Join Yo-Yo Ma for a special evening of music and dialogue, an invitation to imagine new ways of living in balance with one another and with the planet.
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma convened Christine Lagarde, Bryan Stevenson, and Aulani Wilhelm for an evening of music and dialogue aimed at rebuilding “a positive vision of a future world.” Lagarde framed leadership under scrutiny as emotional discipline: crisis management begins with “inner little equilibrium” and breath, enabling calm, sound judgment, and coalition-building. She distinguished tolerance from complacency: it means “accepting the other for who he is,” not “tolerating anything.”
Stevenson argued that justice at scale requires proximity, narrative change, hope, and discomfort. In a world engineered for distance, “the absence of proximity is a recipe for…bigotry and hatred.” He warned against the “politics of fear and anger,” insisting “no human being is illegal” and that each person is “more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Hope, for Stevenson, is not optimism but “an orientation of the spirit,” sustained by those who “dreamed me” beyond inherited injustice; progress demands “uncomfortable and inconvenient things.”
Wilhelm offered an Indigenous framework of reciprocity and generational time, where humans are “descended from nature” and responsibility (kuleana) is both privilege and duty. She urged true partnership with Indigenous communities who steward vital ecosystems. The session closed with a shared gift of sea salt, symbolizing connection, reciprocity, and “medicine” to carry forward.
That's.
Hello, everybody. How's everyone? I'm so grateful that you all decided to come to this session. I don't know how you're all feeling, but at this moment after this week, I think we've had a lot of stimulus. And at least I feel the need to have some time and mental space to clear my mind. And so for this session, I'd like to visit with three of my wise, inspirational friends, Christine Lagarde, Bryan Stevenson and Aulani Wilhelm. And with some of my new young friends all in the front row, global shapers representing people under 30 who are more than half the population of the world. So let's start with some music. I'd like for us to have a chance to reflect without words. I'm going to play you three songs. A Song of Gratitude, an indigenous song with some accompaniment from a little beep beep beep thing and some other surprises. A Song of gratitude, a song that can contain all the sorrows and joys of the world, and then a song that can give us a glimmer of hope, which, by the way, was written in 1938, one of the darkest moments in human history. So here's the first song. Shakers.
Shakers. Now. One, two.
Yes. You're right. So why are we here? During this difficult moment of change? We lack a positive vision of a future world, one that may be only our children and grandchildren will get to see. We need to build a narrative that all of us can believe in and work toward. What I admire about my three wives friends. Is that they never lose sight of either the big picture or the small picture. They have an ability to oscillate between the analytical and empathetic thinking. Their egos are proportional to the task at hand. And through the toughest moments, they never lose their humanity. They treat every human being they encounter with dignity. This is the kind of wisdom we all need if we are to survive and thrive. Christine. Christine, we. You have helped us weather crisis after crisis. How are you able to separate the urgent from the important? And how can you help us? As Mark Carney reminded us this week. How can we keep our treasured values and be pragmatic at the same time?
Can you hear? Because we don't have any microphones?
Because now you do.
Yeah, maybe I do now. Thank you, thank you. And if it works, it's even better.
Even better.
So. So I.
Know I should try. Okay.
You can hear me now. Okay. All right. First of all, good evening to all of you. And it's ever so intimidating to see you all around this circle. And it's intimidating, maybe for you, but it's very intimidating for me. And I'm here because I love my friend Yo-Yo. He praised me way too much.
Not true.
But it's a it's a great risk for somebody in my position to come here and to open my heart and tell you a few things, because I'm a very important central banker. And this important central banker is and has been for the last six and a half years, constantly scrutinized for what she says, for what words she uses, for what signal it gives about the interest rates or the sense of where growth is going. So I'm not telling you because I want you to to pity me, but I hope you come in sympathy with me because I'm intimidated and I'm on the top of it. Emotional. Because when I hear Yo-Yo play the music, I feel like crying, invariably. And when he plays the rainbow over the rainbow. It's even worse. So to focus on his questions. I don't have the answer to the first one, honestly, but I know that. The level of control that you have over your emotion, the level of stability that you can keep, this sort of inner little equilibrium that you have in your sternum that helps you to sort of settle your body and your energy and the breathing, all of that. When the crisis comes for me, settles, and the more complicated, the more difficult the crisis. The easier it is for me to find this breathing, this stability around the, you know, the central part of your body. And it's maybe because I did yoga from an early age that this comes together and my body and my brain start talking to each other in complete synchronicity. And the second thing is that in times of crisis and I've seen quite a few. I see people around me becoming a bit panicked and and worried, and they, they lose their good judgment. They normally have. And I draw on this miracle that I have, which is inside myself to help them, because I know that I'm going to work with them and that they have to settle. They have to, you know, come down and they have to restore a bit of mental sanity so that we can address the crisis together. That's how it works for me. Second question. I was very lucky to grow up in a family where tolerance and respect and love were the guiding lights in with my brothers. I lost my father at a very early age. And his memory, which sorry, I'm becoming emotional now. Whenever I talk about him, it's the case. So whenever I feel that there is an injustice, that something is going wrong, that there is violence or unhappiness. I have him inside me who says, do something. Voila!
Questions? I thank you. No, no, no, this is this is a moment. Look, she's willing to be vulnerable. We do so much to protect ourselves, to prevent ourselves to be criticized. Right. I say to people, if you don't want to be criticized, don't ever do anything. But the fact that you are able to be vulnerable in front of all of us, right. That's a great lesson of wisdom. Do you have any reactions? Global shakers?
Say something. Hello? Speak up. Yeah. Yes.
You're supposed to have mics around, are there? Yes, please. Great. Speak. Speak into it.
I don't think I can.
Okay. It should work. Try.
Thank you so much for being vulnerable. I have one question. So, like all the global shapers here were younger, we probably do not have enough power. So even if we stand up, that's going to be minimal. And as we talk briefly before the session, I think the problem right now is that people who have power may not be meeting people with empathy. So how do we stand up for people who are not getting enough sympathy and empathy as a younger people, who are consistently constituting more than half of the population in the world?
I'll try to address, to address your question. You know, for for 40 years I've been fighting for women because I've often found that young girls and young women particularly were vulnerable and were exploited and didn't have the space that they should have. And the only way to try to address that and to fix it, and it's not done, is to make sure that both men and women are together in that approach to all opportunities should be the same for all. The best way for me to convince men, in particular, is to remind them that, number one, they had a mother. Number two, often they have daughters. So you have to form coalitions, and sometimes the coalitions you form with people who are not in the room, who are not next to you, but who are characters who have shaped their life and who should bring them back to their humanity. Because we carry that emotion, that humanity inside ourselves. But you need to find it. And sometimes you know the people that you call the powerful people. Sometimes if you can manage to get through a crack, there is light behind that crack, and that's where you need to find. And you can.
Somebody else.
Go ahead.
Thank you. My question is what for you is the role of tolerance in leadership? I think when I look at the state of the world, it looks like an argument for being more tolerant as a leader as well as if we were if we're tolerating some of the things that are happening, are we letting it happen? I don't know, how do you relate to tolerance in that way?
I didn't mean tolerance by complacency with things that should not happen. What I mean by tolerance is accepting the other for who he is. Whatever, the color of his skin, his, sexual orientation, his, religious belief. That's what I mean by tolerance. But it doesn't mean, you know, tolerating anything. That's that's what I meant by tolerance and respect.
Anybody else? No.
Go ahead.
I think I have to say a huge thank you from all of us and female leaders, because probably your peer manager will say after this session that that was a bad idea to, you know, meet emotional young people before the session. But, this is exactly what we need right now when so many conflicts are happening in the world and people don't really care, they just read news. So you are just showing to all of us that as a leader, as a female leader, I would just would love to say a huge thank you that you are so you you are not showing your, emotions. You're showing your strengths and you're brave to be with open heart with some random people who are maybe even filming this. But thank you.
That's great.
You know, it's a very good. You said something very interesting in performance. Sometimes vulnerability is a strength, right? Because exactly what you said, it shows authenticity. And if you can be strong enough to be authentic, that sometimes takes the most courage. It doesn't matter whether you're crying or yelling or smiling or whatever, but you're being authentic. People can always tell whether someone is being authentic or not. You can fake it only for so long, right? And I think all, all three of you have lived through instances of that, and you have chosen not to go the other way. And I think that's so, so hurray for all your questions. But now we've went from tolerance to, compassion to, to vulnerability. I'm going to say something from a dictator. Stalin once said, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. So our job here is to make sure that nobody is ever, ever, just a mere statistic. No matter what you do. So after visiting. The lynching memorial, does everybody know what lynching is? Okay. The lynching memorial that Bryan Stevenson built in Montgomery, Alabama, where the US civil rights movement started, my friend Branford Marsalis wrote this piece of music, the Hanging Garden.
Right?
Bryan, you've committed your life to justice. You've done it by practicing something very simple. You meet every person as a complete human being, not as the worst thing they've done, nor the best, but for all that they are. How can we practice this way of living together at a planetary level?
Thank you. I just have to say, I was at, the sort of world premiere a couple of months ago when Branford and Yo-Yo played that song, and I was so moved by it that I thought I'd be okay. But here I am, deeply moved again. I think there are things we can do. I think we have to commit to getting closer to one another. I talk about proximity, this concept. It's interesting. In business, to succeed, you have to know all of the forces that are going to shape supply and demand. You have to get close to the forces that will allow you to determine whether this investment is going to be successful or not. And banking, it's the same thing. You have to be attentive to all of the forces that shape the economic pulls and and things that will impact how economies will do and technology. You can't innovate until you totally understand how something works. We can develop new technologies and ways of doing things. If we intimately understand the things that are are going to have an impact on what will be better. I think the same is true when it comes to human relations, but in our world, it's very easy to separate yourself from other people. We've made it too easy across the globe to isolate ourselves from people who are different. And that isolation and the absence of proximity means that we don't hear things we need to hear, we don't see things we need to see. And I think to sustain the kind of just to create the kind of just world that we need. We all have to commit to getting closer to people who are poor, who are marginalized, who are excluded, to people who don't have power. And when we are proximate to the disfavored, to the unwanted, to the discouraged, we will hear and see the things we need to hear and see to make a difference in the world. The absence of proximity is a recipe for the kind of bigotry and hatred and violence that we've seen too much of. I believe in proximity because I want to be present in the lives of other people, but I also know that my power is rooted in what I feel and experience when I'm next to people who are suffering and struggling. When integration came to our community, my grandmother did this thing where she started hugging me so tightly I thought she was trying to hurt me. She didn't know how to protect me when the schools were integrated. So she just started hugging me so hard. And after a little while she would say, Bryan, do you still feel me hugging me? Do you still feel me hugging you? And if I said no, she would jump on me again. So I learned to tell my grandmother. Every time I saw her, I said, mama, I always feel you hugging me. She lived into her 90s when she was in her 90s. She fell. She broke her hip, she was diagnosed with cancer and she was dying. And I went to see her. And I just couldn't make peace with her being not not being in the world. And I kept talking, trying to do everything I could. And finally they said, look, Bryan, you got to go. And just before I left, my grandmother opened her eyes and she squeezed my hand. And the last thing she said to me, she said, Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you? And she said, I want you to know I'm always going to be hugging you. And there were times when I feel the embrace of my grandmother. But I tell you that because we all have the power, when we approximate to be with people who fall down, to be with people who are discouraged, to be with people who are disfavored, and if nothing else, we can wrap our arms around them and affirm their humanity and their dignity, and we should do it for them. But we should do it for ourselves. Because when we affirm the humanity and the dignity of others, we learn things. We see things, we become different people. So I think proximity is key. The second thing I think we've got to do is challenge the narratives that are floating around our world right now. I'm very worried about the moment that we are in. We see the resurgence and the emergence of the politics of fear and anger, and that scares me because I know that when people allow themselves to be governed by fear and anger, they start to tolerate things you should never tolerate. They start to accept things you should never accept. When you look at human history, the worst moments in human history are the moments when people gave in to the politics of fear and anger. That's what happened on this continent in the 1930s and 40s. We allowed narratives of fear and anger to demonize people, and horrific things happened. It happened in Rwanda 30 some years ago. Narratives spread through that country and hundreds of thousands of people were killed. It's happening now, and we have to push against these narratives, and we have to change the narratives that feed hatred and bigotry. And so we have to push against the politics of retribution and revenge. We have to push against demonizing people because of who they are. I don't believe there's a human being on the planet who is illegal. You can't be illegal if you're a human being. You were brought into this world. You can do things that are illegal. You can have a status, but no human being is illegal. Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. Even if someone tells a lie, they're not just a liar. If you take something, you're not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And when we understand that, we understand that we have an obligation to do more than condemn. I'm a product of a of a history of racial inequality. I grew up in a community where black children couldn't attend the public schools just because of my color. I could not attend the public school. My grandparents had to deal with the horrors and terror of lynching. My great grandparents were enslaved, and the narrative that we bear that we are still burdened by in America is a narrative that is rooted in this kind of narrative of racial difference that we created to justify enslavement. And I think the great evil of slavery wasn't the brutality and the involuntary servitude and the forced labor. I think the greatest evil of slavery in America was the narrative we created to justify enslavement, because people who enslaved other people didn't want to think of themselves as immoral or indecent or unjust. So they created a false narrative where they said that black people aren't as good as white people, and that narrative evolved, and it survived the Civil War, and it led to decades of terror, violence, where black people were pulled out of their homes and beaten and tortured and drowned and lynched. It led to the codification of racial hierarchy and segregation, the laws that prevented me from going to school, and that codification of racial hierarchy was a manifestation of this narrative of racial difference. And we had a heroic civil rights movement, and we tore down the legal architecture of Jim Crow and segregation. But the narrative of racial difference, it persisted and it still thrives. And that narrative of racial difference means that there are people in my country because of their color or their ethnicity, or because they have an accent, are presumed dangerous or presumed guilty. There are people who are presumed incompetent just because of their color or their gender, and that is not fair. And so we have to change this narrative. We have to root a narrative that is kind of committed to seeing basic human dignity, seeing basic human rights. And I think changing the narrative is the challenge we face. The third thing I am persuaded we have to do is I do think we have to be hopeful. I think we have to be willing to believe things we have not seen, because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. I think injustice will prevail wherever hopelessness persists. I think we have to be willing to stand up. Even when people say, sit down. We have to be willing to speak. Even when people say be quiet. And our willingness to do that is rooted in our hope. I am the descendant of one of the 10 million black million, 10 million black people who were enslaved in the United States. My great grandfather was enslaved. My grandmother had to flee the Deep South because of terror, violence. My parents were humiliated and denigrated by segregation. But I am here in Davos with powerful people, with elite people. Not because I have more money, not because I have power, not because I'm an elected official. I'm not. I'm here because I've been lifted up for generations by hopeful people. My great grandparents, who were enslaved, slaved, had a hope of freedom so powerful they risked their life to do the things to prepare themselves. And that hope sustains me. I live in Montgomery, Alabama, and when you live in Montgomery, you walk around the streets and you know you are standing on streets where the generation before did more with less, that community of people would go to places and they'd get on their knees to push for the right to vote. They'd be praying and they'd get beaten and battered and bloodied. They'd go home, wipe the blood off, change their clothes, and they'd go back and do it again. And because of them, I have to honor their hope, their witness, their commitment. And lastly, I believe that we have to be willing to do uncomfortable and inconvenient things. I was talking to all of these beautiful young people before. It's so much easier to just seek comfort and seek convenience when you have an education, when you have resources. And I get it. But I think we have to be willing to do the uncomfortable, be willing to do the inconvenient if we're going to actually be agents that change the world. I feel so privileged to be the beneficiary of someone else's dedication, proximity, narrative, hope. And that's what I want to hold on to as we move to this, to this, through this era. There are times when you can be overwhelmed by the challenges that you face. I experienced that all the time, but I look to the people who have come before me, I, I, I was giving a talk in a church, and an older black man came into the church and he was staring at me, kind of really looking a little harsh and angry, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. And I finished my talk and people came up. They were very nice and appropriate. But this old man wheeled himself to the front of the church. He was in a wheelchair and he said, do you know what you're doing? And I just stood there. And then he asked me again. He said, do you know what you're doing? And I mumbled something. I don't even remember what I said. Then he asked me one more time. He said, do you know what you're doing? He says, I'm going to tell you what you're doing. He said, you're beating the drum for justice. You keep beating the drum for justice. I was, I was so moved. I was also really relieved because I just didn't know what it was about. Then he grabbed me by my jacket and he pulled me toward his wheelchair. He said, come here, come here. I'm going to tell you something. He said, you see this, this scar I have behind my right ear? He says, I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama, 1963, trying to register black people to vote. He turned his head. He said, you see this cut? I got that cut in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 trying to register black people to vote. Then he leaned forward. He said, you see this dark spot? He said, that's my bruise. Got my bruise in Birmingham, 1965, trying to register black people to vote. I'm going to tell you something, young man, he said. People look at me, they think I'm some old man sitting in a wheelchair, covered with cuts and bruises and scars. But I want you to know something, he said, these are not my.
Cuts. These are not my bruises. These are not my scars, he said. These are my medals of honor. And I don't think there's anything wrong for wanting to earn a medal of honor that allows you to say you're part of a movement that's trying to do justice, that's trying to show that mercy is powerful, that believes that we can be better than the things that people try to demonize us as. I think we have to prevail in this moment of struggle, and I think we will. And if anything, I know that if my four parents who were enslaved could find a way to to freedom, if my grandparents who were terrorized could find a way to security, if my parents who were humiliated could find a way to civil rights, we can absolutely find a way to a more just world. And that has to animate us. It certainly sustains me. I'm so excited to be next to people like these incredible people I'm here with in Davos, because it gives me confidence to believe that there's nothing we can't do if we commit to getting proximate, if we change the narratives, if we stay hopeful and we do uncomfortable and inconvenient things.
Can you believe this? Wow. Incredible. Incredible. You know, speaking of inspiration, you guys wanted some inspiration. Here it is. You taught me so much from my visit. Partly because, you know, I think of Brian as a visionary artist who happens to be a lawyer because what he built, when I went through the museum and I saw 400 years of history, tactile, visual, aural, it's all the things art does. But what he said that changed my life was that he said, in 400 years of history, you can talk about slavery, but you talk about reconstruction. You talk about the Great Migration. But the big arc is you get to mass incarceration, which is your main work, and it's one arc. And the reason the systems that have changed for all these years have not actually changed the narrative. So that puts. So the idea is how can we, all of us work for systems change? All of you are involved in this in some way, but can you also at the same time, do little bits of narrative change that will actually move us toward the right direction? Thank you so much, Alani. Your father is Swiss. He's from Staffelbach. Staffelbach a town with no railroad. And your mother is Native Hawaiian. And Aulani has devoted her life to advocate for the well-being and to spread the wisdoms of indigenous peoples. And that is one out of 20 people on our planet. One out of 20. So that's a big job. How do you think of time, of big time, of generational time of the time that that, Brian was just talking about? How do you think about that time when we have to live in the moment in a very unstable and fast changing world? How do you negotiate the two?
First, Aloha Kealakekua na akua na aumakua Aminah. Kupuna e kakumei marconi Allah. Aloha. Koko. Aloha. Aloha. Kakou opo. First, I just want to offer acknowledgement and greetings and the breath of life to our deities, our guardians, our ancestors, those who have made it possible for us to be here today and to be here with each other. I am Native Hawaiian, and I was fortunate to be raised primarily in the homeland of my mother, and in her culture and in that culture, we learned very young that we're descended from nature, that our oldest kin are non-human relations, that we're the younger siblings, of the of what we now refer to as the natural world. But it's who we are. We are nature. And so in that framing, when you think about caring and proximity, actually it's that proximity that we have to the wind, to the rain, to the dirt, to the to the trees, to the fish, to the wind. It's that proximity that actually brings us close so that we actually have that relationship. It's about reciprocity, right? So it's when you have proximity, you can't not give the hug back to your grandmother, can you? And in that makes the idea of dominion over nature or this idea of ownership over nature just kind of implausible. How do you hold those things? Talk about paradoxes. They are paradoxes, and yet those are the ways we live. But my father is Swiss and he is from Staffelbach in canton Aargau. And it's really wonderful because I have those ancestors as well. And the funny thing is, is even though my parents came from literally halfway around the world, they both came from extraordinarily humble means. They actually both came from farming families and, you know, fishing families in my in my mom's case. And the only thing they ever argued about was time. If we weren't ten minutes early, we were late for my dad. And if we weren't one hour late, we were early for my mom. And the role my brother and I always had to play was straddling these worlds, right? Actually trying to figure out how to stretch and navigate time so that we'd have peace in our family and we could actually get anywhere at some point and kind of understand the nuances of that. And so literally in me is like this kind of holding of time. And what I learned from my, you know, my Hawaiian family is that we sort of say, oh, it's okay. Like, relax, calm down. Ancestors will stretch time. Like you will have the time. You need to be able to do what's at hand. Right? And that for me, is like that poetic way of that tension between the urgent and the important or, you know, something, having to do it in today, right now, this one thing has to be done, but you have to be mindful of where we're going in the future. So I think this is also what's so powerful about indigenous thought. And, you know, every, every culture. There's so many indigenous peoples in the world. I don't mean to even speak for my own people. First of all, I can't possibly do that, or anybody else except to know that in in learning and in being, proximate to other indigenous people and having relationships, pilina this idea of closeness, you know, we've learned that there's, you know, that we think in multi-generation we might have to make decisions right now, but you have to think about them in generational time, which often comes in conflict with a quarterly revenue statement or what you need to put on your annual balance sheet or election cycle time. But it's that just really grounding yourself in the genealogy that you have, in the knowledge that you come from people and that who were there before. And if we become good ancestors ourselves, then there's a fighting chance that there will be people before. It also is humbling to realize you're in a long line. You know, we grew up, we had, there was an Uncle Keola that we had. He was my real uncle, but he taught us in Hawaiian communities, everybody's of generations, kind of your aunt and your uncle. And we would go and hang out in the summer and kind of learn our songs and cultural games, and he would tell us about our ancestors, and he'd line up us up in a line and he'd say, okay, you come from this long line of ancestors. And so if you walk really, really slow and you quickly turn back, you might catch them in the corner of your eye. So we would do this. We'd be little kids. We're laughing. We turned back and he'd say, what did you see? You know, and it's always a usually a young strappy kind of guy or kid who would be like, I saw my ancestor and he was this big and full of muscles and, you know, all this and I swear that for me, I saw, you know, my great, great great grandmother who looked at me not with a smile, not with a frown, with an eyes of determination. And I think it's that determined that we have to have to be able to understand that we're always going to be living in dualities, trivialities, maybe even more. We're always going to be put in those places. And it's actually to understand what your role and your purpose is in that and to remain grounded, grounded in the fact, you know, Brian just spoke about who he descends from. For me, like most indigenous people, you know, it's remarkable. I'd say we're some of the most resilient people left on the planet because we've been practicing and being holding on despite many efforts to actually, you know, displace us to to marginalize us and much, much worse, you know, and then you tack on diseases and other things, like, I came from 4% of Hawaiian people who remained. So for me, that motivation is a responsibility I don't have. Like, I'm so fortunate to be one of those descended from somebody who survived that. I better get on with it. Right. What excuse do we have but to press on and to take that responsibility, that opportunity, that privilege that we have, we call that kuleana in Hawaiian, that you have a duality of responsibility and privilege. And I know for all of you young people that we were talking to earlier, the sense that, you know, you feel and I understand it, I have kids around your age. There's a sense of maybe burden. You folks are inheriting burden. We call that a camera. Right. So what's that difference between kuleana, that privilege and that burden perhaps, is in how you carry it. And it's how you hold on to the fact that you are descended from a long lineage of people, and it's your turn to be able to make sure that there's a long lineage in the future. Mahalo for listening.
Incredible. Another you know, it's funny. It's another demonstration of wisdom. It's it's incredible that I've what I've learned from Aulani is gratitude. So you think about where Brian gets his motivation. Unbelievable determination and vision. Motivation. And what you just spoke of Alani, is just, you know, what the ancestors have gone through. And yet you have a positive attitude. What can we learn from that? You know, I'm depressed most of the time and I want to become, you know, native, but I can't. I tried to be black, but it's not. It's not possible. You know, great great great great grandmother, you know, one of four, you know, it's just I want to be positive. It's incredible. But so, I mean, we got something from this, right? Global shakers, do you have something to say? You had a question before. Yeah. So someone with a mic, please give it to this young gentleman who is, over 15 and under 50. Oh, okay.
It's 28, actually.
Okay. 28.
We had the greatest conversation today. Like, we didn't manage to do that, but life did for us. And it was so, so inspiring to see your strength and your dedication to life as you. I also love life. I love living in. There is a Portuguese poetry that he says that life is the opportunity for the wonderful. Just because we are alive, then we can experience the wonderful things that has in life. However, I'm worried about life. I'm worried of the way that we are managing resources, which should be just nature. So I'd like to ask you, can we find hope and if we can, if you can, could you share with us, please? I think we would be really grateful to live here with some sparkling that we could transform in a big, big movement for transformation in the world. Thank you.
Was that for me?
You can each respond.
Sure. Yeah. I think that we should all. So try to be brief. Not. Hawaiians aren't known for brevity. For me, you know, indigenous people are 1 in 20 people in the world. And yet, you know, we're not really seen in many ways. We occupy a quarter of the world's surface or the landmass on Earth, but in those areas are about half of the most thriving and intact ecosystems left in the world, some of the most biodiverse. For me, the kind of thriving that are that our planet needs is still there. This is not something we return back to these these ways of being, these ways of knowing are still present, right? They're not gone. We may push them out or not want to recognize them or see them, but the opportunity right now is here. That, along with the contemporary knowledge, the tech that we have today, right, and the wisdom of old that's held in these places, in these people, if we can actually create these partnerships, real partnerships, not looking at indigenous people as underserved or, you know, disparate or, you know, all these things that we like to call vulnerable and all these things like, we're powerful, we're we're we're holding up the fort for the rest of the planet. Right? So work with us, be partners with us. So for me, that's what excites me is there's so much opportunity, so many smart people, so many caring hearts to be able to come together and kind of work in true partnership to unlock. And that's why I believe is where we need to go. And that's why I believe that this is absolutely possible. And it has to be because what other choice do we have?
I can just I can just add that I think when we think about.
Hope.
We shouldn't think.
About it like it's a pie in the sky, like everything's going to work out. It's not even for me. It's not even a preference of optimism over pessimism. Vaclav Havel talked about this during the time of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and Havel said, we wanted all kinds of things, he said. But the only thing we needed was hope. And when he said what he was talking about, he says, hope is an orientation of the spirit. It's a willingness to position yourself, sometimes in hopeless places and be a witness. And when you are a witness in the midst of suffering and struggle, I can tell you, because I've been doing my work for a really long time. Beautiful things happen. Magical things happen, unexpected things happen. I've spent 40 years standing next to condemned people who the states of America are trying to execute. People have been put in jails and prisons in the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We have a legal system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty, than if you're poor and innocent and people are just thrown away. But standing next to the condemned and advocating for their life and their humanity, I've had the privilege of seeing grace and mercy manifest in the relationships between me and my clients and my clients and their family and their families and the community, and it is so powerful that I now understand things that I didn't understand earlier in my career. I grew up in a poor church, and when people were really suffering and struggling, they would admit their struggles, but then they would start singing something like, but I wouldn't take nothing for my journey now. They had this belief that they would prevail. And that's to me that the hopeful message, I mean, I'm here. I mean, there's a way in which I can talk about how this is so improbable for this little boy who grew up amidst poverty, and people next door to us didn't have running water, and we didn't see much hope outside the door. But there were people always doing hopeful things. I went to Harvard Law School, and the first day all my classmates were talking and they were all saying why they were in law school, and each and every one of them said they were the son or daughter or the nephew, the niece of a lawyer. And by the fifth one, I started to squirm because I knew I wasn't related to a lawyer. And after the seventh one talked about it, I realized something I hadn't even realized before. I realized I had never even met a lawyer. By the time they got to me, I just I didn't even talk. Answer the question. I just wanted to get out of there. And I called my mom. I said, mom, I don't belong in this law school. She said, what are you talking about? She said, you belong wherever you go. She said, you're the smartest person in the world. You can do anything you want to do. Now you go back there and tell them while you're in that law school. And I eventually went back and told them why I was in law school, and I told them I was in law school because my great grandparents were enslaved. But they had a hope of freedom because my grandparents survived lynching and suffering, because they had a hope of security. My parents endured. And my mom bought us the World Book Encyclopedia when we were kids, and I never met a lawyer. I wasn't related to a lawyer, but I read all about the lawyers in the encyclopedias. And I can't lie, when I was ten, you know, I didn't think it was so great because you go outside and it's Christmas and your friends are like, well, I got a bicycle, I got a baseball, I got a basketball. And I'd have to say, well, I got volume G of the World Book Encyclopedia. But what I realized is that I was there because hopeful people had dreamed me there, had dreamed me there, and all of a sudden I didn't feel diminished at Harvard Law School. I didn't feel like I was lacking. I started to feel like, well, maybe I have something that other people don't have. Maybe I can do things that they can't do. And because you are in this room asking that question, it means to me that you have this vision, you have this passion. You want to do something in the world, and you have that which tells me you have everything. You need to be hopeful enough to do the hard things that must be done, because it begins with that. That's what will sustain you. And I just want to encourage you to go into those difficult places. You'll find a way. Peace will embrace you. Justice will lift you up. People will sustain you. It's beautiful, but it's difficult.
I have to wrap this up. No, no, no, this is incredible. I wish we could stay here for another three hours, but I need to end this because people have places to go, so I just. I'm going to offer. I'm sorry. I wanted you to speak, but Alana actually has a gift for everybody. She brought it. It's it's she's going to describe it. But before she does, I'm going to tell you. After she does that, I'm going to play a piece of music that actually should give us hope, because it was written in a prison camp in 1941. Another dark time, the composer found the musicians instruments they played in an early January freezing weather and in front of all the other prisoners. And if you can have that kind of music, come out in that kind of place, that tells you what the human spirit is made of, which is this is what Christine and Alani and Brian, they've given you plenty of evidence of how deep the human spirit is. And you are not what you do. You are much more than that. Everyone of you. And hopefully this piece of music will remind you of that. Tell us about it and then I will play.
A little tag. This is a parkway or it's, sea salt from hand gathered from the island of Kauai, from a beautiful community called Hanapepe. They're renowned for their purity and the health of their salt. You folks probably all know why salt is so important. Not only is it in us, it connects us through the ocean. It's the sodium chloride that that really fuels the planet. You use it for health, for cleansing, for spirituality, for all sorts of purposes. But when we and this is not my gift, it's our gift. We had a conversation, you know, with Yo-Yo about this, and there was a desire to just leave something that connects us. And this is a symbol of that, because salt is something that we all utilize. We all need. It's all part of us. And the ocean connects us in this little bag of salt. When they were gathering it, they had this image. And they said that when they were when they were doing the kind of ceremonial things to prepare the salt, that what came to them is this salt with the intention of reciprocity. So this can be medicine for you. It can be something that helps to heal you. It can make your food taste better. But think about with this little, little morsels of salt. What are the things that you will take and contribute in your way that's uniquely yours? And to be able to share it and pass it forward. So it's with that, there's a little bit of an explanation, and it's just really a gift from all of us here who wanted to share something and have us be able to stay connected.
Aloha and thank you. And after, after the music, you can never sell it, but you can share it and you can exchange it. No applause. Say hello to one another and go on. Peace be with you. Let's start.
Yes. Of course. Yes.