Thank you. It’s good music. I’m flattered. It’s good to be here with everyone. Let’s just first start. Actually, could everyone please just stand up? For a minute. Oh, it’s so good to see everyone. So, I just want to start asking, why are you standing up? Can this… So, some guy in a velvet jacket said so. Anyone over here, why are you standing up? Because of showing respect. Showing respect. Thank you. I feel respected. Anyone else? Why are you standing up? Anyone want to go deeper on this? I asked nicely. How did I ask? I said please. So, whenever someone says please, you’re more open to what they have to say, or you just automatically do it. Who would go deeper? You want to show respect to people at all times. You’re not always standing up. Trust? Okay, that’s a mistake. It’s definitely a mistake. Everyone else is doing it. Now we’re getting to the underside of our motivations. Thank you for the honesty. Been sitting a long time. You want to break? I just gave you some relief. Okay. Good. You asked in the right context. I what? You asked in the right context. I asked in the right context. Right. So, this idea of being at a conference as unique as this conference is, is still not unique in more ways than it is unique. Just like all of us are not really so special. There’s some things that make us special and a lot of things that don’t. So, in the right context, we’re sharing… Why are you still standing by the way? You can sit down. Okay. Oh, but yeah, why are you sitting down? Please, please, people escape the palm of my hand. Please. Yes. As you like. Be free. Be free. So, we’re sharing a world right now that none of us built, but all of us are reinforcing around how we behave in this particular moment. And what are all the things that you think went into building the set of norms and conventions so that I could come out here and please ask you to stand and you would all stand so obediently? How… Where did that come from? White supremacy. Yeah, absolutely. What else? Archetypes. Archetypes of… What? Someone said over here something? Colonization. Colonization? Patriarchy. Patriarchy. Okay. And is there anything else that’s more about the specific convention of a conference and being in an audience and having a presenter? People might say that is a structure of colonization. That is a structure of patriarchy and white supremacy. I was just going to say you’re on stage and we’re observing you. Yes. We’re going to put the power out there where because of the fact that if you’re on stage and we’re here to watch you speak, if you’re going to have us interact, it’s important to do that. Yes. Okay. Great. I’m not going to repeat all that, but hopefully some people in the room heard it. So, there’s a lot that goes into that. And in all the ways that kind of trained you to respond to me in that way, how many of those mechanisms, how many of those experiences came in the form of a press release? Right? Probably not many. So, we’ve had a lot of different experiences, but reading a press release is probably not the experience that made you respond to me in that way. It was probably another set of experiences. Because when we’re talking about building shared worlds and the belief systems that are the hallmark of those shared worlds or shared cultures, when we’re talking about doing things that we would do in one context but not another, because even if with all those factors there, I’m sure that if I came up to you on the street, like it goes back to context, if I came up to you on the street in this little outfit with my little self and I asked you to stand up, even if you know me, you probably wouldn’t do that. So, what are all the ways in which we’re trained to do that? What goes into that? I would say strategic communications are among the weakest of our tools in helping shape that kind of behavior. And how many people here are responsible for, say, sending out emails on behalf of organizations? So, there’s a lot of people. How many of you have built the world in which what you’re asking people to do in those emails not only makes sense for them to do, but feels automatic, almost compulsive for them to do? How many of you who send out emails feel that you’ve built the worlds in which what you’re asking people to do in those emails feels compulsive to the people receiving them? How many of you think, what is the actual behavior that you think most people receiving those emails engage in? Delete or ignore some version. Is that your target’s behavior goal? Do you go back to the head of marketing or the executive director and said, I achieved the deletion rate I was going for? Yet we’re doing this all the time. In fact, sending out emails and thinking they drive people’s behavior is actually a convention of the shale world we believe in around activism. So, I think if someone from Ben & Jerry’s, I’m so influenced by everything everyone said today, if someone from Ben & Jerry’s, a vice president came out and you were at a conference, would you clap just because they were introduced? How does that help Enrique and migrant justice? How does that actually undermine Enrique and migrant justice? So, we can think of all our own behaviors and then we can think what kind of relationship do we have with people that actually is strong enough and the context is set enough that when we ask them to walk through fire, they walk through fire. That’s something that actually doesn’t make sense to most of the world, like being an ardent, active participant relentlessly in social change, which doesn’t make sense to the rest of the world largely, makes sense to the people we’re in relationship with. How many of us are really building the world to do that? So, with Pop Culture Collaborative, we’ve developed a framework that really thinks about behavior change, thinks about the beliefs and how they get embedded, how they get codified in our mind, something we often call mental models. That narrative is a part of embedding those mental models, but narrative is not, communications is certainly not the driver of behavior, but it can be a way of part of the sort of set of experiences of embedding these belief systems and creating cultures around those belief systems. And unfortunately, this framework is not a worksheet. You can’t use this as a worksheet, sadly, I wish. I mean, if this all were that easy, would we be losing so much? Right? Liz is talking about where we are in reproductive rights and abortion, and if it were a matter of filling out the strategic communications framework that you downloaded from whatever organization, if it were that easy, would we be losing all our freedoms, so many of our freedoms? So, that’s clearly not a worksheet there, but it’s a very faint shadow of a process of deep strategic work that actually makes sure that behavior change and the embedding of mental models and building worlds and cultures is actually the goal, and that all the communicating work we do is in service of that goal, not parallel to it. Unfortunately, it is not possible to make hard work easy, but we can increase the capacity and the number of people who can do hard work. And so, that’s what this process is here. But it’s not going to work if we have this kind of mentality, a phishing mentality. Our messages are bait on this little line that we cast into the sea, and because we get the right message, everyone swims up and they bite and they get caught, and we just reel them on in. Well, what if the fish and the sea don’t have the appetite for the bait that you’re putting out there? Unfortunately, that’s mostly the case, and we have to think about actually how do you change the waters before you’re casting that bait out into the sea? How do you change the waters? How do you change the appetite of the fish? How do you think about the whole environment and the whole world? Because if we think about communications in this way, that what we have, the challenges that what we have to offer doesn’t fit with where people are at, the solution here, and I’ll say because I’m running out of time, is that we’re not here to change the shape of our box. We’re not here to say that abortion, oh, so people don’t kind of aren’t down with that, so we’ll just change how we feel. We’re actually here to change people’s hearts. And if our messages, though, don’t connect to the belief systems people already have, they’re going to create a cognitive dissonance. We have to create the kind of experiences and build the kind of worlds and cultures that can create the heat to actually reshape and rewire how people think about the world. And then when we go to them with what we have to say at the communications level, those things feel connected. If anyone is 40 and over, you might remember a commercial from our childhoods, about from Tootsie Roll, whatever it is I think I see. It becomes a Tootsie Roll to me. Tootsie Roll, I’m in love with you. That’s actually part of the ad. How do we create worlds so when people see black lives matter, has helped people see structural racism in all the places they look where they didn’t see it before? How can we create cultures where people see opportunity for transforming themselves, transforming the world everywhere they look, and they feel compelled to them? It’s about helping to shape people’s reality. This is my father. My father was a strange person. He died just exactly one year ago. And he created his own reality. This is him a little later in his street philosopher mode. I don’t know if people have lived in a life with people who create their own realities, and amazingly they can suck you into it sometimes. People that you come by in all walks of life. It would take a very few minutes of encountering my father to have lifelong memories of him. Good or bad. Very, very evenly split across those lines. And so my father helped shape his own reality. And we have to think how do we move from the instincts, the conventions, of strategic communications as we know it and practice it now, to insight. We’re all the different ideas we’ve heard from researchers, from activists, from people who’ve broken through, where those ideas become the norm. But at the same time, also bad news, it’s not that Pepsi does research and Coca-Cola doesn’t. Everyone has, many people are competing and they’re all doing research. Some of it wins and some of it loses. Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad. Sometimes people are looking at the same research, but some people see different things in it. So research we cannot fetishize because we have to have high standards for that. So the last thing I would ask you is who’s willing, really, in this room, to move from instinct to insight and then back to better instincts ultimately. And to actually stand up again now in your own terms and fight for building a community here that breaks the conventions of strategic communications and asks us to push farther to stuff that actually works. Is there anyone else who would stand right now? I’m already standing. Anyone else who would stand and commit to that? Who wants to be part of that community? Who would stand on your chair to say that you want to be part of that community? We’re taking names. So everyone’s standing up now because we’re over on time. Everyone’s standing up now. Really think about was this standing less reflex and more intentional on your part? And what does it mean maybe to go from Netflix to Wikipedia time? Less Netflix, more Wikipedia. More conversations like this and less conversations where we’re hearing and saying the same things again and again. And thank you for making it look like I got, you know, a standing ovation. Thank you everyone.