RoamFM Transcript: David Crandall: Future of Roam, Data Architecture, Interfaces

Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with David Crandall. He is a software architect and fractional CTO. As someone involved in Data Architecture since the mid-nineties, he has been obsessive with note-taking, having done so for 25+ years(!). Roam fits the bill for writing all his thoughts!

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Transcript

Norman Chella: [00:00:00] RoamFM.

David Crandall: [00:00:03] But if I can link to what you’re doing, and especially if we have some sort of ability to see how others have linked the same thing, I think that’s, that’s going to open a really cool world of possibilities.

Norman Chella: [00:00:13] Hello there. Welcome to RoamFM. Here we dive into the minds, workflows and machinations of their #roamcult, the believers of Roam Research.

My name is Norman Chella and I am on a mission to deconstruct wisdom from all walks of life so we can understand each other better. Indeed. This episode, we talk with David Crandall, who is a software architect for a globally known company and freelance as a fractional CTO, AKA part-time CTO. As someone who’s been in technology since the mid nineties, he has been obsessive with the notion of note taking, having taken notes for 25 plus years. So the introduction of Roam to his workflow is a very fascinating story that we will dive into.

We talked about the dark times before he stumbled into Roam, his work flows from tracking his habits to the way that he takes meeting notes, his dislike of non contextual metadata, which we will talk about more later on and the future of Roam as someone who has written an amazing post predicting the future of Roam.

From a software architects perspective, the possibilities of multiple interfaces all connecting to the same graph, led to a rabbit hole of a discussion, not only the future of Roam, but the future of #roamcult from his point of view. So if you are ready, let’s dive into my chat with David Crandall.

Mr. David Crandall. Welcome to roam with him. How are you doing?

David Crandall: [00:01:42] Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Norman Chella: [00:01:44] And thank you for being here with me to talk about anything and everything related to the room research, especially on one, how you’re going to use it and to the future of Roam, because we are going to have a really huge block of time to deep dive into your predictions on the future of Roam.

But. I, well, I have a feeling that’s going to be a very big part of a conversation, but before we even get to that, we’re are going to have to do a little bit of time travel back to the dark times before you stumbled into Roam, the tool, David, I know you that you’ve been taking notes for quite a while, but could you tell us your origin stories? How did you stumble into the tool and what wowed you with it?

David Crandall: [00:02:28] Absolutely. Absolutely. So I’ve actually been taking notes for about. Probably on 25 to 27 years, I’m in my mid forties right now. So obviously back in the old school days, it was on spiral notebooks, pieces of paper, uh, and anything I could find, uh, but to my wife’s sadness, when we got married, I had boxes full of books of notes, but that did compel me to move to the digital age as quick as I possibly could.

I tried little things like blogger back in the day, try to keep a little book or personal things like that. Uh, Workflowy, I’ve had a Workflowy account for the past eight years still have the same accounts, paid account. Big proponent of the Zettelkasten methodology, things like that. So note taking is something I do a deep dive into.

It’s something that I find fascinating. Uh, I want YouTube videos on how to take notes. I read books on how to take notes. So just go full nerd, I guess.

Norman Chella: [00:03:26] I know that feeling if I take it that from all the times that you are reading up on how to take notes and doing note taking and watching YouTube videos on taking smart notes, how did you discover Roam? Because there are many different avenues to actually, you know, discover the tool itself, but what’s your angle on this?

David Crandall: [00:03:47] So back at the end of February, before the world caught fire, I was watching, it was like an hour long note taking video, because, and I saw up in the recommended, it was a video by Shu Omi, and it was just something quick and he just happened to mention Roam and I watched that video and like pretty quick, I was sold even before opening up the application, like just seeing how it was an outliner and it looked a lot like WorkFlowy.

But it had the block references, the page references, the ability to type in linking so quickly. Just those two things, it obviously runs deeper than that, but those two things alone, right from the start caught my attention. And I saw that video about 1230 in the morning, and I was up for quite a few

Norman Chella: [00:04:38] hours.

We call that, you know, that roam itch where once you know the potential, of what the tool can give you, then you just want to stay up to keep working on it. I had the same as all when I discovered the tool. So the interesting thing about this is that even before, like at 12:30 AM in the morning, you already realized the potential of Roam, the aha moment as we call it, because a lot of people would look at the tool and they would think, Oh, that’s interesting. And it’s just like a bullet point tool, just like maybe WorkFlowy, which is like quite a comparison at that time. Like just that feature, but then on using it further maybe few weeks in they realized the potential, but you immediately saw the value of it, um, from a two to three minute video.

Could you tell me, what did you imagine, or what did you envision when you looked at this video, you know, from having 25 plus years of experience, note taking, what was mind blowing about it?

David Crandall: [00:05:40] There’s a couple of things that stood out to me pretty quick. And I don’t know which one came first, which one caught my attention first, but the fact that it was in markdown was really nice. I do like plain text editors, but having that little extra push of markdown. Just an extra nerdy thing that caught my attention. I was like, Oh, this is interesting. Um, the fact that it’s a bullet point, outliner that you could zoom in on nodes, uh, or blocks as we call them in Roam. That was pretty exciting that, you know, that builds on the markdown excitements.

But then once I saw how things could link together and how quick you create a whole new concept of a page or a block by just typing in double brackets, click in it and now you have a blank thing to go. It’s. It’s like it took WorkFlowy, markdowns, Zettelkasten and the idea of a Wiki and stuck them all together in this very eloquent interface.

Norman Chella: [00:06:28] Did you just call it eloquent interface?

David Crandall: [00:06:31] I’m the eloquent one, apparently.

Norman Chella: [00:06:39] Did you have to take time to get used to the interface because everything starts off with the daily pages, like the daily notes. So the most empirical metadata is a date, but what’s your take?

David Crandall: [00:06:52] So I watched this video and I get super excited. I go, I signed up for the beta. I get signed in and I’m greeted with the date, February 27th, 2020.

I was like, Oh, No it’s based around dates. That’s great. Actually I hated it. Uh, my bitterness changed, but in that moment it was actually kind of a let down, but it was around dates. And I think because I had been with WorkFlowy for so long, you make whatever you want, like it’s all categories or dates or whatever you want it to be.

And I think I was expecting that. And so I was like, Oh, wow. Okay, sure. Let’s go with this. Uh, but I’ve actually come to really like the date approach. Uh, it just took a little bit of learning that and wanting everything to be perfect and then realizing it well, each day it’s going to be a little ugly mess of its own.

If you let it be, that was okay. But it was, it was shocking to open it up and just have this blank date page stare at you.

Norman Chella: [00:07:50] Yeah, it is a bit, I’m not sure if intimidating is the right word. But.

David Crandall: [00:07:55] Daunting?

Norman Chella: [00:07:56] Daunting. Yeah. Maybe that’s the better word to describe it. A page that is already defined as just today and you have nothing on, on the page is from a certain perspective. It may seem worse than having a blank page with no title. And I think it’s because we have different, a different perception of a date in note taking systems. So Roam is quite, quite adamant about making things really chronological in terms of where or when you write notes it’s assigned to this date and everything else goes.

So, uh, I, I had to take some time to get used to that. Uh, I’m not, I’m not sure how long did it take for you to go from the blank page of a WorkFlowy system to every day, logging in something. It doesn’t matter how you organize it and then from there it’ll just magically connect.

David Crandall: [00:08:52] So it was funny cause it was after midnight and I’ve always dated my notes, whatever the majority of the day I was awake.

So if I’m after midnight, I still dated the previous day. So here’s this page forcing me to think, Oh, you’re in the next day. So that was irritating. I was like, I don’t know what this next day supposed to be yet, but it’s been nice. Like. You know, in the beginning you just kind of take some random notes and you start seeing how things click.

And I’ve heard a lot of people, like one of the first instincts we have is to start cramming all of our notes in there. We’re like, okay, well, I’ve got all of this. I’m bringing all my baggage and I’m jumping in here for better or worse. I’m just going to give it all my garbage.

Norman Chella: [00:09:31] Actually. Yeah. I want, I want to ask you have 25 years of notes, mostly analog.

Yeah. Are you, are you transferring all of it into Roam?

David Crandall: [00:09:40] Thankfully, thankfully, uh, and this, this might be a good segway as to what my life currently looks like right now. I had already started digitizing a lot of those analog notes. Last year in June of 2019, my wife and I sold everything almost quit my job, uh, and then moved our family of six to Cozumel, Mexico from Dallas, Texas.

So that was an international move. I say, almost quit my job because I wanted to quit. They’re like, you just want to work remote? And I was like, Oh, that’s a much, that’s a better solution. Let’s do that thing instead. But when we moved international, we had to be very selective in what we brought, so I had already started, I mean, we moved in June, but obviously I knew ahead of time, but so I had started digitizing a lot of the notes.

So I had them just in plain text files and a lot of them were in Workflowy. I use Drafts app on iOS. Uh, so I even had stuff in there they’re just kind of scattered everywhere. So thankfully I had digitized a whole lot of stuff.

Norman Chella: [00:10:39] Okay. So you don’t have to bring, uh, all those notebooks, uh, to Mexico, right?

Yeah. I saw the post, uh, on, uh, you making the move and you have like 26 luggage bags. I believe. And I was just thinking to myself, like, how one, how do you transfer or how do you move 26 luggage bags into international borders, or like across countries and two, how many of those are notebooks? Because that’s probably representative of what Roam can be for a person.

David Crandall: [00:11:12] Yeah. Yeah. So each one, you know, there’s six people in my family. There’s my wife and I, then we have 4 children. And so each person gets a personal bag, a carry on, and then a big luggage. Of course we paid some extra, but like my youngest is six. She was barely carrying our own personal bag. So it was a sight to see basically two adults being mules with luggage through the airport.

It was nightmarish. Just going to say that we did make it one piece, but we were exhausted and we got there. Um, but yeah, there was no notebooks or anything like that. We went, I had digitized all that stuff that I was wanting to bring. Obviously there’s still a bunch of things I didn’t get to. They’re still sitting in the storage, but apparently a luggage full of Barbie wins out over my notebooks so.

Norman Chella: [00:12:00] Can you imagine getting stopped at customs? With a whole bags full of Barbies.

David Crandall: [00:12:06] I would tell you. And when you go into Mexico, there’s, a button you push. And if it turns red, they check your bags, it turns green and they just pass you through.

Norman Chella: [00:12:14] Oh, okay.

David Crandall: [00:12:15] The security guy were both stressing when I hit it and thankfully it turned green. We’re like, woo.

Norman Chella: [00:12:21] Oh, okay. Wow. It’s like the lottery, right? Or like a, like a 50, 50. Oh, okay. Whoa. That’s an interesting way of doing it. Okay.

David Crandall: [00:12:30] It is. It’s very different than anywhere else. I’ve been.

Norman Chella: [00:12:35] And now that you have a year plus now of living there, I wouldn’t put up, should I say, resetting your life to a more calmer, slower approach of working remotely and you’re using Roam to help you with that.

Let’s do a deep dive into your workflow because not only do I have quite a few questions, we have quite a few questions coming in from Twitter. So the most generic question of all. David. What is your workflow? How do things go into your notes? Like normally if it was like a normal notebook, but now that you have Roam, how did it change?

David Crandall: [00:13:12] And, you know, I mentioned February 27th is when I stumbled upon the first time. Well, two, three weeks later is when we all wanted to quarantine the first two or three weeks. I kind of kept it up on this, you know, on a second monitor, didn’t really do much with it. Uh, I occasionally will enter a couple of notes here and there and then quarantine hits and surprise.

All of us are stuck at home and Mexico was very strict. There was, we didn’t go for walks outside. You couldn’t leave the house with more than one person at a time. So I eventually left the house three times or four months and my kids lived never once. My wife went to the store and did grocery shopping.

So very different than how the States experienced it, but lots and lots of times to develop a methodology on a new application. At first, I wasn’t using it for work. I was just using it to dump notes in and as I did that more and more, I started seeing connections on all notes. Like I have notes from like before 2000 that were starting to connect with notes I’d taken in the past month.

And that was a really cool experience. Yeah, it’s kind of mind blowing and I’m encouraged for anyone starting or in the middle of their journey after it goes for a while to start seeing those connections and see how much you change in that time. Like things that were important to me, my, uh, best year, yet, uh, post and from 2000, the year, 2000, just a journal entry I did.

The things that were important to me versus when I did that. And you know, 2020, 20 years later, like, I’m like, wow, I’m such a different person now. Uh, nothing bad. It’s just motives and things like that had changed. So that was kinda cool. And as I started doing that, I thought, well, let’s give this a shot for work and see what, what comes from that.

So in the beginning, I really just started taking meeting notes. Like I’ve always been good about taking meeting notes. Just kind of helps me pay attention when other people are talking and then found like it was starting to be really helpful. People would bring things up. I’m like, Oh, it’s, it’s funny. I actually have a note on that from three weeks ago.

And this is exactly what we decided to do on this product. So quick background, what I do, I’m a software architect for a big, internationally known financial company. You can look me up on LinkedIn, but my opinions are my own. So I’m not going to mention them by name at the same time. I’m also a fractional CTO and I do freelance work for individuals and small startups, things like that.

I do lots of architecture and technical design for software and products and things like that. And I started giving each product and project that I was working on its own double bracket page in Roam. And it was really cool to start. You know, when you go and you click on it, you’ve got a little description, which would that, that wasn’t a big of a deal, but you see all the references, you see all the meetings where it’s been brought up, all the decisions made and that ongoing history across everything has been game changing.

Like that blows my mind when I can pull up a product right now and say all the way back to the beginning of March decisions that we’ve been making on it.

Norman Chella: [00:16:12] Hmm. Okay. That’s actually interesting because we also have to have the ability to figure out what to link. So to know what to turn into a page. There’s also a one thing that I would love to hear more from you, but we have someone from Twitter, @mark_bulling asks on tips and tricks on your meeting notes system, particularly ways of synthesizing, consolidating, and maintaining to higher levels. And I think another angle for this is what’s the criteria for turning something into a page beyond just the projects, because I think maybe you are doing link references for something beyond just this project and this project, because that’s kind of common sense, but also the different kinds of decisions, maybe the different kinds of people or the different kinds of patterns that you may turn into a page. I would love to hear like, what’s your take on that?

David Crandall: [00:17:02] Well, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I’ve kind of settled on big nouns as pages. So more important nouns perhaps is a better way to say that. So things like people’s names, projects, products, concepts, decisions, um, sometimes the decision, not so much, I let them just, if they, I make sure they lead to a product or project, but really, you know, the people, the projects and things that I’m working on, uh, and then concepts, I do make concepts their own thing.

So for an example, Shadow IT is something that’s fascinating to me, the idea of nontechnical people doing IT within the confines of the business. And I have a page for that and I kind of link to it occasionally I don’t act on it necessarily. It just interesting to see trends develop over time across different companies.

So I look for big nouns and double bracket them, and the cool thing is we’re not charged to create a new page. So I’m a little bit more liberal with creating them, uh, and don’t stress about it if I never linked to them again.

Norman Chella: [00:18:05] Oh, okay. So you don’t have a problem with say page overload or having too many pages. Oh, okay.

David Crandall: [00:18:12] Why is so, and I did this one, I kind of learned this lesson with Zettelkasten in the beginning. I was very conservative about creating a new note for something, because I didn’t want to have that note overload, the same concept, just, you know, In plain text files as I was doing it, but I want to discover it is if you create notes that are pages in this example, that don’t really ever become something, it’s fine.

Like you don’t encounter it again. Like you don’t care, they just kind of disappear back into the fold. You don’t really have to deal with them mentally.

Norman Chella: [00:18:45] Ah, okay. Okay. I see. Yeah. Even if it’s captured, whether you see value or not is pretty much up to the future you to decide or pretty much. You know, up to how your graph grows, but I guess it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really hurt to write something down, I guess that’s the way to put it. Oh, okay. Interesting.

David Crandall: [00:19:06] Yeah. And I know that’s, that’s not the opinion of everybody I’ve seen, you know, on different forums or different note-taking the technologies. They were often pretty strict about what they create a note from, but that is definitely not my opinion. I just go crazy with them.

Norman Chella: [00:19:21] Yeah. I do have to say, I do not agree with, with that, that way of looking at it, particularly because I do my best to try to find a connection with that page or that block. What have you, so a lot of my note taking systems, even if they don’t necessarily have any big tags or anything like that, they are still under a general overarching, hashtag notes tag. So at the very least they may come up, but if they don’t it’s okay. But, um, it’s more about, I’m not sure, maybe, maybe you have a say on this, but for some note taking methodologies, they may have too much of a dependence on metadata. Or on tagging to resurface them up again so that we can find a context for them to be put in. But I think you wrote something about metadata being a little bit.

David Crandall: [00:20:20] I kind of hate metadata tagging or I should say non contextual tagging let’s say that instead.

So, uh, in my notes, I have a tag that I use for attendees. And then I list the names of people in there. That’s a meaningful tag. Like I can click on that. And I say, okay, well, here’s the people that were in this meeting. They were part of the decision making process. That means something to me. But I see a lot of people, especially in the beginning, early days of Roam, I think a couple of wrote an article and everyone just kind of echoed it out, but they literally just create a tag called tags and then hashtag like a ton of stuff into it.

And I think that’s leftover from our Evernote days and things like that, where. We were kind of forcing systems to link for us. The problem is, is let’s say that I, uh, I create a tag it’s just called payments and it’s attached to some meeting and I work with payments often. So that’s one thing that sticks in my head and I pull up this payments tag.

I look at all the things referenced to it. I don’t understand it at a quick glance. Why did I tag that, that meeting with this word? There’s no context for it. It’s just, here’s the meeting. Here’s this word. And I have to go back and work a second time to have the same thoughts of what that, why did I tag the thing?

So instead what I do, instead of having just a tags tag, if I want to use the word payments, I make sure there’s a sentence in there. And I just, I put in the sentence, uh, you know, there’s many goes about our decisions on payments, you know, should we charge triple, you know, things like that. Um, but that way I don’t have to think again, like I don’t want to ever have to think.

So think through the same steps again, when I look back at my notes, because I probably won’t.

Norman Chella: [00:22:04] You can recognize the friction behind having a tag, just for tags and greater dependence on, sorry, not dependence, but there’s greater emphasis on applying the tag, as opposed to just tagging whatever it is, pages, I think it’s, maybe it could be residue from previous note taking applications that we are trying to put into and trying to impose onto roam graphs. I mean, it makes sense. It’s just taxonomy, right? Like if you make a double bracket or if you make a hashtag or if you make the, a double colon, then it’s all the same. But to have a tag, just to describe that this is a tag, it’s a bit redundant. I guess in putting that way, having them contextual tagging is just pointless. Like it’s just wasteful blocks. Okay. Okay. If you, if you put it that way, I get it. Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah.

David Crandall: [00:22:55] Now I will say you made a point earlier that you want your notes to link together, I hundred percent agree on that. In fact, I’m not really hurting anyone, but talk about this approach that I’m sure there’s others using it, but I often go into the visual graph.

You know, you can see the little dots for all your notes and look for loners. So if I see a dot that’s not linked to anything. I zoom in and check it out. And I’m often deleted notes from that. If the, if they don’t belong somewhere or are trying to find a home for them.

Norman Chella: [00:23:25] Yeah, I do the same as well. That’s actually the only use of the graph overview for me because I don’t have any, I don’t see any value in having a big mess of a graph. Other than that, it looks pretty, but after the, after three seconds they’re like, eh, you know, it just shows how messy or chaotic my brain is, but yeah, I also zoom in and find pages that are not mentioned or have zero word count.

Why are they there? Right? Is it just, is it just dust? Like, can I just delete it? Is it okay if I delete this? Will it have an effect on my connections? And you know, obviously it doesn’t have any, so I just delete it.

David Crandall: [00:24:03] That’s exactly right.

Norman Chella: [00:24:06] Find any other value just from the graph. Like, is it just because it looks aesthetically pleasing and you can find a way to clean them up?

David Crandall: [00:24:12] Up. I will say in the early days, I thought it was really cool to keep looking at. Like I spent a lot of times kind of just staring at it like, Oh, that’s cool. These things connect. Um, I do think, I don’t know what the threshold is, but when you hit a certain number of notes, you can only see them in that grid.

You can’t say them in, when I think about if I’m mispronouncing this, that cose layout, you only have the option for the one grid diagram. I would like to see more options for the graphic layout. I think we’re still in the early days of it. I actually tweeted a while back. Um, Connor was asking for suggestions on the graph.

So I submitted a couple and I think being able to filter things more than just the dates, things like that. Um, but also maybe if you could just select one thing and show, you know, maybe to the third child or just send it or whatever, I think that would be a lot more useful. Hmm. Um, just see where ideas linked together through a common concept.

Norman Chella: [00:25:07] Yeah. I would see value in that. Definitely mainly because by zooming in it limits all the overwhelm, if I’m looking at all 6,000 pages of my graph, I was thinking of a layout that is actually dependent on the dates themselves sort of like a timeline or a skeleton where you have this straight line.

And then from there, you just see all the pages I can link to it, but then you know, it, you have to test that out. I’m not sure if it’s going to be messy, um, because these layers like the cose layout and the main grid layout. There, there are tried and true. Right? So they might be the best way to visualize all of these notes.

But if you have this like timeline style, maybe it’s a bit too much. I don’t know. We’ll see. I hope they have more uses for it because I just don’t touch that button at all. Because when you touch it, it lags. Cause it opens all the notes

David Crandall: [00:26:02] Once you started dumping enough of your brain in there, you’re like, well, I guess I’m done with this feature for a while.

Norman Chella: [00:26:13] Here’s another use case that was brought up by somebody else, uh, at Eliza Doucette. I hope that I’m saying this person’s name, right. Um, she wants to know more about how you are tracking your habits or your routine creation. So do you do any, and what are some of the habits that you track? I would love to hear how Roam helps you with this.

David Crandall: [00:26:37] Sure, sure. So I saw that question. It’s Eliza. I believe it is Elizabeth shout out. Um, so I have just recently started tracking some personal habits. We are no longer in Mexico about a month or so we go, we moved to Indiana for a while and then my wife’s family. So that’s where we’re currently at. It’s very rural, which means we can go outside, hence where I’m at right now.

I’m sorry, podcast listeners. You can’t see it, but I’m surrounded by a ton of trees in a forest, which is nice. It’s no mask, I’m outside without a mask and there’s no one nearby. Um, but I realized I had gotten very sedentary during a quarantine, as, as many of us have either went very hyper exercise or you with the opposite direction.

I was definitely the opposite direction, but I’ve picked up exercise again the past, probably two weeks. And so each day I’ve been tracking to know what exercise did I do? When did I do it, uh, tracking how many steps I take per day, things like that. And it’s been cool to go back and to click on that and to see historically, okay.

I do better on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays than I do on Friday and Saturday. You know, things like that. That’s been really cool to go back and see. That thought combined with the question from earlier, like, how am I kind of, what’s my process. I’ve adapted that daily format a little bit. So are you familiar with text expander?

Norman Chella: [00:28:09] Yes. Yes I do..

David Crandall: [00:28:10] So for anyone listening, who doesn’t know. You can basically treat a little snippet of code and you teach this text expander, you know, if you want to hit semi-colon ABC, it can expand out to whatever you decide to make it. So I use the actual text, expander Bram, and I use semi-colon daily, D A I L Y, and I’ve of course I came up with it, but then it creates, um, headers for meetings, tasks, notes.

And then under each one, I have certain things that pop up. So under my notes each day, I have a, you know, a five minute journal entry and each one of these is I got surrounded by double brackets. So each one of them a page, that’s the first thing I do each morning. I just underneath the date, just type semi-colon daily and it formats it for me pretty quick.

And I try and stick to that format. I’m in tons of meetings all day long for better or worse, a meeting culture still lives on. So under each one I’ve got, you know, of course they’re under the day to begin with, but I also, I’m very nerdy and how I date my thing. So I actually put 4-digit year, month, day. And then I put the time and that put some sort of title for the meeting, whatever I think is appropriate.

And each one of those has their own page that I’ve then write notes under task. If I have an to-do list or anything that pop up, I put the task wherever it’s first encountered. So if I’m in a meeting and a task comes up, I just hit the little, a backslash and enter, you know, create a little check box.

And put it there, but then I use the alt drag to create a reference to my task on my main date. That way I can say, you know, at the top level, here’s all the tasks that I’m working on, but I can also click it and say the reference for that came up the context of what did I come up with this idea of doing this thing.

And I found it to be helpful. And a couple of times a day, I’ll click on the main task header and you can see all the ones that are linked. If you don’t know, you can do this, it saves the filters that you use for a given page. So for task, I have it automatically filter out done because I don’t care at that point.

So I click on it. It just shows open tasks and I find that to be a huge help to my day. And I don’t use any other task management. I just use Roam and that’s been hugely helpful. And then anything else that I want to do during the day, you need other notes, just go under the notes section. And sometimes I categorize them or I create little structure in there, but I give myself the freedom to make those, that note section is ugly or pretty as I want. And I found that meetings, tasks, and notes that has helped me a lot in my approach, my daily approach. And while I hated the brand new date for each time you open it up, I now love that each day is a fresh, clean start. And I can just go from there.

Norman Chella: [00:30:56] Yeah. I have to get used to that as well, as soon as it’s midnight. All of your notes are pushed downwards, which is bad for people who work at night. I think that’s, maybe there’s a way to edit that later in the future. But you know, when you’re in the middle of writing out on a block and all of a sudden everything’s pushed down and you have to start all over again, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Maybe it’s just a minor inconvenience, but that happens all the time. Then, um, as someone who’s.

David Crandall: [00:31:25] Based on Twitter, I think a lot of us are up past midnight. It’s something we all encounter.

Norman Chella: [00:31:31] Yeah. #roamcult is on an open 24 hours. So, uh, uh, we are having some trouble with trying to keep up with all the things that are happening, but that that’s what makes it pretty exciting.

I do have a question though, because you have, you have the template for the daily pages and you start off with the five minute journal. When do you start writing it? Is it when you wake up and you go to Roam on your phone or do you start journaling only when you go to your laptop or go to your PC?

David Crandall: [00:32:02] So this is how bad of a productivity person I am. First of all, I don’t take cold showers. So I’m already out of that group with cool people. Also when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is grab my phone and scroll through Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all the things you are absolutely not supposed to do.

So the first time I am serious about my day is when I sit down and I’m in a work mode, I’m an hour ahead of my actual office, my primary office. So. I started even an hour later than most people do. Uh, so I’ve got probably a good two or three hours that I’m just screwing around online. So my five minute journal is not first thing in the morning after my brain has eaten a ton of garbage actually.

Yeah, I’ve already looked at all the pretty pictures on Instagram. I’ve watched a couple of Minecraft videos on YouTube. Yeah. So please, um, if you have found a more productive way, just, you know, don’t count me part of that crew. I’m just not very good at that part.

Norman Chella: [00:33:11] Hey, it works. If it works for you, I’m sure it’s okay. Right. Like I like, I like how you’re honest about it.

David Crandall: [00:33:23] Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I definitely do not fit any kind of a course or description of what you’re supposed to do to be productive in that role at all.

Norman Chella: [00:33:33] Just note for all members of roamcult, we are accepting of different levels of productivity, so don’t worry. Um, I do the same, actually. I will. I wake up and I’m immediately on Twitter, which is pretty bad, especially because my iPad is near my bed. So, you know, Twitter in HD, which is good and bad at the same time, because that is where the addiction starts.

Actually on what you just said, do you use Roam for gaming? Just totally curious. Cause I know that you have a different, do you have a second Twitter account? All kinds of shenanigans.

David Crandall: [00:34:05] Yes. So my other Twitter accountant was my original plan. It started in, I think, 2008. It’s just David Crandall. So keep in mind 2008 before anything, even before the financial crisis happened and so Twitter was brand new and, you know, I’ve got significantly more connections on that first one, but it’s all kinds of random stuff. And it is, it’s a lot of gaming. I, again, I’m 45 years old, but I have been gaming hardcore since the early eighties. Um, Despite that my favorite game is Minecraft, literally Minecraft, the game targeted at like teenagers.

It’s my favorite. I’ve a server with my kids. We play together and I, every night before I go to sleep, the other end of my day, I’m awful. I watch YouTube videos and then fall asleep to YouTube. So, so everyone could just judge away on both sides of my day. But I do. So I use Roam, uh, you know, like I said, I have a server with my kids.

We’re all pretty active together. And each time we started a new world, it’s about once a year. And so I’ve gone back and I’ve added old notes just because I’m nerdy and why not. So we always put the seed for that world. Uh, but we also have tons of notes and plans that we do. And my middle daughter took to Roam.

Also. She is 11. So I have three that can read right now. The fourth one is 6. She’s just learning to read. But my 13 year old, 11 and nine year old boy, they can all read, but the oldest and youngest of that three, they didn’t care to do Roam. And they’re not quite there, but my 11 year old daughter took to it.

So she’s got her own Roam graph and everything, and she has been keeping her to do list of what she wants to do in Minecraft and Roam and things like that. So it’s pretty cool.

Norman Chella: [00:35:48] Oh, that’s, that is pretty awesome. I was about to ask if there was going to be a, you know, like a public shared graph. For your family to do all this, uh, to plan, you know, Minecraft buildings or adventures that you’re going to do. Oh, okay. Okay. That’s that’s pretty fascinating. Was it difficult to actually on that point, was it difficult to introduce your daughter to Roam?

Like trying to explain to her like, Oh, what’s, you know, what’s so great about the tool?

David Crandall: [00:36:18] No, so. She has not done any real note taking ever prior to, I think, I think it was March when I introduced her to it, but she is very particular. She has a calendar. She writes on every single day I made, kind of goes on the wall, not on her phone because she wants to write on, she is our checklist child.

She writes a checklist, you know, she’s done it for the day. She’s going to write, get dressed so she could check it off. So when I showed her Roam it, she was pretty quickly interested. Now she mostly just hangs out with the outliner features. And very little bit of the page linking, but I think she’s starting to see the benefit of how they link together.

Norman Chella: [00:36:56] Oh, that is pretty cool. And I feel like some of that behavior is quite evident because from our conversation. Oh right now, I feel like you can really see some of the patterns, your obsessive note-taking of decades of notebooks, and it’s now transferred over. Now you have an 11 year old with an amazing room database about Minecraft. That’s fantastic. I love that so much.

David Crandall: [00:37:19] Well, we feel so bad for my wife. She is not a nerd at all, and I’ve got at least three of the four kids so far. We don’t know about the fourth yet, so I feel sorry for her. She’s left out in the nerdiness. So.

Add a to do this  to your Roam, get the fourth one to be nerdy.

Black Panther. So we at least got her started going to the Marvel direction.

Norman Chella: [00:37:44] Nice, nice, nice. This is a great segue because we are seeing the potential of Roam to anyone right from an 11 year old girl to your use case with, you know, meetings and notes and your five minute journal, that happens way later in the day after a couple of hours on Facebook and many other walls walks of life who are using Roam for whatever they’re doing.

Right. It doesn’t matter if it’s gaming or it doesn’t matter if it’s for research or it doesn’t matter if it’s for something else. Roam is very versatile, how it can be used. And you have a lot to say on this. Because on your article, predicting the future of Roam, you drew a very, interesting diagram, for us to see the, potential roadmap of Roam, which I think if I, so correct me, if I’m wrong, you were predicting this and then it was confirmed by Malcolm Ocean. That all of what you were talking about was on the roadmap for Roam. Is that right?

David Crandall: [00:38:45] So. He definitely heavily inferred that I would say, I don’t know how much that the really to confirm, but yeah, that’s the impression I got is that, yeah, this is all in the roadmap, these concepts, so that I thought was pretty exciting.

You know, actually I said, you know, I’m a software architect, meaning I designed solutions from a technical perspective. And my background is actually in data architecture specifically, I’m kind of fascinated by how data connects to each other, you know, hence the whole note-taking things. Strangely when I went to college before I dropped out, I am a college dropout.

I went for graphic design back quite some time ago. Uh, so I am one of those strange people that went from the school of arts over to technical. And there’s not, I’m not encountered a lot of me out there. So I think I say that to think about things just a little bit different. Probably. I think that the average person, I actually started my second Twitter account to begin having conversations with people specifically about Roam. I thought it was that fascinating, but it really just created that second account because I want to be part of the cool kids conversation and talk about Roam. One of the things that I was trying to come up with is I’m like, well, I’ve got to have some sort of unique perspective that others might find.

Interesting course. You know, I think we often downplay our perspective and you know, what’s not as cool as, you know, person X, Y, and Z. So I thought, well, let’s just take a step back, give myself some grace and just talk about what I think Roam looks like. And so I just started drawing on my iPad. Okay.

Here’s what I think the architecture probably looks like on the background from a conceptual standpoint. Now here’s some things I’d like to see, and I think these were easy grabs. That’s basically where that thread came from. Um, prior to that, everyone just kind of talked about Roam as one concept, you know, Roam is an interface.

Roam is the database and it’s just one chunk to them. But from a backend perspective, you’ve got this interface layer and this database layer that really don’t have to be connected to each other. And you have the workings between them that they don’t have to be connected. And when I started breaking those things out, well, how can each one of these individual things grow?

I think that’s where I kind of got excited and it looked like people were excited about some of the thoughts I was having. So that was encouraging. I, for at least a moment, I was part of the cool kids conversation. So I think the database thing, I think a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about what that could evolve to, you know, especially when you introduce things like queries and things like that.

There’s a lot of little mini celebrities that are popping up in the Roam culture that they talk about this stuff pretty often. I think when the areas that I was focusing on is the interface and the what connects the interface, the database, which for ease of conversation, I just said, let’s call this the API layer.

So just how we get data from the database side to the interface side. And there’s different terms you could use. But I chose that term because I wanted people to start thinking about what it would look like. If we put this data in a different interface, And I think that’s why I took a couple notes. That’s some cool stuff to me.

Norman Chella: [00:42:05] I am all about you using your notes, so go for it.

David Crandall: [00:42:09] Excellent. Excellent. So, you know, right now all of us have to basically interact with Roam, roughly the same way we all log into the internet. We go to roamresearch.com and then our name. And then we have to use that interface.

I was very impressed with the room research team when they introduced the ability to have CSS built right in like that was, that was awesome. I love that they did that. We know all doing work arounds prior to that moment, they just made it official. And so let’s go for it. They’ve done the same thing with JavaScript and know that they have a really cool approach to working with our community, but still we’re all using a browser to interface with it.

We still have to go through that methodology. I think if we disconnect the interface in the backend that opens up numerous possibilities. At that point, we could use custom interfaces. Um, and instead of just each one of us figuring out our own workflow and Roam based on their browser, we could have interfaces and applications that are specific to certain things.

Like I use it for project management a lot during the day, and it’s not the ultimate project management app, though. It is very useful for the way I take notes and things like that. But I think that it could very well be married into a project management application that has other functionality that Rome doesn’t natively have, you know, date planning, resource planning, things like that, but still connect on the back end to Roam.

You know, you know, I mentioned earlier, I create a page for each person. Well, if you click on that, you have this history of this person, this information. But I don’t need a Gantt chart crammed into Roam necessarily, but I still want to see that person’s name or their information like having that ability.

If I’m in project management mode is fantastic. If I want to switch to journaling, oh there’s a lot of us that are using a Roam for journaling, but it’s not the best journaling app. It’s not the best thinking if it’s not the best of each one of these apps, but it’s the best app to bring all these things together.

But if you could use an API and a separate interface, you could pull it out and plug it into better versions of those aspects.

Norman Chella: [00:44:20] Hm. Okay. I love this mainly because it touches on the concept of context-switching. If we ask, make use of our inherent need to have a visual element to teach us that we have to do a specific thing.

Like for example, it is the same back end Roam graph, but using interface A it’s now a task manager using interface B, it’s now a project management tab using interface C, it’s a journaling app. It all connects in the backend, but we switched contexts by switching from interface to interface face allows us to create constraints that encourages us to work better in this mode.

And I am a huge advocate of that. I am a huge advocate of that, and I think a the best example of this would be pen and paper on a notebook. I’m not sure about you, but maybe, maybe you might be, be a different person when you write down and journal on a notebook. But then when you write in Roam, when you write doing your meetings, your notes, your tagging, your all the resources that you’re putting in together, you’re adding tests, you required different kind of energy, or you may require a different version of you or a different side of you to work at best in that context.

So to have that API. Oh, well, I mean, I, I think it’s a simplified way to do it, but, um, to have an API that allows you to pull data for specific context. It’s just a major thing to be excited about. So Brandon Toner from Twitter brought this up, uh, and I really hats off to him for bringing it up because I was going to bring it up anyway, since I’ve read it beforehand. So I’m really happy that we could talk about this, so here’s one thing from another angle. If you have this, you know, this potential API that can connect to many different interfaces that allow us to context switch and make the most of our graph in whatever way that we feel, uh, as individual roam users.

Instead of looking at the future of Roam, what would the future of roamcult look like if you were to have this API with multiple interfaces? What’s, what’s your take on that?

David Crandall: [00:46:27] I thought about that a little bit, even previous to this question, but I think it’s such a great question. Very well articulated. So right now, you know, each of us gets I think three databases, roughly, depending on if you were an early abate or not. So it, you know, three different graphs you get to work in and each person is, is separated also, there is a movement within our culture to break out of that. So we are already developing public libraries of information for others to use.

I’ve contriubtedto this Roam Library. Roam public, the two big ones. Yeah. The two of them are great. They’re they’re trying to curate these public libraries that people are created.

And there are things like a lot of them are, you know, things that are in their creative comments or that are in public domain from like Gutenberg and things like that. All texts, speeches, things like that. All of this information that each of us is trying to put into our three databases. There’s like, here, you use this. I don’t know how you’re gonna use it. So today that’s how we have to do it. But if we can open up the back end, we can start being connected in a whole different way. So right now you might have a work graph and a personal graph. And if you want to use data from one to the other, you have to copy paste out today.

You can’t link between those two separate graphs. I think it would be great if you could. I think it would also be great if you could just click a setting somewhere and say, yes, make this accessible to ever wants to use it obviously then just to be some checks in place for that. So, uh, for security reasons, but you know, if you have the work of Marcus Aurelius, there’s no reason I have to copy that, but in my database, it’s just storing it multiple times on their backend.

But if I can link to what you’re doing, and especially if we have some sort of ability to see how others have linked the same thing, I think that’s, that’s going to open up a really cool world of possibilities. And I see, you know, one of the first things I saw people doing this kind of what caught my attention.

People are using Roam to study religious texts, things like the Bible or the Koran and different texts like that are important to them. It’d be really cool if you have, you know, for example, if you had a Bible study and you guys were all going through a particular book of the Bible and you’re all taking notes, what’d be really cool to say, you know, here’s five different people’s take on what these passages mean in this religious text.

Like I think that we can get to more connectivity at the individual level will be mind blowing to see what comes out of that.

Norman Chella: [00:49:16] Oh, the thought of it is just so exciting. It would be so awesome if we both, um, refer to same texts and we can see each other’s comments or deconstructions of text, like the same book on Marcus Aurelius or something.

And, you know, I would see your texts and I may agree or may disagree. But what it does is that it provokes me to think even more or provokes me to think critically, which is fantastic because that in a way, is making linked references from person to person way beyond the book, since these are representations of what we believe or what we think, or, uh, our perspectives or perceptions of this text. Oh, I love that. I think that would be so cool.

David Crandall: [00:49:59] I think even like, when you see a glimpse of what this could be like, when you look like read a Medium article or a Kindle book and you see here, it says, you know, most highlighted passeng or sentence. Especially you’re like, Oh, okay. Other people thought this was cool too.

And then when you get into the, how deep our notes are within Rome and to see, you know, 10 other people made a comment on this passage, in this ancient text, you can see, Oh, okay. Well, three of the people thought the same thing I did. Oh, look this person had a whole idea. And every thought about, I’m just very excited to see what that looks like, actually play out.

Norman Chella: [00:50:34] How would you visualize that? Cause that sounds very, very complicated and it. We can already be overwhelmed by our own graph, but can you imagine connecting to a public Roamm graph and looking at a text and there’s a button that says view references by other people and how many Roam users do we have right now that could potentially reference this one text and you can have like 600,000 references.

I hope they find a way to visualize that properly. Or if we could at least. What’s the best way to put it, follow certain accounts or follow certain graphs so that we can see their references. Maybe that’s the way to visualize it. Oh, I love this. Like the notion of interconnected thinking, uh, has always just got to me like, like excited to see how this is.

David Crandall: [00:51:29] I do like the idea of following other people’s graphs, you know? We follow each other’s graphs on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, you know, if you want to use that same word in those contexts, especially people like Visa. Yeah. Uh, you know, his whole Twitter is just a giant threaded graph.

Um, and we followed that. We follow his line of thinking. I think it’d be really cool if we could do something similar within Roam, you know, if I could follow Anne-Laure and Visa and different people that I find interesting elsewhere. It’d be really cool to see what they look like in Roam. Uh, if we happen to share a similar text or something like that,

Norman Chella: [00:52:09] The way that Visa is using it is pretty fascinating because he stopped treating Twitter like social media. It’s more like the network thought method of, you know, posting each and every tweet storm. And it makes me wonder about blurring the lines between a social media and a networked graph. If, if we are looking at the future of Roam from this angle, right? And we are looking at discussions on texts, we are looking at maybe even status updates by accounts, by Roam accounts or Roam graphs that we follow.

Is that in itself, social media, or is that in itself a different level or a deeper level of social media where we are not trying to, you know, get likes or retweets or shares or anything like that. We connect with each other via our critical thinking. I think that’s something to be really exciting to think about.

David Crandall: [00:53:05] Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be really cool to see. And I, you know, it’s funny, my thread that we actually were talking about earlier, the future of Roam thread was inspired by Visa’s threaded conversations. I didn’t necessarily do for the likes or anything. I think it was just, you know, here’s my contribution to the world.

This makes it much easier to do a thread than trying to get it down to a certain limit of numbers. And I think that kind of influence on each other is something that we can look forward to and see a positive outcome.

Norman Chella: [00:53:38] Yeah, and I am really looking forward to seeing the positive outcome, especially on, uh, the future of Rome, its API and what amazing interfaces that people are going to build on top of it, because, serious thought if people are going to start building interfaces on top of a Roam graph, I won’t have a single app on my phone anymore.

It’ll just be these interfaces. They will just replace everything. Right. Right. Like, I, I have an app for my, to do list. I have an app for project management. I have an app for email. Right. What, I mean, what’s going to stop me from building an interface that is for my Roamm graph and everything just connects to, I’m not sure about security, right?

Maybe you have a, you have a say on that, but how many interfaces connected the same graph? We don’t know, but seeing a feature like that will be. So exciting.

David Crandall: [00:54:26] One step closer to the hive mind.

Norman Chella: [00:54:35] Does that scare you? The hive mind concept?

David Crandall: [00:54:38] I think the Hivemind scares me.

The, uh, the singularity, you know, there’s there’s dystopian and utopian aspects you can take from each one. I think when I see a mob rule and cancel culture on Twitter, that aspect scares me. I think when I see people collaborating and learning, like we do in the #roamcult, that gives me hope. So I’m hoping we lean more towards that latter scenario.

Norman Chella: [00:55:04] I see. Okay. So as long as we don’t weaponize it for, you know, malicious intent, I think it can work. I think it can work really well. Yeah. I think that’s going to be a battle that we have to start fighting for.

And now, uh, David, we are coming up on time, but I have a few, uh, segments to close this off with. The first segment is a pretty simple question. How would you describe roam to someone who hasn’t started using it yet?

David Crandall: [00:55:34] My online second brain.

Norman Chella: [00:55:37] Quite the answer. A lot of people would agree with, especially because recently, uh, the discussions of what second brain means, may not necessarily  apply to Roam, which is pretty interesting.

That’s a, that’s a topic for a whole other thing. Yeah.

David Crandall: [00:55:53] I’ll be brief in my response to that, but like, I was out of work for not out of work that goes on vacation for two weeks and a lot happened in my personal life during that time. I’m fine. But there’s still a lot to take in.

And because I’ve been so meticulous about my note taking and my products approach and all these things. So I have set up some future reminders in Roam just by doing the date picker and things like that. Originally second brain was when I got back to work, I was like, I cannot remember what I was doing at all. Opened up Roam, bam. It was all right there, all the things I had told myself, you need to remember this the two weeks you needed to do these things.

And two weeks, here’s the task. Don’t forget to do. And it really was like having a second brain or a second person. It was just my past self, helping my future self, not to waste a few days trying to get caught up. But it, it really was like having a literal second brain.

Norman Chella: [00:56:47] Yeah. I look at it as having a Jarvis, right?

Like a virtual assistant that just helps you with everything. Like I, I wrote this thread about a, I wrote a quick tweet about how we are building Ultron. Like, it’s just this amazing thing that we’re building over time. That is just going to bite us in the ass if we give it too much power. Uh, but for the time being, it’s just, convenient to have them there, but a, a Jarvis would be pretty fantastic assistant. But yeah, a second brain definitely. I do agree with that with plenty more capability, of course, a way more than just remembering things, but the ability to link them, uh, is what makes it super unique.

And the final question is. What does Roam mean to you?

David Crandall: [00:57:31] Well I’ll tell you during this time of unrest and unprecedented situations. That’s what my email keeps telling me. It has been, this has been a very calming place for me to not have to hold everything inside my head. I think I’ve always had that propensity anyway. That’s why I journal and I take notes so meticulously. Um, now mind you, when I say, cause I don’t mean like beautiful minds level, like I’m not drawing lines and yarn everywhere, but it’s been very helpful to take my time to write things down.

I’ve been on days where I’ve had rough days, uh, you know, the thick of the quarantine was pretty rough for a lot of us. There were certain days where I wrote, why am I feeling bad today? And I just made it its own page, different things. You know, the things that came to my mind. And it was cool to see even just getting them out that always helps, you know, kind of get them out of your mental space, but it’s also been really cool to go back.

Uh, but individually and, you know, with a counselor or my wife or somebody, and like, Hey, look at these patterns. I didn’t realize where am I thinking some of these acquaint to realistic issues and some of them point to things that are not realistic. And I don’t understand where they’re occupying my brain.

So for me, it’s been a very encouraging commonplace to kind of work through my thoughts, uh, initially by myself, but also in conjunction with others, which is one of the reasons why I think linking things together with other individuals can be so amazing. Uh, you know, not just public literary works, but I think it could be very healing.

If one day we could talk with people and say, Hey, look, we’re dealing with this same set of issues. Uh, you know, not me personally, but things like alcoholism or drug abuse, things like that, things that weigh heavy on our hearts, our souls, if we could link together with other people and an additional level that we can today, I think that has a lot of healing capacity for people.

I think that’s such an interesting use of the tool that no one’s really thought about. And I’m sure there was never part of the original, you know, white paper, why we should do this thing. But I think that’s, it’s another example where the, the use of it and the intent of the users is starting to drive how the tool will develop longterm.

Norman Chella: [01:00:03] I’ve never thought about that as a use case. Actually, that’s pretty beautiful. To be able to share that level of vulnerability and through this interconnected network thought thinking tool, whatever you call it, you can find others who are going through the same or have gone through similar perils or a similar downfalls in life.

And maybe one see how they thought through it. Or two. Find solace in a meeting with others who are going through the same thing who can empathize with the pain that you’re going through. And from there you can connect, because these are burdens that are very hard to hold, or they are very hard to keep up on your own in your head, especially.

So we would find it a lot calmer to have it down in writing, but to have it down in Roam and see that it can be connected or see that it has similarities. With things that might be either in public or a shared by those who are honest enough to share that kind of thing. I would find that to be amazing.

Like the Roam at this point would, yeah. Roam at this point would serve as a really good counseling tool. Now that I think about it. Um, yeah,

David Crandall: [01:01:21] Being vulnerable for a split second, I have, I’ve had it open. I’ve had counseling three times as quarantine started. And I’ve had Roam open the whole time. Like, sorry, I gotta take a note on this clack clack clack.

Norman Chella: [01:01:35] Wait, so do you have it, do you have it during, like, while talking with the counselor that you have to Oh, okay. That’s interesting. Okay. Oh, okay. I should probably introduce that counselor to Roam and see how, what they apply it to clients. I think that’ll be pretty interesting, cause.

David Crandall: [01:01:51] That would be cool.

Norman Chella: [01:01:53] Recognizing the patterns of negativity in yourself and in others is probably something that people can explore. Uh, I’m not, I’m not sure to like an academic level, but you know, at the very least in a way where you can learn how to serve them better or in a way where you can learn how to know more about yourself, better than to think those are perceptions that Roam can help you with or can guide you.

David Crandall: [01:02:17] I’ve actually thought it’d be really cool for counselors or people who work with people in that respect, you know, Just like it takes a while to build, regardless of your work, you know, I’m working with products and software, but it really cool to see what patterns exist across all of your clientele for a given mental state, like that would be really cool from that perspective.

Norman Chella: [01:02:40] The most interesting moment would be if you’re in multiple sessions with this counselor and one day they just show you their Roam page of you. And they explain to you, Hey, on this date, you were feeling sad on this date, you were feeling happy. What’s the pattern here?

Why is there a disconnect, dah, dah, dah, dah. And it becomes this, what’s the best way to put it, you now introduce a third person into the conversation, and that is your past self. Now put into Roam and you can disconnect yourself and look from outside the box and see the patterns of this person who is you from days before.

David Crandall: [01:03:22] Yeah, that’s cool.

Norman Chella: [01:03:23] Now that will be pretty fascinating. I hope to hear from a counselor or a therapist who can apply this much better than how I’m explaining it in a very chaotic manner.

David Crandall: [01:03:33] Right.

Norman Chella: [01:03:36] And also talk about things like privacy. Maybe that’s a bit too much, uh, and security because, you know these are very personal things. I don’t think you’d want to have your sessions maybe even recorded. I don’t think some people might find that very uncomfortable, but, uh, these are just examples of all the applications of Roam Research. So, uh, David, thank you so much. If we want to contact you on anything that we talked about in this conversation, or really just to geek out about Roam together, uh, how should we do that?

David Crandall: [01:04:05] Sure, absolutely. I’d love to talk more. So on Twitter, I’m @davidcrandall_w which matches my website of davidcrandallwrites.com. Um, but if you happen to go to David Crandall on Twitter, you’ll find my other accounts and just say, hi there. And I’ll direct you to the one that’s not about Minecraft. If you want to talk about Minecraft, come on, come on.

Norman Chella: [01:04:31] Actually, actually on that note, what’s the most interesting thing you’ve built in Minecraft?

David Crandall: [01:04:35] Oh gosh. Village traders, iron farms, uh, gigantic castles automation, I’m very nerdy in it.

Norman Chella: [01:04:45] We can probably save a RoamFM episode just for Minecraft, another time. So for the time being David. Thank you so much. And I will see you on Twitter.

David Crandall: [01:04:57] Thank you, sir.

Norman Chella: [01:04:58] Thank you. Thank you for listening to the show. Make sure to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast listening app and for a full version of the show notes to this episode, you can check out the public roam graph. The link to that will be in the description right below for more updates, comments, feedback, and suggestions. You can reach out to me at @roamFM on Twitter. Keep roaming your thoughts, and I will see you in the next episode. Take care.