Stump Jerry's Brains

The Story

I've Been
Connecting
Ideas
Since 1998

Not as a hobby. As a practice. What started as a personal knowledge graph has become — after 28 years and over 625,000 linked nodes — a living map of everything I've read, thought, questioned, and connected.

Every book, person, idea, technology, failure, and question I've encountered is in there, linked to everything else I know. When I bring it into a room, the room changes. That's not a feature. That's the point.

Most conference sessions deliver information. This one delivers sensemaking — live, collaborative, and steered entirely by what your audience actually cares about. No slides. No script. Just a mind, wide open, and your hardest questions.

I call it Stump Jerry's Brains because the dare is real. But what surprises people isn't that I know things. It's that everything connects — and watching those connections form, live, changes how they think about their own.

01 Not trivia. Sensemaking. The challenge format is a door; real thinking is what's behind it.

02 Your questions drive it. Zero prep from me. Every path determined by what your audience asks.

03 Irreplaceable by design. 28 years of human provenance. No AI builds this. No one else has it.

04 People leave differently. Not with notes. With a new way of seeing how things connect.

Sense-Making, Live

How a Session Works

Each session is live improvisation: structured enough to be coherent, open enough to be surprising. The audience steers everything.

01 / 05

The Challenge

Chat opens. Audience submits topics — anything from "large language models" to "why Blockbuster failed" to "what is trust, actually." The more real the question, the better.

02 / 05

◎

The Navigation

Jerry types the topic into the Brain live on screen. The graph expands. He narrates what he's seeing — parent concepts, unexpected neighbors, questions the Brain raises back.

03 / 05

↗

The Rabbit Hole

The audience steers — deeper, sideways, or to a new challenge entirely. Jerry follows. The best sessions visit 5–7 topics and end somewhere nobody expected.

04 / 05

∿

The Weave

As threads accumulate, patterns emerge. Jerry names them — connections between the session's topics that reveal something about the room's collective thinking.

05 / 05

◈

The Shape

Jerry closes by naming the session's "shape" — what the group's curiosity, taken together, revealed about the conference theme or this particular moment in time. Always different. Always worth having.

The Tool

Jerry's Brain: 28 Years On Screen

TheBrain is the software at the center of every session. Unlike slides, it's a living knowledge graph — every node connected to others through typed relationships. When Jerry navigates to a topic, the entire relevant neighborhood expands around it in real time. The audience sees the architecture of his thinking, live.

Jerry's Brain is fully public. Anyone can explore it — before a session, after, or any time they're curious.

Explore Jerry's Brain →

Jerry's Brain — TheBrain — jerrysbrain.com

Session Offers

How Much of Jerry's Brain Do You Want?

Each tier is priced by depth of access to the person — not by format or length. The Brain comes to every engagement. What changes is how much of me comes with it.

Entry

$7,500

virtual · up to 60 min
+$1K on MS Teams

Stump Jerry's Brains

A taste of the mind

Live, virtual, open-floor sensemaking. Audience submits any topic — I navigate the Brain in real time, no script. The crowd steers every turn. Zero prep from me; all the prep comes from 28 years of thinking. Perfect palate-cleanser between dense conference sessions.

+ $1,000 surcharge if platform is Microsoft Teams

Core

$12.5–15K

virtual keynote
+$1K on MS Teams

Custom Keynote

The mind applied to your problem

The Brain, pre-oriented around your conference theme, then opened to the audience. I spend ~30 minutes before the session navigating to the relevant node neighborhood — then the crowd takes it from there. Deeper, more tailored. Best for keynote and featured slots.

+ $1,000 surcharge if platform is Microsoft Teams

Deep

$20K+

half-day · in-person
3–4 hours

Advisory Half-Day

Extended access, real collaboration

Jerry in the room for a half-day working session. Brain open, your real problems on the table. Not a presentation — a working session where we navigate, question, and build frameworks together. Best for leadership teams and organizations facing a genuinely hard sensemaking challenge.

Brain on Call

For organizations that want ongoing access to Jerry's sensemaking — a monthly retainer for standing navigation sessions, ad hoc questions, and pattern recognition across your hardest problems. Not listed publicly — introduced after a live session, when the fit is clear.

Ask About It →

This sounds like a game show. Is it?

The dare format is the door — it creates permission to ask anything, removes the pressure of a formal Q&A, and makes the whole thing feel alive. But what's behind the door isn't trivia. It's 28 years of serious thinking about how ideas connect. The game-show energy gets people in the room; the sensemaking is why they stay.

Why is there a surcharge for Microsoft Teams?

Teams' screen-sharing architecture introduces real latency to TheBrain's live navigation — the graph loads more slowly, and the visual responsiveness that makes the session feel alive is diminished. The $1,000 surcharge reflects the extra technical prep, fallback configuration, and cognitive overhead of working around those constraints. Most organizers either switch platforms or pay it without complaint. Both outcomes are fine.

How much prep is actually required?

For the entry Stump Jerry's Brains session: zero. The Brain is always current and always public. Jerry opens the tool and starts navigating. For the Custom Keynote: about 30 minutes of node-review to refresh the relevant neighborhood. No slides, no script, no rehearsal — the session's energy comes precisely from the fact that it's genuinely live.

What if the audience picks a topic that isn't in the Brain?

That's actually one of the most interesting moments. If a topic isn't in the Brain yet, Jerry adds it live — right there on screen — and then navigates outward from it, connecting it to existing Thoughts in real time. Watching a new idea get woven into 28 years of existing knowledge and find its neighbors on the spot is often more revealing than finding something already there.

What platforms does this work on?

Any platform where Jerry can share his screen: Zoom, Hopin, Airmeet, StreamYard, Riverside, and most custom virtual event platforms. Jerry's Brain also has a fully public web version at jerrysbrain.com that can be navigated directly in a browser during the session.

Can sessions be recorded?

Yes. Recordings can be provided to conference organizers after the event and shared with attendees. Jerry requests a courtesy copy for his own archive. They hold up well because watching the navigation unfold is the experience, not just the information.

Does Jerry have opinions?

Yes — strong ones, developed over 28 years. The Brain reflects one person's perspective on the world: his reading, his connections, his judgments. That's not a bug. The human provenance is the point. Jerry navigates honestly, names his biases when they're relevant, and welcomes challenge. If you're looking for a neutral database, this isn't it. If you're looking for a genuinely curious mind that has thought hard about most things and is still thinking, you're in the right place.

What is "Brain on Call"?

An ongoing retainer for organizations that want Jerry's sensemaking in their corner over time — regular navigation sessions, pattern recognition across complex problems, and ad hoc access when a hard question needs a connected mind. The structure and pricing are shaped by the relationship and introduced after a live session.

I've BeenConnectingIdeasSince 1998