How’s everybody doing? Good. Excited to be with you all here today. My name is Tony Weaver, Jr. and I am the founder of Weird Enough Productions, a media company building a new world of stories that will change the one we live in. Now question, is anybody familiar with the Power Rangers series at all? We haven’t any Power Rangers fans. Okay, so Power Rangers as a franchise has been around longer than I have been alive. However, there is one thing that is consistent throughout every Power Rangers series, whether they’re pirates, ninjas, or in space, one thing always remains the same. The Power Rangers are always a group of teenagers with attitude, and when they come across a problem in something that seems larger than themselves, they mumble the words, it’s morphin’ time, and they go and get things done. So I’ve always been into things like Power Rangers. This is a picture of me at three years old dressed as Batman, and I put this picture to show that I’ve always looked good in capes, okay? This isn’t a new thing for me, all right? This is always something I’ve been good with, and it’s normal for young people to dress up as heroes that they like. However, I kind of never stopped dressing up as heroes that I liked, and as I grew older, my mom would always think to herself, well, I wonder when is he gonna grow out of it? But the answer was never, because it wasn’t gonna happen. I’ve always found solace in the idea of heroes. Ordinary people with the power to create extraordinary change. Throughout my life, I would say that what I’ve always wanted to be is a hero. However, when people would look at me, normally what I would be is a weirdo. When I was in middle school, I was moved to a high achievers program that took me about two hours to get to from my house every day. I went from being in a predominantly black school to being one of the only black students in my class. And when I showed up there, I wanted to be cool like all of the heroes that I looked up to, but instead I was just the weird kid. I wanted to be strong like Batman, but instead I was bullied constantly. I wanted to be cool like Ash from Pokemon, but instead it was really hard for me to make friends. I wanted to be smart like Robin, but when I submit my papers, I get notes back from my teacher that said, hey, did you write this? Talk to me after class. Plagiarism is wrong. As much as I wanted to be powerful like the heroes that I saw on TV, I felt powerless. And while I was in the seventh grade, I attempted suicide. In the midst of that dark place, my parents couldn’t get to me. I didn’t have any friends that could get to me. What I did have were stories. Stories were that powerful for me. When I was in that dark place one day, I turned on the TV and I saw a show called Naruto. Do you have any Naruto fans in the audience? Hidden Leaf represent? Okay. All right. For those of you that are uninitiated, Naruto is a show about the title character, our blonde-haired friend here named Naruto, who in this world full of ninjas and amazing powers wants to be the most impressive ninja that the world has ever seen. Naruto features a character named Rock Lee. He’s our character with the black hair here. And Rock Lee, in this world full of people that had all these amazing powers and abilities, had absolutely no powers of his own. So he would go to class every day with peers that could make clones of themselves, summon giant animals, and control elements. And he could literally do nothing but be physically strong. But instead of focusing on what he couldn’t do, he decided that he was going to focus on what he could do. Instead of comparing himself to his peers, he decided that he was going to stand firm in what he was capable of and be his best self for what that meant individually for him. And watching him fight his hardships made me be strong at a time when I didn’t feel like my life had value, because stories are that powerful. I got better. Flash forward a couple of years, I’m in college at Elon University, where I’m studying communications, and as a part of one of my classes, I volunteer at an elementary school where I meet an African-American fourth grader named Nazir. I meet with Nazir once a week, and I’m supposed to be a friendly face that is not a teacher to help him with any curriculum-related issues that he has had. However, I was supposed to be a tutor, I was given very specific instructions, talked to the kids about class, however when I showed up he only wanted to talk about cartoons. That was all he wanted to talk about. And he knew we had the right person, because he knew I had seen it. He knew that I had opinions on it too. So once a week, Nazir had the opportunity to talk to somebody that looked like him about the things that he loved. He didn’t have to be the weirdo for that one time a week. And one day I was having a conversation with him, Halloween was coming up, and I said, hey, who are you going to dress as for Halloween? Because his favorite character was a character named Ben 10 who has this watch that lets him turn into 10 different types of aliens. And he told me, I can’t be Ben because I don’t look like him. I’m going to dress as CJ from Grand Theft Auto. Because in the fourth grade, when he had to think about who looks like me, who can I be, he thought of the main character of a video game where you kill people, steal things, and run away from police. He thought that it wasn’t possible for him to be a hero. And when I looked at Nazir, I not only saw myself, I saw an entire generation of young people that wanted to be heroes, but didn’t feel like they had the capacity to. So I started doing some research, and what I found was staggering. Majority of students in the United States are not media literate. Media and technology have advanced significantly faster than our education system has been able to, and young people of today are not prepared for the images that they see on TV and social media. Majority of students in the United States aren’t digitally literate, so they don’t understand the ramifications of what happens online and what that means in real life. And they also don’t understand the systems that are at play when they go online and algorithms determine what they see. And in addition to that, majority of students in the United States aren’t reading on great level. So they’re not media literate, they’re not digitally literate, and they’re not traditionally literate either. I continue to do my research, and what I found was that the average American student engages with media content over 10 and a half hours a day. So if you think about the amount of time that we spend in school, they spend almost twice as much of that time engaging with media content that we know to be false, discriminatory, and manipulative. 95% of American households have at least one television, so it’s something that a lot of young people are being exposed to. And when I looked at these numbers, it really scared me, because we know what happens when media is used for evil. But it also gave me an amazing idea, because we know what happens when media is used for good. We saw it in 2015, when Lin-Manuel Miranda said, I am not throwing away my shot, and sparked a wave of diversity that spread across the theater community. We saw it when Stephen Universe put LGBTQ representation on prime time children’s television and showed young people around the world that they are no less, no matter who they love. We saw it about a year ago, when black people around the world got the opportunity to build community around the phrase, Wakanda forever. Black Panther made over a billion dollars at the box office, the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture and had record breaking representation. But what made the representation so powerful wasn’t the fact that it was brought to the main stage. It was what the community did with it after. What made Black Panther so amazing was that we had the Black Panther Challenge, where churches and schools were banding together to show positive representation to their students, where teachers were using Wakanda as an archetype for science lessons to show students that they could be heroes and scientists. It was this idea that brought an equation to my mind. Plus curricula equals conquer. If we can take diverse media content and partner it with actionable, accessible curricula, we can conquer systemic inequity. At Weird Enough Productions, we do that through the Uncomments. A group of heroes that we created focused on helping everybody embrace the hero that is inside. The Uncomments tells the story of a group of hesitant heroes that leap into action when one of them predicts a great evil. Weird Enough, we use the Uncomments in two ways. Number one, through our technology platform, Weird Enough HQ, where we say we create comics and community for nerds and creators of all kinds. We want to make comics diverse, transparent, and accessible. We create the comics in a diverse way. We’re transparent about our process. We turn our scripts into blog posts. We turn our writers’ meetings into podcasts. If you’re a young person and you want to write, you can go read the comic and then listen to exactly how we did it. All of our process videos and illustrations, every program, every brush that we use is there and available for people to see. Then, for our media literacy platform, Get Media Lit, we take those same comics and we partner them with groundbreaking media literacy curricula to teach students how to combat fake news, how to identify media bias, and how to create media content of their own to uplift their communities. So students can go and read the Uncomments, get groundbreaking education around how to use media to advocate for themselves, and then go be heroes in their own communities. So schools like Creed Academy, a charter school in Los Angeles specifically for homeless students, those students can go and create photo campaigns focused on showing what homelessness does in their community. Students that are losing their community to gentrification can use media as a way to conserve their culture. There are five-month comments, and with each comment, I want to give you all a point for how you all can use your position as communication professionals to fight systemic inequity. This is Iris. Iris has the ability to see energies, details, and outcomes. So she has the ability to see something that no one else can see. Through her vision, she sees things that other people can’t discern. This is Echo. Echo has super hearing ability. He can discern lots of different things, but he’s even more powerful when he’s specifically listening for something. This is Sage. Sage has the power to empathetically connect with technology. So whereas most hackers would crack a code or something like that, Sage will ask a firewall really nicely to open, and generally it’ll do it for him. This is Influencer, and as his name implies, he is a literal influencer. And in addition to being a superhero, it has millions of people that follow him. And finally, this is Chikara, whose name means power. For Chikara, the answer is not whether she can do it or not. The question is, does she want to do it? Because the answer is yes, I recommend you get out of the way, because it probably won’t end well for you. Through the uncommon, I want you all to think about five things. As communication professionals, we see things that other people don’t see. We understand how the news cycle works and how these things are implemented. As communicators, we have the ability to listen to our audiences and to listen to the industry. Don’t listen just to hear, listen to understand and comprehend what people are going through. As communicators and professionals, we use technology to create things at scale. Use that technology with empathy, and understand how that technology impacts the communities that you are a part of. As communicators, we have influence. Use that influence for something positive. And finally, as communicators, we have power. Leverage the power that you have over the communities that you serve with the organizations that you work with. Recognize the power that you hold by being able to be a part of this institution. And take a look at all the ways that the world needs to change. Breathe in real deep and say, it’s morphine time. Thank you. Thank you.