 it's good to be home. I am now officially by Coastal. My kids and my wife and I live in Southern California, but I do my work at CNN on the East Coast. I'm like the windshield wiper guy. I just go back and forth. And every time I go to the East Coast, especially Washington DC, I feel like I'm flying backwards in time. So it's especially good to be here with you. I'm not supposed to talk about this, but I'm going to. We don't need this war. We don't need this war. And I have spent the past 72 hours pretty much on TV. And I started out thinking these children have been gassed. Something needs to happen. If the president wants to launch those missiles, I'm with him. I just can't stand to see this type of horror. And I've changed my mind. I've changed my mind. I talked to some of the young veterans who just gotten back from the last two wars. And they started asking me really tough questions. And I started asking the politicians really tough questions. And nobody can answer these questions and we don't need this war. Number one, the United Nations says you can only go to war. And if you don't think dropping missiles and bombs on people is an act of war, ask somebody to drop some missiles and bombs on you. You see? It's war. You can only do it if the UN gives you the mandate to do it. We have no UN mandate. The war would be illegal. But sometimes you do it anyway. But then number two, the war should be at least legitimate, which means you build a big coalition. We go to war. Right now we have a smaller coalition than George W. Bush did when he went to war. A smaller coalition than George W. Bush did. And everybody in this room, I know you, we're not big fans of George W. Bush's itty-bitty coalition for war. We would have a smaller one. We'd have an itty-bitty, bitty-bitty us. If the UK won't come with you, if your best friend won't come with you to a party, you probably shouldn't go to that party. No, I can't hang with you there. So no, don't go. We would have a smaller coalition than George W. Bush, illegal, illegitimate, ill-prepared. I talked to a young soldier and she was telling me that even if you write down on a piece of paper, I promise I'm only going to walk across the bar and slap this person in the face and walk back over here. The chances of you being able to walk across the bar, slap the person in the face and just walk back without them doing something to you, and then you're doing something to them, and then you're in a real fight. Pretty slim. And I cannot, I love this president. Everybody knows I love this president. I would take a bullet for this president. I already have. But how can us good grown folk progressives get behind this war, say this president can't lose face, say America can't lose face, say America can't figure out some more peaceful solution, and then go to Oakland, and tell these young men in Oakland that you have to be the bigger person, that it's the bigger person. Am I wrong? We tell the children, it's the big person who doesn't shoot back. We tell our children, no, it's not that you're a punk if you don't go and retaliate. You're a big person if you don't retaliate. No, don't do something out of pride today that may bring you shame tomorrow. Be bigger than that. So we say to the children in Oakland, and when they don't listen, we say they're thugs. How can we expect more of the children in Oakland than we expect from the president of the United States? We have to say no to war. We have to say no to violence. We have to say no to retaliation and find a better way. I'm tired of funerals, and I'm tired of body bags, and I'm tired of war, and I'm tired of violence. I didn't come up here to say that, but I had to say it, because I notice now if it was George W. Bush or Sarah Palin or anybody else in Washington, D.C., talking about this, we would have a different attitude. And we're sitting up here in Northern California like we're not on the verge of a war, and I guarantee you it won't stop with a couple of missile strikes. But let me tell you why I did come up here. No, look, they gave me a TV show. This is amazing. What are they thinking? TV show? You can say whatever you want. I don't expect this to last very long. Cast a check. Quick. Move your family to D.C. again. Just leave them there. I'll be right back. I don't expect this to last for very long. However, they want to put me in nude on TV, see what happens. Some strange love child, I don't know. I'm going to tell the truth. Now, look, I was, the show launched this Monday, so I was preparing, I was getting ready. And to get ready, you have to review tape. So what I did, I got the tape from the last few times I was on television, and I started reviewing. I saw something that I wanted to share with you, and I wanted to talk with you about. One set of interviews. I'm talking about Trayvon Martin, and I'm talking about how this kid lost his life. And part of the story was he was wearing a hoodie. And I was talking about how I wonder how that would go for me if in my neighborhood I saw somebody of a different race wearing a hoodie, and I shot Mark Zuckerberg. I just, I was terrified. What would you have done? I just didn't. So I didn't think that would have worked out too well for me. So, and I was talking about how, as a Black parent, these kind of situations are terrifying, because you just don't know what you're supposed to do. I mean, people have tried to smear Trayvon since, but Trayvon was unarmed. Trayvon wasn't in the gang. Trayvon wasn't doing, you know, Trayvon was just Trayvon trying to get some Skittles for his brother. And I'm like, do I, as a Black parent, do I have to dress my kid in a tuxedo just so he can go to the store and come back? And if he gets shot, the cops didn't think maybe something bad happened, right? Like, does he have to be wearing a tuxedo, top hat, cane? What do I have to do? I'm not saying don't shoot my kid. I'm just saying, if my kid gets shot, could the cops maybe arrest the person? I mean, what's the standard for that? Right? Getting kind of low. So, now then this is what's so weird. So I'm watching that. This is America. Then the next block I'm watching is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Huge, huge turnout on the Mall. Every color in the rainbow and three U.S. presidents throwing elbows at each other, trying to be standing on the spot where Dr. King spoke. Dr. King has a monument and a holiday. I mean, George Washington and Lincoln got to share their holiday. This brother got his own, you know? He just, how does that work? How does that function? What does that say about where we come from, where we have it, and what we need to be doing? I come here to talk to you guys, you know I'm supposed to be in rehearsal at DC, because while we're relitigating the past in DC, and now we're putting the Iraq war on rerun in DC, you guys are here trying to invent a future. That's what you're trying to do. And I want to take a stand for the kind of future that you invent, because when I talk to my friends who are futurists, the future they describe has a lot, thank you for your accompaniment there, somebody has a very cool cell phone ring. The future that they describe has all kind of stuff in it. Robots and smart screens and really cool apps. But let's just be honest, when they think, when they're described, not a lot of black people. It's just, and then when I talk to my African American friends, their conversation is often about history. And you know, we actually, you know, black people like history so much we have a whole month for it, you know? We're the only people who got a whole month. Just in case you forgot any of the bad stuff. February. So this strikes me as strange, because then you have African Americans clear about a past, big chunks of the white population with real amnesia about our racial past. They just don't really want to deal with it. And then you have the futurists who are focused on the future, but they don't seem to have much racial concern, and I'm now terrified. And I'll tell you why. If we're not careful, we're going to create, by ignoring the past, having only a critique of the present, and trying to get to this new cool future you guys are creating, we could create a future that has a lot more Trayvons and a lot less of what Dr. King stood for. And let me tell you how that works. It turns out that the brain science can explain this dichotomy that you feel. Nobody in this room wants to be a racist, wants to be called a racist, or feels himself to be a racist. And neither does anybody in the Tea Party. Nobody in this room, nobody in the Tea Party, practically nobody in the US, wants to be or sees themselves as racist. That is a huge achievement. Dr. King has won over the conscious mind of an entire country. Dr. King did that. Dr. King is the ultimate hacker. Dr. King is the ultimate hacker. He hacked the conscience of a nation that had put up with racism for 300 years and inserted an anti-racist, uh, antiviral program that is still running. You can put his speeches on right now and you'll start crying. The most effective hacker in the world. And Dr. King is the best futurist in the world, in the history of the world. Dr. King gave us a future that I have a dream and that future called us forward out of horrific situations. The problem that we have now is that it turns out when you put a brain scan on someone who says they're not a racist, including a black person and you show them a picture of a black man, the parts of their brain that are not conscious, which is the majority, goes crazy. Why am I talking about this? You don't expect me to talk about racial stuff. I'm usually supposed to talk about some green stuff and make you happy. I'm not doing that speech. I'm not doing that speech. First of all, they gave me a show. Stay with me. We've known each other for a long time. You've never heard me talk this way. There's a reason for it. Look, I'm a ninth. Can we, can I talk honestly? Look, I'm a ninth generation American. I'm a ninth generation American. I got almost everybody in this room beat, unless you're black or Native American. I'm a ninth generation American. I'm the first person in my family that was born with any rights. I'm saying it again. Not trying to make anybody feel bad. I want you to understand the country that you live in and what, in your responsibilities, because you guys are going to do some amazing stuff. I want to make sure you do it all the way. I'm a ninth generation American. I was born in 68. The bills that made us full citizens weren't signed into law until 64, 65. I have a cousin named Kenya. She was born in 65, but before Johnson signed the act, she had to be given her rights. I'm the first person in nine generations born with all my rights. My mother was born in segregation. My mother's in her 60s. My mother, my father, they had to march. He was beaten to be able to vote. If he were still alive, he'd still be in his 60s. And yet, when African Americans then point out that after 400 years of pain and suffering, the past 40 have been kind of all right. Go Oprah. What we get too often, not from you, but maybe from the person sitting behind you. Why don't these people shut up about race? Why don't these people just shut up about race? We're tired of hearing about it. Serigation was 1,000 years ago or maybe 2,000. Why don't they shut up about it? They keep talking about it and talking about it. They say they want me to be color-blind and then they keep talking about the color-win thing and it's just confusing. And I'm trying to be color-blind, but you won't let me because you keep mentioning it again. And then if I mentioned it, you say I mentioned it wrong and then you call me a racist and I'm just going to go back to work. What is happening halfway across a bridge? But we don't know how to get to the other side. We're halfway across. Dr. King won people's conscious mind, but then when you come across Trayvon, some other part of the mind takes over. And the only way to deal with that is to talk about it. It's the only way to deal with it. Scientists now, the good ones, are trying to figure this out. And I want you to know there's some good news. And this community needs to take up this good news and do something with it. Here's the good news. They went to these doctors, and if you go into the medical profession, in general, there might be some people that don't fit this, but in general, you're not going into medicine because you want to hurt people. You're going because you want to help people. But statistically, it turns out that doctors often look at Black patients and they oversubscribe surgery and they undersubscribe less invasive measures. And in the back of their mind, there's something going on. They think that Black patients won't comply with the medical regime. That they're too lazy, their lives are too chaotic, they're just not going to follow. I'm just going to cut them open, deal with it that way, and that statistically, it's crazy the numbers that you can see. But none of these doctors are walking around saying, I hate Black people. It's just in the back of their mind, they have all this stuff. Well, what do you do about it? Do you go up to them and slap them in the face and call them racists? It turns out that wasn't very effective. It turns out that if you just point out to the doctor, some doctors, sometimes when they're dealing with their Black patients, will over-prescribe surgery. And you just may want to be aware of that. 99.9% of them, the numbers are fixed instantly. What was in the unconscious by talking about it was brought into the conscious mind, and since the conscious mind, Dr. King's already won the behavior changes. So wait a minute, what does that mean? Wait a minute, what does that mean? That means that we may be closer to Dr. King's dream than we fear, but we got to keep talking. We've got to keep talking, even when it's uncomfortable. And there's a new term that I want this community to Google. You can't say the one. Use a search engine. Y'all get sensitive about y'all's computer companies. He's like, Google aired. Here's the term, racial anxiety. Isn't that what you really feel? You don't really feel a lot of racial hatred most of the time, but you should feel some anxiety. I've been up here many times. It's the first time you guys look constipated, like, I hope he doesn't call on me. Racial anxiety, we have some anxiety because there's some unconscious stuff we don't know how to deal with, but I want to challenge this community because I think if anybody can figure this out, you can. Here's what I hope will happen, and then we'll have a conversation about whatever you want to talk about. Dr. King had a dream. I have a scheme, you see. I have a scheme. Here's my scheme. I think you guys can fix this. Yeah, you. Like, he means the guy next to me. No, you. See, look, here's the deal. You guys are about to create, just like with the green economy, you're about to create a whole new economy with all kind of new stuff, new products and services, new enterprises, whole new concepts of products and services. Ten years from now, some of the people in this room and some of the people that you know are going to be some of the big success stories of the decade, of the century, possibly of the millennium, which means that you should take yourselves a little bit more seriously. What if we had a conspiracy to get 100,000 poor black kids? I'll say poor blackness to make it sharp, but you know, poor disadvantage. Let's just keep it sharp. Poor black kids. It wouldn't be the right response to Trayvon. 100,000 Trayvons. Not that Trayvon was poor, but he wasn't rich. 100,000 of them. 25,000 on the west coast. 25,000 on the east coast. 25,000 in the heartland. 25,000 in the south. And what if we put them in big auditoriums? And what if you and me and Jay-Z walked out on stage and said, guess what? We're going to create a Silicon Valley that Dr. King would be proud of. We're going to turn you guys into the best coders in the world. And we're not going to be stopped. We know for sure the future we're building is going to require people who can design, who can code, who can think critically. And what we know about you, young, creative, disadvantaged kids, is that you're already creative. Check the box. You're already incredible communicators. Check the box. You're already connected and connectors, like nobody's business, over indexing on Twitter, over indexing on every social media platform. Check the box. You're creative. You're communicative. You're connected. You just can't code. And we can't leave your genius on the table anymore. We can't leave your genius on the table anymore. And so what we're going to do is turn you 100,000 kids into the best coders on earth and turn you loose on the world. Now, if you did that, you make a tremendous difference in the world, but it also would expand the part of all of our brains that actually believes these kids are worth something. See, that's the problem. We got to expand the part of our brain that's actively engaged in believing that these kids are worth something. And I'll tell you one way they're worth something. I'll take any one of these young leaders, any one of them that the folks on the front row here work with every day in Oakland. I see you, Pandora. I see you all here on the front row. I'll take any one of the young men and the young women you work with in the streets of Oakland and you work with in San Quentin. I'll take any one of them and put them in front of Congress and they will make more sense when it comes to peace and more sense when it comes to a livable future than anybody from this administration has made all week long. Thank you very much. Thank you, my brother. Appreciate it. They expect that, did you? No. Oh, I got to keep them together. Well done. Thank you. Oh, man. You got a scheme for the good economy. I got a scheme, man. That Dr. King would be proud of. Dr. King would be proud. Any idea how long it'll take? I don't think it'll take that long. I'm not joking. You guys think I'm joking. Just like when I was talking about the green job stuff and we got 90 billion dollars moved from the administration. They're 2.0. They're 3.1 million green jobs in America right now. You never hear about them. All you hear about is Cylindra. They're 3.1 million people got up this morning, went to work in green jobs. You can clap for that. 80,000 people got up this morning, went to work in the wind industry in America. 80,000. Is that a lot of people? Well, there's only 75,000 coal miners in America. 75,000 coal miners in America. 80,000 people got up this morning, went to work in the wind industry. There's almost 100,000 people working in the American solar industry. So when we were talking about green jobs, everybody said that didn't work out. It didn't work out the way we wanted to because Congress got in the way. But even in our failure, we still have created more jobs than anybody else and could still create a lot more. Here's what I'm saying to you now five years later. Congress can stop a clean energy bill. Congress can stop a cap and trade bill. Congress can stop smart climate policy. Congress can't stop you. See, Congress can't stop the kind of stuff you guys are talking about. So if we're going to hitch our star to a wagon, the economy, your building is coming anyway. And the question is, be mad at the Tea Party, we can be mad at Republicans or whatever. People always say, well, you know, the Republican Party has no agenda for black people then. I'm like, the Democrats don't either. Mm-hmm. We've gotten to a point, and I think we have to be honest about this deal. We can't talk to each other anymore. And if you come from another country, it's very obvious that we still haven't got this thing figured out. The science says we're this close. The brain science says we're this close. The hard work has been largely done, but we still have these, we still have segregation. So what I get joyful about, though, is that we can joke about it. We can talk about it. And also, as we showed with green jobs, we can do something about it. So my big hope, I'm not joking, my big hope is that we will, it's not going to take long within the next year or two, get really underway with regard to getting all the genius you guys have to kids that need it. And a lot of this stuff is going to disappear from view a lot faster. Yeah, right on. I feel like you've always said that each of us need to go back to our respective communities and bring our magic and inspire them in the ways that you're talking about. And I feel like these are ambassadors who are, for instance, connecting the economy with health and healthy communities, looking at our iconic relationships with big natural resources like the ocean and saying, how do we value that? And I feel like this piece you're talking about, which is bringing into speech ripeness from the unconscious into the waking consciousness, is actually, it's happening. And that's what the inspiration for this conference, I think, is about. So in a way, the same communication and human connection around the racial anxiety and fashioning new schemes that are born out of the dream are happening in all these aspects of the economy. So what you're talking about, I feel like people put racism and racial anxiety over here, but we see how to do it with electric cars. We see how to do it with solar. We see where we're going with wearable technology or with underground ROVs. But this thing sits over here. But what you're saying is it's another part of human behavior that absolutely can adapt and can be transformed. So I'm with you on that. I feel like the group is with you. I feel like I want to take some questions because we could have a conversation like we always do, but I'm really eager to hear what's going on in the audience. And we have people working in every aspect of the economy out here on the front lines, as well as in Silicon Valley, as well as from abroad. We have people here from every continent doing really work on the ground. So what I'd like to do is take questions. We're going to need to make this orderly and efficient, so we don't have time for statements or opinions. We have time for questions so we can hear Van share a little bit. And so I'm going to call on you and we'll bring a mic to you and then we'll see how it goes. Okay. This woman right here. Wait one second. Wait for it. And then we'll go right here on the aisle afterwards. Thank you, Bjorn. Hey, Van. Can you talk about this notion of having several billion poor people be on market? I'm sorry? There's this notion that's been going around that we're going to turn all the poor people around the globe into a market and do good and have a profit around that. Can you just? Yeah, I mean, I think people feel uneasy about it sometimes. Here's where I think we got a stretch, though. There's this whole bottom of the pyramid conversation and the people who are at the bottom billion could make somebody a lot of money if they weren't left out. And I think that can sometimes sit poorly in the mouth because of the way that it's said. And I think we have to work with each other to try to figure out how to say things better. But actually, there is something good in the idea, which is there sometimes is a view that the only people who matter are the middle classes in the western industrial countries, and that the only relationship that middle classes in the western industrial countries should have to poor people is just pity, just charity, or drop some bombs on them, right? But you can't do business with them. And so in that, I think there's something good that we can actually do business with each other. And that's, again, a part of expanding the part of the brain. You start dealing with somebody as a business partner. It's very hard to look at them as an itch. So I'm more for it than I'm not. The languaging sometimes sounds like, but the intention, I find encouraging. So if the solution to racial anxiety is really bringing the issue from our unconscious to our conscious, that seems like we need to start with kids. So how do we talk to our young children about race in a way that reduces racial anxiety and doesn't just draw lines in color? Yeah, you know, I don't know. And it's really hard. I have two kids, my wife's white, and I have two kids that are mixed race. And, you know, we talk about this stuff. But what we've found, which is interesting, is that some of our parents who, they're both the parents are white and the kids white, they don't talk to their kids about race at all. And they have a fear. And their fear is, well, if I talk about it, I'm actually hurting my kid. I'm actually maybe instilling something in them that wouldn't have been there otherwise. And so we're just not going to talk about it. And that, for me, I feel very uncomfortable with that. Because kids of color don't have that option, right? I mean, they have to talk about it. In fact, they wind up being very literate. And it also turns out that the white kids know something's going on. I mean, they're pretty clever. And they know something's going on. But nobody's talking about it. So then they have to try to make it up. And what they make up may be worse than what you would make up. And so I don't know how we do. This is terrible dilemma as a parent. But there is something to avoid in this. You know, James Baldwin, the great author, said something that I think is devastating, but liberating. He was talking about how good, most white people are not in the clan. They don't want to be in the clan. They're good folk. They want to be on the right side of everything, right? And yet we still have all these injustices. Like, how can you get your brain wrapped around this? And what he said is most white people, when it comes to race, are innocent. And their innocence constitutes their crime. Okay? I'm going to say it again. He says, when it comes to race, most white people are innocent. Oh my God. Is that happening? How could that be? Oh my. This is just terrible. I've never, is that really, right? Very innocent, right? And yet the innocence in some ways constitutes the crime because it's been 400 years. Okay? So it's actually, at this point, you have to push through that to actually deal with the reality, which every kid of color has, they don't get a chance to opt out of that class. That's a mandatory class for the kid of color. And so then I think what we come up against as parents is we just don't trust ourselves to be good at this. Nobody was good at explaining it to us. How are we supposed to explain to these kids? And this should be a shared dilemma among parents. How do we do this? We have this amazing generation of young people who are every color in the Skittles bag, you know? And if you're, I'll tell you what, and if you're in kindergarten, you already live in a majority-minority country, right? So all the kids are going to have to become literate in this. And here we are, these completely feeling like incompetent parents trying to do the translation. But we, I think, will be more skilled at doing the translation to our kids when we're more honest with each other. See, the thing is we have silence with each other that we then think it's good to pass on to the kids. But I think that's probably a better way. I don't have a great answer, but I do know that we don't want to raise amnesia. Amnesia is not a gift. Giving our children amnesia about their own country is not a gift. It's a curse. There's a reality to America that we're going to have to deal with. And the reality is that America has two things and not one. One is yucky and one is great. The yucky part is the founding reality. The founding reality is yucky. Stolen land, stolen labor, women can't vote. I mean you go through the founding reality and the founding reality is so yucky. And that's not just crazy radical Van Jones saying it. You know who said that? Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson. If you go to Washington DC, in other words, if you're self-hating, if you don't want to be happy at all, but if you go to Washington DC and you go to the Jefferson Memorial, what you see in marble and stone, in the Jefferson Memorial, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. I tremble for my country. He's a founder. When I reflect that God is just, he's looking at the enslavement and he's feeling the frustration. He's a slave owner himself and yet he still feels the frustration. We couldn't solve this. We couldn't get this cancer out. We had slavery before you had America. We had a chance. We couldn't get it out. And now I tremble for my country when I reflect that human beings in this country that we founded are still treated like chickens and cows and horses and property. I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. Founding reality, ugly. And if that's all America was, we should all move to Canada. I love it. But I'm not done. But she asked a deep question. Yes, she did. How do we deal with our children? Tell them the truth. Ugly, founding reality. But beautiful, founding dream. Same Jefferson. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all are created equal. Founding reality. Equal, unequal and ugly. Founding dream, beautiful and about equality. What is America? Who are your children if they're American? Americans, we are an imperfect rainbow people who in every generation tries to take one more step away from the ugly, founding reality, one step closer to the beauty of the founding dream. That's who we are. That's what we do. That's what makes us Americans, that we're willing to be on this journey. You put this many different kind of people together in human history. The past 50,000 years you get wars on top of wars. We have a democracy. We're trying to make work. But it's hard work. And if we give our kids amnesia about how hard it was and how ugly that founding reality was, we don't equip them with what they need to achieve the dream. That's all. Van, so good to have you here. And thank you so much for speaking out against the war. I think sometimes I feel like I'm divided into many pieces of identity when we come to such a wonderful gathering. But we're also not really acknowledging some of the biggest questions that are looming in our face. So thank you for raising that too for all of us. One question. Van, do you know Paul Pollock? And Paul, are you here? Are you still here? Can you state your question? What I'm wondering is if you haven't met Paul, he just celebrated his 80th birthday. But given that you are now going to be on crossfire, I think one of the biggest things that we're missing is how we get our stories told in a way that the bigger population can begin to grasp and begin to have a sense of not only what that big dream can be, but how you can turn that big dream into a massive scheme. And I would love to see how some of the minds here, not only from the U.S., the hearts and minds here in this audience from the U.S. and around the globe, could begin to connect through you on crossfire and to have someone like Paul begin to come on and begin to tell these stories of what could be possible. So I'd love to hear how you want to imagine how crossfire can possibly help to do this, to turn this into a massive scheme. Good. Well, first of all, I'd love to meet Paul. Second of all, crossfire is probably not the right vehicle for what you just said. I mean, just because it's more of like a fistfight, but I do think that we need to be smarter about media. I got a law school 20 years ago and my friend, New Gingrich, took over the Congress the next year, 94, and messed everything up. And we were complaining then that we didn't have a good message. And it's 20 years later. So I'm very interested in using media to get a better message out, but that particular show may not be the right form. The kids can tell the stories. I mean, you're talking about inspiring kids to realize their own agency. And I imagine when you do that, they start talking to each other. So we're on the right track here. Jesse. Oh, there's a mic back there. I apologize, Jesse. Can you wait one second? Jesse, wait one second. Thanks. So another tenet of Dr. King was the lead by example, every the change you wish to see in the world. And so my question for you is, with your own racial anxieties, what are some of the ways that you deal with it? Is it with conversations with other people? Is it self-reflection? What are some of the best ways that you've found so far to deal with it? You know, I think having a diverse set of friends helps. I think we sometimes talk more about diversity than we just go out and make some diverse friends. Like we have committees about diversity. I'm like, wow, like the person who went to get the coffee for the committee probably walked past. But anyway, at least one or two diverse people. So I think that's helpful. But you know, I was really lucky because when I came up, I was trained as an activist and a leftist. And we got a lot, we were basically, we had the opportunity to watch a lot of documentaries about all kind of communities. And I really think that's something everybody can do. Even if you don't know anybody. I was talking to a top environmental leader and I was pointing out some of the problems in the African-American community. And he just said he just didn't know anything about those issues that he was focused on the environment. This wasn't 30 years ago. This is like last week. And I just pointed out to him, I said, well, you know, the, the, the governing coalition in America, which, you know, lets you maybe pass an environmental legislation at some point, has African-Americans as a core part, you know, African-Americans vote 95% for Democrats. So if you want to be able to move that environmental agenda, Democrats are more friendly to it. There should be some mutuality here. African-American vote is going to make it possible for your green agenda to pass. Therefore, you might want to, and he had considered it in that way before that we actually already are working together. It's just one sided. We already are helping each other. It's just the help never comes back. The black vote is the most progressive vote in America. So all the progressive agenda relies on the black vote. And so, but having that conversation, I think, those kind of conversations, just very honestly, you know, we want to have this big governing rainbow coalition. Everybody needs to be respected and helped and we need to help each other. Solidarity, mutuality, not charity. I think those kinds of, if you have that in your heart, then I found I had to seek out information. I had to watch documentaries about Samoans. I had to watch documentaries about the Hmong people. I had to watch documentaries about, because why? I live in the Bay Area and we have every kind of human here. And so, I can't just walk around and say, well, I don't know anything about the Asian community here. I had to go and educate myself. And so, you know, I probably have a little bit less anxiety talking about this stuff because I just have bathed in it a little bit more. But I think you appreciate your question. It might be a segue into a question from the audience that I've got on a paraphrase, basically saying that there's a small number of social entrepreneurs who are black brown people of color. And this is a well-known fact. And the question turns on the fact that these folks have been recipients domestically and internationally of many of the enterprises of this community, yet they are funded at a representationally lower levels. And people have acknowledged this it says in the question in this community, but curious about your approach to reconciling that. And you spoke to the 100,000 as a dream and as a scheme. And this is a community asking to take the first steps, I think. Well, look, if people want to do something about it, come talk to me. I'm not joking around. I mean, I think we can do this. And I think we want everybody else to get out of their comfort zone, but we don't want to do it. That's a great thing about being a progressive. We want everybody else to progress but us. You crazy red state people, my God. You change your behavior. Awesome. But we don't do it. So I honestly feel like there's a group called Black Girls Code. Now, everybody loves Black Girls Code. They're budget, though. I hope I didn't offend anybody. Just starting. They're just starting. They're just getting started. But I just want to point out Black Girls Code dream is this big. The leader graduated from Vanderbilt. She's unbelievable. Her capacity is this big. The mission, the mandate is this big. But the budget is this little. So again, one reason why I know my scheme can work is because people are already working on it. It's not like I got it started. It's like there's lots of people already working on it. You guys have the thing in Oakland? What, what? She works at Hub Oakland. He had a whole bunch of entrepreneurs right here on the front row, right out of Oakland. That's why I keep looking at them. But I know she's having a hard time raising the money. So, and this happened to me. When I first came on the scene and I was working on the green job stuff, people, I would get big applause and little checks. Real big applause. But the only paper was the tissue they was wiping their face with. Not everybody. Got my friend, Ms. Hall here. We got people who were real with it, but Gita, and we got people who were real with it. But I'm just saying there was people who really believed that we could eat our own sound bites. Hello. Now you got the show. Jesse, you got a mic? Can you stand up please? First, this conversation feels so good. Thank you. I gotta work harder then. And it feels so good because we're talking about race and we're talking about politics. And I've been in this space working for SoCAP, working for Impact Hub, and I haven't heard the conversation at this scale for a while. And it's so concerning because the futurists, people like me, are afraid of the politics where if we want Washington to be over there, we want it to be back in time because it failed us. It didn't work for us. And we're trying to do something new, but politics are still part of what the conversation is about. So I think the question is how do we bring politics back into a place where we're really deeply fearful of those conversations? How do we bring a conversation about race back into a place where we really want it to be over? We want it to have happened. We want it to be away. And in particular, in the space where we're talking about code, where it's like we can engineer our way out of almost all these problems, but we have to politic our way out of problems about race. So how, you know, what's the way forward with that? I'd love to hear your thoughts. You know, I don't have a good answer. I just have, now I just have a prayer. I just have a prayer. I mean, I look at my friends, I feel like there's two conversations, me and my friends having conversation telepathically. And I know what's happening in Oakland. And I know the funerals. I know how hard you guys work. And I know there's people here that if we got together, we could fix it. And not because the people in Oakland don't have anything and need you, but because there's so much genius and wisdom and amazing people there. And we're just leaving genius on the table. That's the problem. That's the real crime. Before I went to, we're almost out of time. So let me say, before I went to the White House, I went to the White House on a Monday. It's the true story. I'm trying to tell you entrepreneur something. I went to the worker in the White House on a Monday. I had to report for duty that Monday. And anybody here ever working in the White House, any other political people? Right. Okay. So you know, you have to go through all that processing, all that type of stuff. They take all the stuff from you. They tell you, they spend seven hours explaining to you how you're going to go to prison if you don't do exactly what they say. Because there's a lot of laws that govern what you can do when you work in the White House. Before I went, Pandora and I went to San Quentin. Before I went to the White House, I spent a day at the jailhouse. I just wanted to be there. I just wanted to have a conversation with the brothers who were there. I wanted to remember why I was going. I wanted to remember who I was going for. But I'll admit, I went, there was a kind of a sense of no-bless-o-blease, you know, like, well, you know, let me go and kind of be grounded with these folks who were struggling and who were... And when I got there, as always happens, the brothers who were there who were willing to sit down and talk with me, the genius that the country needed at that time was in the jailhouse. They said, we're going through this economic collapse, young man. And they're talking about the need for an economic recovery. Nobody knows more about recovery than we do. We're the experts on what you really have to go through to go through recovery. We are the experts on that. And nobody's asked us anything. We know what happens when you make a mistake and you lose everything because you were arrogant, because you were cutting corners, because you were breaking rules Wall Street. And when you crash, what has to happen? The confession, the atonement, the making things right, the paying people back so that you actually recover. This is not going to be a recovery because the people who know about recovery were left out of the conversation. And everything they said proved to be exactly true. I want you to understand that the smartest people I met at San Quentin were no smarter or no less smart than the smartest people I met at the White House. I'm going to say that again. The smartest people I met at San Quentin were just as smart as the smartest people in the White House, but the wisest people that I met at San Quentin were much wiser than anybody in the White House. I'm saying there's a genius. See, when you go through something and you had this in your own life, when you go through something and you come out the other side, you're better, you're stronger, you're more resilient, you're more creative. Most of you here wouldn't be here if something bad hadn't happened first. Just for sure. Most of you had a breakdown, yeah, you had a breakdown right before your breakthrough. You have whole communities that have to manage breakdowns every day. There's genius there, there's resilience there, there's creativity there, not just markets, magic. And I know for sure for a fact that Socat has something going for it. There's something special and it gets more special every year. You can feel it humming before you get in the building. There's something special about this community and there's something special about this community and my prayer is not for me, you know what, because I got a show. I'm all right. For at least two weeks. Check your watch. Check your watch. Set to DVR and you come back next week and they got somebody else sitting there saying, well, he told us. Don't sublet. I got a show, so I'm all right. It's not for me and it's not for these kids. It's for you. It's for us. It's for our hearts to be bigger because you know how big our hearts feel when we still are playing little. We still sometimes still get a little bit of a reclimp. How good we are and how great our dreams are, whatever. You wait till we get these 100,000 kids and we're standing in that circle. You wait till you see their first apps. You wait till you see the problems they try to solve and you wait to see the solutions playing out and communities that everybody wrote off but me and you and them and these kids start to flourish a little bit and they had the woman. I know I'm over time. I'll keep talking. They had the woman. Where's my friend who was talking before me? What's his name? Where'd he go? Steve. Steve played the woman, the black woman who talked down the gunman. Where did she find that love? Where did she find that beauty? Where did she, the NRA says the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, Van Jones. Bring in the sister. Let's say thank you Van Jones. Thank you Van Jones. Human spirit.