News. You get smart people who say hello to you a lot. And, i think, what separates us is is not being afraid of reality and science. D, one experience is ever was the debate at the creation museum. At me that they had proof that the earth is 6000 years old. Awk like, you know, ward. Fire was created in thousand years ago. Back. Eted i said, i may be a whore. You are still wrong. Am . So, what if i that have to do with a new thing. I know many sex workers who are smarter than me and believe in science. [applause] yes. My favorite thing is when you talk about is my personal belief that earth control is a human right and should be free for anyone who wants it. Anybody who needs an abortion should get one without apology. [applause] popular things to say outside of these walls. Superpopular. I am telling you. People love it. My favorite thing that i put up in the universe and people come back at me with is, why should i have to pay for your Birth Control . I do not want to pay for your birthcontrol. I think it is funny. I would pay any amount for yours. [applause] without further ado, i would reset i will resell the we are doing. This is ignite. Without further ado, jean pittsburgh. Hello. Am the founder and i am talking to you about how we took over the world and build a community and less than a year. Lesbians are taking over the world. What is this . We are a community of queer women. Else awaye nothing from today, highfives are magic. Give your neighbor a high five. It is tradition. You nailed the high five portion of today. What problem are you try to solve . We can goans in tech, to events and they look like men. We can go to lgbt events and they also look like this. Series ando do a value. How to provide we decide to happy hours and we were not sure if women in tech exist. I have done gay events and it is hard to get women to show up. I thought one of thing one of three things was happening. There are not lesbians. That is not true. They are home with their cat or girlfriend. No judgment. We wanted to create value. We had to figure out how to provide value. Something magical happened for me. Lesbians showed up to something. It was crazy and they kept showing up. All of a sudden, people in other cities emailed me and all we did was provide value by connecting. It turns out that finding lesbians is not easy and there is no secret handshake. I am upset about that. We can start one. I said, yes. We can host one in chicago. If there is a happy hour, i will do it. This is the best, ever. There are lesbians in tech. We have happy hours in 14 different cities and three international cities. London, berlin, toronto. Ofhave built a community 4000 queer women in tech. We all have Passion Projects and it turns out that sleep is not totally overrated. We had to figure out how to make it sustainable. We became too broad. It turns out that lesbians all need to connect. Lost the tech focus. People started calling us lesbians with jobs. We had to figure out how to get back to the value. Of hangoutsseries and people attended the events from all over the world. They said that they wanted deeper connections outside of happy hour. Our firstw we got to summit in separate cisco back in february. We San Francisco back in february. We have people like megan smith. People wanted role models. I said, who is a career woman in tech you would want to hear speak and 95 did not have one name. The other one said megan smith. People wanted this. How did we get the money . I saw paper on twitter i stock people on twitter. Stalk people on twitter. If you put handles in your twitter name, that would save me time. Tell your friends. People would say, what is your vision. Screw that. Strategic clans suck and they are a waste of time. Plans suck and they are a waste of time. Run experiments. In San Francisco, they got jealous. I said i would listen to my community. If we can sell tickets, i will do it. They proved it to me and we had a summit. The white house called and asked us to help plan the best Innovation Summit the first Innovation Summit. I said, i have to check my calendar. I can work something out. I said, yes. Of course. We are going to host another summit and it turns out that people really like summits. You are all invited. There are going to be a lot of highfives and allies and friends are all invited. How can you build a community that takes over the world question mark start with value. Do not go too far ahead. Do not create the Strategic Land yet. When in doubt, give high fives. Thank you. Please welcome depak. Last year, i met a smart and courageous young man named robert. Inworks at a pot bellies washington dc and he makes less than 10 an hour with no benefits. Washington, d. C. And he makes less than 10 an hour with no benefits. He told me that he barely exists. It has to be paid, he said. He said, how can i get ahead on poverty wages and no benefits . They had, even though a mediocre year, the ceo doubled yearay to 2. 3 million a and his wage is 1000 an hour. Robert is not fighting for 1000 an hour. He knows he deserves to be paid more and that is why robert has joined with his coworkers in washington and across the country, bringing others with higher the fight to wages and the fight for 15. Millionst has inspired who see themselves and roberts story. One third of our country live below 200 of the poverty line and earn less than 47,000 for a family of four. How did we get into this mess . 1973, there was a relationship between Economic Growth and reductions in the poverty rate. They broke apart in the 1970s. Together, thed poverty rate in United States would have fallen to 0 in 1986 and stayed there. If wages had kept pace with productivity, americas lois aid workers would be making 17 an hour. Workers would be making 17 an hour. We have been lost in the haze of a tired and stale debate. Conservatives blame the victim and promote trickle down. Many liberals say that there is not much we can do about inequality and poverty generated in the market and through the market. We can have ameliorating programs to help at the margin. Both miss. We need to value labor in proportion to the contribution to the nations online. Bottom line. The best Antipoverty Program is a job that pays a living wage. We can break out of the debate we have been stuck in for the last 50 years and reduce poverty by taking three simple steps. Raise wages so that workers earn a living wage and workers catch up with productivity growth. The minimum wage would go up a lot, like in seattle. Make it easier for workers to bargain with employers through collective bargaining at the workplace. Number two. We need to eliminate racial and gender inequity in the labor market. Poverty is not just economic. It is a Racial Justice issue and a womens rights issue. We need to tear down the obstacles to employment and we need to create workplaces that recognize that workers are people with families. Clearly, we need to change things so that your paycheck is not smaller because of your skin color or that you are a woman. Number three. We need important policies in this country and we have to invest in key sectors of the economy. The green economy. Early childhood education. We need to create millions of jobs and make them accessible to people who need them. This strategy would reduce poverty in United States of america by 80 . This is the moral crisis of our time and this issue ought to be at the center of progressive politics in our country and in the 2016 election. We now know what to do and we need to build the public will to do it. Change in america comes through social movements. Social movements help to make the impossible possible. This country would have believed that Marriage Equality or a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants would move to the center of political debate and now, it is a question of when they will be achieved and not if. We can do the same on this issue. We at the center for Community Change are launching a campaign to do just that. Join us. This is the richest country in the history of the earth. We can build a society in which everyone has not just enough to survive. They have enough to thrive. Thank you very much. [applause] so, i hold the dubious distinction of being a repeater. I was here last year and it was terrifying. I am your token misogynist. Not misogynist. Nasa just. Hist. Soc i am going to look at the incoherence of innovation. Apps. Ok at machines and everythingverted natural and necessary to a mechanistic view of the world. Look at how we look at human needs. Food. Shelter. Education. Fully in al he mechanistic place. We used to have a metaphor of education that was a garden and we would nurture the intellect and culture interests. It entails that children are organic matter and they are all different with known things that they need. In the analogy, soil, water, sunlight. There is a magical alchemy that educators are responsible for. We have moved to a language of the factory. We have inputs and outputs. The kid is a product of a good school. That children is. Re uniform widgets why do they need arch . Art . The teachers are factory workers and it is a conveyor belt. A stamp is put on their ass. None are left behind. We have monetized children. We invest in the future and our kids. They are too small to fail. We can kid ourselves. The prevailing understanding is financial return and that is how it is used. Police say that a reason to do anything is because it is lucrative and we have fallen so far into this paradigm of reifying the economy that, the basis on which we decide something is right or wrong is whether or not it grows or shrinks gdp. We have wandered so far from the reasons that we exist as humans that we are the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoon. What the fuck are we even saying . I know that when i look in my think,eyes, i definitely roi. I love that sweet that is how parents feel about our children. Right . We think, that is some money. Children are not just giant money suckers. Within this monetary framework. If you want to hang out there and you do not believe me, investment language is bull shit. We are talking about miniscule amounts for social issues. What we are talking about is adding to more appropriately, not taking away from food stamps atchup. A fucking c it is insulting to the people who need this. We have wandered so far into this innovative paradigm of loving the economy and we are in platos caves. We think we are looking outside and we are looking at shadows on a fucking wall. Look at the place on the slide. Awaypposition is going from us and the persuadables are getting on board. They love this message. Do you know what is set what is being said in this moment . Values is a nation of founded on the idea that all men and women are created equal. Withhold that all people we hold that all people have rights, no matter where they come from. The reason we do things is because it is more or less lucrative and that is the basis of judgment in our society. That is not even particularly innovative. We do not need to say that. We need to say that all people have rights. Do you . That is a conversation we want ande happening having the conversation that our opposition is thrilled that we allow them to avoid. [applause] yes. Im going to say one thing. That is a good take home for all of us. Ofare going to see a lot people with a lot of interesting ideas and we have been in a conference with a lot of people with ideas. Commit yourself to being a pack mule for someone in this room. Be a grunt for that project. Voice. Heir can you make that commitment . That is what we need to do. We need to focus on ourselves and what we are doing. You can focus on your project and be the legs, the body, the hands of someone else. Moving on. [applause] when i was in india and preparing to move to the United States, one of my teachers told me that the next time she saw me, i would be an american. I was excited by the prospect and it turned out to be a lot harder to fit myself into my new country than i would have hoped. I watched hours and hours of television every day to figure out how to be american and i think that i was doing ok. Something happened. All of the white girls were supposed to come to my Birthday Party and did not show up. I try not to see color. I know. Of myalways really aware own and felt so strange. My friends told me that they did not see me as indian and i was just like them. I went to my first rally under duress. I was taught that changing the roles around race had nothing to do with me. Something miraculous happened at the rally. For the first time in the 12 years since my family immigrated, i felt a sense of belonging and i understood that being an american is not about looking like marcia brady. It is about working with the people around you to create the most Effective Community possible. Lotse demographic change, of people imagine that racism will just fade away and we will fall in love, marry each other, andmillions of babies have exotic looking hair, skin, and eyes. You can trust me on this. Te your wayjust da to Racial Justice. [applause] what we can do is organize our way there. There are three things that i have learned about how to build multiracial communities and organizations. The first thing that is the most important is the real and complete selfacceptance. Learid selfacceptance selfacceptance. The they had excluded black families mortgagesg or getting for their homes. By the early 1970s, middleclass families had been explicitly chosen by congress as being ok to emigrate because we were privileged in our home countries. We were considered ok to move in and i felt guilty about that for a long time. I felt so bad about it that i would build community with all kinds of people other than my own. Your community has to include you, with all of your privileges and a prescience a prescience oppressions. We have to talk about racial hierarchy and discrimination. Color blindness is a corrupt concept that is based on the idea that our brains can do something that they are not capable of doing. [applause] where the universal is white, we have to be clear about who and what we are talking about. The third lesson is that equity has to be the goal. Not just diversity. Think of our project as a party and you can invite me to the party. I could be interested enough to go. I the music does not suit me, find it boring, and i did not have a way to change it, i will not stay very long. In politics, this lays out as people of color to me to a meeting and nobody listens to a word they say. That is called tokenism. This framework, we acknowledge that all the good things at the center of our society, the great education, the safe housing, the Excellent Health care, all communities contribute and deserve to have access to those good things. Nothis framework, we do craft a strategy until all of the communities we are concerned about have a chance to shape it. We do not shape set the play list for the Party Without asking what they want to listen to. Multiracial community is beautiful and it has excellent reward. You laugh at everyone. Ands everyones jokes eat food. You get your lease release the potential in every human being. That is our job as progressives and the key to a great life. Thank you so much. [applause] why are you so funny and your content sucks . Im not talking about you or you. Im talking about all of us. Progressive and ernest dogooders. How is it that we make up such a dynamic and Hilarious Group of people and, when it comes to putting out content for our issues, we struggle. We struggle to find humorous ways to talk about issues we care about. We often be people over the head with jargon or difficult realities or sad stories. There is a reason. The issues we work on are serious and the solution requires serious investigation. Are they not going to take us seriously if we are funny . Who has a luxury to laugh . I do not have time to laugh. Think about this. Scheuer gives us the opportunity to tackle difficult issues in new ways. Schumer gives us the opportunity to tackle difficult issues in new ways. Used humor to talk about an issue that was incredibly difficult. Interpersonal racial aggression. Also motivates us to get off our asses. Sometimes, they need a push and they are more likely to do something if you make them laugh about it. We all remember the great schlep. There is a science to this. Upworthy did a study and you will not believe what they found. [laughter] people love stories they can relate to. They like stories with heroes and villains. They like underdogs. They like to be shocked. And, they like a gotcha moment. The next time you think about making content, think about how you can connect on a human level and what is something that happens every single day that you could connect with somebody on. This is an example of a video that we did with the aclu on reproductive rights. This is a legislator pretending to be a doctor. Taking the highly contested issue to a logical conclusion. We do not want random medical advice from bozos. Think about this video that we launched. Santa is pretending to be the nsa. This was widely popular. Most people think that santa is as creepy as the nsa. [laughter] do not be afraid to say what everybody is thinking. Obviouss, it is most answer that gets the biggest response and resonates the most. [laughter] meet people where they are at. If they want cap videos, give them cap videos. Os, give them cat videos. The internet survives on the systematic humiliation of animals. Talk about your issues in the simplest way possible. People do not know as much as you do and what is the one thing that they need to know when they walk away from talking with you. Do not be too liberal. You are right that it is your health care decision. When is the last time someone has talked like that . Do not be afraid to use metaphors or laymans terms. Think about what motivates your audience. Why should i care . Why should i care about your issue . Your state . Your email list . Remember that humorous content is a nonoffensive pickup line at the bar. How you follow through means everything. We want to inspire people. We want the numbers of people we need to make a change we want to make and we need to get new strategies to engage new people. Making them smile is one of them. Whatever you do, do not try too hard and do not start a joke with [laughter] nk, but a blac we all know where that ends up. Use an authentic voice and schumer in your everyday life humor in your everyday life. Have fun with it. [applause] amy smith. I am amy. I am an obamacare succ