 So it is November 12th 2019. I can't believe that very soon. We start to write them the year 2020 My my brain is not ready for two zero two zero at the edge of my note-taking papers And we are on an inside Jerry's brain call which means and I'm apologizing ahead of time that I will overshare my brain as we go through talking about different issues and our topic at hand is how to represent an argument or a point of view in In the brain or in something like the brain and I come to this and I'll kind of share my brain right now I come to this really from The realization of several things one let me go to a thought that I added to my brain I don't know a year a year a year and a half ago when this is called my a haze about spoil and growing or raising food and It dawned on me that I had a whole bunch of different little Places in my brain that had no till farming soil fertility fun guy and micro rhizomes the wood wide web a Whole bunch of different things and that they weren't connected. So I just made this nexus I said, okay, what you know, how do I bring these things together and then how do I connect this? Thought my a haze About this particular set of topics to the best of the core of all those different kinds of things So for instance, there's a pattern language for growing food Which is a nice kind of and I am no farmer. I am no soil ecologist I don't really know this. This is just what I'm deriving and I would love to improve this So anybody who wants to send me better links to this but what I'm understanding about pattern languages is and actually This is kind of a pattern language for healthy soil Except at the larger skills treat your farm as an ecosystem and Fukuoka's four principles take it a little bit broader But here we go. Here's Masanobu Fukuoka is the guy who wrote no who did no till revolution No chemical fertilizers. No cultivation. No pesticides. No weeding Which is then connected to soil fertility Etc. Etc. So so here's kind of a nexus of interesting things now This is resources not an argument So this is not exactly an example of of the reason for this call But it's one of the better places in my brain where I've really brought a whole bunch of things together This my a haze about soil and growing and raising food So one that was the the pivot point for the last inside Jerry's been conversation is Here which is this libertarian beliefs thought and And so I fleshed out from Looking in lots of places and trying to figure out what's going on some Some things like people have an absolute entitlement to the property that their labor produces is a libertarian principle or belief Libertarians subject to unjustified takings They basically seem to believe that wealth that redistribution is invariably unnecessary and counterproductive And they see this state as the principle enemy of liberty. So there's a Whole bunch of kind of scripts around this like markets work governments don't And the states should be as Grover-Norquist said, let's see if I've got the quote in my brain Small enough that you can drown it in a bath tub I Don't here we go. I don't want to abolish government I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub Is Grover-Norquist's famous quote and Grover is a neocon Who was part of the contract with America and is a big on tax reform basically get you know driving our taxes to zero If at all possible So these are all libertarian beliefs and then I have a not well fleshed out thought critiques of libertarianism Where the one part of it that I like is free markets are basically a myth That you know libertarian, I seem to think that libertarians Believe that if only we had a market for everything and the markets worked we would have a perfect society and There's just really great and efficient Critiques of this notion of free markets and that markets work all the time There's another notion that I haven't represented well here Which is that not everything works in a market that that commons in many ways Should not and cannot have markets and I don't have that well captured So that's a place sort of an edge where I wanted to work, but I wanted to step back from this Cherry the other the other concern there is that libertarians seem to presume that you can have markets without governments And as far as I can tell markets require rules set and held by somebody in order to function So there seems to be a fundamental contradiction there Yes, and and I think that libertarians are looking for the minimum rule set for governing markets So I don't know what libertarians think about the SEC for example Should there be an SEC or should you know the New York Stock Exchange be self-regulating entirely? And Gill your mic is still open so I'm hearing noise, but I don't know if you wanted to jump into that Cool, so Doug any Anything this triggers for you like like I'm I'm really I'm really interested in in your reflections on what I just showed because For me these parts of my brain are super useful and they collect up the best of what I've seen over a long period of time They may be unintelligible to like normal civilians Or they may be on the fringe of okay useful, but what about this or what about that? So I'd love to walk into that territory Well, I find that the The brain the way you showed it is extremely useful, and I've been using it more and more myself And it's a good summary of what happens, but it's not a good experience of how it happened And that's a critical thing and I it's for me all the things online that I've seen for 30 years It's sale after a while and people drop out and it's a problem The idea of One that's happening Is to be explored Sorry Gill I just muted you because we're hearing a lot of ambient noise from you walking around but You've either raised your hand on this on the thing or I think you've been on muting yourself well as you go so So Doug the thing you just raised Raises like three or four other interesting questions for me, which is partly that my brain is just my mind map and it's an inert space It's not a conversational space. It's just a map of mostly links to other resources to essays YouTube videos Ideas within essays all that kind of thing And I would like it to be more of a place and you just said that you know things get stale after all people drop out And then different conversations kind of have lifespans You know, there are there are places online like in my in my early days online. I was on the well And I was on the GBN forum on the well, which was insanely cool that was like my favorite place to go every day and then there was also a Forum called experts on the well where kind of anybody would answer any question about anything and these things are really cool Loretta Thanks for joining We're just sort of wandering into this topic of how to represent things in the brain and how to how to communicate through it and I'm interested in the medium that we use to communicate being also Host to or able to hold the conversation that we're having And so that we might make it a generative space But with the knowledge that these conversations have an ebb and flow they basically It they have a natural life cycle. I think that that something becomes hot for a while and then it dies Now if you sort of cruise the whole world You can see the same conversation happening over and over again in lots of different communities at different points in time, right? If you're talking about soil fertility, I'm sure that conversations been had a thousand times over in many different forms Online each with their own lifespan each with their own little congregation of participants The you know quirky and unique to that community and who it reached and how the word got out and how invitations were processed So I think that's it kind of a side dish, but I I'm interested also in the conversational aspects of this medium One of the things about the well two things on my mind One is if a conversation is urgent people will put up with terrible technology. Yes If we think of the well, which I also was on for a long time You begin to see that the present counts more than the past More than it does in a face-to-face conversation. I don't know quite why that is but in the online mediums The past tends to fade away very quickly So I have a couple of my own hunches about that One is that that one of the reasons I was a lurker mostly and not that much of a participant on the well is that I had a Feeling that I didn't really want to jump in without having read the threads and knowing what had been said already And I have a really hard time reading long threads a really really hard time. They're not distilled There's there's like little nuggets of wow That's fantastic, which are then to me distracting because I then go follow this and follow that and I find it really hard to catch up With online conversations of depth that you know if the if the conversation online was rich That's going to be a stumbling block for me to just jump in and participate So that's that's one take on it and then the second one is that one of my major insights from 22 years of using the brain is that Because we don't have a history Place that we're gardening and cultivating where we put what we knew Things fade out of memory very very quickly so we then go back and have arguments and conversations over and over again We basically debate the same things and part of the reason we're easy to spin as a population by people who are busy lying every day Is that nobody has said okay that lie? We already agreed last month that that's a lie and the next time you say that lie We're going to turn off all the cameras and walk away We don't do that because we don't have a shared memory Right and so so one of the reasons I love the brain and I'm trying to figure out how to make it have more expressive capacity and more holding capacity For conversations arguments logic evidence, etc. Is that is that this is the only tool? I found that lets me have a memory. It's not a good collaborative tool at this point So I'd love to cross that bridge somehow, but I find that essential so I think I agree with what you just said and those are my two major kind of reasons why Somebody described for a few minutes an experience that I had a number of years ago when I was at by the systems design We were hired to do an online conference for a pretty large group and I Struggled with these issues and I came up with the following idea This when you would turn on the screen you would see what looked like a cartoon drawing of a fairgrounds So there were a bunch of tents on the screen and Each tent had a flag which said what its content was what was going on there? And then there was a little placard down by the front door of the tent Which said how many responses were there knew for you since you were last there So on the screen you would basically see the whole conversation all the conversations There was an entrance tent Where you come in and talk to anybody about anything There was an information tent about what was going on And it would be easy to do a hear the key conversations going on 10 So it was actually quite successful, and it just left me with a view that Graphical Navigation into the conversation is probably where we want to go next and what's striking is how little Exploration of that space there has been Super interesting and there have been a couple other graphical interfaces, but not of the kind you're describing I mean there was a there was an early Macintosh app or conferencing app That was pretty cool that let you customize your avatar and everybody was seated around a round table And you basically had good good quality shared audio plus avatars that were sitting around and that was about it And and otherwise it wasn't recording. It wasn't creating space for different kinds of conversations And I wonder how how the tent fair fares What how you name the tents, you know how you how you square out the spaces matters a whole bunch When when I'm approaching issues often I'll take a I'll take a an orthogonal perspective on the topic as as much as I can because it cuts It cuts away or cuts through Traditional boundaries on issues which are which follow, you know industry classification codes or which follow Normal assumptions about markets and marketplaces and and if you then if you if you instead pull on the thread of need or something Or at that you get a very different conversation. So so even like what the tents are named Could be very directive about what gets talked about where is that what happens Well by creating some tents that were not content defined Let people Mull around in a place where it was clearly marked mulling around cool For example, there was a coffee cafe tent Where people could just go do stuff and then you could of course you could pull out interesting nodes that were developing and make them into a new tent I think of the the parent nodes in the brain in a certain way could be tense You know what I have too many, right? That's the problem that's kind of and moderation in That environment was very powerful And it was important because the moderators did control When a new tent would arrive or one of the tent might disappear you could do interesting things like have Footprints between the tents showing a What might be a good way to follow a topic into its complexities So you would see on the screen the bunch of tents Some footprints connecting two tents together interesting and it was pretty successful. Yeah Now at one point like We were playing with virtual reality and other sorts of things for a while and I remember going to one of David Eisenberg's freedom to connect conferences and I had I had a phone call that I had to run So I had to dodge out of out of the conference But just just as I was leaving the speaker came up who was going to do like a virtual reality space and Start sort of a distance conversation And I predicted and it was fulfilled before I even left the room that this was going to be awkward and difficult that You know what he had to do was walk around in the space go to a board that was virtually in the space Put an image on the board try to address it and all of that didn't work Well in it for completely different reasons than what you're saying and also because it was trying to make very Very representative in a 3d world in a 3d virtual world He was trying to emulate what might be happening in a normal world where I think to you the tents are metaphorical Tents for conversations happening inside in text blows or whatever else I don't know but but I think that there's a tendency to go to graphics and there's not a lot of Collective intelligence on which ones work and which ones don't somehow so I've seen a bunch of fruitless graphical efforts to to to empower conversation and Few that really get to the the the nugget of how to improve conversations Welcome back Gil and do you want to jump in? Except you just turned around and got mugged by somebody no Okay, well, let me talk again for a minute Yeah, here I am I Just want to say I think it's not a matter of fruitless graphics, but that very it takes it takes real training And very few people radically trained in doing it. Well, so you see, you know, like anything else There's this, you know, 2% excellence and 80% Not so great and you know 10% yeah, all right curve yep And one of the things that my experience Was that it's very hard in an online conversation To question hidden assumptions or to shift the framework. Yes It's very easy to build on top of what's there kind of like putting bricks on top of a pile of bricks But it's very hard to get into the inner structure of the pile of bricks as it exists and say let's rethink this Have you ever seen that done well online? No Not ever Jerry how about you ever I probably have but I don't remember where or when because it would have been seldom in a very disparate kind of spaces and It's funny because I I love zoom I do a bunch of zooms now, but in zoom I lose a lot of the skills I have in a room with humans Because when I'm sitting across the table from people or in chairs with people I'm watching a lot of Personal behavior body language I when somebody sighs Other kinds of things. I'm sort of fairer moans. Yeah Pheromones in the air vibrations between our neural packages I'm much more to an and I can interrupt in a different way than I do or I can make Side contact in a different way than I can on zoom so I lose a lot of that capacity in a zoom call Which I regret Go ahead. I think it's part of it's a question of scale So I find when we have big zoom calls and break up into zoom rooms But have three or four or five people in a sub room Cut, you know bunch of smaller conversations come back and collect into the group. That's better But you know also you can't do that every time and it takes some skill facility, right? And I and I say that Part about the subtle sort of communications in face of face partly also because That helps me sometimes intercept the conversation and you know put a big fish on the table of the thing that's not being talked about and That is sort of a method for shifting The frame of reference or the topic or calling something out or whatever and sometimes it requires that and if you're not even in Zoom, but you're in a text flow I've seen Somebody said something brilliant and it just basically floats off into the history of the chat, right? Something like a really insightful piece gets gets contributed to the conversation. It's sitting right there My frustration is because it's now in a private thread in a chat someplace It's not going to be recorded for for posterity anywhere else. It has no permalink so worse From my 22 years of having the brain. I love permalinks. I need a I need I need a link to the nugget So that I can you know curate it into the my own set of topics and issues So I see great things just flowed by and it's very hard to get other people to pay attention to those things Jerry, what if there was a designated role called not only this not facilitator or not only facilitator but also observer and harvester So funny you should mention not not it actually not a participant somebody who's there just to listen and to trap the Nuggets so a year ago I invented a role exactly like what you're describing that I haven't had a chance to test out anywhere And I think I put up a baby website that doesn't have much on it, but I call this role the story threader Yes, yes and more so this this role is born from my frustration with graphic recorders Because I know a lot of really good ones and I was just at an event a month ago with where there were two very good graphic recorders They were really skilled at distilling But then at the end of the day what they have is an is an image that they take a picture of and they send the picture to With the attendees and this the thing all dies right and when a speaker says income inequality in the United States It's pixels, you know in an image. It's not connected to that thought then lets you dive deeper have a conversation do whatever So so one piece of that frustration Leads me toward part of the conversation we're having here Which is what might the next medium look like that supports not just the presentation and sharing of ideas and insights But also the conversations behind it. That's interesting But the other the other way that that I took this was this notion of story threaders and I was going to invite a Series of people maybe six people for a meeting of a hundred people So I was gonna invite six people whose role would be to be in the meeting either in person or virtually And their job is to listen for nuggets Interesting things that jump out at them and then to thread those nuggets together into their own narrative and to express that story in any medium they want and The invite letter that I have for this role Basically, it has a paragraph in it that's a that's larded with examples each of which is a link to something else So Nikki case is a really good example because he makes these explainer videos that are games that are interactive that are But it could be an interview series. It could be a board game. It could be a card deck It could be I don't I sort of don't care what the medium is because what I was trying to do with story threaders was raise the requisite variety of ways of expressing interesting things said in the room and So there's trying to get and I was trying to give these story threaders permission to not have to be note takers Because the graphic facilitators role is to capture as well as possible everything important that got set So I wanted to free the story threaders of that responsibility. Sorry back to you in the booth or in the hallway kill Yeah, a I love this a lot be I think there's a couple of different layers to the story threader as you're describing it one is the listening and Harvesting they do and second is the form that they are Collating and expressing that in which some of which can be real-time and sounds like so it could be after the fact Yes, yeah, I Smell I smell resonances resonances of this in World Cafe and warm data laps Where you have the kind of you know People rotating among the themes and leaving something captured on the table that spreads the conversation together And that may be an interesting place to start this experiment is on top of one of those I'm gonna run through a door. Excuse me And I'm going for warm data in my brain here hi moment Yeah, so I would encourage you to launch this experiment when you next find it suitable. It's great idea. Yeah, interesting now World Cafe to me is a relatively limited process because it's you know people bouncing from table to table drawing on the tabletop and The person reporting back what the last group said and leading the conversation a little bit further So I find it I find it an interesting but kind of Low-grade Form of Conversation I don't disagree but your story threaders could could could be a layer on top of that They're just seeing what's written on the tape on the tables Yeah harvest more effectively than the designated of Harvester does now I understand and wander around and listen for meta things and start to build a story. I like that cool, so as a as a added instrumentation to World Cafe I totally get it and then I haven't had a conversation with Nora about warm data labs. I've watched I think I've watched this talk On YouTube and I'm interested so she's trying to figure out how do we contextualize data which makes a total sense to me So here's her essay on warm data and this whole idea of contextual relational interaction Yeah Any other thoughts on and also it I think another inspiration for me was Heinlein's notion of fair witnesses and I think it's in the moon is a harsh mistress or something like that This notion that there would be people that you could bring to a meeting and their job would be to report back exactly What was that this is before we had body, you know video cams and all that But but the fair witnesses have a very narrow specific purpose So so I was trying to broaden the mandate for story-threaters and give them a lot of artistic freedom To report the in some sense to rescue and shine a light on the outlier thoughts Doug, I think that My my my motivation for designing something I called story-threaters was very much to find Extremely useful minority reports that existed in the room that got I was I was trying to wait up to pull those out and make them beautiful and present them And if we're really lucky then one of these manifestations goes viral and and you know picks up a lot more interest one of the problems with story-threaters or graphic facilitators is they almost always have an Implicit model where they think the conversation is going to be going And every decision they make as to what to record Well Doug, isn't that a problem with humans? Yeah, but in the if we're in a room together the discomfort of a listener radiates to the whole group and I think it's easier to keep the conversation flexible In a face-to-face conversation in a way that gets lost on an online Conversation, I know Jerry's looking at how do we overcome that difficulty? I don't know how to do it Doug can you talk a little bit more about What I will call sort of the minority report in the room or? Frame shifting or I don't know what what term you like, but but this phenomenon we're looking at Well, it's how you look at hidden assumption that a group carries The conversations that I've been in lately. I want to say yes But that's just part of Western civilization. We need to think more broadly. Wow. That's just hard to do right with a group of people who are grown up in Western civilization. They don't know how to get out of that box, right and In a face-to-face group you can do things like you know that And really get everybody's attention in a way that online doesn't work because the reality online is Everybody's double-tasking anyway Totally agree So for I mean a lot of my Mind-breaking things that let me see outside of Western civilization for example were kind of hard one They were they were they were hard to get to and one of my big questions is How do you actually get somebody to open up to soften up their brain enough to maybe consider the possibility of the prospect of? Maybe one day changing their mind about some firmly held belief and so I spent a bunch of time yesterday in A loop because I I ran across something where there's a Navajo who's running for president in this presidential campaign is And you know, I went and I read this article about Mark Navajo enters the race as an independent okay fine, and then I wound up going and listening to his TEDx talk and His TEDx talk goes back to the Dungy Versus, which is a papal wall and Gil I'm gonna have to meet you for a moment His his TEDx talk goes back to the discovery doctrine. He basically says look You know the the Pope's basically gave people authority to own anything anywhere on earth Where there were heathens which meant not white people who didn't believe in Jesus Christ and this caused enormous carnage all around the world and Disruption and he goes back and talks about supreme court cases that supported the doctrine of discovery Etc. Etc. And it really it clicked into a whole nexus that I had about systematic abuse of Native Americans Systematic destruction of indigenous populations around the world, etc. Etc. All of which is a conversation a whole bunch of people don't want to have Just don't want to have like hey people have been hurt through history, you know, it's too bad these things happened It happened so long ago. Can't we just get over it? There's a hundred different arguments for why not to talk about this and yet when you listen or try to listen clearly to something like Mark Charles's TEDx talk you're like damn. He's completely right and we haven't gotten over this We know the US hasn't apologized for it Canada has You know, which is a start. I remember April and I were in Vancouver a couple years ago and we went to a the Anthropological Museum that's at the University at the West end of Vancouver and they had a room about the residential school system and There were in that room things you might expect artifacts and stories told about about the whole system And this is where basically we kidnapped children from tribes and put them in schools to westernize them And this happened across the US. It happened across Australia. It happened across Canada and these these children are called the lost generations and What what really whacked me over the head in that particular exhibit in that museum in Vancouver was there were four Apology letters printed large larger than me and a corner of the room one next to the other One was from the Catholic archdiocese One was from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police one was from the government of Canada And I forget what the last one was and these were genuine apologies like if you read through them We fucked up. This is what we did. You are valuable. We are sorry This is what we're doing to make amends, etc. Etc. These were really great apologies The US can't even touch, you know going into that territory. So so sorry for the long regression, but for me The things that open up a conversation and make space for Changing your mind about how you see a situation that changed the frame around it that lead you talk about a different form of economics Or measuring a different set of valuable things than the GDP and whether the Dow went up today Which is what economists tend to think about as you know as value Requires breaking things that people hold dear and In order to get to a place where they can consider the prospect of the possibility of doing that I don't know what they need But one of the things they might need is a little bit a little sense of personal safety some sense that if I consider this thought my world won't fall apart and Maybe a couple other things and I don't know what they are, but I'm I'm extremely interested in my life and creating that moment for people Jerry let me jump in for a second because I'm going out for another for another meeting I I really appreciate where you're going here and it strikes me that you're that you're edging into conversations about Relationship and power. Yes And the the the progressive meme does not like to talk about power, but we need to And that's part of what's at play here And if you look back to when was it that the Pope's gave that dispensation for discovery it's going to tie in with the with the the expansion of exploration and And colonization probably and given permission for power and of course who are the post working for and so forth So I think that's one thing that has to has to come into these conversations in a really explicit way Relationship is is key because a lot of what we're talking about here is conversations with out deep relationship or with strange Multilayered semi-ephemeral relationships. Yes, Vicky Robin. Vicky Robin had a beautiful post either this morning or yesterday about about living in groups And she's you know, she's traveling with a group of people very different experience and traveling by herself and she's provoked some interesting stuff there which takes us back of course the Dunbar number and How do we live with each other and how do we deal with frustration and breakdown and power and so forth when we are stuck With the same group of you know ten or fifty or hundred people forever As opposed to the world that we're in now and it may be the world of climate collapse Gives us something more like that than what we're playing and now what if we didn't have all this online stuff to do What if we lived in a village forever with the same group of people? How would we act? What would we do? How do we interact? What can we learn from that to bring into this larger conversation that hopefully we still have for a long time and with that I'm very curious to hear the rest, but I've got to dive for another commitment. So thank you Thank you for being here Gil even in motion, and I will post this on YouTube so you can pick up at minute 40 or whatever and If you'd like and I'm gonna try to keep closer track of your of your perandulations and opportunities that happen So thanks. Thank you and Loretta. You've been muted this I dug You're muted by default when you come into this conversation. Love love to hear from you if you'd like to jump in But we will we will continue here Doug where does it all of this put your your your your mind? Wow? I've been thinking as we're talking about the conditions of listening to each other Typically in a group Everybody's rehearsing what they're gonna say next rather than listening Agreed entirely. So the thing is how to slow that process down I ran for a long time a Seminar I don't know what to call it in Palo Alto called serious conversations And there was a face-to-face group of about 15 people. We met every Wednesday night for six or seven years, wow amazing and There was some training of people up front in ways that were pretty easy The meeting would start by going around the room One person starting and then going to their left from there saying what's been on their mind that they think is most worthy of a serious conversation By the time you're going around the room the atmosphere was extremely rich and thick Then the question of the psychology of listening what I Wanted to explain to the group and tried numbers of ways of doing it is That when you listen to somebody Things are being stirred up for you that you've never thought before Mm-hmm that have a different edge But your tendency is going to be to default to your expert knowledge and to say what you already know And you're also going to make a choice to not be the expert, but to be a person mm-hmm, and It was pretty successful and people got it In the beginning it took a number of sessions But as we went along and added new people they would get it in five minutes and could play by those rules Mm-hmm, and it was quite powerful, but I felt we never went quite far enough Mm-hmm in being able to get people to talk from what's emerging in their mind that had not been there before But that was critical And I've had in the back of my mind. I think it's a Maori tradition That when you have a group of discussion which tend to be among the Maori quite vigorous When a speaker stops Everybody sings a song before the next person talks Wow, that's pretty interesting I wanted to experiment with Just five seconds of silence Mm-hmm. If you say look, I mean here here with some rules Let people finish when they're talking don't interrupt But the corresponding principle is since you know, you're gonna be heard keep what you say short and For God's sakes don't use listening to yourself as an encouragement to keep on talking But the but to seriously stop So I think the the subtext here is that the group needs some thinking about how to think together The natural thing of preparing yourself like a slingshot the fire your marble into the group as soon as you can get the floor Is not the problem all mm-hmm In the spirit of what you just said, I'm going to just be quiet for a little moment and I'm a little informed by Craker meeting which believes a lot in silence And I attended a Wilton monthly meeting in Connecticut for a couple years before I moved into Manhattan and we had We had a kind of a troublemaker in the meeting. His name was John Lee. He was a retired engineer and He wasn't really a troublemaker. It's just that Every meeting he would have a message and usually that doesn't happen But he would always stand during meeting and say something and and it wasn't always sort of profound or whatever I mean, there's kind of a process where you know what a message is in a meeting and it's called speaking from the light there's a and Participating in Quaker meeting is a version of what you just said is a there's a there's a way you learn the dance of How to be in meeting and how to prepare yourself when you sit down in meeting and what to listen for and When you have a message and how to share it so all of that He was basically violating it so at one point we had a meeting after meeting Which was with the intention of you know improving our vocal ministry. I think it's called and a couple people spoke up couple nobody really pointed to the elephant in the room and then John spoke and he said I Know I speak too much And everybody just doubles over laughing just doubles over laughing. He's I know I speak too much And then he goes and is I probably I don't remember what he said after that I just remember that that all of us were suddenly smiling going well, okay And and Quakers are a little probably too indirect about things They don't you know nobody was going to lance that boil directly in that meeting But but we there needed to be a space within which the conversation could be had about the conversation and there was a process to do that, etc And you know, I'm driven back here to who the heck was it who said, you know I'd love socialism, but I value my evenings Right All of this stuff about how do we have better conversations takes time and patience That we've been taking away from everybody because you've got to go back and finish that you know binge watching that Netflix series and I don't know what other important things we all have on our agendas and We're so drowning in the info flood that making room for listening. Well It's hard. So so I'm appreciating right now given that I started this call about how to present ideas and how to and you know How to flash through the brain and then in a minute Wait a minute. How does all that fit into a context where good listening happens deep listening happens and? How to express ideas in a way that can be heard which is like a different topic, but a related topic, right? Because if there's a thought in my brain that said, you know, all conservatives are idiots, which I do not believe But if I had that as an argument that would bounce people immediately out of that place And they wouldn't be able to engage because like well, this guy's an idiot who clearly wrote that So all of that so Probably the most successful coaching I did in that seminar Was the following I said the reason to talk is not to convince others but to stimulate them and As soon as you see that you've done that guess what it's time to shut up Or you will destroy the very thing you just created don't oversell don't oversell and You and I are probably somewhat guilty of that Sorry, I'm just trying to capture in the chat when you just said Yeah, and we're we're excited about the things we've seen we're trying to express them We're and it's easy to get sort of caught in in your own way of enthusiasm About whatever and to me I love Telling connective stories. So I'm very inspired by James Burke's connection series Right and I watched that as a kid on TV and when it first showed up in PBS And I was like, oh wait So like innovation happens when somebody notices from over here and over here And if we glue this together we get this other thing and then that somebody else builds on that and then there's sort of the accidents and Confluences and insights and all of that kind of moves through and and then bad shit happens throughout history as well Which James Burke didn't really talk about very much But but there's a whole bunch of terrible stuff that happens along the way some of which causes backlash and innovation and so forth All of which makes for really fun stories to tell right So let me bring you back to what your hope was for this conversation And where is the center of gravity of that? So I think we've talked about My hope for the conversation and broadened it and deepened it in really good ways. So partly my initial hope was All right, I've been feeding this thing for 22 years. How do I make it more accessible more useful more powerful as a tool for? What's up? then How do we expand it and move into some other place where it can become? the holder of conversational spaces around all these topics and and One of the frustrating things for me is let's say we were in a good discussion thread on the well Way back in the day There was no place to bring in context in the well It was just words that were scrolling off the screen and if you were smart you were saving the buffer and storing those as files on your floppy disk You know back in the day when we did that I Side story, but one day a guy named Blair Newman committed suicide on the well and I date so I joined the well I think two months after Blair's suicide and He a week before he physically killed himself He had scribbled himself on pico span, which was the software on the well and that meant that he had destroyed all of his own posts And the community reconstructed all his posts because most everybody had been saving their logs So they created a thread where they put all the posts and assembled them again And then I learned at some point that my mom had a bridge buddy who was Blair Newman's mom And I have no idea how I discovered that but I printed out that thread gave it to mom who gave it to her And I realized oh my god the stuff that's happening online is very very real and is really important That was my that was my first light bulb going off that this stuff really mattered and was different Etc. And I had no idea whether she read the thread or that it got to her I don't know but I just know that that that connection happened in my head So I have three or four different projects that are simmering but not boiling over yet that might turn into what could make the next brain like conversational Stratum techno stratum look like and could we build one and prototype it and this conversation is informing that a lot So The the brain itself is such an amazing medium And I would think if it can have two innovations one is that when they're multiple players What they say shows up in a color that's specific to that person, right? and another would be that Somehow it could be marked as to how new it is in the conversation if we had those two things the brain might be pretty darn good at a Conversation which is spread out over time So for how new it is one way you could do that is that older text could be more opaque could fade basically Over time that that would be a pretty easy way to to to visually mark Older things is that what you're talking about? No, because then the past dies. Yeah, exactly. I don't want that. Okay me to have to stay Present and and what I discover is and this is interesting because I have a thought in my brain Which I can show but you know, we've outsourced our memories to Google and that was a mistake Right because the tools for collecting up what we like as it floats by are so terrible that most of us give up on that mission And we're like well, I don't have to do that because I can just search for it later and Google it and Google Remember it which is actually not really true because I have stuff stored that is old in my brain That no longer gets any Google juice or is even no longer on the web except it was an it's in the internet archive someplace And these are really really great nuggets like they're fantastic But unless you were curating along the way 20 years ago You wouldn't have known to store them any place or to put them into that spot where they're useful again 20 years later And so and so partly the the drowning in the info flood of real-time flows of everything is killing us because it it Prizes the freshest thing anybody said the latest thing anybody said and it deprecates and depreciates older wisdom and And part of what I really appreciate is that I can go back and find you know essays from long ago Or or books published long ago that are still completely timely or whatever But to me there's fresh as today's stuff because when I look around in a particular place in my brain I see how important what was said there was Right so so I have and I've got a little video that where I say I have a hunch I'm having a really unique experience here with the brain that I'm Because of this curation exercise for a couple decades I'm having a different experience of information and what I remember than anybody else is having So as you're talking it Suggested me that something and I'm actually doing now. I hadn't paid attention to so much that is iBooks Does a nice graphical interface of the books that you're reading with the covers And if you look across a hundred books that are in there, it's an incredible slice through what you've read and It's a good it's so easy to click on one of the covers and see where you've made underlines or Stopped reading I'm using it a lot as that kind of memory and then so we're talking now. I hadn't been aware of that Interesting. Yeah Yeah, very interesting And I use Kindle reader. I don't have I don't have a Kindle device I don't want to have a separate device to read on so I use the Kindle reader and mostly read on an iPad Sometimes read on my iPhone never read on the Mac that I'm talking to you now through never use Kindle here But I highlight a lot in Kindle and then I use other apps. I use Read wise. I think it's called which every day read wise sends me a random collection of snippets that I highlighted from somewhere in Kindle so so every day I get a little bit of a reminder from Against the Grain by James Scott and The American Slave Coast by Ned and Connie so that's an incredible book Yeah, right Thrilled me thrilled me And is one of those that changed my head, right? And and so this is weird and I'm gonna switch tracks for a second because This goes back to the heart of something we were saying that was really fun For some reason I can't fully explain. I love Love and look for those moments where something I thought I knew was kind of off and I need to change what I what I what I thought And when those moments happen my head cracks open in a in a way I really like and Most people are I think change resistant like when something challenges a firmly held belief They're not like that and I'm probably fooling myself about some firmly held beliefs because I believe people are inherently good You know, and it's perfectly reasonable to think that people are inherently bad that most people are evil That's like a commonly held belief and and that to me is sort of a part of our battle of ideas in the world, but But I had one with when I was watching Mark Mark Charles's Talk and he was framing stuff that I'd kind of heard of but hadn't assembled quite in the way He did and it was a bit of a brain-opener and and so Again, I'm trying to figure out How do we make people enjoy that moment or look for that moment? Rather than curl up in defensive postures and and make sure they retain membership in their posse or tribe Because another thought in my brain is that membership Trump's membership and emotion Trump logic all you know all the time I It's interesting because I also watched the Mark Charles video yesterday For the first time, how did you get to it? No idea Okay, so we Showed up at my Twitter feed Might have been me No, it wasn't okay cool. No, but anyway, and I love listening to it. Yes So authentic and he's saying this so well But towards the end I realized this cannot be a presidential candidate because he has no focus on any issue outside of that set of issues Possibly he doesn't talk about it, but I was wondering okay, so what forward-looking agenda would he propose? I don't know. There wasn't it wasn't present in his talk totally, right? I mean, he's not talking about climate change He said we should have truth and conciliation commissions to get the hell over these issues And then it's like green fields. Don't know Right. I agree with that. Yeah, so let's say where was I gonna go? Oh, yeah on these moments where your brain is lit up by a Thought you'd never had that puts into question other things that you've thought The person who is the most radical at doing that in my experience was Malcolm X It's autobiography and from the time he was a Teenager if he came across something which questioned what he believed he would shift And he did it over and over again It was really quite remarkable And the book is a great teaching from that point of view. So read his autobiography. Yeah, the autobiography of Malcolm X Fabulous. Thank you And I've never read it And I read some James Baldwin and a few other people that were like, holy crap, you know And it's funny. So so just last week I ran across some post somewhere of a guy who said here's my reading list for you know, this is what I read this year And I want to lean in and like fine tune this better and I looked at his list and it was all white men Like to like there were 25 books and I don't read 25 books in a year I don't think but but there were all white men and some of them were great books They were really interesting and so I wrote a slightly snarky comment on his blog post and it was just a regular blog I think and I said, hey, uh, you know consider reading non-white guys for a year That might change your point of view And then that turned into a post I did on facebook just saying hey, hey facebook brain What what would be on your reading list and that turned into I'll share the thought here As we're talking that turned into this place in my brain, which is the my non-white guy cannon There we go So that turned into this thought in my brain and I got a lot of really good recommendations from people and I bought the book Kentucky's which is in Spanish So So I will add Malcolm X's autobiography to this list is kind of what I'm saying But I'm trying to figure out. I think that just telling stories Just telling stories about what happens in these works Is an interesting path for somebody to get acquainted and find their way into different ways of seeing Yeah, very rich. I'm very struck these days by how much Of the good things that are being written in social theory and economics are being done by women Um, and certainly If you look at good commentaries the number of names of indians is shocking By the way, you were at any gosh g h o s h I don't think so I have to try to remember Yeah Yeah, I'm a tough gosh you can send your circumstances the great derangement The great arrangement is an incredible book climate change in the unthinkable Gun island does is put together really good uh technical knowledge How of being a novelist who is very sensitive to the role of literature Wow Awesome. I'll put that in the chat as well. Um Thank you and melka max. I think I think um, so you're talking about The autobiography of melka max as told to alex haley this one Yeah, I think that's well Um, I don't remember the extension. I think there's only one autobiography of melka max Check out amazon and see I will go look and see what else is there because I think the reason I might not have picked this one up Is the alex haley alex haley angle. I don't know which might have discouraged me from picking it up But I will go figure out or let's both figure out which one Because I will add that to the canon and I should read it um So one of the things I'm feeling at the moment Is you're putting stuff in the brain Actually, it's a pretty good map of our conversation Uh, and it's encouraging because I know I can go back to it Right and it's not forced into a linear mode Which would make it dead even if it's good and I you know friends who do note taking in google docs or on modi's cd or whatever it's called Uh, you know, we're all trying to sort of annotate what we know and share links and and and I I copy the chat Out of the zoom calls and paste them on the email when I send out. Hey here the call is up online And it's it's all pretty inert. I find it all Um, it's interesting to scroll through and it might make a shortcut to see what happened And you can harvest some interesting links from it, but it's not the same and and for me the context Which improves over time? Uh is vital and and so so I have again I have this this unique lesson for the value of that kind of context within a limited tool and Parts of the limits of the tool. I love so I think the one thing. Let me just share my my brain again Um, I think the one thing I can point to that I love about the brain Is that you can only connect thoughts to each other through these three little circles called gates Which means you have to choose if something is above below or next to something else So there's so the brain forces you to say there's only relationships up down or sideways It's only two kinds of relationships possible in the brain And that was incredibly clarifying to me and and and gives me an enormous expressive power That other tools don't have somehow you can also see the brain in a rubber band diagram. You can You know, you can do different kinds of Uh displays. Let me see if I I don't ever do this Let me interrupt for a moment before you leave that that uh, Malcolm X If we look at this screen just like this, I would like to be able to go in with my Uh cursor and pick a place in the blue and start a new thought Where I don't yet know how it integrates with what's there. Yes And so in my own Mental neanderings about what would be beyond this I would love for there to be a space where Uh, basically where all of our thoughts are commingled so that your brain and my brain can Exist and where we figure out what the visual representation is so that you can compare your network of thoughts to mine And then connect them across that space So that as you're browsing your brain, you can then add by reference my stuff Which shows up visually a little bit different so you know that I put it in and I'm maintaining it So so it might change spontaneously as I as I update some entry um and Very important to me at some point. I always want there to be like the big red button where okay I'm overwhelmed by by mingling through everybody's brains and adding in too many things take me back only to the things that I added So that I'm back then in what I consider sort of normal terror known territory because even though I have more than 400,000 things in this brain I kind of know what I put in here. I know that it's safe I know that it's pretty pretty trustworthy and as I would bridge into other people's and start including by reference and start mapping nearby That would get a little scary over time So I need to be able to back up to what where I know is safe and then a couple last thoughts It would be interesting to have a github kind of model here as well Where you could fork and pull and are you familiar with how github works? No So github replaced uh source forage as the place where open source projects went because it had a different model for how to update code and in source forage basically The the dictator the the owner of any piece of software Had full control over it in github There's a process called fork and pull which means anybody can go in and fork mean meaning copy Somebody's entire repository known as a repo So fork pull and merge so So you've put some somebody of code up in a in a repo I then fork it first thing I do is I fork it which takes an entire copy and drops it in my github I then work on it improve some part of it and then submit a pull request to you Because I think this is good enough that it should be in the main body of code Which you appear to be the host of On you know until and unless my fork becomes the more popular fork But I submit a pull request to you and you can I you know say yes or no If you say yes, my request then goes into the major body of code and that gets replicated out to everybody Um, that's really interesting, right? So so then you sort of merge the code into the main body of code Um, what if I could do this with a brain-like interface now people are using github Um to do to write books. There's a thing called git book Which Which takes this fork and pull process Um Here are repos pull requests So if I go to git book um I have it under github for writing projects and github enhancements which I Didn't make Pop enough so I couldn't see it when I went when I was on git Git book it's on github itself, but people are writing books this way So they'll publish their chapters on on github And then people can submit edit recommendations or write whole chapters and submit them through git book Does that make sense? So now I'm so now I'm thinking what would a brain look like that had that kind of process behind it um And and I'm torn about whether it's fork it's fork and pull where you might start with a full repo of my brain And then just fork it and you know submit uh comments and additions to me or whatever I'm not not entirely sure how that works Over the longer term with more people participating Because partly I'm interested in other people's brains and from scratch de novo Yeah, and yours is so rich and complicated and mine is so kindergarten Well, what I tell people is don't be overwhelmed by mine because it's useful when you have a hundred things in it Um, and so you'll be happy and and part of the fun is inventing your own pleas for how to deal with repetitive things right the thing that's got me going most with the brain is doing a parent link called readings And underneath that are the months And under there are all the things i'm reading within that month And I can just go there and click on it and it's open Right, which is it just turns out to be much faster than any other way of getting those things cool Do you take notes in your brain as you read something do you take notes in the brain? Uh, I've experimented with using that side panel for notes, right? With most Well, like with kindle you can get a printout of the notes for each book, right? And I've experimented a little bit with putting them in that side panel in the brain But for the most part no I put them into I've been a longtime user of Apple's uh one note So I've used that Okay, and I do the same thing with evernote. So I'm a longtime user of evernote And I use evernote for everyday notes and note taking during meetings and all that And I'll say that the next version of the brain the brain 11 The major change is that harlan and his and his team rewrote the notes editor Because a third of their tech support calls were for this embedded editor that somebody else wrote And so they rewrote a markdown editor from scratch that is completely multi-platform Which is I've seen it's pretty elegant And they're also considering making the notes part of the brain a much more upfront part of the brain experience Which both troubles me and interests me Because I Deprecate the notes. I don't take notes in the brain. I minimize that part of the screen as much as I can I I don't really use it and yet if I could merge everything I do in evernote into the brain It would be much much more findable Uh, you know, etc. It might be really really interesting Yeah, I mean you probably have the experience that I do that we make a lot of notes that we never go back to So they're lost Not I'm trying to overcome that. I have a friend Who Every day he reads his notes from yesterday Smart he also reads his notes from 10 days before And he picked 10 days because if you do a week things tend to have the same structure to them Right. Oh interesting 10 days breaks that up very good Strategy it's actually kind of fun another another reason to do that is spaced repetition um And if you've ever used, um What is the language dual lingo? Yeah, um dual lingo uses The theory of spaced repetition as a way of training you to learn a language And it basically says that your memory fades at a predictable predictable rate And if we quiz you on a particular time schedule, you'll remember things better So that would that that would be a different reason to go back and look at your notes right and I find that like It'd be interesting to look at your notes from a year ago or a decade ago because um We really do forget everything we've seen we forget everything we've gone by it's a it's astonishing I do that some and the shocking thing is my god. I thought that already 15 years ago, right? bingo bingo, this is not a new thought like And we get better at expressing these things they get more complicated. They get richer They we connect them to more things. We understand them in more depth. We've talked to them, you know about them with other people But you look back and it's like wow, we were already saying this thing 10 15 years ago. No problem Happens a bunch. So Is there coming up any possible experiment with a couple of people working in the same brain? So there is a version of the brain called team brain, which I've never used Which mark trexler the climate web brain user and brain publisher does use he says they use team brain all the time I've not gone into that with him and at one point we were gonna start an experiment collaborating on a bit of a brain But that never really took off. So it's doable I I just suspect that it's not the architecture that I'm looking for thinking about so And in particular, you know, I need the ability to back up and see only what I what I've curated So I'm not sure You might take a look at my website where I have a link on the top Readings things that I'm reading and there are the books by month copied over from the brain And I'll give you a sense of where I am I I think you know, I probably should have a more continuous and interesting conversation That sounds awesome. I would love that The thing that's most on my mind these days Is the problem It goes like this most economists and public intellectuals think that if we can only get the cost of alternative generated electricity solar panels and wind to be on a parity with the cost of energy generated by fossil fuels Then would be in a new ballgame and everything would be hunkatory What they leave out is the fact that if you own a house and you heat it with gas shifting to electricity is a multi-thousand dollar project Which is a great resistance to being able to change to using cheaper fuel And people seem to not know that they go talking as though If you just get the cost down to parity, right? So that that's that doesn't apply to all electric appliances if you get clean electric energy But it applies to every gas appliance for example Yeah, we have in the u.s 55 of all houses were heated by gas That's 80 million houses Now think with each one shifting out of gas and into electric that's a huge conversion Not only that, how are you going to build 80 million new electric furnaces? The environmental drawdown of doing that is huge And i'm just struck by the fact that people don't move into this territory They stay in the idea that if we can just get parity we're done so interesting um and Which of your sites do you mean do you mean shakespeare and dow or Carmichael.com. Oh, okay The others are pretty they're all dead Okay And does that come up with the right thing i'm going there now So Carmichael conversation.com. Yeah, okay. Yes Cool. So there's readings Yeah Yeah, because you and my brain doesn't show Doug Carmichael.com, but I have a whole bunch. Let me just show you you in my brain Up So here's you in my brain so i've got big mind media and iNet and a bunch of other things but I don't have Doug Carmichael.com or Garden were basically Carmichael conversation was which so I bet that I bet that one of the things that I have here is in fact the site Yes, navigate to existing attachment So what what name do I have on it? I have uh, Doug Carmichael and garden world politics Yeah, that's good. Okay And that should take you there and that's trying to keep that pretty up to date But of course it would be fabulous if there was a way for the brain To be able to dump those new books Uh directly into the website Yeah, exactly Um, uh, you could I mean the brain is sort of barely embeddable. It's it's doable but not great But you can embed that link in your website Right and that's gotten actually a lot better. It's amazingly fast the web version They said things up a bunch Cool, so um, we should wrap pretty soon. Where does this leave us on the original intent of the call? Well, I think we haven't talked very much about what a graphical interface could be besides the brain and my example of the tense And I just would love to see more experiments. I mean if you just have Come into a Conversation with a screen that had topics that you just click on one and it goes there And the topics are not organized in a hierarchical way. They're just right around right That would be pretty interesting. Yep. I don't see anybody who's done that yet There used to be a piece of software For the mac that would let you create a website where you just drag your mouse And create a little circle and link it to a file Uh, it was just automatic and they got rid of it. I think it was I've forgotten What it was called something like cupcake. It's not ringing your bell, but It was not well and they just dropped it, but I think cupcake was the name of it I used to do the tent so I could Take a photograph of the tent drawing put it on the screen and Just use the mouse select an area and then type in a url and it would go right to that part of the conversation So that was nifty Very interesting. I don't think this is it, but funny enough Funny enough given our conversation. I'll just share my screen real quick Um, there is a there was a project called cupcake by daniel ciders that was part of a protocol called tent Which was a an attempt to create open distributed social networking And i'm quite sure this is not what you're talking about No, but but But he wrote the tent manifesto, which I put under manif manifesti And of which there are very many. This is just a through c Yeah And one of the things in my In my desired future brain-like thing, which I call open global mind One of the things would be that that each layer would have kind of an api Or a protocol such that people could make a completely different interface to this thing and still be updating and talking and touching Talking to and touching the same underlying data It would need a distributed data model basically cool So that the tent interface would work perfectly fine I could be busy accessing info and conversations through a brain-like interface Somebody else could be using a tent city. Somebody else could be using straight text And we would all be able to have that conversation I worry about I mean what we've learned from the internet Contrary to our original expectations was nastiness and destructive behavior great And if we have too many different interfaces with too many people it's easy to destroy it uh entirely true and if too many trolls are in the community They can easily and handily destroy conversation as well. So so I think there's a whole bunch of Social management that has to happen in some ways Well, as usual, I'm delighted you're doing these conversations Thank you very much. I'm delighted you were here and it like that was great That was totally helpful to a bunch of things that I'm I'm working on. So thank you dog Excellent. Talk to you soon. Okay