 All right in the interest of showing you how I use my brain I Collected together some things that I just put in over the last three or four days Now each of these came in from some different vector meaning one of them was an article in the New York Times one of them was A meeting I had with a friend where we got into a conversation about the history of Portland and highways Another one was a video that I ran across About things I care about about healing of trauma. So each of these is very different I just created a node here called 1606 new notes, which means 2016 June I do things a lot by by a year month because they sort nicely then when I go someplace So for example, if you we see my event schedule up here We'll see a few different things that are on year month orientation There we go. So these are different things that I've done this year. So let's go back to Where we just were and I'll start with Carl Safina who I actually had never heard of before and I already had a thought in my brain called do animals have feelings so one of the things about all the things that I'm going to show you now is that these nodes and the books and Twitter account so here's a book beyond words Which is what prompted this whole inquest into Carl Safina somebody mentioned on a conference call that I host The book I didn't even know it was a book. They mentioned beyond words So I googled beyond words and that brought me to all of this. So Carl Safina turns out it isn't is an ecologist He's at Sonny Stony Brook And he cares a lot about this notion about animals and feelings and he's you know Do animals actually have feelings and I had the topic animal well-being and a couple other things in here Also, I thought do insects have feelings believe it or not all these of course under feelings and animals so here's Carl and He wrote the book beyond words, but he also was He also gave a Ted talk which I then watched So I'm annotated the talk by saying that Elephants for example can distinguish between tourists and herders Safina Describes an experiment where they recorded tourist voices and they recorded herder hunter voices and they put the speaker out near elephants and When the speakers had tourist voices the elephants were just fine. They just kept on walking because tourists aren't annoying They don't hurt you When they played the herder voices the elephants started running the other way away from the speakers So they understood that Etc. Etc. So I Have this under what makes us human and also that we are very unaware of our relationships in nature Which I think I need to make more profound He talks a bit about the cruelty we inflict on animals So I put it under cruelty to animals and as you'll see I've got quite a few things under cruelty to animals and then also I connected it to Ted talks because this is a Ted talk and I Been doing this for a while, but these are all Ted talks all of these are Ted talks And in fact there's another thought for Ted X talks So this is just the Ted talks and I differentiate between Ted talks and Ted X talks So that's very funny Clay Shurkey has apparently done five different Ted appearances And I love clay. He's a great great speaker so if I go back to curl and Connect back up to curl by the way anywhere you see a link next to a thought That means that if I click on that link it'll launch my browser to that page So here we are going to cross a penis Wikipedia page I use Wikipedia pages when somebody has one as their sort of canonical starting point and it turned out Carl did so That's what I did. So that's just curl and all of that probably except for listening to his Ted talk Which is itself an 18-minute adventure more often than not But all of that probably took me 15 20 minutes to do Granted I it wasn't central to anything I was doing that day And it was a distraction as all these things are But in some strange way, I'm busy weaving the context of life. So on from there So I had a conversation and learned that Portland the city of Portland back in the days of the national the Federal Highway Act of 1956 and the interstate highway system that resulted Robert Moses and his team went around the country basically basically showing cities What they should do to install freeways which would meant Knocking down housing in different places and had lots of ill effects as well as some good effects And then they offered the Federal Highway Act offered funding for this So they said we'll cover 90% of the cost of installing freeways around your city Portland has a couple of freeways that cut through it But then they said no and what I what I didn't know and that was really interesting was that there had been a series of highway revolts That many cities around the country actually said no including Sydney and Australia It wasn't all in the US But cities that that had planners come in and say you need these kinds of freeways in this many in some cases Not all we have many cities that were really really cut up by freeways And the famous instance of this is Jane Jacobs standing up in New York for a freeway that was going to go through the village the The part of New York that's sort of actually organic shaped in different ways So what was really interesting about the jiu-jitsu part though was that? Portland managed to change some wording or use some wording In the funds they were offered to use the funding that was supposed to go to freeways Originally it was going to be the Mount Hood Expressway To fund their light rail system So Portland actually funded their max system and some of their other Tram system with money that was supposed to go to federal highways that is a tremendous irony because There's something known as the great American streetcar scandal now all of this existed before the last four or five days In fact this these nodes are pretty old because I've heard about this for a long time But if you've seen the movie who framed Roger Rabbit, which is right here in 1988 it's a movie actually based on historic events. It's a cartoon Directed by Robert Zemeckis has Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd in it But there was actually a great American streetcar scandal where General Motors Firestone and others Invented national city lines, which was just a fake company and then proceeded to buy up streetcar systems around the country and shut them down There's a lot more to it But basically 80 cities around the US had delightful light rail systems in Los Angeles it was known as the red the red line was the famous one and amazingly they Burned the cars and dug up the rails knowing full well their goal was to sell bus fleets to all these cities, which they did There but but they knew that once you've pulled up the lines and burned the cars How's somebody going to reinstall a light rail system? So the irony that Portland manages to use highway funds to font or fund a Tram system is delicious Even though I don't believe that Portland had a tram system that got pulled up before that all of that from Conversation where I learned about that on Portland and just came back did a little bit of googling and put all that in Then I had never heard of a woman named Vivian Ming So I watched her Ted talk. It's actually a Ted med talk about incentive insensitivity and about the fact that Fanatics people who really care about stuff are are insensitive to incentives They will stay on something regardless what the motivation is in fact I connected that to a thought I already had before that extrinsic motivation often erodes intrinsic motivation and That rewards and measurements often don't really work Which is tied up to a really important thought that's up here on my On my pinboard called my beliefs. So this is part of my belief snapshot So we're kind of linking up to that from this whole notion about intrinsic and extrinsic or endogenous and exogenous rewards So that was the paradox of insensitive sensitivity I'll do a couple more Then there was a terrific Op-ed in the New York Times actually not an op-ed Judith Chulovitz is actually a New York Times correspondent. I believe so I put her under New York Times correspondent and a journalist married to Nicholas layman And here's her Twitter account. She's written a couple of different really interesting things about Parenthood and The role of moms and so forth also a book about the Sabbath about looking at time differently But this one on how to fix feminism was really interesting It had a lot to do with valuing Homemaking and about work work life balance women balancing career and family Which is a topic I have under work life balance Which is a topic I have next to women in the workplace So there's you know, Hollywood ageism against women Rosie the Riveter career women Rosie the Riveter of course should connect us to World War two Let's see if it does that there it is World War two But if I go back to how to fix feminism It's also linked to articles about feminism and she coins the term caregiver ism And she says that givers of care really are under underappreciated in many different ways points to some really interesting books Finding time is one of them which I had not heard of so I put Heather Boucher and Finding time in the book in in my brain, which I didn't have before and then also The time bind is another good book and one thing I didn't realize was how really crippling Tan F was the temporary assistance for needy families program which passed under the Clinton administration under welfare reform And it replaced the aid to families with dependent children AFDC, which had been doing a pretty good job Protecting Families and children so they they made sure oops. I made a mistake there. I wanted to put a parentheses in at the end So they made a mistake there Anyway, let's go back to I'm clicking on the breadcrumb trail down below here to go back to where we were Then there's going to be Published any day now, which is one reason why I'm making these videos an episode of the cool tools podcast about me and my brain Mark Fraunfelder and Kevin Kelly are the guys who run the cool tools podcast I've had them in my brain for years and years know them both personally oops, and that was my brain crashing So let's reopen it. I'm using the brain 9 beta So It crashes a little bit now and then I was just thinking I should close it and reopen it because that usually clears things up And it doesn't crash So if I go back to the cool tools podcast That will take us back to 1606 cool tools on me and my brain And I was just going to show you how much I had on Kevin Kelly, which the fetching that might have been what caused it to barf on us right then So here's Kevin Kelly the books. He's written In fact, in fact, sorry I have so many things connected to Kevin Kelly that I have a separate note that I colored So it would stand out on the list of just his books And I'm not I'm not guaranteeing that these are all the books. He's written in fact I know that he's he's written more than this, but these are the ones I have in my brain where possible There's an Amazon link so you can go buy it and the year of of its initial publication So he recently put in a whole bunch of work Publishing the silver cord with Steve Massaroni, which is a graphic novel Which is really quite outstanding In fact, it was a Crowdwritten science fiction work that he then turned into a graphic novel in different ways anyway There should be a cool tools episode out pretty soon and those of you who follow that far enough will end up right here and Then finally I will go to I'm not going to do all of these But in fact, I'm gonna do most of them But I'm gonna go to the American Slave Coast, which is the book. I've been reading and probably 40% through it Now I don't know how thick books are anymore because I read them in my Kindle app on my phone But this book is really tremendous. It's blown my brain and I mean this one not this one he Ned sublet who my wife and I met in Havana on a trip recently where we went to speak at a conference He was also a speaker at the same event He wrote this book and talks about the slave breeding industry, which is much darker than I thought America's past was and he really he really talks about the the economy of the south and he refers he Among the many many interesting things he says which have really stuck in my head. He says that the US Revolutionary war should really be seen as a successful civil war It was the colonies splitting away from the UK and establishing their own governance So they broke away in a civil war and created their own governance, but the motivation was really mostly a slave Dependent economy preserving slavery because the UK Went toward abolitionism first British ships could no longer carry slaves. They blockaded Africa. There's a whole bunch of interesting history here Americans saw that coming and the south in particular But the north also completely complicit were so mixed into this that they couldn't they couldn't go that way It's really quite amazing Then he says look at the US civil war as an actually functional more or less Revolution because that's what broke the back of slavery and of course a hundred years after the civil war We had the civil rights movement and we still don't have equality But the history here is very difficult. All the founding fathers are completely complicit the documentation about in particular South Carolina what is up with you South Carolina But Virginia all these different states what they were doing how they handled it Explicitly what was going on in in Congress and before that in the Constitutional Convention and and so forth is really quite incredible so This thought 1606 new notes. I just made so I could tell you the story I think I'll end here, but I wanted to give you a flavor for what happened over four or five days Each of these probably took me a half hour to do the slave coast I've been reading now for a couple weeks so every now and then I'll add a little something to it But this is what it's like to annotate things in your brain and then have them connect up to Things you've already put in before and don't worry. You don't have to have as many thoughts as I do for that to start happening Thanks for listening and keep coming back subscribe if you like this