Paul Hawken: The New Great Transformation

Good evening. Welcome to Long Now Event. My name is Stewart Brand. Now for our speaker tonight - this is a hometown audience. Hometown audience please welcome Paul Hawken. I was can you hear me in the back? Yes good second, I was telling my friend as we were driving here that nobody gives shorter introductions in the world than Stewart Brand and and brevity is so much better than the opposite when you are being introduced. So thank you Stewart and thank you for this series I was talking to Paul Saffo and he was calling this the his favorite conference, the slow conference and you come is just a big intermission between every you know, speaker and but it could called the long conference too. I thought that might be a good idea for . As so often it has happened in my life my work has been affected by Stewart. I am not saying that because he is here, because it's true. And the talk I gave here previously was called The Long Green and it was entitled by Stewart Brand. He gave me the title. That is the third chapter in Blessed Unrest. And tonight when we are talking about the title for the talk he said, The New Great Transformation, which I accepted and the same time only really an idiot would call their talk, The New Great Transformation because those things are not talked about in real time, much less predicted. But I do think it's a very, very useful dialectic, dynamic transformation in this case. The one that is conventionally thought over is really the beginning of the industrial age, 1700s and that transformation to so called self regulating markets that Karl Polanyi outlined so brilliantly in his book published in 1924 called The Great Transformation. And you know much of that and industrial revolution, but what he was saying I think was especially important. He was one of the few economists who was really synthetic, he was integrative, he really looked at all things. He did not stick to his discipline. And what he said is that the nation state have to call evolve with this so called self regulating markets in order for those markets to preserve and survive, but that those markets, those market mechanisms would breakaway from the state. And that the state then would become a secondary and sublimated to corporations and that in the process we would lose our sustainability, our viability in terms of resources and other things, so very, very prescient work. The other than more recently titled work called The Great Transformation, it was by Karen Armstrong. And where she described the actual age the period between 200 and 900 BC which was a time of great violence, great barbarity really. The cruelled lot of cruelty from China down through India, Pakistan, into the Middle East up through Italy, Greece, that whole area the world was wrecked with war. And it was a time when many teachers and sages and philosophers arose. And there was in the populists itself a great revolution against what was being seen. And I want to revisit that a little bit later. And so the transformation that I am going to talk about and I do not use that word transformation to refer to it though is very much within the tension of the dynamic of these two previously referred to transformations. Blessed Unrest first of all about the title. The title comes from Martha Graham talking to Agnes de Mille Agnes de Mille; both choreographers had seen her show that she had won awards for Broadway. She came back six months later. It was terrible; she was bemoaning her faith to Martha Graham. Martha Graham apparently on her stoop, went home, turned to Agnes de Mille and said that like, get over it. We are artists and as artists we are never satisfied. We are always dissatisfied. There is this queer dissatisfaction that that makes us march and makes us more alive than the other. This please forgive me, I forgot the Blessed Unrest this creates dissatisfaction, this Blessed Unrest that makes us march and makes us more alive than the other. And when I saw that phrase, it was the first time I felt that I had words that tutelary held what I was trying to describe. And what I was trying to describe was something that I began to appreciate, maybe 14, 15 years ago. And during that time I was giving a lot of talks around the country, in Australia, New Zealand as well as Europe, and some in Japan. And after those talks people would exchange their cards with me and I would bring them home. And levied them, look at them and put them in a kitchen drawer in my house boat. During that time, I had a house keeper and Stewart and Dennison know her well. She couldn't clean house but because she was too old, she came with the houseboat. But she was an artist and I always knew when she had been there because the house would be completely rearranged. And one day the drawer with the cards it was stuffed with these cards from NGOs and non profits and others was full and she had placed them all in gold ____ Bergdorf Goodman bag in my closet. And it was a very small house boat so I got dressed there in the closet every morning and so I saw the cards everyday. And that bag was full of cards I began to ask my self really a very simple question which is how many groups are there. It was really just simply a data point. How many environmental groups are there in the world? And then subsequently subsequently to that I began to include social justice groups. And the reason I did was pretty simple which is that I saw them as the same even though they didn't see themselves as the same. And what I mean by the same was that they were both dealing with the politically economic system that Karl Polanyi was talking about in The Great Transformation. And that system is one where institutionally, corporately, governmentally, however it's expressed; the future is basically stolen and sold in the present. And it's called GDP or profit or whatever it can be stolen in the form of credit cards in British Columbia that make lingerie catalogues you know, for Victoria Secret. It can be in the form of child trafficking for the plantation workers and Benign for chocolate plantation. They can be in the form of workers in factories in China making_____ being exposed to high toxicity, pregnant women. So it really doesn't make any difference when you look at the environmental movement and the social justice movement, both are addressing this theft of the future. And to think of the environmental movement is not a justice movement really is a disservice the people and place. It is always and quintessentially about justice. So as I began to count both my numbers got to go up to 30, 40, 50, 60, 70,000 and at that point I began to go back to the literature on social movements and try to find if there is something comparable, either extent or in in history and I couldn't find anything that had that many organizations. Now you can probably stop me right now and say well, who says it's a movement? Just because there are so many organizations why would you call it a movement? And several reasons and several reasons not to because well, but as I began to look at the literature, I began to wonder if in fact because movements in the past had organized so differently we were blind to this one. That is to say the dynamics of this movement were so different that we couldn't see it. Now normally in the social movements what you have is the imbalance to power being addressed by organizations or one central organization and trying to redress it. That is to say, to aggregate power to itself, right. And next you have centrality, you have a place, a location and along with that you have a charismatic usually male vertebrate, sometimes female vertebrate, but somebody who is the leader, who talks for, who speaks for, who could represent it, who can you know, give the sound byte, all right. And lastly you usually have an ideology. You have a theory about the way things should work. Economically, politically or spiritually and you get that combination and you got a movement, you have an "ism". Now you look at this aggregation of organizations in the world and there is a subtitle of my book says, "How the largest movement in the world came into being", right, you see something very different. First of all it's not trying to aggregate power to itself. It's trying to disperse the pathological concentrations of power, all right, a very different activity. Second, it's about ideas. It's not about ideology, you know, are there ideologues in it? Of course, the groups are ideological, of course. But the movement as a whole is not ideological. What the media loves and notices is when it coalesces, if there is a march on Market Street, if on February 13th 2003, 10 million people hit the streets because of Iraq it is noticed. If there is an altercation tear gas or something like that the media loves it even more. So a lot of people believe in fact that that is the movement. But I would say having done research now for many years that that may be is one percent of the movement, may be on a good day. That the other 98 99 percent of this movement is about solutions, is about problem solving, it is bottom up. It is about to trying to figure out yes it tries to prevent harm, prevent further damage, but it is trying to figure out how to change things, how to solve them, how to change this relationship between people and people, people and institutions and people and place, people and the environment. And lastly it has no there is leaders, but no one can speak for it. There is no spokesperson whatsoever, right. So here we have a movement that has no earmarks of a movement, right. So why do I call it a movement? I call it a movement because in our work at Natural Capital Institute and I urge you to go to wiserearth.org which is that means world index of social and environmental responsibility. But at wiserearth.org we have about 105 106,000 organizations there. And you are welcome to log on your organization if it's not there. Its editable its a wiki - lot of those things. But if you look at the about the mission, the principle statements of these organizations one by one by one by one and what you find is you could put them up along, read them and see them, you would find that they are all very different they are diverse but they do not contradict each other. And this is my point. Now you go back in the history you go back and there is you cannot find any movement that arose with this characteristic. It has never happened. What's happened is the opposite, which is movements have begun with a very clear set of ideals, principles you know, and then they began to divide and split up and split up. Every ism has become a schism. And what's so great about this movement is that it can't be divided. It started that way, right. It's completely atomized for which many people criticized, right. And say get you act together, why don't you use together as you know, ideological organizations. But what if we are doing something collectively that we cannot understand individually, I mean James Lovelock was here, he talked about the Gaia hypothesis, the idea of the earth being a living organism or having the characteristics of the living organism. But many people for a long time, Spinoza, Kant ____, Lewis Thomas have postulated that we as a species we human beings also have a collective characteristic and a collective intelligence that we create but we do not we do not necessarily understand in real time. And so I am suggesting that this movement may have such earmarks. And as I dealt further into the social movement literature, not be able to find metaphors, descriptors, ways that really adequately presented it, I went to biology, I went to medicine, I went to other metaphors. And the metaphor that was most useful to me and explaining it was really the metaphor of the immune system. And immunize means ready to serve which is handy itself, but the immune system is the most complex system in the body. And this movement if you allow my stipulate of you know, designation of it as a movement, is the most complex movement in the world and in history without question. So the immune system being the most complex system or sort of cartoon picture of the immune system is well like the Department of Defense, you know, pathogens come in and they are attacked and they are shot dead, you know. And so much for that and sometimes it's too many and you are shot dead. Well the immune system doesn't work that way, not only is it complex it actually is more like a Chamber of Commerce mixture than it is an army. And antibodies go after antibodies and there is a tremendous amount of networking going on in the immune system at all times. And what we know is that the immune system that is most resilient is best networked that is best connected to itself within the body. And the immune system will try _____ or detente long before it will try to attack, not long but before. It tries to figure out who this is because what it's doing is identifying things that come in if you will in microorganisms and saying me, me not me, oh there is a not me and then well, what do we do with this. But if it's a me pass, pass, pass, pass and what this movement is doing is same thing, collectively as going humane, humane, - not humane. This is not humane. And what you have is organizations and collecting, gathering, what should we do about it. And they will talk and they will organize and form what? Collectives and alliances and networks and non profit organizations and non governmental organizations and watch organizations and keeper organizations and village based organizations and citizen based organizations, I mean I can keep going. It has so many ways of expressing itself, right. But not only is immune system complex, right but the analog the closest we have to immune system in our culture is the internet. And the internet, as Kevin has pointed out with his quintillion transistors and million emails per second is not as complex as your immune system, right. So are we creating something that is the human equivalent or humanities equivalent of the immune system? I think we are. And if we look at it from that point of view then we don't think of it as gaining power so much as something that permeates all existing institutions, whether it be religious, educational, governmental, corporate, right. And permeating with ideas, with means, with solutions, right, that are thrown out if they don't work, which is what you do with ideas. You don't hold on to them. Ideologies, you hold on to, right. And so if you look at the proposals, the six proposals are examples, they are in Congress right now, concerning greenhouse gas and climate change, you trace them back, they all go back to NGOs, right, 10, 20, 30 years ago, right. So again and again you see with this movement is is permeating society as opposed to taking it over, dividing it etc, right. Now, the immune system, let's go further which is one cell, one human cell, 400 billion molecules, in that one cell there is 10 million plus activities going on, tens of millions really going on at any given second in your body. And you multiply that times the 100 billion human cells not to mention the 900, excuse me 100 trillion human cells not to mention the 900 trillion non human cells which are in you you have quite a community. A lot is going on in those 900 trillion as well. But even putting them aside in your human cells you have the one set to one octillion activities going on right now in your body, which is 10 to a 100 times the number of stars in the known 15 billion light year white Universe, okay. So that's what's going in your body right this second and when I present that I always ask people two questions, which is can you feel it? It's a serious question. It's a funny question but it's a serious question. And some people saying no, it's interesting. But my answer is, of course you can feel it. It's called life. We actually feel life. We are feeling it right now. If you have any doubt about it, wait till you are dead and you compare. And you will say, oh yeah I did feel it, right. And the other question is who is in charge, right? Who is running the show? And can you imagine, somebody did try to run the show. Be that like that, all right. So again going back to this unnamed movement, right like no one is running the show and I would say thank god, for once it's not a male charismatic vertebarte running the show you know, because it's dealing with what they have done for last 2,500 years, right. We don't know who is running the show, right. Now to give you a sense of scale I have a clip and the idea of the clip I showed this at Long Green, I have changed it but showed it then - and the dimensions have changed. But I saw the movie Winged Migration, I don't know if any of you saw the movie beautiful, extraordinary movie. As one does I watched the credits and sort of then stood up and then was walking out and then the credits came for the thanks, that is we thanks to the following organizations. And it was just an astonishing list of organizations that really are saving habitat all over the world and organizations that I had never heard of and I had been on the Board of National Audubon, so I had heard of birding organizations and you know the Siberian Crane association of Cuckoos you know like. Oh, yeah one of my grantees, right. I mean you could tell that these people were in places where they was no foundations, there was no grandeurs, there was no proposals, they just got together and are doing it. And I cried I started to cry, I felt, who are these people - you know. And after seeing this movie it was just like, oh my god, thank you thank you, I will never meet you, see you, know you, right. And this is so important, this what happen because, if you trace this movement back, you go to really to the abolitionists, you got to stop there, in 1787, 12 people in a print shop in London, right, announcing to the world that they were going to stop the trade and slavery, right. Well, all well and good and we look at it now and saying, well of course, but at the time three out of four people in the world were indentured or enslaved. And everybody was going well, this is what humans do. They enslave people. And some of us you know, the better of us were not slaves, but most of us are and who are you? And you are meddling and you are do-gooders and you are liberals and you are going to ruin the British economy. And they were denounced and derided from parliament again and again and again, right. But what's important about it was it was the first time a secular group got together, organized themselves to work on behalf of the suffering of other people whom they did not know, would not know and from whom they would never receive indirect or direct benefit. It was the first time. And now look at this, right. We do it all the time. And so the way to get a sense of scale about this movement instead of just numbers, which I could read aloud to you you look at it this way, which is if I start this now as I am, but if I was to continue to roll it so that you saw the name of every group in the world that is working specifically on human rights and poverty, environment, ecological restoration you know the oceans, forests and going on. You wold have to stay here all night tonight and be here all day tomorrow in fact you would have to be here all night Saturday night, there goes the party, all day Sunday, all night Sunday night and you continue to be here 24 hours a day from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Friday you would have been here a week. And what I will say to you have to stay here for another week, then another week after that, then another week. You have to stay here from 24 hours a day before you would have read the data of all the organizations who are essentially working on this issue. Luckily the person who did this for me loved Star Wars. And also got tired of listing all organizations as well and so you will see pretty soon that it will speed up see it all. This is why I say this is a large organization, there is nothing like it, there is no second place. The Catholic Church would fit in [Background Music] ____. So would Al-Qaeda, so would the____, so would economic fundamentals they would all fit in. Yeah actually I want to make that ____. So that's the scale, yeah. I want to go back a little bit to history, just revisit for a minute, because in during this I got to go back to The Transcendentalist which was such a blessing for me because I grew up in Berkeley and the person who taught transcendentalism in Berkeley, the person through whom you had to go in order to get out of there was Mrs. Smith and she was an undercover Berkeley police women and I was practicing to be an asshole and I decided that this was a good time to learn and so I made it known that she had no right to teach the Emerson, Thoreau and everything and she made it known to me that she was in charge. And so I was repeatedly suspended and finally one day, the Dean came in and she had died and he came in and said you know, she is dead. And I raised my hand in my best Oscar Wilde imitations, said, how could you tell? And I know he didn't like it either. And yeah oh yeah better than that. Anyway I was taken physically out of the room and I was told to write an essay on rebellious youth to get back into school. And - yeah, I didn't and so I was expelled of course. I wasn't suspended. I was suspended then but I was expelled and I never got my high school degree. And thanks to Mrs. Smith and but - So going back to The Transcendentalist was such a treat because I don't think you can understand these guys and these women when you are 17, I think it's impossible. I don't know what Emerson was smoking or what, but I mean the fact is when you read him now it is a completely different experience and really Emerson was packaged by a Calvinist America and he is what I will say is like prudent and you think he was like a penny pinching frugal Yankee and in fact he was some place else. And the story though that caught my attention and there is a brilliant, brilliant biography, Mind On Fire by Richardson, who is here at Berkeley, just brilliant and he also did a brilliant Thoreau's, well but in that biography he talks about a little known event but a really critical event I think in the environmental movement and also in the social justice movement. And bare with me here. So Emerson's wife is died. He is long faced, he is sad, he is gloomy, he leaves on a 25th of December, 1832 and he goes to Europe to see Coleridge and Wordsworth and his friends there. And he goes to Malta, he goes up the boot of Italy and he ends up in Paris. And there Bernard Juzo and Antawn Lorente Juzo so have created this extraordinary exposition and botanical garden. The Jordan [0:28:58] ____ and the Cabinet of Natural History and they are these are taxonomists, they are in the systematics, I mean they are brilliant Wallace and Darwin borrowed from them wholesale. And it was 1833, he goes there what the Juzos have done, has taken plants and shovels and bones and skeletons and you know preserve specimens and they have arranged them in these arrays of color and palette and form. And you can see evolution you can see it, its right there no one had a word for it. There was no word for the web of life. And Emerson for the first time is elated he is rhapsodic. And he goes in that night and he writes into his journal, that everything is nature. It's what he has been sort of thinking about and postulating but now he knows it, that everything is nature, everything is connected. And he starts, what's the nature of the mind? What is nature of governance? What is the nature of religion? What is the nature of law? And he goes back and he writes Nature. That's his first book. And really the first very first person to read it, one of the very persons is Harvard's first hippie Henry David Thoreau. And he buys it and he is so taken by it and he reads it again and he invites Emerson to give the Senior Class Talk or he and the seniors do. Then he invites himself over to Emerson's house, because he is graduated and he said, what can I do? You know I went to Harvard and I am unemployed and you know, I know how to make pencils, right. And Emerson says keep a journal, which he does for 7000 pages from that point on, amazing piece of advice. And what's so critical about that is that is that twelve years later he is arrested for not paying his poll tax, famous story. But what isn't often understood is he didn't pay the poll tax that year because we had elected a president who knew he was going to war before he was elected, Polk, the Mexican War. And he was outraged by the war, by the conduct of the war, the injustice of the war, the illegality of the war. A distant relative of mine Ethan Allen Hamilton wrote a 500 page journal he was a secondant to Zachary Taylor, and he says, this is nuts, this is crazy. We will pay for this for decades to come in loss of character and integrity, this country. And what you know what Thoreau was saying basically is that if I am paying taxes for Texas Rangers raping Mexican women, you know, I am a rapist. What he said basically was if the government is unjust the just man is in jail. And that's what he wrote, all right. After he got out of jail he gave a talk at the Concord Lyceum. He wrote an essay, Resistance to Civil Government. And the story of Emerson coming to him and saying, Henry what you are doing in there, and him saying, Waldo what you are doing out there, is so cute but still not true. But it is so important a story because; it really, really was a split. And the teacher and the student the student had taken the teacher at his word, everything is connected and Thoreau saw that in a social justice context every thing is connected. And he acted on it and it made it made Emerson so uncomfortable because there was a stigma about going to jail. And 1862, Thoreau dies, 1866 this essay is renamed Civil Disobedience. And nobody knows to this day who named it, no one knows where the word came from, its not in the essay, but what we do know is that 40 years later after Gandhi had led a meeting in Johannesburg with Hindus and Muslims voting to get arrested instead of register under the Black Act, and Gandhi writing in his journal that night, I am not sure what we have done, I am not sure this is good, this is not good for my career, right. Somebody from the Indian Times gives him Civil Disobedience and he reads it. And he gets arrested and he carries it into jail, he shows it to the press as he goes into jail. In other words what Thoreau did was making going to jail cool. How many of you have been in jail? Yeah, right we thought it was pretty pretty hot may be not, I was proud to be arrested, right. And again and again, you know, each time, right. But Thoreau did that, you know. And this come up again because 48 years after that when Rosa Parks is standing to get on the famed bus where she didn't get off and gave up her seat to a white man, the driver that night is James Blake, the man who threw her off the bus 12 years before. The most amazing thing she did that night was actually get on the bus instead of going to fight or flight. Her adrenalines were all lit up. Why did she get on the bus? She got on the bus because she was sent to the Highlander School that summer by Clifford and Virginia Durr, right - to learn Civil Disobedience to enforce Brown v. Board of Education, a school influenced by Mohandas K. Gandhi, right. And we see the split that happened with the sort of Emersonian and Thoreauvian School as well as the environment and the social justice movement if you will that, not the only one in the world, please but a very important one, right, that came off after that, you know. And to me what we are seeing now is these are starting to comeback together again. And I think you cannot in especially now funders I mean if an environmental organization does not take into consideration social equity issues, it's not really a very good proposal. And more and more, like you see Van Jones and so forth in Oakland you are seeing this really coming together, green jobs, of social equity, of really combining if you will, bringing back together the social justice and the environmental movement. Now there is here somewhere one more thing I want to show you I think if I have it right, if I don't fix it up for you I might have I think I got it wrong. No I don't. But what I am showing here is simply categories. [Background Music] These are what we just call areas of focus. When we start to catalogue, the organization which is wiserearth.org sort of literally looked at what they do, that is we tell others and being inspired by Juzo family in Paris we decided to take the taxonomy of this movement and ____. But its 414 categories and then 20,000 different tags here sub categories. And when you see this and I urge you to go to wiserearth.org to only just a look at this, to see the immensity, the complexity, the diversity of this movement. But the thing is when you look at it you will see, yes connected, connected, connected, connected, the biggest contributor to poverty is corruption. One of the greatest contributors to resource depletion is poverty, and resource depletion drives poverty again, it drives deracination, it drives migration to cities, 1.4 million people per week, it creates big pools of exploitable and very, very inexpensive labor which drives globalization, which drives power crisis, which drives consumerism, which drives the use of fossil fuels, which drives climate change, which drives the heating of the ocean, which drives the death of polar reefs which causes the loss of fisheries with a poor pick up zone and on. And anywhere you start, you can make the connection. It all is connected together, right. And one of the thing I think is notable and what we did here by the way is speed it up. {Background Music] . But when how can I say this. When when you look at this on song and that's why I urge you to go to this, what you are seeing is a curriculum of the 21st century. What you are seeing is humanity in 243 different countries, islands or sovereignties, which what the database consists of, basically rising up a bottom up movement trying to address the problems. Why do we call them non governmental organizations, right? Think about it. And the reason we do is because there is a big really big NGO and its called Washington DC, right? That's the non governing organization. And there one in Tokyo, there is one in Paris, there is one in London, there is one in Berlin, there is one in they are all over the world, they are called governments. And a long time ago they stopped governing and they started serving. This movement is arising from the bottom up because it's corrupt from the top down, because that's who governments are mostly serving, right. And so this is a surrogacy, right, for a tremendous vacuum of leadership that exist in the world. Now go back to the great transformation, the Axial Age, which is again, if you look at these organizations and you look at their value statements, their principles, they are about, there is something deeper there which is common to all of them. And what was so extraordinary about the Axial Age, right Socrates, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Buddha, Mencius, Lao Tzu is that when you read Karen Armstrong's book, when you read the literature of that time, these people were starting social movements, these were not religions. Yes, the age of religiosity for sure, of reverence, yes. All of these people and more were starting movements to address the suffering of other people. And they were talking about about how to lead, they were talking about re-imagining what it means to be a human being in an age of violence and barbarity. And independently, if you look again at the readings, all of them came up with what Rabbi Hillel did, which is really this basic maxim, "never ever do anything to anyone you would not done to yourself", right, the golden rule. They all uttered it, they all enunciated it, they all published, right, or somebody wrote it down, right. And along with that they also said one other thing which is, "all life is sacred", child, creature, culture, life is sacred, right. And if you take those two and you over lay it across this movement and you look at the underlying values and principles, you will find that it is common to all of them. Just non humane, don't do it. What can I do to help? What can I do to prevent it? What can I do to resist it, right? And that's what this movement is about. I am not going to give rule about it. It gets fails, cut sharp elbows, immune systems fail, you know, it's not better than anybody else, they are not nicer people. They are nice people but there is nice people every where, you know. But something is going on. It is the fastest growing movement in the world and going back to the idea of networking, what I think we are seeing now is because of cell phones and texting and the internet, it is going to hook up in ways which were unimaginable even 10 years ago, five years ago. Stewart sent me a piece, many of you saw it, about a million Chinese getting together and texting on their cell phones to stop the construction of a very toxic chemical plant that would be near their home, right. They rose up. So what we were seeing now is an atomized movement that has too much duplication for sure now starting to change its sense of self, how it sees itself and then how it acts in the world, right. And this as I said is something that has never happened before, people say is it too late, are you are optimistic you sound optimistic. If you look at the data and you are optimistic, I don't think you are looking at the data. The data is terrible and you know it. I feel like if you look at these people, if you meet them, if you go to WiserEarth, you look at these organizations one by one by one as my staff has done and you are not optimistic about who we are, then you don't have a pulse, so it's both are true, right. And I feel like the things that separate us, you know, are going to become less and less important in the decades to come. Do I have two more minutes or should I? Two more minutes, okay. But recently many of you know Kenny Ausubel, he founded the Bioneers. Kenny is a Russian Jew. Everybody in his family knows that, had his DNA done and it turns out that he is 40 percent Italian, you know. So he went to his mom and said, hey what's going on. She said, well we don't talk about that. Right, so we know Hawkins is Cornish, we know we are Scottish, potatoe famine, an Irish, Swedish and French. Well, records I mean you know, cool. So I had my cheek swabbed, I thought this is cool. I will send it and found out who I am. Anyway Swiss, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Flemish and I was like wow, I don't have to be an uptight white guy anymore. I am Portuguese, I am Italian, you know. And it was like I am hot, you know. My skin started to to change, they got darker, you know, my hair is too late but hey and I realized in that instant as it came as an email that my whole sense of self changed, why? Well because of completely artificial concepts that I had about self, right. But those concepts about being Spanish and Italian and Portuguese are just as artificial as well, right. We have dealt with it and when you see somebody on the road who is hurt, do you ask them what religion, who they voted for? You help them; you have this deep, deep instinct to help somebody immediately regardless of what the they have done in the past, right. And I feel that are approaching because of the data, because of this the information is coming to us is that the things that have been separating us are going to become a lot less important to us. And the things that bring us together are going to become a lot more important. And I feel like this movement has to do that but it is also in augury of the future, that is coming together, it is connecting, it is organizing, no predictions there maybe questions that ask me to predict what will happen, no idea. My job was to describe it as best I could. And I hope that if you go to Wiser Earth I think that there are many more interpretations and descriptions that arise of it. Any way thank you very much and I think we are into Q & A