 All right. This is the opening episode of Inside Jerry's Brain, a thoughtful conversation about difficult issues with really cool people where you see too much of my brain. So we're going to head in there briefly. I wanted to display what could become, oops, I'm not screen sharing yet. Let me do that. Let me just start real quick with a screen share and show this possible logo that I did actually a while ago when I first started considering doing something like Inside Jerry's Brain, when word maps were cool, which I last dates this back a couple of years I think, but this is a possibility. Anyway, we are partly here because I have created this strange little thing called Inside Jerry's Brain, and we're not live streaming yet because, let me stop the sharing for a second, we're not live streaming yet because I discovered two days ago with Pete Kaminski where I discovered a bunch of things, including if you're sitting in a conference room as I am right now, and this is a conference table, et cetera, et cetera, I usually have all the lights on in here and I'm surrounded by whiteboards. So the background is always white and was basically bright white behind me. If you turn off the outside perimeter lights and leave only the pendant lights, it's much better lighting for video. Also discovered that the external fancy USB microphone that I thought I'd have to be using isn't really as good as the silly corded earbuds that I have in right now. They're working just fine. They do good noise cancellation, et cetera, et cetera. So stuff like that. But then I discovered that if I want to live stream these shows, I've got to go upgrade my Zoom to webinar, which is like four times the cost of the normal one. I'm like, let's figure out this thing first and then push it out into live. Although I'm really interested in live streaming, partly because I like the idea of who we might pick up if this goes out live to YouTube, for example, or Facebook. It's another alternative. I think YouTube might be more interesting. But also because I think the pressure of the modern lens that's broadcasting outward is really interesting, does interesting things, the conversation. Does it really feel strongly plus or minus about live streaming? Anybody? Kevin is a yes. Jamea is a maybe. Susan, what? Well, I would be really happy if there were a way to have a tool that would sort of, if you decided to excise, want yourself that you could. So there's an app right there. If you decided you wanted to do what? You extract myself from the conversation. So post-post-hoc and say whatever Susan says, take it out. Interesting. So a post edit, basically, that would let you edit your own presentation in the call. That would be interesting. My dubiousness comes largely from my lack of self-restraint and the fact that I tend to make really bad jokes during these kinds of conversations that are not always necessarily appropriate for something that's trying to reach a broad audience. But that's why we're here. We're here for those unconstrained remarks that are just going to pop out. As long as they don't get you in trouble. That's right. Well, the good news is there's no network censorship here. YouTube and Facebook have their hands full with jihadis and domestic terrorists trying to reign those in. Unlikely, we're going to be identified as such unless we cover the same topics and they're doing word ID and then we're hosed. But I think we've got Travis and we've got Shannon, Kylie. So we're in good shape here. So what I wanted to do partly was a little bit of demo about how I use the brain. I think a working background here is going to be, oh, okay, here's what Jerry's already harvested and curated. And as we talk about things in interesting ways, things that I don't have in my brain yet, I will be busy adding them as we speak, which is what I do at any conference, what I do at any meeting is when I hear a good idea, you know, Jeremy and I have done a ton of things through the Institute for the Future. I'll be sitting in one of the workshops that they put on or at one of our conferences and somebody will say something really interesting and I will be busy googling it and then scrolling it away someplace. Or maybe I'm more like a woodpecker and I'm like poking a hole in a tree and then burying the nut. I don't quite know what the animal kingdom analogy, the best one is. But something like that, I feel, maybe it's squirrels burying nuts in the yard. No, you know what, those acorns in a tree is a really good one. And they also do things like my whole garage has been turned into a greenery, but you can see another part of the metaphor is you can see the nut in the hole. Interesting. Unlike the squirrels. Yeah. One of the things about squirrels is they seem to remember where they put the nuts. Like they're burying them all over the place, but they can get back to them. Yeah. I think it's a numbers game. It's like sales. It's all about volume. Acorns are for closers. Exactly. Always be digging. Always be digging. Exactly. Oh, I like that. You know, they come back when the acorn shrinks. They take the acorn out of the big, where there's room, put it in a smaller hole and readjust them all. They move them all. Yeah. They tap them in so that they're kind of solidly in. And if it shifts, they move around. Clark, nice to see you. And then another nice metaphor actually is farmer ants. Everybody know about farmer ants? These are the leaf cutter ants, kind of the same category. Everybody know that leaf cutter ants can't digest leaves? Like they're up in the tree cutting leaves, dropping pieces of leaves, carrying them all back to the nest. Why? Because they then carry them down into the nest where another type of ant, of the same genus, is basically chewing up the ants, mulching them and putting them on a fungus. So they're called farmer ants because what they're farming is a fungus that they keep healthy inside the nest. And this fungus metabolizes leaf cuttings that have been chewed up. So there's kind of some ant saliva in there as well. And then the fungus oozes a nectar, which is what the ants all eat. So if the fungus dies, the colony dies. So there's a symbiotic relationship between an underground fungus that these ants tend. It gets even more interesting the more you dig into it. It turns out that the ants that are right at the surface, at the mine surface, so to speak, tending the fungus, they have a white powder on their shells on the back of their abdomen. They're sort of coated in a white powder. Well, a couple biologists decided they were going to go figure out like, hey, what's this white? It turns out the white powder is bacteria that defend the fungus. Basically, they're carrying antibiotics that will help keep the fungus healthy, all of which is happening symbiotically naturally. It's completely fascinating. And nobody's got instructions programmed in their head. They're all just sort of behaving. Here, I wish we had E.O. Wilson still alive because he could come in and explain some of this. But the whole line- I love that analogy. You ooze things I like to eat. What can I say? I think that's perfect. I think that's perfect. Let me actually, just for grins, go over to my brain and look up ants. And one thing that's going to happen, which I need to figure out if it's going to be a problem or not, is zooming and recording and all that at the same time as using my brain going to cause things to slow down a whole bunch. And I'm unclear. We will sort of see how that works. But, and I haven't gone in here painting ants to identify them ant colonies. No. Huh. That's interesting. Ant hills. So I have apparently have ant colonies in here twice. I'm going to need to fix that. Termite mounds, the mind of an ant hill. Articles about ants. I know we'll take us there. So here's, so here's my brain. Here's a topic called ants. Each node is called a thought. Most of you know this because you've kind of heard me a couple of times, but I'm going to just do this again as a baseline. Each node in the brain is called a thought because it's called the brain. I can attach thoughts to each other through these three tiny circles called gates. And notice that there's no gate on the right hand side, which seems weird when you first look at this. And then after a while weirdly makes sense. And I don't, I don't know how Harlem came up with this, but to me, this little three gate thing is one of the moments of sheer genius in the design of this brain because it means that anytime I look at a screen full of stuff, even though this screen is pretty busy, it's pretty clear what's where. Things are either above or parents of ants in this case. So edible insects, insects, eusociality, or their children. So Adam Lazarus is an ant expert, ant colonies, ant fiction, tasty ants, destructive ant invasions, mermicologists, people who love, you know, study ants, E. O. Wilson, who probably should be under mermicologists. Maybe he is already types of ant. And I'll come to that in just a second. So these are all children. And then I use the jump, the lateral thought for things that are either very similar or opposite. So ant eaters love ants. So they're kind of the enemy of ants. So I put ant eaters over on the side here. And ant eaters are members of colosa, along with sloths, which are under mammalia, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't have the full Indian taxonomy in here. I'm clearly not a biologist. But I like proximities like this. And I like also that, you know, everything is deeply intertwined. So I can kind of navigate back and forth. Then the reason articles about ants is in yellow is that I use yellow and kind of a light purple. I use these two colors to call out places where I've put a lot more information. So whenever the children of any thought get crowded, I then usually create a thought called articles about X, whatever the thought is. And then I drag all the articles. So here's a Boing Boing article. This is from Stanford. These two are clearly YouTube videos. I don't know what Boston Review. Here's an article about colonial studies, which is about ant colonies, et cetera, et cetera. So these are all articles about ants, which includes books. So here's the book, Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon. Here's the book The Ants, which I think is relatively famous by E. O. Wilson. So you'll see often articles about blank. That happens a whole bunch. If you ever see something in yellow or purple, go there because it means there's a lot more behind it. The one that I usually also turn yellow is types. And this is kind of amusing. So I'm going to turn this thought yellow. I click on the thought. It gives me a little information dialogue. I click on the color of the text. I then pick the yellow. I usually pick the third yellow down because it's a little bit brighter. I then go back and click. And now I've turned that thought yellow. No big deal. The brain does support thought types and link types. So I could do typing. I've never used those features. So they didn't exist in the first rev of the brain. And so I wasn't using them at the very start. And then I made the decision early on that every additional click that it took to add something was a detriment to my using this tool. So if I'm going to add a book and then say this is a book, a book type and then the author is the author of this book with a link type, if I had to go in and do like six more things to add a thought, it probably wouldn't happen. And then I was crossing my fingers that someday some AI would come along that would say, oh, would you like me to add metadata to your brain? I noticed you have a lot of books and authors. Let me do that for you. Which I would love. That would be fantastic. But I decided that the added work for me of doing that wasn't actually going to pay off. So, and I'll do one more thing here and then I'll pause. So it will amuse you to see that I have a thought called types. Because one day at dawn on me, I had a lot of these types thoughts. A lot. So this is, you know, types of abuse, types of addiction, types of advertisement, types of aircraft, types of animal, types of ant, types of anthropology, types of Apple archaeology. So if I just go to archaeology, I get feminist archaeology, gender archaeology, Marxist archaeology, internet archaeology, I get interesting. I don't have, oh, it's anthropology I'm thinking about. Never mind. So I should actually go. Well, that's interesting. So for example, primate archaeology goes back up to primates, primates, primates of the great apes. And then here's a book that describes how Louis Leakey, I don't know if you guys know this, this is really a cool thing. Louis Leakey of Olduvai Gorge and searches for primitive man, he recruited three young women, three young grad students, and he sent them off to study one of the each of the families of great apes. He sort of did this. So Beruta Galdikas, Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall. And you probably know the two of them. You probably know Jane Goodall, who went to study chimpanzees. She went to Gombe National Park, and she studied chimps, et cetera, et cetera. But then he also recruited Diane Fossey, who studied gorillas, right? And the third of his protégés was Beruta Galdikas, who went to study orangutans. And nobody knows her name very much. I think maybe it's more difficult, but also orangs are somehow less popular than chimps and gorillas, which is too bad for orangs. But there's a really nice graphic novel. It's sort of for kids called primates, the fearless science of Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, et cetera, et cetera. I discovered it because of this article on boing boing. And if you have a kid who likes science, this is a really, really good gift idea for kids who love science, for example. So that's kind of a start of a tour. And let me pause and see what that kicks up. And I'm going to unshare the screen so I can chat more easily with everybody. Thoughts coming? So one thought, Jerry, is I've always found this thing fascinating. And I love the idea of picking a rabbit hole, running down it, sort of explaining what's in it, starting a conversation around it. My only thought would be, this is the kind of thing that will likely grow an audience. So don't feel like you've ever explained it enough is my initial instinct that even on your 100th episode, sort of starting out with, okay, today we're going to talk about ants and explain above ants is the parents, and here's the children. And just sort of explaining what we're seeing because as you add new audience members, they won't know what the hell you're talking about, even though 90% of the audience might. I think that's perfect. And I will add almost preemptively that one of the reasons I haven't launched inside Jerry's brain for a long time is that I fear people getting sick and tired of this funny thing with the blue background, the big mind map. And I know that I've been staring at the same, I've never changed the color of the background, you can make the background any arbitrary image you want, you can make it a picture, whatever. I've never changed from the original blue, and I've been using it 21 years and I apparently am not tired of it myself. But I have this fear that others will be like, ah, shit, here comes the brain thing again. But thank you. That'll drift into the background. That'll drift into the background. I mean, you could complicate it and say if we're talking about ants, I'm going to make it an amp background, but then that's irrelevant the minute you go to a dinosaur. So I think it functions very well as a conversation starting point, but if it's just completely not understood by someone, then it's just kind of a confusing mess and I'll be spending time trying to figure out what it is and not listening to the conversation. Thank you. So I should pause every now and then and re-explain how this thing works, particularly every new call or something like that. Yeah. I think like the setup at the beginning of the call, you set up here's the topic and just as a reminder, here's how we're going to look at things or how I'm going to nap. Thanks, Kyle. That makes a lot of sense. Travis, and you're muted. There you go. Yeah. To follow up on that, I think that it's kind of like when you're the passenger in a car or watching someone else control a terminal, they're kind of like the other person is controlling where things go. So they kind of know what's going to come up next. So we need to be, it needs to be slowed down a little bit for us to be kind of process because it's not quite clear yet kind of where you're going to go. So I think just like I'm just putting the brakes out. She just slowed down. I've got a somehow crappy internet connection. I just lost a lot of what you said Travis. Can you, do you mind repeating it for me? It was really genius, but I don't remember any of it. I was just saying slowing down because other people can't anticipate like you are where you're going to go next. So just yeah, a little bit of break. Thank you. And part of, I think part of the fun is that I know where things are in my brain so I can go to really juicy places. I didn't pre-explore the ant section. As you could tell as I was wandering, where did I put that interesting stuff about ant behavior? So I didn't pre-explore that, but I did sort of hunt down a couple of places. There was a really interesting conversation on my retreat list just in the last couple of days about lessons from history. So I was going to go there a little bit later in this conversation. But I need to figure out what is the right pace for me to explain things in the brain. A pace that isn't so slow that people who already know this and are like frequent participants don't get completely bored, but a pace that is slow enough that newbies are like, well, okay, I see how that happened. You go ahead. I'm wondering if there's any information online on YouTube or anything like that. Instructions for new Disneyland tour guides. The person who's running the jungle cruise if their jungle cruise is still around. Basically, if you are guiding people through an amusement section, something where you know what's coming up next, but that means it's not just what's coming up next and you're eager to show it, but you want to be able to give them a little bit of, you want to transmit that eagerness, help them get to that point of, I want to know what's next. And you've just told me something that I anticipated that, or I didn't anticipate that, and it's a kind of engagement. So think of it not as much of an intellectual discussion as it is an amusement park tour. Interesting. And you, I think you know this about me. You may write that I was a guide on the jungle cruise. I did not know that. So I don't know how you did that then because that my first actual summer job ever, my first real summer job was at Anaheim in the park, and I was a captain on the jungle cruise. You got to shoot the hippo and everything. That really is a hippopotamide. A piece of a piece of the ride that I'm positive no longer exists. I'm pretty sure at Disney they don't let you fire a weapon at hippopotamide. Time's gone by. So Jerry, one of the questions I have about the way that the brain functions is, can you ask or is there a control in there to slow down the transition? Because the brain actually moves so fast that you don't see the relationship as easily. If it would go to half speed and make a transition that was slower, you would actually grok what the relationship was between where you were and where you're going. So I believe that there's a setting where I can change the animation speed and slow it down. Let me actually consult the settings real quick. Preferences, animation speed, slow. Let me now share the screen out again and see if that worked. It's funny, the ADD part of my brain is loving the speed and not being able to keep up with it is almost part of the, I don't know, there could be a joy in it. So I'll play a little bit of a contrarian there. It might not be the perfect thing to do. There's something about your expertise with the subject matter and the tool. It's kind of fun to be on the outside of, but I also think of the point and value in it. And I just found what you shared dissatisfying because it's jerky now. Interesting. Okay, so it's not a smooth animation on your end because Zoom is, so I'm seeing it relatively smoothly, but Zoom is not able to capture all the frames as they go by. That's right. I mean there's probably an optimal set of settings that works at the frame refresh rate of Zoom. Right. So I can play with that. Yep. I like the slowing down. If you could see what I'm seeing, I think you would enjoy that. So the other, is when you go to a particular topic, you know, seeing the context is really interesting, but if you get to a leaf cutter ant, I'd like to see a leaf cutter ant. I'd like you to bring up a picture of what we're talking about and then go back to the context or the relationship of the ideas go in and out. And so a couple of things. I should have just gone to leaf cutter ants or farmer ants because that's where I have all the videos and that's where I have kind of all the stuff that, you know, here's an article from The New York Times written by Nicholas St. Fleur about how ants figured out farming millions of years before humans, which is about fungus growing ants, which is also about ant fungus mutualism, which connects up to mutual etc. So sort of could have come in here, but this is interesting. One way to do this would be for you all to use hands up, hands down as a method of telling me that I'm going too slow or too fast or some other gesture, which means, you know, let's maybe invent something, but this means slow down and this means speed up as I'm going through them. Does that make sense? Like I can understand, like this, if you have your hand within camera range, I can see slow, you know, slow down, slow down, or even just like this, that could mean slow down, right? And this could mean pick it up. You're boring us. Yeah. And this could mean mind blown. Which one? Oh, I like that. Mind blown. Mind blown is good. And I like this for speed it up. This absolutely means speed it up. Yeah. Yeah. And this means stretch it. If you're like on TV, this means you've got to fill a lot of airtime right now, but we don't need that here. But I like stretch. So I have a question. This is a devil's advocate question. Yes. What if you just use this as a way to curate a conversation without worrying about whether anybody understood anything about how the things are organized? You know, that's like my bull in a china shop approach that I would kind of just charge ahead and do that. You all are like a sensitive group. So I'm trying to kind of take advantage of having you present to fine tune a little bit whether if I do that and maybe what we should do is prototype what you just said. I'll just blow ahead and we'll see what happened. The good news also is that these are all going to be posted on YouTube. Anybody can hit rewind and play and you can listen to different stretches if you like. The thing that's hard is during the call, Zoom doesn't let you press a button to save a bookmark to come back to that spot in the video when it's published. Wouldn't that be cool? Yes, your name? You should, if you're going to take that approach, you'll still be using the brain on your machine, correct? Do a video capture, a local video capture on your screen and this might actually end up requiring you to use two different machines so you don't impede the recording or the transmission. Right. But basically have a full capture just of the brain activity. Right. And then you post that alongside and say, you know, link, you know, start, start to this video when this other video hits the, I put out the red sign or whatever. So basically you can have them running side by side. A feature that would make this easy. So in the brain at the bottom, at the top here is a pin board. So the thoughts that are up at the top are thoughts I put up there and they don't move until I remove them or replace them or whatever. So the top is pretty permanent. Every year I replace the year with the new year. So here's 2017 that was up last year. And here you can see what happened during 2017. Bill O'Reilly is forced out at Fox News, the Catalan Independence Referendum, Bitcoin passes 10,000, Bitcoin passes 16,000, Bitcoin passes 19,000, Bitcoin passes 7,000. I saved all those as landmarks for 2017. And you know, that I do. At the bottom here, this is basically the breadcrumb trail. So every thought I've been clicking on, fungus growing ants, the ant fungus mutualism devil's advocate 2018-2017, they're scrolling by on the left. A really simple feature that would do what you just said, Jame, would be to just save the breadcrumbs as a playlist or as a file and send that to anybody. Basically make that a shareable list. Another feature I've been asking for for 10 years is an RSS feed. Like please, when I add a thought, let it just go to an RSS feed for it. So anybody who wants to subscribe to my brain could see what I'm adding. That would be kind of simple and interesting. Harlan has never seen the need for that feature. But I could easily ask for a way to copy the last N number of breadcrumbs and compose that into a shareable file of some sort. I think that's not a hard question to do. Well, let me push back gently against that, because I think part of the interest that many of us have in this particular topic isn't just seeing the list of connections, it is watching you navigate. And so if we could get the screen operating at 60 FPS, so it was completely smooth, that'd be great. But that's not going to happen while you're doing a zoom at the same time. So doing something where we can, in watching it later, watch that navigation happen. Where do you misclick? What breadcrumbs are you following to get to where you want to go? Well, and we also haven't... Sorry, go ahead, Jermaine. But I think that was just nearly as more... It is as interesting as the conversation itself. And what I just did when Susan mentioned Devil's Advocate, I went to the thought called the Devil's Advocate in my Brain, which comes out of the process of canonization in the Roman Catholic Church. It would be somebody appointed the Devil's Advocate, that's sort of where the usage comes from, and a bunch of other sorts of things. And what we... So as conversation goes on, what I've done in a couple of settings is simply go to that place in my brain during the conversation quietly. And if somebody notices and wants to pull something into the conversation, I love that. That works great. The thing we haven't done yet is to go to my browser and basically pull things in. So what I actually wanted to do was I had an email open, I get my word of the day from the Urban Dictionary. So I was going to go to the word Batman in the Urban Dictionary, which is an acronym, and add it to my brain, just so you all see what my day sort of looks like. So here's BATMN, blue air through my nose. Something was so funny. It's like rot, rotful, right? So I very likely have rotful in my brain and look at that I do. Gosh, I don't have it connected to the Urban Dictionary. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the one we just saw, and here I actually have to manage my screens a little carefully, because I have menus laying over what I usually have. But I grab the URL, I grab the little icon, the lock icon next to the URL, I drag it into my brain, and I let go. And when I do that, it pulls the header of the web page I was looking at and the URL into my brain. And I'm going to actually I just shouldn't let me let me undo that. It drags it into my brain under whatever I was looking at at the time. Right? So we just got this page from the Urban Dictionary. And it's captured properly the acronym, although it didn't capture what the acronym means. So I'm just going to basically copy this from the web page, come back, click on the link so that I can open it up and edit, put in a couple parens, paste and hit return. So now I know what this means. Now I don't want it under rotful. I want it next to it because it's also similarly funny. Then I want to go to the Urban Dictionary. So I'm going to pull, let me do that again. I'm going to pull from the top gate. I'm going to click and drag up and let go. And it gives me an empty field and it says, okay, what do you link up? What do you want to link upward to? I happen to know that I have the Urban Dictionary in here. So I'm going to select it from the drop down list of, hey, here's all the thoughts that are in your brain that have the characters urban dict in them and make a link. Now what's funny is I'm pretty sure that rotful is in the brain, I mean, sorry, in the Urban Dictionary. So I can very easily go over to that, make a link to the Urban Dictionary, go to rotful. Sorry, it's a little slow. There we go. And then drag the link onto the word up for the thought I already have. And now what I've done is I've cleaned up a little gap in my brain where rolling on the floor laughing didn't have, let's do the same thing, I'm going to add what the acronym means because I like to do that. And there we are. And it turns out that there's a conference called RaffleCon that is run by Tim Wang who is a total genius who is in my brain under my role models. So there's a couple of things I recommend everybody do. I mean, just if you kind of, as you look around what you're doing, so I have two thoughts that matter a lot to me. There's a bunch that matter a lot, but these are two, my inspirations and my role models. And so Hank and John Green, the vlogbrothers are role models, the little empire they've built that motivates young like teens and tweens to go change the world for the better. I used to be familiar with nerdfighteria. I think Kevin Clark knows what it is because of a Rex meeting we had. So nerdfighteria is not fighting nerds. No, no, no, that's nerds fighting world suck. And let me see if I've got that properly in here. It's a contemporary Russ Aikoff idea. Pretty much. And it's an incredibly clever, clever hack. So here's world suck. Okay, so the blogbrothers here's world suck. So I'm going to say nerds fighting world suck, which is something I thought I had in here. And so now I'm going to connect that to nerd, fighters and to nerdfighteria because the brain doesn't care how many things I connect things to. So now I've made my brain a little bit clearer, right? So, so Hank and John Green are total role models for me. And they've got an empire of sciencey and other kinds of vlogs and blogs and man, do they have it going. It's really cool. So I'll pause again. So Jerry, can I tell you something I've done with the brain? Yes, please. So I did this about 10 years ago and I had Ziggy, this market discovery software, and I had the brain at a high level. And if you go back to that person who did the nerd fighting that you liked, that role model, you pull that up there. So here's Hank Green and his brother, John. Yeah. So down in Ziggy, I would have, you know, who Hank Green is wearing with, you know, all the things you get from LinkedIn, but then go out from the personal to the organizational, talk about his organization, and you would get him, his brother, and the context in Ziggy, which doesn't exist anymore, which is sad. But anyway, they work really well together. A context thing around the listing would be really useful going from, you know, LinkedIn only goes to the personal. And so you can't go to their nerd organization. So I went from personal to organizational, but I use the brain as the starting point to find either one of those things. Interesting. It might be interesting to do this in the brain with context on personal and organizational length. Yeah. Just for fun, what was the lifespan of Ziggy? What year did you start it? Uh, geez, I started it like, you know, 2001 to 2007 or so, and it worked well enough as a non-profit that I gave it to a for-profit that was supposed to do something and they they failed and they also destroyed the the non-profit software. So anyway, yeah, it worked for market discovery in the so-called space before there was a space. And then here's Kevin in my brain. So I've been stalking you for a while. As is true for almost as is true for pretty much everybody out like on this call, actually. That's what's really fun. The concept of the brain integrated with other contextual software to go deeper would be, you know, it worked for me and it might be something there. Yep. So to go back to your question, I try not to, there's a notes field underneath every thought. So I could type in a whole bunch of notes. I could put a profile of people. Another feature, Kevin, to the thing you said earlier about ants, I can actually add to any thought an image. So I could add, I could say capture image and I could go do a snapshot of a farmer ant by just capturing some area of the screen and it would attach itself to the thought, I don't use that very much. And so with Hank Green, I'm relying on Hank's Wikipedia page to give us a lot of background and in the brain, if I click on the Wikipedia link, it will launch my brain to that page, whatever the URL is that's attached to that thought. So I try not to use the notes field in my brain very much because I figure Wikipedia pages are great canonical explanations for who somebody is. I'm not going to do better than that and it's going to take me a lot of time and effort to create a little profile for everybody. And here's Hank's Twitter handle. I haven't put in Hank's LinkedIn page. Don't know if he has one, but I do that a lot for people. I put in their LinkedIn pages as you see here for Kevin. That's his LinkedIn page, etc. So I get the interesting need for adding a little bit more information or meta information and I'm just describing the decisions I've made in order to streamline my ability to add information to my brain quickly and painlessly as I go because the second it takes me too long. Let me see what I love convenience. So I wrote a blog post a really long time ago. I called the law of convenience, which was basically every additional step it takes to do something dramatically reduces the likelihood anybody will try to do the thing. And I should actually type that up. So the corollary Jerry is in design, eliminating a step increases the likelihood that you will have usage and preference. So have you thought about people being able to subscribe to your brain and having their own version of your brain? So sort of yes. I mean, in a couple of moments in my brain history, for example, one time I was at a conference where Howard Linsen was there. He is the founder of stock tweets, which is actually a really popular stock tracking. Here we go. Stock tweets. I met him at Seabose in Toronto in September of 2011. So this is just another little digression. But every year I not only track what under 2011 are things like the 2011 down meltdown. But I also have for every year back to about 2008 my events for the year end up there's Jerry's brain. Jamea is showing us my app on his phone. And so when I showed Howard my brain, his first thought was holy crap, this could be the next Bloomberg. So if I were to be complete about the stories and information that I do for publicly traded companies, this kind of a map would be super duper interesting. And by the way, if you go look at the current Bloomberg desktop, they have a kind of a slightly ugly mind mapping part of it because they do do associative mapping now in the app. So that was one part of it. I have no desire to be exposed to lawsuits because my data about general motors wasn't complete enough. So I'm like, that doesn't sound like my, you know, and also a very interesting conversation about the brain over time is should I have multiple brains? Should should there be gated parts of it? Should there be like the biology brain and the astronomy brain and the, you know, e-commerce brain? I've never been able to figure out how to separate my brain into multiple brains. And why would you want to? I mean, I think part of the delight is for those of us who have loose brains. Part of the delight is following these lovely little trails. Precisely. But I know several people who manage thousands of brain files and they're always opening and closing brain files. And I don't comprehend it. Like I had a Zoom call a year and a half ago with two other brain power users, one of whom was using all of the advanced features that I don't use. So I use basically the features that shipped in 1998 or 2000. But like my feature set was complete by the year 2000. There's two things he's added since then that I like. And then there's a thousand features he's added since then that I never touch, don't use, don't even want around. The other, one of the other power users was using all of them and I could not understand what he was doing. Like, like we went through a little demo scenario and I said, how about if you try to do it like a getting things done kind of thing. And he went and used macros and what, and I, I was sort of left thinking, well, I don't really know what he just did. And it doesn't look like GTD to me. So this brain is kind of flexible enough and maybe powerful enough that it can be used in lots of different ways, some of which are incomprehensible to me. One of my favorite sayings is this, this Ted Nelson quote that everything is deeply intertwined. And the brain to me is the one thing aside from the web that demonstrates this really beautifully. So I have this one second, Kyle. And I have that under the thought global unity, which I, which is the thought I love, which is about all different sort of meet up with your own scene, which is to all my relations in Lakota Sioux, for example, which is under indigenous ways of knowing. So imagine, you know, we'll come back to these places. Go ahead, Kyle. So I just, I just have a question for you that I think if you get some clarity on will help navigate you. And I kind of see it as is your goal to, for lack of a better term, create conversational entertainment? Is your goal to encourage people to explore your brain and be in that conversation? Or is your goal to get people to kind of use the brain and do things on their own? Because there could be a rabbit hole you could run down where you could pause one of these conversations, have people go in and start exploring your brain on their, while sharing their screens and bring the conversation back and see what they, so the sort of former is, you know, you're going to show up with a topic, you're going to use the brain to drive this conversation. It's, and it's really more like an entertainment that is also conversational. The other one is much more kind of about the product and using the product and getting people to sort of run down that rabbit hole. So it, I don't have an answer or an opinion on it, but I feel like you having clarity on what your goal is may help answer some questions and sort of prevent you from running down rabbit holes that may or may not be what you want, ultimately. Love that. If somebody is motivated to go use the brain after this, that's fine and not a purpose of mine. I'm not trying to drive usage of the brain. I'm also not trying to become a YouTube celebrity by driving audience, so I'm not interested in like huge numbers and whatever. I really want to find our tribe and expand it. I want the tribe to include people who are in the other category for all of us, because I want to be able to use some context to have meaningful conversations and maybe put a dent in the world. So that's kind of where this is heading for me is, is one of my beliefs, one of my maybe naive beliefs is that our lack of history and access to context during conversation makes us much easier to spin, makes us stupider than we would be, makes conversations always cycle through the same thing. The news business is always scalloping along the surface of what matters. So, you know, a TV spot, a TV news piece that's eight minutes long is a giant TV news segment. And at the beginning they have to explain what the statement is. At the end they have to have a cute hook. In the middle they talk to people who are explaining a little bit at the surface and you never dive in, right? So, it's like local news or TV is one of the worst offenders here. The web doesn't have column inches, doesn't have limits. You can link anything to anything, so you can actually go deeper. Lara Satrachian at News Deeply has tried really hard to go deeper into the news and to offer background pieces. Like, here's a social network map of, you know, who knows whom in Syria and who are the ministers and who's connected, so you kind of know some of the dynamics and here's a timeline of what happened. It sort of works, but it doesn't necessarily really work. John Oliver tries to take one thing for 15 or 20 minutes and dive really hard on it, but he doesn't offer any links to things, right? I love John Oliver and I love his explorations and I think it ironic that some of our best journalists are actually our comedians. Like John Stewart's analysis of W's State of the Union address many years ago was both the funniest, you know, analysis of the talk and the best analysis of what W had done during the talk. It was, you know, that sort of seems to be happening in our society. So, another goal for Inside Jerry's Brain is to be light-hearted about serious topics. So the entertainment angle here, when you're like conversational entertainment, Kyle, you asked that? Yes, there's a piece of that that matters to me because I think that humor is a good way to lighten heavy conversations. And I also, it's not just humor. I don't, like, there's something about your virtuosity in how your brain works and your virtuosity with this tool that is the entertainment in some sense. So I know your goal is not to become a YouTube celebrity, but there is something incredibly powerful in watching. I mean, you've been doing this for 20 years. Just that alone is fascinating, right? And then watching you unpack it and how you think is fascinating. The fact that we get to participate in the conversation, really exciting, but anyway, there's something very much there to just for you to get some clarity around because I don't know, don't discount what you bring to the party. And I think I do in the same way that, you know, my wife, April, has what I call a calendric memory. She knows what happened on this day seven years ago, and she can reconstruct the day. And I don't know what I did seven days ago without looking at Google Calendar. And she didn't understand that was a superpower of hers until I could explain to her that other humans don't work that way. And she's like, well, everybody, no, not so much. And so I think I underestimate what I've learned to do by using the brain and I love doing it. I'm afraid that if I overshare it, I'll bore people. I should be so lucky to get to that point. Why don't I try pushing that boundary? I think it's part of what you're saying. Like, let me not be afraid of doing that. And that the experience of talking around context really matters. I want that to carry. You know, if anything comes out of this. And then I just added one comment to the chat, which is another very big goal for me is to bridge together in this context and in this conversation a series of different groups that may not know that they're connected. And I want them to discover how they might be connected and to discover new possibilities for collaboration across their domains. So Kevin and I had a call yesterday with a fellow about regenerative economics in Illinois and a really interesting conversation about mutual aid societies and the future of insurance and a bunch of things like that. There's a nexus of interesting issues that we're designing a call around that maybe a Jerry's brain call may not be a Jerry's brain call, it may go into design from trust. And that's a call that Kevin and Stephen, John Stephen need to make. But I also had another conversation about a really similar sort of a neighboring set of issues with a different community, a different group. And to me, if I can create interesting calls with the right set of people that are coming together and then make those connections across groups and let them bridge if they want to. But if I can draw them together and start to build a common memory of how these things work together, that's really exciting to me, right? So I'll go back to sharing for a second because I'll share one spot in my brain that I really like, which is my ahas about soil and growing or raising food. And just a little bit of background on this. I've been putting things into my brain about like Monsanto and the seed business and how modern farming insults ecosystems and a bunch of other stuff. Then separately, I had a whole bunch of stuff about soil fertility. And then separately, I had stuff about perennials instead of annual crops. Then separately, I had things about desertification and reversing desertification. I did a Yi Ten call years ago. Here's the Yi Ten call. It was in 2011 with Bill Liao of Wee Forest, in which he said something that kind of stunned me. It was that it's not the trees follow where rain is, but trees can create rain because they exhale bacteria, et cetera, et cetera. You can move a tree line to take back desert, that kind of thing. So then at some point, more recently, I realized, oh, crap, I have all these different nexus, nexuses, focal points in my brain. Why don't I bring them together? I created this thought, my ahas about soil and growing or raising food. I connected all those things in here. And it's probably overwhelming at this point, but it bears exploring because anywhere you go, it's all connected. So plowing, destroy soil's fertility. One of the first rule of soil fertility is disturb your soil as little possible. And there's a thing called no-till farming, which is getting more and more popular, that plays this out. There's a book by a Japanese fellow named Masanobu Fukuoka titled The One Straw Revolution, which was all about this, and also about the principle of Wu Wei, which is action through leased action. Like how can I do the leased thing to get the most effect, which is something I'm really interested in? So here's another thought here about minimal action. And there's a book titled Trim Tabs written by Bucky Fuller about that kind of thing. So you see how this is all interconnected. So I'm interested in holding a conversation that then enriches and clarifies this nexus, for example. So Kevin, when you and I and the other people come in and have that conversation with whoever else wants to join as participants, I want to be thinking hard about this and making it clearer and more useful to everybody, because I published this damn map. This goes out to anybody who wants to come in and use it. And so if at the end of our conversations, this is better and a bunch of people realize, hey, we need to talk, and something good gets done that way, I'm a very happy guy. You know, talk about Wu Wei. Talk about Wu Wei. Go ahead, Kylie. And what you just did, the five minute soil rant, the rapid clicking within that, was entertaining, even if none of those connections happened, right? So there's sort of this really interesting both end thing happening where, yeah, all these connections can happen, lives can be expanded, and that was kind of entertaining. I don't have any interest in soil or granules or annuals particularly. You can till all the soil you want in my world. I don't care, but that was really entertaining. And I can do a riff like that on a shocking number of things. Go ahead, Kevin. One thing I would say is that you're great at opening up new things in things I already know, and you're less valuable as a guide to focus to get me from here to there. The thing that you just did was great. You showed me many other ways of looking at something I'm working on a lot. So you're better at opening than focusing and driving. Doug? Yeah, I would, I'm curious as to how many people in the call actually use the brain. I started about 10 years ago when I first heard you talking about it and found it pretty useless for a long time. And then suddenly my life was too complicated and I started using the brain and it's been fantastic ever since. That's interesting. Would you raise your hand if you've ever used the brain? So raise your hand if you've ever tried it. Okay, so most of us actually. Kevin, yep, Clark also. Raise your hand if you're still using it. Cool. So less than half, but four of us are still actually active brain users. That's really interesting. I will say that the moment Harland opened his laptop and started showing me his brain at the first briefing in 1998 in the offices on Fifth Avenue, Esther's office on Fifth Avenue, I have a like really good mental recall of that meeting. I was like, oh crap, this is how my brain works. I got to use the software a month later, which was a month before they shipped to the public. And I didn't need, I didn't need coaching from Harland. And it was immediately useful partly because my job at the time was to track the tech industry and to know who competes with whom, who funded whom, who's the PR for whom. Oh, and let me just do just for fun. One of the easiest demos I have for using the brain. So I can jump to Andreessen Horowitz, for example, and I can go to Bitcasa. What does Bitcasa do? Although they do online backup. Who else does online backup? Well, look, there's Jungle Disk, Live Vault, Orgit. There's also PC Data Vaulting, a subcategory. These are all sort of backup companies that have come through. But if I go back to Bitcasa, and they got money from Andreessen, they also got money from First Round and Pelion. I don't remember Pelion, but First Round has funded a lot of things. They're big. So here's companies not exhaustive. This is only the ones I saw. But here's, you know, First Round funded Massdrop. I don't remember what Massdrop does. Oh, they're a buying club. Right. Who else does buying clubs? Oh, imandijet.com. Let's buy it. Meituan, which is big in China. You know, here's an article about Meituan, which was a Tom Friedman column, etc., etc., right? China is leapfrogging everybody to internet commerce. So that's kind of interesting. Now, I'm a tech industry analyst. This tool was perfect because suddenly I could walk through the industry in a way that nobody else could. Right? Here's First Round Capital. These people mattered to my world when I was writing for Esther. And I could track the piece of their portfolio that was that I could, that passed by my radar. Hot Potato got bought by Facebook. Who else, who else did Facebook buy? Oh, they bought Hot Studio. They bought Friend Feed. They brought CrowdTangle, Drop I O, Hot Studio. People who worked at Hot Studio are known as Hotties. So here's a bunch of Hotties, right? These are, and by the way, I have a thought that will also amuse you, which I haven't connected to here properly. So I'm going to do it. I have a thought called alumni, which is like the types thought. So here's alumni from companies. So here's people who used to work at Adidas, for example. I only have, oh, it's some guy named Mikulski. There we go. How about that? And so that's connected to Adidas. And I always put alumni opposite staff. And probably all of my staff thoughts are out of date. I'm pretty sure that Marta may not be at Adidas anymore. I don't, I don't really care that that's a part of my brain that's kind of fallible. But but this is why it was so easy for me to jump in and start using the brain. I had a, I had, I had a, I had a, I had a goal. I had a job to be done that this fulfilled really perfectly, right off the bat. And by the way, I'm super interested in some open source collaborative form of some brain-like thing. Like that is high on my agenda. I track several different projects that are trying to do that. I'm super interested. Like there will be calls in inside Jerry's brain about that. And in particular, a call that'll happen pretty soon is going to have competing mind mappers. So there's a guy named Robert Best, who uses something called Mind Mapper. My friend Christina Bowen is a black belt in Kumu, which is a systems diagramming tool. And I use the brain all the time. And what I want to do is have all three of us alternate screen sharing, just take the same topics, the same conversation and see how these things are different in each of the tools, because the tools are very different. Mind Mapper is open source and collaborative, which is really cool. But when I use it, I don't get the same sort of connected hit that I get from using the brain. So it's missing something for me, or I would like jump over to it. So anyway, I want to do that. Susan, you had asked for the floor earlier and then duck. I don't even remember. Sorry, it's gone. I apologize. And also Kevin Clark, Doug, then Kevin. No, gotta go. Sorry, that was a wave. Thanks, Kevin. Bye. Jerry, one of the things that I thought at times is it would be convenient for me, but maybe not good for you, for me to be able to just copy a thought from your brain and drag it into my brain. That would be a great thing. I think there still is a tool called Pearl Trees. I can show you it in my brain, but it's a little French company. Yeah, they're still around. They're a French company that had a very, very nice, the back end they got really deeply, which was I could include one of your Pearl Trees by reference into my Pearl Tree. It would show up visually a little bit different. It was more opaque or something like that. And then as you were improving or curating that particular thing, I would just get the benefits of your curation through that link. That was beautiful. Their front end just didn't make any sense to me. I didn't like the UI. It didn't have the same hit that the brain does, but I wished that the brain had that back end. And Harlan just rewrote the brain in the last two years. He's completely rewritten all the code following none of my advice. So there's still a client on my desk that's synchronizing to one server that's different from your server if you were to use the web brain. And so there's no way to make easy links across brains. There's very little metadata that carries. At best, maybe he can say that you and I are pointing to the same URL because he could detect that in our data files, but that's not even a feature that's easily accessible. So the interbrain conversation is low. There is something called team brain, which I haven't looked at very much. So in principle, we might be able to collaborate on a brain. And that's a whole separate conversation. I wouldn't have used the brain very much if I needed to negotiate with you every time I wanted to add a thought. Right? So the collaborative aspects of a mind mapping tool are really delicate and subtle and interesting. I need to be able to see my perspective on everything I cared to remember. I'm extremely interested then in overlaying this side by siding it and comparing it with other people's ideas of different domains. And I would love to be able to do what you said, which is drag in everything somebody found useful somewhere or point to that region in their mind map that's really useful and say, hey, for this topic, you should talk to Doug because he's really laid out a beautiful zone with a whole bunch of things. I don't know of any tool that does this very elegantly at this point. A footnote about pro trees. Two, three years ago, they changed their interface away from the sort of elegant but not quite their circles to something that looks like Instagram and basically killed the product. Like as soon as it started looking like Tumblr or Instagram with little squares, it was not interesting at all. So last thoughts at Clark Travis, you guys haven't jumped in that much. Mika, you got to go? Got to go. I'm going to wrap up our call in a sec. We'll send you some notes. Thank you very much. I'm going to schedule another couple calls for next week just at some random open spots if anybody can make it great. I will completely respond to requests for a topic. So Mika, if you want to propose an inside Jerry's brain thing, let's just find a time that works and do it. Jerry, quick question. I presume you're going to go back and look through the transcript of the chat because I was dropping thoughts in there, so I don't need to speak them up. Awesome. Thank you. I'm totally going to do that. And is this recorded? Can we point to it on YouTube or something? Yes, this is recorded. I'm going to put the link on the inside Jerry's brain. Be available. Okay, great. Good. Thank you. Any other thoughts? Travis? Yeah, I think that there's probably many different ways in which you can post a conversation around the brain or narrate an interesting pathway. I like the idea earlier of thinking about yourself as a tour guide too. All these things are different possibilities. What struck me when you were talking about soil was that it was following an epiphany you had. So one of the ways in which you might be able to create really compelling engagements is to look at, like think about the different times in which you've had significant transformations or reorganizations of your brain and use that as an inquiry. So other people are either, they never had that epiphany and they might have a whole bunch of different data points and you might foster, facilitate a transformation or reorganization of those ideas for them. Or maybe they have had that epiphany and then they've gone through that and they feel a lot of connection with that and might have additional ways. You can take that epiphany maybe even further and identify people who you feel like, okay, I feel like there's an epiphany to be had here. Here's a bunch of things. Help me have that epiphany and then invite them in and maybe have a interview, dialogue, conversation publicly where you actually are maybe doing the reorganization there but maybe just setting the stage for that reorganization. I think that's a sweet spot for where I'm trying to go. I think that conversations around topics that matter with people who have different, really matter to me and so what you just described sounds like where I want to aim. Let me suggest, it's not quite there. I think it's your epiphany and then where that epiphany leads you and the next thing it leads you to. It's not like you have an epiphany and then you go down that path, you have an epiphany and then you see the next thing and then you see the next thing. I mean, it's the discovery of the next daisy off the path that is the thing rather than, you know, the possible had an epiphany then had a plan. You don't do that. You have an epiphany to an epiphany. Yeah, totally get that. Okay, thank you. I got to go. This is great. I talk this all day but I think it'd be a good thing to try to keep them close to an hour. Makes it easier for anybody coming and watching these later as well. So any closing thoughts? The reason that I did not keep using the brain when I tried it a couple of times I've tried it is that I could never get over the hump of the effort being greater than the result. That first period of time of entering information and making the initial links, there's just so much of that needs to be done before it becomes useful. I'm sure it becomes useful. Obviously it becomes useful. I just can't ever get myself over that hump. What I tell people is don't be daunted by the number of thoughts I have in the length of time I've been doing it and that it was useful to me after the first 100 things, partly because I had that one mission of tracking the tech business. And once I had 100 things in and I could see this VC funded this company and this company competes with this company, I was off and running. But I think it really helps to have that kind of turf. Cool. Well, thanks everybody. We will see you on the next call. And again, if you have a topic, you'd like to do this around and other people that should participate in that topic. Let's just set that up. Let's just make that thing happen. Cool. Thanks, everybody.