 All right. This is the fellowship link call for Wednesday, September 6th, 2023. It is nice to see y'all. There's sometimes a couple other people here. Aram, your keyboard is loud in our ears. Oops, sorry. You are a ferocious typist. I am impressed with your typing speeds. Actually sustained typing speeds. It's like it's like an endurance race kind of thing. And it's a lot of practice. Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking we make tiny intros so David knows kind of who's in the room. David knows me a little bit, but I used to be a tech industry trends analyst. I've just been digging through some of my old boxes and finding a bunch of like gems from the distant past, including applications for grad school and a lot of ding letters from people who didn't employ me and a bunch of other stuff. I'm just pumping. But then there's a bunch of other stuff that I'm scanning and then a few things where I'm keeping the paper because it's sort of sentimental or maybe meaningful or something like that, but lots of stuff. And then a whole ton of articles that I photocopied and stapled. And the first thing I do now is I Google for the title of the article. And if it's available on the web, I just curate it into my brain. Anyway, I've also been feeding this mind map for 25 plus years, which you are now in David and I'll pass to Chris if you will introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Chris Aldrich. I live rent free in Jerry's brain. And have for a long time. Just loads of fun. I've spent loads of time in the entertainment industry variously in exhibition first, agenting, managing, producing, you've been done a little bit of distribution. And right now we're all on hiatus because the strike is giving us nothing to do. So how are you feeling your time? I spent some time working on a furniture refinishing project yesterday. So we'll have a new refurbished 1940s Shaw and Walker filing cabinet shortly. Put it over here in the corner behind me if the wife will let me. I don't know what I reasonably well known as a member and tinkerer in the indie web space encouraging people to own and operate their own websites rather than rely on social media to do that for them. And for fun, I'm an inveterate note taker. And Chris Chris runs way deep on the history of commonplace books and sort of how did we share knowledge way back in the day, which is really fun. Intellectual history as they call it in the deep academic circles. All right, I'm a fluid. Yeah. I'm just putting state in our notes. It's just funny, Chris, because two things. One, we've talked a whole bunch and I just realized in this conversation, I never had any idea what you do until this moment. They also have a biomedical engineering company that does micro manipulation, micro injection, and my cross to be for like really high end genetics. Dang, I thought it was all about Osaka. So I've got a I've got a hand handful of well actually more than a handful now because I think we're up to 12 Nobel Prize winners on the client slate. Oh, that's really cool. I've done that for actually I did that because the last strike, the last strike got me back into the biomedical engineering side. So maybe somebody has an interesting new job idea for this strike. That'll be my next me. So so every major entertainment strike spawns a new venture. There you'll see a big blip upward in the startup, you know, during this strike. I mean, I am helping a few writers plot out and plan out spec scripts for when the strike is over, but yeah, you know, hit and miss. Yeah. Hi. Yeah, I'm Aaron. Hi, Aaron Zuckersharf. I currently day job at the Washington Post where I lead privacy engineering. And I also have been heavily involved in publisher oriented advertising technology. I write about it a lot. I work with other publishers a lot. People is a much longer story, but the interest in privacy actually comes from the ad tech side of things and figuring out how to do ad tech privately. Hello. Beyond that, I'm involved because I also am a very frequent note taker and a fan of indie web stuff, though not as involved as Chris is. I spend a lot of time making tools mostly for myself, but occasionally they get to other people. The biggest one that people in the indie web community are probably familiar with is Press Forward, which I led development on for many years. It's an open source tool for using WordPress to manage and archive a variety of websites. That generally is sort of where a lot of my interest fall, archiving, linking, toolmaking, and sort of thinking about how to leverage these things in ways to improve stuff. My current project within this context is working on how we link notes tools together, and the notes tool I'm using is an 11T-based system to begin with called context.center, which is the website name. Again, a tool only for myself, but it's open source and I'm building it out and also just more notes synchronization tools is something that's very interesting to me. Awesome. Flancian, you can hear us. It's all good with your jits. Magical. I invited David, just met him recently, invited him into our conversation. He hasn't introduced him yet, but we're doing a quick round of intros. So, Flancian, why don't you jump in and then David can go last. So, yeah, well, so nice to see you all. I'm like, yes, welcome, David. So I'm, well, I go by the username of Flancian, but my name is Eduardo. I'm from Argentina, originally, and I've been part of this call for like a year and a half. Forever, feels like a decade. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, yeah, I enjoyed him a lot. So I'm a site, very good engineer by profession, but like, yes, I like knowledge, graphs, knowledge commons, thinker by, I guess, preference and like a night and weekend's dedication. Yes. And I'm also very interesting, like, well, pretty much what I, what Adam just described on like, you know, making tools, you know, I, in particular, within targeting the knowledge commons, whether knowledge commons, we can put together. And in particular, I'm developing, I've been developing this sort of like platform protocol is sometimes weird, what these are clear, called the agora. And yes, that's the main project related to, to the commons, I guess, right now, with some other people, which is also about like, essentially, like a proof of concept right now for connecting nodes, knowledge-based weekends that come from widely different sources, and just like trying to like make a, like a greater whole out of the parts. Yeah, yeah. So that's it, Martin. Awesome. Thank you. Michael, how are you doing? I met David recently, he's a brain fan like me and does other stuff. And we're doing a quick round of intro so that he knows who's in the room, if you wouldn't mind doing one of those. Sure. I'm Michael. I am in what is now called New York on walking earth lands and the Eloni, I'm not the Eloni. Eloni would be on the other coast, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lenape. I spent too much time in the Bay Area. Flip of the tongue. The Lenape greater lands. And I, I'm very interested in information meritocracy and how we all define it and how we help each other find stuff. I have been working on a platform called Factor at ACTR, which you will find at factor.com. Um, for a lot of years, um, have been hanging out in the open global mind group for a lot of years, working with the collaborative technology alliance and, um, which is a collaborative dot tech. Another cool thing. I'm involved with all tech is human who are having a, I don't know where you're located, David, but there's a thing going on in New York this coming week. All tech is human is putting up about the future of social networks. And, uh, yeah, I, my, my one liner about myself is I'm a designer, editor, archivist, activist. So, and you have pretty massive collections sort of on the, on the archivist side of magazines and such. I don't know what your range is. What's your, like, what's the focal point of your collection? In my, in my former life, I was a, a magazine, um, art director, editor, um, editor at large for Timing. And I have accumulated magazines that were contemporary to my work going back to, like, 1980. And, um, and then made it a point to collect, you know, kind of in the past tense, viewing the, the 20th century as the magazine century, because they weren't much before that and they don't look like they're going to be much after that. I've been collecting magazines of the 20th century. That's, that's what it's about. Great. Thank you. Didn't, didn't know where the boundaries lay. Yeah. Um, and David, if you would jump in. Yeah, because so I live in Dallas, you'll recognize by my accent, um, very quickly. Um, I'm a, I often describe myself as an itinerant software salesman. I grew up as an itinerant cotton farmer, uh, as a kid and migrated to the big city of Dallas, Houston and Dallas, and became an itinerant software sales guy. And then the technologist of some minor capabilities, but mostly focused on trying to help people solve big enterprise class problems and challenges through various different pieces of software. I do have one pitch for the group since we have some publishers here. My son-in-law runs a company called book.io. He is, they are taking NFT technology, blockchain technology, and creating a publishing environment where, uh, you can own the books. You can resell the books. I can, you can loan the books to your friends, set a due date on them and get them back. One of the interesting things that they're doing is, uh, creating, um, unique covers for each of the books so that you get some level of, um, rarity. So, and, and what's, they started out on the Cardano chain, uh, and they will publish 1700 books and they'll be gone in 20 seconds. They will, they're selling them at about 20 to $30. They're all in Cardano, so whatever the exchange rate, right? But, but it's really interesting and they, they now are starting to do audio and, and, you know, control audio on the blockchain and utilizing NFT technology. So for you guys that are in the publishing, uh, industries, I think you find it interesting to take a look at it. Uh, that's my pitch. David's also a longtime brain user. Uh, I've been using the brain not as long as Jerry has, but, uh, and not nearly as well organized, uh, but since, uh, uh, I think early 2000 was in my kind of first foray and still have it. I only have, I only have one brain. It's not great, but it's, uh, you know, there, I thought I was the only brain user who had only one brain until we talked. So there we are because it's unusual. Most brain users treat it like we're, you know, like a word processor where they make lots of documents. Um, and we can talk about the future of the book. We can talk about other stuff. Uh, thank you for the intros. Curious about what's on people's minds. Michael, you were about to jump in, but you're muted, right? You're looking for the tab, looking for the tab. Have you found the tab? That's another problem looking to get back from book.book.io to, uh, so the jitsita. Yeah. Um, uh, I, I was curious to ask, um, David, um, I'm, I see, um, some, some like major kind of public domain publications, which is sensible. You know, I mean, like to create something that is, uh, made special by its addition and limited, you know, cover or design. Um, I was just curious if you know about how, how that's working and whether, um, with a book like Alice in Wonderland that I saw, saw was there, Swiss family Robinson. So is one illustrator, designer taking that title and doing multiple variations? Yes. They have one artist. Um, they have one artist, he's using generative AI to, to create massive numbers of custom covers. Uh, the, the team is a very small team. It's five people, uh, maybe six now. Um, and, and so the one artist, uh, creates the covers and they, the group kind of picks them, puts them together in a rarity chart. Uh, and, and that's, uh, you see a lot of trading for rarity count as well as just the cover that you like. Right. And so it's, it's, for me, it's been interesting to watch, um, kind of the, the, so, so they live a lot on Discord. Um, and, uh, and to watch the behavior of the, uh, aficionados of various different blockchains because they now, they've now, they're now publishing on multiple different chains. And in fact, they are in this, um, sometime in the last three or four months, uh, they got to the point where you can actually use a credit card. Um, so that because he, uh, they call it the mom test and, and the guys, uh, you know, the guy's name is Josh Stone. Uh, and the question is, can his mom go on the web and buy, can, can his mom go on book.io and buy a book and my wife fits in that mom mom, mom category as well. So it's, it's interesting where there any, he seems to be getting a significant level of backing from a number of different publishers. And one of their interests is this ability to, uh, if you wanted, let's say there was some book that, uh, Michael, you and I were talking about and you didn't own, but you really loved the book, loved the title, uh, that I could, at some point in time, I could send you that book, have a unique custom cover created for you. And, and if you're, you know, let's say the book, you could find the book for $35, but, but I'd be willing to pay that publisher $100 for the book because it gets a custom cover unique one for you. And I, the thing, the, the interesting thing, given your library of magazines, right, the interesting thing to me is how do we, how do we hold that library and share that library of magazines 20 years from now when, or 50 years from now when the world has forgotten that the, the, the, the post had the most incredible covers ever, um, et cetera, et cetera. So, interesting. David, is books.io, uh, an NFT gallery and scarcity play masquerading, uh, as a, as a book publisher because it's taking out of copyright books and just, you know, putting nice covers on them, or is it also a publisher where if you came up with a new book, would they help you make a book out of it and then put a nice cover on it and make it unique? Yes. Yes, is the answer to the question. They, they, they, they, they think of themselves as a publisher and they are attracting, they're beginning to attract some number of publishers to their community. But what, what I notice is the publishers, uh, that they're attracting, their books often don't, well, here's who they're attracting. They're attracting the, the writer who has moved himself or herself into self publishing. They're tired of the publisher, et cetera, et cetera. And the way, the way they've created the monetary monetization for the publisher is every time a book gets resold, that author gets up some percentage, right? So it's a different business model, if you will, than the standard publishing business model. It's a smart contract. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's all a smart contract. And so if I, if I, if I have a book and you want to buy it, when you buy it, everybody in the chain who's owned the book has had get some compensation for it. Yes. It seems like there's an interesting possibility here for, because one of the things that could happen is you could just attract people whose books aren't making it anyplace else. And so they're, they're coming here. What you sort of want is some really sharp editors, um, who are hosting books or who are curating books or who are curating authors. Um, so, you know, Andrew Wiley is a very famous literary agent. But what is the equivalent of Andrew Wiley on books.io in an NFT world? And, and how does that role change so that people could then start following the curator of a community of writers because these are, like, they're, they're going to be better works. Right. Right. And maybe that's just a fantasy, but I think that that's, that that's a possibility in the space right now. Sorry, Michael. It is. It is. Yeah. I would think I was just saying having a sub imprint, you know, that, that the books.io is the, is the press. And not necessarily always the publisher to have inputs that live in that world. Yeah. And, and, and I know zero about the publishing industry. If he, if he weren't my son in law, I'd know even less. So, so that's kind of in what's, what's interesting because I've spent a lot of time in technology startups and done host of different startups. Um, in the year that they, they just celebrated their first year of their first publication. Uh, and it's, it continues to grow at an incredibly for me, a surprising pace, a surprising pace when they put a book out for, for, uh, publication or for cementing, uh, that those books would go in, you know, 15, 20, 30 seconds is, is just pretty astounding to me. And, and it's as they can build the communities across the different blockchains and, and the real challenge obviously becomes how do, how do I take that to an even larger audience? So we'll see, we'll see. Interesting to get you guys feedback and comments on it as you go look at it. Cool. Aram? Yeah, I was just going to say the, I think to your point, there is, in terms of like trying to find an opportunity for sort of rogue book publishing processes that act outside of the, um, the norm. I think like the other opportunity that's interesting here is editors, but not just getting it edited, right? Getting editors a cut, right? Cause this is, this is a big problem that I have personally, which is I lie, I write professionally and I always could use editors and I don't want to use them for free. Um, so any, anything that I publish that gets earnings right now, right? The way that the structure works is you pay the editor on the assumption that you write something, that thing will get some level of earnings. So here's upfront their percentage on that anticipation, but it would be nice to think about ways to attribute credit better to, to the editors and give them more of a royalty model. Yeah. As the smart contract technology and blockchain technology continues to advance, move forward, et cetera, et cetera. I think you, I think we can arrive at a place where for any contributor to some, whether it's a book, a magazine, a piece of art, et cetera, can, it can now be on a royalty basis, right? I mean, I spent a lot of time around the, the oil industry and the royalty systems that do those, that's a horrific math problem. Yes. As it gets passed down through generation after generation after generation. So it'd be interesting to watch what happens, you know, 30, 40, 50 years from now. Beyond that, I don't think I'll be around. So it doesn't make a lot of difference. Well, this platform is an interesting model, but I'm on first blush looking at it. And I just spent some time looking at different translations of Anna Karenina in the last month. At first I'm shocked. I, there's no name of the translator of the book I'm going to buy. So I have no idea which edition or which translation of many I'm going to get. But it seems odd to me to pay what looks like almost $35 for a public domain copy of what I'm, or what I'm sure is a public domain copy of a translation of a book that I own for print copies of at present. And the only unique or interesting thing that I don't have in making that purchase is maybe the book cover art, but that was generated by an AI, which presumably I'm sure it is, you know, that doesn't have a huge amount of value. It seems to me you should rush to market and buy it now so you can complete your collection. I mean, I think the scarcity model should absolutely close the deal here. Well, I, I don't think there's ever going to be a scarcity market for, for Anna Karenina or Tolstoy in general. I, as you say, if when, when you look at it, when you look at it on its face, you kind of say, wow, 150,000 or so books published in the year, they're all public domain books. And they're largely acquired by Cardano chain, aficionados, right? So how do you, how do you take that? How do you get that to become an industry monetized, etc. But they seem to have a significant level of interest from a number of big publishing houses that have given them some level of funding. So just as with most startups, they defy life. Bentley, you came in a little bit late. We're talking about David's son-in-law's startup books.io. Yeah, book, book.io. Sorry. Good, good correction. And that took us into sort of a conversation about NFTs and how these different things work. Cool. And we can steer in any direction we'd like. What other things are on people's minds? Florence and how goes the Agora? And I think, weren't you going to at some point come back to us and explain the Agora in more depth so that we would figure out how it all clicks in? I would love to do that. And I mean, I could improvise something now or just we can do it next week, if you want. And I could do the slide deck and so on. Yeah, how about you? I'm up for a presentation, but let's not do it next week. Let's do it the week after next week because I can't make it next week and I want to make it. Yeah, okay, good. Okay, perfect. Yeah. I mean, I would love that actually. I never want to impose too much. I just want to impose a little. We want to understand the Agora better. So thank you. Me too. Sometimes, you know, like developing the Agora is like a means to understand it. Sometimes. But I would love to set the date of the 20th of September. Let's do that. Yeah, yeah. And like, unwearable, unlike news there. We have like, of course, like some other experimental Agoras up now. And like, I'm still like trying to do down on the model for like sharing things like the injection paths into our hours. So essentially how how to run a set of hours in a way that is efficient. It doesn't have in every hour, how to duplicate work, like investing both from social media, for example. So now we finally have like a shared repository of social media posts. So, you know, if anybody wants to like run an Agora and write it from social media, it will be easier to set that up. Essentially, they can rely on common infrastructure to do that. And beyond that, the next big thing is as planned now, and maybe a reaction will reaction look warm or like positive or negative heroes will actually influence the priority of this and how enthusiastic we are about it. But like the next big thing will be activity power integration. Which will be there we go. Okay, thank you. Yeah, so essentially, and actually, is this a serendipity aspect to it. I mean, this has been in the background for long. But you know, a bounce pool, who it was here, Tim will write was here, like in a past call. Yeah, developer Betula, he's working on activity power. We decided to like, we're going to do it together on as effective projects. And then like a few people reach out to me saying like, Hey, is there any no taking up which is favors, like enable or isn't on the favors. And I'm trying to answer that question. I found some things but nothing very, you know, like spot on so far. And to me, that seems like an interesting space to tackle. So yeah, the idea is to actually have activity about our integration, then in a way that is too like no stick. Essentially, if you want to have your notes in the in the in the favors and use sort of sort of a convention to interact with the notes and the federation, including master and so on, right? You could use the hour for that. You just sign up for an hour and say, essentially, an hour each hour comes with like a matching favorite presence instance. And then, you know, for example, like a Jerry, you know, Adam, who have like gardens in an hour, you could say, I want to post these or every time I create a new note, maybe I want that to be post to username at hour, which could be seen as a post from master. Essentially, it's like a feed provider. Is anybody more familiar with the Fediverse who can name a note taking tool that is favored? I don't think I mean, it sounds like you're sort of building the note taking tool. I don't think there is a I'm pretty familiar with the Fediverse and like, I don't think that there's something that's specifically a note taking tool, like there's lots of micro blogging, and a smaller number of macro blogging. And there's photos and videos and all sorts of other tooling. But I don't think there's a note taking tool that's specifically Fediverse. But the interesting thing is, right, in terms of what you're building, like obsidian does have the capacity for like different types of hooks as plugins. So if you had a thing that was like, hey, send it your notes here, and we'll process them, the thing that could probably do that is obsidian, with very little work in the building the plugin phase, the plugin. Like obsidian publish you mean or something different? More like, sorry, just ask the question again, like obsidian publish. Obsidian publish, or are you referring to something else? No, obsidian publish is a thing that exists and could be part of that. But more along the lines of right, like, there's a good example in the first term, and like, I think we mentioned it briefly on one of these calls obsidian get right, the idea like you can save things and then press a button and say sync with GitHub, right, you can see the same exact thing working to say, hey, push to an activity pub server and have it propagate there. Right, so I could imagine a flow for the Agora where it's like you have your obsidian, and you have a designated Agora, and you hit publish and it pushes to the Agora, and that Agora populates out to the rest of the Fediverse. Yeah, yeah. So, so the idea will be to exactly, this is precisely a model, log seek, I mean, obsidian, some people use obsidian eat, some people use log seek, I mean, of course we have like different other gardens, you know, like from different formats, they all have this notion of like, automatically pushing usually. And yeah, the idea will be to like, to some extent, this, this is a reminder, it's like to say, if you agree on a commons, then you can essentially get services through a commons, essentially, with very little additional set of costs. I mean, this is the, to some extent, the promise of every platform, right, and why, you know, but, you know, of course the Agora wants to do this as a knowledge commons and an actual commons in the sense of like, free and fair and alive and so on. So, this will be the dream. One of the interesting things that would be fun to see that I don't think exists in that activity pub space is a different sort of UI. So, if I'm taking short, you know, let's say index card size notes or tweets or mastodon type things, you can publish them and see the most current one. But more interesting would be to go to that and see the thread of other notes that either come before it or after it in a longer thread so that you can follow some bigger chain of thought or create bigger chains of thoughts and use that as your UI for presentation rather than here's just a stream of random stuff that I've been thinking in reverse chronological order. But here's the thing I thought recently and how it fits in with 30 other things around it, which no one is doing. Exactly. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, this is where, so the Aguilavolt has been trying to like experiment with this in the cheapest way that we could. It gets running, right? But it's like what happens if you take the same streams and then you organize the data in a non-stream first way. So, you know, like, precisely, you know, going for commonality and like connectedness beyond like just the timestamp, right, in which they were immediate. In particular, in the fairy webs where like right now it's very timeline oriented, even more so than maybe like close platform because of the lack of algorithm, you know, it seems like this could be useful, right? Like just, you know, like essentially like and I hear your Chris, it will be like a favorite experience, which is more like hashtag first instead of like, you know, time first. And when I say hashtag, I also say weekly, right? Which is an open question I have. Yeah, exactly. And yes, I mean, this is, I mean, the plans for this having around for a while with the implementation, but we said that we will do the same second half of 33. So I guess that's pretty much now. And the open question is how to represent weekly links in an activity, but one open question is how to represent weekly links. Even that activity seems to a special case hashtags, quite a bit, but I'm pretty sure we will hack something to it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like just adding a link, like seems like the way to go, right? And you could just have some sort of decoration to indicate that it's a wiki link. I know, like I see your output on other platforms, you often use the double bracket. I think like if you use that, but also have the thing inside of it be a link. People, well, your primary user base, people like us will understand instantly what that means. And then the hope is you can build training off of that. Yeah, a bootstrap something completely. Yeah, this is the dream. There's also the weak links everywhere extension. We actually have three, none of which works very well. The intention is there, but sometimes, you know, really confusion, but once you install those extensions, those weak links become clickable on the browser. And of course, the intention there is to be able to, right now they are all hard-coded to an hour out of torque, which is not great, but the intention is to be able to say like, define your hour and then all the weak links are on the web, which are already anchored, will be automatically anchored to your hour. So yeah, this has been in the works for some time. Actually, I remember like I discussed it with Samuel before I joined the first of these calls, as you know, slowly, maybe not surely even, but like some progress is made. And we'll learn more in two weeks. That sounds really good. Yes, I'm really looking forward. Thank you. Yeah. Any other thoughts, questions about that? I wanted to raise a, for a second time, a question I brought in that we talked about a little bit before, which is one that came up in a post I read, which is, does chat GPT and things like it obsolete no taking? Like the post was like, ah, Tiago Forte system doesn't matter anymore, because we now have a way to query and get responses in a structured way. Why bother creating human notes? And I'd love to know how anybody thinks about that. I think that's a very typical AI disruptor take that doesn't make a lot of sense, right? Like the systems of note taken that we've discussed in the past are not just systems for recording their systems, right? We call it tools for thinking. I think I have that in one of our notes, right? The tools for thinking, the note taking process is a way to manage entering the data into our heads to even think about it. And in doing so, it expands what we think about, right? You can only query things that you fundamentally can ask the questions for. And part of the note taking process is expanding the type of questions you can ask. Like, I don't, the point, there's a really good video essay I watched, which was like, and it's not a new argument, but they articulate it very well, right? Like, we are already cyborgs. You have a phone, it's nearby you right now. It expands your capacity to search for things. It gives you a lot of information at your fingertips. But like, that does not, that is still like, we should understand these things as affordances, right? That is like what being a cyborg is. It is enhancing your capacity to do things, but it cannot replace your decision to do a thing. It cannot give you that information without you asking for it. Not really. And so like, I think that's the essay that you were talking about. I haven't read it, but it sounds to me like it's a bad take because it is the same thing that a lot of these AI disruptive people do, which is they do not understand that the process of what it is doing has value, right? Like, just like the process of making art has value, no one's going to look at a piece of AI art in the Louvre and think of it as the same way as somebody who spent a lot of time. Even in a graphic design tool, human intervention is what gives these things the value to us as humans. And you can certainly do a lot with like AI art to intervene in it. And there's a whole range of values there. But automatically recording everything we see, listen to, talk about whatever, and then hoping AI will extract the right outcomes when we ask questions of it. Like, that is a useful potential tool, but it's not the thing that I use note-taking for. And I don't think it's the thing that most people use note-taking for. If that was the case, then like, just record everything you've ever like attended and go back to it, but that's not going to work. You know, you can't search, you're not going to learn something by searching the transcript of a college class course about it, right? Yeah, exactly. That's how knowledge works. Yeah, I'll put that one down one second. Yeah, thank you. Chris, you're muted. Chris? Yeah, me too, yeah. I was going to say chat GPT, build me something like the Ethereum network to distribute books. Wait, wait, where is it? That's nowhere near that happening yet. In fact, Siri and Alexa are very good at giving me the thing I want right now, even when I know how to ask for it. So the issue is, I may not know what the adjacent possible is to every idea I have, but some of it's the serendipity and discovery of finding it. And even if chat GPT could give me the entirety of the adjacency, it can only give me the adjacency that everyone has heretofore thought of. But if I'm Einstein in 1905 or 1904 better, it would not be able to give me that next thing. And that's really what, it's useful and it's great and it may make some more interesting, super hard targeted search stuff, but it's not giving me the things I really, really want. I'm unclear that LLNs can only regurgitate things that have been known or happened before, because I think they can interpolate or infer new stuff. Like what was interesting about AlphaGo or AlphaZero in playing just the game of Go was that it was inventing moves that humans hadn't been invented yet, because it was just given the rules of Go to go, you know, beat itself. And it didn't have any assumptions of historic Go players who have, there's kind of a bunch, there's a feeling and a sense and a rhythm to it that humans have incorporated by learning Go that the machine was like, well, screw that. I don't care about that. I just want to like win Go games. And to me, that was creativity. Now that's within an extremely narrow space of black and white stones on a 19 by 19 grid with a couple rules for taking territory, which is not what the real world is with pros and everything else. But I have a feeling that like these systems are capable of some considerable creativity. Yeah, and I emergency is fun. And that's really what you want is the emergence of what here's a small tiny set of simple rules. Yeah, until Jurassic Park strikes. And when you explore all of it, what are the interesting things that come out of it that you don't expect? And because an AI can take that and go through all of the possibilities, usually in reasonable amounts of time, then you can find out interesting things. But then once you've seen that, if you can query the AI to say, what are some other interesting strategies that human Go players historically have never used, that I can use, and then you can learn what those strategies may be so that you could confound a master Go player. That would be great. But my guess is the amount of emergence you're going to see in those sets is smaller than you think it's going to be. Michael's got his hand up. Yeah, I was just going to mention that there's a link to a podcast with the caveat that, you know, it's A16Z and Marc Andreessen at your own risk and all that. I mean, Marc Andreessen isn't on the podcast. But ma'am, one of the pieces of software that's discussed is an Andreessen horror investment. But the conversation there about note-taking and second brains, and particularly, you know, just that what your experience of note-taking is key to the notes being valuable. So really, you know, having there, there are virtues to having a virtual note-taker who's like processing a bunch of stuff and giving you a summary. I mean, that is useful in its way. But being able to take your notes that you've created, ideally, you know, over years and put them into a model that you can then query or search, you know, and see the sources for that, that does seem like it's sort of a middle answer, Jerry, to your question. Is ChatGPT going to make note-taking obsolete? No, but it's going to make a certain kind of note-taking much more useful than it would have been in the old days, where, you know, that I mean, they're talking about what they've got in Evernote and realizing, you know, how much of it has never been touched since it was put in there. Likewise, I'm sure in your brain, there are, you know, many things you go back to, but there are plenty of things that were placed and you never return. And then, you know, what's big and does get mentioned there is the idea that, you know, we've talked about before, that surfacing the note that somebody you trust has shared with you, somebody you trust on a certain subject has shared with you as you're trying to put together, you know, some thoughts about that subject, that's what is really golden and what, you know, I think we're all in our way working on. Yeah, I have an earlier tiny thesis that was that we, when Google came out and the archive came out, we kind of outsourced our memories to Google and that was a mistake. We were like, oh, I don't have to worry about cataloging or connecting up and collecting up and curating the things I see. I'm just going to Google for it later and that'll be okay. And it turns out that it doesn't work really well because things that don't have a lot of inbound links don't get Google juice, don't show up and the search results, a bunch of other bad stuff happens. And the archive isn't as woven or searchable as we wish it were. It contains a lot of the articles once links are broken, but you've got to find your way back to them somehow. So anyway, so I asked the question of this group, partly I'm a big proponent of humans in the loop and human curation plus this new intelligence. I'm really interested in how it expands our capacities and how it gives us superpowers. And I'm anybody who's exploring that space is really interesting to me. It's like, like, you know, the combination of the two. So yeah, I see, I see and I, there are any number of of recording and transcription services now that you can add into your meetings, right? And depending on what the transcription analysis is doing, right? Most of them I've worked with and utilized have been focused on trying to help either help sales teams improve their communication skills and persuasion skills and or help sales management try to figure out what the real truth is about whether something's transactions are gonna happen or not or thirdly to do a reasonably good job of writing a follow up faster and quicker. But but as you get a large body of this and you get it pulled together, the Jared kind of back to your point, utilizing something usually utilizing chat GPT helps me kind of get a sense of a large body of material, but it doesn't help me learn that material. I only learned that material when I began to ingest it, to take notes about it, to think about it, etc, etc. And you you also run the same risk that over time, the things that you didn't touch a lot get lost in the mass of material, even though they may have been very beneficial to your to the specific view that you were, right? It's your story-threader, right? I have I come to the problem with a perspective that is different than the perspective that you have. Part of the conversation that I had with David recently started around my notion of story-threaders, which I put out, which I think we've talked about a little before here. Aram had his hand up, and so those Glunzian and I will have to leave this call sharp at the top of the hour for a different call, which means I will have to shut off the recording, but the recording will will poop out like two minutes after that anyway. So I'm just warning everybody that I will have to drop off at the top. So go ahead, Aram. I think the really short and easy answer to this is, you know, you can search what is basically the closest equivalent we have to all the knowledge in the world with Wikipedia in an organized format. Google to some extent, but Wikipedia really, but people do not stop going to college and replace it with searching Wikipedia. And I think that's sort of the most clear comparison. I also have a hard stop at the top of the hour. Just a heads up when I leave. Thanks. Anton? Thank you, sir. I was reading down the observation. So I guess just quickly, let's see if this is still relevant. So I mean, playing David's advocate just because I love it, but you know, the question like, will your generator AI or any kind of like models also lead no taking? I think echoing some of what you said is like, well, some kinds of no taking maybe you could make the point. And I think to some extent, it depends on which questions can be meaningfully answered by a model that