 I see it. All right, this is the Inside Jerry's Brain Posse Convocation group. I don't know exactly. Meeting on Friday, November 16, 2018, getting close to the end of the year. It snowed hard on the East Coast. Most of California seems to be on fire. And that's just the domestic problems. So we will progress through thinking in context about whatever it is that shows up. First, maybe just a quick check-in. Hey, Reigns, awesome. Reigns, you're showing up as Ann, but I think it's Reigns. Anyway, maybe a little quick check-in would work. So what does the word context mean to any of you at this moment? And I'll go, Howard. Did you say context? Can I have some context for the question? I'd say the context is the meaning around the meaning. That's sort of off the top of my head. Trying to understand what's behind the question or what's behind what it is that we're about to talk about. I love that. Thank you. Pete? So it's an interesting thing to think about because a lot of times people go ahead and make decisions or think about things without context. So I think it's maybe human to do that. Maybe people need to practice a little bit. It's a muscle that you need to exercise. Reigns between you. You know what? I can help. Excellent. That's all I got. That's a terrific addition. Christopher, what do you think about context? Finding that the mute button is part of my context. I think the thing that I would add is sort of the Marshall McLuhan, the statement that the medium is the message. So there's a lot of context that comes with the medium, the choice of using words or even just having your face on front of the screen here and seeing your expressions changes the nature of the communication. And sometimes for good or for ill. So that's my addition. Thank you. Agreed. Rose, will you want to chime in? What does context mean for you? And Kevin, welcome to the call. I'm just asking everybody for a quick go around. What context means to you? Yes. Rose? We don't hear you yet. You're not muted on Zoom, but you might be muted on your phone or whatever. And Eric, I know that you're on a different call, so I'm not going to ping you. Rose, chime in whenever you want. Reigns, do you want to jump in? Sure. For me, context is seeing what's around you and how it affects you. Like right now, the air was invisible, and we weren't thinking about it until suddenly we breathed, and it's changing everything. That's super interesting. Yeah, exactly. And air quality indices are worse in the world right now in the Bay Area. Kevin? Yeah, I will. Thank you. I'll talk about three conversations that I'm knitting together that talk about that. I'm working in a lot around regenerative agriculture and forestry, which is the kind of stuff that farming and forestry can sequester carbon at scale in a way that nothing else can except mangroves and corals. That's all that bringing things back to life sequestering. And so I'm talking to a lot of geeks, and I realize I need to talk about how people solve problems of collective action. So three conversations I'm talking this weekend to a guy that studied and worked with Eleanor Ostrom on managing shared and pooled resources. And before she won the Nobel Prize, proved that the commons is not a tragedy if you manage it well according to the principle she discovered. And he works in everything but from watersheds in Malawi to shared savings things in Argentina. And I'm talking to a woman who's leading a network of mutual aid societies, so communities discovering what they need in common. And those two together, along with a group that is, I've met through a lot of folks, and they are a decolonized group led by some indigenous people, but they know how to engage with these big projects and to say, this is the indigenous perspective. Thank you for your white guy terraforming plans. We live here, and we will be here. So those three together, how do you engage people? How do you solve the problem of the commons? In a big way, these guys have worked with communities, but then the indigenous actually at the table. So I think if we're going to solve these problems, we need to solve these problems of collective action. Those are three voices I'm going to try to knit together into something. It could be an interesting one for your brain call and also working with other folks. But really, it's solving the problem of collective action, including the indigenous voice, including principles that work, and then figuring out how it works in small communities all across the US. So that's that. That's beautiful. And in fact, absolutely resonant with the reason for being for the inside Jerry's brain calls. One role I think I can play in this is as a bit of a bridge or a connector between groups. So seeing the different kinds of initiatives that are working on different parts of this problem as they come in and sort of bringing them into the conversations, seeing how that goes. Thomas, welcome to the call. I'm just asking everyone has a brief check-in. What does the word context mean to you? And I don't know if you want to jump in right now or we can come back to you. And Rose, I don't know if you've managed to figure out how to be heard. I saw you muting and unmuting. And Thomas, you are still muted in case you wanted to jump in, otherwise I will move on. And Christopher posted his really good article about Ostrom's commons in the chat. So at Life with Alacrity, his website. And I just wanted to throw in my one observation about context that's kind of top of mind for me right here, right now at this early Inside Jerry's Brain call, which is something about this context. And I don't know whether it's Zoom or whether it's Inside Jerry's Brain or whether it's me or whether something else is not bringing women into this group. Like of the people who said, hey, add me to the Inside Jerry's Brain list, really small percentage of women, which totally agrees me because I think a lot of this will fit really well. Gender doesn't matter, but I would love to diagnose. Is it the topic? Is it the method? I think women sometimes are not crazy about being on Zoom calls, which I totally understand. Although I've been on Zoom calls where women are in the majority and they were great and everybody was participating just fine. So I don't know that. I would love to know any theories on this. So Christopher, oh cool. You know what? The Commons is a hot topic for us. I think we're gonna do a bunch of stuff on the Commons. Dave, welcome to the call. Glad you're here. I've just been asking everybody as a check-in, what does context mean to you? And for me, the context that's kind of alive is what is it about the context that I'm trying to create here that has not attracted many women into the conversation? Which is not the way I would like it. And people of color and everybody else. But I'd love to make this a really, really inclusive call because part of what I think we can do is bring together the different kinds of voices. So Dave, just quickly, what does context mean to you? I'm still thinking about my green screen, man, which I guess gives me context. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, the question around women in conversation is interesting to me and I'm planning to have a bunch of guys here to talk about it. Yeah, exactly. And I find it actually, it's not to me restricted to Zoom calls. I find myself in kind of guy groups pretty very consistently. And one of the things I've been thinking about from listening to podcasts and stuff is I think I don't hear women as well. I tune them out more quickly. And I think I was kind of trained, I don't know. It's, I'm not doing it intentionally. I'm not aware that I'm doing it. It's difficult to become aware that I'm doing it. But I think I do it, you know? And it's kind of scary. It's like, shit, I don't even know what I'm not hearing. So I suspect it's broad in these Zoom calls. It's interesting. I think a piece of that is that all of us are looking for confirming evidence for our theories most of the time. And when people show up with positions, ideas that are contradictory to our theories or that we've already, at some point dismissed, we kind of don't hear them. It's a little bit like the old Gary Larson cartoon where, you know, the dog is listening. I mean, I think you're right. But I would argue that I'm not even acting at that rational level. I'm not just, I don't agree with them. I'm literally not hearing them. That's more of a biological level, that there's a tone of voice that I just filter out. And I wasn't intending this, but what I was saying was actually conscious. Said it again. I didn't mean that what, yeah. I meant that it might be very... I think it's happening almost in a physiological level. Right? Or it's like, there's just a tone. You know, there's certain tones I don't hear. It just turns out that's the tones that women speak in. Yeah, yeah. Can I... Please, Howard. I noticed a lot of conservative folks that I know would say that they couldn't listen to Hillary Clinton talking during the campaign. That just not even the context of, or the words of what she was saying, but the tone. And I wonder if there is something to what David is saying, and I'm not implying in anything about David's political or personal views, just that it's an observation that I've heard before. Interestingly enough, I think 45 is hard to listen to. And a lot of people might have the same observation about him, merely as a human. For your brain thing, there's a bunch of stuff about women with who've succeeded in having power, having to deliberately lower their voice. In particular, there are some references to what Thatcher's natural voice is versus her professional voice. I did want to speak about inclusivity of some recent experience on my part. I've hosted some online and face-to-face events, which are considered to be among the most diverse in the industry, which means that 25%. So not enough. And one of the key things that's going on right now in the tech industry is the women who are willing to speak and participate or whatever are being overwhelmed by requests for inclusivity Hey, participate because you're a woman and they're tired of that. And there is this strong thing of women and people of color want to be invited by a woman or a person of color, so or any diversity. I mean, I'm big on trying to get blue color and different backgrounds in my events as well. But it tends to be that the invites need to come from that. So we've made it a lot easier for the women who are involved to invite others and for them to feel like that they're empowered to do so and that the people who come in are then empowered to do so. And that takes a while, but that's the best solution that I've got so far to getting us up to about 25%. That's it. Makes sense. Anyone else with thoughts on this? Cool. Did anybody have a chance to watch the videos that I put up yesterday about me using the brain? Did anyone have a chance? No, no, no heart feelings if you didn't. Yes, no, nobody did. All right, great. No, I saw it the first one. I didn't see all of them. And I've seen you do some things with it before. Yeah, and maybe I'll just sort of screen share with the brain right now and show a little bit of what I put in the videos just so you can get it because the early topic I'm tackling with Inside Jury's Brain is this notion I have of amnesia that there were somehow amnesic. And I think I'm not explaining it right. And again, this is sort of like the same question I was just asking. I'm looking for the right answers. But one of the hunches I have about why I'm not explaining it right is that other human beings don't have the experience I have of living with a curated context that is incredibly handy and is always at hand. And when I'm taking notes, I'm adding things to the brain constantly. Every morning I wake up and whatever shows up in the flow I pick the best of and I put in the right place in my brain and that gives me a little pleasure in the morning kind of thing. So what I was trying to do in that short series of videos was illustrate what it's like to use the context just because the usefulness is pretty interesting. So let me go to screen share for a second. Share my desktop and hop over to my brain. And I was actually, there we go. I was looking for Christopher, you were talking about how women have had to adapt to rise. And I'm wondering what I have because it was like, you know, I think I have some articles about that and I'll have to look after the call because I think some things I'll be able to look up during calls and other things I'll just have to garden and then report back on the list on in different ways. So let me jump to an amusing one. This is the last of the video. This is the video you're least likely, you're all least likely to have seen because it was the last I put in the string of videos of use cases of my brain, partly because it's a little controversial, but I basically did a walkthrough of the best articles about Trump's win, which is, so here's the end of the campaign. I wrote, wow, Trump wins, which is right after, gosh, what if Trump wins? Which was not really sort of, this was in the last 12 days of election 2016, right? So I was sitting thinking, and in fact, right before that is the thought, will Trump make it to election day? Right, because just before that, Trump has reported having extremely lewd conversations. This is the Access Hollywood tape with Billy Bush. And at this point, I and half of humanity is thinking, okay, he just jumped the shark, this is one abuse too many, he's out of a campaign. And for three or four days after that, half of the conservative party defected and said, nope, nope, can't back him. And within a week, everybody was back on board, which was astonishing to me. So there's a thought, finally, wow, Trump wins, and I'm pretty blown away. And I realized that there's a bunch of people who actually figured out that Trump was actually going to win. So my best article is about Trump's win is in fact, connected to people who predicted a Trump victory. So I went looking around for who said Trump was gonna win. And one of them interestingly is Scott Adams of Dilbury. And several of you are probably familiar with Scott Adams and he, I've got him also under vocal and sometimes not so Trump supporters. I've got him under Dilbert, which of course is part of humor, micro management and actually should be under comic strips, which it strangely is not. So comic strips, there we go. So now comic strips has Popeye, Prince Valiant, Spike and Susie, Spy versus Spy, Peanuts, Pogo, Fritz the Cat, Dunesbury, let's go back to Scott. So Scott did a lot of really interesting analysis of Trump. So these are all articles that I found and captured by Scott Adams, assessing Trump and in particular things like the Trump master persuader index and reading list. Trump from the perspective of the persuasion movement, what's it called? There's, oops, I didn't put it in here. Persuasion wars. Oh, the seduction community, that's what I'm thinking about. So there's a whole sort of movement on how do you, it comes a little bit from Chaldeany's book, Influence, the Hidden Power of Persuasion where how do you make people say yes when they need to say no? Of course that and a bunch of other things were weaponized and turned into, how do you make women agree to date you or more? And that became known as a seduction community. That is basically about persuasion. And so a lot of that becomes analytic fodder for people like Scott Adams and he takes apart a Trump speech and he points out the repetition, the simple language, the this, the that. And he points out that Trump is actually a black belt like a fifth Dan black belt in these techniques of persuasion. It may be that he's born that way. It may be that he studied it and got good at it. Who knows? Who knows? But he's really, really good at it, right? So that was just one perspective, Scott Adams on Trump. Michael Moore is one that I point out in the video. Michael Moore wrote a piece before the election in May of 2016, he writes five reasons why Trump will win. And I wrote down the five reasons which I do. So when I hit an article I like, I debrief into the brain. I take notes here as crisply as I can. Tithiness matters a ton here because it's very visual and a lot of words don't help. So reason one, welcome to our Rust Belt Brexit. So this was the white working class in the Midwest and I have a whole series of thoughts about how Trump tried to lose the Rust Belt States which were known as the blue firewall for the Democrats, right? In fact, I need to connect this to the Democratic Party, which is not, I think I'll find which note is actually for Democrats. But there's this whole notion that there were a few states that were kind of the well-known Democratic states that you didn't need to worry about too much and Trump pried those away. So reason number one, welcome to the Rust Belt. Reason number two, the last stand of the angry white man. Reason number three, the Hillary problem, she was the wrong nominee. That connects up to Hillary was the wrong nominee. And there's a bunch of people that have done that analysis. And what's interesting to me is, there's a bunch of different reasons why Hillary was the wrong nominee, right? And I've been collecting them and kind of adding them here and figuring out what's where. So it wasn't just sexism that took Hillary down. Here's an article, for example, by Naomi Klein where she writes that Trump defeated Clinton, not women. And it was quite insightful. So going back to the five reasons by Michael Moore, the depressed Sanders vote. So people who thought the system was really broken didn't get to vote for Sanders and maybe switched over. And then the Jesse Ventura effect, which is basically, we elected a world wrestling guy to office because we could. It's like, all right, we did it because we could. And so that's another person who got that Trump was going to win. And so having these things at hand, here's best articles about Trump's win again. So this is the, this thought is kind of the heart of the last of the videos that I published yesterday. And I think, and sort of each of these goes in different directions. So this is a Maureen Dowd article that cites another important piece written by Solana Selina Zito, titled Taking Trump Seriously Not Literally. And by now you've probably all heard this thing, which is the press was taking Trump literally, but not seriously. Meaning when he said, we're gonna deport everybody and whatever, they were like, oh my God, you can't do that. But they weren't taking his approach seriously, but his supporters were taking seriously, but not literally. They gave him a license to be vicious and crazy because they understood that that was about owning the media cycle, right? So let me pause here and stop screen sharing for a bit. I think my question is, does seeing information at hand in that way affect how you think about information or conversation or context or the things we're talking about here? Please go ahead. This is Chris. Go ahead, Christopher. Yeah, I just wanted, I guess I am having a little bit of skepticism on Jerry's brain in particular as an artifact without the process of shared language. So one of the things that people wonder why do we have thousands and thousands of languages in the world when the network effects and all this other kind of stuff should say, gosh, everybody ought to converge on one language. And that's because there seems to be a human need to create language together. I mean, I had several times in the last 10 years, I run into a group that are just basically going through the same process of talking about different things that I remember going through 30 years ago and they're doing it all over again because they have to. They have to together create a language for themselves. Else they won't believe it. They'll feel like it's controlled by somebody else or whatever. And I've certainly had some complaints from people of color about some of the identity stuff that I've worked on because they say, well, people of color weren't involved from the very beginning. Thus we don't want to be involved. So you have such a huge, huge artifact there that is essentially named Jerry's and it's yours and it's pretty hard to, it works for you, but it's not a shared language per se and it doesn't have some of the characteristics of that. And I don't know how to get from here to there. I want things, shared languages that are that huge and have that much detail. I mean, the best I've seen is things like pattern languages like the group works pattern language or some of the computer. But pattern language, even then we discover, oftentimes you almost have to add to the pattern language to be able to know, to buy into the pattern language. Otherwise it's just these weird things that these experts say that you wave aside. That's it. And this is super interesting what you're saying because my intention and all labels and all actual actions between now and long-term intentions go haywire. But my intention is that I'm presenting a point of view among many and that the synthesis of those worldviews is really interesting to me and important for me for society and that that is the process of the liberation, that is how we might make better decisions, that is how we might actually keep and check people undermining facts in the press and whatever else, et cetera. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of humans who've got an artifact like mine and I called mine Jerry's brain and we are inside Jerry's brain. So it's like being John Malkovich, right? Where we're all like Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich instead of we, we, we. And on the one hand, I regret that. On the other hand, that is my toy for making this interesting and different and a little bit quirky and bringing people into this conversation, right? But I totally hear you, that we are now inside an artifact and I think part of the reason for an artifact is for us to converse such that we can agree and disagree on the language, the vocabulary, the terms that we use. And I'm really interested in an environment where each of us can show the aspects of what we believe and how we see it so that we all might flex, add one another's contexts into our shared meaning and slowly over time say, okay, for this community of practice we've agreed that these terms mean these things. And that may be opposite for other known communities of practice that have very different approaches, for example. So let me, let me stop there. And then Pete and Kevin had raised their hands. So let me go to Pete. I've kind of got two thoughts. One of them is on the discussion we just went through a little bit of shared artifact, shared language or not shared. I've always been enthralled watching Jerry do his brain but it also is very, it's so big and intertwined that it's something that Jerry can navigate easily and it would take a fair amount of effort, almost real time to have somebody else to come up to speed on all the interconnections and things like that. So I watching Jerry go through that, his last tour, I think saying that it's not shared is useful and interesting. It didn't look to me like it really needed to be shared. It's also easy for Jerry to share a tour through a part of the brain if he wanted to talk about a certain topic like he did, he was able to pull us through kind of a recollection and thinking process that any of the others of us don't have a backing artifact that we could do that with as easily and as quickly and as beautifully. For me, as Jerry was going through that tour, I was thinking about, so my model for what Jerry was doing was kind of demonstrating a thought process through the artifact for us and a potential output of that. He could do that by himself to write an article or something like that or to give a screen cast or whatever, a podcast, a video cast. So I was thinking, how would I do the same kind of thing? How would I do that tour for somebody? And I'm very jealous that Jerry has 20 years of artifact like that and I don't. The thing that I do is a similar tour through the web. So using my webware brain, I would kind of remember the touch points of it and I could construct a similar tour through the wild web. I think the deficit of that approach would be that it would be slower for me. I wouldn't have the well-worn paths that he has already in his brain. Maybe a slight positive for me. I'm able to do those kinds of things extemporaneously into the web itself, which means that I can construct and follow a different path, kind of an emergent path into global information space instead of my private information space. So it's interesting to watch and I think, so I guess watching Jerry do that, it seems like he has more context and he knows the beats to hit kind of as he makes the path that I wouldn't be able to do. So I think that's really cool. Yeah. Pete, thank you. And I just wrote in the chat that I've prayed for years that you've externalized the way you do. Like Bill Sykes has Sykes Wiki. He basically took, I think Media Wiki might be a different, I don't know which platform, but he's basically using Camelcase. He's basically created his own Wiki of everything he cares about, very much in the spirit of what I've done with the brain software only much more open and Wiki-like. Michelle Bowens. That was my intention to, and that's why I got into Wikis to do the same thing. I want to draw a quick parallel also to the thing that breaks my heart in the world is that just like even I don't have a brain, like Jerry's brain, the thing that breaks my heart is when we get together collaboratively in a meeting of five or 10 or 15 people. And the pattern in my experience, meetings are a thing where people come to with all sorts of different thoughts and feelings and facts. And they all talk about it and nobody writes anything down. Nobody has any, they don't build shared language in the moment. They don't build shared artifacts of memory. They don't build common commitments and promises to each other. So everybody talks, maybe one person kind of takes a few notes. People later on take a few bullet points into their mail or their Microsoft Word or whatever. Whenever I'm in a meeting I try to pull everybody together into a shared artifact. And so essentially it feels to me like what we're doing is building a shared kind of Jerry's brain thing during the meeting instead of having it kind of all just splatter into the air and be gone as soon as people leave the room. And I'm interested. So for me, if the brain was a collective tool like Wikipedia and I needed to debate everything that goes into it with other people until we agreed I simply would not have used it. To me, part of the ease of use is that I can just jam on it as quickly as I possibly can with the machine kind of lagging to catch up which is terrific because that means I don't waste too much time. God knows I probably wasted a lot of time feeding my brain but the piece I'm missing is the intersection of what I saw with what everybody else saw and that's really the interesting thing to me. I desperately want to compare notes through something like the brain doesn't have to be the brain at all. But I would love it if in a meeting with people who care deeply about a topic or if you've convened the right set of people what is the mesh of what they care about and have seen and believe look like and can we push that hard and deeper such that each person in the conversation is then curating from the collective conversation back into their own perspective the ahas, the shifts in perspective whatever that is I can envision that. I can sort of see how that would be and I think it would be a hard thing at the beginning and then I think it would get easier and maybe you have to be a precog to do it. I don't know. It feels really easy to me. I've watched you do that as you facilitate meetings to come to kind of a shared thinking process. I feel like it's really easy for me to go into a meeting and train people for a few minutes on ESA Pad and then they're able to express into a shared space and come up with shared thinking and things like that. It feels to me like a crystallization it's just a little bit of activation energy gets you into a group brain process. It's just that we've grown up, we grow up in a society where that's actively discouraged to do a group thinking process instead of individual and assaultive antagonistic discussion. And a side tangent for a later inside jury's brain conversation in meetings like the ones Pete was describing earlier where really cool people show up and they start talking but nobody sort of really takes notes. Sometimes everybody's asked to write things on Post-its and those get put on a board and I have watched more good ideas die in the clustering exercise where over lunch the hosts go up and cluster all the Post-its and I'm like, you know, this morning I heard the spark of fire in a couple of those Post-its. I really did. I heard some new things that I quickly harvested and put in my brain and I got it and the little sparks that were there nobody blew on them and they're now dead. And then crap happens in the latter half of the meeting and I've seen that happen over and over again to the point where I invented but haven't been able to test out a role I call story threader which I will explain either later on this call or on a different call entirely but it was an attempt to remedy that problem in meetings. Let me go to Kevin Dundecristofer who has raised his hand using the actual affordance in this tool for raising your hand. Kevin, we can't hear you. You have muted your own phone, I think, because you're not muted in Zoom. We heard you earlier. Yeah, I think your earphone, still not hearing you. Come in, Kevin. Is this working? Okay, well, I was hearing you. But anyway, I think you should give up on imagining a different experience. This is the experience you can do. You're a ninja. It's like watching Bruce Lee play ping pong with num chocks and say, geez, why can't I do that? No, yeah, so you do this and you do this and you do that and you do this, you bring in some people who have common sorts of interests like the women with the mutual insurance or the mutual aid society, the crop insurance, the indigenize and the folks who work with Osterman are doing it with watersheds and you walk around them and make that happen. That's a great experience. You're a ninja, be a ninja, and then, but be a ninja in a place that has some context and then people will want to watch. I'll close this a little bit. Yeah, that's all right, we got it. Anyway, so people will, if you have some experts that are near each other but don't really know each other and you could be the vine that connects them all and then people would want to be part of it and chime in. What you got is working, do this. Don't try to imagine something different. So a couple of things. One is, yes, that's why Inside Jerry's Brain exists. I'm going full bore with this. I can't help but have wistful dreams of what could be because I can taste it. I can smell it. I can sort of see it. And Pete was saying, yep, he can perceive it from what's going on. And partly I'm trying to inspire others, competitors to show up and say, awesome, we've got something that might do this. Right? And let's go try it. Just stop, do what you're doing. Do it better, get a group around you. There's a product here. Don't imagine the other thing. This tastes good. This is a candy bar. You don't need to suddenly find something else to come in. And in the X-Men, Thor has a hammer. And you're like, what the fuck can a guy do with a hammer? And it turns out, hammer's pretty flexible. Yeah, this is a really good hammer. People won't watch you swing. You can fly with a hammer. I did not know that. Pardon? Right, Thor's not in the X-Men, right? He's an Avenger. Oh shit, he's an Avenger. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, wrong universe. Oh my God. You know what? That's because I'm not a comics fan, necessarily. Stanley is only dead two days and look what happens. I know. Oh my God, this is a tragedy. Anyway, sorry. So, to Christopher. Yeah, I think I also have been desiring kind of, I mean, it's one thing to capture these things and organize them for yourself, et cetera. But the power, I mean, that still feels like 20th century stuff in an odd way. Or at least, I can remember various people doing it with wikis or whatever, where the problems of today can't be solved by one person or from one perspective. And so I have the same kind of urge. And so I've actually had some very good experience. I started this community called Rebooting Web of Trust. Before you can even come to an event or at least not pay out the nose if you want a regular price, you have to write a topic paper. So we have 300-plus topic papers from people before they even get to the event. They have to read those papers before they come in. We spend a day to try to create a shared language about what's new. And then we collaboratively create the last event. We created 13 new white papers in three days. And so it feels like it's not perfect. It has its challenges, and it may not scale, and things of that nature. But that's why people keep on coming back to this event, as opposed to, say, open space where people just show up, talk about their brains, whether or not it's as good and as formalized as yours, or they come in with, oh, I want to talk about X, just doesn't do it for me anymore. I need that integration and synergy. And it's when you and I both tussle on a term and then come to some level of agreement on that one or a new one to replace our mutual terms that we both agree on, and then we get a third person to come in, that's magic. And it has this, there's some eight emotional stuff. I mean, there's some hard wiring in our brains, I think, that when that happens is powerful. And it's that power that we need to harness to be able to change the world. I totally agree. Howard's got his green card at hand. Love that. Oh my god. Howard, you've got the floor. These are original OG, Jerry, green, and red cards, I have to say. I used to go to an event where they used those. But that event isn't around anymore. I think it's all fiction, since it's not captured on the internet. Are you sure those events ever really happened, or are they just in your imagination, Kevin? I know, there's so many things I'm not sure about. And that's one. I remember having a birthday party for Kevin Jones and he wasn't even there. You know, that happens a lot actually, you know. I don't know. So I made a comment in the chat that I just wanted to capture on a video, which is that anyone's ever seen Jerry facilitate a meeting and at the same time take detailed notes that he can then basically run back the meeting and the high points. I think, you know, I haven't heard your conception of story-threather yet, Jerry, but or something. Is that what you said, story-threater? Yeah, story-threater. That to me, if I could teach that to people who facilitate meetings, that is a huge, huge value. And I've tried to do it. I've tried to cultivate that skill over time, especially when I was doing a lot more facilitation. It really requires two almost separate halves of your brain working in time, because you have to be listening to people, you have to be capturing the stuff. And I think that it's possible that because you've been facilitating your brain software capture and facilitating meetings in this way that you've actually developed pathways that many of the rest of us don't have. And I don't know if that would be fascinating. You know, I don't know what it is, but I think it would be really fascinating if you could. It almost reminds me of the end of the movie, the Ken Casey movie for Tommy, where people are trying to play pinball with blinders and earplugs and torques in their mouths, and they can't get the experience because they're not Tommy, and they end up rebelling. I think there are certain things that you do, and this whole discussion about how your brain might connect to other people's brains, you really have to bring them on an amazing journey to use the Tommy metaphor continually in order to get them to the point that they could effectively share with you. But there's probably a lighter version of that, and I'd be very interested in learning more about it or helping figure out what that is. Raise your hand on one thing. I'll come back to you in just a second, Kevin. I've got a couple of things in the room. One of them is apparently bird brains, birds have multi-chambered brains or something, some of which are paying attention to making sure you're not killed by the hawk, some of which are busy like, is that a seed? Is that a rock? Is that a seed? Is that a rock? And they're pretty good at that, right? There's a bunch of that going on. Second quick thing, April, my better half, didn't realize that she had a calendric memory and that that was a superpower because she can tell you what we've been doing for the last seven years on any particular day. It doesn't have to be like the 4th of July, and she can reconstruct the whole thing. And I'm like, honey, I can't tell you what I was doing a week ago without consulting my electronic aided memory. So that's a superpower. Third little story is, I taught someone at IFTF to run a podcast and I was trying to do it in the old Yi-Tan model. Pip, at some point, a couple of years into Yi-Tan, Pip said, why don't you report back at the end of the calls? And so I started doing it and loved it. And I was doing then what I'm not doing right now. It's one of the things I've given up in meetings, mostly. I was taking copious notes on a square-ruled notepad by hand. I was writing like an idiot. And one of the detriments of video is that I kind of have to be here and pay attention. The good news is we have a little side channel where we can chat, and I'm busy sort of switching attention back and forth from those. But at the end of a Yi-Tan call, I would have six, seven, eight pages of handwritten notes, which as I went down the page, I would keep glancing up, saying, okay, what was the high point? And I would make little circles around the nodes that were the high points, which is how I went back and debriefed. And anyway, so I trained somebody at the Institute. We ran a podcast. And at the end, we did a debrief. And she said, you know, Jerry, you'll notice that I ended the call a little early. And I was like, yeah, sorta. And she said, I looked down at the sheet of paper where I was gonna be taking notes. And I had written down not one word. And it wasn't until that moment when I thought, oh, maybe this mindfulness of five different things, like hosting a conversation, paying attention to the side channel, taking notes, and then reporting back on it, is a bit of a superpower. So anyway, long story, but appreciate the pointers to it. Kevin, the floor is yours. Just one thing. I think I've seen you lead discussions and I think they work best when there's kind of an inherent context. When you're walking into a garden and you don't quite know the garden, but it's been placed, you know, the example I chose of, you know, that mutual aid society, regenerative farmers, indigenous, and Ostrom, you know. But you're discovering it. If you already know it, I haven't found it to be as interesting. One of the pops is your little ahas that lead you to other places, lead you to other places. So, you know, it has context, but you don't know is the real high point. You know, and you should be brought in blindfolded and moderate a panel, you know. I love that. And my sweet spot, the thing I really like is starting a conversation with a general topic with something, like some thing. And I don't even care that we all agree on what that thing is. Part of the interesting thing to me is how do we see this thing differently? And then seeing how that emerges and then bringing other things that are related, but may not be obviously related into that because one of the things I love to do is pattern fine. So I'm a good connector of ideas that seem different, but in fact, probably have some fit. So I don't know, what I'm hearing is on the one hand, I should just like push the pedal to the metal on the stuff I'm good at, the superpowers, whatever, figure out where that goes, just take that energy and go. O-T-O-H, something about the context and what I've just created is not attracting people of color and women. I need to actively do that. And if there's something about this context that is unfriendly or unwelcoming, I need to remedy that. And I'm not entirely sure what that is open to all suggestions. But any other thoughts on that? Apparently we're gonna agree. I still think that the people of color problem, you will definitely hear, because I've been trying to solve this, that since they weren't involved in the beginning, they don't wanna be involved because they say you're embodying patterns and approaches or whatever that lock them out. So all I know how to do is periodically clean the slate and try to start a new thing where they feel like that they're fully, and they are fully part of it, but bring in when I can very carefully and whatever, the skills, knowledge and language that other communities have. And agreed, and also maybe I need to go where the other conversations are, rather than trying to invite more people in here, maybe I need to show up someplace else where there's a discussion being had, but there I run the risk of, hey, I've got this really weird cool brain thing and I'd like to kind of eat your conversation with this brain thing and that doesn't feel very friendly to me at all. So I'm torn with that. It's like, how do I offer this? I would love, whoever's listening, I would love to do this in your conversation with you as a back channel, as a side show, as a whatever, and see where that goes. So please invite me into other conversations. I'd love to do that, but I don't know how to get there. Well, you're certainly welcome at Rebooting Web of Trust. You care about trust. We are building a subset of the larger problem and I think you could add value. We always try to have 25% of the people be not programmers and stuff. Sweet. Let me know when there's a good one coming up and I'll join in. Okay. Cool, cool. Sorry. Oh, John's here. John, you just joined, awesome. What's your question? How they get, we can't hear you, John. I mean, I think I know what he's saying. So there's a whole graphic facilitator movement. I personally know dozens and I've talked with them. There are a lot of books and stuff on their art and teaching each other their art. And I do, I can recommend some if people have that. That being said, I still feel like, there is still an underlying talent that is required. But if you can draw and you have a hint of that underlying talent, there are some books and exercises and other things that graphic facilitators that are magical, in the same way you're magical with the brain can do that can be taught. So if anybody knows people that are kind of inclined that way or whatever, I'll be glad to share the resources and the people that can help them with that. So I'm showing here graphic facilitation and the facilitators that I've met or know about, a whole bunch of them. And I will say some of them are magical, like really fantastic, but I will add that my inspiration for inventing this role of story threader comes from my frustration with graphic recording, which is that at the end of the day, what you have is a beautiful drawing that gets taken, somebody photographs or scans it, you get a PDF. And when they wrote hand wrote beautifully on the drawing in income inequality, they weren't connecting it to the notion of income inequality. And to me, that's just a huge loss of what's going on. So for example, here's the topic of income inequality up above, this is economic inequality. What I just clicked on is just income inequality in the US, our own sort of perspective on it. These are New York Times articles, salon articles, videos. So I agree with you there. I think that- I was a transition point, the conversation on income inequality, so I go ahead. So I do know like when MG Taylor was doing these $100,000 facilitations, they would basically have a facilitator who was kind of managing the process. They'd have a graphic recorder that was focused on the sort of small, capturing the small stuff. They'd have another graphic recorder that was kind of trying to take things at a much bigger, more metaphorical label. So they'd literally have two graphic recorders. And then they'd have this fourth person, which I think is your, that the thing that you were just talking about, that story threader or whatever. Because I can remember being in one of those sessions and bringing up something. And about five minutes later, a guy taps me on the shoulder and hands me a printout of some threads about some of the stuff that I was just talking about that he had downloaded. So there were literally four or five facilitators for that whole meeting to try to do that capture. And that was the only way they knew how to do it at the time. Was in, and each of those guys kind of were specialized. And their brains worked differently. That's really cool, because you can facilitate really beautifully on these things. And MG Taylor kind of went out of business at some point. I guess they got bought by Ernst and Young. And then kind of were no more, but a lot of people who were MG alumni are this kind of the diaspora that formed some of the graphic facilitators that we know. And I don't have too many of them. I guess Kelby was there. Yeah, so it's a conversation about how to have better conversations. And my particular angle or preoccupation with it is the role of history, memory, context, continuity in that conversation. And I do think that discourse is badly broken right now, partly intentionally. I mean, I think- I agree with the partly intentionally part. Yeah, there's a bunch of players who've discovered that if you weaponize trust and you break discourse and you shatter people's trust in the institutions we thought we're supposed to sort of guard the commons and the public domain and conversation and governance that you can actually run the table. And the people who were trying to protect those things have not figured out what happened to them and have no countermeasures that are really effective yet. That's a real problem. And one of the reasons that Inside Jury's Brain exists is that I think actually having a shared memory, even if it's hotly contested, is one of those countermeasures. Does that make sense? Yep, I agree. And I love your, keep it up. I gotta run. You got a bowl. I'm gonna call it 10. Thanks, Christopher. But thank you much for hosting. That was a way to bring back the invite and the invitation in the last three minutes of the meeting, so I really appreciated that. I mean, it really did. I mean, we did come around to it, which was very good. I feel like, like you say, there's just this sort of overwhelming miasma of bad information that's trying to create this sort of amnesia. And I'm still sort of coming to grips with it. Part of my personal style lately has been removing myself from some of the social and digital spaces in order to just have more time to be thoughtful and to be less potentially stressed by some of this stuff. In which case, I will regret having gone to this thought in my brain at this very instant because one of my beliefs, so right up here at the top in the pinboard, I have a thought called my beliefs, right? And this is, I'll come back to this on a future Inside Jerry's Brain Call, because this is a, I wish everybody published their beliefs that make it easier to talk about stuff. One of my beliefs is that we are already in a nonlinear war. This nonlinear warfare idea came to me through the documentary Hypernormalization, which is right here, which is an Adam Curtis documentary came out a couple of years ago, is available on YouTube at this URL here. I can share it on the chat momentarily. But basically what he says is Surkov and a bunch of other people. So Vladislav Surkov, who is Putin's lieutenant is actually an expert. He's sort of a political dirty tricks guy like Lee Atwater was way back when. So David Bossy, Lee Atwater, Breitbart, Roger Stone. These are all dirty tricks campaigners. And I think that list should be much, much longer because clearly there's a long and ignoble tradition of doing this. But Surkov is really a professional at it. And so what I mean to imply is that we are already in something you might think of as World War III, except that in nonlinear warfare, information warfare is much cheaper and more effective than bombs or bullets. You can take territory without killing that many people and without expending, you know, lives on the battle front. And so I'm a bit cynical about our current situation. And I recently, has anybody seen the New York Times just came out with, where is it, Operation Infection? Has anybody seen the three videos that the New York Times did just a couple days ago called Operation Infection? No? Do not pass, go, do not collect $200, but go watch these. They're extremely good. And they basically sort of spell out what's been happening behind active measures because I also watched the documentary titled Active Measures, which was a documentary of kind of about Russiagate by Jack Bryan. And it's just like, so when I listen to something good, I go in and I say, oh, okay, this talks about Felix Sager and Mikhail Sakashvili and Deutsche Bank becomes Trump's bank. Other banks say no, right? Here's Deutsche, et cetera, et cetera. So when Donald Trump meets alone, he chooses Deutsche Bank. How about that? So I think that saying something sort of out there like we're in a non-linear war requires some evidence. And that's why I love the ability to share the evidence and then talk through it because I could be wrong. I'm happy to change my mind. In fact, I wish we were not in a non-linear war at this point, but go watch the New York Times episodes and tell me that you don't think that we're probably already there. Thanks Pete for putting the link in there. Anyway, that was a bit sad and perhaps sobering. Shall we talk about puppies and kittens? I'd love to know why, well, I guess it's probably a way big distraction, John Abbey, but the lefty friends who think that the Russian collusion thing is 100% made up, it's interesting that lefty friends think that versus the righty friends. I think also there's people on every end of the spectrum who believe different parts of all the different stories because there's so many plots afoot, right? Some of which are conspiracy theories, some of which are actually things going on that smell like, that are in fact conspiracies, et cetera, and it's really hard to distinguish one from the other. And it would be fun if 20 years from now, we could look back and say, oh, right, I got suckered by this one, this one, this one, and this one, and then I was right about this one, this one, this one, and that one. Or just I got suckered by all of them, go now. That assumes you can keep up with them, which is part of the non-linear warfare, hyper-normalization, I'm assuming, having not really defined either one of them yet for myself, but I'm working it through. Yeah, exactly. Somebody's having a birthday just outside this conference room. I'm hearing the ritual singing of the song. Violating copyright laws all over the place. That's right. I think the lawyers are in the hall. And John points out- It is copyright free. It is copyright free, yes. I was going to suggest for those that do want to speak about, at least, cats against capitalism, the Facebook group is a fine meme collector. Super interesting. So here's a many sued for not paying royalties for happy birthday, happy birthday copyright rule to be invalid in 2015. And I think I have that under the general scheme of overprotecting intellectual property, which is a rich thread we can pursue some other time and is also not about kittens and capitalism. Jerry, John just said something that I thought just interesting that just may reflect some of the feedback you get or degree of engagement, which is no, oh, Jerry's brain has it, so I'm redundant. Is there, I mean, there's certainly anybody with any idea, if we come to say, oh, you haven't already, is there something to add? I mean, in the ideal world, it would lead to people finding just the piece to add without re-reifying the set of relationships. Actually, every time I run, so when I put something new in my brain, first I look for it, because chances are I put it in and forgot about it. This memory is pretty good, but I don't remember, I don't remember what every episode of E10 was about. I have to go back and look and say, did we already cover this? Oh, that's right, we covered this topic three times. Dang. So, I need the digital refresh to kind of go at it. Oh, shoot, and I just lost the thread of where I was gonna go. People bringing ideas that are newer. So this morning on the E10 list, George Porr mentioned social amnesia and sent to Wikipedia link, which I did not have, had not seen, immediately added to my brain, and I'm like, oh crap, this is perfect, and it absolutely fits. It absolutely fits where I wanna take this conversation, et cetera, et cetera. And so I'll just go to it in my brain. But it was really interesting, and in fact, as I sat pondering it and doing a little bit of thinking, so this thought, social amnesia, did not exist in my brain before, so I think I have a thought called social dynamics. There we go, bink. So I just made that link. I linked it to, we are a music society, the general theme here, but I also linked it to historical trauma. I already had institutionalized amnesia, and I also had rewriting history, because one of the interesting things that's going on with gas lighting and fake memories and being trotskied out of history, digital retouching, there's a whole series of ways in which history itself is kind of under assault in different ways. And for instance, and this is something that I would need to fact check, but in Japan I understand they don't really teach World War II in grade school. So they're like, this thing is not a thing that ever happened in the country. Whereas in Germany, they're all about remembering and trying not to repeat the atrocities of World War II. And they kind of thoughtfully go back into it. And yet there's Alternatifs für Deutschland, which is going crazy in Germany, and there's the rise of the European rightists, which counters that. So all these things are connected. Well, that killed conversation. Where, so a couple of questions. Where would you like me to take this? Like I'm eager to explore issues that really matter to you. So maybe a really good way to do this would be, and I haven't been looking at the Google Doc that I set up for the call. I haven't checked to see if anybody wrote some notes there. I'm going to post the chat from here into the Google Drive as a separate text file dated for today. And usually I use like it'll be 1811, because I do year month for numbering schemes because they sort well when you look at them in lists. So it'll be the 1811 IJB chat or something like that. Maybe a good idea would be to share ideas about future IJB topics on the IJB list. Just, you know, hey, how about if we have a call on this, this or this, because then everybody sees them and it'll stimulate other people's ideas. Cause I'd like to steer this toward what matters to you all. And then just see where that takes us as my sort of standard demo. So any ideas you'd like to share now or also feedback about format process, et cetera. I think before we jump off social amnesia, something that's been from two different perspectives, something that I've been thinking about a lot over the last few years. One is just sort of the current sort of political environment and having discussions with my son and he's got friends that are across the spectrum and on his friends that are sort of on the more right side, there's an awful lot of known rationalization of, well, if you discount this race or this group of people aren't necessarily your neighbors. If you're thinking in, look after your neighbors and everybody is connected. So if they're not your neighbors, they're not actually people, then you don't really need to worry about them. He's like, I don't agree with it, but he's like, that's what they do. And it's just like, God. And it's like, just sort of the fabric of values that sort of sits underneath what we know has sort of become threadbare. And it really isn't really supporting sort of a common sort of social environment. The other side is a little bit more on the work side and having sort of been in a bubble that had heavily glommed on to sort of the web 2.0, the social object, how to work in a social manner, have good tools that work really well. And as the years sort of move on, sort of drifting away from that, there's an awful lot of really poor practices that have sort of shifted back into place. And it's also, it has been as if the ways that we sort of struggled through and work to find better ways of doing things didn't happen. And part of that a few years ago was doing expert witness on a enterprise social software case for trade secrets. So I was using my Dev and Think, which I've scrolled away all sorts of documents, web pages, academic articles, things that are just completely gone from the web. And about a third of what I was using and finding really valuable for the case, just as the web doesn't know that it exists. And so that was one of the things that was a little bit bothersome because had long thought that the web will remember everything. And the web has this incredible amnesia, which was a little bit bothersome. And so it's that social amnesia when the web forgets things, but also good practices that we find and work through when they don't propagate out to everywhere, they become lost. And it's as if it's not a good idea just because people don't know of it. So it's just things that I've been mulling over the last couple of years and looking for others that are sort of thinking the same thing. Yeah. Well, there's a whole industry of scrubbing the web. I mean, corporate image makers and managers and crisis managers and others have figured out how to game Wikipedia and or other places, how to do issue takedowns. And also really great articles that are posted someplace that is a little tiny corner of the world that isn't well defended or doesn't get much attention, just banish. I mean, they don't get any inbound links. So they get no Google juice. So if you don't point to them, it's actually better. And they'll just, you can flood them by having a series of spurious links fed into the maw of the machine. So SEO, SEM, all those things are being used plus a lot of shilling and a lot of other things. It's an entire sub-industry to alter our collective digital memory to our great detriment. Yeah. So I'm really interested in the memory hole and how we can recover things. Yeah, one of the things with Wikipedia is that there's an awful lot of canonical articles that are sort of the founding understanding for a way of thinking that are just gone. And it's like they're not in the wayback machine, it was really strange. Like what? Do you remember any? There was an awful lot just sort of on, a lot of it had to do with sort of like the enterprise social, E20, different software or I can't, there was a whole bunch of things just on part of it was coming into tagging, part of it was Wikis. And sort of the original articles, just the sites were no longer there, Wayback Machine didn't have it. And by happenstance, I happened to capture it in Dev and Think, which was the only way that I knew that it actually existed. Right. And it hadn't been a dream. And the Wayback Machine had not crawled it, meaning if you put the dead URL back into Wayback, it didn't cough up anything? Yep. Ooh, that sucks. Okay. That was, and I had sort of been under the assumption that the Wayback Machine was sort of crawling Wikipedia and grabbing all the links just to make sure that wouldn't happen. But it was a little bit odd and that was, as I was going through the case, just pulling more things and little by little I would search in Dev and Think first and then look out on the web. And so it was just, and then just going through academic articles and just like all sorts of canonical links for founding pieces that are cited everywhere. Just, it's almost impossible to find some of the papers or particularly if it was a webpage that was sort of the founding of, hey, here's this piece, how do we get back to it? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Thanks Thomas, yeah. Welcome. Anybody else been through this thinking, this part of it? Pete, you've probably hit this. I've been thinking about something else. Okay. With respect to your question about what I'm interested in seeing here, I'm actually very anxious about the diversity of the call. So, I don't know that it has to be solved, maybe this call is just the way it is, but. I would love to solve it, I really truly would. It feels like it'll be a lot harder for me to participate, if you do. Actually, me too, yeah. The other thing is, it occurs to me that it feels like you could train the next generation of the brain users fairly mechanically. I think maybe all of us are too old, but I think also, if you gave somebody the brain and one of the things about your brain is it's hard to approach because it's so fulsome. But any particular tour through it is a pretty easy journey. It's an easy hike in the park. It seems like something called Inside Jerry's Brain or maybe a son or daughter of Inside Jerry's Brain is a project where you just give a tour through a little section of history or a little section of social dynamics. I thought that was a really interesting thing that I hadn't really conceptualized as, I would love to have a tiny piece of brain that was social dynamics that I wasn't reading, but that you had toured me through and I had created my own analog of it in the way that I would think about it kind of. Can you say that again? I kind of caught it, but I wanna hear it. It seems like pick something interesting for a small group of people in kind of professorial demeanor. Today, let's talk through, let's do a five minute tour of social dynamics, for instance. And if you did the same kind of tour that you usually do, but somebody like me or somebody maybe younger than me had their own copy of the brain and they could make their own nodes. So if you did it kind of half speed, they could maybe kind of keep up. I would love to have just the thought of social dynamics, the way that you've captured it. And I couldn't really get that just by reading your brain, but when you walk me through it, I totally get it. And I can even decorate mine as I go or maybe I can go through it with you going half speed. And then later I could do another hour of kind of going through it and going, oh, I've captured this tiny little brain in a way that resonates for me. So you're thinking of this as a way of tutoring others to use the brain to create similar kinds of mapping. Yeah, I think if you maybe if you thought of yourself as a champion Pacific Crest Trail hiker, if you do a little two hour trip with somebody, here's how you hike the Pacific Crest. And they're not going to hike the whole thing from Mexico to Canada. But if you took them on a couple expeditions where it's two hours at a time and then they get to practice by themselves and maybe do it again another time, I think that's a way to get people into the habit of doing it and also gives them something really valuable that they can take away and have and would kind of reflect into your chunk of the brain and also like grow out from there. So a couple quick thoughts on that. One, I mean, a really common way to learn how to paint is to go to the museum and paint or draw like what you see in these days if you just need to bring it up on your screen and emulate it, right? So that makes a lot of sense as a form of entry. Second thought, I'm sort of not doing this as a promotion of the brain as a tool. In fact, one of the calls that I'm scheduling right now with a couple buddies is a sort of a map off which is several different, you know, Kumu, the brain and the mind mapper, at least those three used and shared on screen around the same set of topics. How does that work? What are they each good at? How do they complement each other? Why don't they talk to each other? That kind of thing. So I'm interested in the broad scheme of mapping and sort of semantic visual webby linked knowledge, right? I agree and I think that's more important. I wouldn't necessarily think that people have to do it with the brain, but webby mapping. And also your metaphor of painting the masters is a really good one. The observation that I've got is our culture, our society expects people to do that by themselves. You read, you know, it's DIY. You read a book on how to do it, you watch some YouTube videos, then you go to a museum and you do it. My experience is that, and maybe it's my personality, but my experience is having an experienced guide to doing that helps me capture it and levels me up much faster, like incredibly faster. So. So two completely opposite things to say in reaction. One is that I totally intend to do a bunch of short videos on different topics as I kind of did on, sorry, John, I'm hearing myself echo in the background of your call. So as I did in the videos that I sent out last night, basically, you know, here's what a person looks like in my brain, here's this, here's that. And I would love to do improv style, send in a topic, and I'll do a quick tour, you know, I'll do a quick tour, record it and post it. And then the last thing I was gonna say to the last replies was that the rewind and pause buttons on YouTube are magic. Because, you know, the number of kids who've learned how to play instruments or dance or whatever from watching YouTube videos is actually probably shocking to all of us. Like DIY, I think you appreciate this deeply, DIY is alive and well on YouTube. And so the one side answer is, there's a piece of this that I really wanna do a lot of and with the stop and pause and rewind, anybody could DIY their own tutorial into how to add things to the brain, for example. The other side of it is I could treat some of these calls as master's classes, right? And sit down with people who are trying to map using the brain in particular and talk through the conundrum of how to make decisions about what goes where, because it is interesting and there's a lot of subjects that goes on in your head about how do I categorize things, when do I break things into sub, you know, when do I regroup, what do I do, when do I add a link, what features of the brain am I not using, all that kind of stuff. So those are decisions you have to make as a user of it. And that would be interesting. I'm not sure how many people that would be interesting too. And also when you're showing something, you assume a lot of stuff that you only figure out you're assuming when somebody asks you, hey, wait a minute, that was too fast, can you slow down? So an easy thing for me to do is to do like two master's classes or three master's classes on different topics early, like soon and then see how those went. And if- I love that. And if those answer enough of the process questions about how to make decisions and all that, then I can go and do a bunch of short nuggets, which I'm happy to do on my own whenever. And I'm happy to respond to requests on the Inside Jerry's Brain List or on Twitter or wherever that say, hey, would you do a brain on X? And in fact, there's a business model that I'm playing with, which I sort of put on the Inside Jerry's Brain website, which is, hey companies, I would like to do this for you. And if you're willing to have it published online, it's free. If you want privacy, it's 500 bucks an hour, right? So you basically pay for privacy. And that would work. I'd be happy to do that, and it's a business model because I'm still working on business models around all this stuff as well, partly so that I can stop doing other kinds of things that earn money and just be the vortex in the middle of all this. And I need to figure out how to do that as well. I look forward to it, that sounds great. I'll add some master's classes. I have an interesting observation when you said YouTube videos and people learn and bought. That makes perfect sense to me. I can't do that. I haven't learned that skill of learning something off of YouTube. And I think part of it, what it is, is when I know somebody else is live with me, it ups the stakes in a way that I pay attention. And watching video just almost never does that for me. So it's something that I maybe should learn. I had an interesting observation of a different kind of, so a different way to solve that problem for me ended up being a movie called Free Solo, which is wonderful, and y'all should watch it. Oh God, I'm panicked about watching it because I love Alex Honnold. I know he's exceeded, and I feel freaked out by seeing him hanging off the edge of a cliff. The, I literally got, so my family has been into rock climbing for 10 years plus. The thing that we do that's called rock climbing is to Alex Honnold as walking in on a treadmill in the gym to hiking the Pacific Coast Trail or something like that. So I don't pretend to be a rock climber like Alex, but I got better from watching Alex Honnold. I bet. The way that he approaches the wall, the way that he does bounce, the way that he goes, okay, this is a foot hold when it's flat, is like, okay, I can do that. And so I learned something by watching a video of somebody doing something, and it wasn't even instructional. So the takeaway for me is twofold. One of them are Alex's trek up the wall was stakes enough for me to actually pay attention. It's hard for me to get that without me doing, either something live or actually climbing a wall myself. And the other thing I learned from that was there's a really beautiful narrative arc wrapped around what Alex was doing. And again, a narrative arc up the stakes enough for me to pay attention to what was going on. So I can see my daughter picking up how to do hair or something like that from YouTube, and I can't do that yet. But if there are ways that the stakes are raised enough, I can do it. And I can also now teach myself, okay Pete, you have to learn how to learn stuff from YouTube even if it's not arresting or life-threatening. Yeah, one thing I considered still in the back of my mind, but I don't think I'll go there, is going on Twitch TV with this, with Inside Jerry's Brain, because there are liveprogramming.com or .org, whatever it is, is a Twitch TV subdomain where people are learning how to code, where coders are making money showing themselves coding and basically deconstructing it for people who are trying to learn. And I don't know how much, I think there's a chat there. I think they can be asked questions while they're doing it, pretty sure. I would pay for that. Yeah, so maybe I should do that as a master's class in mind mapping using the brain. That would be, and then I looked into it and it turns out you have to go use OBS. You have to basically wire up a bunch of things that have to work just right. Same thing with doing live streaming to YouTube from your laptop. And it got just a wee bit complicated for me to solve on my own. But I'm interested. John. Just if your goal is to sort of share this writ large. Well, I started with just from what you were saying and realizing like for a lot of people the master's class, like Pete was able to get something out of that film because he'd already done some rock climbing, right? And so I don't know if this is where you wanna go or not. Like if you wanna reach some people who are complete newbies, then there needs to be somewhere in the process probably where there's people who are just learning the brain who are teaching people. And those will be the best teachers for the early on ramp people, right? But if you have a mass audience in mind, the brain itself is gonna be a barrier. If you can find, it's a good time to look for free alternatives, free or cheap alternatives because if part of your push in this is to reach sort of brand new end users, especially even if not to some degree, then that's gonna be a big component. And I know that even though you love, you're invested 21 years in this thing and it totally makes sense for you to teach master's things using it, I know that your interest is broader. And if you want to these general ways of doing things to be available to people, I think it probably makes a big plus to have a tool that is more easily available. Meaning just open source mostly. Yeah, yeah. So a lot for contradictory replies. On the one hand, I completely agree and I'm desperate for an open source collaborative thing that looks and smells sort of like the brain. On the other hand, I've tried almost all the other tools. Like when one shows up, I go and try it out. And I cannot express myself the way I express myself with the brain with any other tool that exists today, period, period. And the other ones are good at other things. Like Kumu is beautiful, but it's good for systems dynamics drawings. It's not good for keeping track of all the different kinds of things, blah, blah, blah. MindMapper is really interesting and open source. So it's pretty darn close. And when I do the map off call, we'll see sort of some of the contrasts more vividly. But I can't use it to express myself in the way I do here. And I don't think it's only because I'm so grooved on this particular tool. I think it's subtle aspects of the UI of the tool that I can point to. I can like this. This thing that this thing does is something that I need and can't find anywhere else yet. Can you give one example? Sure. So in the brain, you know, apropos of that, I can screen share it. So in the brain, there we go. So in the brain, the reason this really complicated screen makes sense to my eyes and it may be overwhelming to anybody else because this is a very busy brain screen. Is that you can only connect thoughts to each other through these three little circles called gates. Which means when I add something to the brain, I either have to add it above, below or to the left of something else. Which really simplifies down to things have to be either up down or left right. Which also means they're never in a big circle and your eye cannot parse a big circle of text. All the mind mapping tools that give you a big circle with word, word, word, word, word, word, word, word, word to my mind are useless. Cannot process what's in the big circle. The rubber band, the effect of everything sort of everywhere also doesn't really work for me. Right? So this simple UI decision that things have to be this way forces me when I add something to think, okay, what is this, in what category does this live? What is the higher level collective noun, for example? And I love that, because it forces me to shift into system two thinking when I add something to my brain. But it also makes a natural organization of everything that's on screen. And- But do the other tools actually prevent you from saying there are three ways this thing gets connected to and I suggest that you have to do it by hand? They don't naturally organize this way. In many of them you just kind of place nodes wherever you feel like putting them and that doesn't actually work when you add more things. So before I ever saw the brain, I thought I wanted a mind mapping tool that was more like the game of go where you position the next stone matters because this is more related or less related. Turns out this tool convinced me that that doesn't matter because once you've added Marine Le Pen and then you're gonna add later Mateo Salvini and Norbert Hofer and Roger Eatwell, they just belong in an alphabetic list or a chronological list. They're not closer or farther away and you're not going to have the time or the technology to relate them to being closer or farther away from one another, right? You can't do that. So you can't place them in an dimensional space. You just need to put them in some simplified kind of space for which this seems to really, really, really work. I think there are lessons here that you've learned about how to structure data that are very general and very important and it's reminding me of, I just had a Twitter thread the other day with John Udall and Seb Packett. And yeah, and John was saying he doesn't really believe, except for super expert curators, like he doesn't really believe in tagging anymore as a very common thing and that the tools, the particular project he's working on right now, that doesn't mean there isn't tagging in it, but all the tags are kind of auto-generated by the context. So, for example, he's not using the brain, but it's like you're, there you go, if there might be, for example, I mean really tagging is just one way of talking about the data, right? If you say these things are in this relationship to emerging leader labs, one way to represent that in a database would be with a tag and that's basically kind of what you're doing. But that's automated and I think he's finding the benefit in that, but you're still, you're talking about human curation of deciding where these things go, but it's a question of degrees of freedom and I think a lot of us when we get into this stuff at first, we have infinite degrees of freedom, we think of infinite ways we can relate things to each other and we eventually discover we don't need as many of those, like the power of constraints is important and the process of thinking, it's like finding the Goldilocks, you know, the right thing for the right purpose and I'll bet, I mean, and one thing I'd be curious to find out with you is if you find out later, ooh, I wish I had added a lot of structure, you know, to this set of stuff and find yourself going on a jag, reorganizing or organizing whole chunks. Anyway, kind of a ramble. No, love, love, love you ramble and completely agree and I think I'm mostly blind to whatever special insights I might have arrived at in doing, in collecting and curating information the way I've done it here. Well, there was a specific one right there and I think Apple has obviously made the same kind of have decided the same thing that the full free use of a 2D thing is unnecessary. So I call this 2 1⁄4D. I call the brain 2 1⁄4D because early on, early on when computers were a little slower, if I clicked on a new thought, you sort of see it now, although it probably isn't capturing the frame rate going to you, but the text gets a little bit bigger than it gets a little bit smaller in a Muriel Cooper kind of way and basically that little visual is a mental cue that says you just hopped which means it lets you hop over things. It's a little bit like a wiring diagram on a printed circuit board, right? Where you need to jump across something, but you can't, that little thing lets you think, oh, okay, I can jump through the whole thing anywhere. I am of the belief that 3D information systems simply don't work, like virtual 3D spaces that you walk through to get information don't work, abstract 3D spaces where you've got a Z-axis and you have to make your way around don't work. I think we just haven't figured out how to make good use of them yet, but what I see over and over is people stumble into trying to make use of two entire three dimensions and then they eventually realize it's too much if they continue and pull back and that's how we get things like two and a quarter D. It seems likely the brain people started with a full open thing and quickly decided, no, we can make useful information by constraining. Love that. Pete, go ahead and then we should wrap the call pretty soon because we've gone more than I intended. Great, great suggestion, John. I kind of echo, well, I definitely echo the idea of some open tools that might provide something similar. I'm actually, I would be happy if they were proprietary too. Good proprietary tools at least, well, all supported and things like that. So Jerry, you certainly use, you actually use the brain and you've got a personal schema that you've laid on top of the capabilities of the brain which you leverage in a way that other people, I think, would find really hard to leverage. Not that it's, I think also maybe a different way to say that same thing is that you've invented some parsimonious ways of managing a lot of information, things like that. My thought is that if you do those master classes and other people are following along, people learning people and maybe newbies as John says and also more accomplished people who are further head in learning about it, I think that some of them might use the brain, some of them might use a completely different tool. I think the thing that you should try to gift to the world is not only artifact of the brain but just the concept of interlinking webby memory and recording. And so I think the master classes and maybe newbie classes help with that. I think I said it in chat, that kind of capturing and recording and remembering should be a discipline in the same way that graphic recording is now a discipline with people who've written books, different practitioners doing it different ways. I think that what you do and you've become a Renaissance oil painter, you're a master at, you know the vagaries of the different paints and pigments and how to make your own pigment. How much egg should go into the fresco? And you say, dude, I've tried the watercolor stuff and I've tried collages, it's all bullshit, it doesn't work. And graphite is just black. Exactly. I think if you showed techniques and showed insights and encourage people to do it in their own tools, some of them in watercolor, some of them in crayons, some of them in graphite, you would help the world, you would help other people, it would work. So I think, and I think there are tools that are enough, and maybe we could even start inventing tools that are better or more useful for other people or things like that. Love that. That's what I say. Yeah, and I think there's people really interested in creating sort of open tools that do some of these things that we could bring into the conversation. That's part of my goal. And then there's large sectors of very juicy, excited developers. I mean, I think all the stuff around platforms are on cryptocurrency. I assume you're aware of Holochain and all the people we all know who are part of it. But of course. Yeah. But of course, I should add Gene Russell to this and I think a bunch of others, right? A lot of people, Mark Finner and Sam Rose. What? Mark, isn't that cool? Yeah, oh yeah. Farinanda, Ibarra. This is funny, because I'll be people you're mentioning, I know, of course. Yeah. Art Brock and Eric Harris-Brown, of course. Yeah. Well, they're kind of, so Art Brock and Eric Harris-Brown are out here directly under Holochain. Oh yeah, okay, I see. Because when there's a company, the people who started the company, I put right next to the company and then everybody else usually goes under staff, but here is team, not staff. Okay. Yeah, I don't know exactly what roles the people you just added have. Yeah, yeah. And I don't usually add roles. I don't usually tag people up as like the CFO or the chief marketing officer. But you know, here's Nancy Giordano in my brain, for example, right? And she's represented by the Big Speakers Bureau, probably among others. And here are other people represented by Big Speak, right, including Ram Sharan, who is a management guru, who wrote the book The Game Changer, which I've not read. Anyway, fun to do. Any closing, this has been phenomenal. It's like we picked up energy towards like the time I thought we were gonna wrap the call, which I really actually appreciate. Share your thoughts on the Jerry's Brain List, please, because I wanna get a conversation started there. If you can invite a person who is not a white male to join us for some of the next calls, I would truly appreciate it. That would be fantastic. Dave, you had a thought you wanted to add? Yeah, you know, I wanted to toss it in, especially since Ken popped on the call, that things that we maybe would talk about later if you're interested. So Ken is in our inner group where we're talking about conference weaving and trying to figure out how to kind of amplify and multiply upon conferences that exist and network them together a little bit. What was the word you said? Conference weaving. Weaving, it is, okay. And so we're playing a little bit, we played a little bit with Bioneers and we'll try some more conferences where we're doing virtual stuff around the conferences and then in some sense knitting the conferences together. But the brain looks, you know, would be a natural tool to use in the knitting process, I think. And so when you were looking for places to play, I was thinking, well, maybe that's one. But then the other piece that I've been spinning around a little bit is like, okay, I always confuse myself around what's the point? Kind of what are we trying to do? And it feels to me like you've hit several different things, like the difference between teaching people to use the brain versus teaching people to remember versus being the memory in some sense. Those are all valuable roles. And I kind of feel like you probably want to pick, know which one you're doing and pick between them. And the context that I've been playing with us around conferences and Ken and I got this rough draft, but we're trying to ask the question, what's a conference for? And I don't think we have a very good answer. And I'm not sure people who host conferences ask the question well up front. And so, John, you've been making me think about this stuff. I don't know what event you've been running, but it's really interesting. And I love what you're thinking about it. But, you know, it's like, are we networking? Are we just commiserating? Are we learning? Well, both, right? Yeah, but you would design differently. Depending on where you're prioritizing, I think. And we're not seeing, we don't see the conference design reflect intention, I'd say. So, the conference designs, I think, often reflect habit, not necessarily proactive intention. So, I feel like you may have a similar issue around the brain. You've got the tool, you know, you've got the habits. Yeah. You know, where's your multiplier? What are you trying to make? What's the value of the screens you want to create? Super interesting. And I think you're right. I think I want there to be a role of somebody who brings context to meetings in kind of a fair way, in a useful way, in a way that everybody can trust, which is hard because people enter meetings with completely different sets of preconceptions. So, I'm not entirely sure how that plays out, but that's very much a goal I have. And if we could help invent and propel and staff and propagate people who do that, who attend meetings large and small, everything from, you know, large conferences to small meetings, I think that'd be fantastic. I think if we focus on developing a network of people who are really good at this role and what they can do and them and having them work together and so on, I think we'll be setting ourselves up for, you know, creating a new power center, whatever, you know, and it'll be great when it works and it'll be a real problem when it doesn't. I think you'll get better results if you focus on the change in everybody and how everybody does things. And it may be a thing like the brain, you know, only really takes off when a lot of the data entry is kind of automated, like I was saying about the tax. You have something watching your comments version of Facebook as you do things and when you visit an organization, you know, it doesn't wait for you to like it, like it enters it in your thing somewhere. But then whether or not, however the data gets in, what we need to establish, I think, is a thing for not just those special people, but for everybody to do at least a tiny bit of the act of curation. So that, and that for everyone to be aware of the value of having this kind of shared context, for everyone to do a little bit of the work so they know what it is. And that, yeah, then also, of course, there are people who become the super experts at it and they tend to be the ones we have take that role at meetings because they're so good at it. But we think of it as something that everybody, you know, is engaged in actively in some way. So this is like, I just put a bunch of gerunds in the chat, which are, I think, the modern verbs, like the, this is what humans should be tasked with over the next period, which is shepherding, curating, weaving, caring, taking care of the commons, taking care of groups, taking care of our memory. These are good occupations and they're undervalued presently because we've forgotten about concepts like the commons. So feeding and nurturing the commons matters. And I don't know, I like that, I like that a lot. Ken, you dropped into this conversation late. I'm sorry I didn't notice your ping earlier. I'm also sorry that I goofed on putting the wrong link into how to join this conversation. And I didn't want to rebroadcast to everybody who's on the blind carbons for Yi-Ten. So I'm glad you're here. Do you want to add anything from what you've heard? We can't hear you. You're unmuted in Zoom, but your phone is, your device is muted. The Zoom is fine, but we can't shoot. Oh, well, it might be earphones, but you don't seem to have any handy, but can you type something into the chat? Is that better? Yes, you just did something magically. I'll take the headphones off. Oh, brilliant. Number one, I'm just really glad to see you're doing this, Jerry. I've missed the Yi-Ten calls, and the little bit I've heard here in the last half hour says been extremely interesting. Appreciate everybody's contributions. I'm kind of in observing mode, and I appreciate Dave bringing up conference weaving because it does relate to memory. We were looking at conferences from the standpoint of so many people go to all these conferences and there's all this energy and then nothing tends to happen. People get a lot of information, maybe a couple of relationships from having gone to the conference and then it sort of disappears, and there's a tremendous opportunity to start to weave people together, weave relationships, weave themes, bring people into conferences ahead of time virtually so they can say, here's what I'm looking for, here's the kind of people I'm hoping to meet, have them interact with conference designers and facilitators, then do follow-up calls so that afterwards people who couldn't go could connect with who did go and find out what was meaningful, how are you gonna use that and start to move things in a much more positive direction and I think what you're talking about here today, this idea of becoming un-amnesiac, of really remembering is critical to that so it's a topic that has a lot of interest for me and I'm really happy to be here with you good people. Thank you. Thanks, Ken. Rose, I don't know if you're able to talk to us but you've been patiently listening and muted. If you would you like to jump in at all? You are still muted but I will watch for your icon and feel free to jump in, otherwise I will start to take us out. Anybody else with any closing comments? I think Rose is calling in from Tel Aviv, I'm not sure so we'll see. If not, thank you all very much. I will put this up on the tube of you and book another couple calls for next week. So I'm kind of booking calls around 9 a.m. because it's good for Europe and East Coast and all that. Is it a crappy time? Should I, the times are open. I can book these calls at any time, right? So I'm probably gonna do Tuesday, Friday, next week, maybe at nine or 10. Should I move them around? Anything else I should do? That's good. Nobody feels strongly. Once I think of other people to invite, I might find that weekends or evenings are better. Daytime is definitely, obviously, takes a lot of people right out, but I don't have anybody in mind right now. Cool. And if we get some people interested in Singapore or China or wherever, we'll probably do evenings, like 6, 7, 8 p.m. Pacific was good for them or Australia. We'll see how this evolves. And Tuesdays at 9 a.m. you have a standing call. Okay, Ken. Oh, that happens to be with conference meeting. Well, how about that? Cool, we should talk about maybe introducing the two groups to each other. All right, thanks everybody. Thanks, Jay. Appreciate it. Bye, everybody. A lot. Bye, everyone. Thanks, man. All right.