A recorded conversation in which Robert Scoble explains how he recognizes patterns and judges credibility by interviewing thousands of entrepreneurs, building an internal "map" of people and their topical authority. He describes practical techniques—real-time background research (Googling, social feeds), using conference context (e.g., World Economic Forum) to infer importance, and anticipating wearable computing (Google Glass) to enable on-the-spot lookups.
Okay, but can you explain or how did you learn to recognize pattern? Or was it just in your brain all the time?
No, you know, to get to the level I'm at, you have to interview. You have to know something about the world. And I've interviewed more than 3,000 entrepreneurs at this point. And those entrepreneurs, what they've told me is like a map in my brain. So I know who Tim O'Reilly is, and I know why he matters. And so if he says something right now, I know how to count.
The.
Importance of what he's saying, particularly if he's a book publisher, by the way, and he runs conferences or his teams run conferences. And so if he says something about the tech industry or book publishing or conference industry, it's very important, it's credible. If he says something about politics or wine, less credible.
Right.
And I know that for thousands of people. So I know, like Gary Minerchuck is the other way. He's credible on wine because his family owns a wine store. And he's credible on social media because he's built a social media company. And he's credible on the New York jets because he is fanatic about the New York Jets. If he talks about, I don't know, cricket, he might not be so credible about that.
Right.
And so out of these thousands of people streaming by, I have a map in my head of who they are and what their role in life is and what their credibility level is for what they're talking about. And so that helps me gauge whether something's a hoax or a scam or if it's really important to pay attention to.
Okay. And yeah, you have a very good knowledge about the sources. Most of the.
A lot of the sources. I mean, I have the most in depth lists of the tech industry on both Twitter and Facebook and on Google, for that matter. So I look at my role in World as a curator, somebody who can tell other people who Tim O'Reilly is. And I've made that a study of mine. And so when I do what you're doing, you know, I'm taking notes on who they are and I do research about them. And I also know how to find information in real time. So if I meet somebody new, like, for instance, I met this guy, Peter Pyatt at the World Economic Forum. He had a badge on, so I knew his name. I knew he worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That was also on his badge. I knew he was smart because of how people I trusted were interacting with him and the language he was using. And the kinds of topics he was talking about. I knew within a minute that he was in the, you know, biology, bio biology, biological sciences world. I didn't know how quite how he fit in that world or what he did, but I could tell he was passionate and authoritative on that topic and maybe wouldn't be so passionate authoritative about sports or art or music.
Right.
He kept bringing the conversation back to science and using scientific words and scientific language. I still didn't know who he was.
Right.
He was important because he was at World Economic Forum. He'd done something in his life that was interesting because you don't get to go to the World Economic Forum unless you've done something interesting. Unless you're the CEO of a huge company. I mean, I can't even get my own CEO, which is a 9 billion dollar market cap company, into World Economic Forum. It's not big enough. They say you have to be a Fortune 50 company to get, but you can go. I got invited because I'm one of the top tech bloggers in the world, right? And they wanted me to report on the tech Pioneers program there. So. But everybody else is, you know, like the inventor of Dropbox, the founder of Google, you know, or Peter Pyatt. So I knew Peter Py was interesting, I just didn't know what he'd done. But I walk away and I googled him and the first line was Wikipedia. The first line was he was the discoverer of the Ebola virus. So in real time I can figure out who people are and what makes them tick and how they fit together, which a lot of people don't think of doing that when they meet people. They just say, oh, that's a cool guy or fun person to hang out with. They don't think of turning away and Googling them and figuring out who they are, what they do, you know, and find them on Facebook or find them on Twitter and subscribe to them and start, and start seeing what they're doing. I'm doing that in real time. That's why I'm really looking forward to these wearable computers coming from Google Next year. The Google Project last. That puts a computer screen right here and it will let me do those Google searches in real time. It'll be very interesting.
