 Hi, Jerry Mikulski, to explain what an Earth story-threading is. And I'll start just with this notion of stories. Stories are fundamental. Stories are more important than we think they are. We all have stories in our heads, and if you change those stories, you will change our behavior, you'll change our affiliations. Our belief systems are very much molded by a series of stories, some of which, many of which, are wrong. Some of which are planted there on purpose by people making clever memes and memorable stories. One way that I'm manifesting this in my brain, which is the curious tool I use for telling stories and for story-threading, and I'll come back to this, is this notion that stories are more fundamental than facts. That facts, it turns out, when psychologists go out and they study people, it turns out that telling people a bunch of facts doesn't actually change their minds very often. I have a thought in here that emotion and membership trump reason most of the time, and stories are the vessel. So stories are hugely consequential. You can also think about it from a spiritual perspective that the world is being spoken into being, and that stories are the ways that we're speaking those stories into being. My friend Jay Golden has a nice way of describing this. He says that what you want is retellable stories. He wrote a book titled Retellable, and in it he talks about the journey curve, which is the path for telling a story. And as you'll see, I collect sort of techniques for storytelling. There are many different people with lots of different advice. The story spine, the red thread, the story brand, the circle theory. Of course, Joseph Campbell's 17 stages of the hero's journey. Kurt Vonnegut talking about the shapes of stories. But I like Jay's a lot because it makes you realize that what matters really is the retellability, the memorability of stories. And we are kind of drowning in a flood of means, right? So hold all of that as background for a second. And the origin of story threading really comes from my experience at a bunch of different conferences, where at the beginning in the introductions round, I would see a great little spark of an idea. I would see an ember glowing. And I'd be like, oh, I hope we talk a lot about that, and I really want to meet that person. And then very often, way too often, the group process of the meeting. In particular, when everybody had put their posted ideas up on a board, and during a break, the facilitators had clustered the post-its and put some collective nouns on them. And then given all of us little dots to put a green dot or a red dot or five dots or 12 dots or whatever on the ones we liked, the little embers of really good ideas that you might think of as the minority report in the room were gone. They died out. We didn't get to talk to them. They died in committee or whatever else. And I was thinking to myself, wow, it seemed like that idea was transformative. That idea might actually have led this group to come up with a very different outcome, with something much more interesting than it actually did. So I saw this over and over and over again. I'm probably guilty of it myself, because I facilitate a bunch and I'm not, I don't know how to always get to that note, to that different spot in the conversation. So I came up with this idea of story threading, which is a way of broadening the conversation. It's a way of bringing people in to tell stories about what they hear in an event and a speech and whatever it might be. And again, I started this around events and I started this as a compliment for graphic facilitation. So some of you have probably been to events, conferences where during the conference, there is a smart person who is at a big sheet of paper, in fact, over days, multiple sheets of huge paper. And they're taking notes visually. They're writing down keywords and phrases. They're using visual metaphors. Here's a bacterium. Here's a bridge. Here's an airplane. Here's a stop sign or a policeman, whatever it might be. And they're trying, their role usually is to capture as faithfully as they can to channel what they hear in the meeting and then represent it in ways that are useful. And the sign of great success of a graphic facilitator is when on day two, somebody points to where the drawing was on day one that they had drawn of a particular point that happened in the event. It says, just like over here, and then everybody remembers what that was. That's like success in graphic facilitation. Except in graphic facilitation, all you get at the end is images, PDFs or JPEGs of the drawings, and the drawings are mostly inert. And even when now facilitators are really often using graphics tools like Procreate or Paper or whatever, but even then we get kind of a PDF of the diagram. And I've been using this brain software for almost 24 years. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could connect your ideas into the greater context? And then I thought, hey, wait a minute, why don't we try to rescue those little burning embers, blow some oxygen on them and see what they turn into? Ideally you don't have one or maybe even two story threaders at an event. You might have four. And they would have very different skills. They might be a super game developer like Jane McGonigal or a simulation creator online like Nicky Case or a poet or an artist like Peter Vanda Ora who is sort of a corporate artist and poet, but you want people with very different skills. You want to mix them into the event and then their job is the opposite of graphic facilitation. Their job is not a faithful recording of everything that happened in the event, but rather to pick up the embers they see from their own perspective and then connect them into their own belief systems. So they're broader narratives about why things happen and how things happen and then to use their skills and magic powers. Mine happens to be this brain thing. Other people might use pastels or scissors and paper or they might develop a deck of cards that is a diagnostic tool for understanding how organizations are dysfunctional for example as my friend Dave Gray did years ago. So all of those examples I'm giving are in fact inspirations for what story threaders might be and do. And you really kind of want multiple story threaders and you don't want to require them to weave their stories into one another. They can be really quite different from each other and a requirement to start to harmonize stories will probably kill off the uniqueness and the flavor of what they're doing, but the intersections might be super interesting. So I'm prototyping story threading right now at the unfinished 21 conference, which is virtual but is hosted in Romania with Emma Schmidt who is a graphic artist and she and I are having conversations after we're watching each of the sessions and talking through the recurring themes, the points we see, what we got from each of the sessions and then each of us is busy story threading all of that. So for example, here is my link for story threading unfinished. Here is, let's see, Tracy and Erin was a really juicy one and I've got a whole separate video that I'll put a point or two which is this session right here that had Tracy Ryan's, this person in conversation with Erin Solomon, now otherwise known as Brotherful Filment who is a retired Buddhist monk but still a practicing Buddhist and Dharma teacher and they had a fantastic conversation which led to all these different things that you can hear in the story threading of this event. Story threading is a nice metaphor because we're sort of weaving a context or a fabric of shared knowledge. We also use fabric for the fabric of society, right? And often the stories we tell each other and the interdependencies we have are what make the fabric of society and one of my beliefs is that we have shredded the fabric of society. So I'm trying really hard to figure out how do we re-weave that fabric? And this brain thing is my loom. This happens to be my tool. I happened to be on their first press tour 24 years ago, one of the inventor opened his brain, his laptop and showed me his brain. I was like, oh, this thing, this is exactly how my brain works. Maybe not exactly, but this represents what my brain does better than any other tool I've been able to find. So I took to it like a duck to water, didn't really need an instruction manual, none of that. And what I've been showing you here is the result of that effort. But as I've said in a couple of other places, but when I'm story threading, I'm not starting with a blank sheet of paper. I'm actually weaving what I see and hear into the broader context of what I've known before, what I've seen before. So for example, in this particular conversation, Tracy and Aaron, they talked about how the body holds trauma. And there's a lovely story about Tracy and his body during a vipassana sit. But I already had the book, Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score. I have a whole bunch of material on healing from trauma which I hope would be helpful to anybody who needs to go through the process because I've discovered that there are a bunch of really smart people like Gabor Mate and Cathy Kane and Peter Levine and Resma Menachem and Richard Stroze Heckler and a bunch of others who've done really smart things about healing from trauma. So when I'm story threading, I'm creating my own point of view in order to enrich the conversation. And hopefully one of the story threader's points of view or offers might go viral and might create a new story that causes a dent in the world. And that's one of the reasons for creating story threading at all is that if we create these artifacts and we share them outside of the little event we were at and we put them in the world, some of them might catch fire and might make a difference. If you think you might be a story threader and would like to try this out, let me know, send me an email and we also have storythreaders.com where I'm beginning to describe this process. Really excited to do this. And I hope that in 10 years, story threading is a job title and that when you do a Google search or whoever beats Google over the next 10 years and look for story threaders, it'll be as easy as looking for graphic facilitators today because 30 years ago, nobody knew what a graphic facilitator was. And today, there's a bunch of them. Some of them are my dear friends. Thanks very much.