– Jerry Michalski

On this episode we learn from the incredible connector Jerry Michalski. His fascinating career is hard to summarise, playing a central role in the emerging digital economy as long time managing editor of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter. He is now leader at the Relation Economy Expedition (REX) as well as an advisor facilitator and speaker at the Institute For The Future with a deep focus on trust and relationships

Website: jerrymichalski.com

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Jerry Michalski: It is a great pleasure to be here, and it’s nice to have a chance to talk with you as well.

Ross: Yes, it’s been too long. I’ve got to say you’re certainly one of the very first people that sprung to mind when I thought about people who are excellent at thriving on overload.

Jerry: I love that. Thank you.

Ross: We’ll try to go through in a little bit of the frame we have around Thriving on Overload; firstly around purpose. In a world of information, how have you developed the clarity of filtering information, or how do you find what’s relevant to you? Where does that come from for you?

Jerry: I can point to two things. One of them is an insight, and the other one is an accident. A long time ago, both of the events happened within a couple of years in the mid-90s, when I was a tech industry trends analyst; not a Wall Street analyst, I don’t care what next quarter’s earnings are going to be, but is AI going to kill us or save us? Or where should we apply neural networks? Those were the things I was looking into back then.

Ross: It’s probably a good time to tell us what is TheBrain?

Jerry: TheBrain is a mind mapping piece of software. The easiest way to show you is to share my screen.

Ross: Some people will just be listening to the podcast, so can you describe that?

Jerry: Okay, I’ll describe it as a football announcer. The mind map has a blue background and words or phrases, mostly phrases, linked by lines. The color scheme that I use is the color scheme that this thing shipped with 23 years ago, a dark blue background with a little bit of fading at each side, a little bit of gradient, words mostly in white on this dark background, lines in a light blue, and occasionally, I use the colors yellow or purple as highlights. I just took us to a thought because it’s called TheBrain, every node is called a thought. I just took us to a thought I called Lessons from my Brain. Under here are a whole bunch of different thoughts, one of my favorites, because it’s an unusual insight, is that we are an amnesic society.

Ross: Would it be accurate to describe this as a mind map where each of the element clicks is a hyperlink to another mind map?

Jerry: This is actually one big mind map. We have an amnesic society. Amnesia is under memory. There’s also elective memory loss, then there’s institutionalized amnesia, organizational amnesia, social amnesia, a whole bunch of different kinds of things. Apparently, Henry Gustav Molaison was studying amnesia. He had students named Brenda Milner and Suzanne Corkin. Molaison wrote about patient H.M. who had a traumatic brain injury, etc. You see that I’m basically making these links. All these little links between the thoughts, I’ve put in by hand, because these things are related to each other.

Ross: This gets to a really fundamental point. Let’s say you have a new piece of information, you find an article or resource, how in your mind do you go through the process of working out where that fits in your Brain?

Jerry: It’s really simple. Before we go forward, I just want to correct myself, Molaison wasn’t a scientist, he, in fact, was an accidental research subject because he had a lobotomy after a traumatic brain injury, and suddenly things happened to his memory that changed everything, so here’s a couple of articles titled “The brain that changed everything”. Sorry about that. Do you see anything in the flow of information in your day that’s worth remembering?

Ross: Yes.

Jerry: Me too. It turns out that I probably see 50 or 60 things every day that are really worth remembering. Then there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam that I let go by. The first decision is, is this worth remembering? The second decision is where would it go? I’m curious about everything. I was just on YouTube, and right there on the side, there was an explanation and simulation of the ExxonMobil Refinery Explosion in Torrance, California, in 2015. I clicked on it and started going there. Then I decided, that’s interesting. I already had a couple of refinery accidents. One, I had the attack in Saudi Arabia, and then I had a Texas City one, so I added the animation that I just watched. I just dragged it into my Brain, creating this thought in the meantime, under Refinery Accidents and Incidents, which is under Oil Refineries and Types of Accidents.

Ross: Coming back to purpose, what is it that makes something you want to keep in your Brain or not?

Jerry: When I first started using this, I was a tech industry trends analyst. The company Edify, for example, I don’t have much around them because they are all around an interactive voice response, they got some money from Greylock management. Then if I click on Greylock management, we’ll see that they also invested in Dig, Crunch Fund, and Coda. These lists are out of date. I don’t make any claim that these lists are complete. But obviously, there was a purpose for my use of this tool for my job immediately back in 1998,1999, 2000. Then, I was like, I can store everything here.

Ross: Do you ever use paper or any other visual tools outside TheBrain?

Jerry: I have next to me a little Squirrel pad. I use it rarely. I can only write on graph paper, on Squirrel paper, only on one side of the page, this is an old habit from 30 years ago, and only with the pen; I can’t use a pencil anymore. I have a little metal clipboard that I love. Then I have an iPad, and I use a drawing app on it. But I use them all occasionally.

Ross: Essentially, this is where you capture and organize your thoughts?

Jerry: Exactly. Now, I don’t do outlining for an article. Let’s say I’m writing a post somewhere, I would have a link to the post here in my Brain but the outline for the post would be in Google Docs, or medium, or wherever it is I’m writing the piece. I don’t use TheBrain for outlining. You easily could and many people do. I just don’t do that, partly because I feel like I’m serving two audiences. One is just me and my idiosyncratic use of this tool to remember stuff, but because I’ve been publishing my Brain online for a really long time, at least 15 years, I have a second audience which is whoever trips across this thing and decides to try to use it, for which, thank you very much, but I want to make this clear enough that people can find their way through and run into stuff that’s actually very useful to them. I have a thought that people are generally more trustworthy than we think they are, which is one of my beliefs. I have a thought called My Beliefs right here.

Ross: Just want a comment on the point of saying, alright, I’m going to open this up for the whole world to see the inside of my Brain.

Jerry: First, there was no reason not to. I can check a little box, so if I click on a link, it gives me a little dialog box. Then over here, there’s a little lock symbol; if I click on the lock, it makes this particular thought private. Now and then as I synchronize to the cloud, to TheBrain’s web servers, whenever I sync, that refreshes, and I do that several times a day, which puts the most up-to-date version on the cloud. Anything I marked as private, nobody else gets to see it. I can protect the things that I care to protect, and I don’t protect very much. I’ll give a speech inside a company that nobody outside the company is meant to know about, that thought is private. But the people I meet who are employees of the company, I attach them to the company, and I make them publicly visible. Nobody needs to know where we met, that linking thought is for me. My notion of the benefits of publishing this publicly has obviously grown over time, as this has become a bigger asset, as I’ve done more thinking about what it means to work like this in public, etc. I’m a little bit vulnerable for doing this, so I do have that thought called My Beliefs.

Ross: That’s wonderful. You have shared extensively on social media at various times in various channels over the years, so this is perhaps the biggest sharing, you’re sharing TheBrain and everything with your Brain marking. How does this relate then to your other social sharing?

Jerry: It’s funny, I’m Twitter user number 509. Ed Williams is a friend, but a different friend of mine basically said, Hey, try this when it was still just an SMS service. I don’t have a zillion followers, but I’ve been on Twitter since it was born, and I’ve used other social media, but I have no large audience anyplace. My wife and I recently were doing our wills, and the only asset I have that matters to me when I pass on is this thing. The only asset I have that matters is my Brain. It’s easy to fund a server still being alive to serve up TheBrain contents frozen on the day of my death. Okay. But a really interesting question is, how might there be other people who then pick up and start using this as a sourdough starter, and then keep going? The project I’m doing now Open Global Mind, one small motive for that project is to get me out into a more open collaborative tool with other humans doing this so that what I’ve done is just a starter for some new layer. Think of this as on top of Wikipedia, but different.

Ross: Tell us about the tool, where that’s at, and where it’s going?

Jerry: OGM, Open Global Mind isn’t actually trying to build a tool, we’re trying to first look around for open source products that exist. There’s a thing called Graphviz, which does visualization; there are a few other bodies of open source code. We’re also trying to motivate existing vendors to write toward each other so that their tools can interoperate, and to separate themselves from their proprietary data formats. Almost everybody has seen Minority Report, and they have that Tom Cruise scene where he’s doing the analysis and flipping things around, isn’t that cool? Some of our geek friends were actually advisors on that movie, so it’s a really good simulation. Although I’m not a huge fan of VR gloves, and all that stuff but imagine a conversation between people using different kinds of tools for memory, and connecting ideas, and building arguments, who weren’t just trapped in little rectangles with a chat on the side but instead were in idea land, and when you showed me something you believed in an argument that I really liked, I could grab it and link it into mine, and say, for this topic, refer to this thing Ross just did.

Ross: I sometimes think that the defining theme of where my life is going is collective intelligence.

Jerry: That’s fabulous. Collective intelligence, collaborative sense-making, hive mind, whatever term you want, that’s the place where we’re aiming. Then there’s a whole bunch of small subgroups. There’s a bunch of people who are fans of subtle custom, which was a system developed by Niklas Luhmann with index cards and a coding scheme, and they’re emulating that in software. Then there’s the cult of Rome research, which is doing backlink key outlines; then there’s a bunch of others, and none of us are connected to each other. Each of these is like its own frothy little cult. I’m really interested in what does it look like when a heavy Rome user, who’s done a lot of this work, and I talked to one another? And what can we build together?

Ross: One of the things that hopped off for me is actually social bookmarking and Delicious, and so on, which was a big loss when that disappeared. Is there anything now that you feel in terms of social bookmarking or other things that are useful?

Jerry: I was not a Delicious user, because I was already a Brain user, but Delicious was the closest thing to TheBrain without any of the visual aspects, but certainly the social side of it was more than TheBrain, the shared links, the hash-tagging, a bunch of other interesting stuff, and I regret the day Yahoo bought them. I, even more, regret the day that they went under, and Joshua Schachter is now driving sports cars. I’m like dude, couldn’t you have just funded this thing to stay up as a server? A lot of old Delicious users wound up on Pinboard, which is a mediocre substitute. Then there are a couple of other tools that are picking up some of that but don’t quite have the magic or the community because, for example, C19, as a hashtag on Delicious, was a rallying cry for historians who cared about the 19th century.

Ross: Yes, it does seem that there’s less happening now than there was, unfortunately.

Jerry: Yes and no, because the little cults that I talked about are new. A lot of those are new, frothy, and interesting. Whether it’s personal knowledge management, or personal knowledge graphs, or network knowledge graphs, there’s a whole bunch of subcategories, I’ve got most of them named in my Brain and collected up. They’re all trying hard to figure this thing out, and many of these people are really good bloggers or chroniclers of their activities, on whatever medium you want. If you want to get in those conversations, they’re openly available; but you’re right, in another way, a lot of this stuff has died off, and there isn’t a great deal of interest.

Ross: I will have a look at your Brain to find those references.

Jerry: I’m happy to send you links or whatever. A nice thing is that I can send a shortened link to any particular thought, any specific thought in my Brain to anybody. That’s easier than going to Jerrysbrain.com, clicking on launch Jerry’s Brain, and then trying to use the search function, which is okay, but slow. You can get around that way but it’s so much easier if I send you someplace directly in the middle of TheBrain.

Ross: Actually, that would be awesome to get the direct links for where you were referring to earlier in the podcast so that people can track our conversation and to delve into what we’ve just been chatting about.

Jerry: We can add them to the comments, no problem.

Ross: What are your information sources? The things that you use regularly? How do you choose those sources? How do you find broader sources beyond that? What is your structure for finding and using your sources?

Jerry: I’m no scientist or information technologist about this stuff. It’s been a pretty organic thing. I love the New York Times because I lived in New York for five years and got really used to it and its writing style. For example, there have been plenty of controversies about its agendas and whatnot over the last couple of election cycles, but I have a lot of references there, and that’s the only paper that I will regularly go look at. I only look at it online, I don’t get anything delivered on paper anymore at all. Then I subscribed to a bunch of different newsletters most recently, probably Heather Cox Richardson, the historian, who’s doing political commentary, no opinion. There’s a whole bunch of people, and I’ll turn them off once they’re less relevant for me, so I’ll unsubscribe.

Ross: You’re getting to the essence of what this is all about. I’ve got to say, if you had that feeling of overwhelm only a couple of times, then you’re doing better than most people.

Jerry: I think I feel less overwhelmed than most because I have a very productive way to put things in a place where I know I’ll find them again. David Allen is the Getting Things Done guy; he says, you have a whole bunch of open loops in your head, you need to put them in a system that is reliable, where you know, where you don’t have this worry that you’re going to miss a loop and drop something. He helps you design a reliable system. I’m terrible at GTD, although I took a couple of David’s workshops.

Ross: You mentioned serendipity before. When you’re out exploring or finding, is there any way in which serendipity is more likely to happen in what you discover?

Jerry: Serendipity, curiosity, and innovation are not things that I worry about, I have no scarcity of any of those. There are a lot of reasons why. One of them is that I keep a bunch of open channels, and I have a bunch of friends who will send me stuff. Another one is that I’m curious about everything, and I’m always nosing in corners looking for stuff. Years ago, when I was 35 years old, I finally read my first good history book, and that gave me the nose for Oh, wait a minute, history doesn’t have to be about there was this battle on this date, and here’s who won; you can actually peel back the curtain and see what was going on; isn’t that cool?

Ross: Do you have any routines or structures during the day or the week? Are there times of day when you scan sources, or think about things, or do deep dives?

Jerry: This is a great and painful question to answer. The thing I should be doing is I should eat the frog, as they say, every morning. The night before, I should set up with the one most important thing I could do the next day, and then just do that and ignore everything else for the first couple of hours, and my life would be very different had I figured out how to do that. Instead, I try to get through my email and I start following things. Before you know it, I’m curating my Brain, adding stuff in, which is beneficial in the sense of these were all little pieces of the puzzle, but not great in the sense of, I probably should have sent that email today.

Ross: You’ve been implicitly talking about mental models throughout, about how you’re building your way of seeing the world, to be able to build it and collaborate around that and to refine and make it better. Your repository is TheBrain but it is not in the software literally, it is inside your mind. What’s the relationship between what you are thinking in your mind and the external resource of TheBrain or anything else? How are you continuing refining and developing?

Jerry: Farnam Street famously has published a couple of books about mental models, but I’ve been collecting mental models for years. I see yellow as an attractor that says hey, there’s a lot of stuff under here; so these yellow things are OR tools, dynamic programming, linear programming, Monte Carlo, nonlinear programming, queuing theory, etc. That’s just one little subsection of useful thinking frameworks. The Cynefin framework is in here from Dave Snowden, brainstorming techniques, etc. I have a massive collection of mental models here that aren’t curated toward each other, meaning somebody who took this collection and went down another level with it could actually say, this one is like this one, here’s how they’re different; somebody could front end this collection with, if you’re stuck in this kind of a situation, here’s how to find your way to a useful mental model or thinking framework. I think that it would be terrific work to do.

Ross: Synthesis is one of the key frames through my life. It’s bringing together disparate ideas and making them one. TheBrain shows connections but there’s this vast amount which you cover through your voracious curiosity, what is the process where you synthesize, pull things together to make sense from these things, and coalesce all of this array of different resources you’ve discovered?

Jerry: Let me show you two examples. One is the OODA loop. John Boyd, Air Force Colonel, a crazy guy who used to call his associates at 2 am and say, I’ve got an idea. He invents this brilliant thing, which was used by Dick Cheney. In John Boyd’s biography, the author credits and acknowledges that. Dick Cheney is a big fan of Boyd, so I wrote a piece that I didn’t actually publish. Back when John Kerry was running, I wrote neocons are inside the democrats’ OODA loop. Because everybody on the far right understands OODA, nobody on the left understood it. When there was swiftboating, flip-flopping, and all the things that kept John Kerry off balance were being done because this was political use of OODA. That’s just one little piece of synthesis. This one, I understood by myself and got into it.

Ross: You’ve mentioned that word pattern hound more than once, what does that mean? How do you sniff out patterns, find them, or articulate them?

Jerry: A big piece of pattern recognition is I curate the world’s largest published Brain with 460,000 thoughts, 850,000 links, and 23 plus years now. This idea that when you look from one place to another, there are things that are really parallel to each other, really works for me. I have a thought that’s really important to me, which is going to look messy, my apologies, but it’s contrarians who make or made sense. Years ago, when I was starting to figure out about trust and all that stuff, I discovered that I had a bunch of heroes, David Bohm, who invented the dialogue process, Alice Miller, who did the unresolved childhood trauma, and a bunch of stuff around family systems thinking, Christopher Alexander, the cranky urban planner, and architect. These people are all on this list.

Ross: Just one thread there was David Bohm’s dialogue.

Jerry: Yes.

Ross: WikiHow is a wonderful and often neglected resource. This is a little implicit in what you’ve been sharing, but how do you use dialogue? How do you engage in dialogue to be able to enhance your models, or other people’s models, or collective models?

Jerry: It’s funny because I’m a facilitator. I’m a convener; I have meetings that I pull together of different kinds, and Open Global Mind right now is mostly a community of practice that is busy working on these different kinds of things. When I lived in Manhattan, I attended several Bohm dialogue sessions, and I was really struck by how subtle the whole process is because we would show up, we would take our coats off, we would sit down and start talking, and before we knew that there was a special something in between us, that the place we were in, the conversation we were having had grown to feel different. That’s a piece of what dialogue is. It’s not about trying to convince anybody of anything. It’s not for therapy, but it might feel like it.

Ross: Not by everyone.

Jerry: Not by everyone; some things come around later, and make a lot of sense later.

Ross: Yes, that’s perennials. You are really an exemplar of thriving on overload. You’ve pointed a path through what you’ve done, a unique path, and you’ve pushed it out further than anyone else. I really hope your project succeeds in being able to provide a more collective frame for this filtering, gathering, and sense-making. Is there anything else to share from your insights and experience on how other people can learn from that to thrive themselves on overload?

Jerry: Yes, many small pieces of advice. One of them is, you can browse my Brain for free at Jerrysbrain.com. I would love for anybody to join the conversation and the actions at Openglobalmind.com, the same sort of thing. A thing for young people, in particular, is to pay attention to your little inner voice, because many people have a lot of trouble finding their purpose in life, like, what is my purpose? Doing stuff without a real purpose is not nearly as much fun as having a purpose. Although sometimes having a purpose is really frustrating because if your purpose is to stop the earth from melting because of climate change, man, we are in a lot of trouble right now around that.

Ross: Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much, Jerry. It’s been really insightful. I look forward to speaking again sometime for long.

Jerry: Thank you very much.

Ross: Take care. Thanks.