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foreign [Music] hello out there thinkers linkers and mappers we are really happy to host a series of conversations around the topic of tools for thinking
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our longer term goal is to spark a diverse connected shared memory that will help us make important decisions together our near-term goal with these podcasts is to intro startups in being part of beta Works upcoming accelerator think
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Camp betaworks is a New York city-based incubator and accelerator they've run seven camps before on topics from Bots to synthetic media and voice interfaces you can find out more about thinkcamp in
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this domain this whole area by going to betaworks.com Camp all lowercase I'm Jerry mikulski your interlocutor and obsessive mind mapper this is our first episode so I'm talking with John
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Borthwick the founder and head of beta Works to describe this sector and our hopes for it now we just had last week a session we called the render uh for tools for thinking where John and I
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basically rant it at the very beginning to open the space and describe it and we like that so much that we're going to include that right now in this podcast and then we'll pick up from from there so here's what we uh here's what we said
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on uh last week Jerry and I are going to kick off right now with a few thoughts uh basically you know two personal rants on why we think this is important and why we're very passionate about this
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this is a space that uh ever since you know I first used the computer I've been thinking about how can a computer actually be a better tool for thinking and I think that today you know given the degree to which our information
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landscape has been flattened uh we have access to all this information but we don't actually have access to Great tools to organize that information scaffold it
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uh and make meaning out of it make it actually service in some like functional way and so I think that that sort of to me is the Crux of what I think we need
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better tools for thank you you know the word information actually in its roots comes from the formation of the Mind and I think we're you know in today's world we're sort of forming our minds to
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be sort of mass consumers and not great thinkers uh you know uh you know day in and day out and tooling and Tool out and thinking about how can I use this tool more or better but not really how to
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like take all the ideas from this specific you know flow of information I'm looking at and organize it to help me actually construct my beliefs and how I think about the world so that to me is sort of the essence of why I think this
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is important um I think the moment right now that when is also really important uh we have you know since you know through covid last couple of years we've seen sort of
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the broad uh development of graph databases we're seeing NLP and machine learning get to a point that we can do really interesting things with large well you know tuned data sets we're
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seeing Tools in web 3 that allow us to have protocols funded and to have open protocols that could potentially mean that some of this data all of this data
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can actually be owned by the actual person who's thinking about it and that it can be shared across multiple apps instead of the sort of web one Web Two models that sort of have
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everything sort of siled so I think all of those things you know and I would add on top of that that I think that the visual access to tools for thinking are
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starting to get also interesting you know we've seen uh some apps that are starting to do semantic spatial work that I think is super interesting so as we move towards AR and VR and sort
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of the extension of the mobile device I think we're going to have UI that's going to actually permit us to organize and think differently and so and hopefully think better um so I think that the you know this is
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very much needed the time is very much now and when I think about the tools you know specifically the tools I think I think it's really important that we
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think hard about how different people think because I think different uh different folks think differently and I you know I personally when I first came to and
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started using tools for thinking I thought about them primarily as memorization tools basically putting in things making notes to remember them um and then I realized that I wasn't going back to the memories much and so I
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sort of reverted to pen and paper and just like simple things because I over time I realized at least for me personally that the associative function of a tool for thinking was actually more
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important than the memory function so being able to take ideas to scaffold them to be able to associate them with one another and then to just like let them simmer in my brain because at least
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for me personally one of the best tools for thinking I have is taking a walk or going to sleep um because if I have some bigger ideas where I've sort of scaffolded them in a functional way and then I go to sleep I
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often wake up with an ideal and Association that I hadn't thought of before and so I think that all of that is uh is about better interfaces better tooling better use of the new technologies that
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I mentioned at the top so I think that uh different tools for different folks is sort of central to how I think about this world it needs to emerge So speaking about different folks
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let me hand over to Jerry who is a very different uh he has a very different brain that I have and he actually has two brains and so he's gonna show you both his wet and his dry brain I love it
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it's not a good pickup line in a bar trust me um and I was introduced to my wife as Jerry has the world's largest brain and it's like oh that's great but it wasn't a romantic meeting but um so we're going to see up on the
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screen hopefully in a second there we go you're going to see this piece of software called the brain and before I go there I you'll see me do this now and then jazz hands up means I agree with what's being said or I like it this means I disagree this means meh feel
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free to do that and then you're not an audience anymore you're actually we get to this gives us a little bit of a temperature feel for what's going on in the room so this jazz hands and I did this once in San Antonio with 50 military folks and there was a kernel in
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full uniform like doing jazz hands I'm like this works so I've put up here I've created every node in this mind map it's called a thought this is a piece of software called the brain it's proprietary software from a little company that's
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still alive in Los Angeles I used to work for Esther who's sitting over there in the room and was her managing editor for the newsletter release 1-0 and I was in the middle of writing an issue of the newsletter about
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link management and mind mapping and I was very frustrated because the tools I saw were terrible and then out of nowhere this little company has this tool and I started using it the file that you're looking at right now is the
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same file that I opened in December of 1997. so I've been feeding one mind map for 24 and a half years this December it'll be 25 years a month or two ago I passed the half million thought mark
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so each node is called a thought there's a half million of them in this one mind map but look we're looking at one little screen and it's pretty handy here is today's session here is a link and in fact I made a link for every one of the
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sessions for today and then I wanted to say that I'm me my relationship with the brain is a little bit like this guy who in 1977 started making dioramas out of toothpicks he had this Obsession and
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here's a whole collection of his dioramas here's the Palace of Fine Arts and a galleon and whatever except I've been adding toothpicks to this mind map of what's out there what I what I know and what I believe and that's really
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important because there's opinions in here as well um so um I loved hypercard anybody remember hypercard raise your hand yes the web raise your hand if you believe hypercard could have been the web and
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Apple's really stupid meh okay good um and then I used Echo for a while and then when the internet shows up Echo falls apart and then this pitch comes through I was also an avid bubble Charter so the moment I saw this I was
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really happy then I've had this long-standing sort of addiction to the tool and I will do a demo of this tool in a couple sessions so I won't go there just a little bit more to talk about there but my use of the brain feels
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really unusual and useful because I have this aggregated memory and very few people most people I've seen who use Mappy tools like mindjet or mind Domo or there's a thousand of them so if I go to
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mindjet for example which has been around since 1998 and if I click on mind mapping here's all the Mind mapping companies I've heard of before and that's just mind mapping here's visual search tools
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here's visual analysis tools uh etc etc there's like all these sort of subcategories and I created for this event and this sequence through the think Camp I created this thought called mapping tools for thinking that includes
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links down to every one of these yellow things as a cluster is a category and then the purple ones are more towards opinions and things like that so I think that somehow
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what I'm hoping to let you do is sort of look over the shoulder of somebody using a tool for thinking intensively and see what that's like um I'm sitting here feeding this thing all by myself the brain has a team brain mode but it doesn't work the way I wish
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it did in its proprietary software so I'm like where is everybody this is really really fun I feel like a lone wikipedian out there like you know trying to make an encyclopedia and part of what we're talking about here is how
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do we create a social memory that allows people to use their favorite tool because different people think and represent things differently but yet still create an aggregated asset something together in between us that
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actually helps us figure out what we know and why we know it and why we believe in it um so I have a thought in my brain uh that says lessons from my brain you can go browse it my brain is available on
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the on the web openly for free you can go to jerrysbrain.com click on launch Jerry's brain and you'll open a new tab with this display and it's I I hit the little sync button uh several times a
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day so the data you'll see is fresh and I Mark very few things in here private so of the half million things in it they're pretty much all available to you but there's a couple really interesting lessons from the brain one of which is
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kind of key for me which is I believe that we're kind of an amnesic Society we are dumber than we normally would be because we've been consumerized instead of being treated as Citizens like you can go down the street and ask
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your average person like uh who the current president of the country is and they probably don't know but you can ask them who Kim Kardashian's kids are and they've got that and I don't think that's because humans are stupid I think
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that's because we're doing very weird things out in the public sphere and and we're we're sort of dumber and building a shared memory is a piece of the solution of trying to get someplace
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where we can actually start to use this to make Society a little bit better so for me using this brain has not cured Amnesia but it's given me much better recall because every time I show something to somebody or every time I
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add something to a category it refreshes the wet pads in my head so my unaided recall and a bunch of things is much better I think than it would be otherwise for example two more points
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what you'll see from this afternoon is that there are Embers of Interest everywhere right now there's subtle custom which is an old method invented by Nicholas and Lumen so I can make a link here to settle custom
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which is this one so I've just made a link in my brain to settle custom invented by this guy this philosopher Nicholas Lumen who studied under Talcott Parsons who was a structural function of
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systems thinker at Harvard etc etc there's the cult of Rome there's a whole bunch of people using different kinds of tool I happen to have become addicted to this one but how do we collaborate together how do our data
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sets are all siled there's no bonfire in the middle and one of the reasons for this sequence of sessions is really to build that bonfire and to attract the people who care about this and help us build something together
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and then last thing um I think there are some civilizational implications for this work this isn't just about personal productivity and getting things done and note-taking and and hey I remembered what I what I heard
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or saw a month ago um if we do this right then scientists are actually feeding a shared brain and students are actually feeding the shared brain and the data sets are open under open content possibilities and then
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journalists are actually going in and tackling those issues directly and then policy makers and communities can harvest the actual data from actual studies participate in the conversations this medium which doesn't exist could
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enable us to make better decisions together as a society right and I think that's hugely important it's it's part of the path toward recovering the mess that we're in right now and I think I've got a thought in here that says we are in five crises
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right now and that's a whole fun conversation to have and the second piece of this is um The Story Goes that in the early days of Cinema they put a moving camera in front of on a tripod in front of a stage
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and they ran theater and they recorded theater because everybody knew theater since ancient Greece and before awesome then somebody says hey let's put the tripod on a little dolly and move it around and we invent the pan and the
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jump cut and the Montage and suddenly we get the vocabulary of Cinema awesome the web is stuck in web 1.0 language we have magazines and movies and mail
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electronic mail messages and some other chats we're like we haven't leveled up in part because of intellectual property over protection good ideas go into books where they're surrounded by DRM or they go into PDFs where information goes to
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die and we need to sort of liberate it and and put it between us so that it's actually useful and then instrument it or make it executable so that it turns into stuff that lets us run our lives
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better and make better decisions together so that's kind of my rant for for opening this and I'm really looking forward to where we go uh and we have some great things showing up here yeah
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thank you Jerry so uh I think that that's uh I hope that's a good kick off what I think what you could see is that there's it's a big space there's a lot starting to happen in this space and you
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know during the day you're going to see us sort of Simon we're going to be going back and uh through a series of the conversations looking at the history of computing and sort of how we got here and why we're stuck in metaphors around
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file folders and things like that and then we're going to be looking forward with a lot of the demos and the entrepreneurs who are starting to build in the space so um what what did we learn from from
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render John what what things what things jumped out for you so I think the the render session was a really good session I mean it was a it was a lively sort of half day event that
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we did here in the city we had I think a set of high-level discussions a set of really compelling interesting demos and you know I encourage you just to check it out because uh we'll drop some links
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into show notes but it was it was a really good session they covered the breadth of what tools for thinking I think have been and can be uh and so I think the you know what what
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came out of it for me I I think the the handful of things uh the first is is that I think the importance for really simple accessible tools for thinking
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um and so uh you know I I have on top of my Twitter feed right now the sort of the meme of the sort of midwit um uh meme uh and sort of that I I found
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myself in that trap before where I get obsessed with some like you know tool for thinking app and then I realize I'm not actually thinking I'm just like using more technology and I think
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getting really good accessible tools that really can almost the tools can get out of the way so that people can really think and not think about the thinking or think about the software so that was
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sort of one key thing uh that came out for me uh do you wanna do you want to do one for you and then um and then I I think I've got uh one or two others that sounds great um and also my shorthand for what you
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just said when I'm trying to describe this to other people is we need something that's one step more difficult than Instagram Tumblr Snapchat Pinterest all the things that millions billions of
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people are using happily with hashtags and hashtags or metadata so so they're already sort of deep into using these tools most of these tools for thinking look pretty arcane and a little daunting so I think finding that little sweet
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spot is really important um one of the things that jumped out of me in in our render session was unexpected applications and uh Linus Lee stood up and and said you know yeah that was for that I'm just kind of messing
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around with this stuff for myself and here's what I did and he makes this two by two Matrix where he drops a paragraph in the middle and then drags it around and the Matrix has Dimensions like slower or faster happier angrier or
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something like that and as he's dragging the Little Dot around the text that he Dragged In starts changing and being Rewritten live by gpt3 so that it's faster slower so gosh every couple years
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we need to discuss tools for thinking turns into you know last you know five minutes ago we just had a meeting for tools for thinking kind of thing and and I think there was a there was a gasp in the audience so things that I hadn't
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begun to consider because I'm still stuck on how do we build the simple tool that lots of people are going to use so that was there were several moments during the the day that felt like that to me yeah yeah yeah I agree that that was
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brilliant uh that was a brilliant sort of it it encapsulated so much of the I think the moment and the opportunity right the the use of these large language models uh yeah and the pace that the uh being
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developed is is extraordinary and since many of them are open source and they're being sort of co-developed with communities uh they uh uh the this I
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think the speed at which we're going to see Improvement there and uh you know we've suddenly seen the sort of the uh the shift from gpt2 to three uh was remarkable and I think that
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we're now going to see sort of beyond that and other related tools uh that are going to be uh truly I think companions for thinking exactly also when when
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Alice Albrecht sort of pulled the curtain back and said hey if you're using these models you have to think of your compute budget and it was like talking to Scotty in the engine room of the Enterprise and he's like well we've
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got an obtainium but or vibranium but not quite enough and and here's how it gets used up really quickly and I was like ah this is super useful too uh yeah I also think Alice's comments in
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the that loss panel was uh second to last panel uh that she did uh with with Chris and with Linus you know she she talked a lot about sort of the uh the uh
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conception sort of the really sort of core pragmatic issues that these language models are dealing with today and you know it's uh it's fun and it gets headlines to you know discuss you
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know uh sentient language models but you know these are uh you know I I think that what we really need to do is we need to figure out what we actually have today and
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start uh getting these models and software to really work with people uh and so the people we can start to understand what real needs are instead
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of these sort of large abstractions that mostly come from sort of Hollywood either uh dystopian or utopian fantasies I was happy that we didn't get stuck in a you know is this stuff sentient yet
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conversation we can we can do that some other time we don't need to do that the other thing I realized and it was just nice because we were in our physical room this is kind of post-pandemic-ish and we were in a physical room with
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people who were really enthusiastic about this they were leaning in they were asking fabulous questions yeah the way I think about this is that if you look out over the horizon of this field there's a bunch of different bonfires that are Burning Brightly but there but
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but these people aren't really talking to each other so I thought yeah I mean yeah I think we had a you know 100 plus people in the room we had uh I think about another 400 on the live stream uh
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we you know uh Kevin marks was you know totally unprompted because it's nice enough to a live tweet the whole thing and and then at the end of the day at the end of the evening right we had to
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literally kick people out and uh we closed the doors at seven because the support staff was uh was gone uh and uh was packing up I needed to clean the place up and I left at 7 30 7 45 and
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there were people still on the street um like hanging out and talking so I think that there's you know this community here um and there's there's people who really
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believe as do we as do I that uh you know we're at a sort of one of those you know tipping points where these Technologies whether it's graph databases launch language models facial
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uh interfaces a whole set of things a sort of conspiring for us to be able to actually come to the table and rethink you know what our tools are thinking are and and these things become much more
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available the closer we get to having sort of protocols and apis and agreements for how they fit together and Gordon brander did A really lovely job of presenting his notion of what that is the no sphere protocol a lot of people
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were leaning in there and I think there's there's other groups that are building similar kinds of things but the closer we get to that the easier than it is to integrate these different things um although we have to be smart as Alice said these data sets are often
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incommensurable that they don't mesh they don't like right different language models don't actually play nicely together they were generated in different ways and and you know aren't the same sort of thing so where let's look forward and I think also sorry I
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think you were just reminding me I think Gordon's uh I I think Gordon's presentation was really interesting and sort of sparked a lot of thinking about uh the importance for these uh for uh
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these tools to be open and so that we can move these sort of clumps of knowledge or as I think about them sort of you know uh little stacks of knowledge or knowledge blobs where I've
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got like these small ideas laddering up to the bigger ideas and I can transfer to you the whole idea right and so you've got like my supporting hypotheses data maybe my contrarian
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hypotheses and that too but you've got a blob of an idea not just you know a hashtag of a word so I think Gordon did a brilliant job of that I think Davey's presentation you
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know really sort of you know uh started scratching on the social uh thinking uh side of the equation uh because I think that
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um you know if if language is you know sort of our original tool for thinking um language is a social tool right uh talking to yourself you don't get so far
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um and so I think that it's you know having conversations and being able to like and being able to think socially I mean how I touched on that too
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um and just the importance of the sort of you know how the social internet emerged and how social thinking is to emerge and so much of the power here is actually social um back to what you just said about sort
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of uh the ideas and being able to share them I I posted a video on YouTube in 2010 called nuggets narratives and points of view where I was trying to describe an idea is a nugget you can string them together into narratives and
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then you can stack them up into a point of view within some domain and the example I gave was some videos that I shot about the 2008-2009 global financial crisis how did we get there what's the evidence what should we do
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about it what what got done et cetera et cetera and and we need much better sort of fluid language and some social norms to get into that mode or we can do that so so I wanted to shift us a
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little bit into looking ahead for the sector and so forth and I think a piece of what needs to happen is we need to like go to dance class together and figure out that this is Tango or Rumba
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or waltz or all three except we're going to sort of go back and forth between them so that we know the Rhythm and the steps to do together so that these tools can collaborate because I think you and I both are coming into this strongly
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with the belief that there is no one tool to rule them all we need a variety of Baskin-Robbins flavors of tool to come in but the tools need to talk to each other and the people need to be able to interact through them to create
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more of a shared shared knowledge base so so how we get there I think is going to be a piece of what we're we're busy kind of stewarding in the background as we're working on a particular startup or
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a particular idea or a particular feature right which is like already hard enough to do yeah yeah totally hear you I think that that's right so Jerry uh what are you gonna do on these podcasts
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so I am going to be um interviewing some of the startup people I I think that the general model we want to do is me and two guests each time so that it's not one profile of one company or one whatever and it'll be a mixture of
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entrepreneurs who've got startups and some really interesting thinkers in the space and there's a bunch of those to choose from uh and some other people trying to figure out what is tools for thinking look like and how can we sort
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of stand this thing up together so that there's both a thriving startup economy and then an ecosystem of shared knowledge so I'll be going through that in a series that at least we'll go through November and then we'll see
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we'll see like how it's going at that point and maybe continue it but um and we're going to do this every week it'll be a weekly podcast yes fantastic and we're going to run it as a podcast and what's going to make the video
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available so if people want to see uh the tool because in many cases there's a visual component to these tools we'll have the video also uh so so that's brilliant my my job and what I'm going
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to be doing is uh I will drop into these periodically where I can be helpful but my real job is going to be to help uh Source some uh uh diversity of
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interesting uh people and products uh in this space because I think that uh as we as we go through the process of uh talking to a whole set of companies uh
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who are interested in the accelerator program it's a great opportunity to see the sort of the the diversity of people who are coming into this space because I think that on one hand you could think
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about this as a very narrow thing a lot of people come to it and when I say tools so thank you they go all note-taking and then you know um you know you speak to somebody else and they say oh my best tool for
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thinking is meditation or cooking right so long walk um in the forest yes yeah yeah yeah yeah and so then that sort of you know that I think that that opens up a question of uh sort
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of like okay how do you how do you help people think contextually in the place that they're actually thinking uh which may be voice capture interfaces which may be mind mapping which may be spatial
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which maybe you know so those so my job is going to be to help uh find things uh to get onto this podcast that are great and that really stimulate I think uh
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people's uh interest and and the scope of the space so if you're listening to us and you have a startup in the tools for thinking space get in touch we would love to have you jump into the camp or be a guest on
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the podcast or mix into our conversations around around the space so it's uh there's a lot to do here yeah there's a lot to do I'm super excited and I think it's uh I think it's
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right time so uh let's get going and if you feel like it and you are you have a workflow of your own with a tool for thinking that isn't just note taking um yes post a video of your workflow and
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use the hashtag t4t workflow uh and we will find those and highlight them on our streams and uh post our own because I need to do some of that myself around this brain thing yeah yeah I think it
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would be wonderful to as part of this to uh you know as as you interview people Jerry is to just get like really specific sort of like tip or sort of like what tell me one thing you do
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that's magical um because I think so many people I mean I met with some guy this week and he you know sort of unpacked for me his his tips but uh so many people have put
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together and uh basically you know band-aiding together in sort of lazy web fashion as many tools as they can because there's a lot of tools out there that are not made for this but the who
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you can use for this um but there's better ways to do this and that's what we want to expose so excited and we want to make we want to promote and encourage more tools that
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play nicely with others so that you can take your note-taking tool and connect it up to a machine Learning System and connect it up to something else that's busy creating visual output and whatever so
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so there we are yeah I know um this is the this is as we said our first episode of tools for thinking thank you for listening to us uh this is the new podcast that might just help you with your thinking if you're part of a
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startup in the sector knock on our door at betaworks.com Camp thank you for listening thank you [Music]
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