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In this episode, we talk with Cato Minor, who is the Duck of Roam, quacking his way into fun, ridiculous experiments with physical controls, crazy CSS, and much more. But behind these experiments, is the intention to explore something deeper.

Coming in from medieval Twitter, Cato Minor focuses on digital humanities studying medieval, Latin, as well as classic Latin. In the midst of trying out many note-taking apps throughout the years, he had stumbled into Roam.

We talked about:

• Knowledge workers of the past and now, what are the differences between them?
• Memory as a process of internalization and digestion, and how outsourcing this to a tool hinders our ability to learn
• Adventures of note-taking: the differences between the many note-taking apps Cato has tried
• How do we make the digital word more physical?
• The interesting physical experiments, from using a train set controller to a TV remote to use Roam!
• The power of medieval diagrams: how can we learn from people who have drawn outlines in the Middle Ages
• How do we create win-win situations for the individual in the PKM space?
• How will Roam scale?

Enjoy!

Timestamps

• 3:48 Where Cato Minor got his name from
• 5:19 Medieval Latin and Cato's fascination with it
• 7:13 In the Middle Ages, all knowledge should serve us in our seeking of God
• 9:20 Memory is what gives us material to transform
• 16:34 Make your notes unique
• 18:59 Roam is a great motivator for experimentation
• 22:47 Physical touch gives us food for thoughts
• 24:21 Everything is a touch screen
• 29:28 Cato's adventure in experiencing other apps
• 41:00 How to make peace in the continent of Note-taking
• 48:39 What you can do now with CSS
• 55:09 How do we foster a tinkerer's community?
• 1:05:00 Roam's growth via the community
• 1:09:18 How will Roam scale?
• 1:16:25 On Featuritis vs. Engelbartian Intelligence
• 1:25:23 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]

Links

• Cato Minor's Twitter

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Warning! This is an explicit episode!

In this episode, we talk with Bardia Pourvakil, AKA @thepericulum. Bardia is a member of the Roam Research team, having started off as a technical writer and dove into the world of Roam.

We talk about:

• Bardia's origin story as a technical writer to discovering Roam Research
• What are the key components for a tool autodidacts use to learn?
• How he joined the Roam team and built up his Clojure skills through contacting Conor
• Roam team's workflow, and Roam pairing sessions
• Bardia's emphasis on community, building things for developers to build upon and the search for fulfillment

Enjoy!

Timestamps

• 4:16 Bardia's origin story as a technical writer
• 10:43 Joining Roam as Support
• 13:26 "You're being really annoying but I like you" - [[Conor White-Sullivan]]
• 15:34 The 3-hour pairing session with the CTO
• 18:48 The power of the Roam Community
• 22:46 Build things for developers to build upon
• 24:57 The search for fulfilment and finding that answer
• 27:50 Never fall in love too much with what you're doing
• 31:21 Bardia never believes in institutions
• 34:08 Learning by Design
• 40:34 Roam Team workflow
• 43:36 Roam Pairing and Roam Games
• 47:37 What Roam is still missing and documentation
• 53:05 What Bardia is excited about: Mobile apps
• 58:10 The wonderful world of Roamania/Roam Manor
• 1:04:10 The cross pollination of ideas and inviting Roamans to Roamania
• 1:08:36 The Roam House Guestbook
• 1:11:28 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]
• 1:13:30 Bardia's dstryd.albums and creating art naturally

Links

• Bardia's Twitter
• dstroyd.albms Instagram

Support the show

WARNING: This is an explicit episode!

This is for Lydia.

In this episode, we talk with Beau Haan, a trained actor, model, and one of the key pillars of the Roaman community. Leading the Roam Book Club, he's built a space for many participants to share their thoughts with a Roam-specific Zettelkasten method. With up to 300 actives in RBC3, they found the chance to discover more of themselves and their thoughts at block-level.

We talked about:

• Beau's origin stories, from running away from home to entering rehab and telling stories
• The loss of loved ones and the impact that has on one's life
• Discovering Roam Research and how he became a true believer without even trying the app
• What he learned from his personal coaching sessions with [[Sönke Ahrens]]
• How questioning the way you learn is questioning your identity

Enjoy the episode!

Timestamps

• 3:55 How Roam has changed how Beau behaves in the world
• 7:13 "I'm supposed to be dead": Beau's origin story
• 11:35 "I wish they had Roam" losing loved ones to drugs or alcohol
• 13:06 The story of Lydia
• 19:29 Discovering Roam Research for storytelling
• 21:21 Signing up for the Believer's Plan
• 22:25 [[Sönke Ahrens]]' private coaching sessions
• 25:31 Roam granularity and the power of the community
• 27:40 Testing Roam Zettelkasten with Roam Book Club
• 29:16 "You're wrong about Zettelkasten"
• 32:18 The Angel named [[Matt McKinlay]]
• 36:19 Learning who you were in Roam Book Club 3
• 40:29 Preparing for the next wave of Roamans
• 45:35 Questioning the way you learn is questioning your identity
• 50:49 Becoming defensive from questioned identity
• 53:17 Outsourcing our learning methods to others and blaming them for failure
• 55:55 We have the fear of public speaking and thinking as ourselves
• 57:55 [[Sönke Ahrens]]: Forget about the tool and focus on the writing
• 1:03:50 The rush of being at the peak of a mountain
• 1:10:17 Emitting the same energy as the believer's call
• 1:13:59 The friend, and the RBC Workflow
• 1:18:30 The beauty of Roam is the people
• 1:22:07 The Roam Energy, and articulating infinity
• 1:23:58 Protect the Roamans from those only wanting to make profit
• 1:29:52 Join the town and be part of Roam
• 1:31:37 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]
• 1:33:22 A Letter to Lydia

Links

• Beau Haan's Twitter
• Roam Book Club's Twitter
• Bookclub 4 Waiting List

Support the Show.

In this episode, we talk with [[Abhay Prasanna]], Founder of Roam Bounties, and active Roaman in Slack as well as the Twitter Roaman community. Abhay is always up to date when it comes to everything related to CSS and adding in visualizations to one's roam graph to make it look prettier, more functional, and much more.

As someone who has created one of the most, used Roam themes, Dracula Pro (adapted set of colors from another theme), Abhay has been on a long journey to explore himself through the usage of Roam.

We talked about:

• Life before Roam: From engineering to management consulting
• Gaining a vision once he discovered Roam: The perfect notebook
• His daily notes workflow where 90% of his blocks live only in his daily notes!
• Aesthetics and how they play a part in him viewing his own knowledge graph
• Tackling the voice of the unreliable narrator, defining who you are through making connections and building evidence on yourself
• What do you really want from your Roam graph and how does that affect you in life? From algorithms of thought to algorithms of feeling.

Enjoy!

Timestamps

• 3:47 Abhay's origin story and the little breadcrumbs of our lives
• 5:40 Connecting life experiences and emergent writing in Roam
• 9:46 The anticipatory regret for not writing something and not making a connection
• 12:47 You write for the entirety of your knowledge graph
• 14:05 Abhay's workflow is an evolution
• 16:34 Marginality, Mattering and the Roam Community
• 19:43 The writing happens in conversations, and Pokemon evolutions
• 24:06 Valuing the structure of your mind and your Roam graph
• 30:54 We are completely innocent and blameless and make mistakes
• 32:39 The shadow of optimization, and wanting to feel functional
• 35:33 CSS and the power of aesthetics
• 38:32 Learning CSS with Roam as the experiment
• 40:14 Providing the act of service for the Roam community
• 46:28 Why purple is a memorable color
• 49:01 How do you plan for Roam experiments?
• 51:20 There are things that we value, but do not have exclusive rights to our attention
• 52:31 Salience, sovereignty, and protecting our own attention
• 59:54 How do we tackle the Unreliable Narrator, our lies and our truths?
• 1:01:50 Continuity of contact, not closure into conclusion, and facing heuristics
• 1:03:34 Finding what you don't resonate with helps with answering what you really want
• 1:10:52 The only agenda is to figure out what is actually salient
• 1:15:01 Algorithms of feeling and using Roam templates for your emotions
• 1:20:00 Revelation and illumination are hard to distinguish
• 1:20:49 What Abhay is looking forward to in Roam
• 1:23:42 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]

Links

• Abhay's Twitter
• Dracula Pro Roam Theme
• Masonry Vanilla CSS

Support the show

In this episode, we talk with Jeff Morris Jr. aka @jmj on Twitter, who is the Founder and General Partner of Chapter One VC. He was previously the VP of Product Revenue at Tinder, and in the role, Tinder became the number one top-grossing apps in the app store.

He invests in early-stage startups who are passionate about the future of work developer tools and subscription businesses. So if you are interested in having a product person on your cap table, Jeff is the person to go to.

As someone who I've been following for quite a while on Twitter @JMJ, he is quite the enthusiastic person when it comes to Roam Research and tweeting about it quite a number of times.

I've brought him onto the show to talk about:

• His origin story, how he dreamed of becoming a professional NBA player, to screenwriting and diving into tech startups
• Becoming connected with Roam Research after glancing at the tool from someone's screen-share and getting connected with [[Conor White-Sullivan]] later on.
• What to look out for as an investor In companies like Roam: staying far away from the San Francisco Bay area startup scene, becoming non-conformist to tackling problems and more
• What is it about Conor's decisions that has compelled Jeff to invest in Roam Research?
• Jeff's workflows on how he keeps track of investor meetings, learnings, health and more
• What will Roam look like 40 years from now, and why it's the Jimi Hendrix of the PKM space.

Enjoy!

Timestamps

• 3:00 Jeff's dreams of becoming a professional NBA player, and Jumpsoles
• 4:53 Catcher in the Rye, Screenwriting and getting a script picked up by Sony
• 8:26 Discovering Roam Research through an engineer's screenshare
• 9:55 People who invested in Evernote did not think Roam was a good investment idea
• 10:39 The 10-hour pitch on the porch and beers
• 12:54 Evernote vs Roam, from an investor's perspective
• 16:04 Jeff's note-taking workflow before and after Roam
• 17:13 Roam Consultants and Multiplayer Graphs
• 21:03 Conor's truth seeking and conspiracy theories
• 21:58 How do you measure scalable complexity?
• 24:09 "Roam was meant for power users at the start"
• 24:42 "I think the goal of Roam should be to make Roam accessible to as many people as possible"
• 26:15 New users can get overwhelmed by all the power users
• 30:18 The Non-Conformist Personality of Roam Research, and Jimi Hendrix
• 33:06 Hiring the Roam team, and why Conor needs to find his lead guitarist
• 36:03 The flaws of the Bay Area, and tech talent groupthink
• 40:16 The rise of distributed companies and what that means for investors
• 44:32 What will Roam look like decades from now according to the both of us
• 49:35 The metric of company durability
• 51:12 Infopop, the information management system for the physical world
• 53:59 When is Jeff going to hire a Chief Meme Officer?
• 57:06 How Jeff structures his Roam graph for investor meetings and more through templates
• 1:00:00 Product frameworks and investing frameworks
• 1:03:16 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]

Links

• Jeff's Twitter (@jmj)
• Chapter One

Support the show

In this episode, we talk with Ryan Muller, the author of Fractal Inquiry. Focusing on learning and education at Google For Education, Ryan wrote Fractal Inquiry in pursuit of a system for building knowledge in Roam.

It covers the tools you need, plus six tips and eight use cases in building your knowledge graph through one of my favorite methods of knowledge expansion: questions. How do you develop the right questions to dive further into a field/thought/idea?

We talked about:

• How evergreen and atomic notes are tied together via questions, using fractals as an analogy
• Ryan's origin story, how he dove into note-taking and spaced repetition, from learning languages to other fields
• Fractal inquiry: What is a fractal? How do you shape the right questions? What constitutes a good and bad question? When should you delete them? When should you filter them out?
• Would a public fractal inquiry graph work?
• The education system and how the field as a whole is slow in growth compared to others.

If you're on the journey to cultivate a quality knowledge graph, Look no further. Let's dive into my chat with Ryan Muller, the author of [[Fractal Inquiry]].

Timestamps

• 5:19 Ryan's origin story and obsession with spaced repetition
• 7:11 Discovering [[Stian Håklev (侯爽)]]'s research system
• 9:47 Combining the spaced repetition system with block references
• 12:56 When do you stop inquiring into one atomic idea?
• 15:26 What is a fractal, and how does it help with questions
• 20:38 Can you do fractal inquiry in a public graph? What do you need?
• 23:39 Current focus on macro-economics
• 27:13 Formulating useful questions using spaced repetition
• 31:20 A very small percentage of Ryan's inquiries in his graph are future-oriented
• 34:04 Changes in education, learning with YouTube and Minecraft
• 39:00 Where the US education system may be going and where does Roam fit into that
• 48:32 Excited feature request: more support for incremental reading in Roam
• 51:37 [[How would you describe Roam to someone who hasn't started using it?]]
• 53:35 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]
• 56:12 What compelled Ryan to start asking more questions in the first place? + How to do it in Roam

Links

• Ryan's Twitter
• Fractal Inquiry

Support the Show.

Welcome to the final episode of Season 1!

In this episode, we talk with Richard Meadows, a finance writer, investor, and journalist. After quitting his full-time job at age 25, he has been pursuing his own hobbies and research interests while traveling around the world. He is also the author of Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World.

Optionality the book lays out the time tested strategy for not only becoming resilient to shocks, but also positioning yourself to profit from an unpredictable world, especially in the world that we are living in right now. I reached out to Richard because I found out something very fascinating about him: he is the first user of Roam Research!

We talked about:

• Richard's origin story: from a business reporter in New Zealand to quitting his full-time job at 25
• Making the big trip to India and meeting Conor, becoming the first beta tester of Roam Research
• How did his workflow improve over time? We look at Richard's writing workflows and hear what is considered a page, what queries are used, nesting decisions and more
• Optionality: What is it? How can we apply it?
• How do we prepare for an ambiguous future and volatile world?
• Why asking yourself 'What's your 10-year plan' is a stupid question
• How can you use Roam to figure out what options are the best for you?

Enjoy!

Links

• Richard's Website: The Deep Dish
• Richard Meadows' Twitter

Support the show

In this episode, we talk with Sam Marfleet, who is a writer, a marketer, and currently writing a study guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Hailing from Trinidad and Tobago. He discovered Roam in early 2020, Which had answers to a question he's had in a very long time: How can he remember all of these stacks of notebooks that he's had written and forgotten?

As someone fascinated with storytelling, writing, and symbolism, Sam had embarked on this study guide to explore the meaning of a story. So in this episode, we talked about:

• How Sam discovered Roam Research and the impact it had on him
• The Hero of a Thousand Faces: why story is an interesting concept
• The relationship between books and the public intellectual space, and why we like to measure the number of books read
• Exploring the study guide as a format: how Sam's study guide helps you understand the material better
• Joseph Campbell's works on mythologies, the stories that we tell, and the psychological challenges that are manifested as symbolic characters
• Diving into the empirical truth of stories (aka. metaphysical): what does it mean for a story to be true? What does it mean to have a story influence every aspect of our lives, ethics, society, and more?
• The Public Mythology Graph: what a graph about humanity's stories should look like, who should be involved, and more.

Enjoy!

Links

• Sam's Website
• Sam's Twitter

Support the show