 panelists. I'm so excited. Mr. Yo-Yo Ma has joined us. Actually, a little anecdote, we have a second when I was opening the email to, you know, from Lydia, the invitation, I looked up to gaze upon my own daughter playing cello in the background. This is a sign. An individual who has inspired children and adults alike all around the world. Mr. Ma began studying cello at the age of four, and three years later moved with his family to New York City where he continued his cello studies with Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School, and after his conservatory training he sought out liberal arts education and graduated from Harvard. He has received numerous awards including the Avery Fisher Prize, the Glenn Gould Prize, I'm a huge Glenn Gould fan, the National Medal of the Arts, the Dan David Prize, the World Economic Forum's Crystal Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Kennedy Center Honors, the Polar Music Prize, the J. Paul Getty Medal Award. He has performed for nine American presidents most recently on the occasion of President Biden's inauguration. So exciting. His multifaceted career is a testament, and I quote, to his enduring belief in culture's power to generate trust and understanding. Yo-Yo Ma has a lifelong commitment to stretching the boundaries of genre and tradition to explore music as a means to not only share and express meaning, but also as his contribution to a society that is trying to improve itself. Mr. Ma serves as a UN messenger of peace, the first artist ever appointed to the World Economic Forum's Board of Trustees and a member of the board of Neatero, the US-based nonprofit working in solidarity with indigenous peoples and movements worldwide. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Yo-Yo Ma. Kendall, thank you very much for the introduction. I'm so glad your daughter plays cello. Please say hi to her. And my congratulations to my fellow panelists listening to Shalini speak so eloquently and Sharon so passionately about your histories, but also describing really the festering gender inequality that exists in society is very moving. But before I say anything further, I'd like to say that Lydia, who invited me to be on this panel, I must, this is the truth be told. Lydia, through her husband, who was my physician for many years and who is a fabulous person and doctor. And whenever I went in for my annual checkup, I would ask him about his research and his work. He's very, you know, did a lot of things. He says, yes, but nothing I do compares with the work of what my wife does. And so Lydia, what an honor to be invited to be on this panel by you because you are a legend in my mind because I've known about your work for years and how incredibly hard you're one of those women that Sharon is essentially describing who's gone through the trials and tribulations to do work in so many areas. So it's such an honor to speak to all of you. And I was wondering why you would want a musician to come and speak on this topic. But I was given a couple of questions to talk about path to leadership, including barriers, circumstances that were beneficial, and what did it take to bring people from different genres of music, dance, athletics in order to collaborate, and finally to talk about lessons from life and music. So I'll try and speak a little bit about this and not too long because I know people want to ask questions of our other panelists. So first of all, I would like to start by saying that I think that scientists are just that every society needs scouts. By scouts, I mean people who are able to go on the periphery of the center to look for what's out there. And to do that, of course, at the center, and for all of us humans, we have our senses, and we have our experiences, and we have our minds. But what scientists use, and I think what artists use are coded material and tools that can actually extend our sense of perception so that we can actually figure out what we can't see and what we can't hear and what we can almost not feel and to actually get to those places in order to report on what is there. And that is, I feel that this is essential for center and edge in every living thing and in every living society, every thriving society to have good communication between the edge and the center, between the scouts and the center. And without that, we do not have thriving societies. So hence, the unbelievable importance that every society uses all of its resources and people to maximize that dynamic condition that has to exist in order for us to get to things like what is true. The scaffolding for truth has to be unbroken. The scaffolding for trust in order for its to reach truth has to be unbroken. And every time it's broken, we have to actually rebuild over and over again. And so gender is huge in terms of our being able to use the abilities of different members of our society to get to a prismatic truth so that we can better understand what is in store for us as homeostatic beings. That we need those frames to help us see what's out there. So that's my opening attempt at trying to say that we can't get to gender equality fast enough. Unfortunately, at the World Economic Forum, they wrote a paper that said we're not going to get to gender equality for another 100 years. That's unbelievable when I first heard that, that's impossible. But then I started thinking, if we look at the whole population of the world, it does take generations. And I know my daughter who's a lawyer, I know what she goes through, my sister who's a scientist, I know what she went through. And hearing the stories of that Sharon was talking about, yes, I see that. And I can tell you that in my own experience, as a cellist, you'd say, OK, well, that's not a field. That's playing the cello. And so you're just doing some funny thing. Well, I can tell you that for by 50 years of playing cello, when I first started, almost every question, every interview question that I was asked started with, how do you, as an Oriental, understand our music? Now, that was like nine out of 10 questions. Now, 50 years later, maybe one out of 100 questions is that. The latest being that question being asked when I was in Japan a month ago. And I said, you know, what's funny is this happened 50 years ago. But now you're asking the same question, but I can happily report to you that I believe deeply that culture turns the other into us. Now, what do I mean by that? Culture turns the other into us. Take the sciences, the lady who runs CERN in Geneva, Fabiola Genotti. She says, CERN, people from 150 countries built CERN because their wish to look through one frame of thinking for a truth that takes decades to find. Who cares, people say. Scout for what? We don't know, but guess what? 25 years later, they find it and new tracks of investigation open up. MRNA, for so many years, what are you doing? But suddenly in one year, it saves millions of people. And so the fact that culture, the culture of science, the culture of physics, the culture of molecular biology is able to come do something because people spent years following their passions to investigate without knowing exactly why or what they were looking for, but they had a hunch. They knew something was going on and they needed to follow. If we don't have those scouts, we would be in far worse shape today. So I want to say scouts to center, gender, and my own tiny example of how does someone like you understand what we do to say today, help us by telling us what you know so that we could actually work together in different musics, in different fields to collaborate. How do we do that? I'll just give you a couple of very quick examples that in my life, I had a friend who told me very early on, there are two kinds of people. The first kind does what they say they're going to do. Let's have lunch. You end up having lunch. I'll call you tomorrow. They call tomorrow. And then there's the other type who doesn't call after they say they're going to call. It's very simple. You do that. You build trust. You don't do that. It doesn't happen. That goes beyond gender and it happens over and over again. I'm sure you've all experienced the same thing. Another example, a very close friend of mine, before starting the Silk Road project about 25 years ago, I went to him and said, what should I do it or not? Wisely, he says, two things. Don't forget your family and two, make yourself redundant as soon as possible. True words were not said because boy, it's tough to start something and to run something that's against the grain when people are criticizing you for doing what. But I have to say, I'm a slow learner. It took me 20 years to become redundant. It's the best thing I could have done to have stayed there for 20 years. It's the best thing to leave because things must evolve and change. And the fact that it's important for organizations to continue to thrive not always under the same person because we need to get to prismatic ways of looking at the truth of the moment. And there's only a certain amount of time that I feel I can do it because times change and I then need to focus on other things. So last but not least, I would like to say that in terms of leadership, in terms of anything that we do in culture, which has invented our system of government, which has invented our system of economics, which has invented so much in our lives. If it's true that culture can turn the other into us, then in order for us to build a thriving culture, we need to focus on the values of building trust amongst ourselves, of seeking truth, no matter what the consequences are. And the reason we do all of that is for us, is for service. It's for the business of being human. So that's, I think, my response to the questions. I come back to you, Kendall, and maybe we have questions for our wonderful panelists here. And Lydia, again, it's great to see you and wonderful to be able to be in the same virtual space as you.