 from crazy people that are not from New England, and all those people from New England. Like it starts like this, it's beautifully attended like all of a sudden, and like this time we're here, and you're like, wow, how many more people live here? And you come back in January and you realize why. So, you know, like thinking about today, just in general, like these ideas of like the weather. And it was like, it's a perfect segue into the story that I've found, and some of you will be familiar when I get to the end of this story, that happened around 1914 in a very similar part of, in a certain time of the year, so that maybe September. So, it's like, it was that time of the year where it's like, it's sweater weather. I can never say that, right? Because every time I say it, I think in that second we had lives again. It's sweater weather. But it's like, it's that time of the year where there's these four kids in the South of France in the middle of 1940s, in 1940, September 1940, was during World War II, and they were just hanging out. They were really kids. They were going out to this like wooded area. And so, if you could imagine that wooded area, which is not very much different than what we're in, but it was like tiny, and you know, you got the petricor mixed with like the idea of like the weather of the fall, like fallen leaves. And it was four kids and this kid had his dog. And so, they're out from the ball with his dog and they've thrown him out and their dog is going and running and the dog falls into a hole, which is very tragic. So, with all the people I understand, like you know, they had little figures down in the stuff. And so, the kids go down, so they go down into the hole to try to find the dog. And it starts, they can't do as long as it goes back and they get, they end up getting a lantern. And so, he goes back, so they go back down in there and what they discover in this subterranean mix of all of these caves were 17,000 paintings. They were cave paintings. These were the cave paintings out in the south. And so, these kids, unbeknownst to them, discover probably one of the greatest amateur discoveries in our history and cultural history. And so, they're looking down in that, they're down there looking at it and what they find is like a life force of an ancient civilization encapsulated within the protected bowels of the earth. Like this amazing sort of thing that we find. And the story, this art that they pulled from this that they didn't know to pull it because it's still in the caves, right? And everybody is familiar with cave paintings out in the south, right? You had like any passing interest over that 101 art history credit. You know that that's where we all start, right? Cave paintings of the south. And so, what tells us this history of the civilization, this art that they tell us? It talks about their artistic, it gives us a history and a narrative about their artistic capacity, right? We actually can see how these people, like what they were able to just do, right? Like the way in which they had ideas about hierarchy of scale, color, there was a lot of sophistication in it. They had a lot of cultural and social aspects. So you could see what was happening in these cave paintings, how groups were getting together, how men and women sort of reacted, like all of these sort of cultural understandings. You had environmental and geographic understanding, specifically in terms of biodiversity because they showed multiple different things. While the majority of those images were all of horses, there were lots of like herd animals and like large felines, so you could see what these people were actually doing. They got technology, which is surprisingly that you guys would probably be interested in, right? You could see what their technology was because you could see how they were using the materials that they had readily available to make this art that was on the wall. Cultural exchange, there was evidence that other groups of people who were living at the time would also come into these caves and actually see these things. Ultimately, what we get from this cave painting in LaSalle is a narrative of the story of these people. And I always like to say this, whenever we dig up a society, no matter where we are in the world, we never dig up their accounts or their lawyers. We always dig up their art, right? We never dig up their accounts. We dig up their art and that art is the thing that actually tells us a story. And when it tells us this story, it actually takes us back into a place where we can understand who those people are. And there's a theory behind this, most people don't know this, it's called narrative transportation theory, which revolves around this idea that an immersive experience of absorbing a story so deeply that one person gets transported into that narrative world. Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock first introduced this theory in the early 2000s, aiming to elucidate the profound psychological impact that narratives have on individual. The theory operates on the premise that when an individual's lose themselves in a story, their emotional and cognitive experiences are deeply affected, thereby altering their real world beliefs and attitudes. So why would you wanna transport somebody to a story? So why would you wanna do that? I think about it like the golden rule. And the golden rule as we've always understood it, right? Do unto others as you would have others do unto you is actually a mistranslation. Based on some scholars that the idea is actually not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it would be do unto others as they would have done unto themselves. So what that means is that if I invite you to my house and my favorite thing to eat for breakfast is mustard and sardines with a side of beet juice. I'm trying to think of the grossest things I could think of. And I've got you towels, heated towel, and you're coming in. It's like, I've made you this amazing breakfast and I sit it down in front of you. I have done unto you as I would have done unto me. And you will look at that and go, no thank you. This ain't it. So in order to learn a thing about someone, you have to understand them. And in order to understand them, you actually have to have empathy for them. And what happens when we share our narratives? We actually build empathy. And I'll give you another really good example of empathy building in the 20th century. During the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement of the 19, well, I always say like, we always like pinpoint the Civil Rights Movement in the middle part of the 20th century, but it actually started in like 1865. Just FYI, like we're gonna say that Civil Rights Movement started there. And when we got to this place almost 100 years later when Dr. King as 27 year old minister decides that he's going to run this bus boycott in Montgomery, which starts a big movement. So one of the things that people don't understand about this is how important television was in the idea because most people don't know that there was a march on Washington. There was a planned march and bus and burnings in the 1940s led by A. Philip Randolph. And A. Philip Randolph goes in and threatens to FDR that if you don't desegregate the military, we're going to do more marches. And so he does this. Like he stands in like a black man in the 1940s goes and threatens the president of the United States with a march on Washington, which is kind of an amazing thing. But the point is I'm trying to get to. So we get to the 1940s, 1950s and 60s and the march on Washington is happening. And specifically the things that are happening in Montgomery and Selma. And one of the things that happens, most people don't know this, but the civil rights activists actually go to a different town. And I'm not sure about, okay, I always forget the town, but I want to say it's a town in Georgia. They go into a town in Georgia and they're going to like desegregate the, they're going to protest. But the sheriff was actually just a reasonable racist. So he doesn't, so he doesn't, he doesn't like pull out guns. He doesn't pull out tanks and like dogs and anything else. He just calmly talks to people and he just has this thing. But the problem with that, that the leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott and a lot of the leaders of the civil rights movement needed was they needed somebody to be reactionary. And so they looked for someone to be reactionary. And so that's when they found Bull Connor, right? And so they go there and they are, they actually like instigate these things. And the reason that they instigate them is because they knew the world was watching and they wanted a story to be told. And that story that gets told is the thing that actually helps change, move the needle, right? It starts that people are watching on the news, black children being brutalized by dogs. They start seeing people being hit by water, by water cannons, which most people are like, oh, it's a little water, it's not gonna hurt you. That water was ripping people's skins off. And so people were able to see that. There were actually photographers at the time, during the time that wanted to put down their camera and go and help. And the leaders would say, no, no, no, we need you to document this because we need to tell this type of story. This is a story about who we are as a people. And so we need people to see that. And that story created change. It created a movement. Now, I will say that whenever we go a little ways, we always go a little ways back. And so that was some progress and we got some things happening, but we still need to move things forward. But what they did, what Dr. King and the Civil Rights protesters did was create empathy. And they created empathy by sharing a story. And one of the things that people miss about the idea of how our stories work is that we are way more connected narratively than we think we are. And I learned this, I do this accreditation trip in the Middle East in Amman, Jordan about 10 years ago. So I was living in New Hampshire, I still live in New Hampshire. I called New Hampshire white condo, by the way. If you've ever been in New Hampshire, when I leave New Hampshire, I significantly decreased the black population just by leaving the state. But so we go from New Hampshire to the Middle East and it's like this amazing place. I'm expecting Mad Max and the Terror Dome because that's what the television shows us on a regular basis. But it's not, Jordan is not like that. It's a very cosmetology city with women in short skirts, men in colorful clothes, women arguing with shopkeepers. It's just like this amazing place. And I hit it off on the way over there with there was two politicians whose names I won't say. But I hit it off with these two politicians from New Hampshire. They were state politicians. And it was a Democrat and a Republican and the little Republican lady, she was like a little gray haired grandmother. And she and I were talking during dinner. We're like, we're gonna go down to a little bizarre. We're gonna go down and look at the little place. And so I go down with her, this little gray haired white lady. And we're looking at the stuff and we're talking and looking like buying souvenirs for our family. And I started noticing people were staring at us. Like people were just looking at us. And at first I was thinking about how people looked at me, because I'm from the South, when I was with white people in the South, like while black people and white people are very similar in the South, they do things a lot different. They do things differently, separately, but they do with them the same. I always tell people that my wife's family, my wife is white and her family's from the South and my family's from the South. And when I go to a cookout at my wife's family, I know they're gonna be fried chicken, collard greens and macaroni and cheese. Those recipes are going to be different than my mom's recipes for fried chicken, collard greens and macaroni and cheese. But I know I'm gonna get that. If somebody invites me to a barbecue here, I don't know what the hell I'm gonna get. Cause you just don't know. Funny story, in New Hampshire where we live, they had a barbecue at the state, like little town fair, the little town fair, they had a barbecue when we were all super excited when we first moved to town. We're gonna go get some barbecue at this little barbecue place. And I realized that when they say barbecue in New Hampshire, they mean hot chicken. And I don't mean spicy, I mean chicken hot. Like it's just hot chicken. I was like, did y'all put any flavor on it? They were like, we pour vinegar over it. I'm like, that is not flavor. So I always know that because people are very similar. They just do things differently. And what dawned on me when I was in the Middle East with this little senator is that these people in the Middle East were staring at us, not because we were a black man and a white woman, it was because it was obvious that we were Americans, right? And that we came from a similar, they connected us in a way that we would not have connected ourselves. And the reason was is because we shared a similar story and culture. And that story is a story about America and who we are. Like we actually have to leave this country to realize that we are like connected and we're connected through that story. So when I talk about stories, I talk about this idea of what I do as a cartoonist. And so I always say that on a macro level, I make stories that are just unapologetically the truth. And they are forward facing about the systemic oppression that black people face in America. If you go look on my Instagram, most of my Instagram is me yelling at racist, which is like a video game for me because the internet's not real when I was like, this is fun. It's like hitting one down. And so I make these things, but what I'm really doing is sharing stories. And I didn't realize this when I first started. When I first started, I was thinking, oh, I'm drawing these little comics about black people, hipsters who will spend $9 on avocado on toast should buy these $3 mini comics that I'm selling. By the way, if you ever see a group of hipsters, that's called a podcast, a group of hipsters. And so I'm thinking this. And then I go to this first book signing and it was after I did the story about Malaga Island, Maine, which was this mixed race community that was destroyed by the state of Maine in 1911. And so I did the story about them and I was in Maine and I was doing this whole thing like, oh, I said the same, the hipsters will spend avocado on toast, they'll buy these little comics from me, right? And this man came up to me and he had tears in his eyes. And he said, thank you for telling these important stories. And I was like, oh, right, this is something different. This is like, this is how you make change. This is how you connect to people. It's about telling stories. Is it a coincidence that in the early 2000s, one of the most popular television shows on TV was 24 and they had a black president and in 2008, we get a black president? Because the story is in the zeitgeist, right? Is it a coincidence that we have a civil rights movement happening and we have these races, these people who wanna conserve racism, so terrified of the fear of a black planet that we get planted of the apes? Or the idea that in the early part of the 20th century when Jack Johnson knocks out, I don't know who that guy's name is, he's forgotten the history, but if you ever wanna feel good thing, watch him knock this guy out, like there's a video of it, he knocks him out of the ring, this white guy. But he becomes the heavyweight champion and we get King Kong about these white people going into the jungle and conquering these things. Like the stories, the narratives are the thing that becomes part of the cultural experience. Is it a coincidence that in 2016, after the election of President Trump, we get a whole bunch of movies that say, hold still and be quiet and everything's gonna be all right? Those horror movies. We get a whole series of these things because they're in the cultural side guys, because narratives actually change people's minds and they help change things. Studies have shown that if you want to change someone's opinion about something, and they did this with abortion and gay marriage in 2006, 2007, and they found that if they sent someone who was actually gay and actually married to another person, that that was more likely to change someone's mind than it was for you to tell them facts and figures because of that narrative transportation theory, that taking us into those stories. That's what we do on a regular basis, right? Before you know anything about a person, you sit down and you have a conversation with them, right? And when you sit down and you have that conversation, you talk a little bit. You share bits and pieces of it. You tell them why you think the last season of Game of Thrones was terrible, right? You tell them why you think that Tom Brady should never have left the Patriots. You know what I mean? You go through this whole thing where you're like sharing these little bits and pieces of your story because sharing little bits and pieces of your story actually help, it helps humanize us, right? And so when we share narratives, when we share narratives about whether they're nonfiction or fiction narratives, we're actually putting that stuff, information into the cultural zeitgeist and we're actually helping change stories. We're actually helping change minds and you're actually making change. So, in conclusion, it's important to share stories and to think about how stories and narratives shape the way our society moves through the world because you'll be putting things in the cultural zeitgeist. So think about the ways in which we share stories and how we share stories moving forward because if you do that, you create empathy and empathy is not doing unto others as you would have done unto you. It's doing unto others as they would have them so that means you have to understand that person. You have to understand what it's like to be those people and you have to build a story that actually connects to them so that they have, you understand them, they understand you, you understand them and by doing that, you're exchanging little bits and pieces of humanity and when you do that, when you're changing those little bits and pieces of humanity, you're actually making a better community and when you make a better community with those bits and pieces of humanity, you also make a better world. So share stories. Think about ways in which to share stories. Change the cultural zeitgeist and build empathy and when that doesn't help, hug somebody because that always helps. Thank you guys.