 First of all, I just want to take a moment to thank our hosts and curators. Part of what I'm going to talk about today is a little bit of history. And so I think that often the roots of ideas and the seeds of ideas come from unexpected places, and I'd like to express the first word of deep gratitude to Denise for cooking two amazing humans that have catalyzed this amazing gathering. So if our roads lead back to Denise, and for that I'd like to also thank Matthew and Brian, Rebecca, the entire group of you who have curated this really powerful gathering of people. It is truly diverse, and it's diverse because it's diverse in terms of opinions. It's diverse in terms of professional backgrounds. I think there are a lot of meshing cultures here and compliments to the chefs who were bold enough to bring these ideas and people together. And thanks also yesterday for the really powerful theme of open hearts and open minds and repeating that refrain. And I think a lot of people heard it and felt it, which is really good. I was talking to someone yesterday who was talking about how even working in a space such as a geodyssec dome changes the energy around which these kinds of gatherings take place. It's much more reflective and there's a lot more energy that's catalyzed. So what I'd like to offer in my 17 minutes and 55 seconds is a challenge that we all work together toward creating a new story around digital media. It was really interesting hearing the backgrounds and I'm really looking forward to hearing the talks of the people who are going to be coming throughout the day who are doing innovation through digital media. In as much as we were talking yesterday about going through a period of revolution in agriculture technology, we're also in the middle of another revolution in digital media. And I'll tell you a little bit about the history of why I think we're at the peak point of that moment of transformation and why it's an opportunity. But first I'll tell you a little bit about my history. And so I'm trained as an anthropologist and so the filter through which I come to and engage moments is through cultural sensitivity, taking a culture on its own terms. I was raised by a husband and wife team of chimpanzee sign language researchers. They raised a family of five chimpanzees as though they were deaf human children. And this is very relevant to cultural communication. In fact, I say my parents are into inter-species communication and I'm into inter-cultural, intra-species communication. But one of the reasons that they chose sign language is because they needed to take this species on its own terms. First, the arrogance of humanity is often that we think we can dictate the terms of the culture and listening to the story about yesterday that we heard about the early agricultural, how the Brits were coming to New Zealand and they viewed the forest as a threat and so they cut it all down. Instead, so much of the refrain we've been talking about is, how do we take nature on its own terms? Well I think we also need to make sure that we take human cultures on its own terms and other species cultures. So, a brief snapshot on chimpanzee inter-species communication. The earliest research was done in the 1950s. There was a family that raised a chimpanzee named Vicki and this was when, through the arrogance of humanity, we thought, well, clearly chimpanzees have a capacity for speech. Let's just teach them how to talk like humans. Well, chimpanzees don't have the capacity for voluntary vocalizations and it's entirely limbically driven. So, for instance, if I dropped a glass on my foot right now, I wouldn't look down at my foot and say, oh, that hurts. I'd say, ow, that's the limbic. So, if you're in the wild, it's highly adaptive for chimps. Chimps have a food bark. When one chimp is on the other side of the jungle and they hear the, oh, oh, oh, oh, everyone else hears it and they come gathered to food. That's highly adaptive for that kind of survival. But humans, having a frontal lobe and having developed the capacity for vocal speech, we have other adaptive traits. So, in our arrogance, we tried to teach Vicki vocal English. She was capable of four words with a very thick chimp accent, which were mama, papa, cup, and up. And if you can imagine, if you don't have control, voluntary control of your larynx, what that might sound like, it was... So, what I learned from... So, my parents ended up raising chimps. The other notion that they learned was that humans, or at least active information-seeking organisms, the reason that we all learned the languages that we spoke is because we were born into this family of these people and we wanted to be able to communicate with them. And we had these big, wide, cute faces and they wanted to be able to communicate with us. And so, we learned their language. So, what they did with Washo, the first chimpanzee, is they emerged to be taught sign language, is they immersed her in a community of friends and signed around her. And, Lo, she learned sign language. The reason for that was to take a culture and a species on its own terms when you're thinking about how to engage it. And that metaphor and that thesis applies toward media as well. So, I got my first epiphantic moment in digital media was in 1990. I was at the University of Washington and I had my first experience. This was before... We have to think about where we were in 1990. It wasn't so long ago, but we had no web browsers. We had no graphical user interface. The internet was actually just used for text. There was IRC chat, which is still alive, but was a text base. And I logged on to an IRC chat that a friend of mine showed me in a lab at the University of Washington. And I immediately started texting with some Israeli graduate students at Haifa while scud bombs were landing in Israel. And I had this moment where I said, wow, this is going to radically change the way that we're all going to communicate and understand each other as cultures. And I committed myself to being a part of that. I went on from there to work at the U.S. State Department where I was for six years. I was actually at our media outreach division. It was an organization that, in the infinite wisdom of the U.S. government, we closed in 1999. It was effectively our Ministry of Culture. It had built tens of thousands of libraries around the world that funded exchange programs. It had a big radio station called The Voice of America, and I was based there for a majority of the time that I was there. But what we tried to do with The Voice of America was to tell stories in a way that were relevant to the communities that wanted to receive them. And that means what technology are they using? One of the things that you'll see or that I've seen in communities in which information is heavily controlled by government is that people will go to any means necessary to access that information. And we're seeing new arcs of that today in terms of freeing information. And so two of the projects that I worked on, one is we had these, we were broadcasting in 52 different languages, and we put video cameras into radio booths, which this predates Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and all of the talk radio people who are now, it's now become a ubiquitous part of their practice. But our notion was, well, there are unused satellite times, satellite transponders that Rupert Murdoch is using in Southeast Asia and China. What if we simply co-streamed our radio signal upon these video transponders and explained to people how to build satellite channels or satellite dishes. And indeed people in China and Iran ended up building satellite dishes out of garbage can lids to say, oh, I can hear you in this whole relationship with visual and audio shifted and changed. So the other thing that we did was worked with a guy named Rob Glazer who was running a company at the time called Progressive Networks, which ultimately became one of the, for a period, one of the most offensive and aggressive media entities, which is called Real Media. I'm sure many of you can remember how Real Media worked, which was one of the early streaming things, but we actually were, we streamed the Voice of America in 52 different languages and that was another really interesting thing was that in, again, we have to think about where we were in 1990, 1991, where the internet was, most everyone here in the United States was on dial-up and if the United States was on dial-up, the rest of the world was on a worse dial-up or there. But the notion was if you make the technology and the media accessible to people by any means that they can possibly access it, it will come to it. So I left, in 1996, I left the State Department because of another tectonic shift in media that was taking place and that was that a CBS gift store clerk named Matt Drudge had discovered that the dailies that the Hollywood Reporter and Variety paid thousands of dollars or charged thousands of dollars for people to access every day. We're being dumped every day in the dumpster outside of the gift store and so he ended up taking those, scanning them and putting them up on his website called the Drudge Report. Well, this ultimately, he had connections in conservative politics and people started leaking information and a very, very significant leak came out which was otherwise unheard of in the media sphere which is that Michael Isikoff, who was an investigative reporter for Newsweek, was reporting on a story about President Clinton potentially having had a liaison with one of his interns and so the fact that this information was leaking out of a very closed newsroom onto the internet, onto now we have web browsers. 1991 was the birth of Mosaic, so one of the first web browsers came out then and so we're still in the early days of sort of what the web meant in terms of the internet and that ultimately became a sensation that shifted the course of both journalism and internet journalism and so I moved to Los Angeles, went to the University of Southern California to launch a think tank on the future of internet journalism and one of the first things that we did was launch a digital watchdog called the Online Journalism Review and our goal was to get people in the journalism space to pay attention to the fact that this was a new medium and one of the things that we discovered was that a lot of the old lessons around advertising and the firewall that traditionally takes place in the journalistic space where you have, where the advertising and the business side never touches the editorial side was already beginning to blur. Fast forward to today and it's a food fight but even at then what we saw, we uncovered some suspicious or some cloudy efforts that the New York Times was doing where they were bridging, where they were doing some sort of ad for coverage stories. So I did that for about seven years and then I was invited to launch another think tank and this one on the future of intercultural collaboration and the notion here was this was 2003 and so the notion here was that in 1999 after the US government had decided that we'd won the war of popular public opinion and we got rid of our Ministry of Culture and we shut down the libraries around the world. We all know what happened three years later. September 11th happened and it's much easier to close a bureaucracy than it is to create a brand new one and so the interesting thing was that intercultural collaboration in a policy framework is not something that universities are interested in studying because interestingly enough in the engineering division you have no problem with collaboration with the government. There are plenty of engineers who are interested in working on new types of missile technology but in the communication and cultural collaboration space collaborating with the government was perceived as being in cahoots with the devil. These are the people that were against cultural collaboration into controlling it and I was part of a movement to try to at least get an interest in academia to try to shape the narrative of government and so I launched this think tank called the Center on Public Diplomacy and I created the first ever master's degree in public diplomacy and it was ultimately resulted in I can't say there was a statistical correlation but after we launched our center either the zeitgeist of public diplomacy blossomed into a thousand flowers but ministries of culture around the world started opening up public diplomacy divisions several other universities then subsequently created masters in public diplomacy but I brought my technology and digital media filter with me and I had another epiphany and that was a friend of mine who was one of the faculty members that introduced me to 3D video games so this is one of the we're now sort of in a peak video game space but one of the games was called Star Wars Galaxies in 2003 the notion of having a 3D representative of yourself as an extension of yourself was completely anathema it was considered to be a waste of one's time a lot of antisocial and it's important in context to think about the history of our relationship with every new layer of digital media or every new layer of media humans are highly suspicious of any form of media that mitigates our conversations so in fact even when Samuel Morse built the telegraph it was called the tell lie graph when the telephones were first introduced in the US as a way to help farmers communicate the press decried this as something that was going to stop people from leaving their houses and always talking on the phone and so every layer that we had so the internet's born and of course Steve Case was famous for saying when he launched AOL that if it weren't for rainy days and lonely people there would have been an AOL so America online is one of the first internet service providers in the United States that was based on largely a chat program but so virtual worlds and video games were again another layer of digital media that were considered to be an affront on our capacity to be social together and I I saw something much more different going on here we are in 2005 a post-September 11th culture in which the United States had basically exhausted all of the goodwill that the world had felt for us because of the our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and people didn't like the United States polls around the world were I mean think about 2005 was like where people in the United States were pouring out French wine and freezing to buy French fries I mean it was crazy and the rest of the world was equally cynical about us one of the things that fast forward one of the things that came out of this effort to look at how 3D virtual worlds at 3D games and virtual worlds were were changing the landscape as I ended up getting a 1.5 million dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation to look at how virtual worlds could change the face of philanthropy and what was basically this is based on a premise in neuroscience in neuropsychology which is that because we have stereoscopic vision humans remember 3D visual experiences differently than we remember audio or text only experiences we're hardwired to remember these kinds of experiences is real so there are if you will folders in our brains that if I see an avatar of Nina on a screen I'm going to file that in a real experience folder as opposed to texting or chatting with you so the brain differentiates between these kinds of experiences and there are psychological studies going back into early 1900s looking at 3D memory as one of the linchpins for what we're hardwired for so where are we now so just a quick 30 seconds through history 30 seconds through so if you think about where we are now in 2015 in 1998 in 1997 there was no Google we didn't have LinkedIn or MySpace until 2003 we got Facebook in 2004 Huffington Post in 2005 Twitter in 2006 Buzzfeed created by one of the Huffington Post creators also in 2006 and what's interesting to me is that after the great recession of 2008 not only did we see a consolidation of resources but we've seen a consolidation of media and I think I called the period we're in right now sort of the peak Facebook or the peak Huffington Post period there was a fascinating article in the New Yorker recently about a young entrepreneur who has created these what I would call sort of the McDonaldization of the Internet where we're all basically we were talking about this on Friday before the gathering began about the sort of BF skinner the sort of skinnerization of the behavior mod skinnerization of the Internet which is we're all kind of rats in a cage tapping our clicking our mouses for endorphin fixes and actually I think there's truth to that and there's truth to that throughout all of the elements that I've talked about what makes video games so sticky is that you get a lot of endorphin fixes from clicking that mouse and moving your avatar through and so in fact in the early days of the video game industry it was you were not allowed to use the word addiction because they knew that it was addictive and they wanted to make it more addictive and in fact Facebook is addictive all of these these platforms have an addictive component to them how many times have we have you found yourself drifting into your your iPhone and then clicking away looking up at 5, 10, 20 minutes a half an hour disappeared because you just gone into that space so setting all that up one of the beautiful things I've heard around here is and that I've seen recently I think I met Josh the other Josh who I don't think is here there are three of us not him but there is a new movement toward creations of new forms of media and creative content in 1997 before we had the platform blogger people were creating web zines there were all sorts of terms that we were coming up with we actually the term blog didn't exist the blogger was launched in 1997 but before then there was a debate whether you were a journalist or a storyteller or a writer or whatever there was a great movement in San Francisco that was a part of called the web zine and I see a new movement toward that coming again there was a project so the thing that Josh and I went to in San Francisco a couple months ago was called project Nuevo Mundo and this is a group it's sort of a collective of digital enthusiasts who want to tell their story by creating a by creating a consortium and that leads me into Bioneers one of the things that excited me most about joining Bioneers a year and a half ago and Kenny and Nina invited me was that Bioneers has always been radically expansive Kenny and Nina describe Bioneers as being sort of a coral reef of communities they if you think about how many people approach organizations be it for-profit or non-profit it's often about sticking my flag in the ground and declaring this is my turf and that particularly translates well in the for-profit world because you want to go and you want to win the market but in the non-profit world it shouldn't be that way I think that the but it is and part of the reason it is because we've had this mass consolidation of wealth in the non-profit world especially we there's a- Kenny describes it as sort of a Hunger Games modality now and he actually has a very interesting essay and thesis on the dramatic shift that's going on in the philanthropy in the philanthropic world but the Hunger Games references is for example the Knight Foundation which has supported media in tremendous ways is now making it all a competition so they want everyone to submit for- they want to gamify non-profits and that causes a whole that causes you to shift your priorities and causes us to have to sort of react to that shifting landscape in a different way so how do we take the so what I would offer is a challenge to those of us who are from this very diverse organizations I was thinking about one of the things that Scott was saying yesterday about how in his response to Christiana's presentation where he said yeah you know behavior change is a good thing I would hope that you would be able to change behavior more well I would offer- I would invite organizations like the Founders Fund to actually seed disruptive change in a way towards social good and that means taking a risk and the risk is that since most and many of the investments are going toward big money the whole arc of investing often is that you're going- you want to know what the exit strategy of the business is so you want a business that's going to collect the most eyeballs but I think that that the ability to collect the most eyeballs particularly in the non-profit space is by us staying together as by us creating this core reef of collaboration that we have to stand together now is the time to stand together now is the time to get radically seeded- radically disruptive small nonprofits who are doing adventurous media work seeded to grow into things that can ultimately result in significant behavior change but I think that requires us rethinking our paradigms and rethinking our perspectives when it comes to what it means to do social good in the for-profit space what it means I think that there has to be more bridge building and crossover between us so what so just to in my closing remarks I want to just summarize with a comment that is each of us has talked about how we're trying to bring the dream to reality and so well the way to get to that I think is taking and understanding the culture of media consumption on its own terms if you look at what Buzzfeed has done, Jonah Peretti understood that people want hype and he's starting to seed Buzzfeed now with what I think is an interesting bit of broccoli if you will he's starting to do some political reporting, they're starting to break some stories but that's not the whole story and what's starting to come out in the digital media space is a hunger for more media information and we see that in the form of medium I think medium is a really interesting website if you think about the kind of information that's being presented it's interesting that the former founder of blogger and twitter went long form I think long form still very much has a life if you look at the arc of where people think media has been going it's about getting your eyeballs as quickly as possible to read and consume the smallest piece of information possible well that's fine if you're just feeding your endorphins but I think that people are now more and more hungry for information as Kenny says we're going from climate denial to climate panic and as that palpable level of emotion starts to strike the opportunity then is provided for organizations, communities people like us to help change the story and the narrative around that so that's where I'll close my question to you is around binaries and the work you guys are doing so I spent I came over to one of your sessions and there were hundreds of people in the room but I've consumed so much great content of binaries online where you've reached tens of thousands of people I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about the work you do and the messages spreading through these new platforms that are developing and like is binaries turning into a digital media organization? I think binaries has always been a digital media organization it has been a storytelling organization if you talk to Kenny and Nina about what they were trying to create when they first created the organization this topic has it come up but they said that they really wanted to create a field and so if you think about what they needed to do to create the field they needed to create content so now we have roughly 25 years of content what's really interesting about this content is that it's it still has currencies so speeches that were given in the early 1990s in fact we just released a yearbook we have some copies of us copies of it with us here it's called Seeing Around Corners 25 Years of Visionary Leadership and what's really really interesting is that they were so far ahead of the curve 25 years off and ahead of the curve that the information that we have is now still has currency and so I think we are a media organization what I've been trying to do since I came on board is to make sure that we adopt in a radically inclusive and radically expansive way any new platform that comes about because binaries has a really interesting challenge we have a generation that goes from 14 year olds to 80 year olds or more and we just did a demography of the people who attended the conference this year and it's like a camelback we have a big peak this is about 3,000 people that came this year so you see a peak at 21 and then a trough in people in their 30s and 40s and then another peak in their 60s and 70s and that's what does that mean from a digital media standpoint the last great technological shift that 80 to 70 year olds made was switching to CDs and DVDs and they're not going beyond that whereas the 21 year olds are streaming everything is digitized maybe you've got thumb drives but it's mostly if they want to access content you need to be able to access it and download it and stream it so we're radically expansive in adopting what my fantasy and one of the things we're trying to create over this year with scarce resources we don't have the resources yet to do it but is to create a 24 hour binary internet radio program so you'd come to the website and we'd have a grid because we could literally fill a 24 seven grid with all of the different topics and say noon at every day might be binary's indigenous hour where you could listen to some of these the amazing speeches a decade ago Kenny Nina were approached by the top Native American elders who said we want sovereign space at this conference and they gave it to them and so there was a conference within a conference of binary's that is the indigenous knowledge conference and this year an unprecedented state visit from the elders of the Iroquois nation came to binary's as the US ambassador to New Zealand came here yesterday and effectively presented their diplomatic credentials to Kenny Nina on the stage so I've digressed a little bit but it's to say that I think we are very much a media and storytelling entity that's how you change the narrative very illuminating stuff really awesome one of the things that really stood out to me because I work in marketing and is the McDonald'sization it's hard to say the McDonald'sization of everything really but that's a great example and just to extrapolate out from their trending as we've distilled food into the most cost effective and sugary and fat centric mode that it can possibly be in out of that the trend the backlash trend is to have a resurgence into organics and have a little bit more awareness of what we're putting in our bodies and so I see this trend that you've talked about about just getting your fix clicking the mouse and getting your fix and something that's occurred to me for a long time is what will the backlash be for that where will we go because that's the way things have gone so heavily how will we produce solutions that will provide slowing down and a centering and an opening to counter that and the third answer is places like this and places like Bioneers the slightly longer answer I can tell you through the so I referenced briefly the MacArthur Foundation grant that I received to look at the future philanthropy vis-a-vis virtual worlds and so remember in 2007 Second Life came out and this was another big bubble that people were investing in because those who had missed out on the .com bubble were like we're not going to miss out on the virtual world bubble but what I got out of what we got out of that project and it resulted in a project that ultimately I presented at Bioneers in 2009 called Understanding Islam Through Virtual Worlds and what we were doing was looking at how we could create connections between these disparate communities of Muslims and non-Muslims in the wake of September 11 and what we found was virtual worlds or any kind of digital or recommendations where any kind of digital action or space should only ever serve as a vehicle for creating meaningful physical interaction for engagement so we see we saw things like the challenge was that in the case of Islam and all of the tensions around the US behaviors that and the tensions between those two communities without getting the polemics of it were around people couldn't come the tensions were so high that they couldn't have person-to-person communications we needed to soften the territory if you will find an entry point in which to create that dialogue but I think that the whole there's a we're already seeing that that shift where and it's revolving around so many of these key issues about the environment so many of these key cultural issues are people are realizing that we haven't been paying attention we've been sleeping we've been like as Kenny says rock stars in the hotel room we've completely trashed the hotel room and it's all it's caught up to us and so you start to see more substantive contributions but my frustration continues to be around websites like Huffington Post which I think is has been received endless accolades for revolutionizing journalism but in many ways it hasn't in fact they don't pay their many of their reporters it has become completely saturated with ads I'm sure it's a financial myth now which is great you know they AOL bought it but as far as how much social good it's doing nothing so hi. Question for you getting very close to answering so in the U.S. traditionally you know media news etc had a solid wall between it and advertising but when you travel around the world that doesn't exist and so we were talking about McDonaldization the value in promoting products that provide you with an economic means to get your message out so in the rest of the world when I talk to people they know that that's what's happening so they are able to filter it whereas we tend to be very offended when we see those products appear it's a place that we felt was trusted previously and I'm just curious what your opinion is on whether or not that's something we just have to accept or how do we manage this particularly when you're a non-profit and capital is the thing that lets you go forward Right so the one of the first there's a couple interesting responses in that but I think that in my world I would distinguish between journalism and entertainment I think the ads that we see in Facebook posts are fair game I think that the challenge with journalism is that there has been journalism itself is going through a tremendous cultural identity shift we're there where you look at the Brian Williams scandal where basically the hype and the infotainment of things have shifted so I think the onus of responsibility has advertised advertising has and will continue to be one of the lifebloods of journalism without getting into a longer discussion about non-profit journalism versus journalism as a public good and all of that I think that the real challenge is that journalism needs to get back to its roots of radical transparency with in terms of their relationship with advertising and renewing their trust in the people but so much of it's been lost because of just the mass it's just become infotainment so yeah Yeah thanks Josh I just wanted to make an additional comment which is when we started Bioneers in 1990 my background originally was a journalist and filmmaker so and then Nina's was in communications and theater and so creating we'd never been to a conference before which turned out to be an advantage actually we had no idea what we were doing so we just made it up as we went along but part of what happens is when you get you know these 3,000 people together we do try to create an energy field basically the live act and there's nothing else like that so when that's translated into media you know the way we talk about it is we try to get people firing on all 7 chakras if you bring the fullness of our human experience and human endeavor to the table it creates a hole that's much greater than the sum of the parts what also happened was so we started with more conventional media including a book series and audio and video and all of that stuff but someone approached us in the year 2000 who wanted to bring the conference to Toronto so we created a program called Beaming Bioneers and originally we did a live broadcast by satellite and people used the morning keynotes for each of the 3 days to then create their own local events and the whole point again was the live act and they created they used our keynotes but then they built their own conferences with local speakers, local solutions local issues so over time what that evolved into from our point of view is not ROI return on investment it's ROI return on engagement and I think that's what's missing in the equation today digital media I love media, I totally love media it's a large part of what I do and there is nothing like FaceTime and Malcolm Gladwell has written about this in terms of the so-called Twitter revolutions in Egypt or whatever in fact if you look back at the civil rights movement it was all about shoe leather and it was all about intensely personal relationships that people held by sitting at lunch counters together and so somehow we need to find that balance between the digital world, the virtual world and actual return on engagement that brings people together so that's where we're so elated to have Joshua join Bioneers now in terms of his expertise with digital media and his understanding of the political dimension of this because what we all need is social change I think that's why we're all here in this room together and the question becomes how do you marry media with social change most effectively so we're so eager to learn from all of you and I would say that we're poised at a cusp where Bioneers could have a much larger outreach for engagement and that's one of the reasons I'm here is to learn from you all and make connections and figure how to get this stuff out there quickly. Thank you very much Kenny and thank you very much Josh, really appreciated