 This is weaving the world ops call on Wednesday, November 24th, 2021, the day before Thanksgiving. And I like your advice to not do the call on Thanksgiving. I haven't heard anybody call up, but I also don't know who's watching Town Square. So Stacy on the Town Square matter most I said how about this year. Last year I felt like we really needed to get together on Thanksgiving. This year I feel like we really need sort of time to go take a walk and see family and whatever else so I think I'm I think I'm going to pass on tomorrow's call. Sorry, back to you. Oh, Jerry you were you were wondering. Well, how to get out of you know what what advice we might give to help you get out of your own way with weaving the world, I think, and, and you've got a good sense of you know some of the next things, finding a podcasting host. Maybe it's anchor maybe it's maybe it's not maybe it's blueberry maybe it's not. And then just doing some production. I have a an oddball suggestion, which is related to suggestions I've made before for you. And maybe it'll maybe it'll resonate maybe it won't but I think if I were you, I would hire a taskmaster, I would hire somebody who was doing the project management of it. And they wouldn't necessarily even need to have to be like sometimes you want, you really want a good project manager. In this case I think just being able to externalize and then reflect with another person. You know, what, what should we do next. It's a, it's a hard thing to do that all in one head. It just means project management, not production help this is separate. And I think, I think, you know, if I were in the, in charge of the budget, it seems like an overhead overhead he kind of thing to do. I mean, I mean, I have a we budget, but I do have budget to spend on that. I mean, I was just thinking with what money and then I'm like, all right, I could use the. I think it's a really good demonstration and if, if I were a funding partner or if I were a participant, and you know the, and we, we ran through the course of the current funding. I think I would be really happy with one of the outputs, actually top line, one of the outputs is how we did it, you know what worked what didn't. So that for that you don't need project management. But, but I think that is actually an output that you should, you should aim for, you know, actually, maybe a mini episode even a behind the scenes episode or a wrap episode or something like that, you know, okay, we're at the end of season one, here's what we learned. Here's what went really well. Here's what we do again and here's what didn't work. You know, join us for next season. Makes me want to do a podcast. So then the other thing I guess in that retro in the, you know, in the in the wrap party in the wrap review. I think it would be really useful. I, you know, thinking through what that was, you know, it's like, and we hired a project manager part time, you know, we didn't. We didn't budget a lot for this we didn't, you know, we, we, we bought a few hours from somebody, we didn't buy all the things that we wanted from a project manager, but it really helped drive the project forward it helped us keep on track and, you know, Jerry the the lead, be able to reflect with another person, you know what was going on what, what to do next, especially. And like I said before, it's, it's, it's really hard to do that kind of project management in your own head without, you know, without somebody who's a little bit less involved in the subject, being able to look at, you know, you in the meat any person in the meat of the subject, and say, you know, here's where we should go next here's what we should do from, from arms length. I think it'd be really bad. And that's what I would pick next. What that's what you should do. I think so question. So the person I imagine is creating an organized list of what has to be done next and using some kind of tool to present it and the tool question is a separate question here, but it's interesting to my problem is when I'm confronted with a long list of things, that doesn't necessarily fix things for me. The kind of project manager I could use is one who'd love to pair program on some of these things or, or one for whom some of the tasks are go invite two people to pair program with you on this this this this and this. So that somebody shows up to do it with me. The interface to the project management infrastructure shouldn't. I mean, it should be what serves you best and what drives you best it shouldn't be, you know, oh, hey, I made a long list of crap here I'll come back in a couple weeks and see how you did on it. Right, so I'm trying to figure out how to get to the one that's going to work. It's a lot more and the tool, the tool question is really interesting and, and you know me I would love to come back to that. And for this project what I would want to see is somebody who has a set of tools or processes that they use already. I don't care actually if it's digital or it went where or paper or whatever I really don't care, right, but they should be able to manage, you know, I have a list of 100 things. And Jerry, here's, you know, here's the next one, and the one after that by the way that don't think about it here's here's the one that you have to do today, and another one is going to be another two or three. I whatever I think that's probably you can handle more bandwidth than that but they should, they should. For me a project manager is project management is more about facilitating the project getting done right. It's not making a list of things. A list of things is involved and a good project manager will have a list and they'll probably have a list of lists that they have and nobody wants to deal with that that's why they're the project manager that's their daily work to manage. Stacy you were going to trip in a moment ago. Yeah, it's it's just slightly different just an idea, like you just named a few questions that you had and I was just wondering like if you had a schedule and like at nine o'clock. The question is, you know, which, I forgot what you said which hosting thing would I use, and you invited people just for that conversation, you know, in a group that wanted to share and then at 10 o'clock, like if you had a whole schedule of events that people knew about and they could stop in for the question they wanted to weigh in on. I don't, you know, only this is a very different kind of thing so only because the whole thing is about engagement I just wonder if that would be helpful at all. I'm imagining different ways in which this could be instantiated, one of which wouldn't probably work for me given who I am, which is that there's a list on a calendar on a schedule that's that that's only for me that only I see because I have this very weird trait where I show up for other calls anything that involves another human. I'm on the call I have no problem I show I love it I'm mentally completely in any event I put on my schedule that's just an update for me to go sit down and do something. I have the worst trouble sticking my my butt in my seat and keeping it there, like the worst trouble. I don't hold I don't hold appointments with myself well at all. So if I was faced with a long list of what to do at nine 10 o'clock and it was just me. Probably not going to get done that way, but I can see a different way where either the list is made public which is like sort of public blackmail which is interesting but not great like it doesn't make me feel good but I get the pressure would be different. Or it's something else in a different I can see it instantiated maybe in a different way which which could work. I just, obviously, or I would have solved it and I'd be like my life would be humming. I haven't hit that system yet and adopted it to know that like like that that one, when it when it's shaped like this, it starts humming and I start just like being in the flow because what I, the problem I'm having is transitioning into the flow when I'm in the flow I do stuff really quickly like I'm efficient when I'm when I'm focused. Right, I'm talking about having one set block of time hours hours, but you have that schedule which is public have at least one designated person sitting with you, but other people still invited to come in for that question. We're going to be talking about this at nine at this at 10. And at the end of that, those little blocks of time, you answer the question. It's like, okay, so we're going to do this. Check it off. Go to the next block of time, which you've already said is going to be the next question. So am I am a pair phrasing it badly by calling a pair programming hours with tasks assigned to each of the segments of each doesn't. Sounds like you're sounds like you're phrasing it perfectly. It's Mark. I really like that Stacy. And, and I feel like from experience I there, I don't have any problems. So one problem, I think is, I think we don't have budget to pair pair somebody to make sure they have time in in chair with with Jerry. I think this would be like an open list of for all GMers and drop in and we don't know that any. Yeah, and then office hour drop in stuff. And actually I can speak from experience with wiki Wednesday right. Just because you advertise, you know, availability of something doesn't mean that you're going to get any participation and it doesn't actually mean that you're going to get focused participation. So I can kind of imagine a tweak on that where it's We're going, you know, here's, here's a block of time, let's get together and make progress on this sub project, you know. But I still worry that having having people drop in and drop out is probably not a good team dynamic. And then Bring people up to speed a lot. Yeah, unless you have have a dedicated person, you know, a dedicated person. We could mint that we could start it down and mint the coin and offer people are what basically and What's the word. Profits. Yeah, profit. I'm just saying, put it this way, the people that show up to the OGM calls, they're not coming for money. They actually enjoy being there. And there are people that care about I don't even remember the different anchor or blueberry. There are people that want to be able to just say, Oh, I like this because so if they know beforehand, that's the question being answered. They might stop in the same way you stop on somebody's Facebook post and put your opinion. I'm thinking with that kind of motivation. And if it's if it's people we know and they might just come because they want to help you. And also, Pete, we table the conversation that we've had tried to have a couple times about having IO use of some sort for people who put a lot of effort into OGM. I, my last conversation with John Borthwick, we only had a half hour, but I said, Hey, John, like, if I wanted to go set up a Dow or something like that for OGM, what, what would we do and he proved his brow and it didn't turn into okay call this person do this thing do that thing so it was not, it was not a simple thing but but if we had a picture if we had a cryptocurrency, we could we could in fact reward people with something for participating in these kinds of things. Okay, Michael. We're, we're trying to figure out how to, how to find a project management model that will work with me, which I hope is not an oxymoron, or an impossibility like I hope it's not like an impossibility theorem of some sort that I've just uttered. It's really straightforward. We're finding our way toward it. Yeah. And, and, and one of the, one of the cool things about you Jerry is that you actually work really hard and really fast when you're on task. More, more so than most. So, so what do we think about the idea of hiring project manager person. I think what you said earlier about finding someone who's got a methodology and a tool and a process, I think that's right on. And I think what I need to do is shop for the process and the person. I think I need to figure out whom to ask but I need to sort of knock on some doors and book a couple calls where I'm like, okay exactly like what do you walk me through what tool you use how you know screen share me through a couple a couple incidents or setups or something like that. You shouldn't care what tool to use. I kind of do because the tools seem to matter to me and I'm also and let me open the tools Pandora bucks for just a second, because we've we've brushed that a couple times during our time in our gym. I'm, I'm, I'm, there's a little budget and I'm interested in six months worth of Mondays or something like that. So, of all the project management tools I've ever gotten to use the one that I was like, Oh, this shiny object is really sweet and luscious was Monday selected more than Trello more than a sauna. More than the couple others I've sort of tasted, and I'd be, I'd be happy to find a human who is like a black belt in Mondays and has their own process, and then pay for start paying, you know, for Mondays for six months and see how that goes. It's great and that becomes the PM tool and off to the races but but I don't know, right. I, I, I feel like it's a failure mode if you're doing, if the tool is interesting to you. Really. Oh, for me, for me it's like, I, for me the tool matters a bunch because if I am not looking forward to opening Trello on my on my desktop or even flipping. I think of that not as often right there, the, the interface to the tasks and the interface to the work should be amazing for you. But I have a hard time thinking that Mondays would be better than having the project management person say hey, I'll start to call with you today and I've also scheduled a pair for you today. Where I don't, where I don't, where I don't see the tool you mean or where it's transparent to me or invisible to me. If, if it needs to be in a tool interface, then, and you know Mondays is the most beautiful thing you can imagine, which I have a really hard time to believe, by the way. Because it may be the most. No, it may be the most beautiful project management tool. But a project management tool I think is, is like weak sauce compared to the most beautiful thing you can imagine, you know, the most beautiful thing I can imagine for you is a pool of casso sweeping in and going, okay, let's get to work, you know, and then the next day it's Richard Feynman and the next day. Stephen Hawking pulls up in his turbo wheelchair. Yeah. So, you know, so that's, that's the bar to reach and then, you know, Mondays or Trello or you know, it's like, I mean, just because those are things that people use to get stuff done doesn't mean that that's the best, you know, the best interface to getting things done. So, if, if it were the case that Mondays or Trello or Airtable or, you know, whatever, Asana, were the interface that you wanted, what I would want to see is a project manager, project management person going, okay, it turns out I use Excel and a bunch of legal pads, but, you know, Galdurn it if, you know, if Mondays like gets you excited to wake up in the morning and it's like, okay, I'm going to knock out my Monday stuff. He or she would be, you know, sticking a bunch of stuff in Mondays based on a much larger set of their tool and process. And then, you know, here, here's your, your stuff for this week or this month on Mondays. And I think they could probably do a better job than Mondays of or Asana or whatever of setting you up for success, setting up to be excited, setting up to and it's probably a lot more like today's, you know, hey Jerry, you know, good morning. So today you've got, you know, X at 10am and Y at 1pm and Z at 2pm. She's, you know, she's X, you know, she's blah, blah, blah, and wants to talk with you about this, you know, this person is going to help you do these things and Z is going to, you know, etc, etc. So whatever that interface works, I, you know, but it doesn't need to be the tool that the project management person is using. So I think in thinking about this, I'm assuming that I can't pay for somebody to be as involved as you just described, because, because in the center you described which does sound juicy and delicious for me. And there's somebody who is actually involved in my daily life all the time and saying, hey, here's the next thing, hey, here's the next thing. And they're doing jujitsu right ahead of me, like a fantastic assistant would do or a great ops person would do. And I can't afford that. So the reason I don't think that's true. The reason I'm relying on this. Okay, so I'd love to figure out how to afford that but but the reason I'm relying on the tools is my assumption that a whole bunch of this is going to have to be me and anyone else who feels like helping and who can come in and actually do some some some work on it. Using the tools as backdrop for what's next, how does this fit where does this go the the get yourself out of your own way is where we started this question. I think if you're doing any kind of project management stuff or trying to figure out what to do next or, you know, watching the tool going okay these are the, the six, you know the six things in the asana tasks or whatever. I think that's a sub optimization. You know, it's, it's like, we've, we've taken our specialist, Jerry you're a specialist and you do what you do really really well, and we've assigned them to the project management tasks, it's like, Why would you do that. You know, and, and that's the definition of being in your own way for me is having you do pretty much any project management stuff, you know not that you can be wonderful at it. It's like, you know, it's like taking a turbo race car and slowing it down to not even first gear. It's like we're getting out and walking and pushing the thing. I need Guido from cars. Yeah, yeah. That would be a good one. I need Guido. I thought you meant Guido Van Rossum from Python. No, no. Yeah, no. Yeah, that might work too. And God knows, Python's become a huge thing. Anyone, Michael, Mark, Stacy, other thoughts. I was just going to throw in about, about the seductive, you know, Monday's interface that, you know, it is, it is the prettiest of those things that I've seen. And you sort of, there's this feeling like you want it to like that, harnessing that desire to want it to succeed because it's pretty and satisfying when you click on things and move them. It is, is, is sort of a boost, but it's, it's a little bit of a sugar rush. And, you know, I've worked with Mondays and Trello and Jira and, you know, all these, all these different things and, you know, Todoist and just like various combinations of various things and paper folders and GTD and blah, blah, blah. And, and I don't think that the tool really makes that much difference. Honestly, it's, it's, it's like they're the, and I'm specifically referring to Mondays is like I thought Mondays because it felt good and looked good would supercharge the same stuff that I've been doing in the Asana suite. And it didn't, it didn't really. Great, great evidence. I appreciate that. That's, and, and when I, when I said that it was the best looking sort of I kind of meant, I would be really happy to turn to it often in the day and see what's next, and I can see myself updating it a whole bunch of times in the day. Etc, etc, etc, where, where if we hacked one out of air table, I think it would be interesting, but I would then have to become an air table black belt to use it kind of so. So I think that Monday kind of takes that away. Her table has has a whole new thing called interfaces. So if you get an air table person to set it, set it up, right, you can have beautiful air table now and not have to deal with the air table interface. I, and some of the best. Well, when I've seen project management done really well, it's with Excel actually Excel is probably the power tool I've seen use best and it's not, it's like, like Michael says it's not really the tool. It's practices and the artistry and the genius of being able to keep up a bunch of stuff and make them all happen. And, you know, with with tools that help you. So I think Jerry that the thing that I would, I would ask you to do is instead of going, I need to find the best tool so that I can do the project management. I think you should really split into. I'm a podcast host. I'm a connector. I'm a maven. I'm information specialist. I'm a magician. And project management is something that I need to hire for. So it gets done well, it gets done cheaply. Maybe economically is a better way to say that. And, and it just works. So taking that apart. This is I think of effective people, you know, in the tech world is the the folks I kind of know the people I look up to. It's the ones who figured out early on. Here's, here's how I am turbocharged here's how I got a lot of work done right. Yeah, exactly. And it's doing what they do really well and outsourcing the other stuff to other people. Right. And it's when they find an effective outsource that they, you know, can ramp up or triple or 10 acts what they used to be able to do. Right. Yeah. So what what you should do is look for a 10x improvement in throughput of podcasting, which means that you need to take yourself out of the project management loop and do the podcasting and then hire in for the support of project management. Stacy, I was just going to ask, is it possible that maybe Jerry needs an assistant more than he needs a project manager. Same thing. To me, they're not. To me, they're not the same thing at all. Because to me, an assistant means that he's directing. So in essence, he's still a project manager but he's not doing, you know, it's like, here, take dictation that whole thing, you know, it's it's different to me. To me, project management is. It's not the boss. Project managers is not the boss. Project management is a facilitation where the project manager is the boss of their domain, but their domain is making sure that the team gets the work done. So my question is what like when I think of project manager, I think of a higher level of expertise than I think of with assistant. I, you must have seen assistance in your life, who are kick ass and where they're great assistant like for example, I'll give you an example I am a great assistant. When I call myself a project manager. No, I mean, if I'm planning a bar mitzvah maybe, but not if I'm, you know, In your role as an assistant you're doing project management, some of the time at least some of the other times you might be therapist some of the times you might be, you know, appointment maven or something like that. Okay. So, and to Jerry's point about Oh my God, Pete you just described something wonderful and it sounds damned expensive there's no way I can afford that a first place to look is virtual assistant. So the kind of stuff that I, I, I, you know, somewhere between booking Einstein for today, out of the grave and, and self serve Mondays somewhere in that continuum is some some reality but a good chunk of it is a virtual assistant. This is what a virtual assistant does right. They, they say okay, tell me all the crap that you've got, you know, let's let's let's rant for 20 minutes on on the 10 things that you think you have and by the time we're done. I'll have a list of 100 things. I'll leave them in my, my tools. I'm not going to tell you what my tools are because you don't care and you don't need to care and then every morning I'm going to, you know, drop in for for 10 minutes tell you what's up. Check in with you at the end of the day and so it's you know like a, like, like a four hour a week virtual assistant is probably a huge step up from where you are right now, a huge step up. And if we could hire that person out of the universe of, of OGM or something, we could maybe pay or otherwise compensate. Right Stacy. A person and get even more value out out of that right because they know you or they know the space or, you know, they're, they're, they're doing double the work because half the time they're connecting with, you know, amazing people that they've connected to and then they can chitchat with, you know, whoever. I don't know. Jerry correct me if I'm wrong but I think just from what I observed that there's a piece of you that really likes that personal connection. You know, so I would. Yeah. So I think it's important to have somebody there. Just to say, right, did you do this, or, oh, we have this person has to be contact or whatever it is. We have that personal connection I mean I know from the one call we did together where you wrote the letter. Yeah. Yes, and also I'll point out that Michael very kindly gave Phil Kennedy some time to spend with me, and we had some standing calls for well and he was, he was trying to do that sort of but we didn't really spec it down this way, and we didn't focus this way but it was very much like what's next. How do you know how do we make this happen kind of kind of thing. And we wrap that up a couple of months ago. Right around the time when Phil moved to London. I think sort of chemistry and connection or whatever matters a bunch here but the process and, and standing up what Pete what you were describing sounded pretty reasonable, just from my personal personality perspective. The way I see it going is I so so the cool thing is you've made one big first hurdle right you've got budget you could actually hire somebody. Maybe you will maybe you won't. If I were my my path forward or or what I can kind of see roadmap wise is a higher virtual assistant, who's somewhere between three and four hours a week or something for three weeks, or four weeks. The first couple weeks are going to be tough so four to six weeks actually would be better. I Jerry learned how to let go a little bit of of worrying about project management and let let somebody let a professional do that let them hold the space for deciding what to do, making sure it gets done, things like that. Not deciding what to do in the whole universe of things but deciding what's the next most important thing that we've agreed upon is my list of important things to do. So, learn a little bit how to delegate getting shit done, you know, over three, four, five, six weeks. Then maybe move on to the next phase of that you know get another transfer funding, be able to pay for eight hours a week of a virtual assistant, find somebody even more aligned with me maybe the first virtual assistant was fine but kind of, you know, we didn't click the next one I know what to look for I know to, I know how to lean into being able to rely on somebody else to externalize that part of my brain and get somebody better, you know, and basically work your way up. Like anything you're not going to be perfect right out of the gate, you have to to learn and learn things. You have to share brain with somebody, and that's never fun. But, you know, over the course of six months a year to years five years whatever it takes. I, you know, I am imagining a journey in the future, a couple years hence, going, I've got this kick ass assistant or assistant team or whatever. I get a lot of shit done I get much more done than I did, you know, back in in the olden days in 2021. So, incrementally getting, you know, into a much better place where you're more effective you get a lot more done. It's more fun. You worry less, you're making money more. All those things would be great. And there's two things that I think this person needs to be good at one of them is decomposing large amorphous projects into tasks into doable tasks so that chunking the chunking of activities. And the second one is the clever, the Tom Sawyer outsourcing and rethinking of how the tasks actually get done. Right. So one task I have in front of me is we have no graphics really for for weaving the world or the big fungus or anything like that I have like. And I keep thinking like, do I go to Canada and sit down and mess with myself. And I've got one, I made, I made a tile for the audio podcast that's ugly as sin, but it's a decent starting point that it's the right sides for what a podcast needs etc etc. But someone smarter than me would be like, well, okay, if we frame it this way and do it this way, you could get like five options to choose from and maybe that would work. But then that means sort of like running and managing a tiny little contest or something. Or, or, or, and that gets complicated. I think that's spending $200 on graphic design on on a web hero on dribble or something. Yeah. I don't know about dribble, but, you know, whatever the modern dribble. It shouldn't be a contest, it should just be, you know, hire somebody who's going to work whose art we like. Yeah. And, you know, and then again with incremental thing right it's not going to be perfect the first time. Great. I'm going to budget some money for 150 bucks 200 bucks to get you a lot of graphic design that, you know, that is fine. And you should go with that right. Michael's like, I don't know about the fine but you're muted. I'm sure I'm sure there's something serviceable there. But, but big, big big ups to it not being a contest, which is a kind of model. Because of the getting free labor part or because of the. Yeah, it's just a bad, it's a bad, you know, it's like, yeah, and I mean, it somehow took a little bit of hold and design but imagine if you know there were like newspapers who said, we want a story on this subject. We're throwing it out there for everybody to write and we'll pick the best one and the rest of you won't wait, wait, wait, that's how you're just describing how the web works. Well, it's how the web works but it's not how, like, it's not how a business it's, it's a level below gig economy. Yeah, and the economy is not a gig economy being being the precarious itself, but it's it's worse than gig economy and that it's sort of like, I need a ride. I'm throwing it out there and whoever gets to me first gets the gig and the person who drives the same amount gets your second gets nothing. Hey, that that's, that's how my old boss Esther used to work. Because everybody knew that her time was scarce and it was like, and everybody knew she didn't drive. So she always needed rides to and from airports so be like that's when you pitched your product. Yeah. So one of her assistants main jobs was to find a pool every morning at six or whatever time she swims. Like, in whatever city in whatever city she was in in pre web pre everything sort of day so this is this is actually a hard task, sometimes involved paying off a Russian guard, so that you could sneak into the pool before hours etc etc. And then the other task was filling all these little interstices with with appointments and like oh she needs a ride from you know, whatever. Are you up for that and they'd be like yes. Very funny. And then all of which showed up in Xi right in her schedule in an in an ancient antique word processor, DOS word processor, and we could go sort of go look at like, if you could piece together the abbreviations it was like, are you guys familiar with German crossword puzzles. German crossword puzzles are really cool used to do them with my grandfather, the clues are in the squares. There's no separate table there's no number with a cross index cross referencing to a list of clues the clues are abbreviated now German is not known as a concise language. It would be shocked at how much you can say in a square in German, like it's really weird and, and there's lots of abbreviations for things right so it was really cool anyway. Have you done the search to look to see if any of those, you know if there are any graphics out there that kind of match what you want already. Yes, I've gone, I've gone looking for a bunch of stuff. And I got a couple trails of something that's interesting. Nothing really huge. And, and also, there's a young woman who works at Ziba, who has a master's in textile arts. And I, some of the, she bought in some of her work and I took a couple photos of some of her textiles which is what I've put on weaving the world right now so if you go to weaving the world.org, you'll find a shot of one of her. Exactly. I had never heard of a sheet in the itself but makes sense. So, so I could ask her if she would weave something or start something because, because kind of the image that makes sense. It makes so much. It's too much sense that maybe it's not compelling is like a woven artistic woven globe out of a mix of materials and a close up a close up of it some different angles, whatever but not finished not finished globe. Out of textile art would be absolutely perfect. There's all the possibility but I haven't gone and said hey, could we do this or, or, you know, could I commission you to make a piece or whatever that, you know, don't have that much budget I've got a team we tiny little piece of budget. Sounds like a good virtual assistant task, spend 30 minutes finding, you know, sourcing some textile arts person. Well, but I've got it, but I have a textile as person. So you're saying someone cheaper or someone like. Well, are they available and Malina could do this in her spare time yeah I think I think she'd be available I think if I said hey, could you could you spend some time on this on weekends or whatever I think she'd like to it because she's trying to figure out what the hell to do with her fine arts degree. Because she's had to set it aside, right. If you pay her 50 bucks, what would that make it turn from a part time or a spare time thing to a possibly 50 bucks plus materials or something. Yeah. I can ask. Okay, so, so my operation and then it's funny. Right in my head it was like, oh and she'll get exposure, and then I'm like, this is another no no, you know this is don't don't hire artists for the exposure. Yeah, exactly. You know, you could be on this panel and there'll be great people in the audience. Okay. So my next task given that we were coming up on the top of the hour is to shop for a virtual assistant. I think that's I think that's a virtuous path. And God knows I want to tread the path of virtue. I, I feel. I'm a little concerned that I, I, well that we we took all that time coming to that as a next virtuous task rather than just parting part and parceling out your your stuff into Google sheets or whatever. Um, yeah, except this is a meta task that should facilitate the whole thing, right. I think, I think it's a good approach I think, and especially coming back to the way you stated it you know how do I get out of my own way it's like higher professional to do the part that you could certainly do, but it would be a complete sub optimization. So just for grins, here's what I've got for virtual assistants. And most of these are tech virtual assistants of different kinds. And then here I've got so I've got two different thoughts I've got one for cyber assistants which is like intelligence on, you know, on call like X dot AI I think is a reasonable one. I don't know which other ones of these are I haven't looked at this thought in forever but then I've got a separate thought for virtual personal assistants who are actually real humans. And there's a couple of businesses that do that, including one that's one block away. I don't remember their name right now, but it's a it's a Portland based company called shoot I think they'd be right here. Anyway, so you know, and I don't think I want to go to an agency like fancy hands or balance works or I've got fancy hands and twice got to fix that. Why not. Should I knock on the door of the corner here or magic or is here's a list of. Yeah, thanks. Time doctor. Mark found a textile is an appeal in the global economy, which is a woven globe of rope by Kitty Dickerson. Thanks. Top 25 virtual assistant websites for a better approaches to network for this a little bit. At least a couple lists where you could say, Hi, I'm in the market for a virtual assistant to help me, you know, run the they have to be a little careful with how you say it. Yeah, because you don't want it to sound like they're doing podcast production but you know, I've got a, you know, a small project called weaving the world and I need to hire. A production assistant, but a somebody helped me to make sure this gets done, you know, do you have a good line I think in your network, you should be able to, I would like it's hard for me to imagine that you wouldn't get somebody says, you know, I've got a person they've got, you know, 10 hours free a week or five hours free a week or whatever. Yeah, I kind of also want to find out what's really worked for anybody like who's got one they love. That's a good question. Can you, can you record enough of that to make it part of an episode. Enough of the process of finding someone. Yeah. So is setting up the infrastructure for weaving the world a possible behind the scenes episode of weaving the world. It's not possible, but I don't know that it's compelling in the sense of like, like the material looking for but it's entirely possible. I mean, this is a generic problem I think most everybody has just like hey, it sounds like one of the more compelling things I can imagine we've been doing really maybe maybe I'm, you know, six sigma or something like that but it's like you to could run a podcast on a shoestring and you know have a full production and blah, blah, blah. Number one, let's find a virtual assistant. Okay, I would eat that up. This may be in the episode. That's great. Cool. I would also like to reschedule with you to go over Krav and synchronize all that kind of stuff because we must start our call time yesterday. It would be great. Can we do a little bit of show tell as they. Yes, you were going to start with that. Sorry. I wanted to start with that. I wanted to do the other thing first. Okay, good. It's not very much fun. Productive. Let me share my dang it. I have it half set up to like, I'm going to blow the reveal just by sharing where it is right now. Shoot. But it's okay. What should we ignore it and not have the punchline blown. It's you'll see it right away. I guess, you know, I started a what it did with starting started a script screencast of what I learned. So one of the things I wanted to show and tell was so let's. Well, so this one's a little bit hard to show. So let me show this one first. Here's a page on tour tour. And it has the subheading spelling story, etymology and sources. And so here's a little mind map of this page. This one, you'll notice doesn't have any links out. So if I made, well, actually, I don't know. For the Wikipedia page at the bottom, right? So it has one. Yeah, so it doesn't have any, any wiki links. So let me. Yeah, so you can see that the mind map changes his life. Yeah. And now it adds a link to the map of links. Yeah, I didn't do what I thought. I'm still not very good with the mind mapping. And so the, so the tile on the lower right is back links right. The tile at the lower right is back links and so let me undo this. Yeah, close this real quick. This is the way most people see obsidian. So this is a standard teacher here. There's a couple of things in here that I wanted to show and tell. So we can do that maybe you can see that tour is linked from interest net. This is also very topical because Christmas season is starting and we have Donna is Donna and Blitzen. In case you don't have that woven into the web there you might want to do next but still. Here you go. So it would be easy for me to highlight that thing go. So the other thing to notice here is I found a new thing in obsidian. This is this is a link from interest net. There's a link to tour from the rough transcript. This could be a link but it's not this could be a link but it's not. And so you can actually just click this purple button here and magically it's linked it and then it makes it pretty and that's a feature baked into the default view. Yeah. So, so I can go to a random topic here. You'll see that I have topics right. Yeah, the organization of this is that that call had books organizations like Club de Paris, right. Have books organizations persons resources topics. So, if I click on Knephen. It, once, once you get enough topics going, then you can come back and find all the places that you don't have linked and link them automatically like that. So this is a parsing text for links it knows it has in this particular ball. Oh, yeah, all it's doing is matching. So if I was doing is it's doing a word search for the title. For existing titles of pages. Yeah. So if if I go to the choosing topics thing there's, you know, this, this is a decent page name but obviously it's not something that that came up in the transcript. If I went to free hugs. You know, there's, here's to in the rough transcript. And here's another one in the page that I created stories and the news stories. So then this one free hugs carried really really well comes from this part of the transcript. You know, I already. What's the difference between those two, the ones rough and the one is it's cleaned up. This is a page that I've curated. So I'll click on that one. So a big part of that call was about the new story. Right. So then the, the, the conceit for for this whole wiki was take stuff that people said and curated into pages. Some of those pages had obvious like eight flex superpowers is a great man theory. It's a well known topic. Some of them are topics that came up and are new. So there's an interesting actually conundrum here. The, the, you know, Keneffen or great man theory is something lots of people already know about. But for our signal purposes, it's actually more important to know about the things that we came up with on this call that that most people don't know about. So the new story, you know, is well anyway, I can't explain what I wanted to say there but maybe you kind of get it. I'm wondering, I'm wondering that the news that the new story isn't the topic that bubbled out of this particular crowd. Um, I, well, it arguably kind of is, and it could be argued that I did a poor job on this title. Okay, so this is this is the page for the new story is just that it's called stories comma and the new story. Yeah. And, you know, I said the primacy of money is another, another curated subject that I came up with. So this is what somebody said. What is the story that's in place that is so pervasive that people can't talk outside of it. And I, I didn't do much annotation of who said that but Grace said this. So she didn't say this part. But what I did was try to, because I could have linked story here but it doesn't really capture the fact that she's talking about stories and the new story. So, I guess, to do this right to name this well or something like that there would be more, more explanation of stories in the new story and more kind of stitching together. And it's a different way of implementing this not as good would be to just have hashtags so it could be hashtag the new story which would be at the end of the paragraph where grace mentions what is the new story for example. Hashtags, I, and I've tried that experiment with, you know, this, these are hashtags here. Obsidian actually does hashtags pretty well so I think if I click on that, it does a tag search. I don't think I didn't do many of these hashtags end up being more like a index. I should be able to turn on a pain here with hashtags but I guess I don't have that plugin set up. I, it turns out, it's more effective usually to use links. So, so a way to fix this conundrum. The story thing is, I'm probably going to delete this by the way. I could say something about. I would probably do it differently than this but I could even say keywords story. It turns out that hashtags are interesting. I think they're going to be useful for indexes. They're not particularly interest, interesting for connectivity so already, if I just make a page called story. So, and then story probably should be a phrase or something. It's not a topic. It's, it's more of a, maybe, maybe it's a concept. Yeah, concept is good. Yeah. So, story got created in the root, but I'll move it to concept. Back where we started it, I'm sitting up, updated that link. Right. But if I go to the page file story, then this unlink mentioned things works perfectly again. Because now there's a page and it's busy looking. So that becomes a new search term for all the pages in this vault. Right. And I could, I could waltz to here pretty quickly and just linkify the, you know, like this is a good one. And then that makes me think that this is another crazy story. And then we can see if there's any, any other mentions of that and there aren't, which is okay. So anyway, thanks for that little tour and the questions. What it was, the show and tell thing I wanted to show off was it's called local, local graph. If I go over to hotkeys and search for local graph. I've already got a hotkey on it, but there's a function in Obsidian called graph view open local graph and going to make hotkey for it. I'm going to pick command eight because above the eight is a star. And that makes me think of a graph. And nobody uses command anyway. Yeah. So then I can open that pain. And right now it's a separate pain like one of one of these page pains. So you have two different graph views when you started this one was a view of links embedded in the pages and the other was of subheads and heads and sections of the document. Yep. The other one is called a mind map. And it's not, it's not quite, it's not quite perfect at it needs some some more work. The graph is a built in feature and it works pretty well. There's a, there's an overall graph, which I can go to. This is all the pages in this fault in this fault. I can drop things out like there's, there's too many things linked to people to make it interesting so I like to do a thing where I drop that out. And whoever's not familiar with obsidian vault is kind of the local database size calls calls them both same same thing with rough transcript. So now it's starting to get a little bit more interesting and let me turn that off. And the other thing that you can do with the graph visualizer is an animation of how the whole thing group. So it should be relatively straightforward to write a plug in exactly like this one. Is this one open source. The graph visualizer is just a built in part of obsidian and obsidian is a source to the answer. Obsidian is not open source. There's another graph visualizer which is not as polished called juggle. I'm pretty sure that's open source. So this is me putting this, this workspace together. And you can see things grow, you know, it's, it's interesting. I don't know if it's useful. Yeah. But I'm asking that because it should be relatively simple less so now that these pieces aren't exactly open source, but relatively simple to write a brain like viewer through a space. And then if we were to absorb my exported brain into an obsidian space into GM wiki or whatever, then one of the viewers could in fact give me brain navigational possibilities. It's well put. Yes. And the garden crew actually has a project very much along those lines. I'm going to turn off this pain. I guess maybe I shouldn't do that yet. We saw it come. It pops up like this. And then obsidian lets you drag these pains around. You want so this is actually pretty good layout. So now this is now I've got backlinks and I've got a cool local graph thing. And they're not taking up too much space. So the local graph thing is so so back to demoing the local graph on each page you navigate to you can see what it links out to. And you can also see these are dark because there's actually content there and news story is a page I just created and there's it's lighter because there's no content there. Cool. That's nice. So I can navigate here. I thought that one would be more interesting but I guess it's not. So I can navigate just by clicking on things here or you know of course I can be using this page instead to do just this. And then quick machine. Yeah, I know right. There is referring to the fact that this I knew in one with lots of memory. You can see up here. Eight CPUs or something like that. A few of them are engaged and also my memory is not full. A scary thing though, you can see that we're not seeing your toolbar. I think you're sharing only the same. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's okay. Let me share the whole thing. Thanks for telling me. Up here I've got a CPU meter. Most of the CPUs are idle. I'm using half the memory. 64 gig machine. And there's 28 gigs active. So wired is the stuff that it really needs. So it's only got, you know, three gigs. Does it tell you which apps are. Yeah, five gigs. Dockers only three right now, which is pretty amazing obsidian's got two gigs. So you can see pretty quickly an eight gig machine. Wow. So obsidian's using considerable memory. Two gig is a lot of memory. I've got a number of documents. It's, it's the, the, the beauty and the terror that is electron. Each of these windows is a separate Chrome. Browser basically chromium browser. Oh. So I've, I, especially on my old machine, I, I definitely noticed that I didn't want to have too many obsidian windows. Right. Because it's a memory. I was doing other stuff. I would close. Start to close obsidian. Fascinating. Okay. Mr. Krause status hand up for a while. Mr. Krause. Hi, great, great presentation, Pete. I'm wondering this pain on the upper right. Can that be embedded into a page? So that we know, no, no, it definitely has to be. At this point, this is a obsidian plugin that I think runs in obsidian only. Is that what you're saying to you? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's obviously kind of a, you know, it's a fairly generic piece of web engineering to do a first directed graph and, you know, mapping links and stuff like that. Again, David Boval and the garden crew. We're designing something like this that can be embedded on a webpage. And the idea is to make it so that it, it works natively in massive wiki and tiddly wiki and fed wiki. And then on a website like the static site generator massive wiki builder. So the, the idea of that is to kind of recall this, but make it a little bit more static and also let you export SVG from it. And especially the thing that gets David excited about that is that when you export the SVG, you can give it to a designer person and then they can make it look pretty as opposed to algorithmically generated. So, you know, there might be take, take this for instance, this is all the people in this thing. Some of these people Doug Engelbart and I don't know, you know, you might color those people differently for some reason or make them bigger or smaller. Because they're dead. Well, because they're dead or because they're important or because they're, you know, where you might have a view where you, you counterpoint Jack Walsh and Bucky Fuller or something. Those do seem to be too extreme as some access. So, so then the code name for that project is called brainlet named kind of after Jerry's use of the brain. And then this, this particular plugin is equitable in its deployment of links. But to, to make this more like a Jerry's thing, we could type these, these edges, the lines. So some of them could be children and some of them could be parents. And then we would start to get pretty quickly towards a, a brain view of stuff. I didn't get to demo another thing that's cool. Keep, you know, it's funny when you're doing these by yourself, I guess I remember the times when I clicked a page that worked really well and then you click another page and it's like, the law of demos. Yeah. If I put a, another cool thing is that if I put a link in here, let me make a totally different one. How about technical debt? Thank you for that. Whatever it's trying to do is remember an important amount of industry. So the, this is dynamic too. As I, as I, you know, add stuff here, this keeps populating. One of the main things, I guess, Jerry, if you, if you were to use some of this for a podcast episode, this, this, like, this thing of Obsidian where it finds, it does a word search on the page title and then lets you link it just by clicking a button is pretty brilliant. And then combined with, you know, once you get kind of a critical mass of, of subjects and stuff like that, all of a sudden you can, you could import another transcript into your, for instance, and link it up very quickly, right? Because every time you make a link, it's, it's a virtuous circle because every link informs more links and right. So your rough transcript would be tagged up with suggested links right away. Yeah. And you would want to do some, some smart, smart things for the idea of concept. Yeah. Smart naming of pages and stuff. Then you can, you know, and if, and if your rough transcript was really rough and hadn't transferred translated a couple of things properly the moment you corrected them, they would turn into clickable links. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. There's a place where we should. Linkify story threading. Yeah. Story threading, no space. Sure enough. And camel case, if you, if you get there. Thanks. I was hoping there would be more. Cool. Now it's, now it's reified. So thank you. If I may. Peter, I didn't quite understand the difference between concept and topic. What, what you hope to differentiate there and kind of make. What's the improvement in, I guess, the cognitive ergonomics of, and kind of memorability of. A group kind of practice. Great question. Mark, as always. Thank you. There's, there's a bit of initial conditions that forced topic to be the thing that is here in that this whole wiki was meant to be the, the, the transcript or the, you know, the collection, the, the reification, the, the, the crop, cropping of just one. So the idea was, you know, what, who are the people we talked about on the call? Who are the, you know, what, what books do we mention on the call? And then what topics do we say? So this was call was about as we may think and as we will think and it's flex superpowers and climate and. Heroes and stories. So. A cool thing to do would, would have been to. The process of this creating this set of things was me going over the transcript and the chat and picking out the things that I remember that we talked about and highlighting them and turning them into sometimes into. Well known phrases. And then a well known phrase you can wikipedia is pretty well, pretty quickly too. There's a plugin for this. And some of them were things a little bit more. Or in just another good one. Some of the things were me. Curating together, right, primacy of monies is something I'm really proud of coming up with that term to capture. You know, a thing that we were talking about, but this term didn't get used at all. And this was this for me was. And you know, maybe somebody would have picked a slightly different topic or a way to encapsulate this, but. And the concept of share a shareholder primacy is, is like a wikipedia thing like, like that's, that's a common. Yeah. That's a common term. Yeah. So let's do real quick. I think I have this on hockey, but I forget what it is. I'm just going to do it this way. The law of demos. Um, shoulders, not worth it. So, so topics are. Topics are bigger than concepts in this, in this schema. So a topic is something like Facebook's metaverse or. Inter twinkle this into disciplinarity and polycentricity. The one you just created shareholder primacy that, if I understand correctly, wasn't in the call, but it certainly links to. Um, your topic. The primacy of money as a possible topic. Oh, yeah. Yes. As a possible concept. I'm sorry. So we just, you know, push that in there. Yeah. I, so, um, I have to say. Shareholder primacy is in, in Wikipedia too. So maybe. That's a common term. You know, I wonder if, uh, let me check. It may be just that I called it wrong. Uh, I can share the link to show her primacy in the, in the chat. Yeah. I've got it on a separate window. Um, so. Uh, good, good observation. Um, Mark, another thing that I kind of ended up with this. Um, I, that all of all the playing that we're doing with it today, I think I'm going to revert. Um, sadly. Um, although it's the shareholder primacy is, is really interesting. Um, I really meant this to be about one call and even in the one call, um, I had a lot of trouble, especially with people. Um, some of these people were mentioned on the calls or were participants in calls. Some of them are like the co-author of, um, uh, somebody. Yeah. Some of the pieces that are authors of the books mentioned. And it didn't, it didn't seem, um, uh, It didn't seem right to leave them out. So, but then so, so topics are kind of like bigger things to me and then concept or more generic things, topics or something. I guess you would find in as a Wikipedia article, probably. Um, and also things that, that we in, you know, that we came up with, um, or that we referred to positive cartography, for instance, is probably not on Wikipedia, but it's a good topic. And then concepts, uh, in this schema doesn't have to work at this way, uh, forever. But concepts would be something that you would find in dictionary, uh, instead, uh, where I, you know, we wanted to be able to say, um, there's a thing called, you know, actually this for me stories and the new story, that's a topic for me, um, different than stories and different than the new story. The idea that the new story is embedded in, uh, uh, context-based called stories. It's, I think important. Um, but then, then we needed a smaller, you know, dictionary word, um, to start to link, uh, to do the, the backlink things. So we're kind of feeling the effects of a tiny trap here of using as high level identifiers, abstract things like concepts, ideas, topics, phrases, idioms, whatever. And then also because obsidian kind of likes this outline view and you're using it heavily. You're not using this as a wiki namespace where it's just flat and everything. It happens to be a page in the namespace. You're actually using the directory as, as an important organizational structure that gets really funky. Because then when you have a person who is alive and in this group, is that a subcategory of persons as opposed to a dead person who happened to write a book or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, so it gets, it gets tangly really fast because you and I might disagree on, you know, new story might, one of us might say, ooh, that's a concept. One of us might say, no, that's a topic. And then we're kind of a little bit screwed because we suddenly like, we've suddenly created a problem where they didn't need to be a problem because we're using these large, large scale headings. Yeah. In other work in the massive wiki space, we, OGM wiki actually suffers from this pretty, pretty heavily. It's got even more fine grained. Folder hierarchy basically. Over the massive wiki space, I've kind of wanted to say, hey, this whole organizational hierarchy thing is just a distraction. Please don't do it. For this, for crabbing something, if that's a verb, kind of, It's becoming one. It's, I think it's a really useful thing. And I think it's the thing that you mentioned that something is, you know, both a topic and a concept or a topic and a book. I don't, I don't see a big problem with that because it's a, you basically had, had a disambiguation link, you know, to both of them or on top of them. So, which brings me to my second thing before passing to you Stacy, which is when you're, when the space in question is tiny, like a 90 minute call, and you're crabbing sort of that then the list of people involved and that is manageable. The second you sort of bump up to the broader scheme of everything we care about. And let's say we'd accumulated 100 calls in this space, click down hierarchy menus are completely worthless because you don't get beyond A and B on anything. And suddenly the space is dry. Like the one reason I don't like outliners very much at all is that as they collect up information, they just get worthless. You, you start to accrue information and the backlink view is just like overwhelming and gigantic, right. So the categorization I've used here, I think it's useful and, and if you, if you, I'm just trying to explore what happens when this, which, which looks nice. It's good at small scale goes bigger. This some, some of this breaks. A lot of it breaks. And then you figure out how to fix it for, for what it's worth. I tried this in the background. It turned out this when I had a capital peer, that was what broke it. So the wikipedia plugin needs, needs help. So let me do it, do it live again. So I can just hit a hot key and it fills in, fills in some wikipedia. I, this, this is very few things here. And they're, they're not organizational. They're not, they're not, this isn't Dewey decimal. None of these are, are like big subject areas, right? Subject areas is kind of a landmine. Once you start doing Library of Congress headings, you know, right? All you're doing is library science. I think I, I, I like this. They're, they're types. They're not subject areas. So a type of a thing, you know, a book called debt is different than a concept called debt. And I wouldn't have a problem making a concept debt here. And then say, you know, the, the book called debt, there's another weird thing. But in this case, the system would not help you disambiguate between instances of people talking about the concept versus the book. And you'd have to be really careful tagging up to go to one or the other. I, I, I obsidian for what it's worth is very flexible. And it doesn't really care. No, but it doesn't care. But you'd need to make sure you don't link back inappropriately to the, to one or the other. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Flex is another one. I did a plus thing or a minus thing when I made the book titles, it was like, whatever is before the colon or the dash is the title, and then this is sub subtitle. Right. That's half the time it worked because I think there are some of these that have really, you know, open innovation and researching a new paradigm is a bad title open innovation is a good title. Anyway, being able to say that some of these weird, you know, I, I'm not sure that I would recognize that as a person, but when the system knows that it's a person, there's value add to me. Not, not because the Naka is, well, Naka is just not familiar to me. It's the name. Kind of the same thing with, with topics, topics versus, you know, books, I think is a good. So I, I, I'm not told. I'm cautious about the hierarchy thing, but if you keep it to types and you keep a very small number of them, I think it's, I think it's potentially useful. Some caveats and. Yeah, it falls. Stacy, sorry for the long wait. No, that's okay. I think it sort of ties it. I was just going to say, is there a way to differentiate whether it's by color or something else. The speakers that are in the container at the time, as opposed to the ones that are being referred to. And then if it's somebody that falls into both categories, if it's somebody there that's mentioning their book, then it would be, you know, like, it would have like an extra ring about it, you know, around it or something. I don't know. I'm just, you know, it makes a difference to know, like, I don't want to think that I was in the room with Frederick Douglass. Yeah, I would love to be in a room with Frederick Douglass. That would be a dream come true. I've got. I've got to be distantly related to the KKK, you know, the highest KKK person in Oregon in the 30s or whatever. He only came to mind because it was a conversation about things that Trump didn't know yesterday. Okay. Already I have. Did you think Frederick Douglass was like a third baseman or something? Oh, he thought he was still doing great work. Oh, perfect. This was a while back. So already I do differentiate. And I can make this into a separate page right now. It's not. If I made this into a separate page of people who were there versus people, people in general, right? I could differentiate it. Yep. Yeah. Even with colors and things like that. Yep. We've gone 90 minutes. But it's been really fun. So thanks for y'all for parents. Yeah. Thank you for the, for the great demo. That's really cool. And it's reminding me of city and its magic superpowers. Yes, thank you. I'm quick question. Is there a Thanksgiving morning. Oh, I'm going to send a general note to the Google group that says we're going to pass on on a call tomorrow morning. Super. Let people let people have family time and go back to stuff. So happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Happy Thanksgiving. May all your gratitudes come true. Hope you like that. Yeah. We're going to spend a bunch of time being grateful for stuff. All your gratitudes. By nature are true. True. You make them true by being gratitude. I mean, if you're grateful for something that happened. There it is. It's real. I suppose you could be grateful for things that didn't happen. No. Is that a concept? Or is that a concept? Or is that a wish? Or is that an appreciation? Well, it happens to be a book. I'm working. Excellent. Excellent. And, and yeah. And so Pete. Everything you just showed us marry that to externalizing my, my digestive system. And that's an interesting conversation right there. One more thing. Would you want to put in any of the matter? Most channels that you're looking for this virtual assistant. Just to get it out there. Hi. I shall do that. Cool. Thanks everybody. Thanks all. Thank you. Bye bye. Good to see you all. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks everybody. Thanks all. Thank you. Bye bye. Good to see you all. Yeah. Same here.