 I want to start with a couple of stories to ease into things. We seem to be, as a species, hardwired for stories, hardwired for play. This story is from the book Art and Fear. And as the story goes, can I walk around and be there? Thanks. Topapa is built to rock. As the story goes, a college pottery class was meeting. The first day of meeting, and the professor walked into the room and said, hello, welcome, everyone. The way this class is going to work is on the last day of class, I'm going to give you a grade. Everyone on this side of the room, on the last day of class, will bring in as many pots as they've made during the year. And I'm going to bring in my bathroom scale, and I'm going to weigh those pots. And if you make 200 pounds of pots, you'll get an A. If you make 50 pounds, you'll get a C. But you, on the other side of the room, I'm going to judge you on one pot that you submit at the end of the year, the perfect pot. And that's all I need to see at the end of the year. Go do your work. And the amazing thing about the story was over the course of the year, really within the first few days, everyone in the class realized that by far the best work was happening not with the group assigned to quality, but from the group assigned to quantity. Because it seemed that while the group assigned to make one perfect pot was standing around contemplating perfection, the group assigned to quantity was just rolling up their sleeves and doing, learning by doing. The other story I want to ease into things with this is a study the Urban Institute did in the USA of culture in underprivileged communities in Oakland, California. So a team of researchers, I think this was in the 90s, a team of researchers descended upon Oakland, California as teams of researchers do, and they found people on the street and they asked them, where do you get your culture? And the people on the street said, we don't have that around here. And to the researchers credit, as the story was told to me, they went back to the office, back to Chicago, and they rethought the question. They came back three or four months later. And instead of asking where do you get your culture, they asked who are the creative people in your community? And when they asked the question that way, people lit up with knowledge of the local rapper, painter, artist, poet, dancer, musician. And the challenge here wasn't that there wasn't a cultural life in the community, it was that people weren't associating their creative emotional lives with the institutions that were built to serve them. And as a final thought, easing into things, I was privileged to be one of the jurors in the MacArthur Foundation's hundred and change competition, grant competition. The idea was, what if instead of giving out a lot of little grants, the MacArthur Foundation would hand one grant of $100 million to be paid over three years to a group of people who were trying to solve a big problem? Could we move the needle on a big problem with this amount of money? And it was a very humbling and inspiring experience to be a juror and to see these applications. But the profound feeling I had in looking at these grant applications was how small an amount of money $100 million was. One of the grants, as I recall, proposed to reform the child welfare system in the United States of America. That's a system that itself spends about $27 billion a year in the US. Over the three year course of this $100 million grant, that system will have spent almost $90 million. It couldn't possibly hope to make a dent on that size of a problem with a few million dollars a year, 30 million dollars a year. So there's something about scale. Another one of the grants was to eliminate cervical cancer, death from cervical cancer in Africa. But, which is a totally preventable disease, the diagnostic tools are low tech, the treatments are low tech. It just needs intervention. But $100 million was not enough to address the problem at a continental scale. So in thinking about that and thinking about that question, I let linger up on the screen for a moment. How do we get challenging, difficult work done in society? I come away with three observations to share with you. Cultural organizations, and I'm using secret finger quotes here, cultural organizations, need to seek new ways to share, leverage, scale their vitality and power. And I do think they have vitality and power, though sometimes I think that's an article of faith, if it's not applied. Much of that power will come from outside the institution. I helped develop the Smithsonian Institution's first web and new media strategy. And it was immediately apparent that all of the things that needed to happen in order for that strategy to succeed had to come from outside of the institution. They were beyond our direct control. The lives of individuals and the community are far more dynamic. I did as many adjectives here as you want. Dynamic, creative, amazing than we in institutions. Architects of the mechanisms of society and culture give them credit for. And I've been thinking about this a lot on this trip. We must cut the knot that ties us to institutional processes, to old assumptions about who we are, who we serve, and how that work gets done. I'm referring, of course, to the Gordian knot. Cut the knot. We must find ways to cut the knot. There's too much at stake. So that's kind of like heavy. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Have a good afternoon. So let's play. Do you do rock, paper, scissors here? I think you do. I think I've already played a couple of games here. So here's what we're going to do. Here's the drill. Everyone's, when I say so, everyone's going to stand up. Don't hate me for this. There's a reason for this. Everyone's going to. The director of Copenhagen Public Libraries, Copenhagen's wonderful public library system, said they can do events all day long now. They're great at getting people to come into events to face the stage. Now they're working on getting people to face each other. I thought that was beautiful. They get citizens to face each other. So you're going to face each other. Everyone's going to stand up. You're going to find a partner. You're going to do rock, paper, scissors. If you lose, sit down. If you win, find another partner. The tension. Who's still, you're still looking. You need a, who needs a, who's still the winner? One here, there's two couples going up there. We've four left. Here we go. Find a partner. Long distance. One here, one there. Here we go. Here we go. Behind you. Oh, bird just is looking for a, one over here by the camera. The hand is past it. It's getting so close. One in the way back. Back of the room. Oh, look at this. Epic. Throw down. Do, do, go. Oh, here we go. Extra scene in an action movie in this fact. Rock, paper, scissors, rock. Well played. Time to see a preview. Okay. Someone take down the limited green. Okay. What just happened? You have just taken part in an ancient ritual, it seems. I say it with a smile on my face, but this is serious business. This is an Edo era game. Apparently the game was called like Huntsman, Fox and Herdsman or something. It's the exact same thing. You can find a ton of this online. You can also play rock, paper, scissors in Fortnite. Battle Royale. These are two sort of bad asses who meet in someone's backyard and they're just armed to the teeth and they drop their weapons. And there's video. There are whole channels of people doing this. They drop their weapons and they do a face off. The guy in the bunny suit wins, I think. You can of course do it in Minecraft. I forget how many thousands have used this particular tournament had live tournaments. There's also in, it's called Jackpot and Poi, a game show in the Philippines built around rock, paper, scissors with all of the pumping up and milking of drama that you would expect in something like this. Yeah, this is a video with Jimmy Kimmel. And oh gosh, what is her name? I don't have my glasses on right now. What is it? Sophia. Sophia is sort of a dressed up AI, supposedly. It's a computer that can have algorithmic thought. And he converses with Sophia. They meet and he's Jimmy Kimmel. And then they play, which is interesting. You know, that would be the thing you would think or your producer on the Jimmy Kimmel show would think to do. You'd play. You'd play with the AI. And you can see maybe a little bit how deeply unsettled Jimmy Kimmel is. He's really, truly, Jimmy Fallon, thank you, sorry. This is a crowdsourced presentation. He's really deeply unsettled by this freaked out, on the verge of being freaked out, by playing with another kind of intelligence. And this is just a thinly-guised version of this. Sophia, all day long, robot saying, I got you, all day long. Yeah. So what's going on here? So in the time that you as a homo sapien sapien think of the thought and put your body in motion and your senses confirm back to you through your kind of chemically based sensory system that you've done the thing. High-speed cameras trained on your hand a long ago figured out what you've done, told the high-speed robot fingers to cast the winning vote and gone off for a coffee break. And that system just keeps getting faster and faster and faster. It happens truly. The whole cycle happens in milliseconds while it takes you, the organic life form that you are, a grueling 100 or 200 milliseconds to just consider the whole thing. And I bring this up for fun, but also to make a few points about the future and play. We're hardwired for play. And a lot of research says that when you're trying to solve a difficult problem, groups that play first, groups that do improv theater first, that do participatory theater that, as we say, lean forward with each other, that face each other, even surgical groups, surgical teams, when all they do is face each other and introduce themselves to each other, look at each other's faces. Those groups far outperform in creative, cognitive tasks, problem solving, innovation, so-called groups that don't do that. It's this play thing, this warm up that we just did, is very deeply rooted in us and is a very intrinsic part of civic activation. But it's a tool we don't take advantage of very often. I've kind of, in figuring out you and live, and that's an ongoing process, I assure you, I've kind of become a student of this body language of participation. What does it look like in a room or in society when people are working together? Working together in special ways, in powerful ways. And we know, it wouldn't be surprising to any of you if I asserted, you can design, in the grandest sense of the word, you can design things to be conducive to that kind of body language. I read recently that people who go to a farmer's market, a kind of civic infrastructure, have 10 times more human interactions when they shop than if they go to the supermarket. It's a very basic kind of play, very basic kind of activation. I just like this picture. And we as a species, I'm not breaking any news here, we are, we have some challenges at our plate right now. This is a visual representation, the graphics for the United Nations sustainable development goals. Adopted by a consensus of the UN's member states, 17 global goals, 160 something tangible objectives that we ought to achieve together by 2030. When I show this a lot of times, people who aren't familiar with it, it sort of makes you laugh. That's not a bad thing, it's your brain coming alive, connecting different parts of your systems of thinking. And I want to ask you, now that you're warmed up, take a little bit of a risk here, now that you're warmed up, your heart's beating, you've faced each other, you've heard a little bit of my voice. I'm gonna set a timer for a minute. And I want you to think about these goals, not as a scholar, not as an analyst, not as a museum professional. Don't try and zoom out and deconstruct them intellectually. But I want you to look at these and think about your neighbors, think about your family, think about life experiences. And I want you just to sit and think for a moment about one of these goals, not that it's the best one, but one that means something to you personally, not the best one, but one that you could tell a story about as a human being. And I'm just gonna step back and look at my watch for really literally 60 seconds and just indulge me for a moment. And I'll come back to that at the end. So put that thought in a little treasure palace in your mind, maybe not in working memory for the next 30 minutes or so, but somewhere close to it. We'll come back to that. And this is an exercise I've done and had the privilege of doing in interesting places, not all over the world, but in some interesting places in the world. This is a workshop we did at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. We've been in Addis Ababa, rural Denmark, UN headquarters, pretty much everywhere I go. I try and play this game at some length to try and get, understand how people relate to each other on a personal level to these goals. So UN Live, the Museum for the United Nations, UN Live, with that as a backdrop. We have a mission to connect people everywhere to the work and values of the United Nations. And this is very carefully written. To start with a verb, what are we about connecting? To connect. Who? People. What kind of people? People everywhere. It's the first project I've ever imagined where if you take the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at face value, everyone on Earth is entitled to be a part of this, to contribute to it. Read, write. It's a digital conference, right? Remember, read, write? Read, write. To contribute, to be a part, to access cultural and scientific knowledge. So it was very important to me that we start with a verb, connect. People, connect to people. To what? And work and values of the UN. Not the UN itself. We're an independent NGO, a startup NGO close to, but by design not part of the United Nations. We have an agreement with the secretariat of the UN, with the secretary, but general first granted by Ban Ki-moon on UN Day in 2016. That gives us permission to use the UN's name and brand in association with this mission. And that agreement, that arrangement for a small NGO is almost unique in UN's history. So big comma at the end of this sentence though. You might recognize this first part as kind of a museum mission. It's a raising awareness connection. It's all very nice. But we really felt there needed to be something more. Really something more. To force us into a more impactful civic space. So there's a comma and an and. And this is where it gets interesting. Catalyze global effort towards accomplishing its goals. So this isn't about the UN as an institution. It's about the work and values, which are or should be our collective work and values. And it's about accomplishing goals. Catalyze global effort. Having a mission like this in front of you as you're figuring out strategy, as you're casting, as you're figuring out digital is incredibly bracing and clarifying. Global means global. Goals mean goals. Effort means effort. And it's quite intentionally done. Quite intentionally done. And we also have found ourselves saying recently, but our dream is to dramatically increase the number of people in the world who directly participate in solving global challenges. Directly. With their hands. After they've played rock, paper, scissors. But this now it starts to feel a little like a traditional PowerPoint presentation. But how can a museum, a mere humble museum, get millions or really frankly billions of people working together on global goals? We call ourselves a museum on three platforms. And depending on how young at heart or old at heart you are and where you work, this may seem completely obvious or like the most incredible magic trick you could ever want to have. Three platforms. A physical museum, public house, civic classroom and headquarters. First in Copenhagen, Denmark. Cause that's where we're founded. But that's just a template of a building that we'll use to help grow a UN live institution anywhere it wants to be. Physical building, network of partner institutions and public spaces around the world. And in a hundred years as we look back, I think it's that network. If we succeed, it's that network that will be the thing that does it. Everything else will have been a pretext to forming and activating that network. And then finally of course, duh, a digital presence. Weaving it all together, of course. Why would you not? And it seems that very few institutions, certainly the ones I've worked at, have a very hard time thinking these three things at once. Theory of Mind says you can only keep three or four concepts in working memory at any given time. And it takes a lot of practice to consider these as one thing. But I think this is a key to our value proposition, what we propose to do in the world. And I'm just showing a few slides, renderings from a few years ago to set the stage as it were for what a building, a physical building might be like. I think UN Live has the soul of a great city's great public library. I think that's the kind of institution we're hoping to build, the kind of physical place. Thinking through this work, how do you deploy? What do you begin to do? How do you talk to people? What are your values? These things have a lot of meaning when you're starting something from scratch because you could do almost anything. It's a different kind of conversation when you're working with an existing concern, sort of steering the ship one or two degrees to port or starboard, we're starting from scratch. We've come to believe a few things. It sounds like an obvious one, but this is about people, human beings, not policy so much. We talk about bringing the ideals, the difficult ideas of the sustainable development goals, climate change, poverty, down to eye level with so-called normal people who we know aren't normal at all. Bring it down to eye level, humanize these goals, humanize the conversation. And part of that exercise I had you do with thinking about a story you had about the sustainable development goals is about bringing them down into the grammar of your daily life. We think as a museum, as a cultural institution, we have access to a very broad set of tools with which to do this. And a note on eye level, on the scale of this, I'm beginning to think there's no such thing as global. We're after global change, but it's hard to touch global. It's hard to think about global. I remember this magazine cartoon I saw when I was a little kid, the best pizza on the block. Isn't, so the store on the far left, best pizza pies in the city, there's one person walking in, best pizza pies in the country, couple of people in a dog. Best pizza pies in the world, almost no one's going in. Best pizza pies on the block has the line out the door. And I think that's really an apt metaphor for what we're doing. It's all personal. It's all local, and a lot of research backs this up. People don't begin to think about climate change till they've seen it in their garden, okay? So this being about people is being where they live using the language that they use. And as we've surveyed the landscape of institutions and efforts that have tried to get people involved in solving big problems, we see a big cluster of activity, if I may, in the top left of this graph, where the architects of engagement, museum curators, educators, decide how recipients of engagement should act, and they build a fairly traditional marketing ladder to get people along this path. And that works somewhat. It scales. You can have KPIs. But we've also noticed that between there and where people lead their daily lives, there's this enormous void, vacuum of deep space. Very few institutions are trying to act at global scale in people's communities. And we think that's key to our success, or at least that's a place we can add value. Head, heart, and hands. When looking at the ways that institutions catalyze engagement with these big ideas, we found three things really. You'll be familiar with one is a faith that if people have an emotional reaction to emotional encounter with a difficult idea, they'll be more likely to take action. And this is a wonderful, one of our co-founders is the Danish Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson. In the Paris Climate Summit, he brought icebergs from the Arctic and parked them on the streets of Paris so that people could feel, could sense what a melting glacier was like. And the optics of this are incredible. But when you look for evidence that once people have felt this feeling that they then act, they then change, there isn't a lot. Similarly, there's a lot of faith in our industry and the information deficit model of knowledge, of action, change. That if people know something, they know an idea, they will take action and be better people. They will change the way that they act in the world. There also aren't a lot of stories about times that's really happened in our industry. And you can ask curators, ask a designer, tell me a story about a person who has left your exhibition and changed. Those stories, they're not a lot of them. And actually social science tells us that the opposite can be true. The more people know about an idea, if it contrasts with their own worldview, the less likely they are to take action. Also, somehow the more people know, I think neurologically they feel they've already taken action. American middle class consumers know more about the science of climate change than almost any cohort in the world. They're not particularly politically or socially active on the issue. So there's something missing in this equation that we've built our institutions of emotion and knowledge on. In parallel with this, who can't notice the, we've noticed the maker movement. We've noticed hand knowledge. The habit of doing can be a skill set in and of itself, not connected with knowing things or feeling things. It's a skill, know how we talk a lot about on the team. So we've chosen to compose our programs, compose our concept of the institution, our model of change, based on designing for head, hands, and heart together, intellect, action, and emotion as one connected system. It's notable, maybe useful at this point. We went through the typical thing you do when you wrestle with who's your demographic, who you for. It's kind of an easy question to push on a design team, who you for. And we really struggled with this. I really didn't want to come out and say we're for teenagers. We're for teenagers who read this magazine or who live in this place. I felt that was very limiting. It was limiting our thinking. It was limiting our ability to lean in to tackling this big problem. How do you dramatically increase the number of people in the world who do this work? Until someone close to our project came up with this idea, not of a demographic, but of a psychographic, it was liberating for us. We are open to people who see themselves in a greater perspective. We're open to people who recognize their own ability to change the world. This has been a game changer for us. A game changer in helping us consider the ways that we can interact with people. As is this gem from Ethan Zuckerman at MIT. This is an engagement, a matrix about people doing civic engagement. Up and down is thick engagement and thick engage. A thin and thick. Thin is stuff that's easy, light. Thick is hard, deep, often interpersonal. Symbolic outcomes to impactful outcomes. Top left corner is the slactivism, pardon me, the slactivism quadrant. Stuff that's easy to do, thumbs-up-ing, retweet if you agree that youth are important. It's not bad. It scales phenomenally, but it's not actually directly impactful. I don't want to diminish or dismiss this kind of engagement, but it's not by itself going to get the job done. Next to that is voting. Voting is designed by designers to be thin theoretically, to be easy for people to do, but it can be tremendously impactful. Why? An insight here is because it has infrastructure, has support, has armies, laws, courts, education. That's a clue. Bottom left, symbolic but thick, the Occupy movement. These people lived, breathed, ate together for years. They knew each other really well, but it didn't have a specific policy goal. It wasn't about pulling a particular lever in society. Symbolic activity. Next to that, as Ethan Zuckerman says, is when Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the United States, the first and most effective boots on the ground relief agency wasn't the Red Cross, it wasn't the National Guard, it was the Occupy Wall Street movement. They knew each other's cell phone numbers, they were used to working together, they practiced being together, and when the hurricane hit, they were the ones organizing carpools to take diabetics, to dialysis, to take women to the hospital to give birth to children. I just learned in researching this talk that they were trying to find out a way, so they're not an NGO, it's just people, they're trying to find a way to get material aid to their community. What they wound up doing was setting up a wedding registry on Amazon.com and filled with diapers and gauze bandages and water and electrolytes and baby blankets and things like that. They raised about $700 or $800,000 in a week to give directly to people in the community from that. Very resourceful. I think UN Live, this architecture that we're talking about, head, hands, heart, thin, thick, is about providing an infrastructure that moves people towards impactful. Moves people towards impactful kinds of engagement and activities. Now I'm gonna skip over this. This is a great story, but you'll get it later maybe. So how do you begin doing this? We're not going to wait, we have significant political and financial support to build this first template of a museum in Copenhagen, Denmark and eventually in other cities in the world. But you don't wait, right? That would be stupid and irresponsible. Like you don't start in 2023, the global goals are due in 2030. Last time I checked CO2 in the atmosphere was not going down. There's a lot of work to do. So what do you do to get started now? We think we need to do three things. Bottom-up storytelling at global scale. Deep, thick engagement where people live and a pretext for playful learning, playful engagement. What that looks like in practice, starting in 2019, is three things, three related things. First is a global competition to cast video bloggers, hosts for a new video channel, working title of change makers. So we think that the story of the future, the story of how people are pragmatically solving problems together happens in neighborhoods around the world. And we have a great faith that that work is happening, that those storytellers are there, but they can't find each other. We can't find them. But through a competition, we hope to draw them out onto a well-lit stage so that they can begin doing their thing. And I think it's significant that our first act as an institution won't be to hoist up our own flag, launch our own traveling exhibit, but to look outward to the world for the evidence of thought and creativity and verve and know-how that we're going to need to begin cracking some of these big challenges. We'll start the activation by asking some of our friends who are already well-known vloggers to ask their followers to come along. I've noticed that almost all of the interesting social good projects I've found in the last 15 or 20 years, 15 years, 10 years, that have reached a significant scale have done two things. They've been online video in a playful way and they've also borrowed an audience. Wikipedia borrowed the audience of slash dot, Hank and John Green at the Vlog Brothers borrowed the audience of the Harry Potter Alliance. There's not enough time or hubris in the world for UN Live to build its own audience like a precious thing from scratch. We need to go out there and find the audience that's already there doing this work. So it starts to get very, very interesting when you get, start combining this distant high-scale online video thing with local training, local meetings, local celebration which leads us to festivals. So online video, high-scale, low-touch, all over the world. We know we need to be in people's local communities. We need to be with them as a member and a servant of their communities. So we'll do festivals. Almost everywhere we've been in the world there's already someone doing a festival by that or some other name related to social change, related to social good. We'll come along for the ride at first but ultimately we think we can convene four festivals a year for the next three years at a city scale in the service of local partners. I'm very inspired by the work that Southbank Center does in London. Women of the World Festival is their signature festival program. It starts, you can see the body language here. These people are not passive observers here. They're there, they're invested, they're focused. The programs often start with a family activity in the morning, something you can bring a kid to, all free. In the middle of the day it becomes workshops, training, meetups. In the evening it becomes ticketed events, often ending Saturday night with a marquee presentation. Of course all of this is content in and of itself. It's also research. How do people in a community think about? What's their story about the global goals? It works very well with the YouTube channel as well where we share the body language of participation in UNLive, share it with the next city down the line. Trade school, there are great examples everywhere of this happening in the wild. Good stuff. The last piece of this equation of how you begin to activate a global museum for the global goals is a game, it's play. And I had this thought taking the plane into Copenhagen from my home in Washington this winter, I thought about Pippi Longstocking who's a wonderful children's character, Astrid Lindgren character, beloved in Scandinavia and around the world. That's Pippi riding a horse. I think they're playing Don't Touch the Floor. Do you play that in New Zealand? It occurred to me that all the great children's literature that I know about in the world happens when the parents are out of the room. You know, mom and dad are gone. Even in the Harry Potter stories, there are grown-ups around but they're awful people, they're terrible role models. The kids have to figure it out on their own. And this is, of course, a poignant metaphor for where we are as a species now. Ultimately, there's no other mom and dad who's gonna show up and help us figure out how to crack ending poverty, saving the oceans. It's just us. It's just us, it's just us, Andy. We made that point a few years ago. There's nobody else in the room but us. And ironically, when the UN shows up in a room, it's like the ultimate parent. It's an authority figure. And it should be. And the ideas that the UN stands for, the work and values, are kind of epic. Not something we're used to dealing with on our own independently. So, like, you can almost see it when the UN walks into the room. People shut down, body language, they turn into themselves, they lean back in their chairs. That's exactly the opposite of what we want to happen. Interestingly, the same thing happens when I mention the word museum. People just, they die a little bit inside. I'm not kidding either. You know I'm right. Actually, that's a good moment to tell this story about the kids. I did a workshop in rural Denmark using Legos to help them, to get them to design the museum for me. So, these were awesome kids. I blurred out their faces a little bit, which may look a little funny that way. So, it's one group of 10 to 12-year-olds, one group of 12 to 14-year-olds. And I said, build a model of a great day you had with your family. Right on. And that sound of Lego bricks going, it's like a melody and they just eased into it. And five minutes later, they all had their models and they all tell a story about their models. Here's where we went to the beach and here's the place where we got ice cream. There's a lot of ice cream in these stories, which is a clue. A lot of play, a lot of pleasure. And then, fine. They get to know each other, they play, they face each other. Next question. This place you went is now magically, it's a place that helps make the world better. I didn't want to frame it more specifically than that. I wanted to see what they came up with. What kind of institution a 12-year-old would invent from scratch to save the world? It's like, oh, okay, that's righteous. Then start building, they go and talk. And I just remember things like time machines and just general sense of play, participation, but still a lot of physical activity. Last question was this place, it's now 2025. This place is the museum for the United Nations and you could just see them all die a little bit. Not a lot, but particularly the museum word. Like, oh, okay, crap. Like the trap is sprung, I knew this was gonna be about somebody else's thing. And so it exists in Copenhagen, you work there. Your family's coming to see you for the first time. Build the tour that you'll take them on. Like, oh, okay, yeah. And they were amazing tours, again, with time travel and ray guns and ways to test different futures and donuts and play, but it bothered me, that death, that darkness, the cloud that came over them when I said museum or UN. So I ran it another couple of ways. I just said it's a place. I tried not to use the word museum, not to use the word library, not use. And they were baffled. They were just completely at a loss. You could see the hopelessness and give us something. I made them go through it and it was just, it was bad, like bad. And we talked about it afterwards. And I asked them what they thought about museums and they all literally said, they just, no, no. I asked them about libraries and they literally went, shh, they all went like this, a bunch of little sassy Danish school kids, shh. But then I asked them, tell me about places that you go, that you love. Tell me about, tell me your story. Tell me, you know, tell me your awesome stuff. And they all went, oh, there's this place downtown, we all go after school. We, yeah, what do you do there? Well, we do homework, we listen to music, we hang out with each other. What's it called? They had no idea what it was called. They go there every day after school. The teacher told me afterward, it's their public library. They, it didn't matter to them at all that it was a library or a museum or an institution. They had the same reaction to a beloved children's museum in the suburbs called the Experimentarium. People love the places they love because of the experiences they have there. Doesn't matter really what they're called, but some framing is necessary. Some framing is necessary. That scaffolding of the word museum is highly contested. Library two, I suppose, though less so, but necessary. But we quickly move past that and the relationship with the public is built on the experiences that they really have there, how it helps make them great. That was a huge breakthrough. So on to the game. The idea for the game is you are science fiction, you start getting text messages from this cool kid named Sanna. She has very unusual musical tastes, unusual friends. She seems unusually curious about us. It turns out she's from the far distant future. She can see us. And I bet you didn't know that the only way you can communicate with Earth from the future is by SMS, which conveniently for us is the most, the ubiquitous communication and play platform in the world. And as we get to know her and as she asks us questions about ourselves, she tells us there are 12 other Earths that she can see in parallel with ours. And she has cool friends there, but each one of these Earths seems to have a problem. Like on one Earth, they're running out of drinkable water. And as the cool kids we meet there with their outrageous music and style begin to ask us questions about where we get our water from. They begin to connect us with each other. The kids in your classroom and the suburbs of Wellington meet the kids in the classroom in Rio de Janeiro, put the clues together. As we solve her problem, their problem on that planet, we realize that whole, in the reveal that whole scenario was written by people in Cape Town, South Africa, which ran out of water. It's a way of telling a story about the future that we can solve, that we can approach our research, our research. The research we've found says that a lot of people won't take action on something like climate change because they feel you need to be an expert. You need to be special. The cool thing about scenarios like this, about rock, paper, scissors, about a personal story, is that everyone's, it's leveling. Everyone's an expert. Every 10-year-old kid on Minecraft knows as much about Earth 7 as every Nobel scientist on Earth. And this is a straight play if you've been in the sector for long, if you've been in digital for long. It's a straight play to the long tail. It's a straight play to cognitive surplus. There's just an awful lot of know-how out there in the world that hasn't been brought to bear on difficult challenges. And everywhere we've been so far, we've heard a great willingness to be a part of something bigger, but there's been a lack of a convener. We think we can help you, that convener. Just good examples of play. Play at city scale. Good kinds of play. So Model UN is a kind of play. Though we often think our role is not in the Model UN conference room. It's not in the museum. It's not in the classroom. It's in the liminal spaces, the hallways just outside. I think as a newcomer, as a scrappy newcomer, that's where there's a bit of, Harry Houdini said, there's always a little slack somewhere. That's where I think there's a little slack, a little space to operate. Pictures are great. So, wrapping up. The UN League of Nations was founded in 1945 to prevent World War III. 51 nations signed the original treaty, 51 nations, and Earth had only two billion people on it. Now, yeah, this is state-of-the-art IT. Back then, members took to the first meeting in San Francisco, people took steamships to attend the first meeting of the UN. This is the UN today, 192 member states represent Earth's seven billion people. And the UN's portfolio, while it was at first G to G, government to government preventing World War III, it now includes peacekeeping, economic and social development, the environment, human rights, humanitarian work. There's a lot of work to get done. It's a G to G institution, a government to government institution in a peer-to-peer world in a lot of ways. And when I think about cutting the knot, cutting the knot between working in my department, working in my institution, working within the highway safety cones that have been set up for me by others, often from another world. Go up, go over to solve a problem. I don't think there's time. And everywhere we've been, we've seen a willingness, a hunger, a desire by people in neighborhoods and communities to go straight over to the target. So a lot of what I'm proposing to you today is asking you to lift your sights. There's a purpose to all of this and an urgency. And I want you to join us. I wanna join you. I think you have something very special here, very special in New Zealand. And I wanna be a part of it and I want you to be a part of how we figure this out. And on that teary note, I'm gonna step away from the microphone and thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Despite losing in my first round to Burgist, I think that was the least awkward crowd interaction I've ever had. Thank you for the play. Thank you for the silence. Thank you for allowing us to think big, but still have moments of beautiful clarity to take away. I especially liked your line, bringing them down into the grammar of your daily life. It was a nice reminder to think of the South that exists outside the institution and to remember to bring that in with me when I come in every day. We have time for some questions and I'm sure there'll be a few before we break away for morning tea. I know, I have a question. Our volunteers will have, oh, oh, there's a few. Okay. There's a couple of hands down here. There's the microphone coming. Oh, this is the best. I know. Good morning, guys. Where were we going with these 17 things on the slide? Say that again. Where were we going with these 17 things you gave us on the slide? Yeah, I left you hanging there a little bit. Do me this. If you can find in a break a scrap of paper, write me a little note. Tell me the story. Send me a text message. I think what I was trying to do there really was just, I'm always telling others to take risks. So I decided to take my own medicine. And I think I wanted you to have that challenge, that mental challenge, of stepping away from the analytical deconstruction of a set of goals into thinking about your own lived experience. It's a kind of cutting of a knot. I didn't give you dramatic narrative closure to that. But I think it's an important thing to do. I found it to be a very important and clarifying way of talking, meeting with people at eye level. So that's why I had you do that. And also a little bit of a, I was curious. One thing I've learned often, almost always, the thing I think I'm working on, the thing we think we're working on is never the thing we're actually working on. Everything's sort of pretext. I met with a bunch of educators in the States, frontline tech education specialists. And they spent a whole weekend conference talking about how to teach their teachers Microsoft Word. That's not the actual thing. That's the prerequisite to the thing they ought to be working on. If you think about this pattern, and I've realized that a lot of these interactions, rock, paper, scissors, that moment is often just a prerequisite to getting in a certain mental state that's conducive to thinking about this other stuff. So I guess I wanted to play around with that some. I think, actually, this is a ninja trick. I'd like to ask you to tell you to play when you're in a meeting. I've been in some gut-wrenching meetings with museum staff who, we want to change the future, but jeez, Stan, one desk over, he just wants me to fill out this form. And like, no, there isn't time for that. The thing we should be working on is the next piece. So I'll just preamble now. We'll leave it at that. I think there was another question down there. Oh, there's one here. Oh, there's another one. Hello. Hey, as a Wikipedia, I need no convincing of the power of grassroots citizen involvement, and I totally buy your examples of the power of that. I am concerned that it helps abdicate responsibility from the bodies and organizations that are technically in charge to take the Harkin-Sandy example. The Occupy people did fantastic work and helped FEMA not do that work. I'm a little concerned that the UN, or organization branded with the UN, is kind of sidestepping the institutions and just focusing on encouraging people to do more kind of instead of the institutions. Are you going to channel some of that energy to reforming the institutions? Yeah, that's such an interesting question and something we think a lot about in the architecture of this. A couple of thoughts. And I don't work for the UN and I don't know anywhere near enough about it to be a spokesperson for it or a critic of it really in many ways. But I don't think, I think it's an open secret, I say in my TED talk, that it's not perfect. The, there's a move, the Buckminster Fuller change model. Roughly put, some systems are so broken you have no choice but to build a new system on the side and move people over when it starts working. Also Gaul's law from physics. All successful complex systems evolved from successful simple systems and no unsuccessful complex system can ever become a successful complex system. You have to begin from scratch. So among people who are observers of how big institutions, cautious, open public institutions work, there's an acknowledgement that those institutions are stuck and everybody's looking for a ninja move. Everyone's looking to cut the knot somehow, to be peer to peer in a gov to gov world. And I don't think anyone's cracked the code yet. But Michael Moeller, one of the UN undersecretaries says, for example, says on a video on our website, the way we govern the world is broken, which I think is an incredibly bracing thing for an UN undersecretary to say. We need UN live, no pressure, because we need to give everyone at the world a seat at the table where decisions are being made. So there's a belief that this is a hack in the best sense. And a lot of the architectures we're proposing, those liminal spaces are hacks on existing kinds of institutions. We're asking Topopa to come out out into a shared space a little bit and do some things that it might not normally do. We're asking schools to do the same things, partners to do the same things. And I think, I don't think that it's necessarily allowing institutions with power and big levers to abdicate from people who have been to Davos and who are working with the big levers, but what we've heard from them is that they're really, really working hard. If they can see evidence of the bottom up, they can see the map of thousands of local institutions pulling in the same direction. If they can see evidence, the body language of that, it's going to be the most powerful motivator and accelerant to that change work that you could design. And we as a museum, we can't add anything to the way Davos works or the inside workings of the UN, but we can do something very strong next to it. And I think in a system, there's two, wrap that up into two expressions that come to mind. One is if you want to know how something works, study it while it's breaking. Like welcome to the Northern Hemisphere, right? We've learned a lot. And I think this actually, I feel like this is a really important idea. In stable times, these institutions work, they hand off to each other. So journalism does its thing. It finds wrongdoing or meaning. When it finds wrongdoing, it exposes it and it makes a handoff to elected government. And elected representatives are supposed to take that. Thank you very much. And they're supposed to act morally. Like those handoffs in a time of dramatic change are not happening right. And I think it's causing everyone who has control over a domain of thought, of resources in society to take a bigger risk than they would ordinarily take. To risk more, to stick their neck out farther. I think of libraries in particular that are built on this knowledge of garnering civic trust by being cautious and neutral. I use the neutral word. That's a whole land to mine now. But I think everyone, Wikipedia, the local scouting organization, to Papa, everyone's gonna need to work outside their comfort zone a little bit because the handoffs just aren't working. And they kind of have to. So that's a, thanks for asking that question. Those are my thoughts. Yeah. Everything off right now, but we need to get to morning tea so we can be back for the five for 15, which will be in here at 11. Micah will be around so you can talk to him at all of the break sessions. Please join me in thanking him again for his. Thank you.