 Te ora e te whānau. Ngā mihinui kia koutou te atiawa Taranaki whānaui. Ngā mihinui kia te whānau o te IHF. Kia te whānau o Kotpokopa. Te rongoa kia te ao. Noreira he mihinimahana kia koutou katoa. Hurinoa tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa. Ngā mihinui kia koutou, idahona, koutou and social-entrepreneur. Ngā mihinu haastu mo mĤ aíngutra pa kana kawai isso hodl a nd 2010. I started eating raw broccoli and that was my vegetables. I started eating two-minute noodles and white bread and double brown beer. And on that highly nutritious diet, I was also very stressed out with the amount of design assignments that we had due and there was a culture that developed of staying up all night and handing it in the next day. And with that kind of behaviour, myself and a few fellow students here in the room, we were on the road to just destroying our immune systems. And I quickly learnt that if I was going to continue that behaviour, I was going to wind up really sick and I did. I got something called glandular fever, anyone had that before? Months and months of a sore throat, cough, snotty nose, everything. And it just wouldn't go away. So I started to educate myself after going to the doctor and being handed some antibiotics and some steroids and being told I had IBS as well. And I went home and felt kind of a little bit cheated after that, after paying $75 and spending ten minutes with this doctor. And I started to research myself as to what was going on. And I found that IBS was a blanket term for something that was based on something that was going on in the gut. And for me, there was something called leaky gut syndrome where because of the stress, because of the bad diet, because of all of those things that were going on in my lifestyle, I had developed tiny holes in my gut. And that meant that the food that I was putting in was gradually leaking into my bloodstream, causing things like chronic fatigue, depression, all kinds of things. So at this point, I really started to educate myself as to why this was going on. And I was brought back to some ancient wisdom by a man named Hippocrates, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. So when I moved back up to Auckland, I started a business with a few best mates of mine that I'd been friends with since primary school. And we set out to make health and well-being cool. And at this point, nobody was making green smoothies. We were total strangers with this approach and people would walk past our little stall at the Parnell French markets and be like, what's that grass that you've got in there? We really had to coax people in to try and give it a go. But really what we wanted to do, instead of focusing on the smoothie that we were, our product that we were giving to people, we were really focusing on the interaction that we had with the people, kānohi ki te kānohi. And it was about the experience that they had with us instead of the product that we were giving them. And we also tapped into some indigenous Māori wisdom with this approach and we learnt that nutrition is not the only thing for health and well-being. Also, it's a very simple framework. This is the Māori model of te wharitapa whā, which illustrates four different aspects of holistic well-being. One being physical, taha tīnana. One being mental and emotional, taha hini ngāro. One being te wairua, the spiritual aspect. And one being the social, the whānau aspect. And for us, we started to really embody this with our humble little stall at the Pānau-French Markets and we started to grow a community of people that would come and visit us every weekend for their medicine, for their tune-ups, for their body. And it wasn't long until we started learning about gut health and that New Zealand has one of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the world. And Hippocrates also said that all disease begins in the gut. And we're out there, we're putting a whole lot of stuff in there, but we really need to be conscious about what that is. And one of the things that we started putting in our smoothies was something called kombucha, which is a fermented tea. Yeah, basically a tea that's fermented for about ten days with this bacteria, it's called a scoby. I've never seen a scoby before. Yeah, scary-looking things. It looks like a mushroom. But that scoby, over time, it metabolises the sugar and the tea into living enzymes and good bacteria, probiotics for our gut. And people saw us pouring that into our smoothies and they were just like, like, what are you doing? I just want to buy a bottle of that. And so we pivoted with our business model and started putting these bottles on the table and started selling it for $20 a bottle. And there was a lot of education at that point. Four years ago, no one knew what kombucha is. It seems everyone does now. But we've really seen a massive growth in that consciousness in that market and that enabled us to go from a smoothie store to on the shelves of stores all over the country. And then we started to take our operation into the community. We started to attend festivals. This is us at Splaw in 2015. In the middle of there next to me, the tallest one there is the late Jason Corliss. And this guy was one of my greatest, greatest mates and he passed away this year. It's all part of this journey. And it was a reminder that you never know when your time is going to come. So make every second count and take every opportunity that you can. So as well as going to all of these events, we also started putting on our own events. And this was the fourth iteration. It was called the On Party 4.0. And this moment here was just after a mass meditation that we had at this party. And it was alcohol-free, zero waste and we just got all of our mates involved and all of our friends in the community that played an instrument. We put them on the stage and we sourced our local community and created a festival much like what EHF is doing here. And one of the things that we realised about organic mechanics is that it abbreviates down to OM. OM. And I don't know how you guys feel, but would you like to do an OM? So if you just take one breath, we'll just take one clearing breath and then we'll gear up and we'll make some good vibrations up in here. So breathing in. Letting out. All right, now breathing in for this OM. So people talk about creating culture within their business and this became part of our culture. It was OMs. We'd OM before we had meetings because it brings us all together that vibration. It's the same vibration. I've never been to space that vibration. So at the same time as doing all of these events and things, we started to realise how much we're creating this waste. Even though they're glass bottles, we still have no idea where they're going to end up. People recycle them, but they also just end up everywhere else. So we started putting our kombucha into kegs and we started putting refill stations all over the country. And we realised that it was really the behaviour that we needed to change and so that's a lot of what we focus on now is creating a transformation in that behaviour. And we also realised that we have a deep connection to our landscape, to te whenua, to te ngahere, our forests. And the sign of a clean river is a sign of a healthy forest. And this is Te Waiho Walkway up in Hamilton. And it was recently slammed. A company came in, I think, as pure blue NZ was going to extract 7 million litres of water per day out of this spring. And the local iwi put forth that this would destroy the modi. So take away from the mana of this place and this was stopped. So the idea of Kaitiakitanga, of stewardship, of conservation of our environment is a huge thing for me. And as an artist I use my skills to help to keep alive this knowledge because when we are entrusted with knowledge it is our responsibility to keep that safe. Cannabis. Who knew this plant could cause so much trouble around the world? This little seedling here has put more people in jail, torn apart more families than anything else on this planet. And coincidentally it's also a thing which spurred me on this whole journey. And as part of my activism ventures I put together Hemp for Victory Aotearoa, which is a campaign to change the awareness of hemp and cannabis in New Zealand as a whole. And this year, last year November 2017 a group of radicals and myself got together and we planted our own hemp farm and that's industrial hemp and the idea with that was to empower local and rural communities with a way that they could monetise their latent land and also to heal that land because hemp can create fight over remediation in the soil and can also secret the carbon from the atmosphere. So there's a lot that we can do with this plant. And there's a group there and in the middle there is my partner Savannah Savannah, can you stand up? I'm going to say kia ora Savannah. When we plant our next hemp farm in the next couple of weeks that will be our one year anniversary. Kia ora babe. So yeah, hemp has many many things we can use it for food. It's a staple food source with more protein and steak more fibre than oats and more omega-36 and 9-den tuner. It's an amazing food source that we can make clothing from it we can make buildings from it. We can do so many things with this plant. So together with Savannah and a few other radicals we created a company called Arohem Aotearoa and we sponsored the New Zealand Hemp Summit a few months ago in Wellington and there I met Michael Mail and we shared an idea that if every child in New Zealand had a two or three tablespoons of hemp seeds a day we could dramatically increase the health of this whole country. So for Arohem Aotearoa we have four ease of change which are our guiding principles. Environment we we are planting hemp to heal the soil. We are kaitiakitanga is our main value. Education we are mentoring farmers to grow. We are creating the networks for people to figure out how to do this in their families if they have never done it before. Embodiment we are embodying our values of kaitiakitanga where planting in tune with the moon Maramataka keeping in tune with those lunar cycles and enterprise teaching people how to create business people who have no idea and bringing them into a place where they are creating a whole product in their backyard with their whānau. So if you'd like to talk to me about this hosting an open space later on today talking about hemp and regenerative agriculture this is how you can contact me thank you for listening Kia ora.