OtiumFM

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

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

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

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