 We don't really have prepared remarks here. In fact, I actually forgotten that we were going to cut off a talk. But look, I think that the point is that we're all here for the same reason that we believe that we can make a difference in the world somehow going forward. I think we all acknowledge that it's going to be very trying times ahead. We see problem, but we also believe there's an inherent optimism in this group that I really respect, that we have resources as human beings that are going to allow us to meet these challenges. In my opinion, I think it'll be the most challenging time in human history. We have things like in my lifetime, I just turned 60 recently, in my lifetime the population, the human population of the world has tripled, which is pretty insane. If you think about it, in one person's lifetime you can see such a huge knee in the curve and it's just going stratospheric and of course the reverse curve is happening simultaneously in terms of biodiversity. As our influence expands across the living world, it has the effect of negatively impacting all the other species on the planet. And one of the things that I think we're all going to confront as a civilization, I think we're at the vanguard. This group is at the vanguard because we're starting to acknowledge the fact that the natural world is inextricably bound to us and our survival is dependent on it and that we need to start looking beyond this idea of what can nature do for us, which is how humanity has lived since its inception really, and that's what all organisms do. They look at the environment and say, what can I take to make my life better? And we have to evolve beyond it. We're at a cusp in history right now and it's going to be your time more than mine, but in your lifetime the human race is going to need to evolve and transcend itself somehow because the problems that we face are global problems. As for the first time ever in the existence of humanity, we face problems that are going to require global cooperation in order to solve. And that's a fundamental shift in thinking and viewing kind of who the in-group is and who the out-group is, you know, because we grow up as human beings, whatever the culture, whatever the language, with this idea that there's us and our family and we have to fight for them and there's an out-group that we're in competition with and we're in competition for resources or for esteem or whatever it is and we have to outgrow that somehow. In the past, whenever a society outgrew its resource base, whether it was the soil or whatever else became depleted, if they were an island group like Easter Island or the Maya, which basically were surrounded by hostile tribes, they basically died out. And if you were the Roman Empire or the ancient Greeks, you'd just go take stuff from other people. And there's a point where that works pretty well, you know, in the whole colonial period, let's just go take stuff from other people. And, you know, the European population of New Zealand was founded on the principle of let's go take stuff from other people and we're going to be celebrating Waitangi Day, what is it, a couple of days today? Okay, perfect, exactly. So, you know, you can only expand so far before you meet yourself on the other side of the world and you run out of places to expand to and take things from other people and take things from nature. And that has happened and we're now saturating. And the metaphor that I always have in mind is a Petri dish with a growth medium of some kind and you inoculate it with a bacterium and that bacterium will spread across the Petri dish until it hits the other side and it's fully saturated and then it dies. And we're kind of at, but we're smarter than that. And we have the potential, obviously, to meet this challenge and figure out ways to survive it and to, if not prosper in the definition that we think of prosperity now but prosper spiritually and experientially we can not only survive it but we can have a good time doing it. There will be ziplines. You know? Because, you know, what I love about it is there's a kind of, there's a kind of sober optimism in this group. I mean sober in the sense that, you know, you're looking at the future clear-eyed, wide open and yet there's an optimism about what you can bring to it and the sort of basic human nature that is innovative and can find solutions and loves to solve problems, you know, and we can meet this thing head-on. And so it really inspires me what you're doing, you know, what you're doing, Matthew and Brian. Me too. Yeah, right, and bringing this group together and creating this momentum and giving something back at a point when you guys, you know, could have sort of cashed out and either plowed it all back into the next enterprise to make another billion dollars or gone on a yacht someplace and just chilled out in the French Riviera, you chose to give something back and to dedicate yourselves to solving problems that are going to affect everybody and the solutions will be open source. Whatever you come up with, everyone can benefit from and that is so synchronous with what Susie and I have been starting to do. And there's so many intersection points and commonalities between what we're doing over on the other side of the hill and with some of our efforts in Saskatchewan, which is let's spend the money, let's experiment, let's attract like-minded people, let's try to figure out some answers to these problems of sustainability and the robustness of systems that other people who are living on a relatively narrow margin as farmers or whatever their business model is can't afford to do. So let's take advantage of the opportunities that we've been given, you know, the good luck kind of windfall that was hard earned. Let's take advantage of those opportunities and try to give something back that could be meaningful beyond just our group, just beyond our in-group to the out-group because we really need to start thinking about the entire human race and the entire biosphere that supports and harbors us as our in-group. And so, you know, I get sad and depressed sometimes because I think about things like the coral reefs and that, you know, your generation will be the last to see coral reefs in living abundance. They'll be gone. There's no way to head it off at this point. So the world needs to have that sober outlook that we have irrevocably changed things and look at what kind of life we want to have because it's not about survival. It's about what kind of life do we want to have. I always say that rats, cockroaches, and human beings will survive anything including a nuclear war. It's a question of what the quality of life is and what that society looks like and how creative it is and how enabling and empowering of artists and culture it is versus a survival kind of thing. So anyway, I guess this is a long-winded way of just really applauding what you're doing and saying that we want to be a part of it. We want to be partners in it. We want to learn from what you come up with. We want to share what we come up with because I think that's how this works. Everybody is going to come together and work together, but we're also going to go off and do our individual things, and then we have to create strong cross-links so that that forms a commons of solutions that then is shared with the greater world, and that's what we're here to do. Not only do I applaud you, Matthew and Brian, but I applaud the group that you've pulled together and the bigger group that you're pulling together over the next three weeks, I guess it is, right? So anyway, it's fantastic. I think what you're doing, why you're doing it, it gives me hope and optimism. I think you have a little more optimism than I do. I'm learning from that, and I'm inspired by that. But I think that as a father of five, it's my job to have hope. It's my duty to have hope. So that's the way I have to think about it, and I have to do my damnedest to make sure that not just our in-group has that quality of life, but there's a justice to the way our depleted resources are distributed and how food is distributed and all. I think it's interesting that we don't really have a food crisis. There's a food distribution crisis. When people have more than they need and they're throwing it away and there's these vast industrial monoculture type production models and then other people who are living in subsistence are getting hammered out of existence by droughts that are caused by the burning of hydrocarbons in other countries and you realize the interconnectedness of that. There is not justice in that model. And so that's part of the great awakening, the transcendence that we all have to have. It's about compassion. I love the competitive model because it creates innovation, but it is inherently anti-compassionate. It says, I'm going to succeed and you're not. And we somehow have to balance these impulses, the impulse to compete, the impulse to do better, the impulse to gather wealth and glory. It has its place, that impulse in the human brain has its place. It's what drives art, it's what drives innovation, but at the same time it has to be balanced with a compassionate sense and it's that compassion that I think is missing from the systems of the world or it's only given just a brief kind of token nod but it's not fundamental. So when I look around at people that could choose to be selfish who are being compassionate, that inspires me. So I'm going to give Susie a chance to... No, it's a perfect moment to kind of like piggyback on what you said and I had a wonderful mommy to mommy conversation with Mom Monahan over there about our young men and the integrity that they hold and what you were saying about the fact that you guys could go off and do whatever you wanted to do basically and I have a very wise young man sitting back there who has absolutely been my teacher and I can't ignore the fact that we have young children running around and maybe more to come from this group and being, you know, you're a father of five, I'm a mommy of five one of the things that I love to do is take a deep breath and for everyone in the room to think about a child in their lives now think about a wish for that child my personal wish is for not just a child but to create a better world for all of the children being born into our world and into our planet because we are at a tipping point and at one point when we are all long gone we'll be gone before everybody else probably in this room but we'll be all long gone and our children will turn around and they will wonder why we didn't do something and I'm not willing to live with that I know you're not willing to live with that I woke up every day with a pit in my stomach thinking what else can I do what else can I possibly do and you all are doing it and you're young and you're hip and you're wise and you've got integrity and you have the ability to gather people there are people coming in and we all do find each other we find each other and we're able to connect together and each of us individually has strength each of us individually has wisdom and integrity but collectively what we can do moving forward is strengthen numbers so let's take our strength in numbers and go out and change the world so is there anything that anybody would like to pose to us in the form of a question or a challenge? you said that primarily our focus as humans has been to go out and consume user resources and I often thought that's really the root of Christianity is that the earth is there to use so the world's biggest religion has taught people to go use and it's a huge thing to counter it's like a humongous belief system that's ingrained in 2000 years maybe less a lot of years of using how do you... how do you counter that? I think the really big question that we have to answer is what is our role in nature? because we can't just go back to nature nature's broken now and we're too influential upon nature to sort of just trust in nature to solve its own problem that can't happen we've grabbed the tiller we've taken over and yet we don't really know what we're doing yet and all the Republicans say I'm not a scientist, don't ask me I just make policy that wrecks the world but don't ask me what it all means which we can't do that we can't stick our head in the sand we have to use our intelligence and science and I look over at Jasper and I think we also have to profit from the wisdom of people who have lived close to nature for thousands of years and what they've learned from the old view because we've dealt a fair bit over the last two or three years with indigenous communities whether it's in Canada, First Nations people or whether it's the Amazon, the Kayapo and some of the other tribes that are impacted by these big dam projects or the big dam projects as I call them and we've come to realize that they're the kind of canaries in the coal mine that speak for nature to us of course their voices are not loud that's the problem and there's so much cultural momentum for our world view of a growth economy that's based on greater and greater consumerism and I think it's probably the deepest part of the problem because we were talking about the role of science in this and we need more science and of course we always need more science we need more instrumentation out there we need to understand what's happening down underneath the surface of the ocean because it's a big dark unknown on a day-to-day basis we have spot information and we can see it from orbit but we don't know on a day-to-day basis like a weather forecast what's happening down there to carbon, to CO2, to heat flux and things like that so we need more data but at the same time I think we're a wash in data we've got tons of data and tons of analysis and 10,000 climate scientists who all agree and yet it doesn't make a dent on policy it does in some countries not in America apparently so I think the question is not so much what we need to learn but how we can act effectively on what we already know to be true it's taking that, it's education it's taking that information and educating people yeah, but you can only educate the willing and so the question is how do you get people's attention how do you make it interesting how do you engage them how do you think of it as Brian was saying earlier as an upgrade, not a sacrifice I'm going to upgrade my existence doesn't work exactly, yeah and you're going to have to sacrifice for future generations people that can't even contemplate the fact that they might get cancer for smoking a cigarette today aren't thinking about future generations they're not even thinking about their own life for 20 years in the future so it's not human nature and how it works so part of what you guys I think have collectively in your spirit is that there's a demeanor of I was saying optimism earlier but it's almost like this is a challenge that's fun we're smart people that are going to have fun solving this challenge and we're going to get in there and we're going to attract other people to do this challenge as well I love solving problems I like solving engineering problems I like solving artistic problems creative problems to me filmmaking is the same thing as going on a science expedition you actually say if it's not challenging enough it's not fun yeah exactly, go big or go home let's not mess around we're dealing with the fundamental we're going right to the heart of the biggest problem that humanity has faced we don't have all the answers part of this is an experiment to find answers and we may be ahead of the curve of the greater public in terms of awareness and the sense that we have to act but that doesn't make us experts and the quickest way to turn people off is to turn around and say I'm the expert and I'm ahead of you on the curve but I think if you have a certain humility before the task we think these problems are coming and they're going to be very real and aren't going to affect all of us and we're trying to find some answers and what we find out we'll pass on to you and if you have something you give it to us and collectively we'll just do it better so it's those cross linkages that are going to be a critical aspect to this but I think you've hit the nail on the head and I don't want to single out religion I think there's a lot of cultural momentum having to do with colonialism and the American spirit and the competition that's ingrained it's human nature and the things that we were taught and my generation are not going to be applicable going forward you know so what are we going to do about that is humanity prepared to change and redefine its role are people prepared to change I think if you make it fun and you connect people at kind of a level of compassion kind of a spiritual connection if you can do that music does it music is one of the best ways to do it art does it literature does it film does it speaking the truth does it it's all going to boil down to compassion but competition and growth economies are generally pretty much at odds with compassion well is there a possibility for people to actually make change before it's forced on them I mean we were talking about Cuba earlier it was forced on them they made lemonade out of lemons you know can we somehow inspire invoke people to change before we don't have a choice but to change everybody is going to eat plant based eventually if you look because they won't have any choice you know so the question is can we make it fun and sexy in the meantime we don't know when it's going to happen but land use will ultimately require if you're going to feed enough people either that or we'll just go down in flames of warfare fighting over continuously diminishing food supply but assuming we're not that stupid there's kind of an interim state where we just simply don't have enough land left to grow animals and so people are just going to have to progressively go more and more to eating down the food chain at the level of primary production let's not get that far because what will have happened in the meantime is every forest on the planet will have been cut down every river will have been killed by runoff pollution the ocean will have been killed by dead zones and will have eaten everything in the ocean bigger and tastier than a jellyfish about this big you know because we're well on the track to that we're all on the track to that right now you know and don't get me started on the oceans because that's a whole other issue but it does impact us even inland and even farming you know when we're getting fertilizer and if fish food aquaponics is a great thing because it's so good with water it's like two orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of water use but you still got to feed the fish something and what you feed them comes out of the ocean and starts and you know keeps chopping out that food web in the ocean so we got to think about other inputs for aquaponics so all these problems are interrelated they're very complex no one person has the answer there's no guru that can give you the one stop shopping answer for how to solve this and any solution you have for one place isn't going to work as well someplace else which is why the linkages are critical you might find out something that works really well but you take it into a place where your growing season is only a hundred days a year might not work so you know it's got to be site specific it's got to be regional as well but I mean what we have to do just collectively is learn how to build robust communities that aren't our linkages must be informational and conceptual but we need to start to delink the flow of goods around the world because we're too dependent on extended supply chains and if you look at the life cycle analysis the lca on anything any product that you have a car an iphone whatever it is there are hundreds if not thousands of container ships that have touched every molecule of what goes into that phone or the robots that assembled it or the robots that assembled those and it's a very it's a ridiculously complex you know fractal complexity that we've created in this system and an iphone is affordable because that system works but you break that system and you try to build an iphone at a level of Wellington now you're making Ferraris so if our information infrastructure is predicated on the low cost and the ubiquitous distribution of these technologies that are designed to be thrown away every year that's not going to work indefinitely so what does a sustainable iphone look like well it should last 20 years nobody's thinking that way because you know competition and innovation work against sustainability in that particular case and yet that's the world that we're you know that's plunging headlong off a cliff right now we have to rewire how we think about our information systems and that sort of thing we have to start not all innovation is good not all growth is good so it's a complex problem and it basically we have to rewire kind of society and the economy to solve it these are big big challenges but like Susie said it's go big or go home this is the kind of challenge I like what's that? yeah full out exactly yeah so does anybody else want to comment or since we got a role going I always think of education that's the core of these things but how influential do you feel media is like after avatar did you get a lot of feedback that helped raise awareness it was an interesting thing after avatar I think avatar reached a lot of people at a very shallow level but it reached a lot of people and the message was in the right direction I just don't think it really toggled people into taking action it didn't tell you what to do it just gave you this general sense oh nature is under the gun and we've got to do something about it and then that kind of wore off where it actually made an interesting difference was the indigenous communities around the world rallied around avatar came to us how can you help us we were then able to take direct action working with them whether it was First Nations communities around downstream of the tar sands in Alberta or whether it was the Bellamonche Dam in the Shingu region in the Amazon working with Amazon Watch and things like that so we were able to find ways to take specific action I think the subsequent avatar films if they work we'll do the same thing it'll remind people that we have this thing missing in our lives which is a connection to nature I think a couple of years ago was the point where more than 50% of all human beings on the planet for the first time in history live in cities so collectively as a species we're suffering from nature deficit disorder you know and you can't protect what you don't respect or love and you can't respect or love something you've never seen other than a few trees in a park you know so this is a problem we have to work against and one of the reasons that we came to New Zealand was to get our kids back kind of a little closer to the soil live on a farm, there's a lot of native bush around they go out and hike and go to the ocean and that sort of thing so it's reconnecting reconnecting with the work ethic getting them away from a consumer kind of materialist view of the world and that sort of thing but the problem is who's running education you know if it's yeah well you should talk about that because it was Susie's dissatisfaction with the educational system in Los Angeles that caused her to start a school a green school where kids got to grow their food and eat it at lunch and do nature hikes and work with people that could teach them the plants and show them what coyote scat looked like so they could understand that these really interesting pack hunting animals lived right behind the school things like that that reconnected them to nature and that was it really has affected these kids in a positive way and I guess the hope is that some of the things that fall out of this unique school might go into curricula that could be applied more broadly even in a public school system one could hope but right now kids are still forced to drink milk so who's in charge of the messaging the environmental messaging at schools broadly you know it's government I mean you can barely get evolution taught in some schools in America some not this is Susie's area I should shut up I don't have one yeah it came from Jasper and and Joza and watching older kids go through different schooling systems and watch basically their spirits being completely squashed watching them being fed junk you know both mentally spiritually and physically and when it came time for the oldest of our three little ones to start kindergarten I started looking around at the different schools and I couldn't find I couldn't find anything I mean I those of us that have children have children around us I mean we all know that children are born scientists they come out curious they come out asking questions and then you put them into school and then that bright curious light gets dampened little by little by little and I actually watched it with Jasper I watched his spirit being dampened we took his lights back on though his light is way back on but we in eighth grade we home schooled him for a semester we had a teacher that was creating a curriculum for him on his feet outside he went from D's and F's to basically an A student and he was happy and all of a sudden that light started shining again and a high school for him that really celebrated the kids and supported them and really let them celebrated them for who they are and I watched Jasper I don't know if you've ever heard me tell a story or not that when Jasper started high school he was about six feet now he's I don't know six four six five and he kind of walked with his shoulders down a little bit not feeling great about himself and by the time it was about a month into it and I literally watched him physically open up and I heard him and I still hear him today talk about his high school experience he said man my school rocked it was awesome and I don't know that many people can say that about their schooling we watched the same thing with Joseph she was in an all girls school in California and she basically lived under her hoodie for about two years we put her into this high school and that hoodie came off and Joseph was basically reborn and she was able to be who she wanted to be and which is an artist you know creative person and I just thought you know there's there's something in this with learning a child's learning style allowing them to follow their passions teaching them about the environment teaching them about taking care of things Jasper is the one that came in the house at a very young age and said why do we still have plastic bottles in the house I was like well we need water and he said well we don't need plastic bottles so I got all the plastic bottles out of the house and next thing I did was I got one of those handy coolers and he walked in the kitchen and he said mom it's still a plastic bottle so then we subsequently got a filter and now we all drink out of canteens tap water exactly but you know so Jasper has been a huge teacher to me and thank you for that but the school itself is really all about celebrating children as who they are as individuals and teaching them about living in nature with nature not against nature and we are creating these little global champions that are going out in the world and they go home just like you did with me they go home and they talk to mom and dad and brother and sister and auntie and uncle and grandma and grandpa and they come to us and they've been enlightened by their children and our ultimate goal and it's what I'm going to be going back to California to is working on Muse Global and opening these schools around the world because the more we can start we can all walk around and go yeah we're recycling and we drive hybrids and aren't we doing a great job taking care of the environment you start with two year olds and it's just part of their fabric and they walk around and they see a plastic bottle in nature and they say that doesn't belong here so it's really about starting at a very very young age and allowing kids to really follow what turns them on what blows their skirt up and you always say you know if you find something that you love to do and you can find someone to pay you to do it you never work a day in your life and the more we have happy kids out there doing what they love to do the more we can create community that you guys are doing right here you all getting bored? I was just going to add something about that one of the things that Susie's school does really well is kind of teach critical thinking it doesn't teach kids by rote it teaches them to teach themselves what they need to know so it's project based learning so if a kid evinces an interest in something they say alright fine we'll teach you the math and the science and the how to write a paper around the thing you're interested in oh you're interested in parkour we'll figure out so the teachers are challenged to come up with essentially on the fly dynamic curricula that's based on each kid's interest and kids just switch on all of a sudden you can't teach them fast enough I'm going to give an example of Quinn a different way for the children to learn and for instance every single child has an individual learning plan at the school that's the first thing we ask him is what do you love to do so Quinn last year he still is but his interest was motorcycles so he decided he wanted to build a motorcycle he's not a strong reader he doesn't like to do math he just wants to build, be outside around and create things and so he wanted to build a motorcycle all of a sudden he had to do a lot of research and so he was reading some very grown up books he was in fourth grade last year and he had to write a lot of information down and then he started the whole project of building the motorcycle and all of a sudden he had to learn about the physics of motorcycles in fourth grade he was doing some very very complicated math computations and at the end of it he was able to look back and realize how much he read how much he had written down all of the math that he had done and he was working two, three and four grade levels ahead of the state and national standards and now all of a sudden he's like yeah I like math, it's okay it's cool it really is and then our daughter was really into sewing she still is she's eight years old now she was seven, she decided she wanted to create a quilt well the quilt taught her about textiles she went into geometric shapes which in first grade if a child asks about geometric shapes typically they're told it's okay sweetheart that you're thinking about that I'm gonna learn about that in fifth grade and so all of a sudden she's learning about geometric shapes which takes her into architecture which took her into the architecture of beehives and what we do is we incorporate all of the academics and you can incorporate science history, math science, art all of those things, literacy all of those things into the project whether it's ballet fashion design, motorcycles sewing parkour, whatever it might be and the other thing and I'll just go there is the kids now are growing probably 90% of what they're eating and they are they're planting it they're growing it, they're harvesting it they're learning how to cook they're learning how to compost it they're even creating business models and providing different produce to different restaurants in the area and in fall of 2015 will be the only plant based school in North America that we're aware of yeah and the kids know that one of the reasons why we're doing it one of the main reasons why we're doing it is for environmental reasons that's actually the interesting point we had to sell it to the parents too it's like oh my god we just joined a cult a bunch of freak vegans you know are running this cult school let's get our kids out of this and so we lost a few parents one argument was it's one meal a day you still have breakfast and dinner to force feed them bacon and cheese burgers you know one argument was why'd you come to the school to teach your kids about their connection to nature and the environment this is an environmentally attuned school well we can't just ignore that 14.5% of all greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture not all agriculture just animal agriculture no that's inclusive of of you know crops that are going to feed to animals there is no land use plan or water scarcity plan or food security plan going forward that makes any sense without a whole lot less meat and dairy in the diet and my primary interest in switching plant based almost three years ago was because it was something that I could do that was instantaneous and self empowering that I could do to help the environment you know you watch all these films about climate change and Al Gore never tells you what to do so all you do is you just kind of get this feeling in the pit of your stomach of anxiety and okay I'll give more money to Greenpeace or whomever you know and you know this is something you can actually do this is actionable I mean you can go buy a Prius but all the tailpipe emissions of everything including aircraft trains and cargo ships and everything else don't add up to the amount of warming effect created by animal agriculture so here's something you can do instantaneously you don't have to wait for the politicians to do it you can just do it and then as that meme spreads virally outward from you as you look you know you have more energy you look more healthy you look younger your fitter you don't get sick all those things and people start to reject it and then after a while they start to say that's kind of interesting I can't completely ignore this and now you've actually done something because every single person that you can you can help to see this way of living they will then help others and it will spread and there's a lot of things inhibiting that spread obviously but it was critical we literally faced a dilemma we may lose half the students in this school because the families are rebelled but we have to do it it's the right thing to do we're not running the school as a business we're not trying to make money at it thank God because we're not but we're trying to do something right and figure out the best way to do it it's the best way to educate kids and the kids that are coming out of it are switched on, energetic they're interesting because they look you right in the eye as an equal they're this tall they're not the slightest bit cowed by a conversation with an adult give me one second to finish this thought because part of what the school seems to foster it's intentionally fostering but what seems to be working is this idea of critical thinking the kids get to review the teachers it's not unidirectional if the teacher is doing something wrong the kids get to not in class there is a channel for the kids to review the teachers and say I'm just not getting it or whatever it is so it teaches them to not just accept the sort of the word the wisdom of their elders or the momentum of social systems but to challenge it and to think critically and this is going to be so important because people are going to have to think critically looking at all of these systems and values that have been handed down to us that are not going to work going forward and Christiana Wiley who runs the plant power task force for us came up with a really interesting thing this is not about the paleo diet versus the plant based diet or anything it's not about what our ancestors used to eat it's about what we have to eat going forward and this is just an example of how we have to adapt so she says it's the adaptive diet what do human beings do better than any other animal? we can adapt we can adapt to being underwater build a sub or a scuba tank we can adapt to the air by building an aircraft a helicopter and we can adapt to anything it's what we do best so it's the adaptive diet it doesn't matter what people were eating 100,000 years ago meat might have been the killer app 100,000 years ago probably was out of Africa into northern Europe where the plants are buried under 6 feet of snow for 5 months out of the year you're not a vegetarian you know, inuits aren't vegetarians they're there because it was possible for the human to adapt to eating an all meat diet if necessary so we adapt it's what we do best so the critical thinking in the kids is something that the educational system widespread doesn't really foster and I think the best thing you can teach somebody is to not need you as a teacher not in the conventional way anyway in an unconventional way where you listen carefully for what they love and are interested in and you find those little hooks to engage their interest because once they've taught themselves to learn they'll just learn voraciously but you had a question I was just curious how many kids are in a class it's a 14 to 1 ratio no it's smaller than that in the older classes there are but in the early childhood it's 5 to 1 and then so that's the 2-3 year olds and then it's 6 to 1 and when you get into first grade it's 12 to 1 so we will add another teacher to the classroom when that happens and then we've got middle school and high school now and obviously the ratio is bigger but it would never get above 15 to 18 in the high school classes because they're more autonomous and that sort of thing but it's I mean it's working and it's amazing and yes we did lose a few from just saying that we were going plant based but since Christmas we've enrolled 25 children they've just popped in so anything else anybody wants to get into just conceptually I'm curious what are your thoughts about how does filmmaking fit into these solutions well look I mean film is given a disproportionate value I think in our society for shaping people's values and perspectives so I think filmmaking is an important aspect of change I think it played a role in civil rights movement and anti-war campaigns and Vietnam era and our perception of Iraq and Afghanistan and things like that I think it's not the type of filmmaking that I do Avatar is not it's not kind of directly focused on a contemporary issue it's more of an allegorical film that speaks to us at almost more of a subconscious level and it creates this sense of yearning for the higher version of ourselves that we imagine used to exist I'm not sure it ever really did exist and I don't think you know being an early human 50,000 years ago was all that much fun although we are finding evidence of art and music and things like that but I think that what the Avatar films can do is to remind you of that sense of yearning for nature and connectedness that you had when you were a kid when you took a walk in the woods and you've just edited it slowly out of your life and people do need to reconnect what that movie is about and what the subsequent films are about is really about connection with each other and how we earn our sense of belonging through our actions and the responsibility that we take and that's kind of what it's all about it's those bonds that are going to get us through the next 100 years I think this is the defining century this is the make or break for us we get through the end of the century we've gone past kind of an adolescence we've gone past the bad years or the crazy years you're not old enough to have had kids that have gone through their teenage years probably but it gets a little nuts and then it settles down and you learn from them and they learn hopefully a little bit from you and from life and they get through that and the essence of the human race is coming to an end one way or the other I think in this century but that's exciting apocryphal Chinese curses may you live in interesting times we live in the most interesting times of all time so that's kind of fun kind of scary but there's so much and I I want to be a part of the solution on that challenge I have to ask even though I feel there's aspects of this that are clear to all of us but I'd love you to speak into how your love story and partnership has inspired your service in the world related to all these issues awww I think having a partner that backs your play and I back Suzie's play and she backs my play is really important and I think it's important to pre-select in a way for that person consciously or subconsciously you have to find somebody that you have enough common ground with that you know that you're going to tackle things together and be a team we weren't looking for each other but we use this aviation term fighter jets they'll say I'm on your six which means you're right behind them but we say we're on your six we're on your nine we're on your three we're on your twelve depending on you know what we're doing and we're side by side or we're somebody's leading or somebody's following and we do we back each other's play no matter what that's exactly right and Suzie was out with me on the expedition 11 miles above me in the ship talking to me she grabbed the microphone and took over the comm system you know I've backed her 100% with the school I mean the school started off in a funny way because there was a dissatisfaction with the schools in our area alright let's home school Suzie said well it was home school because that had been successful with Jasper I said well the kids are still going to need social interaction the interpersonal conflict resolution and sense of responsibility and things like that responsibility to each other is going to be an important part of their education could we get a couple of like-minded families to come in with us and we'll do kind of a group home school and defray the cost of a teacher to do that sort of made sense overnight it was a school you know all of a sudden it was like well that's a little too big to have in our living room we should find a place to rent and then that rents a little high maybe we need to get some more students and you know one thing led to another a year later it was a school yeah we started with 11 11 children but to go back to what you were talking about when Jim and I met on Titanic and everybody else saw the sparks flying way before we did and we actually didn't but we were way too professional to let everything didn't tip our hand to one another until we were completely wrapped because we were just way too professional and when we did decide to commit to one another I kind of said to Jim one of us is going to have to quit working and something tells me it's not going to be you and oh by the way I really want to have a bunch of kids and we kind of had made a pact I mean we obviously worked together as director and actress but we kind of made a pact that we wouldn't work together in that capacity going forward and we really just built a home and built a family together and what's interesting is that it was November of 05 when Jim was talking about do I continue to do expeditions so I do this little film called Avatar and I was saying we have to educate our children and I don't know what to do and you went off and did Avatar, I went off and did Muse and we had these whole worlds our world together was always really solid but we had these whole other worlds that we were doing and interestingly enough it everything has dev-tailed beautifully in terms of the environmental piece three years ago May 7th 2012 we watched this film called Forks Over Knives and it completely switched the way we think about how we're eating about the environment and that piece has that's taken over I mean I mean plant-based eating has revolutionized our whole household view of ourselves it was the first thing that actually gave me hope about rescuing the biosphere and preventing runaway greenhouse warming because I didn't see a government that's been hijacked by the coal and oil and gas industry reacting quickly enough I didn't see the populace who are being fed so much disinformation from rising up and forcing change from policy makers soon enough and all of a sudden I realized here's a handy thermostat that we can just turn it all down with if things get bad enough and people realize it they can literally make change immediately this carbon dioxide coming out of tailpipes is something that's going to be around for hundreds of years it's got a half-life active half-life of 100 years methane only 12 years and methane is a big component of agricultural greenhouse gases so methane can have a big warming effect some people say 25 times some people say 75 times as CO2 depending on how you parse the timeline but you can switch it off in 12 years so that's pretty amazing if the entire human race just woke up out of its fog tomorrow and said let's just shut off this climate change thing no matter how it impacts our lives let's do it with alternative energy it would still take us 20 to 30 years to replace our existing grid just the sheer build out time just the engineering time and manufacturing time installation time if we woke up out of that same fog and all decided to act together this is pure fantasy obviously but it's an interesting kind of thought exercise and decided to switch off climate change tomorrow we could do it in one day just have to not eat any meat and dairy and the market demand falls off everybody has to switch to plant based agriculture you rewild half of the farmland on the planet and your greenhouse emissions have gone down by 14.5% now the energy sector is still bigger obviously we still got to solve alternative energy but that's going to be a slower response time but you can take your foot off throttle right away so there's a potential there to make a big difference but again this is going to have to be a grassroots thing because the meat and dairy industry has got its hooks dug into to the people running the show as much as the coal and oil industry they've just been ducking the spotlight they've been out of the spotlight coal and oil has taken the heat for the heat and meat and dairy aren't you know when they get outed on this they're going to fight back and it's going to be like tobacco all over again with the same result but 20 years later but the difference is that people can make a difference so again it's communication and you're asking about the effectiveness of film well one film forks over knives switched us around and we've given it out to hundreds of people and of those hundreds of people there are 20 or 25 people who have heard the message and I think it's probably more yeah maybe more but it's probably the most effective documentary ever made in that regard because it gives you something very simple to do you watch a documentary on climate changing convenient truth or whatever and what do they give you to do come to our website and get feeling more hopeless insulate your house you know a lot of sense of power from that one so that's the real piece that has dovetailed us together in terms of everything that I've learned over the last you know 10 years with doing music and then all of the avatar films and it's a piece that we can lock arms and walk together and you know when you talk about you guys being able to go out and basically do whatever you want to do and you know drive fast cars and hang out and get your toes painted you know yeah that was that week in Vegas you don't remember exactly exactly but we realize we have an amazing privilege and opportunity and a platform to be able to make a difference and to use that for the greater good and go out and make a difference and Jim can certainly go out and speak to tens of millions of people you know through his through what he's doing I have the ability to touch people's lives through education and we're just doing everything we can with all of the extra bandwidth that we have it's completely focused on bringing awareness between livestock production and the environment I keep almost stepping on this thing I'm afraid I'm going to start going God, God, God I just want to simply say thank you for using that platform to create a better world thanks, thanks appreciate that how can you not you know I mean as a parent how can you not but I mean I think everybody here feels that sense of duty you know and it seems to be just blithely missing and so many people and vitally it's not even it's almost sniggered at in some circles you know you go to New York and you look at the centers of you know sort of corporate might and it's sort of like there's a naivete to that kind of idealism and sense of defining your purpose through helping others you know and they're just wrong you know but it's going to take a while for things to shift obviously and we just got to keep at it well look we've talked enough and we have a remarkable artist right here that has already expressed a willingness to come back up here so we're going to get off thanks you guys