Julien Smith (Trust Agents co-author)

I’d like to take you back way back, 100 years ago. It’s Christmas Eve, you’re in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. You’re the navigator of the ship. You trust the equipment that you use. It helps you find out where the other ships are, in your area, so that you don’t slam into them. Something incredible is about to happen, has never happened in the history of mankind. It will revolutionize everything you do in regards of communications. For the first time, a voice comes through this device. It’s never happened before.

Julien is telling us a story about the radio. Radio was not transmitted in that way, but it made it possible. Television is a kind of radio, it’s a mass medium and lets you transmit information in a different way. The radios of today are Twitter, Facebook, they are compounded all on top of each other. We can also do them with the Internet, but it adds on another layer. What I’d like you to consider doing is to think about mastering tomorrow’s radios. I don’t know what tomorrow’s radios are, neither do you. Someone will take control of that. Tomorrow’s radios will indeed need some kind of thing.

Touch the burner, that’s what we all do when we are children. We put the hand in the electrical burner, it hurts and it sucks. This helps us understand what life is like. This is what he did – he took a risk, he did something that nobody was doing before and nobody had done before. He took the risk.

It’s very easy to do what everybody else is doing.

These computers are doing something that is natural to human beings, which is to network – share information better and faster than anybody could do.

This is what a channel looks like – ShitMyDadSays – you can’t see it over here in the corner. 635,000 followers.

I’m pointing it out because it is stupid. The things that bring people together aren’t the smart things. The things that bring us together are stupid, when we laugh at a bar. I was totally late for work, it’s the silly things.

Julien is speaking about what the ShitMyDadSays account says. Silly things that are not meaningful unless it makes people closer. People are brought closer together .

All these things bring people together.

All of these things are producing content, but content is being produced differently.

Julien is now presenting an example about Kylie Minogue.

People don’t care. People are the there for the channel. Once you have the channel you’ll have it forever.

This is what a channel used to look like. You can mute a channel, you can tune the volume up and down. You cannot talk back to a channel. It does not listen to you because it doesn’t care.

This is what channels look like now – connecting together, this is what people do, we naturally build relationships, that make us happy. Julien is now describing the career that his father had (career counsellor).

Let’s say you lose your job tomorrow and your network is not in place, you’re lost.

This is why building the channel is important, even if you don’t know that you may not need it it for. It’s been studied/said once you get to a certain level of financial gain, at that point, beyond the $ 50,000/yr, at that point, you no longer are made happy by the next $ 1,000 (book – People Stumbling on to Happiness).

What makes you happy is how tight you are and how central you are to the network. The more connections you are to people, the tighter you are to people, by working on the channel, you are also growing.

The potential connections, not only will help you find a job, they’ll not only help you with your next project, they will make you happy.

As you get older, everyone gets this experience, your friends move out of town, they have other priorities, you don’t see them anymore. The network over time will dissipate and you won’t be able to get the same people, you need to build the network again and maintain it.

Creating real, valuable connections. Building tribes is critical, one of the best things you can do personally or for your business, whether you know what it is.

Julien is sharing the BME Magazine

The smaller the tribe is, the harder it is to find people in your own geographical area, the higher chances what you build will be way more relevant and valuable.

This is particularly true within the notion of a diaspora .

You provide value if you build a tribe.

If you own a channel you can put anything you like through it. There are some people that aren’t thinking about how to build something with you at the moment, they aren’t thinking about how to grow with you, they are thinking of how to make money out of you.

Julien is sharing the story of Reddit (and how bad it could be).

People who helped a guy whose family made soap were participants in the Reddit community.

The old channels are nothing for you, they need to be replaced, badly.

Julien is sure that he will get a lot more comments about the dog in the sweater (and FAIL) - he makes a point that I am not sure is obvious to everyone – he is talking about how he’ll talk to other people as they are drinking WITH him (e.g. in making himself accessible he’s growing a new tribe here at Third Tuesday).

You want to be a part of everything, we are wanting to connect and at the same time, we are afraid of connecting. This is a gain, what ends up happening is that every game has a shape to the puzzle piece.

What is the shape of the piece? Is the social capital. The dog in the sweater. The thing that brings people together. Our job is to facilitate the exchange of social capital. The answer to “do you want to go out?” the answer is YES. Because, guess what happens when you say YES to something? When you are doing something like this, you possibly meet your future husband/wife/business partner.

In the early day of podcasting – one of the amazing things is that it was there every day. Some people go to his site before anything else. If you can build the church and get people to come to it, get it to be the default – you’re way ahead of the game and doing amazing things for yourself. (I think he’s talking about Chris Brogan)

Be part of every conversation

Go and find stuff on Twitter Search.

A bar is a great analogy. The real different from a bar we’re all in groups like this. On Twitter, you find serendipity. You may have no idea who these people are and the walls are down. Create stuff that is visible and indexable.

Create stuff that is visible and indexable

If you answer stuff on a website, it gets indexable and people can all come to your site. You can be sitting around, doing anything, but even though you’re doing that, you’re answering questions. You can become a resource as you answer hundreds of questions.

On the internet we are engaging with people, answering questions ALL THE TIME. People can just search and find you.

Understanding how the system works.

I love the way in which Julien is explaining a video game and how to get to the end of the game. All you have to do is know about the secrets. Understanding how the system works on the internet, you gain a lot.

What if you are in a situation where people are asking questions, you’re answering, and then all of a sudden people are answering their own questions – understanding the system (insiders and outsiders).

Insiders forgive each other faster. Outsiders not so much. Insiders have an understanding of each other.

Use insider language

Making yourself a little bit vulnerable.

Read Blue Ocean Strategy.

Be a human artist.

We kind of have forgotten how to interact with people and in some cases, we never knew. If you get bored in a conversation with someone you barely know –

Pattern breaking.

Oh crap, now I have to tell them what I do. If you bored the other guy, you’re in a really bad situation.

The usual patterns – you see it hit you at the corner of your eye. When you don’t see the predator, you don’t need to pay attention.

Never let anybody turn themselves off. Break the pattern, all the time. Because it will let people really engage back again.

Larry King will go into an interview with a broad variety of questions.

Interviewers do this – and that’s the stuff the best interviewers are made of.

Making people emotional is good.

The idea that the web works for you, that you don’t have to be doing everything actively – it’s wrong.

On the web, social capital almost transforms itself into financial capital.

How much do they hear about X thing vs Y thing. You can test for this over time. Anything that can be tested can be monetized.

Now Julien switches to fear.

What if you fail? You may be embarrassed, you may not want to do things.

Julien is reading the book “Connected” – the power of social networks, real social networks.

What they talk about is levels of influence – if I zero-in in the center of the network – if all the people that you know is group 1 and group 2 is the people THEY know – high likelihood that the group 2 will get fat, hehe.

It extends to 3 levels. You getting thin, happy, exxtends to 3 degrees of influence .

If you drink a lot of beer, you end up influencing up to 3 degrees (and they’ll drink a lot of beer). – RPV_ NOT SURE I BUY THIS. I understand the concept that Julien is explaining but not sure I buy all of it in regards to the 3 levels of influence.

Become the lead goose

The lead goose reduces the wind resistance for all other geese. If you become an experimenter, as a habit, if you try new things, if you try to change the way in which you’re behaving, if you are breaking the pattern, you’re making it easier for everybody else in your network to break the pattern.

Everybody has friends like this. I have friends on Facebook (Julien does, not me!) – if one of them says no, all of them say no (the domino effect). They fall down like pins (I suppose Julien is speaking about bowling pins).

You have a choice- you do the same thing for people. Either you show up or you do something different. Somebody needs to be the lead goose.

You have to touch the burner, before any other pattern of fear that we have, before anything, there was a pattern that we had.

We did this because as children, we needed to make our world bigger. Our world is small as kids, but we don’t understand a lot – so we need to make the world bigger, so I touch the burner. Now I understand the burner and my world gets a little bit bigger. It also hurts to touch the burner so eventually we stop. But when you stop, that world that we have stops getting bigger. We don’t touch things anymore, we have no reason to experiment.

The thing we were born to do is to make our world bigger and bigger. So Julien encourages us to touch the burner. You are helping a bunch of other people if you touch burner .

“Successful business man and pillar of his community”

Julien is describing the success of his and Chris Brogan’s book.

Talk to people as people, don’t talk to them as numbers. Treat them with dignity and respect their intelligence. That’s Julien’s point.

We will never need more advertising.

What we will always need is more connection and we will do amazing things.

Monica Hamburg is asking a point about breaking the pattern