant gratification And we need to need to come back in and and start one of the things I like about feeding the brain Is that it shifts me from system one thinking to system two thinking? This is tell me about that Yeah, so this is thinking fast and slow by uh kahneman and twersky Actually by by kahneman And he says that system one is your your automatic response It's your knee jerk instinctive response to an answer and then system two is when logic kicks in And then you're like, oh, okay. Wait, wait, my instinctive answer was wrong I need to actually piece this together and make sense out of it And feeding my brain, which I do every day all the time if you do the math I'm adding 50 or 60 things to my brain every single day To put something in it's like is this thing worth remembering? What is it? Where do I put it? What do I call it? Do I rename it? What else is it connected to? Just like you were saying earlier? Ooh, you know, did you know that brussel sprouts and broccoli and gailan and all those things are all the same damn plant? Right. It just like it was bred differently and grows differently That's really kind of interesting and going on from there, right? And so I think there's this possibility to help bring people back in to talk about difficult issues And we have to overcome our learned helplessness and our idea that these are hyper objects That these are problems too big to actually even deal with And come back in the community and start talking to people who think differently from us All of those things matter a whole big bunch But a piece of open global mind is not about the geeky mindmappy tools But is about open-mindedness and about being vulnerable and present and building trust and creating safe spaces Where difficult conversations can happen And I don't know that we're good at that in ogm yet But we're that we're like really aiming there because for me the global crisis Is partly that we're not dealing with big global crises, but partly it's because we're frozen We're fearing the other half of the population worldwide. This is not a us phenomenon. This is a global thing And this is being done intentionally So so I think we're in the middle of a plot of hey, how do we get make people become critical thinkers? But so much of that is because we've been Pulled away from being citizens and being mutually responsible for our outcomes and our futures and our towns and our neighborhoods All of that is is is like one big thorny package And I think that there's a moment here. We're in this moment of the great resignation the big quit the big rethinking of what we're doing I've got a thought in my brain. I can show you called we're involuntarily. We're negotiating the social contract worldwide Right and you know that moment is an opportunity. It's a huge opportunity back to you Well, one of the reasons that I Move to and love the Netherlands so much is it for 600 years it had to train itself to think globally and to integrate and to diversify Because the god here is money And the way you make money is you are merchants And you merchant merchandise the world which the Dutch the Dutch did, you know, uh, but at the same time It then became this sort of global A network I think statistically Amsterdam is the most uh diverse city in the world In terms of how I think there are 172 different nationalities that are resident in in the Netherlands I don't I don't know some number like that So You know, this is a place that has that sort of idea of integration that idea of Let's find out how this works how that works how that works out of that works And you know, I know when you know in the southern part of the Netherlands has more patents than in the other place in the world per person That's where Phillips, you know started whatever so the Dutch are very quirky. They're very smart They're very clever. If it ain't Dutch it ain't much they say you know, that's funny and so Interestingly that there might be air islands Where this kind of thing I would imagine the kind of thing is sort of going on Jerry I mean come on you this you can't be some voice Totally crying in the wilderness right right now, right? Totally, there are totally communities all over the place busy doing this But we're not connected to each other and we don't Our tools our tools don't connect our efforts don't connect and a piece of what I'm trying to do in OGM has become a kind of a bridge or a butterfly or a connector of sorts Between them. Have you read the book Amsterdam? Shortos history This one Yes, Russell short. Oh, yeah, sure. Well, he talks about her twice Okay, good where he talks about herring buses and how much is herring Because they invented gibbing and so much as herring becomes the the thing that juices prosperity and how Holland basically misses feudalism because have you read this did you read his first book and I did not The island of the city the world or the island in the center of the world history of Manhattan Why did you get so interested in Amsterdam because it was new Amsterdam? And so I did not know that so I've got his book in here, but I didn't have him to actually read it now Now I need to No, it's it's fascinating. I read it after I read Amsterdam Because it gives so much backdrop A lot of the u.s. Culture by the way came out of new york not out of the Not out of new england everybody thinks in the history books that it was all new england people came to new england for Religious freedom, but they got burned at the stake as witches And so they all went to to new amsterdam, which was freewheeling and fun and no rules or whatever And the british once they traded serenade for Manhattan Kept all the systems that the dutch had set up because they weren't Great, so a whole lot of the u.s. Culture Actually, which was fascinating. That's why you'll you'll you'll be fascinated by by russell's first book You know I was too You know about because they it was new data. They it was new historical data. They didn't know somebody uncovered a whole lot of the dutch uh, the old dutch language documents somehow it wound up in some cash in new york in the capital of new york And albany albany in albany, sorry and some guy had wound up You know making his phd You know studies this old dutch language and they found him they found all these documents and he spent the last 40 years Uncovering how much stuff was going on You know in new amsterdam That was actually just a mirror because this was the 1640 1650. This was the golden age, you know in and and in and in hollum. Yeah, and Anyway, so we could go on and on about that. No need to but just No need to accept I adore histories like that and and like back when I was like 35 john taylor gatto turned me on to the first good history book I ever read which was tragedy and hope by carol quickly Which is about the history of the world's financial system? And it's published in 1966 the middle of the cold war kind of so it tells you like What kind of what happened behind the curtain? I'm like, oh, that's really really interesting And so when you find a good history book like amsterdam and now the island at the center of the world Which I must read what I try to do is debrief that into my brain so that I can share it out So that I can track back and then tell stories around it And these stories wind up getting sort of animated reified Whatever they're they're made more Hopefully more visible and palpable and then you start to see the connections in the thread So I will connect this to the dutch golden age. Um, you know, I have you seen the movie admiral No, uh, it's about uh, the the most uh Most famous admiral of the dutch fleet and it's it's phenomenal. It's like super super interesting Alongside all of this anyway, but but history Is so important to us as we're talking about our present because we often don't know enough history and we pulled the wrong historical analogies out When in fact, there's like richer more interesting ones we can go look for Yeah, well what turned me on to intellectual history instead of philosophy was reading oswald stengler's the decline of the west So, you know, of course in a very Germanic way We talked about, you know, I think the nine Cultures around the world that had their own dna that affected the architecture of the art the the science the The everything that went on in that culture had this signature, you know, of uh, oh there we go Oswald stengler the time of the west but i've not read the book But i've not read the book so here's um And the west is still in decline which is weird, isn't it? Well interesting, you know, he was the guy who basically sort of said look the west is in the same Is in the same position that the roman empire was where it was falling apart Right, so I think there'd be a whole new configuration or Rethink of that, you know, given what's going on because there is no more west Exactly. Well, there is to some degree that, you know West is everywhere but but again where did the towel come from? Where did gothic cathedrals come from? Where did the whole russian plane, you know idea of we're all we're all sort of equal in the Whatever that became communism. I mean, this was fascinating stuff to me I nobody we didn't even use the verb paradigm back then You know, but then it became You know, then a popular idea because wow, there's a paradigm here in this culture that then is impacting on how anybody thinks You know and what they perceive partly why I care a lot about those things we're talking about is that is i've sort of Focused it on this thought in my brain Which we are in a titanic battle over the narratives in our heads And by the way, we've always been that this is a major force in human history is that Is that for long stretches of time several hundred years at a time? We think that people are lazy. We think that people are evil We think that those people eat their children whatever it might be and these narratives are mostly planted in our heads by people who are creating um The power structures whatever else and we're All of us kind of peasants suffering from those power dynamics, right? We like like those those things kind of run the larger waves of history that run over us In different ways and create civilizations. You either want to be a citizen in or not Do you know what gerbergman's book? uh humankind I've uh not read it, but I've got it of course in my brain well Believe me, you know, it's a it's a huge rant about sensationalism in the press And how that has so reframed or that is so it importantly poisoned you know people's perception of our culture and collaboration cooperation goodness You know, it's really a fascinating book and so I've not read it But I've already put it under people are naturally social and collaborative humans are altruistic Cooperators and people are generally more trustworthy than we think they are which is a major piece of my thesis. Yeah Because I I coined something I call designed from trust back in 2012 Which to me is uh, maybe an advancement of design thinking and like if only we designed more of our Of our systems from trust. You might have some of these problems speak to that some more I didn't understand that totally when I heard your last podcast about that So give maybe some examples samples So the easiest use cases and whatever Yeah, the easiest example is wikipedia because almost everybody's touched it now So I'd say like who who remembers the first time they looked at wikipedia. Everybody raises their hand Who remembers the first time they realized how wikipedia works? And then a bunch of people raise their hand And it's like didn't you have this like sphincter tightening moment where it's like wait It's certainly certainly the encyclopedia. We're all referring to can't be editable by any asshole on earth Right, certainly that that's not a thing and yet that's how the system works because it's designed from trust because the key is in the front door And they then deal with bad actors once the actors are inside But they're busy inviting people into co-edit Which is the ethos of how wikis work, right? And if you go deep and deeper into the history of how wikis work and it turns out that ward cunningham Who's the inventor of wikis lives here in portland? And so every now and then we'll get together, but but there's a whole ethos about Believing that people are more trustworthy than we think they are and then designing systems that start from there Instead of believing that just about everybody's a potential potential bad actor and then building a system that defends itself against them In which case what you start doing is you start building Preventions limits coercions And our educational system the compulsory education system is a great example of a system which could be abundant Because anybody can be your teacher you could learn from any object You could you could spend a month on this pen and learn a whole bunch of stuff about whether it's geometry or literature or Or chemistry or you know, who knows what right? And yet we've designed a coercive system because we industrialized learning And and so so in some sense designed from trust is a way of rethinking a variety of systems and institutions so that People can actually step in and take responsibility and begin collaborating toward better results And so these systems are their systems are cheaper and reconnect us Except they're also really counter-intuitive because we're so far down the other rabbit hole They feel really dangerous So compare this it might be a really bad comparison But all the freebie That people use that then sell upgrades, you know to get the pro version or whatever That is all shareable and you can you can do all that so Is that just a sort of a minor consumer consumer risk, you know version of what you're talking about So freemium is just a business model, right? I'll get people to try my thing and and by the way if somebody else downloaded my software and goes off and does something with it No cost to me. I'm not supporting them very much if they're on my server There's a little cost, but having lots of people is really good for my service. So there's a good pro quo Freemium isn't isn't really necessarily designed from trust. I don't see it sort of fitting in there However, open source software and the design of the internet are both extremely great examples of design from trust Because pre pre internet you had to go to the international standards organization or the international telecommunications union And be a big entity to propose some change something you were going to do to the system to add to it And the internet is this incredibly permissive thing where it's like Hey, ietf. I've I've invented this new protocol that does this weird thing and lots of people seem to be using it now Would you like to make it a standard and they're like looks great. Let's go Right. And so that's designed from trust now a lot of those things don't have a business model around them So pay what you want That's designed from trust And panera had had a moment some years ago where they created I think six or seven restaurants were which were pay what you want restaurants And they put them they put them in fringe neighborhoods that were between prosperous and not so prosperous neighborhoods on purpose Because they wanted the traffic from both areas to sort of to cross the benefit And they stopped the experiment for reasons I don't understand but but but the idea of hey There's no actual set price here. There's maybe a recommended price. Maybe not But letting people sort of pitch in and in terms of people believe in fairness fairness is like a this deep thing in human nature Um, you know, monkey experiments show us that when you give monkey over here more cucumbers than than I got I'll I'll get mad bring me to a fast forward if how does jury mckowski? You know spend your day and what keeps fueling your fire In terms of doing this stuff Yeah, so it's it's funny you should ask because I just got off a call with some friends who are sort of helping me puzzle through this When I say I'm the anti-matter david ellen what I mean is I've done a really really crappy job Turning all of this into sort of a way of of just making a living at it So this open global mind thing is like my white whale and I'm ahab I'm trying to figure out how how do we come together to actually solve problems that matter to us and there's really kind of no particular business model around it We did get some funding from jim rutz family foundation. So that that's good But but I'm busy moving all these little chess pieces forward on the board without really putting all of my energy behind any one of them And uh, so my latest thing and by the way, anybody who's listening can join open global mind Just ping me or go to the website open open global mind calm and click on some links and you'll be in our conversations um But pictures brain is kind of the way I'm going right now because I love being in thoughtful conversations like this one Where I'm sharing what I've discovered and kind of squirreled away in this weird artifact called the brain Because it actually often enhances the conversation and you know in a in a good conversation I can send somebody links to different points in my brain where there's all sorts of Either opinionated statements with some backing some evidence or resources to go Look up or whatever else right? And the more I curate that artifact The more sort of the richer it becomes the more I have to share back. So so what I do every day is funny It's it's a you know too many too many calls with too many subgroups Working on all these different moving parts I recall jerry when we had breakfast on shattuck avenue in berkeley God, can you remember the year gotta be? um 1990 something probably I don't know Yeah, it feels like a way a long time ago. Yeah early 90s. Anyway, I think you you were you've been in A lot of what you were doing was sort of organizing these ad hoc events Which I love an ad hoc event where you invite people who don't have time to show up and there's no agenda And then you see what and then you see what happens So in 19 yeah in 1996, I invented jerry's weekend retreats Which which I last I haven't run for the last six years, but pretty much every year from 96 until six years ago I ran an 80 to 90 person event with no agenda invite only And regularly half the people who showed up were newbies had never been to one and were rolling the dice on this weird sounding thing And then the other half were like, you know perennial retreaters And we would talk about whatever showed up and sometimes 20 minutes before some block of time You know the venue we had said well, this is when we serve breakfast lunch and dinner and that that was our structure And and people were trusting me to figure out what the next Piece of of our activity would be and I tried not to send us often the breakouts too often But but the result is like a really interesting community that's that's heard each other and seen each other go through These these you know interesting and not very structured moments, which is totally fun. So So that was not I was breaking even doing that. I couldn't afford to like you know, host everybody for free But I would charge what it cost me to put on Um, and again, I haven't done one of those for five or six years Well in the virtual world, there'd be probably some some virtual version of that I would think of the kind of these open global mind conversations are a virtual piece of that Yeah, although although I'm not using you know Jerry's retreat methodology for them, but but my I'm really comfortable opening a conversation with who shows up With the general idea where we're going and then like slowly wading into the deeper waters And I'm and over and over and over again like 45 minutes into a call you feel like in barbershop quartet singing apparently there's something called the bird Which is when the four people singing I hit the right harmony. There's an overtone, which is almost like a fifth voice And and and I call these moments in sort of group conversation like the bird in conversation Um, and then which is why I like kind of 90 minute calls more than 60 minute calls because if you're gonna like go 45 minutes In and suddenly start humming. Um, you kind of want that you want want that to last So anyway What if there were somebody listening or watching this right now Who would be the most interesting or ideal person for you to sort of catch what you're talking about if they If they were this kind of person or they had this kind of resource or they were interested in doing this kind of thing What would be your ideal? You know audience person for what you're talking about. So there's there's um Different ways I can frame your question, which lead me to different ideal people So one of those ideal people is a lot of my thinking is really upside down The design from trusting comes out of realizing that we stop trusting humans And if you can flip that in your head you start having all these creative ideas about how to fix stuff You start finding finding which I've curated in my brain Hundreds of stories of that actually happening in the world in different ways You start realizing that there's some general principles for that So one ideal person is somebody who's trying to like flip the script in their industry In their company in whatever it is that they do And would like to think that through and figure out where to go with that And that that's like really juicy because I think every institution is sort of ripe for redesign a reason there are protests in the streets everywhere from casero lazos to Occupy to trumpism to everything else is that people are really pissed off that the system is broken and not serving them well They're truly angry and for many good reasons and so Anybody who wants to redesign those systems. That's one path Another path is this critical thinking. Let's think together. Let's solve local problems question, right? And then the simplest perfect person is somebody who wants to test their ideas or break their ideas and pictories brain I'm trying to design that pictories brain.com. I'm trying to design that to actually help people Um broaden their thinking around whatever their presenting issue is and say well, have you considered that? Um, this thing over here happened way back when and it's kind of a really interesting lesson for you Or maybe a model or did you know that these five startups failed to do what you're trying to do? And this is what I know about how they failed Right those kinds of things because I've got the skeletons in the stories buried in my brain as well I'm pretty good. I watched software for so many years I think I heard you say There were 300 calendar apps that failed Something like that about yeah, well Understood, they they never got it right Exactly and today we've got Calendly and Savick Cal and a bunch of others making you know making their way and 20 years from now one or two of those will have one At least temporarily the way Facebook, you know beat Friendster and everybody else and has one Facebook has more I'm an average monthly users than the populations of India and China together That's that's like really really hard for me to wrap my head around Right and yet and yet and yet we don't treat them as a nation and we like they're not under any compulsion To tell anybody anything they do or whatever. It's very very interesting how we got ourselves into the situation What do you think about all the stuff going on in the media now and it's about all the you know The evil empires of all the big tech You know companies and then allowing all kinds of things going on through their media you know that that that You know support or promote not optimal behaviors out there in the world. Yeah, exactly. Yeah well Partly it's complicated, which I guess is a natural answer here, but Misinformation is really hard to separate from parody from satire from a bunch of other kinds of things So it's actually not that straightforward to find isolate and get rid of People who intentionally are coming in and spinning tails and spinning tails is a really powerful tech technique or strategy, right? That it really kind of works second We allowed a company to sort of step in And build a business model that depends On addicting us to the platform and selling off our information Those are the revenue sources and one question I have like Let's pretend that the department of justice succeeds against a facebook the way it succeeded against microsoft way back when What are the remedies? What would you ask facebook to do? Should they sell off whatsapp and instagram? I think that's dumb. That's not going to fix anything My remedy is What if facebook were designed around citizens instead of consumers and right now it's designed entirely as a consumer mass marketing exercise With all of the repercussions I just mentioned right all of the knock-on effects What if they had to redesign the platform for citizens and citizenship And us being together and building a shared memory together So for me the meta metaverse The the thing that zuckerberg showed Would have looked stupid in 1995 like like like like the the examples he gave were just silly But this brain thing i'm wandering around it is also kind of a metaverse except it's just me Sitting there curating my own brain because the tool is not that great at the shared brain thing So what does this shared memory look like and maybe companies like facebook and google and others could help us Know what we know together because we don't know what we know We're stuck Fascinating idea Okay, I'm going to call it the end of this Jerry anything else you want to share with the Whatever listening universe it might be listening to you know to me in this conversation anything else you'd like to have people know Either about you or what you're doing or what do you think they should do? I think only um that i'm I'm sort of a A pessimistic cynic in the short term and an optimist in the long run because I think humans are actually like better than we think They are I think we're going to find our way through this thing And a lot of how we find our way through this thing is the conversation we just had If if if some if some people are inspired or motivated by Any of these kinds of energies to come together and think together as citizens again to rebuild trust to redesign our institutions from trust For example, those are I think those are those are awesome things to work on And if people wanted to get in touch with you, I know you've mentioned several different touch points In terms of getting into what you're doing, but if somebody said oh god, I gotta talk to I'd love to talk to jerry directly How would is that okay? And how would they do that? That's totally okay Go to linkedin and find me and friend me and mention david allen like like I if somebody just says if they click on the default connect I normally say no, but if they register any kind of like awareness of who I am as a human I'll say yes My twitter handle is jerry is my first name last name. So uh at jerry mckalsky. I'm actually twitter user number 509 And I didn't realize when I signed up that having a really short name would be a good thing so done, but I'm the 509th person to sign up for it. Uh, and then, you know, I google pretty well. So you can find me. Yay Thank you jerry. This has been fun. And let's uh, let's do a version You know 2.0 sometime. I'd love it. Yeah, and and and hear what's happened So, uh, Thanks very much be safe