 This is the inside Jerry's brain call for Friday, January 4th, 2019. The first IJB call of 2019 and a call that presupposes my mortality, which I think is a reasonable assumption. But the question is what happens to my brain when I am no longer here to shepherd it, feed it, curate it, worry about it, make sure it stays up, et cetera, et cetera. And it's a question provoked because April and I have been working on our wills, and it turns out the only major asset I have is this thing I've done pouring data into somebody else's software. Dave, you and Pete and April are all really familiar with me and my brain, so I don't know that until other people show up who don't have the background, I don't need to explain kind of the nature of the company and the product and what I've done with it. I will do a little screen sharing because I set up a couple of questions in, of course, my brain. So I set up a couple of questions that I'll try to answer just to open the call and then see where that takes us. So this thought over here, basically for every inside Jerry's brain episode, including all episodes of Yeetan and Rex calls and other things that I've done, I create a thought in my brain, and here you'll see these thoughts already have a YouTube link associated with them because these are older calls that I've posted to YouTube and then I put the link in here. So I've created a thought for this call, which later will include the link to YouTube. Hey, Jane, welcome to the call. And so I created a thought about my brain in my will. And I can answer a couple of questions kind of right off the bat. For example, do I want other people to improve the brain? Do I want to keep a version of my brain public? Do I want to be open, et cetera, et cetera? Those things are pretty, actually pretty easy for me to answer. So I'll start off with that. I would love to maintain open access to my brain data as long as possible. I'd be thrilled. In fact, I wish that there was an API so that today people could poke at it, query it, analyze it, do whatever, so that I could throw some AI at it and add metadata and do other kinds of things that would be interesting. But that does not exist right now. But I'm really interested in the brain as it stands being available forever. And I think it's very, very easy to envision that a snapshot of the brain as I had it on the day I left this mortal plane in this bag of meat and water, that a snapshot of that can remain someplace. So the question becomes, how is it hosted? How does it stay up, et cetera, et cetera? But it's really easy to fork this thing so that there is a snapshot of the last thing I did to it. And as of that day, anybody can still visit it and that can stay in whatever perpetuity means, but that can stay up forever. And then I think the interesting question then is, okay, great. So there's a whole bunch of data. Are there other uses? Should someone else, might someone else be inspired to pick up where I left off and keep going? Is this an asset to other projects? Other kinds of things. So the questions I kind of put here spin out of that. Like first, how do I keep my brain data accessible as long as it's possible or practical? The one bright spot right now is that the brain software knows how to export itself to XML. And actually when I gave a talk at the Quantified Self Conference here in Portland a couple of months ago, one of the people who was quite the hacker came up afterward and he said, hey, I'd be happy to try exporting your brain. I haven't given him a copy of it to run the exporter or something like that. I should just do that because that would be interesting to do. So that's very doable. And I think there's a whole bunch of other questions about how do I fund? Who is the host? I run into some questions from the Long Now Foundation, right? And the clock of the Long Now, how do we make a clock that ticks every hundred years, that rings every thousand years sort of thing? The second question that I've been sort of opening up here is who might pick up where I left off? If nobody wants to, I would understand that because it's sort of complicated. But if somebody wanted to use my brain as a starter, as a sourdough starter, and go from there and build on it, that would be really interesting. They might want to meld it with their own project. They might want to, a group of people might want to curate together. I don't really know. I think that's an interesting question. I'm wondering what larger thing might my brain feed? Might what I've created be a starter for some other project? Could it be fed to Google's knowledge graph? Could it be something sort of vastly different? Could it lead to the first evil artificial intelligence? Because it can infer bad intent from everything I'm doing. And then we're all doomed because I actually made my brain openly available. So I doubt that's going to happen. And I wanted to make room for us to brainstorm a little bit. What is the wackiest thing that we can imagine happening to my brain? I haven't gone into this territory really. I haven't thought about Brain Post Me. I haven't thought about its usability in other contexts that much. I mean, a little bit in the sense that I'm talking about right now, like deep mind or Google's knowledge graph or other kinds of things. But I'm not exactly sure where it all would go, should go, could go in those senses. So I'm going to stop the screen share for a second and come back into our chat and see what anybody else starts thinking. I've got a couple of thoughts. Please, Pete. I have what might sound a bit contrarian, a kind of contrarian idea, which is that my guess is actually now that I think about maybe two things. The nodes are interesting, but I think even more interesting than that is the connections between nodes that you've got. So that and the combination of the curation of what nodes were interesting to you, maybe over time, how did that evolve? So I think there's kind of the content of the nodes. But then there's the connectivity of the nodes, which I think is actually kind of more important. And then there's another thing, which is the way that you interact with the whole system. So the interesting thing to me, the thing that I would want to see if I were your great, great, great grandchild or a historian a couple of hundred years hence, I'd want to kind of see the thing in context. How did Jerry use it? What was he thinking as he traversed through things? What did other people think of this? How did this compare with? How did the interconnectivity of that much information? How did that, how did other people react to that? So the things, I think, you know, we'll kind of come back to just digital preservation stuff. And I looked this morning, it looks like now they do JSON as well as XML. Oh, I didn't know. So I think digital preservation is important and kind of fairly obvious. The things that I would be interested in are things like maybe some articles about what you're thinking as you go through the process of using the brain, what you've found other people's reactions to it are just lots and lots and lots and lots of videos of you just, you know, three minute videos of a tour, you know, kind of James Berkish, you know, here's a connection that I, you know, I know that, you know, I know that probably nobody else has made that kind of following that path. And then I think also you interacting with other people. So this is, you know, the IGB series is a great, you know, it's going to be a great artifact. What did other people think of the brain? When you show it to them, what do they think? When you give them a tour through, what do they think? How do they react? I think also going into the future, that's going to be the way, the highest way kind of to maintain preservation of it is not so much just the data. But if you can mentor up other people to do something similar or mentor up other people to do something maybe a little bit different, but be inspired by you, somebody who's 20 years, your junior, 40 years, your junior, or a couple of somebodies who can give somebody a tour to their kids or, you know, their intellectual kids at least in 60 years or 80 years or something like that, that that would be probably a better way and a more practical way kind of to continue the, you know, the thread of it. And can you, you said that this is probably two ideas. Can you separate out the two ideas that you were thinking about? And I'll make it three, content which is susceptible to digital preservation, then connectivity and curation, which is kind of one thing for me clumped together. So, and it's something that I think is not going to be obviously maintained in a digital preservation. Just, you know, just XML representation or JSON representation of the nodes doesn't replicate the UI of the brain and you kind of lean into the UI and you've got a superstructure UI built on top of it that you do just in practice. So part of the preservation, long-term preservation needs to be not only just the data but the use of it, how it's in action. So those are two things, content, connectivity, and then the third one is culture. I think, I think if I were you, I'd, you know, spend the next 215 years of my life building culture around my little digital artifact and the connectivity around it. And the culture is really, I think, going to be the thing that's interesting to the future of humanity and the future of AI is where they go. Many things I haven't thought about. Like Michael and Kevin, welcome to the call. Thanks for being here. Many things I haven't thought about, Pete, thank you. One of them is the idea of mentoring somebody to sort of tend this thing. It hasn't occurred to me. It's a great idea. It's very funny because you said a couple of times, how do other people react to it? And there's this really wide spectrum of reactions. On the one hand, other people trying the brain bounce off it a lot. Like the brain has a real problem with uptake, right? People don't stick on it. They don't groove the habit. Even people who really like it uninstall it 10 times or annually, as Gene does, it doesn't sort of stick necessarily and it can look pretty daunting to people. Then at the same time, I was standing in front of 200 people at the Quantified Self Summit and they gave me some time at the end and I had the brain big on screen behind me and I was busy talking through what I'd seen at the thing. Everybody was leaning in completely enthusiastic. They absolutely got it. Like they were completely on board, excited, and they were like, damn, this is like Quantified. This is Qualified Self. I don't know what it is. But they really got it and that takes me to another thought I've never thought of, which is that the metadata that the brain is actually capturing is actually quite useful. So the brain knows anytime I've modified a thought, when I've put, you know, the brain is time stamping a lot of actions, which is good, which a pure JSON or XML pour out might not preserve, right? Don't know what actually gets poured out other than thought names, link names, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it'd be interesting to know how deep the export would go. And then, of course, anytime I do an export from that moment on, anything I add to my current brain is out of sync with whatever else happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, it gets really complicated there. And then the last thing you said about culture I'd love to go back into, because part of what this is all about is sort of a spirit of inquiry and collaborative sense-making, right? Collaborative sense-making is one of, like, favored phrases for me in this whole space. And the brain that I'm using doesn't lend itself well to collaboration. Right now I'm using it as exhibit A, but it's not like we're all busy editing our brains and sharing them together in this space. And those are maybe several different kinds of culture. But I am really interested, and I've never voiced it this way, in sparking a culture of inquiry, curiosity, memory, sort of thoughtful memory so that we're not asking and answering the same questions over and over again and being spun by other people. I think that's hugely important to me in the middle. Let me go to Gene who's raised his hand and then back to this question of culture. Go ahead, Gene. Culture was one of my questions because I'm not sure I understood what Peter meant about spending the next 10 or 15 years developing culture. And before I give Peter a chance to answer or elaborate on that, I've wandered around in your brain several times, probably numerous times. And I find this is what Jerry connected to this and this is what he connected to this. But what I don't seem to find is, what did Jerry think? There aren't any notes in there that tell me what you were thinking when you put all this stuff together, unless I just missed them. So I use thought names as editorial comments a lot. So I have skeptical of, I have critiques of, I have my beliefs, of course, which is what I believe, right? So that kind of trickles down through. I don't necessarily try to editorialize in the notes field, for example, right? So I think a lot of my point of view needs to be inferred. Does that make sense? It might be a leap too far. It may well be. It may be incomprehensible. I'd be curious if other people who browse my brain have a similar question about like, where am I and what am I thinking? Kevin, go ahead. You're muted. I can unmute you. Hold on. You are now not muted. All right. I didn't realize that I had hit that control. So when I have experienced the brain as an optimal experience like a chick sense mahi optimal experience where the aha is coming through is when you are curating a journey through it. It is not through self exploration. Now, while it's probably a good repository and artifact for someone who might be doing research and wants to see connections for ideas, it comes alive when you use it. It does not come alive when others use it in the same way because it is a representation of you know when you put the link in. You know why it connected to other thoughts. And so the narrative comes from you, not from the brain. So this is a really good argument for me living forever. Well, or that your videotape narratives of journeys through the brain are showing people particular stories, use cases, right, you know, where they could replicate their own. They said, well, now I'm using Jerry's brain to tell you something that I want to say because you've provided it by example. And relative to the comments that I gave you online yesterday, which I won't bother to unpack, you saw those, right? Yes, you need to be able to say, do I want this to be living so that after I die, other people continue to add to this space and continue to make it more and more robust? Or does it freeze at the moment you die? And it is a representation of what you were thinking during your lifetime. They're both legitimate and it's not either or, but there are two different paths and two different intentions that you need to express in terms of what do you want done with what you have created? Because this is a digital inheritance that you've created and you need to express intention about what gets done with it. So just before you and Michael climbed on the call, I did say it's really easy for me to imagine a forking where there's a snapshot of the last time I touched the brain, that gets preserved in aspects somewhere and is always visible as the last version that I touched. And I would love for that to exist, that that's important to me to exist somehow. And then that data gets exported, that brain gets sent to other people, that brain gets published openly and 5,000 people around the world decide to pick it up and go try something and two of them stay with it for a couple of years. I don't know. I mean, I'm interested in all these scenarios where and that could go lots of different directions. So I mentioned in both. So I will leave you with this thought and then I'll go back into listen mode is that if we were to take a technology like the Tonjo machine learning and creative version and interest graph version of Jerry and what he's interested in and you have the brain object sitting here and then you have the semantic web sitting on the other side which is constantly changing what you do when I talk to you as you say, oh, you see what happened today? Let me show you something over here in the brain. All right. If I had a digital representation of your interests, a digital Jerry, things that are happening in the real moment would then trigger references over to the brain, right, which would give you a dynamic ongoing environment. Similar to what Asimov wrote about in the foundation series with Harry Seldin as the digital self that comes back and gives guidance later, right, at certain points in as a psycho historian in certain points of the future. To Michael and then April. Yes, of course. All good points. Thank you, Kevin, Peter. Jerry, your brain is great. It's terrific. Hallelujah. But it's just a brain. You know, it's just one. What is particularly relevant is your brain in. It's like if somebody invented music, somebody's got to play the bloody stuff. And maybe the guy who invented the harpsichord had hammer fists of some sort. You know, like, you know, if you can't play the gig, it's not not communicating. Now what I find most relevant about your exploration, your work, your product is your process of doing it and using this tool as a medium. So so the idea of mentoring, not so much mentoring your material and your content, although that would obviously be the feedstock and all sorts of stuff. Very valuable. But you need to clone people who can play Jerry in their way. It's it's it's it's like learning a new instrument. So definitely mentorship. Bring them in. I agree. And and in 10 or 20 years, you'll you'll also have AI players that that will be able to play like James Burke or like Darren McCall skier. I mean, what would actually a really, a really interesting possible future is where I train an AI to pick up and be be me in the tour guide sense and in the curator sense. Right. And I think the way to do that is is lots of videos of you explaining it to another human. So, you know, so an AI of 20 years hence will be able to kind of have a map of all the stuff in your brain and then watch you make the connections through it kind of people do this too. You know, they watch you braining. It's a great term and they they can see it. I've used this metaphor before with you, Jerry, of you playing, you know, stepping up to an instrument and and playing like you're a concert pianist and other people respond to that emotionally and can see what's going on and can understand what's going on. But that doesn't mean they can replicate it. But I that being able to play the music and hearing music. So in a sense, you've kind of innovated, you know, it's like the brain is like a new a new piano and you've figured out how to become a concert pianist on it and that that that, you know, leap or that practice is kind of the thing to inculcate other people with. If I may, I think mentoring other people for me and what I would imagine happening, you know, 100 or 200 years hence, it's going to be what I would do is try to train, you know, multiple people. You know, this is what I'm doing. I think the people who will catch on aren't necessarily you don't want to mentor them into being the brain experts. And you don't even need actually for them to be able to replicate what you do, but being able to explain what you're doing. So, you know, somebody who can say, okay, now he's he's using his hands in a different way. The keys he has to hit are different or he's changing, you know, look, here's a chord and here's a chord. And did you see the progression that he did between them? So, a historian 100 years from now should be able to say, you know, here's Tiddly Wickey and here's somebody who used it really well. Here's C2, the C2 Wickey and what they were doing with it. Here's Jerry Mikulski and the way he used the brain. And somebody, somebody giving a tour through it, you know, we'll be able to kind of analyze and explain what was going on as you make connections. And that's kind of what you want to preserve. So, yeah, so I just watched this, I think it was a box video about Coltrane's Giant Changes, Coltrane's Giant Steps, right? And I don't know any music theory. I can't play an instrument. I found it riveting. It was fascinating. It was super interesting. And I think it's sort of like what you're talking about here. Yes. Yeah, but you should go back to the origins of jazz as a music form. Right. Because that's the most analogous to what's going on here. Yes. And so I think of some of what I do as a performance art or improv, right? So the couple of times I've been able to have a brain performance with an audience, the most recent being that quantified self thing that just happened. I very much think of it as a combination of improv because I'm taking cues from the audience. Like, what are you interested in? Where do you want to go? And performance art in the sense that this is digital performing maybe one, what a really interesting I should do is I should I should connect to some of the people I know who curate performance art or digital art of different kinds and see what they say and see if we can't set up something with them because I think that's a that's a super interesting venue format channel environment that I have not explored whatsoever. And I found most digital art to be difficult. I haven't I haven't hit that much digital art that I look at and go that I need to do in you know be use inhabit anything like that. Let me let me unmute April for a second because she wanted to step into the conversation and she's on her phone. There we go. April go ahead. Hi everyone and sorry I'm not on video but glad to join this column. These are wonderful wonderful sessions Jerry real quick you might have to drew Katayoka who is very much in the digital art world and could have some interesting ideas. But first and this is where I think the pragmatic part of me and the lawyer in me and all of this just wants to put in a word really quick and then we can go back to being super generative and creative and all of that Jerry mentioned that we're trying to do our will. There's there's kind of a different kind of fork here that I see one of which is and again very practical but I think it's helpful as you transcribe these notes as you think about what happens moving forward. The part about the will is actually highly legalistic but also it's like what has to happen versus or I would say your request for what has to happen versus what you'd like to see happen and none of that actually belongs in a will. So I just I call that out because I prefer the like let's blow the lid off of what all of this could be but at the end of the day it could easily be in the will just a couple of lines where and again this is maybe a different Avenue but we've talked about possibly having a effectively a board of trustees people with to whom you would entrust ongoing the ongoing life of the brain along the lines what we're talking about here but that would simply be your request you wouldn't put anything like I must have a group of what do you call it brainers or that it's not about obligating others to do something it's about there's a separate conversation that I think a lot of this call is about which is beyond the will which is totally fine. I just kind of want to call that out because the will at the end of the day isn't most of what we're talking about right now and that's fine but what I like is that the will itself may end up being just a very simple provision in which and again I don't know if it's a it feels to me like there is maybe a consortium of of people who understand what this legacy ought to be that gets listed as you know or whatever anyway let's pause there but just kind of coming back to some of the more foundational framing of not just this call but your goals for the brain and you didn't say it and I thought you're going to go there as well but like are there legal protections or copyrights or other sorts of things that I should or ought to do so that somebody doesn't somehow waylay the whole thing I mean well this is where yes and no I mean right now the only and sorry if this is a little bit wonky but the only parties to what's going on right now are you and the brain software team so long as somebody doesn't hack your brain or or do something really nefarious which I think is highly unlikely it's just the two it's just you guys so you know would you would you want to make sure in advance that you agree and notify the brain team that your expectation is that you know given the contribution you've made to them the world and all the rest that they would ensure that your brain remain active and I hate to say it but so long as the brain software remains active because there's always the likely the possibility that in the future they're not there and if they're not there within your brain they're not there or that you would be migrated somehow but that would be something that you would contract with them not that contract doesn't show up in the world but it does you would make a reference to the brain software people and then anyone else that you would bring in as maybe a curator or trustee or something like that quite candidly you can do that after you sign the will you just basically say you would make an addendum to it at a later time where you spell out who is on the board of trustees kind of thing anyway this is getting really wonky but I love that for me it's been fascinating because when you think about it as not just as a lawyer your wife but like for in terms of intellectual property and for me and this is more for the broader group what you what we're really starting to touch upon and I think those of you on the call who know me know that I spend time on the sharing economy and access of ownership and heading to the world of ownership this and the other will there a lot about one's legacy and more and more especially as we look at digital assets and what one's digital legacy is this has massive implications I feel like we're kind of today on the tip of the sphere for a lot of people are going to have to be thinking about in the future where it's not like okay I have and I hate to say it put it so bluntly but like in the past it's like okay I have two houses and three cars and a boat and like all this stuff and here's I'm going to bequeath it we're clearly moving towards a world in which that is less common but digital assets and digital legacies are more common and there's not really a set of best practices or principles that I'm aware of for how you think about such things in the context of trust and estates and wills and all of that I does feel like that we're sort of stepping into this whole notion of digital legacies which is a really a really nascent feel. Dr. Whitzel you've raised your hand. Yeah, that was really helpful April I was when I saw the note about the call I got excited because the two meta things that you will indulge one is it does feel to me like you're asking a fairly universal question or any kind of organization that has a depreciating asset I suppose right I mean somehow if you want it to exist into perpetuity it has to be funded and maintained and how do you do that and so you know I think there's a broader discussion around strategies for maintaining this asset so you know and I was you know looking at Linux how is it that Linux is going to you know exist into the future and so there's one if I just think that you've got a specific case of a general problem and then second that this format of doing a consultation around a problem like this I think is really interesting and I'd like to hit you up about doing another one so I've got a guy that knows how to replicate core or he wants business processing by so I was thinking this would be a good format. Sounds awesome I'd love to do that I mean on the inside Jerry's brain website there's a little section that says let me do this for your company and and there's actually a feed schedule because I would love to you know not a problem and the feed schedule basically says if you want to do it openly and you're willing to have the conversation be published and you know live streamed or whatever it's free or close to free and if you know you can pay for privacy kind of thing but but that's something I'm actually super interested in. Yeah and I see the note about a depreciating asset and I don't know if it's to me it's it's any that if it doesn't depreciate if it if it doesn't decay then it's not as big a problem you know I mean flat flat HTML pages are probably easier than anything that has a database for example. I think I think anything that needs to be kept up to date depreciates when nobody's keeping it up to date the moment somebody stops maintaining it it goes starts diving it's not really depreciating it's appreciating as long as people are curating it and it's just getting more and more valuable as it gets better connected unless getting better connected also leads to a deterioration of the sense making capacity of the thing like one thing I worried about you know in using the brain was would it just get too messy and it hasn't I mean to this point it didn't take that particular path but it's funny to think of it in terms of you know passing stuff down this is the brain in some sense going to be like your grandmother's China which like nobody wants grandma's China and you know what I we have we have an old silver tea set that that like nobody wants tea sets it's like weird you might as well melt it down for the silver which doesn't doesn't you know go for much but yeah you know there's a question of value you have to you know it's it's worth passing down to someone and having them be the custodian to the extent that there is some value that they feel and the value question brings up a separate thread that I've been on here on these calls which is why does nobody give a damn that we have no memory like like I'm I'm still completely frustrated that very few people seem to care that we have no collective memory that that we don't get tools for making memory that everything is flow and you know we're busy being spun in the middle of the stream we're like little boats tossing in the great info ocean and it's like well I guess that's the way it's got to be when I stuck a link into I think this is the one I was thinking long ago but Stephen Johnson's note taking tools and his background stuff which is interesting but you know he doesn't try to publish his note taking tools he publishes the books it's an intermediate product and right it could be really interesting to have access to Stephen Johnson's notes I don't know but I don't think they're public and and I don't think that's the product he's talking about he's talking about the books that come out of the product and I wonder if you're in a similar situation or the videos or some or your books are going to be the product of the brain the brain is simply you know it is it was an intermediate product it doesn't have a life. Yeah, let me just screen share for second because I've got his essay from when he when he originally published it not on medium so I think he republished he reposted it because I've got tool for thought which has a different URL here and he's a big big fan of Devon think so I should actually put given what I do these days I would put the reference to it under the tool and I should blink this article up a little bit more but here's here's Stephen and got a whole bunch whole bunch of stuff on him. He's represented by the Lee Bureau. He wrote Mind Wide Open. He wrote The Invention of Air. How we got to now and his latest book Farsighted and I went to listen to a book talk he did here in Portland actually in Hillsborough and we got to hang out for a little while around around it was very nice. Somebody was just Jean you were raising your hand. You are you have to remember where where to unmute me. It's not on my image. The comment about having a collective memory. I mean we don't know we need one until we need one and then we don't have it and then you can't create it. Right and and any when when I'm interested in discussing with numerous people a subject because I'm extremely ignorant about the subject and I would like a lot like or benefit from a number of additional perspectives. Discussion groups suck. Okay. They're essentially a garbage dump. And you know for a long time I have looked for a way to to facilitate a multithreaded discussion that makes sense where you can in fact create a collective memory about the discussion of this topic that goes on so that you start with a thought and then you have two thoughts and then you have seven thoughts and then there are 25 thoughts and there's 25 discussions going on at one time. And I have participated in a number of consortiums where the people that were initially part of the consortium developed ideas and they progressed and the people that were there at the beginning understood the progression and a year later when half of the people changed you couldn't make progress anymore because you spent the next six months bringing all the new people up to speed on what you talked about the first year and and the question was how do you get over this? Okay. And and the brain would make a marvelous archive for this but you can't have 50 people involved in discussions in the brain because it's just too damn expensive. All right. So so I was having a discussion one day with a few people and all of a sudden there's brain fart and I developed this thing in Kumu which is a way to have a multi threaded discussion and and piece it all together on the fly as it evolves and distill it. And in Kumu yes. So Michael would you you already watched the video? Would you say a couple of words about what you thought when you watched the video? Yeah, yeah, I thought I thought it was excellent because it gave pattern and thread it allowed you to annotate and the notes could stay accessible. It seemed like a very practical approach to some quick memory of a conversation in an effective way. So the idea was that that I posted a link to the video that I did about the Kumu project and I just posted a link to the Kumu project itself. And the idea was that that you can develop a discussion on any element that you create in Kumu whether it's an element or a connection or a loop designation. You can have a discussion about it and as the discussion progresses someone can be responsible for that particular thread and they can distill the content of the thread back to the top. So that if something well why don't I just share the screen instead of doing this? Yes, let me let go of the screen for a second. I'm adding your video to my brain under you. You are. It's a sort of distributed curation process. It looks very very usable. Hold on and I'll let go of the screen right about now. Go ahead, Gene. I put this together at about 30 minutes. So I mean the topics aren't anything relevant. But the idea was that that I can create topics and I can initiate a discussion on that topic and anybody with a Kumu username and password can participate in the discussion and then it's all free. And as the discussion evolves I can go ahead and take the meaningful elements of that discussion and I can go ahead and distill them back to the text for the description of that particular element and I can then fork it to create other elements and create discussions on them and create connections between them to give someone a sense of how they relate if they relate and I just just you know figured we have active pending and concluded so that that the ones that are concluded we already talked about and we came to a resolution on and and here's the collective perspective on those and here are the ones that we're currently talking about and this one we haven't started talking about yet. But if I just go ahead and create I'm not even logged in if I just go ahead and create a new element. The idea was that somebody is responsible for that particular discussion thread and and as to when it was started or when it ended and you can put whatever on it you want but you can go ahead and say okay here's another piece. All right and then and then simply say okay. I want to start a discussion on this create the issue. And then it goes ahead and actually puts an asterisk on that element to say that there is a discussion associated with. So yeah. This also points to the need for modularity and interoperability between things like discourse and things like the brain and PUMU because or Evernote for example. So I don't put a lot of the notes field in my brain because I just know it's going to make my brain file gigantic and probably cause problems. But I use Evernote all the time for for note taking. So what if the notes field in the brain could be Evernote. So what if the discussions you're putting in here could have the sophistication because discourse is actually really a very nice threaded conversation engine with lots and lots of features. So what if instead of just a notes field in KUMU software you were linking to a discussion that was on a different platform but was but was perfectly happy looking embedded here where you're showing us in KUMU. You know what was the platform you were talking about? Discourse which is not discussed. There's several. It's discourse. Yeah, there's several. There's a whole a whole bucket of these but I think I think the one I like best right now is discourse but there's there's also I've got a quick suggestion for that. Generate a unique ID and drop it in your different tools as you go. So just go to the threads in discourse and assume that somebody in 10 or 20 years is going to find your your breadcrumb trail. Right. The other the other truism about interoperability is that we don't really understand the the schema behind discourse or KUMU or there's there's a it's the schemas are difficult to kind of instantiate and they're not completely reflected in the technology. They don't map, you know, so it doesn't make sense yet. So right now, the best we might do is find a permanent somewhere in the tool to a piece of the conversation. Drop it in our tool and cross fingers. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So the last thought on that on that project. It's a public project which means anybody can go there and fork a copy of it. Fork is the programmer term for clone and make a copy of it that belongs to them so that they can use it as a template for evolving it to whatever they might find useful. So very cool. Thank you. Excellent. Let me go over to the what is the wackiest thing that might happen kind of question just to play with that for for a little bit. It's funny because when you start talking about the culture aspects of this Pete and I might my brain went to the culture series in banks sci-fi novels and how there's a there's an entire galactic civilization known as the culture that has particular ways etc. And I was like oh wow OK that's interesting. Can you say before we go to other sort of streams can you say a little bit more about how you imagine this this cultural aspect of of using sense making tool would might play out you're muted still how it plays out into the future. Yeah. Let me let me tell I the best way I can do this is maybe tell a story. It's about my brother who's a high school teacher couple different various subjects but he noticed in the past five years or so that the children that kids high school kids are are not learning to write anymore. So he realized he was on this precipice of of change where everybody wrote everything and nobody writes anything and he kind of wanted to document that so he dove into the history of American handwriting learned a ton about it knows a ton and he can now tell stories he can look at different samples of handwriting from you know 50 years ago 100 years ago 150 years ago he can tell you when it was written what part of the country was written in the the gender of the writer he goes into things like library hand which is a certain kind of script that librarians use to do Catholic card catalogs they do a lot of tiny little writing and you know has to look fairly fairly regular so that different librarians have the same kind of hand and he goes into Dewey and how some of the the library hand came out of Dewey and and his writing with people so he's he's got you know he's got interest Edison wrote and or Edison invented an electric pen an electric pencil the idea was it was some kind of vibrating thing or or electrical thing where you could make a copy of something written by writing it and it would duplicate at the same time it was writing I'm so my brother has a culture of handwriting and he's picked it up from bits and pieces there are penman penmanship associations there are lexicographers there's ancient manuscript to people he's got these various lobes of interest that kind of coal us around handwriting that he's he's gone out to each of these communities and learned what they know about the history of handwriting or how to describe the history of handwriting or how to describe you know letters or things like that and so kind of to come back around to Jerry's brain what I can imagine in 150 years is somebody like my brother who's got a passion for the way people used to do information architecture and kind of collaboration and memory and note-taking and you know bunch of different things and they'll have a they'll have stories about the brain and how Jerry Mikulski used it and you know so the I think so if I look at that is kind of an end point I think what you want to do at this point setting aside your will for a sec is teaching people to jazz teaching people to brain and most of the people aren't actually going to be interested in braining as much as they're going to be interested in their own little thing you know it's either wicking or outlining or whatever but for those people who are interested in the things that the brain accomplishes for you who have something some other you know set of tools that they've they've gone over probably all of us having them be able to explain what it is what what you're doing how it's different from that the thing that they you know do whether or not they like it or not and have this culture of braining and all the things adjacent to it is is kind of what I'm thinking well that may I ask your brother's name David Kaminsky thank you now he's under handwriting how about that that's awesome and you saw that library hand and an article about it and stuff like that yeah super cool so so I think Dave Dave said something interesting to me which was you know assets that have to be maintained need funding and maintaining and that's a completely reasonable thing to say and true of of things like maybe land or cars or electric there's there's a different kind of preservation which is cultural preservation people telling stories to each other over and over and over right or people like my brother finding stories or in his case even and I do I do genealogy that's my historical thing I can I can pull together things that people in the past had no clue that would ever exist even DNA matches and and transcribe censuses in search engines and archives in a few seconds I can put together a story of somebody's life from you know 1880 that you know was impossible to even imagine that anybody would know you know 100 to 200 years hence so so back to culture I think so that there's a I've got a passion about archiving and archivists and historical research but there's also another thing which is just people telling each other stories you know over and over and over over the course of generations I I also wanted to one in right in this thread is also another thing another thing you want to figure out how to inculcate is is ceremonies so the long now clock is something that says you know well every you know 100 or 1000 years there's going to be something interesting that happens and we'll wait around for it laying a cornerstone or or creating the the anniversary that of the great demo are things where people can look back and and reanimate something that existed from 50 years ago 100 years ago 100 years ago so if you can have you know a Jerry's birthday party celebration in 200 years where somebody pops open the brain and does some kind of VR kind of thing where it's like okay this is projected on this flat thing you know and the kids are kind of walking around through the space and you know some of them grab the the nodes on the the brain and kind of pull them apart why was he talking about these things you know that's that's what you want love that and it's not funding it's it's culturing right yeah exactly exactly I don't necessarily want to know how much money needs to be put away in perpetuity to pay somebody to do this for that long I want to know what what actions will cause a bunch of people to want to do this in 200 years Michael you've got the floor hands on like unless there's hands on nothing's going to happen and hands is the thing we keep losing I noticed how much you know Peter is using his hands we all point we wave at my you know but then where the hands gone I don't see any hands anymore oh there's a hand right Jerry's hand is up but otherwise we're just faces on boxes and what I found recently is my hands have been sucked into the frame the machine has got my hands first it was keyboards now screens and I'm beginning to feel a bit like to run a source Rex you know you know it's it's futile and it's not working and I I'm devastated by your point the Peter about your brother's experience with the the loss of writing which I I don't write anything anymore it's an ill illegible you know so how how quickly can an entire culture disappear because we are not hands on we're not in the real world with our tactile bilateral multifunctional real-time flow sensory process cooking along oh shit yeah I I love hands and I make a point to use the frame of video calls to put my hands in and do stuff with them because they're expressive and you can say something and you can hold something and you can you know they're they're fun so I but but I I don't see many people doing that mostly we're talking heads now which is one of the functions of this necessary technology this technology is enabled us to form these conversations in the street you know this has got the brain has got to be local friends I want a brain in my home home town as a joint project so I should set up a soap box on the corner and a projection screen behind me and do brain well there should be brain a storefront of some sort in every town the storefront where you can just wander in and participate in the brain and and buskers yeah with a hat and coffee and coffee you know but basically the we we see the political spaces disappeared in my home town you know there's the library and there's the fountain by the intersection but that's it right but you're not supposed to talk in the library right yeah right so if not a civic speech through discussions a space only for individual research so can we just changing take these processes down back into the the social and the community and the present time mm-hmm team go ahead I was to very disgusting movie the other day about the the gaming companies paid the government so that the government could provide a guaranteed income to everyone so that they could stay they could live jacked into their gaming chairs and never leave and it was a just the circle and there was nobody on the streets anymore everybody just lived so I've already forgotten the name of the movie because it's not worth watching but I have no taste in movies I'm sure we could look it up and find it one of the wacky things might happen here just flag one one point here is the story we keep talking about how the story is what confirms and is repeatable and has communication to the the next audience and whatever so it this is about the out of writing the story of the brain and and so partly from Jean's saying I can't infer from your brain what you think about these things your opinion and from he talking about the value of the stories or the narratives or my guided tours you know the cooks tour of why put something in where I'm starting to think of the the three minute videos that discuss a particular path through any as high thing so so my ceiling is the the plant mushroom is the fruiting body the high thing are the little tips of the of my ceiling that are sort of racing out to connect and do things the high fear sort of the active threads that are weaving across right people have the right I think so yeah and so it's a good analogy yeah so and this whole thing is very raise raise rhizomic right very much very much about roots and connections and whatever and and frustratingly my brain is only my brain I would love to see where the rhizomal connections are between us and even perhaps more interestingly just to stretch the metaphor a little bit and I I think I showed some of this in one of our previous IGB calls fungal networks metabolize minerals out of the soil and feed them to trees which cannot metabolize those things themselves the trees exchange sugars and stored energy for those minerals with the the fungus so there are these wonderful symbiotic underground relationships going on of production and exchange so that brings me to different roles that we all might play in these shared curated webs of what we know I mean hold on had to cough in one of my wildest dreams we start to figure out how to have good governance conversations about how to make collective decisions around things that really matter right so Dave around regenerative agriculture and regenerative economy gene around what do what do we think about how we think and how do we represent that and where does it go and who gets to talk about it Michael about currencies and how we how currencies can help us manage resources and connect together back in you know and keep wealth local and all of those kinds of things like the next conversation we're going to have and I'm really interested in that happening so I mean to be to be overly optimistic here for a second I'm creating inside Jerry's brain conversations about these things and we're busy having them and recording them and publishing them so to to the the smallest fractional extent possible this is already happening in the world right there's there's like six of us on a on a Zoom call doing it more or less if we can lather rinse repeat maybe there's something interesting here and this may be such a nishi edgy thing that only you know 60 people care eventually but but how what would need to happen to this so that 6 billion people care that one one of the things one of my open questions is given that I know how many people people bounce off the brain and how it seems to a lot of people or whatever what could you add to Pinterest what one or two gestures or features could you add to Pinterest or Tumblr or any of those Instagram any of those dead simple things where I took a picture I tagged that I posted it what what simple thing could you add to those tools that would give you 80% of the the connective associative mind map be power of the brain could you know is is there an uphill path from a dead simple tool that has a huge audience at some of the symmetric richness of what we're we see and things like the brain I think that's dredging the wrong mud in a way I'm I'm I'm more interested in in processes that are led by a sort of an intelligence and a purpose then that we tap into Instagram and you just go this massive metadata starts happening I mean one day sure but I think what will take braining out into a wider utilization is that it's being wider used in good effect you know it's got to develop its own momentum and process and I hear your your Instagram proposition is like sure there's a big white market out there huge community but I don't think the hugeness of the community is as important as the the function and the purpose of the community well I think you know parents trying to get their kids to eat broccoli or their veggies this people will suck people will someday realize this is good for them we should just keep teaching them these these arcane tools is an arc is an argument but but you know I'm I'm pretty aware that I'm six off the mean in the sense that I looked at the brain thing when Harlan opened his laptop and showed it to me and I could immediately see using it and and that that it mapped to how I did things and I stuck with it and I I've never had like a month where I hate this thing I'm never going to use it again hasn't happened simply hasn't happened sorry Gene Gene has that as a recurring episode at least annually we were looking for different things exactly exactly adding something creating something that matters to me about circular current circular money and things like that and I was like I don't know how I would have such a clear representation of this thing I'm thinking about and trying to make sense of in any other tool I had that thought I was sitting there looking at it going that's nice and crisp and clear and okay next right because it and I have I'm a little bit like you know the the worker be that's down in the comb or or maybe more the farmer I'm gardening a fungus sort of like farmer ants that that could be nutritious to a lot of people because farmer ants don't eat leaves they eat nectar off of the fungus that they are busy tending in their hives right so I I kind of metaphorically see myself as one of those little farmer ants busy in the corner and I wish there were lots of other farmer ants and we were all busy on the fungus but damn it this is like good work and look look and then it's satisfied because like that one little farmer who clear drop of nectar really nutritious this is awesome right and then I look around up and down the the hive and I'm like shit where is everybody and then I come to a call like this or I host to call like this I'm like okay okay here's some of the other farmer ants and we're like all busy in our own little hives because the hives aren't connected how do we do something bigger better out of this team go ahead the hives are connected there are multiple links in my brand to your brain and vice versa okay so though there there isn't another product like the brain is there I mean the only the only one that I know that even comes closest debate graph and it has a different purpose let me actually it's in your brain somewhere right exactly and there's a different question which is what other what other brain activities are there say that again well I think I an interesting question is the the verb part of that instead of the noun part so there's brain with the brain is there wicking with wikis there's you know I do something similar to to what Jerry does with the brain but I do it with a weird hodgepodge of all kinds of stuff was what's that what is that why what is that or what tools I you know more no more what no more the questions why rather than with what or or how what with the brain doesn't doesn't serve the need for some reason for yeah for a couple of reasons okay which we could go into but it's probably not the interesting thing I think that the interesting question is what is this you know what what's the activity of brain and and what's what happens with Jerry when he's doing that and what happens with Jerry and another person when he's brain with somebody else so so since making the the closest word that we've got is since making and collaborative since making and and maybe you know a mash-up of the word since making and memory or something like that I so a couple of people I I we talked about the the box jazz thing that's there's a Siri by a still Caswell and she's got this magical way of being able to she's a video essayist she's got this magical way of making connections through happens to be music right there's Maria Popova who kind of does the same thing out of you know literary and cultural history James Burke was the same kind of thing where you can make a thread through history so since making and and ironically there's an irony to me which is the thing that I I think the best thing that could happen to Jerry's brain is that there will be sense makers there will be a Marie Popova or Marina Amaral in 200 years kind of taking you know a whole bunch of branding and telling a story about it in the in the in the lexicon of the the age you know which is probably going to be immersive VR so so I have a thought that I've just gone to here in the screen sharing of just changing its color because I'm really is it's sort of important to me for a lot of people's lives were shaped by Atlas shrugged in the fountain head many people point to cosmos Carl Sagan's book a lot of people were motivated by the whole earth photograph that Stuart brand basically said asked NASA to cough up and said hey why have we seen the whole earth what's the deal and out of this comes Earth Day and environmentalism and a bunch of other stuff right and this nice article about Stuart in the New York Times the man who changed the world twice and his creation the whole earth catalog which influenced a whole bunch of other people right so so in the best of of all futures I would love braining yes as a verb to be on this list yes right I think that's a good aspiration for me here's powers of 10 Ray and Charles Eames right so so for example of Keith Yamashita of S. Y. Partners was inspired by powers of 10 right so sometimes when people say out loud what motivated them I'll make that link explicit here and I don't remember who Richard Foy is but oh he's a guy that I met at at the conference on world affairs in Boulder which April and I going to go to again this April and he was also inspired so I'm really interested in this idea of braining as a verb and and I think braining is an instance in a class of of other things and so braining isn't isn't the only interesting or and it's not even the most interesting one of those necessarily and braining as I practice that is not collaborative yet it's only collaborative the sense that we're in a conversation and as you know Pete as you mentioned a couple things I didn't have in my brain and I'm you know I I've set aside to go put a still in it's also collaborative just when when you can perform for somebody in the same way that you know I I I jazz musician can play for a small group or even one person there's some collaboration going on there even though that makes sense mm-hmm well and when when it's when improv is working right and when when the audience and and and I are connected is really it feels really interactive I I can feel their curiosity they're asking great questions it's lively it's it's lovely I like that a lot I think it probably feeds back into the way that you bring to yeah that could will be huh so what else does this braining mean Jean go ahead the the relationships that you make that make sense to you are are to an extent dependent upon all of the experience of your entire life right so at that moment when you form a mental relationship between things it it may be a relationship that doesn't make any sense to other people might be might not be because you made it because it made sense to you and that was based upon all of your experience that other people only some of which other people have right there's a question about hmm when when I now there is a couple of people been talking to you about the about the book I'm writing and and who the target is and and where I'm missing the target because I'm writing it from a perspective of what makes sense to the audience that I'm writing it for and and they're trying to get me out of my box okay to to think about it from an understanding of the perspective of the target audience and it's and it's real difficult to get out of the box and stay out of the box it's like you know the people who work in a product-oriented company have real difficulty thinking about I think that the same thing comes into play in terms of the way that you build the relationships in your brain so a couple things on that one is this thing I just noted here about beginner's mind which is over the years I've developed kind of an idea that to do something innovative you often need to know a lot about the history of how the thing gets done so when the internet shows up I because I was a tech analyst for a while I knew a lot about how the phone system worked I knew what the difference was between a PBX and a Centrex and how you know how switches worked and all that kind of stuff and the really hard thing is to know a lot about something and then try to forget enough about it that you leave enough mental space that this other thing showing up actually sounds smarter and more reasonable and will probably take off even though if you bought the philosophy of the existing regime you would reject it out of hand right so I remember I was an advisor to AT&T laboratories when Dave Nagel was in charge I went to one meeting one year and we were talking about IP telephony I was like on a soapbox about how urgent it was and they were like TCP IP is not designed for telephony this is a really stupid idea and at the next meeting they had a voiceover IP call between their Menlo Park office their New Jersey office and a Berlin office and they were already late to the party and they never quite like figured it out then AT&T basically goes belly up and Southwestern Bell buys it as a badge and pastes it on the front of the company and the current AT&T is not the old AT&T almost no remnants of it and that's in my brain as well like Southwestern Bell and some of that legacy and it's confusing and I can't I should do the story of these different parts and I'd like to but anyway getting to beginner's mind is really really hard and that's part of what I'm trying to do with this collaborative sort of memory collaborative sense making thing because I'm 21 years buried in this brain thing which has shaped my head in different ways for what I expect, how I work what I see, what I like what smells good what doesn't smell good and I realize that that's twisted my perspective on it quite a bit I think in some ways in a good way because I often and staring at a screen that's really quite clear and expresses well what I'm trying to remember or say and then the second point I wanted to make from what you just said Jean is when braining with people with other people it's kind of up to our conversation to peel back the layers of the onion that I have in my head around that context and so I will dive into the first obvious thing and then if somebody else asks a question or points something out or looks at the periphery and says well what's that I'll go there and try to explain and there are tons of stories that most nodes in my brain like lots of directions I could go and there's no way to download all the context and all the history I have so this is I don't mean to this is not self-aggrandizement but I just recently was listening to Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's cello concerto like one of the late ones which is really kind of an abstract piece of music and it's beautiful and he's sitting back he's leaning way back in his chair holding his cello sort of flat against his belly and he's playing like this and you sense that every note Yo-Yo Ma has ever played is showing up in the thing he's playing right this second he's right there inside of Bach's head inside of his cello's wood he is like really you sense it so that's what resonated for me when you said that when I'm playing or Pete when you were describing how I'm braining or using this thing I feel like well yeah and what I'm hoping to find is a shortcut way to explain the most important part about whatever it is I'm looking at right now what was the insight because my brain as an analyst for a dozen years my brain is trained to go to how do I crisply express the insight that I'm staring at and so what I'm trying to do when I name things in my brain and when I make connections is tease out I'm trying to do like a bonsai gardener does I'm trying to call out the warp or twist or natural shape that we're looking at to enhance it to make it more visible so that others might see it and I'm clearly not succeeding that much in there because you know Jean I think it's perfectly normal that you would say hey I'm not getting your opinion here but I'm trying to do that through digital topiary but you're too good at it Jerry that's not the problem you are too good at it and really what has to be acquired is an equivalent sort of comfort levels by a bunch I can lean back you know we've got to get good at this and I mean carrying on with a sort of musical analogy I'm seeing a potential emerging relationship between braining and cooming that it's sort of like the brain is sort of like the rhythm section it's firm it lays down the pace it makes connections it puts the pieces in it's your moving static if you like whereas the cooming in la Jean it's very much multi-threaded it's solos it's cross-reference it's flow so it would be interesting to explore how those two plays could interact with a content area that was entertaining and useful it interacts very well now that I can embed coomoo projects in my brain and actually have them show up in the brain and I've developed no proficiency in coomoo or many other tools I'm very proficient in Prezi which I like so I'm very comfortable in Prezi and I'm using that but I still and I do see these tools it's very complimentary I see that one of the inside jerry's brains calls that I want to do in the next couple of weeks I'm waiting for Robert Best to come back from a trip but I want to set three or four of us up who use different tools and to listen to the same conversation or start from the same idea do our own version of whatever it is we're mapping from that conversation and then compare notes and the meta-maps version and the brain version and something else because we're not doing the same thing exactly and there's different kinds of value that come from those different exercises right? yeah and well what we don't have yet is the jazz quartet what we don't have is us playing off each other while doing this we don't even have so one thing I've offered to do at several conferences and I've gotten to do this once at Peter van de Ora's finance conference whose name escapes me right now but I can look it up anyway there was a panel about the future of money and I was sitting behind the panel my brain was on a couple big screens above the panel I did not say a word during the panel but I had already put all the panelists in my brain and as they talked I was busy bringing up the topics that they mentioned right? so if they mentioned the vendor if I brought up the vendor, if I didn't have it I added it, I was basically I was doing graphic facilitation sort of of a sort but in my brain during the call it was really interesting I'd love to do more of that but even just putting up a projector and braining at an event is a rare thing nobody's looking for right? nobody's asking for this not a soul I would love to go do that I'd be perfectly happy to attend conferences and be the brain annotator for a while it would be super cool I could also do it just from my barca lounger with a bud light in hand listening to a live stream that's really easy and they could project the results of my brain that could screen share back that would be super simple too I don't actually have to be physically present at the event which I would think is a whole branding opportunity too especially if I sit there with the barca loungering we get a good portrait of me with the bud it's a sort of skill like these graphic artists that have proliferated over the last 10-15 years wall charts of everything that's been talked about same thing except you don't have to be present back to where you started about this there are things that I do in Kumu that you cannot do in the brain there is no equivalent which is what I finally sorted out in my mind to try and get one thing to do all of the things that I needed to do and it just doesn't work that way and Kumu I think will let you set up a simulation where you have variables and you have dependencies and you have variables that have effects on other variables and you can run it as a simulation that's the inside maker damn it and we also could use and I think this is an interesting role we could use knowledge from people who know a whole bunch of different tools and who the experts are who the black belts aren't using each of the tools to help people find their way to the right set of tools for the questions that they're asking because mostly what happens is we get good at one thing lots of people are really good at excel for example and we wind up just bashing that tool against whatever problem shows up yeah exactly that's pretty much fun so how do we get a jazz quartet this is really intriguing to me I'd love to do that so on the inside jerry's brain list if you're interested suggest who all we should bring together because I'm already going to invite Christina Bowen, Rich Robert Best they're both Kumu experts and so are Eugene so we could get multiple Kumu experts actually sorry Robert is actually using metamaps earlier so we could have brain, Kumu, metamaps going if I should add another one or two tools let me know send me who one is you can add the insight maker and I'll cover that one too fabulous and maybe something else but let's have that call and see where that goes and do a little compare and contrast that'd be fun and then before we run out of like 90 minutes which we're sort of right on thoughts now looking back on the question we started with which is what does all this mean for my brain as a legacy and what do I write into my will and Pete I think I have to do a lot of things that are separate from the will in order to create a community that might outlast my life that would be interested in this quest and would sort of carry it forward in an interesting way and I really love the idea of braining as a thing and I'm now extremely inspired to create just a ton of short short video to out loud on what I see what it means to me and how that all works so that all works so what else does this mean for my will I've got a dangling thought before we go to that wrap which is if we rewind three or four minutes Michael I ended up saying you're too good at it you had said right before that you're putting stuff in and trying to make an obvious connection but it's obvious to an analyst right especially obvious to you I think the picture that gives to me is you've made a parsimonious connection a parsimonious representation of a larger thing and again with the music analogy it's a lot like you've finally created a jazz passage that you've been going over and to a accomplished musician a accomplished jazz musician or maybe even somebody in a classical pianist they could pick up your notation and they would go I see what he's done here I'm going to just follow the same thing and they could actually explain this is why he did this transition this is why the rhythm changes this way for the rest of us we're looking at a bunch of dots on paper okay I kind of see that there's some nodes and I kind of see that there's so the performance is not captured in the brain the brain ends up being essentially the sheet music for an accomplished pianist that another accomplished musician could read and constitute there's another really nice music video of Leonard Bernstein introducing Glenn Gould to play some Bach and the introduction he says hey look here's the sheet music Bach leaves no clues and we don't have recordings we don't have any evidence of how these things were actually played we have a little bit of what the instruments were like of the day so we can tell that period period instruments would sound a little different etc etc etc etc but there's just it's like bare bones score you have to figure out what he meant what it means you have to crawl inside his head which is what Glenn Gould does too right so super super interesting to see the many ways you might express a passage and how it all hooks together and all of that and then in dance notation this is true too but you know when a musician sits down with a score when an actress sits down with a script their notes on the score or the script are the inflections the pauses the the crib sheets all too often these are totally mystical to any other person a lot of these are personal notations that they would understand because they need to glimpse at it and be reminded of a much bigger thing that they've internalized already because that one little hint on the score is reminding them oh yeah this is where I picture like there's a truck coming after me and I need to hurry up and like speed up the pace or something right but I like that a lot I added Dick Hyman who does these arranging arrangements of old music he's got an album called if Vicks did Gershwin I think it is he's a piano player but he can arrange music to sound just like it would have you know in 1930 ooh that's cool I just added him to my browser to go hunt him down he's not in my brain yet but we'll be soon that's Hyman and Haifa today that's good Haifa Haifa cool any closing thoughts anybody there are no closing thoughts there are no closing this does not have a period this was really inspiring for me and opened a bunch of new territory in my head in the onboard brain so I really appreciate that and if you can think of a couple of IJB call topics other topics that tumble out of this suggest them on the list or send me an email or whatever I'd love to do that I'm certainly going to do the compare and contrast different mind mapping tools and we'll go from there and otherwise Gene and Michael I'll probably see you in a second because we're going to come back I'm going to stop recording this then we can just hang out in here no periods just a lot more questions excellent we're good thank you thanks guys