View seems under assault. Paul and you could bring other issues into that. Greta we will have to leave it there now. Paul singer with usa today, and Michael Moran of the weekly standard, thanks for being with us. This weekend, the defense the store learns about the life and history of tulsa, oklahoma. Frank willits was an oil man. He bought a place that became the headquarters of philip 66. Today, you still see the familiar phillips 66 shield. Philip 66 has become familiar to people as a coke bottle. It is that iconic in the minds of many voters. He was part of that flamboyant oil fraternity that came out of the late 19th century into the 20 century. These are men, very muchacho, who had amazingly solid egoist. They were very sure of themselves, and that was important. He was human. Thats all part of the story. The good, the bad, the ugly. He was many things. But always first and foremost, he was an oil man. Watch all of our events from tulsa today at 2 00 eastern on American History tv on cspan 3. The most memorable moment of this for me was hearing cory gardner saying, you must be firm with your details but harsh with the details. Id to give represents a methodology that if all the centers, if all the congressmen and women and legislators can a dos, we can come together as a country and solve many of our issues. My favorite quote came from julie adams, she said, remember to be humble, and have a strong work ethic. I think in particular congress itself, often times we have a lack of true statesman. As much as i disagree with them, john mccain did something very impressive last year. He committed to the veteran Affairs Reform bill. Saying how staying away from church f torture is important. A green with people who they dont often agree with is something we need to assure the integrity. High School Students who generally rank in the top 1 in the states were in washington dc as part of the senate youth program. Tonight at 8 00. Next, a conversation with twitter chief communications officer, gabrielsl stricker. This was hosted by the university of california berkeley. Today it is an absolute delight for me to introduce and welcome gabriel stricker. He is a cal alum. Some of you artie know that. He is chief of communications at twitter. Chief communications officer. We will be welcoming back, not just for this event, but he has also been helping berkeley think about and celebrate be 50 Year Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. This is an important year in berkeley this year. His bachelor of arts was in latin american studies as a graduate at berkeley. His current role as to communications officer, he leads the global teams for Media Relations and Public Policy and media partnerships more generally. He first came to twitter in 2012, stepping into the worlds absolutely highest profile roles in the communications field. He has been credited by many as the driving force behind turning around twitters public reputation. Gabriel has been recognized as one of the most successful in his field. He was named one of the 20 top insiders. Prior to joining twitter, he was director of Global Communications and Public Affairs at google where he was active on the issue of Free Expression and defended the companys refusal to censor information. At twitter, he accepted the radio, Television AssociationFirst Amendment award. His earlier work was in campaign politics. He developed his expertise in communications for his work in the electoral arena. Today, we have a chance to talk to him on a variety of topics, some indications free speech but also leadership and how he thinks about culture and what makes organizations work better. We have a chance to celebrate with him has i mentioned this 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. It was exactly the 6465 year, for those of you who know, the free speech cafe, i am sure most of you have been there. A remarkable tradition for this institution. It is an important part of this institution, of our society. It is the notion of freedom of expression. It is not equally appreciated throughout the world. Part of the different value judgments on where one draws the line on expression is a very active area worldwide of policy and management. There is much to cover. Let me introduce to you gabriel stricker. Thank you for being here. [applause] let me start with the Free Speech Movement. I mentioned it a couple of times. You worked here in the 1960s. You, like i, was here a little after that. Can you say a bit about how you think about free speech as it relates to twitter and also the fine line between freedom of expression and some of the things that happened when expression is to free . Gabriel thank you for having me. It is lovely to be back. The Free Speech Movement predated me but i think even when i graduated as an undergrad in the early 1990s, that spirit and the disruptive spirit of the Free Speech Movement still lived on and i think at the time, and i think today, on campus there is an attempt to figure out how to keep that culture going. The good news is that culture exists beyond that place. For people like myself at where, and before at google, we are still trying to figure out how to ensure those values are a part of what we do. For me i get to go to work , everyday at a place that i think is one of the most extraordinary, viral platforms ever to exist. It has been this amazing vector that has facilitated Free Expression around the world. The mythology is we create these technologies with Free Expression in mind to create a platform that would let all of these flowers bloom. We had the idea of what the impact of a platform would be but we never thought it would be used the way it has and facilitate revolutions as it has. It is getting People Voices where they didnt. It is an ongoing commitment to upholding the platform as we do. As you say, it is a tricky one because for those of you less familiar, one of the parts of it that has allowed the rise of it is being this platform for Free Expression is that we promote pseudonyms. Because we allow pseudonyms, if you go into cases like the arab spring, if you want to take down the man it is easier to do so if you dont have to give your actual identity. The flipside of that is if you dont have to give your identity, it makes it easier to express yourself in less constructive ways, potentially just controlling ways. That is a tricky balance. One that we, today, are grappling with. Our ceo had an internal email z leaked out. He was saying, in his own words, that we have been falling short on striking that balance and it is something were trying to figure out. We are trying to preserve the beauty of the platform as a vehicle of Free Expression while having boundaries that prevent people from engaging in what is really abusive behavior . It is a daily challenge. Part of it if you thought the pseudonyms would allow a lot of things, there might be other tools to allow these unfortunate outcomes. Is there an example of where it is in trolling . Where you say, we have tried to address that issue in a more targeted way. Gabriel i can tell you, the things we have done, and the kinds of things you can write from us going forward. Some of you may look at this as just fixing bugs. Some of them have been more or less difficult. Historically, we have done a pretty lackluster job of making it possible to even report abuse. The amount of hoops people had to go to through to say people were engaging in an abusive manner. It has to be the case that it is easy to report the abuse as it is to do the abusing. In our case, it was easy to engage and hard to report. That has been something we have gone out of our way to fix. The next step is, i think in balancing the ability for someone to express themselves but giving someone the ability to not have to be exposed to abusive behavior. The next step is for those of you less familiar, we have an asymmetrical follow draft, which means we can follow each other but it can also be the case that i follow you but you dont follow me. Part of what our thinking is if you are sending tweets to me throughout the day saying you are a jerk, if we follow each other, i am saying i want to hear you telling me that i am a jerk. But, if i dont follow you and you are telling me throughout the day i am a jerk, maybe there should be ways that if you are bombarding me with this that i should be able to have greater control to knit out. You should be able to say it but i should also have better control in tuning that out. That is what we are trying to pave the way forward. By the way, we have a. Hotspeakers. If you want to tweet any of this. I always take notes and i always tweet after talks and i will do it again. I so appreciate twitter. A very quick aside. When i first became dean, people were saying, you should do these blog posts. I am thinking, i could spend half my day doing that. But, 140 characters once or twice a day, it is a great bitesize for putting out thoughts. I think, for a lot of us who are in seats where we get to hear a lot of interesting things every day, i think that is one of the functions i am serving. Let me bounce them back out so other people can hear the things i am hearing. Recently twitter sued the , government over the ability to disclose more information. Could you talk more about that Public Policy interface . Gabriel twitter was not the first to have a transparency report. I think when i was at google, we started that process of issuing these transparency reports and what they are is simply when Technology Companies get request s from governments around the world specifically to take action on certain content and it could remove content because it violates local law, to suspend certain accounts because it is against their local policy. A lot of the companies in our space have felt there needs to be a way in some centralized fashion to disclose to the people, we are getting these requests and you should be aware of them. Not just to say, we are getting these requests but these are the nature of the requests and heres what governments are giving us and here are how many of them are and how to categorize them and what action we took coming off of these things. I guess without getting into too much detail, regarding a lawsuit, on a high level, it turns out there is a government, ours in the United States, that wanted to limit our ability as a company to tell people. Again, it is not just twitter users. It happens to be there are individual users impacted by this but, if you are i would argue if you are a user or if you are just a member of this society, you have a right to know that your government is making requests of a private company like ours and what we are doing with that. We should be able to disclose in a reasonable amount of detail what is this sort of boundary surrounding these requests. What is going on there. We had engaged in conversations about this in terms of our ability to be more transparent in our transparency report. Finally, when we reached an impasse, we said we will not abide by this. We will sue you over our ability to be more transparent with our users and people of the world. That is what motivated it and it continues to motivate. I think there are other companies that share our opinion. I think we took it another step and forced the issue that way. We had an earlier conversation about values. When one thinks about the coulter, the shared values that hold twitter together, that make it what it is, i would imagine when you are making a decision about how aggressively to pursue an issue like that, it does come back to very fundamental values. Can you talk a little about how that particular decision about transparency connect to the values of the firm . Gabriel some of this is not that complicated. We end up running the company in more or less some sort of golden rule type of way which is as we conceive of and implement these policies, would we as users want to exist in a product that has these policies . By and large, that is what we are trying to do. If there is an environment surrounding us that is unfavorable we try to change , those things. I would say, some of these decisions, including the decision to sue our own government are internally pretty uncontroversial because i would say as a Leadership Team, we have aligned values. I think we have got about gone about building a team, that we have values and we believe they are values that we embody and reflect the value of the users we have on the platform. It is a responsibility. Earlier, we were talking about the Free Speech Movement. I believe that there are a handful of companies in the world, and you can probably count them on two hands, that transcend just being companies and become a movement. I think twitter is one. With that comes through responsibility. People are depending on us to be able to achieve things that go far beyond business or just culture. It is actually achieving higher purpose. So, as we go about our business, these are the types of things we are considering. An interesting notion when an enterprise becomes a movement. Twitter is a great example. How about the Public Offering of twitter . Does the change of ownership and control, does it have an effect . Gabriel when we hear were in the process of going public there were a lot of people on the sidelines saying, twitters talk of being purpose driven, get ready because it will go out the window. I think that when part of the significance in some ways of our lawsuit was eyeopening for a lot of people. Like, wow, these guys will stick to the values they have had all along. The speculation that existed on how becoming a publicly traded company would change us, i think somehow, this was the Conspiracy Theory premise of it all. Oh, now they become a publicly traded company, he hold into outside interest they will sell , out their values in order to adhere to all of these financial pressures which have existed all along. Ps those pressures have not existed all of the time. It was never the case that the sort of tension we experienced was a tension between users and business interest. That was never the source of the tension. The source of attention, what we are talking about earlier, the tension existed between one group of users and another group of users. How do we navigate those waters . Those tensions still exist. Being a publicly traded company , i dont think hasnt done anything to change our values or how we approach going about our work. I think it has brought is slightly brighter spotlight. For those of you who go out and see publicly traded Companies Pre and post ipo, i hope you realize it is just a part of the evolution. Then you go public, and you wake up the next day and go to work. That is how that is. You obviously love your job. What do you love most about your job . Gabriel i think it goes back to the idea of it being a movement. You can work at any number of companies or organizations but there are few opportunities you have in life earlier before we were onstage, we were talking about these precepts you have at the Business School and i love this point of being beyond yourself. What an inspiring plank to have on your platform. What i love about my work and what i really just have long been inspired by in technology is if you are lucky, you get to be part of a company that is a movement beyond itself, beyond any one of us. The impact you get to have on the planet starts to go beyond i went to work and sold a widget versus i want to work and change the world for the better. It sounds trite but i think for us, we get to see this and the technology, in twitters case begins to take on a life of its own and be used in ways that we would have never anticipated. It is inspiring. Absolutely inspiring. It really is. This gentleman spoke for us not so long ago, i was walking back he spoke across a the street, that is why am pointing, and we were walking back and one of our employees here who had grown up in iran walked up and she talked about how influential twitter had been for her family. She had some remarkable stories. It was just right there. Someone i see everyday talking about her family and the role twitter played. You hear those stories often but it was very poignant. Gabriel we hear them often. I was talking to a group of employees who started yesterday and they were asking, basically does this ever get old . Do we ever come to work and get jaded . No, we dont get jaded. It does not get old. I came to work a couple of weeks ago and as a user, got to see somebody who is tweeting images of our planet from orbit. That is not get old. Hopefully, if it does, we should do something else. I think no, we never thought , these things would be used in this way. It does change the world. Sometimes, more trivial ways. But sometimes extremely profound ways. Absolutely. Your job is different than a lot of peoples roles. Could you talk about the personal advice around some risks you took that opened out some pathways that might not have been there in your career . Gabriel please, since one of your playings is to not accept the status quo, do not take my status quo as the gospel. Now my responsibility at twitter is overseeing our Communications Team and Public Policy team and media partnerships team. It is a departure from what i was doing earlier which was working on political campaigns. I like twhirl electoral politics is a person perfectly noble profession. My hunger for participating and in that process was facilitating some form of social change. What i realized at a certain point was that the impact i myself could have on that social change was limited and i was living on the east coast at that time. I was looking back to the west coast, where i grew up, and i was like, that is where the change is happening. Those are the people who are revolutionizing the world. I want to be part of that. I say coincidently, it is not that unlike what happened during the Free Speech Movement where you had people who were literally watching newsreels at the time on the east coast of what was happening and berkeley and saying they wanted to be a part of it. The lesson that i would give on this is that when i look back on it, i have known for some time that electoral politics, i was not getting what i wanted out of it. It took me longer than it should have to make the change. I talk to people, particularly new graduates that work with us a lot about this where you may not be certain what youre calling is and in that case, keep experimenting. The flipside of that is there are many people, and if you push them on it, they will tell you they will say i dont know what my calling is but what i am doing is not that. They dont have the courage to make the change. For me, the main lesson was when i knew that that was not my calling, it probably was i dont know, a year, a couple of years before i really owned that and said, im going to honor the fact i know this is not the right path for me. Part of that transition for all of us is, the kernel of that notion of facilitating social change. We dont always know what the kernel is. Once we identify a kernel, the options that are likely to be more aligned become more clear. Gabriel for me, part of the insight i had came out of trying to create a little bit of distance from it and saying, what is it i am doing . What is the pleasure i derive from this . What is it that is inspiring . Is this the best venue for me to be living that out . Even in the world of media and communications and Public Policy, i didnt know that was the job for may but the insight i had was it seems Like Technology is the general venue for me to live this out. As a leader, as a manager what is your leadership style . How has your thinking on leadership changed in the last few years . My thinking on leadership and management is in some ways informed by my experience in political campaigns. First on management and then on leadership if you were going to create a petri dish of how not to manage people, you would have created a political campaign. To be fair, it has been a long time since i worked on a political campaign, so let me give that the benefit of the doubt and say a lot has changed in the meantime. It was in this country at least, you have an environment where it is very transactionbased. You have a bunch of people trying to win things by a certain date and it doesnt lend itself to nurturing people over a long time. It is really transactional in that way. So much of my approach to management and more broadly leadership was informed by what is not happening. The beauty of the Technology Industry is you end up getting a lot less experienced people who bring new ideas to the table and if you can embrace that to the question of my leadership style, i really try to give people attentive room a ton of room to make a lot of small mistakes. As leaders and managers sometime from now you could have someone on this stage who say i want people to fail and it is easy to say, but i think you cant just say that. Especially for less experienced people. You need to go out of your way to force them to make mistakes. I had someone who would work for me who is so riskaverse and i would say you really need to make mistakes. You need to be taking more risks. We have these quarterly objectives and goals, measurable goals, a lot of companies have these things that i said heres whats going to happen when you set out your quarterly goals. I want you to put in there that you are going to make a certain number of mistakes and at the end of the quarter, we are going to revert back to the mistake she made. A much shoe are really deliberate with people about this, its not going to happen. I guess my style is encouraging them to take risk, to make mistakes, and make sure they know they are unable to make a catastrophic mistake. If someone makes a catastrophic mistake, that is more of a position as a leader when they can make a catastrophic mistake as a leader. You can put them in a position to make a small mistake and if there is something cataclysmic on your watch, it is up your it is up to you to take responsibility for. Also the stretch assignments as well. It just popped into my head that one of our faculty, he was giving a speech, a commencement speech and there was a project in the phd student said i dont know if i can do that. He said i would not have asked you to do that if i did not think you could do that. There is a profoundly validated element pushing places. That is a great management style. Can ask you one more questions before you eat open before we open it to the floor . You think about your role in the senior team in helping to keep twitter can you talk about how you keep and think about that part of the inwardfacing role . Gabriel the culture is a living, breathing thing. Especially in the Technology World where you have Companies Like twitter that are young twitter is going to be nine later this year. You imagine this has been there forever but it has not. Not even close. Yet, because of the cycle of our role in the media and Technology World, there is a sense of attachment to things, including culture. Even in Companies Like ours, there is this pull to preserve parts of our culture. At twitter, dean lyons are they well identified . Gabriel they are. We have these core values. We want to create a culture where those values can continue to exist but that is different from preserving a culture. Inwardly, our responsibility on the Leadership Team is to create an environment where those types of values can continue to flourish and also, being really openminded about when some of these things are falling down. Ill give you a specific example. We had to core values which are deliberately in opposition to each other. One of which is to be rigorous and get it right. Another is to ship it. We talk about launching things as shipping things. Ship it is just get it out the door. Get it right is a different, thoughtful value. Those two things are at all the with one another. When as a company we felt like the fact these things are at odds with one another is slowing us down, creating tension we dont need and building headwinds that are counterproductive. Then it is our responsibility as a Leadership Team to acknowledge it. I think our companies tend to fall down is these things possibly exist. You are building this. You sit at that table. If you are doing nothing, you are just standing by, you are facilitating this counterproductive thing. Acknowledge what is going on and acknowledge for everyone outside of that room it is going on and say, even if it is the case we dont have an answer, this is something we are thinking about. We are trying to address it. Part of us as a culture, we were talking earlier about our external transparency report. We try to be radically transparent internally also. As a Leadership Team, we are deliberating over a number of things that impact our culture but we try whenever possible to share that with the company as it is happening. That is great. A great internal norm. Dean lyons those are some of the Difficult Conversations not usually framed that way. Usually, we are thinking about a manager and a direct report and something that is not go right. But this notion of saying, this is a tension in our work environment. We dont have the answer but lets talk about it. That is a great example. Questions from the audience. Lets open it up. We have a couple of microphones. We want to make sure to capture it in the video. We have the capacity for questions to come from remote. A recent article on npr highlighted the role with her the role twitter was playing in journalism in mexico with the Cartel Violence that was a rubbing that was erupting. One womans account was hacked and it was reported she died. What response is any dust twitter avenues violet situations . Gabriel the account was not true . She was reporting on the violence. No one was entirely clear if she ever was a real person or not. Gabriel i would say in the context of violence or any kind of crisis kind of situation, part we get this question a lot. I will give you another example. It relates. In the aftermath of hurricane sandy, there were accounts on twitter of flooding in this place and people had these falsified photos of certain places underwater. There, you have questions like twitter and other social media seem to be giving rise to potential misinformation. As i was saying earlier, i really believe it is one of the most extraordinary viral platforms ever in existence. It can be a vector for the viral spread of misinformation. What i always point out in this context is the spread of misinformation in the context of some kind of crisis breaking news situation is not new. It far predates certainly social media. The example i would give from sometime after i graduated from here was the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Before social media, you had established media and news accounts at the time were that there were people of a certain ethnicity who purportedly executed that bombing. The difference, and i think this is the key distinction, it can be this vector of this misinformation but the difference is i dont remember the confines but if you go back it was not minutes that that misinformation was out there. Perhaps someone knows how long the duration was. It seems to me it may have been days. The fundamental change is that you have on one hand, with platforms like twitter, an opportunity for incredible on the ground reporting. I am standing on the hudson river, there is a plane. It just landed. Here is a picture. We later find out this is true. Or, i am standing on the corner of bleaker street and we are underwater. Ps, it is not true. The beauty of social media is it has accelerated the time of the debunking of these things. If we could rewind to the Oklahoma City bombings, with that tragedy, with a platform like twitter, we might have accelerated the time it took to debunk the misinformation. It exists but it can get put act in its place better put back in its place better and mark quickly now. Dean lyons thank you for that. Can you use the microphone . Thank you. Thank you. What is your view on google withdrawing from china . More specifically, to provide limited but still superior service to 1. 4 billion people compared to no service at all. Gabriel that was definitely the most challenging chapter of my time at google without a doubt. You know, it was a source of real soulsearching at the company. First, let me tell you where we stand on this at twitter and i can try to shed some light on how that went for us at google. Twitter is currently blocked in china. As much as we would love for people in china to be able to freely access twitter, they cannot. What we said is that we are unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that we believe we would need to make in order to be unblocked there. Perhaps there is a world in which twitter can be unblocked but it would require sacrifices that were just not prepared to commit to because of our values. In the case of google, i would say it was similar. The difference was for us at the time to continue to operating there, it was requiring levels of sacrifice that we were unwilling to continue to sign up for. You can absolutely argue as it was argued extensively internally at the time that being there even in this diminished capacity and giving people some access to the service is better than nothing but what i will tell you about the experience of the time was the premise of it was we will be there and hopefully, the trendline will be one of greater and greater openness. Yet, we view the opposite. Coinciding with our presence was a move towards more and more closed behavior and limited access and then finally, at the time when we decided to take the action that we did, actual targeting of activists and dissidents, the question was what is the benefit coming from our presence . It didnt seem like it was benefiting the people in Mainland China and it did not seem like it was benefiting people outside either. It is a perfectly valid question. It was one that required years of deliberation on our part. That was a conclusion we can do and it is a similar conclusion we have come to at twitter. Dean lyons thank you for that. Feel free to line up. One of the things with twitter that is interesting is you have seen a decline or not the growth people have wanted to see for monthly active users. One of the trends is around syndication, how is twitter being integrated into tv shows etc. It is a greater measure of the impact twitter is having. Now that you are talking about the Free Speech Movement, i have been wondering, do you have any thinking about what metrics you could use to more quantitatively measure how twitter is being used as a movement and whether it is where you want to see it and the impact it has had as a company . Gabriel this is a great question. Before when i was saying that i feel like being a publicly traded company has not changed us that the spotlight as maybe brighter, this is a great example. We love the growth we see with the company. There are people who have their own ideas of what that growth should look like. The disconnect is if you just view twitter through the lens of monthly active users, it is missing the whole part of the equation and it is certainly missing it in the context of a broader movement. For us, when we think about the impact we had and how best to measure it, it is much more to do with the audience associated with any moment than it does the specific number of monthly active users exposed to something. It has more to do with the number of people who got to view and interact with a tweet associated with the oscars or the super bowl or elections in then the individual number of elections in the u. K. Then the individual number of people who produced a tweet. It has more to do with the audience than it does this limited slice of a user base. That is more how we think about it. Most recently, you saw it is hard to experiment with different kind of logged out experience that would allow you to experience this. That is how we are thinking about it. Hopefully, it will let people experience that part of the global conversation. When you use the term audience, you are not just thinking collective followership. It is retweets, expression of engagement with the content. Gabriel if you are barack obama and you want to tell the world you have just and reelected as president of the United States you take to twitter to do so and you tweet out four more years, as he did is, but you take to twitter to do so because it is not only your x million followers could see that. You do that because that tweet gets syndicated around the world, around the web, broadcast on television. That is your audience exposed to that particular expression. Our users already think of it in this way and it is just a question of what are the ways to quantify that and we are certainly thinking along those lines. Dean lyons great question. We have time for some more questions. Can you give us examples of things that might be worrisome . Gabriel the china example is a fair one. We have been blocked at various times by other countries around the world also. These are things that keep us up. Suddenly, people are unable to access this platform that gives their voice this broader megaphone, it is really challenging for us. And how do we do that well continuing to uphold our values . Yeah, those are things certainly for me, those are things that are really, really challenging. Dean lyons especially for you you get the first call. Gabriel yeah. Dean lyons how often do you tweet . Gabriel several times a day. One of you was tweeting you were excited to have me here. I responded. Was that you . Good to see you in the world. Just to tread lightly and question the status quo, partly for me what i feel is a visible position, i am a private person, and i use twitter more for professional services, so you will see me tweeting things like we issued our transparency report. That is the kind of thing i want people to know about. I know there are a lot of other people tweeting about seeing their daughters first steps. My daughters first steps were experienced by me in the comfort of my own home and were not disseminated in this way, but that is up to each on their own. Dean lyons i tend to use it professionally as well as well but occasionally i will tweet about my kids, and it sounds authentic to them. I think they respond favorably. Gabriel it is lovely. It is lovely. As a user, some of those moments where i get to see this unvarnished look at people ive never would have had access to i love those experiences. To be able to be exposed to interactions between people i love those experiences, too, and to the extent there is an appetite to see that unvarnished look at me, i am happy to catch up over a coffee at some time, but i am not putting it on display. Dean lyons are there any tweets you regret . Gabriel that is a great question. Maybe because i am a cautious person, no, there are none, but i stand by them. There are plenty of other people i regret having done. Dean lyons that is great. This is a relatively recent tweet of mine and i thought it was harmless. My daughter had a civilizations history textbook and i picked it up and started going through it and it mentioned that as best experts can tell, christ was not born in the year zero. He was born in the year 5 bc that was the best guess. I tweeted i just learned this, am i the last to know . The birthdate of christ is an important date for a lot of people in the world, and i got a response. [laughter] i was trying to be the scientist. It was one of those things where it got a little more response than i expected. [laughter] gabriel if it makes you feel any better, we had dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson out in the bay area area last week, and he came by the office and i was asking him about an extraordinary exchange he had some of you may have seen this i think it was last christmas, and he tweeted out that on this day december 25, we celebrate i will do a bad job of paraphrasing, but this is the spirit of it, for you factcheckers on this day,