 Hi, I'm Jerry McCall-Scam in Portland, Oregon, and I've been story-threading Unfinished 21 And I've been doing that using this strange mind-mapping tool called the brain This video is to explain to you kind of what this brain thing is how it works and how you might make use of it because you Can go browse my brain for free on the web So here's the conference. Here's Unfinished 2021 and its theme midnight In my brain every node every little element here in the brain is called a thought because of course it's called the brain And when I click on a different thought first if I mouse over it It's highlighted when I click on it it rotates into the middle and so in the brain in this form of the brains the brains display There's always one thought in the middle You'll notice that here. We're very close to midnight on the doomsday clock. I already had the doomsday clock in my brain There's various notions of doomsday and doom and doomsayers and disasters that wipe out humans. We can go there But if I go back to the doomsday clock, and I will find Our conference right here and this is last year's and I decided to make a lateral link You'll notice that that the brain only lets you link up from this little circle or gate Down from this little gate and left not right and it turns out that this little up left Updown left dance is perfect for me like it you'll see it allows me to express things that are really hard to express in something That's only up down only hierarchical Especially if the hierarchy means one thing must have multiple things under it But can't have multiple things above it So here you'll see one thing has lots of stuff above lots of stuff below the brain doesn't really care It's not checking for references so here's last year's Conference virtual which was virtual and here is the talk. I gave it last year's conference This little fave icon over here is actually a link It means anywhere you see an icon a little fave icon Attached to a thought that is a URL to a website typically and you can tell from the fave icon This is going to be a YouTube link. This is going to be a Google Doc This is going to be a LinkedIn page somebody commenting about my my talk etc etc and For example in this talk. I quoted Anand Giridharadas from his letter to all who have lost In this era a talk he gave in 2016 a Ted talk he gave in 2016, which I thought was excellent He said I heard you but did not listen which was really interesting and important to me so This is kind of how I use the brain Ongoing all the time So the file and the file you're looking at is the same file that I started 23 almost it were a month away from it being 24 years ago When I was a tech industry trends analyst and a little company came by with a piece of software called the brain This is it. It doesn't look that much different from what it looked like 24 years ago And so I that the the inventor Harlan Hugh opened his laptop and started showing me his brain And I had been weirdly writing an episode of the newsletter that I wrote back then about mind-mapping and about link management bookmark management And I was a tech analyst So I cared very much about what companies were competing against what companies in the startup space and all of that kind of stuff So this turned out to be the perfect tool I began using it I began using it a lot and I found it more expressive than other kinds of tools and then a really weird thing happened. I Kept using it for apparently just about 24 years, but I kept using the same data file So the file you're looking at which has in it a thought called we're in an epidemic of not listening is The file that I started 24 years ago and you'll see that a screen full can get a little complicated This is kind of complicated ignore the columns on the right. I haven't turned them off I can turn off that view, but I like it. These are sibling thoughts These are these are common children of some of the parent thoughts of the current active thought They're not as important as everything else on the screen right here But but more or less you can start making sense of a screen full at a time even though at this point to have 484,000 Thoughts nodes in here connected by more than 880,000 links these little things All of which I put in by hand over these 24 years meaning even though it's called the brain It has no AI. There's no machine learning. It never makes a suggestion Originally it had a feature that would let you crawl a website Or crawl your drive and I just didn't want to pollute the namespace in the brain because it has a really nifty fast search feature so if I want to find Neural networks, I just type neural net and I can find out every thought in my brain that has that That's that little string neural net suddenly shows up and I can go jump to articles about neural networks, for example Which is under this is a habit I as I started filling a brain with a lot of things I created a bunch of habits one of which was when things get crowded under a thought like neural networks I always create a little I spawn a thought called articles about neural networks And I color it yellow just to draw attention to it So articles are sorry thoughts that are that are colored yellow just mean hey look over here You've noticed I also have thoughts colored purple and the purple ones are more opinion So I believe that we are in an epidemic of not listening and you'll notice I just click down here This is like a breadcrumb trail. Everything I'm clicking on is scrolling off to my left here And so yellow, I don't I try not to use colors a lot because I don't want this to look like early HTML Pages with blink tags, but I use yellow for hey There's a collection of things that might be interesting here and I use purple for opinions for stronger sense and this opinion thing is actually really important because My brain isn't just a directory of stuff. This isn't just a listing of startups that happen to make Web storage or buddy lists or whatever else. I've got a lot of those and in fact have a lot of those But it also contains opinions about how you know, how things are going and where things are headed So I have a whole bunch about the pandemic that we're still in here's the Delta variant Which is much more contagious starts a fifth wave of coronavirus in the summer of 2021 July 2021 looks like a brief respite and then we're back into the miseries of lockdown So there's a whole bunch you can see that there's a whole bunch of things here Including you can figure out pretty quickly what my politics are So I believe that the GOP the American conservative Republican Party has become a suicide cult and we can go Deeper there, but I'll head back into safer territory with with unfinished 2021. I Also realized that when I'm story threading using my brain I'm trying to tell stories Through the brain by using this woven context as my as my display as my story thread I go pretty quickly sometimes and here the magic of the pause button and rewind and Scrolling back and forth will help you a lot So you can slow me down or change the speed of my presentation to point seven five So that I slow down and talk more normally whatever else it might be But but use the tools so that you can actually go in and and hear me carefully And then I will be offering lots and lots of links into the brain so that you can wander around yourself Then what I what I'd like to do also is show you This is the brain on my desktop as a desktop app When you follow a link to my brain in the wild when I send you a link to my brain It's going to look Like this and I have no say in how this looks when you get to it This is the web server at the brain.com that serves up my brain data and periodically I clicked on the little Let me go back to the brain periodically I click on this little cloud icon and that synchronizes my brain data So that any changes I just made get freshly sent to the brain itself So you're seeing the fullest latest version of the brain and I've just set this one to complexity But I want to show you a couple things First I don't use this notes field very much at all and there's links in here and there's also notes I don't really use it to write notes And so a trick that you might want to do right up front see down here the little chasing arrows icon Click on that and then pull this bar down I have the display scrunched enough that you probably won't see it one way to do this also is simply to Click this arrow and get rid of the comments below But then you won't actually see the URLs that are connected to the thoughts But now you'll notice that this looks an awful lot more like the brain that I'm using and then to jump through the brain you don't have to traverse you don't have to go to the Kinevan framework and then Wait for the server and sometimes you have to be a little patient because the brain server is not the fastest server in the world Here's Kinevan It was created by Dave Snowden who should be in here Anyway, you can just leap through the brain by clicking in the search field and saying Dave Snowden and you don't have to You don't have to type the whole thing. I Maybe I should have said more than Dave. So I think it's Dave Snowden might be David. There we go So here's Dave Snowden. No relation to Ed Snowden. He's the creator of the of the Kinevan framework and There he is now he's shown up and apparently I first met him in 2008 at a dinner That had him as a featured guest. He's quite brilliant So this is how you can use my brain if you copy this URL and send it to someone else that will work They will be able to go to this URL. They'll still have the funny split vertically split screen But this will give you some some clues about how to get around in my brain If you're interested in creating your own brain and would like to try it out go to the brain calm Download and install the personal brain that version the free version does most of what I do If you want to share it out with other people like I do by using their servers, you'll wind up paying them something every month And it's a proprietary tool. So I have little say in how things get displayed But clearly I become addicted to a few things that it does really really well. I Mentioned that my brain is really my point of view and and I mean that it's just one person's one curious observant person wandering around the world saving stuff that matters to me to them And then sharing it out with other people. This is not definitive. This is not exhaustive This is not in any way meant to be official There are many broken links and there are many things in the wrong places if you wander through the life science section If an actual life scientist were to wander through the life science section of my brain I'm sure they'd be horrified and it would help me move things around which brings me to the next point I want to make which is I'm Always looking to improve my brain and I love it when somebody sends me an email Unfortunately, the tool doesn't let you say hey, this is broken. Here's how to fix it But send me an email That says hey Jerry I noticed somewhere that you don't have this and I get a bunch of these emails all the time But I'd love more because my goal really is to be doing this with you My goal really is to create a shared understanding to do some collaborative sense making to understand the world It just so happens that I have this funky note taking tool That's very visual that really works for how I represent things in the world that I've been using for a very long time, so I have this massive body of work and and having a huge history is Different in kind. It's different in a way that I think is hard to communicate Whenever I start a new project, I'm never starting with a blank sheet of paper I'm never starting from scratch chances are I know the people or certainly the topics that that the Conversation is going to be about and if I don't I rapidly add them and then they're there forever for me and for anybody But anybody else who comes in and shares this information But working with it with an ongoing context has been a fantastic Adventure and I'm trying to figure out ways of explaining its benefit and and the kinds of Actions and interactions it has with me. I do have a thought called lessons Lessons from using my brain for all this time And it includes a really important the brain is as my extended self or mind But it includes a really important insight that I had years ago, which is that we are an amnesic society Because we don't have a shared memory That we don't really have a shared memory and then by the way, we're not listening to each other We're in this epidemic of not listening So I hope that gives you some background on what this brain thing is if you go to Jerry's brain calm You will find some more videos explainer videos of what this is and how to use it and a link that says launch Jerry's brain So you can go straight into it, but it's always easier easier to follow a specific link to a specific thought in my brain Which I'm happy to give you Thank you very much and Help me make this better and send questions and build your own. Thanks