Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:03] This is method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host Lisa Kiefer. And today I'm speaking with Gabriel Zucman Professor of Economics and Public Policy here at UC Berkeley. He has just co-authored a book with Emmanuel Saez  called The Triumph of Injustice --How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. Welcome to the program, Gabriel.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:00:36] Thanks for having me.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:37] Why did you write this book. What was the problem or problems you were trying to solve?

Gabriel Zucman: [00:00:42] So the main problem is the rise of inequality in the US. So if you look for instance at what has happened to income concentration, in 1980, the top 1 percent highest earners in the U.S. earned about 10 percent of total U.S. national income today they earn 20 percent of U.S. national income. Now contrast that with what has happened for the working class for the bottom 50 percent of earners. They used to earn 20 percent of income and now about 12 percent. So essentially the top 1 percent and the bottom 50 percent have have switched their income share. And the reality of the U.S. today is that the 1 percent earns twice as much income in total than the bottom 50 percent a group that by definition is 50 times larger. So you have this huge level of inequality and this big increase in inequality and the tax system is a key institution to regulate inequality. And so we wanted to know OK does it do a good job? Does the tax system limit inequality or does it exacerbate the rise of inequality?

Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:58] And as you say in your book all the way back to James Madison the whole point of taxes yes is to raise revenue but the other significant point was to reduce inequality.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:02:07] Exactly.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:08] And that's something that's been kind of forgotten since 1980.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:02:11] That's been forgotten despite the fact that it's deeply rooted in American society. The U.S. was created in large part in reaction against the highly unequal aristocratic societies of of Europe in the 18th century and ever since, many people in the US have been concerned about becoming as unequal as Europe. Europe for a long time was perceived as as an anti model, too unequal, at least until the middle of the 20th century. Now it's the opposite, it's funny to see how these beliefs and perceptions have changed over time. Now many people in the US feel that Europe is too equal, but in fact for most of US history it was it was the opposite. The US invented some of the key progressive fiscal institutions designed to limit inequality to regulate inequality. Let me just give one example. In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt goes to Congress. He makes a famous speech. He says I think that no American should have an income after paying taxes of more than twenty five thousand dollars which is the equivalent of a few million dollars today. Therefore I propose to create a top marginal income tax rate of 100 percent above twenty five thousand dollars. And that's the idea of a legal maximum income. That's an American, a Roosevelt invention. And people in Congress they hesitate a little bit you know 100 percent, maybe it's too much, but they agree on 93 percent which when you think about it is that very far from 100 percent. And then the U.S. kept these very high modern 90 percent top marginal income tax rates for a long time. So there is this deeply rooted tradition in the U.S. of using the tax system to limit the concentration of income. The idea being that wealth is a good thing for the working class, for the middle class. It provides safety, provides security. But for the very rich,wealth is not safety or security. Wealth is power. And an extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of power, of political power, of economic power, which is detrimental to the rest of society and so one key function of the tax system is to prevent such a concentration of wealth and such a concentration of power from happening.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:52] You've been consulting with Elizabeth Warren and others adopting pieces of some of the ideas that you had. How does Elizabeth Warren's plan, when you plug it into your model in the book, your 1980 model,what was the outcome of plugging in her wealth tax.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:05:09] So Elizabeth Warren proposes to create a wealth tax at a rate of 2 percent above 50 million dollars and 6 percent above 1 billion dollars. So just let me explain what this would do. It means that if you have 50 million dollars in wealth or less, you pay zero. One of the things we do in the book we tried to imagine how the U.S. economy would have looked like if such a tax had been in place since 1982. So let me first start with what has happened to wealth concentration since 1982. If you look at the 400 richest Americans, you know Forbes magazine has estimates every year of their wealth. And according to Forbes magazine, the 400 richest Americans owned about 1 percent of U.S. wealth in 1982. And today they own about three point five percent of U.S. wealth. That is their wealth has been growing much much much faster than the economy as a whole and than average wealth in the economy. If the Warren wealth tax had been in place since 1982, inequality, wealth concentration would have increased much less, it would have increased a little bit. That is, today, the top 400 richest Americans would own about one point five percent of U.S. wealth. So a bit more than 82 but that would be much less than the current three point five percent. So this shows something which is very, to me, is very striking, a 6 percent tax on wealth. It's a big deal. You know it means that someone who has a hundred billion dollars has to pay six billion dollars a year in taxes. So it's big. And even if that tax had been in place since 1982, billionaires would still have seen their share of wealth increase.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:00] In other words they'd still be billionaires.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:07:02] Not only billionaires but multi billionaires. Some of them would still have tens of billions of dollars because the rise of wealth inequality has been so massive. The growth rate of wealth of billionaires has been so much higher than the growth rate of wealth for the rest of the population that even with a big wealth tax you know it would not have been enough to reduce inequality.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:26] Well you give a good example about Warren Buffett. You know he's always bragging about how "I pay taxes. I pay a lot of taxes."

Gabriel Zucman: [00:07:32] Yeah. So Warren Buffett is a good illustration for why we need a wealth tax. He's one of the main shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. His wealth, according to Forbes magazine again, is about 80 billion dollars. His true economic income is his share of Berkshire Hathaway's profits. It's something like five billion dollars a year. That's his income. But what he does is that he instructs this company that he owns, Berkshire Hathaway, not to pay dividends. And so his only taxable income is when he sells a few shares every year of his company, is a taxable income of the order of 10 to 20 million dollars. And on that 10 or 20 million dollars he pays three or six million in capital gains taxes. And now you do the math. His true economic income is 5 billion. His tax bill is something like 5 million. So his effective tax rate is essentially zero percent.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:41] It's lower than his secretary.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:08:43] It's not only lower than its secretary, it's it's zero. Essentially you know five million compared to five billion. It's nothing. Then you have a number of proposals such as oh but let's just increase the top marginal income tax rate or let's just increase the tax rate on capital gains.But you see the problem....

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:01] That's what Bill Gates says.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:09:03] That's what Bill Gates, Warren Buffett himself, there is this so-called Buffett Rule that was popular at some point among Democrats and the idea was we need to increase the tax rate on capital gains. Fine. You know it's not a bad idea. But you have to realize that the Buffett rule itself would make essentially no difference to Warren Buffett's tax bill, because even if you increase the capital gains tax rate to 100 percent let's say, then Warren Buffett would have to pay let's say 20 million in taxes. 20 million divided by five billion, which again is his true income, would still be zero percent. So if you want to tax billionaires like Warren Buffett or like Jeff Bezos or like Mark Zuckerberg, the proper way to do that is with a tax on the stock of wealth itself, with a wealth tax. Because when you're extremely rich it's very easy to own billions or tens of billions while having very little taxable income. And so you cannot tax billionaires well just with the income tax. You also need a wealth tax.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:10] Gates also argues estate taxes and I like your argument in the book, you say well you know fine but are we going to wait around all these years? Some of these billionaires are very young.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:10:21] Yeah exactly. You look at Mark Zuckerberg you know he's in his 30s. He's not paying much taxes today. Just like the Warren Buffett example because Facebook doesn't pay dividends. Facebook doesn't pay a lot of corporate tax. So is it wise to wait for 50 years or more before some of the country's wealthiest individuals stopped paying taxes. I don't think that's very wise.  You Know, essentially because there are all these needs for revenue for early education, for university, for health care, for infrastructure. These are immediate needs and some billionaires can contribute much much more than they do today. There's no good reason to wait for 50 years to make them contribute.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:11:12] If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm speaking with Professor Gabriel Zucman about his new book The Triumph of injustice how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay, co-authored by another economics professor here Emmanuel Saez. They advocate for a progressive wealth tax as a solution to global inequality, one that rethinks both evasion and the goals of taxation.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:11:48] You talk about labor versus capital and I want you to explain that a little bit because you said for the first time in history labor pays more than capital. Why do the working class pay so many taxes right now. And that has to do with that labor capital crossover.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:12:04] Absolutely. So historically the U.S. has taxed capital a lot. The corporate tax was high. The estate tax. Taxes and dividends, on interest. Property taxes. So there is a long tradition of relatively heavy capital taxation in the US.  The main change that has happened since the 1980s is that these capital taxes have been rolled back, have have been cut massively, so the corporate income tax is a prime example. In December 2017, the Trump tax reform slashed the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Another good example is the estate tax which used to generate quite a lot of revenue in the 1970s. Today almost nobody pays the estate tax and even the very wealthy who are supposed to pay it can claim valuation discount and avoid it in many ways so that the revenue generated by the estate tax is extremely small. Dividends are taxed less than wages and so on and so on so capital taxation is essentially disappearing,it has not disappeared completely but has it has been dramatically reduced. And at the same time Labor taxation has increased. So Labor taxation, what is it? Taxes on wages, you know the income tax, but also the payroll taxes. So no matter how low your wage is in the United States today, 15 percent of that wage is paid in payroll taxes, that fund Social Security and Medicare, and these payroll taxes they used to be quite small you know in the 50s-60s, less than 5 percent of income. And they've grown a lot and these are taxes that are essentially only on wage income. And so you have this process where wages have stagnated for the working class for the middle class. In fact at the bottom of the wage distribution, wages have declined a lot because the federal minimum wage has declined enormously since the 1970s. Today it's only seven point twenty five dollars. It's a number of states and and municipalities like Berkeley have higher minimum wages. But if you look at Southern states for instance they only have the federal minimum wage seven point twenty five dollars an hour, much lower than in the 70s, and at the same time as minimum wage workers so their income fall, their taxes have increased because of the big increase in payroll taxes. And I don't think that's a sustainable process.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:40] And not only that, the cost of childcare, education, I mean when you think about it, they could be considered taxes on the working people. You know you're out of pocket for everything and not to mention medical care and a lot of people do not even have medical care.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:14:55] Absolutely. And that's a very important point. When you look for instance at health care, health insurance, it is in effect a giant tax today on working families. If you are lucky enough to work for a firm or an employer that has more than 50 workers, the firm has to provide you with health insurance, that's mandatory. And the way this works is that employers pay premiums to insurance companies and these premiums are enormous, the costs for covered work today on average is thirteen thousand dollars. That thirteen thousand dollars that in effect reduces the wage of employees. Okay. That's something that could be added to their wage for instance if there was a public insurance program, if everybody was covered by Medicare, workers could get thirteen thousand dollars more in wages and it would make no difference for employers. These insurance premiums are in effect a huge tax on labor, a huge hidden tax. There mandatory.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:04] You call it a poll tax.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:16:05] We call them a poll tax or head tax because they are of a fixed amount per head, that is, the employer pays those same essentially for a secretary and for an executive-- thirteen thousand dollars. So it's the most regressive type of tax. It doesn't depend on income, it doesn't depend on your ability to pay. It reduces wages by thirteen thousand dollars for all work workers no matter what their wage is. This is a huge problem.  This is a big part of the reason why wages have stagnated since the 1980s for the working class and the middle class. Their wages have stagnated because employers have to pay more and more to private health insurance companies and so that leaves less and less money that can be paid in wages.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:56] In the Democratic debates, why are they not explaining this. They seem to defend the choice of a private insurance tax. "Oh let people choose." It doesn't sound like people truly understand what they are choosing.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:17:11] I agree. We are trying to explain that in the book and we are trying to explain that to as many people as we can. There are many problems with the way that healthcare and health insurance currently works in the US, but the main problem is how it reduces wages dramatically for the working class and for the middle class. And we have a solution. In my opinion, this is how things should be presented. If you move to a universal public health insurance program let's call it Medicare for all. What would happen the first Year? Employers would be required to convert insurance premiums into wages. That is, an employer that used to pay thirteen thousand dollars for the health care of each employees, would add thirteen thousand dollars to their wages, so this would be the biggest pay raise in a generation. First year of Medicare for all, everybody's wage increases by thirteen thousand dollars. And then of course you need to collect extra taxes to fund Medicare for all. But if these taxes are smart enough, if they are not head taxes or poll taxes that doesn't vary with income but rather if they are taxes based on your income or your wealth or if you tax corporate profits, you can make sure that the new tax would be much lower for the vast majority of workers than the extra wage that they gained. And so you can make sure that 90 percent of workers would benefit from a transition to Medicare for All in the sense that they would have a huge wage boost. They would have to pay a bit more in taxes but the extra tax would be much less than thirteen thousand dollars. Any my way is the proper way to explain Medicare for all. Your wages have stagnated. Big part of the explanation is there so much money that goes to private health insurance. There's going to be a law that says all the premiums are converted back into wages. Part of your wage was stolen. Now we're giving it back to you. You have a huge wage boost. We're going to raise taxes. But in a progressive manner so that the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution has a big net of tax pay increase.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:19:33] With a wealth tax, it seems like the taxes for middle class and lower class would actually go down, even paying for Medicare for all.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:19:41] Yes that is, if you include current health insurance premiums in your measure of the tax rate which I think is legitimate since these premiums are essentially like private taxes, mandatory payments. And if you abolish these premiums and replace those by progressive taxes, you get a big tax cut for essentially 90 percent of the population.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:20:05] That's something no one's talking about.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:20:07] Not yet. I'm not losing hope.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:20:09] One of your most interesting chapters is on tax evasion and tax competition, which is going to be a challenge to any kind of change to our tax system. Can you talk about what you discovered and actually it goes back to when you were working as a young man at Exane.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:20:26] Yes. So many people have that view that in a globalized world it's impossible to tax multinational companies, impossible to tax corporations, because if you do that they would move their profits to tax havens, the Cayman Islands or Bermuda. Or they will move their factories or their headquarters, their production activities, to low tax places like Ireland. And so according to that view, the only possible future is the race to the bottom with respect to the corporate income tax rate. So countries slashing their rates one after another. And we are very much in that situation today where countries are slashing their corporate tax rate. And for a long time I thought OK no this this makes sense. I understand why in a globalized world, countries want to attract some activity by offering lower rate and there's going to be tax competition and it's the huge pressure that pushes towards lower rates. But what we understood by doing research, that the research is summarised in the book is that this view is actually wrong. That is tax competition, just like tax avoidance or tax evasion, these are not laws of nature. These are policy choices. So we've embraced as nations, collectively we've embraced a certain form of globalization, which is characterized by tax competition and tax avoidance. But that's a choice. It's not a very democratic or very transparent choice, not a very well-informed choice, but it's a choice that's been made, and we can make other choices. There's another form of globalization that's possible. There's no tax competition. There's no profit shifting. There's there's much less tax evasion. So the way this would work for instance is this: right now if you are a U.S. multinational company and you book your profits in Bermuda, for instance, where the corporate tax rate is 0 percent, you don't have to pay taxes. Bermuda chooses not to collect taxes and the U.S. essentially doesn't tax the profits booked by its companies abroad. Okay that's that's a choice but we can make another choice. We could say the U.S. is going to tax all the foreign profits of its companies. It's going to collect the taxes that other countries choose not to collect. If Apple for instance, books a billion dollars in profits in Bermuda, taxed at 0 percent, and then the corporate tax rate is 30 percent in the U.S., the U.S. is going to tax that billion dollar at a rate of 30 percent in the U.S.. If Apple Books profits in Ireland taxed at 2 percent in Ireland the U.S. is going to collect 28 percent, so that the total rate would be 30 percent on a country by country basis.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:23:12] So that would change everything.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:23:14] That changes everything because then it removes any incentive for firms to book profits in tax havens, or to move real activity to low tax places, one. And second, since firms wouldn't have incentives anymore to do these things, it removes any incentive for tax havens to offer low tax rates in the first place. Now they would have incentives to actually increase that tax rate as so you see how you change the race to the bottom into a race to the top.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:23:48] Yes and manufacturing might start to happen more in the countries that had previously been taking them offshore.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:23:54] Exactly and what might also happen is that instead of competing by offering low tax rates as countries do today, a very negative form of international competition, we would move to a more positive form of competition, where countries would compete by providing the best infrastructure for companies or by having the most productive workforce thanks to good universities, good schools, good hospitals. So that's how globalization could look like. You know it's good to have some competition but the form of competition that we have today, which is you know countries are competing by slashing their rates, a very negative and bad form of competition. We could have a much more positive form of competition once you put taxes out of the picture.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:46] So this would require cooperation amongst countries and just the will to do this.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:24:52] Yeah and look there's already a lot of international economic cooperation. We've made a lot of progress. For instance, when it comes to trade agreements, some of that is is unraveling today with the Trump administration. But if you take the longer view. We've made tons of progress. Reducing tariffs in terms of facilitating access 

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:14] Access to data which helped you with this book.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:25:16] Exactly, in terms of access to data, so does there is international coordination. But the problem is that there's way too little coordination on the tax rates themselves. So for instance when countries talk about free trade agreements these days, these free trade agreements are essentially about property protection, protecting the rights of foreign investors and dispute resolution settlements. So know how to protect the rights of investors, but property cannot come with only rights and no duty, no, property also comes with the duty to pay taxes. And so the way to make progress, to reach an international agreement on taxes, in my view. is to put taxes at the center of free trade agreements, is to say, we are not going to sign any of any new free trade agreement if it's only to guarantee new rights to investors and ignores taxes. Any new free trade agreement should have taxes at the center stage and that's how it would become possible to make quickly a lot of progress in terms of tax coordination.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:19] And that's also true when you think about the constitutionality of any tax reform here in this country, it's going to require the will and the cooperation of our legislatures. It can happen.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:26:32] Yeah it can happen because the current situation is is  similar in many ways to the discussion during the Gilded Age in the late 19th century early 20th century. Inequality was rising a lot with industrialized nation, with urbanization, you know huge fortunes were being created. And second, the tax system was very unfair. At the time, the only or the biggest federal tax was the tariff. So taxes that essentially exempted the very wealthy and that that made the price of goods more expensive and so that hurt the working class, the middle class. The situation today is pretty much the same. Inequality is rising a lot, the tax system is less regressive than than during the Gilded Age, but this is much less progressive than what people think it is. During the Gilded Age you have all these debates about the creation of a progressive federal income tax. The 16th Amendment 1913 allows the federal government to levy progressive income tax and it was a huge success. So the income tax very quickly became extremely progressive with rates in 1917 of close to 70 percent. So it's it's a huge change in just a few years. In 1912. There's no income tax. People say it would never happen. It's unconstitutional. You know there's no way this is going to become reality. And then in 1913 the constitution changes. 1917, ,70 percent of marginal income tax rates for the highest earners. So I'm not saying that the same process is actually going to happen for the wealth tax today. But when I look at history, I see dramatic U-turns and changes and reversals and retreats so the history of taxation is far from linear. There is progress and that's what fundamentally makes me optimistic about the possibility for change and for reform.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:28:27] Well when 50 percent of the population makes eighteen thousand five hundred dollars a year, it's untenable. You created a Web site. Tax Justice now dot org. That's all one word.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:28:40] We developed this website to make the tax debate more democratic, because it's not for economists, it's not for experts, to say what taxes should be. It's for the people through democratic deliberation and the vote. And we want to give the tools, the knowledge, to the people. So it's a tool for the people to simulate their own tax reform. It's user friendly, it's very simple to use. Everything is is transparent. It's fully open source, with all the code you know online  for people who want to dig into this. But the Web site itself is extremely simple. You don't need to be an expert or to know anything about economics. What the Website does is two things. One, it shows how regressive the U.S. tax system is today. When you take into account all taxes paid at all levels of government, the website shows what the effective tax rate for a group of the population and how it has changed over time. And then you can change taxes. You can change let's say the top marginal income tax rate. You can change a corporate tax rate. You can create new taxes like a wealth tax, change the rates, change the exemption threshold. And the website shows how this would affect the progressivity of the tax system, one. And second, it shows how much revenue would be collected. So let's say you want to fund Medicare for All, or free college, or student debt relief. These things have a cost and there's several ways to fund these things. And so the user can very simply say OK, with that combination of taxes, with that tax refund, I can collect enough revenue to do these important policy changes.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:24] Obviously you guys have plugged in all the numbers and come up with the ideal type of tax and you call it the national tax. Can you describe that and how it might be different from or in addition to a wealth tax?

Gabriel Zucman: [00:30:37] The idea here is, how do we fund universal public health insurance and more broadly how could the U.S. increase its tax collection in a sustainable manner? The way that European countries do this is with value added taxes which are taxes essentially on consumption, better than sales taxes, but still pretty regressive because they're only on consumption and the rich consume a small fraction of their income whereas the poor consume most or even sometimes more than 100 percent of their income. And so what we are saying is look the U.S. doesn't have to introduce a V A T --A value added tax like other countries, it can leapfrog the V.A.T. and create a new tax which like the V.A.T. can collect a ton of revenue, but can do it in a much more progressive manner. And we call it the national income tax. And so the idea is for instance, if you want to fund Medicare for all. Step one is you convert the premiums into wages and so everybody's wage increases by thirteen thousand dollars. Step two, maybe year or year three. You create this new national income tax, which essentially is a tax on all labor costs and all profits made by corporations. So it's the broadest possible form of income taxation. And the beauty of it is that because it's so broad with a tax rate of only 5 percent, you can generate a lot of revenue, enough to replace all the insurance premiums that employers pay today.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:32:20] What about education?

[00:32:20] And you can increase the rates,  go to 6 percent or 7 percent and that generates a lot of revenue that can be spent on early education, an area where there's nothing in the US in terms of public spending essentially, something municipalities do spend some money, but the U.S. is at the bottom of the international ranking when it comes to a public child care and early education in general. So that's a high priority. It's easy to collect a percent of GDP with that national income tax to fund universal early education. It's easy to collect an extra 1 percent if you want to make public universities,  much more progressive than than anything else that exists.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:33:01] And it's still less than what I would be paying today.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:33:03] Of course.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:33:04] Way less!

Gabriel Zucman: [00:33:05] That's the beauty of it because today you're paying so much in child care, for college, for health, in a way that's very unfair because it doesn't depend on your income. It's the same amount essentially for each individual.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:33:22] Essentially what's at stake is the future of globalization and the future of democracy. If globalization means ever lower taxes for its main winners, big multinational companies and their shareholders, and at the same time, higher and higher taxes for those who don't benefit a lot from globalization or sometimes suffer from it, retirees or small businesses, then it's not sustainable, neither economically nor politically. The problem with high and rising income and wealth inequality as as the Founding Fathers themselves understood at the time is that excessive wealth concentration corrodes democracy, corrodes the social contract, and we're seeing this today when you look at, for instance, what has been the main piece of legislation of the Trump presidency so far, it's been a big tax cut for wealthy individuals. So you've had three full decades of rising inequality and then on top of that, a law that adds fuel to that phenomenon. And it's hard to analyze this other than by saying that it reflects a form of political capture of plutocratic drift. That's the reality of the U.S. today and so if democracy is to prevail, and if we want to have a more sustainable form of globalization, we need to tackle this issue of tax injustice.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:34:53] Thank you for being on the program,Gabriel.

Gabriel Zucman: [00:34:56] Thank you so much for having me.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:34:58] The book is The Triumph of Injustice --How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. The website: TaxJusticeNow.org and you also have a profile in the October New Yorker which is really great reading. So thanks again for being on the program.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:35:24] You've been listening to method to the madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today's guest was Gabriel Zucman, professor of economics and public policy here at UC Berkeley. We'll be back again in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:06] This is Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with Ashley Grosh, the CEO of PIP's Rewards. Thank you for coming on the show, Ashley. What is PIPs?

Ashley Grosh: [00:00:36] So PIPs Rewards is an app and it's a technology platform that is owned and operated by our company 3P Partners. We call ourselves an impact tech company. What we really do is we turn a verifiable engagement in beneficial behaviors, things happening daily, riding your bike, bus riding, taking a workout class. All these beneficial behaviors that you might be doing throughout the day, we verify that and we award you our digital currency when you do those things. So Pip's is our digital currency, which stands for Positive Impact Points.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:09] That's interesting. It sounds complex how you would measure this. So walk me through the application as a user. An example.

Ashley Grosh: [00:01:18] Yeah. So from a user perspective, it's actually very lightweight and easy. You just would download the app in the app store for iPhone or Android. You download Pip's rewards. Today we're targeted in higher education, so you would use your university email through a single sign on. We would capture who you are. You'd set up an account and then you'd really begin to start using the platform. It takes you through a quick tutorial of what you need to do. You'd want to have your Bluetooth enabled and it shows you ways in which you can now start going out into the community and around campus and earning the currency. So a day in the life of a Pip's user, you may wake up in the morning, you fill up your water bottle, which has our little QR code sticker on it, which you may have gone to pick up an environmental center on campus. So you carry that water bottle with you. But when you fill it up, you take your phone out, you take a picture of your QR code and then you've earned 10 points. You can only refill your water bottle three times per day. So if you try to do that again, you'll get an error message. And that's really more just the behavior, we want you just to be in the habit of carrying that water bottle.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:19] You don't want people scamming this system.

Ashley Grosh: [00:02:20] That's right. So we set barriers in place to make sure that doesn't happen. So then let's say you're going to a study group in the morning, so you hop on one of the bike shares programs that's here on campus and we are automatically already integrated with that bike sharing platform. So when you check out that bike, we know who you are. We know you're on that bike. And all the sudden immediately our currency goes into your digital wallet with inside the app. And now you've earned for refilling your water bottle. Now you've taken a bike to a meeting and now you've earned again. Let's say you're coming back up to campus for a class in the afternoon and you hop on the bus. Well, now we have either a beacon or an API integration installed with the transit company, and you don't even have to have your phone out for this. In some cases, we might use near-field communication. So we're using a lot of technologies, right, to integrate innovative technologies. If we think about the connected city, smart cities. Right. All these things to track and measure. So you come back up the bus to class and then again in your digital wallet, you see your currency being added for that behavior. :et's say in the afternoon then, there's a speaker coming onto campus that's talking about climate finance on an environmental or health related topic. So let's say you go to that event and that's one of the activities that we award for. We also capture that you've gone to that event and you've earned our currency than you maybe go refill your water bottle again. Then you go into housing and dining. You go have some lunch and let's say you brought your own silverware. So let's say you brought your own bamboo silverware and then let's say you're composting and you're doing all these things. We have different mechanisms to capture that as well within the dining hall. And if if the campus is interested in financial literacy, then students can take EDquity financial literacy modules and earn our currency. I'm giving you kind of a flavor, right, of you go about your day and you're earning all this currency.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:08] And it's very transparent to the user, it sounds like.

Ashley Grosh: [00:04:11] Yeah, it happens in real time. So you can see your digital dashboard in your wallet.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:15] What is a a data point worth?

Ashley Grosh: [00:04:17] So that's a great point. So one pip is worth one cent. And so then we we do this, you know, kind of carbon pricing on your actions. So when you're refilling a water bottle, you may only get 10 pips for that. But if you're riding the bus. Right, that's got a bigger implication in terms of your carbon savings. So maybe you'll get 50 pips, in that case, if you go to volunteer at a tree planning event in the community, maybe that's a thousand. So we work with the university to really put the value behind each of these actions.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:48] And then is this accumulated reward money, can it pay for education and books and things to do with college?

Ashley Grosh: [00:04:55] There you go. That whole secret sauce. So what happens is when you accumulate your your pips in your wallet, well, then the question becomes, what can you do with it? Right. And so there's really kind of three key things that you can do. We have an in app e-commerce platform. And so we screen for green, though, any company that we partner with in there has to be promoting sustainability or have a sustainable product. And so we have some food companies in there. So Whole Foods, Chipotle, Patagonia's an example. Roffey shoes, right? These are sustainable companies and brands. And so you can convert your pip's into either gift cards or discounts with those vendors. It's really cool. So you can, you know, use that in app e-commerce site to redeem your currency. You also could donate your currency. So we work with a number of nonprofits, both national and local. So if you're really interested in a cause, an environmental justice or the Nature Conservancy or something happening right here in your community, you can donate your pip's and we will cut a check to that organization from 3P on your behalf. And then the real secret sauce that we just rolled out last spring is the Pip's for Schools program. So this is where it now you can take the Pip's that you've earned and convert it to pay down tuition, books, school fees. We do that through the Office of Financial Aid and then we have a separate fund called the Pips Education Fund in which we provide a match. So let's say you have $100 that you've accumulated. You put that towards your books. We provide you a one to one match. Now you've gotten a $200 scholarship.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:27] Who's matching it? 

Ashley Grosh: [00:06:32] So we have a separate fund and it's a 501 C 3 non-profit. We're raising for that fund separately.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:34] And so people can donate to that fund. 

Ashley Grosh: [00:06:36] Absolutely. So, alumni or corporate partners, charitable institutions, community foundations, people that are really interested in supporting education, sustainability, student success and higher ed can make a contribution and donate to that fund. And then we use that fund to make the match. And our goal over time is to get to a two or three to one match. So all the sudden you go about your daily life, you're doing all these good things. You're earning the currency that has real value and you're putting that towards your education. When students are taking those earned pips and converting them to tuition dollars, the money's then flowing back to the university through the Office of Financial Aid. And then we are providing through our separate 501 C-3, the Pip's Education Fund, a match. And so really the university is recouping their initial investment of the subscription back through the Office of Financial Aid. So it's a really great ROI for the university. It's really a win win win.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:33] The technology behind this is mind boggling to me. It seems like there's a lot of tech pieces, a lot of data points.

Ashley Grosh: [00:07:40] It is. It is.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:41] It's very I mean, it's transparent to the user. But can you talk to me about the technology that is in place and how that all works?

Ashley Grosh: [00:07:49] Yeah. So some of it, you know, we install so there is an infrastructure component. So I mentioned on buses or on transit or if you're going to an event on campus, we may use little beacons or sensors. And these sensors can know that if you're in the building, it's Bluetooth enabled. And so we can pick up on that, that that student ID is there, we verify that you're there.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:10] So do you have to turn that on, the behavior tracking system?

Ashley Grosh: [00:08:12] You just turn on your Bluetooth and actually people may or may not know this, but these beacons and sensors are used in retail stores. So if I go into Target, for example, they want to know how long am I spending in each section? How long am I spending in the food, in the women's clothing? I'm a mom. So how long am I spending in the baby section? Right. So beacons and sensors have been used in the retail market too.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:34] From your phones.

Ashley Grosh: [00:08:35] From your phones through location based services. Right. If those are enabled on your phone to get data. And now that's a different use case. Right. So we're not using that. We're using it in more of a closed loop system.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:46] There's a lot of talk about giving you back money for your data that you're giving to like, say, Facebook or Amazon. And there are some parallels as far as, you know, verification and the tracking.

Ashley Grosh: [00:08:56] You're right on. I mean, this question comes up a lot, but we follow the privacy policy of the university so we don't do anything with that data other than analyze it, look at it and share it with the university. And then the university looks at, wow, look at the impact, look how many bike rides or look how many bus rides. And wow maybe we need another bus station over here because we're seeing so much action and so we only share the data with the university and we use it to measure retention, engagement, a bunch of things related to the platform. We would never sell that data anywhere outside of the campus.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:34] If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness a bi weekly public affairs show on K.A.L.X. Berkeley celebrating innovators. Today, I'm speaking with Ashley Grosh, the COO of Pip's. Pip's uses a behavior tracking platform to reward positive behavior.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:00] How do you know that a company or a service that I use as a student is sustainable?

Ashley Grosh: [00:10:05] In the case of like Patagonia, for example, who we bring onto the platform,.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:08] That one's pretty obvious.

Ashley Grosh: [00:10:09] That one's pretty obvious, right. But, you know, Rothey's is a good example or Blue Planet that makes sustainable sunglasses. So we really do as a B Corp Right. So we're a certified B Corp. Okay.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:21] And just so our audience knows, a benefit corporation is for profit, but you are required to consider the society and the environment in addition to profit. Correct?

Ashley Grosh: [00:10:31] That's right. So it's that triple bottom line that we hear about where we want to see an environmental return, a social return and then a financial return. Right. So we're looking at the triple bottom line and we screen for other companies and partners to be a part of our ecosystem. You've also got to have those same values. Air BnB is a partner of ours. Again, that's a circular economy. The shared economy. I can convert my pip's to a gift card for AirBnb. You know, we provide gift cards to Wholefoods, which is technically Amazon's the parent company, but Wholefoods is still a wonderful partner of ours and we'd like to see Amazon learn more about our platform and figure out other ways to partner with us and then offer maybe even further discounts. Could we also work with Amazon on other features, you know, other sustainable products? That's a huge area of opportunity for us. So I think Amazon, you know, will continue to have those conversations through the door of working with Whole Foods. You know, we're selectively screened for green companies. And so Panera is one that we just added, Chipotle,right, that are thoughtful about their supply chain. We love to really promote local. So when we come onto a campus, we also will go around to all the local vendors. In Boulder, for example, our flagship university, CU Boulder, there is a store called Refill Revolution where you can fill up bulk laundry detergent, lotion, shampoo, conditioner, things like that. And so they're a partner of ours. They accept our currency as well as you earn. So there are certain sort of a dual partner. But we love to go locally and find partners like that in the community, local stores. And we haven't had anybody turn us away yet in wanting to be a part of the program.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:12:10] Where are you happening? You say you're focusing on universities.

Ashley Grosh: [00:12:14] CU Boulder, as I mentioned, was our early adopter. They are our flagship university, Univeristy of Colorado Boulder and very similar, a sister campus, I would say, to Berkeley. But so CU is really interested in this technology. When they learned about it really from two aspects from a retention standpoint and from a sustainability standpoint. So they want to be leaders in promoting sustainable actions on campus. They want to measure that. They want to put that into their climate action planning. They really want to better understand that the footprint they're having in the city and then retention, retention is probably the number one buzz word on campuses. Right. If you don't get students to stay engaged and to graduate the four, five plus years, you're leaving big money on the table. There's a lot of reasons why students come to campus and they don't continue. And partly it's the cost. Partly it's food insecurity and then it's mental stress and it's not finding friends. And so those are some of the top reasons that we've we've studied a lot of surveys around retention data. And so our thought is, if we can help with food insecurity. Right. We're helping to offset and subsidize the cost of healthy food by providing more access and more funding to food, healthy food choices, transportation costs. We can help to offset that. Financial aid. Right. If we're now starting to contribute in, you know, a couple thousand dollars per semester that a student could earn. Now, it doesn't seem so overwhelming, the burden of debt and then mental health. We also have mindfulness trainings. We also have financial literacy that we can do through the app and then we make it fun. You can gamify it..

Lisa Kiefer: [00:13:44] So you get points for taking care of yourself.

Ashley Grosh: [00:13:46] Yeah.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:13:46] So how long have you been doing Boulder?

Ashley Grosh: [00:13:48] We started a pilot there in the fall of 2017. That was our pilot year. And then we took the outcomes. We targeted just freshman that year and we took all the results back to the university and they really saw the opportunity to scale this. So they in 2018 signed a three year contract with us. And so we're now in that contract. We've we keep adding to it. We're constantly measuring, really working on the user adoption and then adding new actions, adding new partners, building the ecosystem.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:17] So it's actually working there and it's successful.

Ashley Grosh: [00:14:19] Yes, we've got about 5000 users on the platform. We initially set out to get about 10 percent of the student body and now we've exceeded that. Now we've added staff and faculty onto the platform. And what's cool about that is the staff or faculty can donate their pip's to individual student or to the Pip's Education Fund. It's really booming over there. And it's we now just launch refer a friend feature. So if you bring a friend onto the platform, you're rewarded. The origin of this is really around behavior, you know, neuroscience kind of the way that we act. Dopamine, the way that we're engaged, incented. And we know that rewards work. We know that gamification works. And so. We gamify, we do a lot of contests where you can count constantly be earning. And then we make it really fun with our prizes. We also have ski passes. That's what makes us different if you think about the value of these rewards. You know, you're getting food, you're getting Patagonia gear. You're getting tuition. Ski passes.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:15] And it's not interfering with academic study.

Ashley Grosh: [00:15:18] It's actually aiding in helping them with basic needs support.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:22] What were some of the challenges that, what were your biggest challenges?

Ashley Grosh: [00:15:25] There's a lot of different parts of campus that you want to engage. So you want to engage housing and dining, you know, Office of Financial Aid, the communications group, because you want to message this out in any way you can. So you really got to work and integrate with the communications teams on campus. Hey, how can we get included in newsletters? Where can we get some signage? So it really is a collaboration I think, when you're first setting it up, the messaging, how do we fit into the brand in the brand voice on campus? And so it takes, you know, a couple of of different groups to come together on campus.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:58] Campuses are noisy with groups.

Ashley Grosh: [00:16:00] That's right.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:01] There's a lot going.

Ashley Grosh: [00:16:02] That's that's exactly right. So there's clubs every which way. There's a lot of competing interest. That's why the refer a friend. Right. We know that things get sticky when other people talk about it. So if I'm a student and I have my phone out and I'm doing something. It seems like. What are you doing? Oh, well, I'm doing this cool app where I can earn currency and I can pay my tuition. tuition.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:19] How did you get the word out initially?

Ashley Grosh: [00:16:22] The strategy that we used at Boulder was to integrate it into welcome week. And so as students are coming to campus, even before they came to campus, we had a welcome letter that went to the parents and the students. Download this app before you come to campus. And then when you come to campus, we set up a scavenger hunt so that students could really learn, hey, here's the library, here's the dining hall, here's the rec center. And they used our app to go through this scavenger hunt. And then they got Pip's at every place they went. And so we got really clever about welcome week. All the students filed into the football stadium and we got a big P.A. message, hey, have you heard about the Pip's app? And we got thousands of downloads in a matter of a week. And so that, you know, integrating into welcome week, but otherwise you can do it into other events on campus. So there's lots of different ways. But the welcome week one is is really a trick of ours.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:17:14] Where are your other applications happening?

Ashley Grosh: [00:17:14] Yeah, we're pretty early in our journey. So CU was the early adopter. But now we like to take a systems approach. So we're looking at the University of Colorado system. So we've launched to their second largest campus, which is in Colorado Springs. And then we're looking to roll out at U.C. Denver. And so that would capture the entire system so we're at two of those system wide campuses now and then we've got proposals really throughout the country into large university systems. And so really looking at a systems approach in different parts of the country, but also within Colorado, we've got a handful of other universities coming on in 2020 to help us regionally gain some traction, gain some visibility, get some of the regional transit partners on board, getting a ubiquitous feel to the currency across higher ed in one state, and then we can go regionally and plug and play. But what's really great is we're getting all of these in-bounds now. So people, sustainability officers are talking about this. You know, Forbes did an article on us, hey, turn your actions into tuition money. There's a lot of talk right now around basic needs support, food insecurity. Just this week, I talked to somebody at University of Miami that said, hey, we're on the frontlines of climate change. Our students and our staff and community need to be doing everything we can. Can you please come here and help us? And so that's what's really starting to get exciting is is the inbound buzz that we're getting. So I think we'll continue to really lead in Colorado, but then you'll start to see us regionally as we head into 2020.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:18:41] And California is on your map?

Ashley Grosh: [00:18:43] California is... all things lead back to California in some ways, just from the leadership standpoint that California has taken, in so many measures. And so, you know, we really would love to be out in California. There's a lot we could do. And even in the UC system, you could imagine two of the two or three or handful, the universities competing. Right. Who could draw down the most carbon. So we have a carbon drawdown challenge. And so that becomes really fun, right? In the storytelling there. We can also integrate into athletics. So we could have a green game, you know, through the PAC Twelve and do some fun things there. But really getting a system on board is a significant goal. And where we're spending a lot of our focus right now, talking to the UC system, talking to the California state system, the community college system, too, if we think about some rural places, Bakersfield and others, you know, how can we promote alternative transportation, how can we promote some of these healthy behaviors in more rural communities?

Lisa Kiefer: [00:19:37] You're giving currency back to people, social currency. But how are you as a company making money off of this?

Ashley Grosh: [00:19:44] Great question. So I'm a trained banker and I spent my whole career working on businesses, scaling technologies, looking at business models, a program I actually in my former role worked with here on campus at Berkeley is the Clean Tech to Market program, the C-2M Program with Brian Steele and Beverly Alexander, I have to give them a shout out. But really looking at right, how do you take an innovative technology platform and scale it? And so we make revenue in a couple of different ways. So it's a subscription model. So first and foremost, the university pays us a subscription to have the Pip's Rewards platform deployed on campus that unlocks the pool of pips then that we divvy out. But then we also have action partners that pay to join our programs. So that could be ridesharing companies, companies like Zipcar, Car2Go, you know, Lyft and Uber really want to dominate the university place. We've got proposals into both of them. If I come to the university and I pick a ridesharing company, when I leave the university, I'm probably going to use that one. Bike sharing platforms pay to be on our platform. So that's another source of revenue. Within our catalog, our E commerce catalogue, our affiliate catalog, we also earn a small commission. If somebody uses their pip's to buy something, we may have a commission that comes back to us. And then sponsorship is another source of revenue. And this is when I really get excited about too. So I mentioned, Chipotle and some other partners that are on the platform. But thinking about large corporate brands. Right, that spend so much money on marketing, if they have a really strong CSR, corporate social responsibility mission, an initiative, you know, their brands are really working hard across communities to promote sustainability, promote maybe their products. So we really see sponsorship in underwriting as an opportunity. A beverage company, for example, could come in and underwrite the recycling behaviors on our platform. As we know in most California campuses that have divested from plastic. But that takes a little bit of behavior change to think about. What are the alternative sources? CU Boulder just rolled out some new aluminum type refillable cans for their stadiums or cups, I should say. But there's some behavior change that has to happen there so we can use our app to educate. But brands that really want to be associated with an app like ours, we're in front of young people, we're in front of their customers. Sponsorship is it is a big opportunity for us to go and work with large corporate and small corporate brands.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:01] Tell me how this idea even got started.

Ashley Grosh: [00:22:04] So Wendy Gordon is our co-founder. There's several co-founders. And so Wendy has a fascinating history. She's a serial entrepreneur and she's always tackled this riddle of how do we change the behavior? How do we get consumers, you know, to think about smarter products, to think about their footprint? She launched and co-founded Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet with Meryl Streep, which was the original green guide, and that ended up being acquired by National Geographic. And then Wendy was an environmentalist at the National Resource Defense Council, NRDC. And so she's got a really fascinating background all around, you know, sustainability, the sciences in consumer. And so, Wendy, you know, really thought how could we think about rewards points? So if we look at traditional credit card, frequent flyer miles, they sound really good on the surface, but the redemption rates of those are very low. And so, Wendy and one of her college classmates, David Sands, got together. They went to Princeton. And they've kind of been thinking about this riddle of how do we how do we get people to do things, right? It's through incentives and rewards. So they came up with this initial idea and then they were introduced to two developers. So technical folks, Evan and Ynev and Ynev actually has a neuroscience background. And he ran a dopamine lab. So he started bringing in the science and started to look at loss aversion and all these different, you know, scientific ways of the way that we interact in the way that we're, you know, incentivized and what works and what does it what keeps us coming back, what makes things sticky. That's why we bring in gamification. So you had the business side that, you know, Wendy and David were building and then you had the technical side and Evan and Ynev said, think about all the wearables, the wearable market, Fitbit, if you think about the connected economy, that there's so many things that we could plug into. If we build an open source platform with API, we can connect into all these tracking devices and start to verify the actions. We don't want to see greenwashing. We don't want to say, I pledge to do this or I pledge to do that. We really want to verify that you took an action. So the company got formed and then really started to think about where could this application where's the best use case? They tested it in a new enterprise locations, some real estate firms doing fitness competitions and things like that. But then really it was CU Boulder that said, you know, we think this is a higher ed solution. So spend a couple of years.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:24] So they came to you? 

Ashley Grosh: [00:24:25] Yeah. Yeah. Sue Boulder came to Wendy and said, you know, we really think this is best served in the higher ed space. And so they completely pivoted and decided to focus all the actions, all the technical side on Boulder and in really targeting higher, higher institutions, higher ed.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:44] What are some of your future plans?

Ashley Grosh: [00:24:46] So longer term, I think there is absolutely an enterprise solution here. So that's an employee engagement platform. Again, retention is another key issue we know with employers. And so if you could. Offer meaningful rewards for employees. You know, Google we've talked to, they have a problem with transportation. They have too many people driving single occupancy vehicles or this is a case of a lot of employers, right. So how can you change the behavior and get them to carpool or get them to ride the bus system? And then how do you incentivize them to do that? So you could use our rewards platform to do that. And we have proposals into some other large corporates that, you know, see it as a benefit from a fun currency. But if they need to change behavior.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:26] So are you reaching out to cities, city governments?

Ashley Grosh: [00:25:29] We have proposals into municipalities as well. You know, a lot of the team members within municipalities, they want them to be riding buses, going to certain events. And so it's a similar program that you would do at higher ed, but you would change the actions based on what that individual employer municipality would want to do. And then you you can customize the rewards. One day, what if you just had the city of Berkeley and that included the campus and that included and that's actually the goal is to get it to be a ubiquitous currency. So I think to get there right, you've got to start traction and so you start traction among the universities. But then that can lead over into the cities and they adopt it. And then you're right, it just becomes, you know, a taxpayer benefit. So we also have a carbon footprint calculator. And so I can see.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:13] Where's that?

Ashley Grosh: [00:26:14] In the app.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:15] In the app.

Ashley Grosh: [00:26:15] And it's individualized. So I can see my individual footprint and then I can see my community's footprint. And I can see, you know what? We are making an impact. And so then it doesn't seem so daunting. Right. And I'm doing my part. The other thing is we're building environmental stewards in higher education. We have stories about this, case studies, students that have graduated from C.U. that were on our platform. They've moved to big cities. And their first inclination is to not get into a car or buy a car. They're used to doing public transportation. So Pip's has really led them to those behaviors. And so then they go on and carry them forward.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:53] Do you have competition in this space?

Ashley Grosh: [00:26:54] So that's a great question, right? You always want to know kind of who's in the rear view mirror or off to the side. And we haven't come across anybody that's doing exactly what we're doing in the way that we're doing it. And especially from the technology integration, the verification and the scholarship component and the matching. Right. That's really unique. There are a couple other pledge based systems, pledging that you rode the bus or pledging to do a Meatless Monday or something like that. And then they don't have a reward platform. So they might say you get a gold star or or.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:27] You don't get any monetary.

Ashley Grosh: [00:27:29] Right. You might get a badge. They call it. And then two students have five badges and they get eligible for a pizza party or, you know, something. So they don't have the high value rewards into the system, which we know are the drivers to get students to stay on this. And then they don't have all the other bells and whistles that, you know, carbon footprint calculators and all those things, verified actions and the currency. Right. The currency component with the scholarship piece. So that's really what we believe sets us apart. I really think we're on the cutting edge, because if you look at 5G, right. That's getting rolled out. Things are gonna be happening a lot faster, more devices. I'm seeing more wired, you know, clothing and wearable rings that that track your your health metrics and send them to your doctor in real time. So, you know, 5G is really going to enable us to do more of this. And so we're, you know, at the forefront of that. And we're really excited about being able to plug in to the new wearables and the new companies that are coming into the space.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:28:30] Tell our listeners how to get your website and what they can expect to find there.

Ashley Grosh: [00:28:34] Yeah. So if you go to www.pipsrewards.com and then you won't want to sign in because you're not a user... yet. There's some graphics you can start to see our story. You can get a list of all of our partners. As we mentioned some of them on the show today. The earn, redeem, the donate, the nonprofits that we also support that you can donate to, and then you can reach us that suppor@pipsrewards.com. If you want to learn more or bring this to your campus or if you have any other questions or ideas, we're always open to discussions.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:29:09] Are you looking for volunteers or interns at any point?

Ashley Grosh: [00:29:11] We are. So we we have two interns right now and we are growing like crazy. So for folks that are interested, reach out to us. You know, the reason this is so important to me, you know, I've worked in climate and sustainability almost my entire career, but I'm a mom and I also spend a lot of time on college campuses. And I think about these students and I think about my own kids and how successful I want them to be, and any boost that we can give them, any head start, if we can help them chip away at their debt sooner, if we can help them really have healthy behaviors and habits, we're going to better equip them when they head out into the into the big, real scary world. Your actions can make a difference and added up together, they can have a really big impact. You know, that's what we want to do. 

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:01] Thank you, Ashley, for coming on Method to the Madness.

Ashley Grosh: [00:30:04] Thank you.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:06] You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K.A.L.X. Berkeley celebrating innovators. We'll be back again in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:01] You're listening to Method to the Madness. A biweekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:12] I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with Mohamed Shehk, co-director and media and communications director of Critical Resources. Welcome to Method to the Madness.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:28] Thank you for having me.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:29] I've been hearing a whole lot with the upcoming presidential election and all the debates, about prison reform. I find it kind of interesting that for the past over 20 years, your organization has said "forget reform, we need to abolish prisons."

Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:43] Yes. Critical Resistance was founded in 1998. It was founded in Berkeley. There was a conference called Critical Resistance Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:53] Yes. And you had a lot of heavy hitters, Angela Davis.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:55] Angela Davis was one of our co-founders,.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:57] And, Ruth Wilson Gilmore!

Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:59] And we're actually doing an event with Ruthie down in L.A.. Yeah. So we began using a term that was actually coined by Mike Davis, the prison industrial complex. And it was a way to begin thinking about the interrelated systems of imprisonment, policing, surveillance and other forms of state violence and control. Really looking at this system as being built intentionally to control, repress and inflict harm and violence in communities. So if we understand that its purpose is to control communities, then we don't want to fix it. Right. We want to chip away at its power. We want to abolish it. So we really popularized the notion of prison industrial complex abolition. And for the past 20 years, we've been working on various projects and campaigns toward eliminating the prison industrial complex in our society.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:51] So of all the candidates, who do you think is most onboard or at least understanding of what your strategy is toward prisons?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:02:00] It's really interesting with the current presidential candidates that have approached criminal justice reform in a variety of ways. I mean, you just had Bernie Sanders release a platform that actually picks up a lot of some of the concepts and community based approaches rather than continuing to invest and waste millions and millions and millions of dollars into the system of policing, into imprisonment. What are the reforms that appear to be liberal or progressive but are actually entrenching the system?

Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:36] Right. They're kind of co-opting.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:02:37] Yeah. After the death of Mike Brown and Eric Garner back in 2014 with the, you know, upsurge of Black Lives Matter and the enormous amount of attention being focused on policing, and you had an array of reforms being discussed, such as body cameras, such as, more training for police officers. And we see that these kinds of reforms are actually pouring money into the system of policing. They're expanding the role of policing. We're giving surveillance technology to policing. Right. So these reforms aren't actually chipping away at the power, but actually legitimizing and entrenching the system of policing itself. So these are the kinds of reforms that we want to be cautious of and use this framework of thinking about abolitionist reforms vs. reformist reforms. What are the reforms that are actually cutting away resources from the systems that we're fighting rather than continuing to waste investments into these systems.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:36] And so what are some of the strategies that you are using in your organization? And you're located in four cities. You're headquartered in Oakland in the Temescal. You're in New York City, L.A. and Portland.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:03:48] Yes. Our national office is based in Oakland. We are a nonprofit organization and we function primarily through our chapters and our chapters, the ones that you named, our volunteer members really make up the bulk of the organization and we work with them and they decide what local projects and campaigns are most relevant to the political geography that they're operating in, to attack the prison industrial complex. So, for instance, in Portland, we started a campaign called Care Not Cops. Initially, that campaign was really focused on cutting policing away from mental health crisis response. We want to divest resources away from policing, take money away from the police budget and put that into community based and user determined mental health resources. One strategy is to really focus on the city budget and to use that as a method to organize communities and to say these are actually where we want our resources going, not continuing to go into the Police Bureau's budget. We use a variety of different strategies and tactics, so we do a lot of media and communications work to kind of shift how we understand safety, how we understand what strong and healthy communities actually look like. We do a lot of work around the legislative realm. We work with decision makers and also put pressure on decision makers to put forth policies that are actually in line with what we're advocating for.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:28] So let's talk about what you're doing in the Bay Area... Urban Shield, for one thing. Can you talk about that a little bit and some of the other successes you've had locally?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:05:36] Yeah. Thank you for raising that. Critical Re sistance along with a number of other organizations, including the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Chicano Moratorium Coalition, the American Friends Service Committee. We're part of a coalition called the Stop Urban Shield Coalition. And we came together to put an end to Urban Shield, which was the world's largest SWAT training, and also included a weapons expo. That organizing happened for five plus years. We built a grassroots campaign to essentially pressure and empower the Board of supervisors in Alameda County to say to the sheriff, no, we do not want this kind of program anymore. Urban Shield was justified under the guise of emergency preparedness. Right. And so the sheriff would say, well, we need this kind of program because of all these different kinds of emergencies. But obviously, just as with many programs that came after 9/11, it was funded through and bolstered by the logic of militarization and counter-terrorism and was effectively a program that endorsed war on black and brown communities. So last year, the Board of Supervisors made a decision to end Urban Shield. They said after this year, Urban Shield is no longer. Then this year, a gain, after some kind of foul play by the sheriff to attempt to kind of reverse their decision and even just ignore that it actually happened. Earlier this year, they reaffirmed their decision and Urban Shield was effectively defunded.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:08] Does that money then go to the programs that you are backing?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:07:12] Yes. So we have been working alongside various city and county agencies to really put in place what emergency preparedness and disaster response looks like. So one of the things that we did with the Alameda County Board of Supervisors is part of their decision to end Urban Shield was to put together a task force to say, okay, let's actually look at how this money could be funded. And they adopted a number of recommendations, which was about 60 recommendations that called for things like no more SWAT centered scenarios. You know, we want inclusive programs and transparency that include community members in the planning and the implementation. And so these recommendations were adopted. We also took them to San Francisco because San Francisco is the fiscal agent of this money that's coming from the federal government. And they also looked and adopted many of the recommendations. And so for what comes next, we are hopeful that it really embodies the kind of program, the kind of framing that we were after.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:23] Can you tell me also about the project called Oakland Power Projects?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:08:27] So there was a coalition, the Stop the Injunctions Coalition, that put an end to gang injunctions in Oakland. It was the first instance of a city in the United States ending gang injunctions as a result of grassroots mobilization and pressure. And so after that, we said, OK, we ended gang injunctions. This is tremendous. What do we want to do next? So we started surveying and interviewing Oakland community members around things like what does safety look like to you? Do you have instances where you feel like you need to call the cops? What kind of investments do you want to see in your community? And so we compiled all of these interviews. We started picking through them and found a common theme which was around health related emergencies and people saying, when these emergencies happen, I don't want to call the cops, but they're the only options that I have.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:19] Give me an example of something like that.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:09:21] So it could be someone gets in a car accident. Someone is having a or experience as someone else, having a mental health crisis or someone just badly cuts themselves or injured themselves. They have to call 9 1 1. And in many instances, the police show up and either don't really help in what's often the case or exacerbate the situation.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:45] By criminalizing it.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:46] Exactly. What we did is we got together a number of health workers from counselors to kind of traditional like EMT as doctors, nurses, acupuncturists, the whole range, right? Street medics and we said, okay, now we want you to come up with different resources and come up with a number of different workshops that you can provide to communities on knowing your options when situations occur. They did exactly that and it was really powerful. They came up with three different tracks. One was acute emergencies. Another was mental health and behavioral crises. And another one was chronic illnesses and also tied in opiate overdoses. And so we began to offer these workshops to different community organizations, to places of business, to community groups, neighborhoods. And the workshops are really geared toward ending our reliance on policing by building up our know how and our capacity to be able to respond to situations in our communities.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:54] You must've gotten a lot of resistance because it sounds very radical when you say abolish prison.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:10:59] We really want to understand the root causes of harm and violence. Right. Because oftentimes what the status quo has been is that when something happens, we're reactive and we respond. And oftentimes what that looks like is targeting black and brown people and putting them in cages. So if we really are to want to address harm and violence in our communities, social injustices, we have to understand the root causes. And we have to begin to see how we can transform the underlying conditions that gave rise to harm and violence in the first place. When we say prison industrial complex and when we say prison industrial complex abolition, we know full well that just taking the prisons away from society is not going to be the end of the game. Right. We have to understand that prisons don't exist in a vacuum. Policing does not exist in a vacuum. That we're gonna have to also look at the ways that different dynamics in society are integral to the prison industrial complex. And so changing social conditions and transforming the ways that we relate to each other is fundamental to understanding and achieving abolition.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:12:21] If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, I'm speaking with Mohammed Scheck, the media and communications director of Critical Resistance.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:12:43] And you've been successful. You're stopping a prison from being built locally here in San Francisco, is that correct?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:12:49] Yeah. So one of our one of our campaigns here in the Bay Area is the No New S.F. Jail Coalition. What that essentially is, is the sheriff back in 2013 or so or even a little bit before, but that's when the coalition really came together. The sheriff wanted to build a replacement jail to one that already exists at 850 Bryant Street, which is known as the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. The interesting thing about the Hall of Justice is that nearly all of San Francisco, it's it's unanimous that that building needs to be torn down because it's seismically unsafe, it's decrepit, it's falling apart. And the sheriff wanted to build a replacement saying that that was his only option. What we did was we formed a coalition with a number of other organizations and effectively put a halt to that plan. So in 2015, we got the supervisors to vote unanimously and say we don't want to build a new jail. We actually want to look at alternatives. We want to look at ways to reduce the jail population while building up resources and looking at investments that actually support people coming back home and can support communities in need where we don't have to respond by criminalizing.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:08] So you guys are active participants in this new solution?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:14:12] Yes, absolutely. And so right now, our effort is to actually close the jail at 850 Bryant Street. That's that's kind of the main thrust that we're working on right now. We do have one supervisor who has stepped up and is willing to put forward legislation toward shutting the jail this year. What we're looking at is opposing different kinds of reforms and different proposals that would actually legitimize other forms of punishment as a response. So like they'll say, OK, we're going to close this jail, let's put everyone on electronic monitoring and we're like, no, we don't want to expand surveillance. We don't want to expand the jail beyond its reach, which is essentially what electronic monitor shackles are. We don't want to move people to Alameda County, to Santa Rita jail. We want people to remain close to their families, close to their communities. And we don't want to reopen new jails or reopen old jails and refurbish them. So it really is about looking at what are the resources that we can build, what already exists, and then what do we need to build up around. Housing is a big one. I mean, you have nearly 30 percent of the jail population that was house less before they were arrested and booked. You have enormous racial disparities in the jail population in San Francisco,.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:34] And in the nation.

[00:15:36] Yeah, but I was going to say even more so than the rates that we see across the country where the city of San Francisco has about a 4 percent black population that is on the decline and black people make up 80 percent of the jail population. So you look at that enormous disparity and say what's really going on wrong? Right? What is, what's wrong? You have a significant number of people that face mental health issues and substance abuse. Just looking at these numbers, we can easily begin to say a new jail is not necessary. We do not need to be locking these people up. We can easily be thinking about other kinds of investments that would actually strengthen communities and make new jails obsolete.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:16] Tell me how you're getting funding for these programs, because they sound like they might be pretty expensive.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:16:22] We do fund raising. We are actually fortunate to be majority grassroots funded. So about 65 percent of our of our funding comes from people, you know, donating monthly, giving us onetime gifts. We hold events, you know, fundraising benefits. In terms of the funding for the programs, were advocating for those to be taken away from the police, sheriffs, other agencies that are about criminalization. And we want to divert funding away from them into the resources that we want and need.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:57] Have you seen an upsurge in interest over the 20 years that you guys have been working hard at this? It seems like there's more of an opening now.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:17:05] We definitely have seen a tremendous upsurge in the popularity and interest in just in the concept of abolition. Right. What we've done and other community members, other organizations have done is to really make this concept common sense. Because you mentioned earlier that, you know, this can be kind of a scary radical concept for people. One of the things that we really do is to show how practical it is. We show the the way that abolition can be worked on, can be practiced on a day to day level.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:17:38] How did you personally get involved with Critical Resistance. How long have you been there?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:17:44] I've been involved in Critical Resistance for just over five years now. The way that I came to Critical Resistance was really beginning to recognize the role of policing and imprisonment in this country. My background as a Palestinian, as someone who has long been involved in organizing and in different activism around Palestine, solidarity, began to really look at what are the intersections between what's happening there and what we're experiencing here. When you see that the state of Israel imprisons such a significant portion of the Palestinian population, the aid that they get from the U.S. government in order to do so, that helps them and and allows them to do so. And then the ways that Israel really practices its tools of repression on the Palestinian population. So for many that follow this issue closely, you might know that Gaza is essentially a laboratory experiment for the state of Israel to test different tools, tactics, technologies, and then they export those technologies to governments all around the world by billing them as battlefield tested.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:19:03] And I assume we are one of the recipients?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:19:05] Absolutely.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:19:06] And that's kind of what we get back for our military aid that we provide. When you look at this, the interconnections between policing and imprisonment there and in other places with the systems here, you begin to see that they're playing a fundamental role in whatever issue that you work on, whether that be environmental justice, whether that be public education, climate change, women's rights, LGBTQ rights and liberation, the prison industrial complex is tied to all of those issues. The prison industrial complex is fundamentally patriarchal. It's fundamentally toxic to the environment. It's fundamentally why we have such a disinvestment from public education. Right. Because of how many how much resources are being squandered on this enormous system. That for me, became very central in the kind of activism and organizing that I wanted to do.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:20:02] Are you also working inside prisons?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:20:05] Yes. So our Oakland chapter has a inside, outside working group. Their primary drive is to communicate with people on the inside and to share resources on how to support organizing that's happening. We also do a lot of work in communicating with people on the inside to help inform the work that we're doing out here. We have a reading group that we do where we read articles from a newspaper that we published with people on the inside and then share and give reflections and circulate those. We publish a newspaper called the Abolitionists that goes to now over 7500 people in prisons, jails and detention centers across the country. Much of that content is actually composed and written by people that are currently or formerly imprisoned.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:20:55] How about education programs inside?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:20:58] We don't do education programs like formally, although we do share a lot of educational resources and organizing resources with folks on the inside. One of the main campaigns that we supported is the California Prisoner Hunger Strikes that happened. And so this was an effort that was organized by and led by people that were in prison in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison. They had a list of demands and they initiated a hunger strike effectively aimed at ending solitary confinement, improving conditions, getting rights, ending discriminatory and criminalization policies. That hunger strike in 2013 reached over 30000 people in California prisons that joined in solidarity.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:21:45] And what was the outcome?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:21:46] That had a huge impact. It gained national and international attention and drew widespread condemnation on the practice of solitary, of locking someone up in a windowless cell for 23 hours a day. Because of that attention, the United Nations rapporteur on torture said that solitary confinement is a form of torture. The California legislature held a number of hearings on the use of solitary confinement. Mow in the midst of this happening, there was also a lawsuit that was initially brought by the prisoners themselves and then was taken up against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, CDCR. That was then taken up by a number of lawyers and legal organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and that lawsuit in 2015 ended in a settlement by which the prisoners achieved a tremendous victory and effectively ended indefinite solitary sentences, which a lot of the prisoners were being held for five, 10, 15, 20 years in solitary confinement and were were put in indefinitely. It also greatly reduced and restricted the rationale by which someone could be placed in solitary confinement. Yeah, so we supported that as part of a coalition, the prisoner hunger strike solidarity coalition and Critical Resistance specifically kind of played the media house for the campaign.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:23:25] I recently read about your new headquarters location in the Temescal, which used to be Baby World, and it's such an interesting story. Would you mind sharing that?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:23:35] Yeah, we had already been talking about needing to find a new location because the place that we're currently at, which is in downtown Oakland, the rents have been rising exponentially. And so we said to ourselves, we really have to start looking. This is just unsustainable. During the same time, some of us, you know, just through kind of personal and political connections, were having conversations with with other folks and the family that owned the building, the Cabello family, we had conversations with their daughter, Danya Cabello, and realized that this building was for sale. When we found that out, we jumped onto the opportunity and reached out to a loyal donor, Rachel Gilman, who is part of an organization called Resource Generation, which is essentially an organization that seeks to bring in people with wealth in order to redistribute their wealth to social justice causes. In talking with Rachel, we kind of put that on the table and just had kind of a frank conversation. This is what we're thinking. What do you think? And she loved the idea.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:43] She's only twenty nine.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:24:44] Yeah.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:45] She said herself that she thinks of giving as a "way to help up end the forces of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that underlie her very own inheritance." And she said, "I believe ending this economic system that creates such drastic wealth inequality is necessary for all people's humanity and dignity, including my own and that of my family." I think this is revolutionary.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:25:10] Yeah. Absolutely. And it's a beautiful space. We're in the process now of renovating the building to serve community organizations that are operating in the Bay Area. We want it to be a hub for social and racial justice organizing of all stripes. We want it to be a place where organizations and communities that are fighting to resist gentrification can have a place to hold their meetings, to have events, fundraisers. So we really want it to serve the community and to really pay homage to the legacy of organizing in Oakland.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:46] And it's kind of interesting because the owners, the Cabello's, their family had suffered under Pinochet in Chile. So they there was just all this serendipity that happened between you and them.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:25:57] Yeah. No, absolutely. They come from a very kind of rough political history and also are very much tied to resistance movements. Right? So they were part of the first suit against basically the horrors of the Pinochet regime, the School of the Americas, and the role that the U.S. played in supporting the horrors of Pinochet.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:21] I did want to ask you what your greatest challenge has been in the time that you've been in this organization.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:26:28] One of the greatest challenges that we face today is the way that the prison industrial complex is shifting, how much technological innovation is going on, the ways that technological innovation is being integrated into the prison industrial complex to expand its reach. Now, this can be like the physical tools and technologies that are developed or something that isn't so tangible, but it's just as dangerous, such as predictive policing or risk assessment algorithms. These are, in a way kind of taking away the the human element, so to speak, and putting in place algorithms and technologies that are actually serving to criminalize people in an automated fashion. It's a very scary concept to think about. We really need to resist attempts to say that we're going to make the prison industrial complex better by removing the bias of humans, by introducing technology. The society that we live in is built on racial oppression, gender oppression, oppression against sex. And so technologies are not going to solve that. We have to actually begin to transform those dynamics, eradicate systems of oppression if we want to achieve liberation.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:50] What's coming up for your organization?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:27:52] As I mentioned, we are working on the NO NEW SF Jail effort to close 850 Bryant Street. Be on the lookout. Join our mailing list, visit our web site, sign up, because we'll be putting out information on how folks can can really plug into that fight and and close the jail. For folks in Los Angeles, we're gonna have an amazing event. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who's an amazing, inspiring, brilliant scholar, is going to be speaking. This comes after a huge victory where we, along with the Justice L.A. Coalition, stopped L.A. County from building a, quote unquote, mental health jail. That was an enormous victory. You've been fighting jails in Los Angeles for 10 years. And we wanted to celebrate and bring our communities together. We really just encourage folks to check us out.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:28:40] What is your web site?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:28:41] criticalresistance.org

Lisa Kiefer: [00:28:43] And can people volunteer in your organization?

Mohamed Shehk: [00:28:45] Absolutely. Our Oakland chapter holds volunteer nights every Tuesday from 6 to 9 p.m. And that's in our current office. Not the not the new building, 1904 Franklin Street, Suite 5 0 4. And so come through, volunteer. We find ourselves in a very trying political moment. You know, the current presidential administration is unrelentless and attacks that it's waging on our communities, blatant racism and sexism and xenophobia that has come from this administration. We also have seen the ways that communities are resilient and resistant.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:29:24] You saw the massive energy into opposition to shut down airports in response to the Muslim ban. We see opposition from ICE raids. We also want to resist the tendency or maybe even the appeal to want to go back to how things were, because there were a lot of things wrong and violent and racist in the policies in former administrations. Rather than shy away in this political moment, actually to raise up radical ideas like abolition as the tools, as the strategies that are actually going to get us to where we want to be, to a society where we truly have equity, self-determination and freedom.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:10] That's a nice, positive way to end this. Thank you, Mohamed, for coming in.

Mohamed Shehk: [00:30:15] Thank you.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:16] You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. We'll be back again in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:27] You're listening to Method to the Madness. A bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with faculty members of CalStar Yoga, a program that helps people with disabilities practice yoga.

Claire Lavery: [00:00:51] I'm Claire Lavery.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:00:53] And I'm Saraswathi Devi.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:54] Welcome to the program. And you're both on the faculty of Cal Yoga.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:00:58] I guess you could put it that way.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:59] OK. Well, why don't you tell us about your program?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:01:02] Well, we call it CalStar Yoga and at their recreational sports facility, the RSF, there is a little program called CalStar, which serves people who live with different kinds of disabilities and it's open to the public. So our part of that is an adaptive yoga class.

Claire Lavery: [00:01:19] The class has been going on since 1996,.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:22] Since 1996. Is it for just students or.

Claire Lavery: [00:01:26] It's open to anyone with a disability in the community or in on campus, on staff, on faculty and any member of the gym or outside the community?, campus community can also join?

Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:39] I thought it might be useful for our listeners to know how you define yoga and how you define disabilities.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:01:47] Yoga is an ancient practice and it's a lot about body and mind health. It comes from an ancient root, yog, meaning to join. So it's all about balance of body and mind and the quiet aspects of the self and the more assertive aspects of the self. It has a lot to do with exercise, which is how most people in America know it. But it also has to do with mind training, with making your intellect more sharp and your emotions more clear and peaceful. And some people pursue it as a spiritual practice as well.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:22] And could you define disabilities for this class?

Claire Lavery: [00:02:25] We define it as someone who is living with some kind of an ongoing condition that limits their presence, their ability to move in the world. Most of our participants have physical disabilities. We don't work too often with people with intellectual disabilities.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:44] Are you speaking of autism?

Claire Lavery: [00:02:46] Right.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:46] So you don't service.

Claire Lavery: [00:02:48] We've had students with those kinds of disabilities in the class, but they've definitely been in the minority. And it's much more about the people who are living with more physical limitations, people with multiple sclerosis, people with cerebral palsy, people with post stroke syndrome, injury, trauma. So we've had quite a wide range of different kinds of disabilities represented in our class. And people with multiple disabilities are, have been long term members as well.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:14] I didn't know that this existed, honestly, and I want to know how it got founded. What was the reason behind it? Were you there at the beginning? Well, Saraswathi is the one to tell you.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:03:24] Well, I've been practicing and teaching since the mid 70s. And as the years went on in the beginning, in the early days, we just had everybody in class. We would have kids and seniors and people who were injured or disabled. Everybody would just be glommed together.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:42] On campus?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:03:42] No, in the community in Berkeley. I was trained by and served very closely a yoga master from India who lived here part of the year. But then as the years went on, we found ourselves specializing. So I began to teach pre and post-natal yoga and children of all ages and seniors and adults at different levels. And then I found myself partly because I have some of my own disabilities. I found myself very attracted to the whole subject, observing a person who was not typically abled and so found myself to the Multiple Sclerosis Society and other places and began to develop a practice that seemed to be really helping people. And that gradually led me to UC Berkeley, where I was hired. Well, at first at the Hearst Gym and then down at the RSF. 

Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:28] Did they hear about you and hire you or did you know approach them?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:04:31] They did. It's a kind of long, convoluted story. But there was a really forward looking woman working in the RSF who hired me. And what I have tried to do is in serving a person who is living with a profound disability or multiple disabilities, we're trying to offer them a practice that they would never otherwise have access to. So we're taking yoga to a place that you wouldn't imagine it could go, so somebody might not be able to speak or move outside of a power wheelchair, whose body might be contorted or who might be having a lot of involuntary movement and and meeting the whole person. So sometimes a person on the street will see somebody living with a disability and they'll either discount them or not have proper regard and respect for the humanity of that person. They just see a bunch of equipment on a wheelchair. But anybody who comes over the threshold into our class is automatically recognized for their rich humanity and just loved and respected instantly. So what I tried to do is take other disciplines that I recognize as another form of yoga in a way and sort of a broad way of thinking. So I'd like to add massage and acupressure and range of motion and sometimes even using free weights.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:50] Do you use water?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:05:51] No, we're not. I would...

Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:53] There are pools here and I thought maybe...

Saraswathi Devi: [00:05:53] True. Well, I love aqua yoga and if we had a way of somehow having a pool, we would do it for sure. But we lift people out of their wheelchairs who are not ambulatory. They'll be four or five or six of us carrying a person. Proper word is transfer out of the wheelchair onto the floor and then people who are much more mobile who will arrive in class with mobility aids like a cane or a walker, or even walking on their own in a maybe halting way. They're also in the class, so it's a broad range.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:28] I can imagine that you've encountered some really beautiful transformations for people who have never experienced this before.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:06:36] It's a lot of hard work, but it's a joyful experience for all of us. For the students themselves. For Claire, for me, for our volunteers and for our young undergrads who help us every semester.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:48] And how many undergrads help you?

Claire Lavery: [00:06:50] Well, we have a range. We often have up to 60 or 70 students. They enroll in an undergraduate course that gives them two credits. It's a DeCal course. So they come and help us every week.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:03] And they learn how?

Claire Lavery: [00:07:04] We train them. We supervise them. We keep an eye on them and they blossom. They do wonders. Many of them arrive without any experience. Many of them arrive thinking that they're going to be doing yoga. And we tell them right away that's not the case. But some of them decide that's not for them. Some of them despite their fears or trepidation, stay with us. And just are wonderful helpers.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:29] Are any of these students disabled that come to you?

Claire Lavery: [00:07:31] Yes, some of them are. We've had many students who didn't tell us right away that they had a disability and some are significantly disabled, but would gradually feel safe enough to reveal that. And sometimes they found that they couldn't do the kind of heavy lifting or harder work that we asked them to do. And we are fine with having them help in whatever way they can.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:54] It seems like they would have the most empathy and understanding of where that person might be.

[00:07:59] Sometimes that's true.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:01] Not always, but.

Claire Lavery: [00:08:02] Not always. And many of the students who come have a family member with a disability or an aging family member or have had an injury and and can apply that emotional information to the work that they're doing with the students.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:14] And how many of your students are Berkeley students and how many are community members generally?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:08:21] At the moment, we don't even have one Berkeley student, but we've often had maybe four, three, four or five, maybe a professor or two. But actually the better part of the student population is from the surrounding area.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:35] Do you do this every semester?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:08:36] We do it all year round and we have a summer session.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:39] OK. Claire, how did you get involved in this?

Claire Lavery: [00:08:43] Well, I had started teaching yoga in the mainstream yoga classes here at Cal and had been doing that just for a couple of years. And the same wonderful woman who hired Saraswathi knew me and said, you know, there's this great class that you might like to help with. They're always looking for volunteers.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:59] Is she still around?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:09:00] NO,Suzanne McQuade, she retired. We miss her terribly. 

Claire Lavery: [00:09:06] Unfortunately, she's not there, but we're trying to keep it going. And she steered me to help out with this class. So I showed up as a volunteer. And I just kind of stayed. I learned a lot.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:19] It seems so innovative. Do you know of any other programs, anywhere else that are like this or is this unique?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:09:25] For a lot of years, we thought we were the only place in the country or maybe beyond. And we're starting to see others somewhat similar programs sprouting up, but we still haven't found anything that that goes as far as we go. And the reason why I say this, once we have the opening of class where we're sitting in concentric circles and doing a little bit of breathing or light meditation, then we will transfer people onto the floor. And then we essentially divide ourselves up into two groups where Claire works with the people who are more ambulatory during that part of the class. And I work with people who are less mobile and. So with the people who are more mobile, they'll be two usually two people serving each of the students and they'll be on the floor. They'll be sitting up. They'll be standing against a wall using chairs and yoga blocks and people's hands and arms and legs to help hold them with good alignment in yoga postures. And that actually draws up the strength and balance and alignment from within the person's body. It's not just an artificial hole. On my side of the room, we're moving people on the floor and forward and backward bending movements and yoga postures that look pretty conventional. But there might be two or even five or six people clustered around each of the students holding them at the shoulder at the low back and stretching their feet. And then we incorporate, as I said, a lot of massage and acupressure and other methods.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:58] If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, I'm speaking with faculty members of CalStar Yoga, a program that helps people with disabilities practice yoga.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:11:24] We had a woman who came in the other day and this is a few months ago, and she had been injured rather badly in her back and was able to after her initial rehabilitation, this was probably 20, 15 or 20 years ago, after her initial rehabilitation, she was able to walk at first with a walker and then with a cane. And then she was able to somewhat haltingly walk in a conventional manner. And then as she started to age, gradually, she found herself in a wheelchair. However, it's a manual chair, so she gets around quite nicely. But she came in very suspicious, trepidatious, and frankly, bitter, understandably highly educated, very productive, talented woman. And she was a little resentful, understandably, of of this new loss of full action in her body and and in some ways in her personality and affect and effect. And so came into the class and we tried to humor her and love her and respect her. And then she said to us, I feel transformed. At the end of the first class now, she's a very stalwart member.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:12:30] Once you founded this, what were your major challenges in getting this up and running and accepted?

Claire Lavery: [00:12:37] We've had challenges. Initially, the class was really only supported by volunteers from the community and Saraswathi would put out messages in the free papers. This was several years ago before there was a big Internet presence, posters and flyers and put out the word on the street asking for people to come and volunteer. And so we struggled along and it would only be maybe five volunteers and we still have about that time, 10, 15, 20 yoga students. So we couldn't have two people working with each yoga student. We didn't have the manpower of a woman person power. So we would revolve. And we'd do some poses as one person and then we'd set them up comfortably and we'd move on to the next. So that was a little difficult. We had a really innovative and wonderful undergraduate volunteer who had a brainstorm in about 2003 and said, we should make this into a DeCal class because then students would get credit and then.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:13:30] ..Tell me what a DeCal class is because some people may not know.

Claire Lavery: [00:13:33] A DeCal class is an undergraduate led class in the university and there are hundreds of them. They range from things like baking, hip hop music, to electronic engineering theory or more esoteric interests that students in in Cal hold and want to share.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:13:52] And there's credit, course credit?

[00:13:53] There's course credits. So our student who was interested in social work and in our class really wanted to make this accessible to more calendar grads. He thought they'd be interested. And so he went registered as a DeCal. And he was right. People came. When that happened, we had many more students and we did start to get the numbers of people we wanted to see to really fully support our yoga students. I know Saraswathi's dream is to have 75 students every semester so that we can have a really full bodied support group and we get pretty close sometimes now.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:29] Do students have to pay to get into this class?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:14:32] Yeah, it's a modest fee and they get a little bit of a discount for proving that they they might come in in a wheelchair and not able to speak, but they still are required to bring a doctor verification. That's understandable.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:43] I wanted to ask you what you think your greatest impacts have been. You've been at this for several years now,.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:14:49] Since 1996.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:50] Yes. So what do you think has been the greatest impacts or accomplishments?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:14:55] I think as far as the yoga students, probably the best benefit that they derive from the class is psychological. They feel seen, respected, loved. They are touched. And I don't mean that in any kind of negative way. They're touched in a nurturing and helpful way. And many of them also experienced good physical effects. They're more relaxed. They feel more cheerful. They have better sleep. Sometimes they have a considerable reduction in pain and stiffness. Many of them find that their circulation has improved, their digestion, a whole host of physical benefits. So I would say really in some ways, though, it's more, one of our students who had been coming for some years who is living the after effects of having been assaulted. So he was brain injured. So he asked what we would call TBI, traumatic brain injury. It affects his vision. So he's legally blind, almost completely blind, and his brain somehow recovered quite amazingly. So he has a very sharp mind, but very halting speech. So he has a speech aphasia. So he walks and speaks in a halting manner and uses a cane. So one day he said to us, when I come into this room, I am treated utterly differently from anywhere else that I go. People just see me as a disability and don't see me. So that's a huge part of it. For our yoga students, volunteers, the undergrads, we always at the end of every semester we ask them to write a reflection paper and we'll give them a certain theme, but essentially it's asking them in some way or other to tell us what their experience was and what they derived from it. And many of them, well, undergrads often will try to write to what they think the professor wants to hear. But nevertheless, you can hear a lot of sincerity in it, too. Most of them will say they were, they had never met a disabled person, with a small exception of some of them who do have as Claire said a disabled person in their family. Many of them have never met a disabled person, or if they have or seen people in the community, they've discounted them or really not given them much credence or attention. And then they also will say that they were terrified that they were gonna do something wrong. They didn't want to touch or hurt anybody. And then they started to get to know our students while we're practicing. There's a lot of really fun, gossip and conversation and everybody's giving each other mutual support and mutual interest in each other's lives. And so they discovered that these are full human beings. Some of them are UC grads. As I said, some are professors. They're all incredibly interesting. And so they find their lives utterly transformed. And we've had a small percentage of of them also change their majors. We've had some who decided to be an attorney giving pro bono services to people who were disabled and any number of really interesting trajectories to their story as they moved through the semester and have their their experience transformed. For me, it's impossible to describe. It's each of the people that we serve is an entire universe as it is for any human being. And I've gotten to know almost all of them, at least those who've stayed for many, many years. I've gotten to know them very well. Some of them have become very dear and close friends. So for me, it's it's like seeing the face of all of creation in the eyes of each person. So I feel like it's the huge super consciousness of the universe. Me and this other person in this lovely communication together across all conventional societal membranes, across any way that you might think that there's an encumbrance when you are communicating with someone who is not is typically abled.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:18:33] Well, that kind of leads me to the next question, which is when you're doing these movements, do you also provide some sort of a lecture on the philosophy of what you were just talking about, which is, it's so beyond the physical, that we can, you know, reach each other beyond the flesh.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:18:52] We do that in a variety of really subtle ways, and we do it increasingly quietly coming in the side door for our young undergrads as the semester goes on, through reading assignments, through the opening in class, where we give them some internal practices and in some other ways. So.

Claire Lavery: [00:19:11] I agree. And Saraswathy said it so beautifully. We don't approach them head on. These are skeptical young people and really don't want to be told what to think or how to think. But they do come into class pretty much glazed over and heavy and distracted. And in our opening session, where we do some meditation and some breathing exercises, you can see them visibly relax. And we have had people, undergraduates right in the end of this semester that that meditation session was what transformed their experience and how they've got to understand what we were really doing. Many of them say that they are now going to start doing yoga. Of course, as we've noted, that might just be so that they look good in our eyes. And I do see some of them in my classes, in the mainstream classes. We do have some readings that we ask them to consider. And when we veer from the very technical or practical readings into a little more theory, they're sometimes a little bit at sea. We just had them reading the Bhagavad Gita which is a pretty familiar text to many Westerners, but it's dense and it talks about a lot of mythological people that are not familiar in the Western culture, and that's enough to really put up a wall for many of the students. So when we discuss it, we have to kind of break down and ask them what did they understand? And some of them are just unwilling to engage in that. They want to be, they're scientists, they're practical, they're 21st century kids. So some of them get it from the meditation. Some of them get it from the theory and the Bhagavad Gita. Some of them have their own understanding or practice of yoga that they bring with them. And some have other traditions that are congruent or complementary to the kinds of thoughts that we were just discussing.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:21:03] And partly also when we're teaching a technique because they're learning hands on as we go over the semester, we're not training them for weeks. And then we have weekend workshops throughout the semester, several of them. But part of what we're doing, too, is we're helping them to see a link between this kind of beautiful ancient ritual form of exercise and the quietness and focus of mind and emotion that comes to the yoga student who's being served, but also comes to the volunteers who are doing the serving. Because here we are, we're holding a little bit challenging position and we have to breathe slowly. Yes, there is a lot of fun conversation in between. But there's also a lot of slow, deep breathing. And anyone who experiences that kind of breath on a regular basis will find that it has a very focusing effect on the mind and emotions and makes your brain more clear. So one of the things I like to say when we're doing an opening meditation with these undergrads is this will help your memory, your ability to focus and do well on finals. So sometimes that..

Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:04] that's kind of a carrot... 

Saraswathi Devi: [00:22:05] that helps.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:06] Well, this Igen generation after the millennials is the first to have grown up with so much technology in their lives. Have you been able to monitor the difference in the students you've had over the years since technology has become so prevalent in their lives?

Claire Lavery: [00:22:22] We kind of saw a sea change about 10 years ago in the way the attention spans worked. Students are a little, a little antsy at the start of class. They generally settle in and they can focus. They're intelligent and they're used to working hard and intellectually hard. But they're not always used to working emotionally hard or are focusing in a more subtle way. We do have them take their phones out, turn them off and put them on the side of the room for class. And that's challenging for a lot of them.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:22:52] we have a little bit of fun with that.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:55] Probably helps them in school. What you're doing?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:22:58] They've said that. Yeah. So we all benefit everybody. And they. One of the things that they will say to us often is this was a great ending of my school week. I've left class feeling really refreshed and ready for the weekend.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:23:12] Do you have anything else going on that you want to tell us about coming up?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:23:16] People have been asking Claire and me in all of the different universes that she and I both live in. Asked if we would please do a teacher training. So we're in the very, very first steps of organizing that. And we're going to do it collaboratively between the two of us and a third person who has been an on and off volunteer with us, who's very talented. So we're just in the beginning stages of formulating that. And then we have to do outreach and funding and all of that.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:23:42] And where do you see this heading out to?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:23:43] We'd like to serve other yoga teachers who are interested to make a foray into this universe. And many of them, most of them have not. They couldn't even imagine it. And we'd also like to find ways of influencing and giving some practical strategies to someone who's a family member or a caregiver who could help someone with a disability at home.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:06] It sounds like you've got a lot of data over the years that you maybe collected?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:24:10] We do. It's it's very informal, but yeah.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:13] Still, that's very valuable. I would think from a lot of different people it would be of value. Are you going to put together guidelines, like a book?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:24:22] There will be our training manual. Yeah. Okay. And it may end up and we'll see. Claire, we're both so busy, but it may end up that we'll have satellite programs that will come from that where we'll we'll start with a basic teacher training and then we may find that we'll do some specialty as an extra specialty training over there. You might do some kind of weekend workshopy kinds of things. We haven't figured it all out. Yes. But it's something that we really we have a responsibility to do. We need to share it more widely than just here.

Claire Lavery: [00:24:53] We would like to have medical professionals in our trainings that would learn a different way to communicate and work with the people they see on a very regular basis.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:03] Are you talking about physical therapists?

Claire Lavery: [00:25:05] Physical therapists, doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, the whole spectrum. We want them to be aware that this is an alternative to the very strict regime of drugs and hope.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:25:17] You know, we have the father of one of our students who lives with cerebral palsy one time said to me, what you're doing here is much better than most of the doctoring my daughter is ever going to receive. He's a physician. I thought that was maybe a little dramatic, but actually in a lot of cases, I'm sure it's quite true.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:34] If somebody is interested in the community, whether that's a student or a regular person out there, how would they get a hold of you? Do you have a Web site? And how can they help you or join up?

Saraswathi Devi: [00:25:47] One way is to contact the RSF, the recreational sports facility, on the UC Berkeley campus on Bancroft at Dana. And it's right near the student union.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:58] Is that reachable via the Web?

Claire Lavery: [00:26:00] There is an online website presence under CalStar. So if you look under recreational sports and there's a drop down menu and you'll have to look, I think it's under group exercise or you can type in the search bar. CalStar, one word C-A-L-S-T-A-R and that's the program. And if you write CalStar yoga, it should bring you to the page that describes our class.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:24] And if people wanted to volunteer, it's the same. It is the same place you go to the same place, whether you want to volunteer or take the class.?

Claire Lavery: [00:26:32] Right. And in either case, if you're interested in volunteering or in being a student, you could drop in to one of our Friday afternoon classes and just see the first class.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:41] And where are those classes located? Where would they go?

Claire Lavery: [00:26:44] They're in the RSF, the main gym on campus at Bancroft Way. They're in the combatives room, which is unfortunate for a yoga class. It's on the first floor. You'll have to tell the guard at the gate that you're going to CalStar Yoga and they'll let you in and you'll walk down the hall. It's the last door on your left.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:00] And how long are your sessions, generally?

Claire Lavery: [00:27:01] We meet from 1:30 to 3:30 Friday afternoons every week.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:27:06] I like sometimes for someone who's inquiring, who might be interested. Who really wants a description of the class beforehand. Some people like to just jump in. Everybody has a different way. I would be happy to give my email address if somebody wanted to contact me. I would be very pleased to describe the program and just try to light a little psychological fire in the person. So it's info@yogalayam.org. I teach and live in a yoga and meditation center. So yogalayam is all one word spelled y o g a l a y a m.org.

Claire Lavery: [00:27:42] And it is a good idea before joining the class, especially as a yoga student, to communicate with us so that we can both understand what you are going to experience.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:52] Before we leave today, I wanted to ask you what advice you might give someone before they start this program.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:27:59] And I believe you're talking about people who would come in as a volunteer and also people who would come in as a yoga student. I would say for the volunteers, please come with an open mind and realize that you will probably learn more than you thought you could and that you will enjoy what you're doing and feel a certain psychological upliftment that you might not ever have imagined you could. For the yoga students, again, I would ask the person to come to the class with an open mind and see if they feel like it's a good fit and give themselves a chance, coming even more than once to see how we can stretch the practice to accommodate anyone's needs.

Claire Lavery: [00:28:42] I would also just advise everyone who comes to come with an open heart and to be open to the transformations that might not feel familiar.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:28:54] It seems like this is such a valuable experience for anyone of any age to to take part.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:29:01] I would say the human body, mind and heart have an amazing ability to survive. If you find yourselves, caught yourself, compromised in some way. If you're not able to garner all of the themes and abilities and structures and functions that you typically have or used to have, other people can come in and make up some of that difference. They can support you not only physically with their hands, but really, I would say psycho spiritually surrounding you and helping you to find and sustain what is profound and essential in yourself. Even if you can't do it all by yourself.

Claire Lavery: [00:29:43] I can say from my experience, I am an able bodied yoga instructor. I have been fortunate to be fairly strong and healthy. I get so much out of this class. I get emotionally an uplift. I get a calming effect. I get love. And I'm a cynical New Yorker, so it works for me.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:07] Well, I want to thank you both.

Claire Lavery: [00:30:08] Thank you so much for having me.

Saraswathi Devi: [00:30:09] Thank you very, very much.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:16] You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:08] This is Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with Catherine O'Hare. She's part of a trio of female entrepreneurs who have started a company called Salt Point Seaweed. Welcome to the program, Catherine. Thank you.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:38] I have so many questions for you about this seaweed company, first of all. Are you the only women owned seaweed company in the world?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:00:45] That's a good question. I don't think so. There's a seaweed harvester up in Sonoma County who's a woman. I don't know if her business is all women owned, but there's not many.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:55] Are you an alumni of UC Berkeley?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:00:57] No. Tessa and Avery, the other two women, are alumni. They did their grad program here at UC Berkeley. Tessa and I both went to Oberlin College in Ohio for undergraduate.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:08] How did you get started in the seaweed business? What inspired you to do this?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:01:13] All three of us have a background in agriculture, so we've always been interested in food. I was a biology major and then worked on farms. So I'd always been interested in local food and healthy food. But it wasn't until moving to the bay now like five or six years ago that I got connected with the seaweed harvester and started learning about all the local seaweeds that we have here on the Northern California coast. I grew up by the ocean in Southern California. So I loved the ocean. I loved the beach. I was always looking for ways to be by the water. They were the first to get involved. Of the trio of founders. Yeah. So we all have a background in agriculture. We also all have some ties to East Africa where we've either worked before or lived before. And there we all saw seaweed farming in Zanzibar.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:58] Were you in the Peace Corps?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:01:59] No. I studied abroad there when I was in college, just doing a coastal ecology program. Tessa and Avery both did their graduate program at UC Berkeley and they did a master's in development practice. So it's kind of sustainable international development. So that brought them to East Africa.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:17] Did you all meet up over there or did you find out later that you had.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:02:22] We found out later. Tessa and I knew each other from Oberlin. We both ended up in the bay. We each had independent experiences in East Africa. And Avery and Tessa met here at UC Berkeley. And during their during Avery's program here, she did work in East Africa. So we all just kind of had these in our weaving paths. So I was just living and working in the bay, working for a small food company and kind of learning more about seaweed harvesting and doing it as a hobby. And in the meantime, I was good friends with Tessa. So we were talking all the time about all these things related to food, just tossing around ideas about local agriculture systems, herbs, seaweed, farming, like we just were tossing around all these ideas every time we met up. And seaweed was always one of those things, I think because I had seen seaweed farming in Zanzibar and she was interested in these alternative livelihood systems for women all over the world. And so it was during that time where Tessa and Avery were finishing their graduate program here.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:03:23] I was working and exploring where the seaweed on our local coast that we just started delving deeper and deeper into the world of seaweed and talking to everyone we can, emailing people, trying to meet up with people just to learn more about the seaweed industry, about seaweed farming. And it just has kind of.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:42] How to harvest and all that? 

Catherine O'Hare: [00:03:43] Yeah.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:44] So what were your steps?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:03:46] Well, so we're doing our pilot project with Hog Island Oyster Company there in Oyster Farm in Tamales Bay, because the legislation and regulatory agencies are you know, it's a long process to get your own aquaculture permit. So we're doing a research project. This Hog Island Oyster Farm is hosting our pilot, but Hog Island leases from the state, the state waters. So they have aquaculture permit from California Fish and Wildlife. And that's kind of one of the many, you know, permits that they have to be doing aquaculture.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:19] Are you going to be a pilot for a long time or how long does that last before you actually have to get your own permits independently?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:04:27] We're still figuring it out. We first talked to Hog Island over two years ago where we just showed up and kind of bounce this idea off them of, you know, we're interested in doing a little pilot to farm seaweed to see how these native species of seaweed grow. Have you ever thought about that? Would you be interested? And so those conversations happened kind of over the course of a year. Meanwhile, we were trying to apply for grants to fund this, I think because Tessa and Avery had this grad school academic background that was kind of the framework that that we knew of how to try to do a project like this.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:04] So you got your funding via grant?

Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:06] We applied for one grant through NOAA that was big. It like gave us the structure to really dive in and figure out all the details. We did not get that one, but because it had set us up to really have a project. Then Hog Island was still on board to do this. So we were like, OK, we'll find we'll find other funding. So then we got a smaller grant from California Sea Grant, which is like an affiliate of Noah. And that gave us ten thousand dollars That development grant is just to prepare mostly academics to go after a bigger grant. So it's kind of this like small bundle of money. So we were awarded that and then that really funded the pilot.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:48] Have you continued to just use grants or or did you go out into the private equity?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:05:53]  No. We. We all put in a little bit of our own money to start. We got another business, small business grant from Oberlin College where Tessa and I went. That was great. That was a huge help. We just finished a Kickstarter a few weeks ago. And other than that, we've just been getting some revenue from our product line of our wild harvested seaweed.  So we're kind of...

Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:16] So you're keeping your mission in tact, keeping outsiders out.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:06:19] Yeah. So far, we're also growing very slowly because of that, which is okay with us. We're not we're definitely not the traditional Bay Area business, I think. But yeah. So far, there's no other investment in the company.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:32] Okay. This oyster company. What is the relationship between oysters and seaweed?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:06:38] It's a really beautiful symbiotic relationship. Oysters are also filter feeders, so they're filtering the water and making it less cloudy and less murky. So more light can reach the seaweed. And seaweed is a really beneficial. You know, seaweed is just the term for marine macro algae. So any algae that's growing in a marine environment that's like seaweed is kind of this big, vague term.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:02] So it's kelp and there's all kinds.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:07:04] Yeah. There's all kinds, kelp or brown seaweeds. There's also green algae and red algae. So what seaweeds do just like land plants, their primary producers, they're absorbing carbon and nitrogen to grow. And so unlike a land plant, that carbon and nitrogen is coming from the water. So in seaweeds, growing in an environment, it's, you know, kind of taking out some of those excess nutrients. Too much carbon in the water is what's leading to ocean acidification. And that's one of the factors that can inhibit shellfish growth. So if the water's too acidic, it's hard for their shells to form when they're young.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:39] And seaweed helped with that.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:07:40] Right. So seaweed is making the water. You know, so far the studies done show that it's just in a local area.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:07:46] So right where you're growing the seaweed, there's hope that you can be moderating the P.H. of that water. So making it a little bit less acidic, making the water chemistry a little more balanced for lack of a better word. And also by absorbing nitrogen that helps, you know, too much nitrogen in a marine environment is what causes those harmful algal blooms, though. So the thought is by growing the type of seaweed that you want and then harvesting and getting it out of the environment, you're helping to kind of capture some of that nitrogen before it leads to. It's like using it for the seaweed you want instead of the algae that.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:21] It's kind of like seaweed farming.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:08:23] Yeah. What we're doing is technically under the umbrella of aquaculture, but there's a lot of different ways that aquaculture can look. Seaweed and shellfish farming are pretty low input like you need to put physical equipment in the water column. But then there's no feed, there's no additives, there's no additional fertilizer or anything. It's just, you know, they're using sunlight in the case of seaweed, sunlight and the water aquaculture on the other end of the spectrum can be fish farming can be these bigger, more intensive systems. Some of those fish farms, you need to get fish to feed the fish. You have to I mean, I'm sure some add a lot of additives. So, yeah. This word aquaculture really has a big range.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:06] OK. Are you testing the water daily? What have you discovered in the short time that you've been in this business about the quality of the Pacific Ocean?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:09:15] That's a great question.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:09:17] We have had to kind of scale back our pilot based on money and time and resources. But the wonderful thing is that Hog Island has been doing partnerships with but Bodega Marine Lab through UC Davis that they get water quality measurements every day. They have these monitors in the water that are constantly giving them feedback. So through that, we've been able to see how the salinity is changing, the PH, the temperature. They're measuring all these things every day.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:44] And what are you discovering?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:09:45] Our pilot ran from April of last year till November. So a pretty small window. And really what we saw were just seasonal variations. So like seasonal temperature changes and PH changes not related to our pilot. I think there is concern just in general about ocean acidification. But our pilot was a little too small scale.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:05] But you will continue to see any changes. So that's really valuable.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:10:10] Yeah. So right now, that pilot wrapped up in the fall. And just because everything is so unknown, we're kind of taking a pause to see what's next. We're still working with Hog Island, but we're kind of in conversation about what phase two will look like. So, yeah, I think if it were easier to get an aquaculture permit in California, that would be the direction we would want ahead. It's a long and expensicve process in California and, you know, rightfully so we have this beautiful protected coastline.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:48] If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators today, speaking with Catherine O'Hare of Salt Point Seaweed.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:11:09] If you could just walk me through the process of I guess you'd call it farming the seaweed. What would a typical day be like for you three?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:11:18] It's about to be harvest time for our wild harvested products. For the seaweed farming pilot, we harvested mostly in September and October because the species that we grew, we grew throughout the summer and then harvested in the fall. A lot of the kelp farms on the East Coast grow throughout the winter and then harvest in the spring. But the type of seaweed that we did for this pilot is a type of red algae. So not the big long kelps, but a type of red algae called grass grassaleria. It's also called ogo. It's like a kind of a red spindly seaweed. We chose it because it's native to Tamales Bay. It's edible. It's pretty easy to propagate because we were doing this very low tech. And so how we did it was we created little bundles of seaweed.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:12:09] So do you go out there and cut it? Or how do you do it?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:12:11] So we had a permit to wild harvest the initial, you know, seed stock. And then so we harvested we created cut little bundles. And this seaweed is a type that will propagate vegetative. So just by cutting it, it can grow more. So we created little bundles and then out there already, Hog Island had big, long lines that were floating on the surface of the water and anchored to the bottom. You know, there are buoys and each of those buoys were anchored to the bottom. Each of those bundles that we created, we kind of un-twisted the long line to create a little gap in the long line and then shoved the bundle through. And as we let go, the tension of the line would hold the bundle in place. So that's the basic, our basic propagation method. So it was originally wild and then that's how we farmed it onto a line. So then we had a long line out there in Tomales Bay and the bundles of seaweed were kind of growing down from the line. So we were measuring growth rate. So each month we would come back and harvest it and see how much grew. You know, we have this little fishing boat and we just use scissors. We can get really close to the line and just use scissors.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:13:19] And so you don't actually get in the water.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:13:22] Not for this farming pilot. We stayed on a boat. So we're kind of have this split personality where we're all so wild harvesting seaweed and that we do get in the water, that we go at low tide to these rocky coves up on the northern coast and still just using scissors in our hands. But we're on foot and kind of exploring the intertidal when it's really, really low tide.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:13:47] And what kind of seaweed is that called?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:13:49] The re were harvesting three species. Two are kelps. One is a lemonaria. We call that California kombu. And then alaria is California wakame. And then we're also harvesting Nori, which are actually many species that look almost identical. So it's hard to kind of say for sure the exact species, but they're on the genus Pyropia. So those are the three wild harvested seaweeds. We don't harvest any of the giant kelps. Yeah, although species can be sustainably harvested. So you're just kind of pruning the species, so you're cutting it to a certain level and then they'll regrow and regenerate.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:29] And so you bring it back to the shore and then what happens?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:14:32] Usually when we're harvesting is far from any road because, you know, we're choosing the most pristine area. So then we hike it up because it's so misty and cold and wet on the coast. We have a drying location that's inland about 45 minutes or an hour so that it's, we can get the hot sunny afternoon and then we dry it in the sun and seaweed roll on a good day, dry by the end of the day. And so that's why the sun is really important.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:14:59] So you can have it in a truck ready to go to market in 24 hours?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:15:03] Selling dry, the low tides are low for many days in a row. So we like, do you know, day after day. But yeah, after harvesting one early morning. By the next day, we could have product ready to go when you're done with that process.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:20] When you are done with that project, you have a warehouse here?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:15:20] We have a small storage location in Oakland.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:24] OK, yeah. And is that the place from which it's distributed to end users?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:15:29] Yes. Basically, we have so many locations because we're trying to scrape together affordable places, but we have a commercial kitchen that we sublease where we do all the food production so that it's up to California health code.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:44] And where is that located?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:15:45] That's in South Berkeley. It's at the Berkeley Kitchens. It's an amazing group of food businesses. We sublet from Cult crackers who make those really amazing gluten free crackers. So we're using their kitchen on nights and weekends. That's where we make our food products. So from there, we, you know, have another storage location where we can do all the shipping and distribution.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:07] So do you have to do packaging as well?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:16:09] Mm hmm.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:09] There's a lot of pieces to this.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:16:10] There's a lot of pieces to it.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:12] How would I find your product as an end user here in the East Bay?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:16:16] We just got into Berkeley Bowl, which was a exciting development a few weeks ago, we're at two farmers markets, the Fort Mason market in the city in San Francisco and every other week we're at the Kensington Market both on Sundays and then when a few stores.. it's growing. But Berkeley Bowl in the city, you we're in Rainbow Grocery. We're at Far West Fun guy's booth in the Ferry Building. We're at Oak Town Spice Shop in Oakland, preserved in Oakland. The whole list is on our Web site. So you can also buy products on our website, which is SaltPointSeaweed.com.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:52] You also have recipes on there for using seaweed.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:16:55] Yeah, we have recipes.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:56] You also post your research notes or anything.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:16:59] So we're creating this public report from the pilot. We're trying to get it done as soon as possible. And then, yes, that's gonna be on our website. We're kind of gonna distribute that widely because we want the results of this pilot with Hog Island to be distributed and open for people to see. We want it to kind of help tell the story of what seaweed farming could do and how it could, in theory, be a positive benefit to the environment.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:17:23] Tell me about using seaweed. I don't think most people know about the nutrients in seaweed.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:17:30] Each species has slightly different nutritional profile, but in general, seaweeds are just very nutrient dense. So there's a lot of minerals. Almost all seaweeds have iodine and that's a hard especially for vegans. It's a rare mineral to find in high concentrations. Seaweed has vitamin B, calcium, iron. It's just kind of like the super dense food. Seaweeds also have these mineral salts. So instead of sodium chloride, which is table salt, they have these other mineral salts like potassium, which kind of just give it a unique flavor. And I just read this article about the scientists who discovered you umami in Japan back in the nineteen, early nineteen hundreds. That flavor umami is attributed to the glutamate. I hope I'm getting this right, that seaweed is high in. So seaweeds also aside from the nutrition, give food this really savory umami flavor. Partially because of those minerals.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:18:28] So it must be really good in soups.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:18:30] It's great in soups. Yeah. So the types that we sell the kombu is this great bass for broth, for stews, for soups. It's high in that umami. It's high and iodine. So it's adding,I throw it at anything I cook just because it's giving it minerals, nutrients. And this kind of savory flavor combo also helps break down the carbohydrates and beans and legumes that sometimes give us digestive problems. So it helps make beans easier to cook and digest. Kombu's an easy one to to throw in a lot of dishes without thinking about it too much. We also sell California wakame, which is a thinner kelp. It's more mild. It's like Kombu is hard to eat. Just raw because it's thick. Wakame is thinner, so it's easier to just cut up and then throw the pieces in like a stir fry.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:19:19] Or a salad?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:19:20] So yeah, it's great to rehydrate and then make a seaweed salad with. We have some of those recipes on our website. A lot of people come up and take samples at the farmer's market and they're like, oh, that's not, you know, that's not the superintense seaweed flavor I was expecting. I always say that I think the varieties that we harvest here in California are a little bit more mild or maybe it's that they're fresh.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:19:40] I was going to ask you that. What would be the taste difference between the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific and, you know, any other bodies or what have you noticed? Have you done a tasting?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:19:48] You know, I this is a maybe a sad confession. I haven't done too much tasting of East Coast Atlantic seaweeds, just haven't spent much time on the East Coast. Chefs tell us that they can taste a difference between Japanese and Korean grown seaweed and the type that we're growing here. The Nori that we harvest here, they tell us that there's a more mineral, kind of like wild rich taste compared to the Nori that's coming from Japan and Korea. Out of the three of us, Avery has the most culinary background. She was a chef and has background in culinary. I'm learning how to put more culinary words to seaweed. But sometimes, you know, that's a, that's a muscle I'm trying to build.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:20:31] That's when you just say, I like it.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:20:33] Yeah. I love it. I love eating it. Can I describe the differences? I'm working on it.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:20:38] Speaking of Japan and that area, do people worry about the fallout from the Fukushima radioactivity in the waters? Is that a concern?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:20:48] Yeah, we get a lot of questions about that. That's one of the reasons why we're excited and interested in providing California seaweed, because it's harder to trace the seaweed that's coming from Japan and Korea.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:21:00] Don't most seaweeds come from Asia?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:21:02] Yeah. Most edible seaweeds are coming from Korea, China and Japan. There's seaweed grown all over the world, but in the US, over 95 percent of the seaweed eaten is coming from overseas and other, other places. UC Berkeley actually was part of this consortium of UCs that after the two thousand eleven Fukushima disaster started testing the kelp beds from the coast of, like off San Diego to Canada. So for years they were testing the kelp beds and looking for radioactive isotopes and they didn't find any being picked up by the kelp beds.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:21:40] Great.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:21:41] Yeah. So that's good news. And we have you know, we so far can't do our own testing, but we turn to that third party. I'm so grateful that now that they have done that and if anyone's interested, it's called Kelp Watch and you can go to the website and they have all the information there.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:21:55] And a lot of people are allergic to oysters. If your seaweed is in a bed of oysters, do they have to worry about that at all?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:22:03] Good question. We rinse every all the seaweed in saltwater. So if someone's allergic to shellfish, like on our products right now, we have a disclaimer that because it's a wild product, there might be some small sea crustacean that, you know, we can't ever 100 percent confirm that there's no traces of shellfish, but it's not like they're touching or intermingling. We rinse all of the seaweed in fresh seawater.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:29] And I wanted to ask you about the challenges that you three have faced in entering this field, whether it's being an all woman business or finding money. You've talked a little bit about that. What are some of the major challenges?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:22:44] Gosh, I think there's a couple different categories. One is that we did start this very slowly and organically and didn't take funding. So we all were working other jobs for the last two years. You know, it's kind of a feedback loop, right? We were working other jobs so grew slower, but it grew slower because we're working other jobs. But just finding access to funding that we would feel good about and that we would still have control of our company. That's been one. I think the Bay right now is a really supportive place to be a woman known business. So we've felt a lot of enthusiasm and encouragement from that. But sure, there are always people who don't take you seriously or don't give you the time of day because you don't look like the typical business person. A big challenge with the seaweed farming pilot that we're doing is that the regulatory process to get our own aquaculture permit is just so long and expensive. That was one of the reasons to do the pilot is to take the results of the pilot. How much carbon and nitrogen the seaweeds absorbing and show it to these regulatory agencies. So have a document that you can go to Fish and Wildlife and California Coastal Commission. But that's been a big challenge because if that were easier, I think we'd be in a different place. And we're definitely supportive of the regulatory agencies. They have a big job and a hard job and are doing the good work of protecting our coast and our resources. You know, I think there's a number that there's been no new aquaculture leases granted offshore in 25 years or 30 years. So there's just no precedent. So that's a big challenge that we're trying to we're trying to address by sharing the results of this pilot.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:27] And are you making any money on your product?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:24:29] We are. Right now, we're about breaking even.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:32] That's pretty good in a short time.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:24:34] Yeah, I mean, we have low expenses. We're being very scrappy. And, you know, just being at farmers markets mean we have regular sales and regular income and we sell online. We sell our products online. And then we also sell bulk to food restaurants and food businesses. There's a few restaurants that are ongoing supporters and then some businesses like a kimchi company and a bone broth company. So there's been regular sales. So we've been able to keep ourselves going on the wild harvested products and and really, you know, show that there's demand for seaweed and help build the education and awareness around seaweed.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:12] Do you have any competitors in this marketplace?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:25:14] There are other wild harvested seaweed companys.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:16] Local?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:25:17] Most based in Mendocino County, and they're amazing. Some of them have been doing it since the 80s or the 70s. There's a few other groups, you know, they feel like collaborators who are also trying to do seaweed farming. So there's a duo down in San Diego trying to farm seaweed in the port of San Diego. There's a company called Farmer C in Santa Barbara who's head by Dan Marquez, and we know him really well. So there's other people who are trying to farm seaweed in California, but so far all are at the research stage or the preliminary stage because it's hard to get those permits.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:53] So you all share information, I would assume so far.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:25:56] Yeah, it's been very collaborative. We're all trying to you know, we kind of see it like a rising tide, lifts all boats, like it would benefit us all to have easier access and sharing resources. And then there's a lot of Kelp farms starting on the East Coast. Most farms on the East Coast are farming sugar kelp, especially the state of Maine, has made it really streamlined and much easier to get aquaculture permits and start kelp farms. So it's really exciting to see all the progress happening over there. There's kelp farming that's being started in Alaska, so it's starting... California, I think it's gonna be a little bit slower to take off in California because of the regulatory agencies.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:33] You're doing a lot of your harvesting in public water. There's boats and you know, the whole idea that there could be motorboats and oil in the water. Yeah, you know, it's complicated.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:26:44] It's definitely complicated. And seaweed. You know, a lot of aquaculture happens in mixed areas like that.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:26:51] So I don't mind a little bit more regulation as a consumer, if it means a higher quality product.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:26:57] Yeah. And seaweeds can absorb you know, they absorb what's in the water. So that's why it's really important that our waters are clean and pristine and as protected as we can have them.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:07] What have been some of your best accomplishments?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:27:10] Someone gave us the advice like keep a list in your journal or on your phone of other little firsts like, oh, first time someone emailed about having an internship. So I think we've done a mediocre job at that. But there's been a lot of little accomplishments that feel great. The Kickstarter last month was a big one. We rais..we set our goal at $25000. And I think we ended up raising $42000. And it was really emotional to see so much support come in. So that felt like a very tangible success.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:40] Have you gotten any awards or recognition?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:27:42] We have bee n featured in Vogue and on the the website Goop. But it's funny, like the little like Berkeleyside just did a feature on us and that I think resulted in more sales and attention. So you never know which ones are going to end. The Kickstarter did also help with that. It's kind of like this concrete little time pressured event that really helped spread the word. So I think like there are publications that we reached out to for the Kickstarter, but it just resulted in more awareness. But yeah, winning some of these small business grants felt like big accomplishments and we had to, like the one at Oberlin was a competition. So we had to pitch and get judged and people emailing to ask if you're hiring. It's like, I have to be one day, that we can you know, there's like lots of things that feel like accomplishments.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:28:30] What are some of the things coming up? Maybe if you project out a couple of years? 

Catherine O'Hare: [00:28:33] So we're definitely still talking with Hog Island about phase two of the pilot. So we're still trying to do research on seaweed farming. We're looking for more grants to fund that, because really what we want to do next is partner with the academic institution and kind of go for a bigger scale project. You know, we're kind of split personality because we're still running the business and creating these food products. Just our time and resources are limited. So we're looking for partners for that. But we hope to be finding ways to sustainably scale, sustainably source our seaweed. We feel like as if we continue to grow our presence and our market demand, that will only help us be in a better position to, you know, to take on some of these issues around seaweed farming.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:29:22] What is your website and can people reach you if they have questions?

Catherine O'Hare: [00:29:25] Yes. So our website is SaltPointSeaweed.com. You can also follow us on Instagram. That's where we give the most updates. We're @SaltpointSeaweed. Yeah, you can reach us on our website. There's an email form. We have products on there. We have recipes. We send out email newsletters. You can sign up for that on our website, too, or we'd send out little fun articles and pictures of our harvest and stuff like that. Seaweed is this amazing resource that grows without land or freshwater. It can be farmed and harvested sustainably. It can be grown abundantly. And I think as the world changes, we're going to need food sources that are sustainable, that are locally grown and that are nutritious. So for us, seaweed is this wonderful resource for that reason.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:14] Well, thank you, Katherine, for being on Method to the Madness.

Catherine O'Hare: [00:30:17] Thank you so much for having me.

Lisa Kiefer: [00:30:22] You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Ojig Yeretsian:This is Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Ojig Yeretsian. Today I'm speaking with Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation and technology at NVIDIA, where he leads gaming technology and simulation efforts. Welcome to the show, Rev. What is VR?

Rev Lebaredian:Well, VR stands for virtual reality, obviously. What most people imagine when we say VR are these clunky headsets that you put on your face or some little receptacle you place your phone into before putting it on your face. VR is actually something that we've been experiencing throughout mankind from the very beginning. All of our perception actually happens in our brains. You're not seeing with your eyes, you're seeing the world around you interpreted through what your brain is actually doing. When we sit around and we talk to each other like we are right now, [inaudible] elephant, and you just got an image of an elephant in your brain. There's not one around here. You conjure up this image and that's me incepting this image into your brain a virtual reality that we're constructing. Here we are talking, having this conversation, we're constructing a reality amongst ourselves.

These new versions of virtual reality that we're starting to see are just a more direct way to create an immersive virtual reality experience. It's not actually the end yet. We're not totally at the end of this thing, it's just one of the steps along the way. Humanity has figured out ways of creating this virtual reality, this just communicating, telling stories to each other verbally. Eventually we had books, you can write them in there. You could do recordings like the one we're making right now, movies, video games, but the end game is going to be where we can start communicating even without words, potentially. I highly recommend you look up Ken Perlin from NYU. He's one of the greats of computer graphics, where he describes what virtual reality means to him. I completely agree with what he's saying. My piece in this is construction of virtual realities and virtual worlds through simulation, that's fundamentally what we do at NVIDIA. Our core as a computer graphics company, we power most of the computer graphics in the world, at least the serious stuff.

Constructing these virtual worlds so we can inject them into these virtual realities is what our currency is.

Ojig Yeretsian:What is AR?

Rev Lebaredian:They're actually related. So, virtual reality is a new reality that you create that you're completely immersed in, but it's on its own. AR stands for augmented reality. Another term is mixed reality, MR. Some people use that term instead. Currently we're in a reality of our own right here. We're sitting in this room talking to each other and I'm perceiving you sitting there. Mixed realities or augmented realities are ones where I can blend in other realities into this world more directly. The current manifestations of this, the beginnings of AR, we're seeing through your phones. I mean, every iPhone and Android phone nowadays has something, that crude thing we call AR, where you can point your phone at something in your environment and it creates a digital representation of some reality mixed into it. The first one to make this popular, the first app, was the Pokemon Go. It was very cool but still extremely crude. A few years from now it's going to be far more compelling and far more immersive.

Ojig Yeretsian:AI versus deep AI.

Rev Lebaredian:These terms are very contentious. What is AI? What is intelligence? We still haven't really defined that. Generally speaking, when we colloquially speak about artificial intelligence today we're talking about algorithms. Computers doing things that we used to think only humans could do. We've been going through series of these things throughout computing history. One of the first challenges that we had for computers that we thought only humans would be able to do is playing chess. In the 90s, Garry Kasparov, the world champion at the time, was beat by Deep Blue. It reshaped what we thought computers could do and what is the domain of humans. Interestingly, it didn't kill chess which is what one of the things that people assumed would happen once a computer wins. Turns out, we don't really care what computers can do. We mostly care what humans do. So, I'm sure we'll make a robot one day that could play basketball better than any NBA player, but that won't kill basketball.

Ojig Yeretsian:It won't replace it, no.

Rev Lebaredian:We have people that run really fast and we really care about how fast they can run, and we go measure that at the Olympics, but just because cars exist or even horses that can run faster, it's just not particularly interesting. What we've assumed all of these years, that there are things that only humans can do. It's something special. So, we've defined artificial intelligence as the things that computers can't do and that humans do. We're inching along over here, occasionally make big steps. We have computers do things that we thought would be impossible. The big one in recent history, it was around 2011 in Geoff Hinton's group at the University of Toronto, there were a few grad students, they took some of our processors, our GPUs that were used for gaming and they were able to use a machine learning, a deep learning algorithm to train, to create a new algorithm to do computer vision. To do classification of images. There's a longstanding contest called ImageNet where all these computer vision experts in the world would have their algorithms compete with each other to see who could get the highest accuracy classification.

Look at an image and you say, "This is a dog. This is a blue bicycle." Traditionally extremely hard problem. It's been there since the beginning of computer science. We wanted to solve this problem. At first we thought that it would actually be pretty simple and then we realized it's extremely hard. I mean, I've been coding since I was a little kid. I never believed I would see the day when a computer would be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog properly. This magic moment happened when these grad students took their gaming processors and they applied an older algorithm, but modified, using the computing available to them. This extreme performance that they could get was a super computer inside their PC, afforded to them by the fact that there's a large market that wants to do computer games. They took that and they created a new kind of algorithm where instead of them writing an algorithm directly, they trained this algorithm. They fed data into it which was only available because the internet had existed long enough for us to have these images to begin with.

They shattered all the previous records in terms of accuracy. A few years later these algorithms started to become superhuman, and by superhuman I mean humans when they look at these images are sometimes not accurate. They don't know exactly what kind of dog is in the image, or maybe sometimes they think it's a dog but it's really a hyena in the dark. Humans make mistakes but now the algorithms are superhuman. Before that moment we believed that only humans could do that kind of classification, but that changed. That changed over night. Now computers are actually better than us for doing that. What does that mean? Is that intelligence? It's hard to say but the trend, if you look at it, we keep figuring out new ways to make computers do things that we didn't think was possible. It's happening so fast. If you extrapolate, you imagine maybe at some point we will have machines that are superhuman in a lot of the things that we consider the domain of humans. Emotions, humor, things that we call human. Or, maybe not. Or, maybe they'll be some other thing that we don't quite understand.

Ojig Yeretsian:What are you working on these days?

Rev Lebaredian:I've been here for almost two decades. I really found my calling when I was around 10 or 11 years old. I saw this image in an [inaudible] magazine of two spheres, these balls, floating above a checkerboard floor. They looked so strange. I'd never seen anything quite like it. I couldn't make out whether it was drawn or whether it was some kind of weird photo of something. I read a little bit more and I realized that it was an algorithm that produced that image. That it wasn't actually drawn by someone, nor was it real, or a photograph of something. I was hooked. This image was created by Turner Whitted, who invented ray tracing back in 1980. He published [inaudible] on this. Luckily I got to work with Turner years later. He was with us until he retired recently at NVIDIA doing some amazing work. I got to tell him that, that the reason I was there at NVIDIA working with him was because of that image.

What really excited me was that I could finally draw without having to know how to draw. I could use the tools that I'm good at, which was programming a computer to produce these images.

Ojig Yeretsian:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today's guest is Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation and technology at NVIDIA. He's speaking about gaming technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. 

Rev Lebaredian:So, what is computer graphics, what is a digital image that's been constructed? Basically, computers aren't really drawing or drawing in the traditional sense. What we have that computers do is through simulation. We have some understanding of how light works and the physics of light, and the images that you see are the products of this simulation that's happening around us in the real world. We're trying to approximate that. Light travels through space. It interacts with matter that's present all around us. It reflects, it absorbs, transmits, it refracts, it diffracts. There's all of these things that happen, and so what we do with computer graphics is we try to get as close as possible to what reality is and simulate that. So, those images that we're producing for a video game, or for the Avengers movie many of the people probably just went and saw, it's fundamentally a simulation of the physics of light. 

When NVIDIA started before I joined, our CEO Jensen Huang who's probably the smartest person I've ever met, he realized how important the computer graphics is, the simulation of light, but also realized that it's important to find a large market that could support the development, the amount of R and D that goes into creating something like this. Previous to then, most of the companies doing really advanced graphics were in fairly niche areas like making movies, or professional CAD design and stuff like that. What we did was we took this to the masses through video games. Realized people love playing video games. What we're creating in a video game is a simulation of some world, and in this world you have to do the simulation of light. That's the graphics that we produce, and you have to do it really fast because it has to be interactive. We do it in a 60th of a second instead of the hours it takes to produce one of the frames in the Avengers movie. 

We have to simulate physics and the interaction of objects, how they collide with each other. We have to introduce some kinds of AIs to drive the opponents or the virtual cohorts and people you have on your team. You need to collaborate with other people or play against them and deal with the interaction of people in these virtual worlds and large distances between them. They may be on the other side of the globe. They have to interact with each other and make it all feel like they're present there at the moment. Video games are actually the hardest problem, if you think about it, for computer science because you have to do everything in order to make the best experience. One day when we have the ultimate video game experience, it'll feel no different than being in reality here. We're actually going to feel like we're inside it. That's the ultimate game. 

So what Jensen realized was that there's demand here, and the fundamental technology needed to create that is one that's important for mankind in general, but you need this large market in order to pay for the development of this thing. There's an entertainment purpose over here that's large enough where we can afford every generation GPUs we create. It's $3, $4 billion dollars that we invest in creating that. None of the other single markets can support the development of that, but through video games we get this core, and then we can have adjacence. Simulation for robotics, for autonomous vehicles, for design of products, for collaboration. Maybe one of these days we'll be doing an interview like this inside a virtual reality that's powered by that same gaming technology. So, my team is focused on building the tooling and the fundamental technologies at that layer to create these possibilities with these applications. Whether they be video games or simulation for some of the things I mentioned like robotics and autonomous vehicles. 

Ojig Yeretsian:What are some of the problems you're trying to solve?

Rev Lebaredian:There's a whole lot of them. We still haven't solved rendering. Simulating light is really, really hard, and then doing it fast is even harder. We understand the principles of light, physics, well enough so that we can do approximations but what we have to do is simulate billions and billions of photons bouncing around in a scene, and figure out which ones hit your sensor whether it's your eyeball, or a camera that you're modeling. Doing that extremely fast, in a 60th of a second, it's hard. Even the best that we do for movies, which don't have that restriction, they can afford to have supercomputers. Thousands of computers they put in the data center to calculate those final pixels that you end up seeing in the movie theater. They can spend hours and hours, or even days rendering a single frame. We have to do that in a 60th of a second in real time. So, the first problem that's on my mind always is, how do I take the things that we are doing that take hours for a film and make it so that we can do it in a 60th of a second? 

Once we can do that, then we can really approach, get close to making a virtual reality that's believable. So that if I stick you in this virtual reality, you might not actually know that you're in it. 

Ojig Yeretsian:Sounds to me, from all that we're talking about, is that the future is coming faster and earlier, and it's forcing us to contend with our understanding. It's like a culture shift. It's like a paradigm shift for us. AI is already here. There's technology to do gene editing. There's facial recognition, there is amputees with robotic limbs, sensors on the steering wheels for cars that if they sense that you're getting sleepy or your mood is changing, the car will start talking to you to keep you awake and engage you. These are all these that were unimaginable.

Rev Lebaredian:There's a lot of technology we're building inside the car, not just for self driving cars, but for assisting drivers. Technologies like that where we have cameras in there that can see if your eyelids are drooping or if you're agitated, and try to help you, it's remarkable.

Ojig Yeretsian:To help reduce road rage perhaps. Sebastian Thrun developed machine learning algorithm to help diagnose cancer, and that radiologist's role is going to change as a result of this. That they're not going to be necessarily replaced, but they're going to have augmentation of what you mentioned, with classifying and reading of the CAT scans and the MRIs and the X-rays, and do better classifying, and the radiologist will be more of the cognitive end of thinking about disease. So, how do you see technology impacting our lives and humanity?

Rev Lebaredian:Understandably, all of this technology happens so fast it's scary. It's even scary for me even though I'm in the middle of it. It's happening at a pace that mankind hasn't experienced before, so it's hard for us to just digest how fast it's happening, what the repercussions are to each of these things. So, we have to be very careful about how we integrate technology into our lives, and really be thoughtful about it and not just assume that they're by default good. Technology is neutral, but the application of it isn't necessarily, right?

Ojig Yeretsian:Yeah.

Rev Lebaredian:That being said, one of the biggest fears is that AIs are going to make people obsolete. I just don't see that. It doesn't make sense to me that we would feel that way. A lot of the things that we think about are manufacturing jobs, and stuff that robots can go replace. If you look at it traditionally, those jobs didn't exist to begin with. It's kind of weird to think that the pinnacle of mankind is a human standing in an assembly line, toiling away hour after hour doing mundane, monotonous tasks. We were mechanizing mankind, which is odd. Humans are creative, they're wonderful creatures that are interesting. We should try to do everything possible to make it so that they can reach their potential without having to do the mundane and monotonous things. 

We were just discussing virtual worlds and simulating them, but one of the bigger problems actually with virtual worlds is the creation part of it. Creating a virtual world is extremely expensive. It takes thousands and thousands of people to construct a really large virtual world experience. One of the most important ones in recent times is a game called Grand Theft Auto V. It was released in 2013, I believe. If I recall, they spent about seven years building this game and they had, at some points, probably 1,000 artists constructing this virtual world. It's still extremely popular. People play it all the time. If you go search on YouTube, you'll find millions of videos of people creating movies inside the Grand Theft Auto world. They take it and they modify it and they insert their own characters, they put Marvel superheroes in there. The reason why it's so popular is because it is the most accessible, the largest virtual world that you can go access that's of high quality, but it took 1,000 artists seven years to create this. 

It's a micro version of Los Angeles. They call it San Andreas in there, and it's great but it's nowhere near what we really want. Something that's as rich as the real world we live in, and even more, except we've reached the limit. There's only so many hundreds of millions of dollars you can put into creating these virtual worlds. So to construct them, how do we take these thousands of artists and augment them with AI tools, not so we can put them out of business, but so that they can create not just this little micro version of Los Angeles but they create the whole globe? So that you can go walk into any building, into any alley, into any basement and it's detailed, and rich, and filled with all of the objects that you would expect there to be in the real world. It'd be based on maybe the real world. We can take our Google Maps data that exists, satellite data, and use AI to go augment that and build these worlds out.

When we introduce these AIs, I don't believe there's going to be a single artist that goes out of business. What we're going to do is we're going to take away the monotonous task of handcrafting every single piece of geometry, every single little thing in there, and I think that's what's going to happen in general. Now, the scary part is when it happens fast. There's this period where you have people who have been doing something for a long time. Sometimes they're not even capable of adjusting to the new thing, so there's pain there. We need to get better at that as a society. How do we make people not dependent on one specific task as their job or career their whole lives? People should be adaptable, and creative, and we should be progressing together and learning to do new things. 

Ojig Yeretsian:So, you believe that we're not prepared?

Rev Lebaredian:I don't think so, and I particularly don't think we're prepared here in the US. We're actually notoriously bad at dealing with new technology. If you look at it in the political landscape, I don't think we have leaders in politics that truly, really understand what's happening as we speak, and there's no plan for this. Hopefully that'll change soon. There are of course smart people in government, in our various agencies and whatnot, but just in terms of leadership you could see it any time congress calls tech leaders to-

Ojig Yeretsian:Fly them out there [crosstalk].

Rev Lebaredian:Summon them out there to talk. There seems to be no understanding or even respect for what it is they're talking about.

Ojig Yeretsian:The European Union has the General Data Protections Regulation. Article 22 that states Europeans have a right to know how an automated decision involving them was reached and a right to know how an automated process is using their personal information. Is this something that you welcome?

Rev Lebaredian:Well, I welcome governments thinking about these things. I don't know if the particular way they've implemented is the best, but at least they're doing something. We comply with all those, and as far as I can tell so far there hasn't been any negative repercussions except we had to do extra work to go comply with them. All of those things are important, but I think something is necessary and society should be engaged. These are important questions.

Ojig Yeretsian:There's a lot of concern that machines are making decisions instead of people, and that there's an inherent bias embedded within algorithms. Is this something you encounter in your work?

Rev Lebaredian:The algorithms that we deal with usually are not probably the ones that you're thinking about there. We're not Facebook or Google where we're dealing with peoples' personal information and social media. So, bias to us means something else. It's this car thinks there's a lane to the left here versus to the right. Something like that. That being said, I'm actually less worried about machine bias than I am human bias. Human bias we definitely know exists and we know it's really bad. Machines might have bias right now, but we know how to fix that, and we know how to test it, and we know how to measure it. I don't think we know how to fix humans yet as far as their biases are concerned. I can imagine that sometime in the future, maybe not so far future, we'll have judges and arbitrators that are AIs that make decisions. I trust them to make a decision on a criminal case involving a minority holding up a liquor store or something like that over most of the judges that are currently in place, and probably do it in a far less biased way. 

Ojig Yeretsian:I've heard the example of in a hospital exam room, where a machine assisted healthcare is actually reducing the numbers of hospital acquired infections and sepsis. I had never heard it on the more moral and [inaudible] realm such as the judicial system.

Rev Lebaredian:Yeah, we trust humans to be arbiters of things that they probably have no business doing. I'd rather have an algorithm or math to decide these things.

Ojig Yeretsian:What could go wrong?

Rev Lebaredian:The work that I'm doing is actually to help us solve these problems before they cause harm. Simulation is actually the key to do that. So, one of the most direct examples is a simulation we're doing for autonomous vehicles. Before we put these cars out in the road and really sell them to people, we need to make sure that they're going to work well in every possible environment and every possible situation. With other crazy humans around them, driving around doing crazy things. There's actually no good ethical way to do a lot of the tests we would really like to do. How are you going to be sure that the self driving car doesn't run over a parent pushing their baby in a baby carriage when they go out into the road without looking both ways? Can't test that in real life. We can try to mock it up with some cardboard cutouts of those humans or something like that, but it's not the same thing.

Ojig Yeretsian:Yeah, it's scary.

Rev Lebaredian:So, all this work that we're doing to construct these virtual worlds and do them in real time, that ends up helping us here. We need to put humans inside these worlds that we test our cars in, and have them drive millions of miles and fool these cars. We're building a brain for this car that perceives the world and decides to act upon it. Our simulators are virtual reality for those car brains. We produce these graphics and pipe those pixels directly into the sensor inputs on the computer that's running inside the car, and the car, if we do our job right, doesn't really know the difference between reality and the virtual reality we're giving it. So, if we can simulate it beforehand, the better we can do these simulations, the higher fidelity simulations, we have a better chance of averting some of the really tragic things that might happen. We can all imagines what happens if an autonomous vehicle goes awry, but I'd actually argue that we already know what happens when humans go awry. There's plenty of-

Ojig Yeretsian:Examples.

Rev Lebaredian:Plenty of bad drivers. I'm sure you've experienced some of them driving out here earlier.

Ojig Yeretsian:Absolutely.

Rev Lebaredian:So again, I think in a lot of these realms, best chance is to make algorithms that are less biased and not as flawed as humans.

Ojig Yeretsian:How might this create a better world?

Rev Lebaredian:That's a good question in general, and what does that mean even? A better world. I think there's some simple metrics of better worlds. They have less babies dying. That would be a good thing. People living longer, more people with enough food in their bellies so they don't have to worry about it. People getting educated so that they can keep their minds busy. Without technological progress, we wouldn't be where we are today. I know things seem pretty crazy, but it wasn't that long ago that a good portion of our babies used to just die at birth, and the mothers along with them. We take it for granted now. Babies are born early, like my sons, they were born weeks early. That would have been a death sentence for them before, but they're alive and kicking right now and thriving because of technology. Everything that we're doing, there's the dangerous aspect of it, but generally the world has always gotten better as a result of it.

Ojig Yeretsian:What's exciting for you in terms of new technologies? What do we have to look forward to? 

Rev Lebaredian:Well, in the near term the things that we were just discussing, the things that I've been working on for the past few decades. In terms of virtual worlds and computer graphics, I feel like we haven't realized the full potential to them. We've been primarily using them for entertainment, which is great, but we're almost there where we're going to start weaving these virtual realities into our daily lives. 40, 50 years ago the average person didn't have a video camera. The average person barely had a camera, and if they did, it wasn't something that they could use all the time. To go get film developed, it was expensive and cumbersome. You look at our children now and they're all videographers, they're all photographers, and they're creating content and worlds themselves. Everybody is. I want to do the same thing for 3D worlds, for virtual worlds. I want to get to the point where my grandchildren hopefully, hopefully before but at least my grandchildren, are going to be able to construct virtual worlds that are more complex, richer, and more beautiful than what Grand Theft Auto has done or what we saw with Avengers: Endgame.

By using whatever device is there or just by speaking, I want to see my grandchild step into a virtual world and say, "I want a forest here," and a forest appears. "I want a stream with a unicorn jumping over the stream." Just describe it and have this world unfold in front of them. Once we get to that point, I can't even imagine the things that people are going to do with it. So, that's the thing that gets me excited.

Ojig Yeretsian:How can folks get more information about your innovative work?

Rev Lebaredian:Well, you can definitely go to our webpage and all our social media feeds. NVIDIA.com or find us on Facebook and Twitter. If you're a developer or into the technology directly, we have Developer.NVIDIA.com where we provide most of the technology I've been speaking about directly for free for people to download and go incorporate into their tools. One of the most interesting things I've ever worked on, and my passion right now, is a new project that we just announced that we kind of hinted at about a month or two ago. We call it NVIDIA Omniverse. It's a platform that we're building that allows for a lot of the things that I've been talking about here. We want to connect various tools in different domains whether you're an architect, or a product designer, or a video game creator, or a director for a movie. All of these domains have different tools that they use to describe, things that are actually quite similar. They're constructing objects, and worlds, and scenes.

So what we're building is a platform where all of these can come connected together, and we can allow people to create these worlds together using the tools that are specific to their domain. We showed an example of this. We called it the Google Docs of 3D. Just like how you can go and edit a spreadsheet with your colleagues or friends simultaneously, we want to provide these and we are starting to provide this for people creating 3D worlds. So, you and I can be in completely different parts of the globe using our own tools. You might be using a tool to paint textures on a model, and I could be using a tool to construct a building using something like Revit from Autodesk, which many architects use. We can be collaborating together, building these worlds together. So, you can go check that out if you search for NVIDIA Omniverse. We're doing some cool stuff.

Ojig Yeretsian:Thank you so much, Rev.

You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll see you again in two weeks.

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Transcript:

Ojig Yeretsian:This is Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host [inaudible 00:00:12], and today I'll be speaking with Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, founders and chefs of Cafe Ohlone by Makamham, a restaurant serving traditional Ohlone foods located right here in Berkeley at 2430 Bancroft way.

Vincent Medina is a member of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe from the East Bay and Louis Trevino is a member of the Rumsen Ohlone tribe, which originated in the Monterey Bay area.

Together they now run Cafe Ohlone by Makamham, where they serve traditional foods and a very welcoming and engaging environment. I got to experience their cafe for the first time recently and was impressed by the design of the space, the meaningful exchanges, and the delicious food.

Welcome to the show, Louis and Vincent. Thank you for being here.

Vincent Medina: Thank you. [foreign language 00:01:01]. In our Chochenyo language, that means hello.

Ojig:Your cafe is receiving a lot of positive attention and great press. Tell us what inspired you to open Cafe Ohlone.

Vincent:Both Louis and myself, we grew up very proud of our Ohlone identities that was instilled in us from our families. Our grandparents had a lot of influence in our lives and our great grandparents. We saw how valuable and how meaningful our culture is.

Our identities were able to be carried on, and in my family, our connection to our land has also been able to be carried on. In my family here in the East Bay, no generation of our people have ever moved away from this space. There's a lot of power in that. We see how hard that our families have worked to keep our culture alive, but we also know that because colonization hit us really hard here in the Bay Area, especially here in the East Bay with the urbanity that surround us, it meant that not everything could be carried on naturally because of very forced oppression that came as a result of people coming here, invading our homes and trying to erase the original culture of this place.

However, our ancestors and our elders, the people who are even alive in our families today, were able to carry on as much as they could and the amount of what they are able to carry on it's amazing, and it gives us a lot of pride to know that in spite of those hardships, these things have kept going.

The ancestors of our community found ways to keep what wasn't able to be passed down because of how hard again, colonization affected us, they found ways to keep those things alive as well through old ethnographic recordings that they wrote and recorded in the 1920s and the 1930s that gave us the hope that one day we would be able to have those things again in our lives.

Louis and myself, we decided to create this organization called Makamham, which means, our food in Chochenyo language, because we wanted to be able to recognize those sacrifices from the people before us that they made. That one day when things were better and safer, that all these things could come back out again and we could have them in our lives and they could be passed down again to Ohlone people, and our elders can see these things respected again as well.

We want to acknowledge that this work, it's not just being done by us, but it's being done by many people in our community. Many people who are doing this work quietly. A lot of times people don't get that acknowledgement and we want to give that acknowledgement to our people and to acknowledge that it's not just us doing this work, but we're part of this work and we can only do this work because of those people before us who allow us to have these things.

It's disrespectful to those people not to be able to carry on our culture. We also want to create spaces, physical spaces, where we can see our identity reflected outside of our homes. It can be isolating and lonely when you're Ohlone growing up and you don't see any reminders that you exist or that anybody cares about you or wants to know about you outside of your home, even though you're right in your homeland.

We wanted to be able to create the space because growing up we didn't have these things, but now the Ohlone kids who are growing up, they get to see these things and they get to go to a restaurant where their culture is reflected and their food is served.

While it might be a small space right now, it represents a lot of hopes and a lot of dreams that our people have had for a long time and it also represents a lot of vision and to where our future is going as well.

Ojig:Would you like to add anything to that, Louis?

Louis Trevino:It's just that for our families, those living elders, people who are around today who remember these foods being eaten in their childhoods, they're the same generation that remembers also hearing our language when they were young people, who remember seeing those cooking methods, whose mothers and grandmothers took them out to gather plants for food.

They're also the generation of people who, for many reasons, we're not able to learn to speak our language, even though they heard it. Who were not taught the proper names of these plants always, and that knowledge was not passed down to them. In the case of my family, specifically because that older generation of people was trying very hard to also protect their children from the harm that the world around us was putting on us.

By doing this work, by bringing these foods back, by simultaneously continuing to work on reviving our languages, by bringing our family into this work and feeding them, we're also repairing that part of our family's history, that loss.

By feeding our elders, we're also feeding their parents and also feeding their children and their grandchildren and their great grandchildren, so that we can all have these things again, and so that harm that was done can be undone by us.

Ojig:Before Makamham, where would one go to eat native food in the East Bay or the Bay Area?

Vincent:Before we started our organization, there were a few foods that our people were still continuing to eat. Especially, for our elders, because they reminded them of foods that they ate when they were a young person.

I started to talk to my grandmother about foods that my great grandmother would gather, and she would tell me all these stories, Louis too, she would tell stories to him about how she would gather these foods, where she would gather them.

Because she's in the city, she would even have to gather them sometimes that when she was waiting for the bus at the Hayward bus station, her native plants that she loved, that she would find there, and you think about that, there's just something that's so cool about that thought of like resilience right there. Like, this strong, Ohlone lady, right there in her home, right where that's in the same area that where she's gathering this that our ancestors have always lived in, right along [inaudible 00:06:48], [inaudible] creek is right there in that area, in this urban setting, waiting for a bus in 20th century at that point and still gathering plants.

Probably, putting them in her purse right there. There's just something that's so cool about that with shows like how people just never give up these things no matter what's around us, how stubborn we are and how proud we are. Those are the people that I always look up to.

I know that in our family though, only a few of these foods really could have ... They were continued. Not many of them though were, just because of how hard things impacted us here. How accessible is it to go and gather our foods when we're in the middle of the city?

All of the inner East Bay where our people are raised, which is right in our traditional homeland as well is urban. It's definitely hard to be able to have access to these foods. And so, we wanted to be able to change that and that's why we created this organization before we even started with Cafe Ohlone.

We named it Makamham, because again, that means our food, and we named it this intentionally because we believe these are our collective foods. These are foods that belong to our people. This is also representative of the fact that Ohlone people, our tribe, we don't just want one thing back. We don't just want just simply language back or just simply our stories back or just one particular item, but all these things are interconnected with one another.

The truth is, we want everything back, because everything that was taken from us, was taken from us against our wishes. Those things that couldn't be carried on, we want to see all those things come back, including our land. Yes, that's the truth as well.

One thing that I try to work for and envision with Louis and with our people is what it looks to have a holistic revival and a reawakening, where through being in our homeland and gathering these foods, using our language alongside of the gathering methods of this food, speaking our language to one another, we reconnect with those old villages that our ancestors directly came from where we gather for an example, the Yerba Buena that we make tea. That's right in an area that where my great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother was born. All the way back.

As we do these things together collectively, it inches us back into that traditional world, and we see how much our people have always loved these things and it also is a reminder that when we are given the chance to be able to nurture our traditional culture, ever since colonization has come here, our people have always chosen to go back to traditional culture whenever given the chance. Right now, we're seeing that happen again in a modern day form and it's really exciting.

Ojig:If you're just tuning in, this is Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show at ALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today we're talking with Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino of Cafe Ohlone by Makamham, a restaurant serving traditional Oglone foods.

Vincent:We want to be able to just be mindful that this food that we're serving, and we say our food is full of justice as well, because our food, it's connected to helping people better understand that Ohlone people are here, that our culture is strong, that our culture is rooted in this place that we're in right now, and that our people will never leave here.

When people understand that we're here and they understand how rich what we have is and how much we care about these things, and after they're empowered with that truth, then they have no reason to not stand with our people. And so, this is the need to be able to have allies with us, to be able to work for a better future that includes Ohlone people central to the story here in our homeland, and this is why we're doing this work as well.

The primary goal of this has always been to empower our community, not just to have these traditional foods back, but also for the wellness of our people. We know that when the government imposed foods on our people, they were often foods that cause great harm to our health. We believe that when we take out those things that aren't good for our bodies and eat the things that our bodies recognize that our bodies get stronger. When our bodies are stronger, we're more capable of fighting back against the injustices that we face.

We also believe as well that culture is central to keeping our identity strong and that when we have a robust, full culture, with many different things and we are also able to adapt new things in our culture over time, that represents a living identity. That also is able to keep our culture strong and also able to be carried on within these modern times that we're in as well.

Ojig:You touched on a number of aspects of language and culture and violence and healing and repairing. It's just such a rich space. Also, a different kind of space that embodies some of these elements that you value, your vision and the context in which you're innovating.

It includes words and pronunciation of certain words in Chochenyo. You also use Chochenyo phrases and language with diners at the cafe. Why is language so important?

Vincent:Our language first of all has been very, very revived, and we're extremely proud of that revival. It's something that collectively we're excited to see happen and we know our language will never go to sleep again. We never say that it died, but we say it was sleeping, and it was sleeping for about two generations.

With the right effort, our people breathe life into it, and now it's awakened again. Now, it's spoken with fluency. I speak it. People in my community, young people are growing up speaking the language right now, and elders as well.

Louis:Our language in my family was used until at least the mid 1930s, and that might be true also of the Rumsen language in general, but when we work with language documentation to look for information about our languages, those things were recorded in the 1920s and 30s.

There's one woman today in my extended family who heard our language when she was a young girl. She is in her upper 80s now, Gloria Castro is her name. She is my great grandfather's first cousin, and this beautiful woman, she just loves what we are doing because it is exactly what she has wanted to see for a very long time.

In the early 1990s, she visited the language archives here at UC Berkeley. During the first, what became breath of life, and she's always been hungry for that information, for things that she remembered seeing and hearing, but not understanding from her childhood.

The people that she heard using our language were her grandparents and her mother, and her mother never used it after her grandparents passed away. She remembers hearing it at these family times when all of the family would get together for weeks at a time and all of the adults would go into the house and all the children were made to stay outside of the house, and there was a woman who kept watch and made sure the kids didn't get too close.

She does know that they were using our language and that she heard things. She remembers them preparing food in our old style, earth ovens, at the creek side there, which is a very old method of cooking. She remembers being chased out of her grandfather's garden, and this is when she very clearly heard our language, when he yelled at her and her cousins to get out of the garden.

She had this memory for years. She was six years old when he did that, and that's the phrase that she remembers, and she says that she remembers exactly that sequence of sounds because she and her cousins looked at each other and they laughed because they didn't understand what their grandpa was saying. She says that laughter imprinted that memory in her mind, and she's been looking for that expression ever since, and she's always wondered and she's had times when she doubted what she remembers hearing.

But, during the last breath of life, last summer, in the language archive here on campus, we were reading through Alfred Kroeber's notebook from 1902 where he records a relative of ours, [inaudible 00:14:50], and Gloria wanted to read every single line out loud, and so that's what we did. We spent a couple of hours doing that with her. We came across [inaudible 00:14:59], and we just had to stop everything, because Gloria finally found the expression that her grandfather used, and she could hear his voice in her ear, she said.

There it was. It was this confirmation of all of those experiences that she had as a young girl was confirmed and now she knows that he was telling her to get out of there.

Ojig:It took 80 years. it's amazing.

Louis:There were the sounds. These are why our language is so connected to our foods, because those same people who were using our language, were the same people preparing our foods, were the same people who we are sure prayed in our traditional way, who did all of these things and kept all of these things close to themselves, because these things all come together.

When we work to revive our language, it's very organic that that work leads to the revival of all of these things.

Vincent:That's right. One of the powerful things about language, it's able to convey a worldview that's there. Our world view, I feel, is embedded within our language. Helps people who are coming to Cafe Ohlone better understand that this place was never a new world. This place was never a blank slate, but this place has culture, it has language, identity, nations that are here already, has a great food, great diet, great people, all of these great things that are already here.

One of the most harmful things about this narrative that exists that we're trying to change is, it almost seems that anything that's introduced here can just be called Californian. People talk about Californian cuisine, but it's made up of nothing that's California, nothing that's native to this space. Just because there's avocados or something that's seasonal or fresh doesn't mean it's native to California. That doesn't mean it's California and cuisine.

We believe that when people can understand what the true identity of this place specifically is, and I also want to add that what's native to us here in the East Bay isn't native to [inaudible 00:16:51], down south in Los Angeles or other areas, and we're all different here in California. That's one of those beautiful things, but by focusing here on East Bay Ohlone culture, and I'm aware, in Louis' family's area, in [inaudible] Rumsen Ohlone culture, we believe that we can show people the specifics of these things that helps people better understand and respect our identities.

Ojig:What is the website address?

Vincent:The website address, it's makamham.com. We did that intentionally because we believe that people can learn how to say Makamham. It's not that hard. Makamham. It's three sounds, and those sounds, they mean our food. Ohlone people have had to learn a lot of really difficult words over time, and so you know we believe that people can put in a little effort to say [inaudible 00:17:37].

But, then Cafe Ohlone is also there as well. Cafe Ohlone is like the public face of this work. That's also the cafe space that we run over in Berkeley, but the website is makamham.com.

Ojig:On the website you can get information also about the price of brunch, [inaudible 00:00:17:54], lunch and dinner. These prices include much more than just Ohlone food.

Can you walk us through what a diner's experience would be like?

Vincent:We always prepare everything fresh the day that we are going to have our events. We are always cooking with only what's seasonal, what's available to us, and we try to gather as much as we can here in the East Bay. If we can't gather it, we source it. The same ingredients from just a little bit further out. Ideally. Here in California.

We never want people to think that we're just a standard restaurant where people are just going to go and just be able to consume food and walk out without any thought. We're slow at Cafe Ohlone because we want people to understand the intention as well as the purpose of the work that we're doing there. We say we want to elevate people's consciousness to help people better understand what [inaudible] here in the East Bay is, what contemporary Ohlone identity looks like, but also how delicious our foods are.

Like what I was saying previously, we believe that when people are empowered with knowledge about how robust the living Ohlone culture is, that they'll respect us in a different way.

Because of that, every meal that we have, we bring people in, and before anybody pays or before the meal starts, we ask everybody to sit down.

Everybody sits down and we have [inaudible] that are out. They wrap themselves in one. We have all of these beautiful native aesthetics that are out, our baskets, our gaming pieces, the raw ingredients of the plants that we use, the salt that our tribe gathers and native plants and flowers that are on the tables and abalone shells and huge basket pattern that's painted in goat milk on one of our back walls with abalone adornments hanging down.

People just sit there and look at everything. And so, for so many people, it's unfamiliar and new. We understand that that's unfamiliar for a lot of people, but we want also to help people better understand these things without making them feel bad for not knowing these things.

Instead of just pointing fingers and making people feel bad about not knowing these things, we want to be able to help people understand them in a way that's really caring and loving, because to us, those are the things that we grew up with, which is learning to talk about these things with a lot of love and care.

We also believe that when we're preparing these foods and when we're serving them, we only want the best words and intentions to be around them, because in our belief as well, if you're making food and you're in a bad place or you're serving food in a bad place, that's going to come into that food as well.

You leave the drama out at Cafe Ohlone, right? No drama, no problems, and it's just good intentions. When we come back there, it's just celebration about our identity, telling people about why these foods are being eaten, but talking honestly and candidly about the fact that these foods weren't in our family's lives for a couple of generations because of our history, because colonization. Not because our people didn't care about these things, but because of the abuses that our people had to endure. Needlessly endure.

As people understand these things, then we introduce the ingredients. We talk about, we try to change the narrative of how people understand our culture, because we talk about our history honestly but then we talk after that about our survival and the fact that we can have these things again, that we can be able to keep these things going, which shows triumph, which shows victory.

That's what we want people to understand, is to associate our culture less and less with tragedy, but more and more with victory. We want people to look at Ohlone people and to say, "Those people are strong. They survived all of that and they're still doing this, they're still in their place, they're still eating these foods. They're still speaking their language."

When people understand that, they view us in a different way. After that, we say a prayer, and we always make a plate at every meal that we have for our ancestors. We do this intentionally, and this is something that when we make these foods we do at home as well, because these foods, we're only able to know them because of our ancestors. We're only able to have these things in our life because of the strength that those people before us.

Before we eat anything, we all pray. I'll share a prayer, Louis shares a prayer in Rumsen, and me in Chochenyo, and we pray to what these foods represent, and that starts off, this meal, this experience, on a note that this is different.

When you slow down, then you can really taste these first flavors of the East Bay. We always ask that elders come up first, because that's something that we value in our culture. After we eat and we have music, contemporary indigenous music that's there, we answer questions. Then, usually, we'll bring out some traditional games, and we'll play some games and then at the end of the events, we'll always have a call to action.

Ojig:What are some of the ingredients in the Ohlone foods you're serving?

Vincent:We're always making seasonal dishes, and so right now we're cooking a lot with mushrooms, because mushrooms are in heavy abundance as well as hazelnuts, which the season just recently ended as well at winter time.

Right now, we're also with the earliest growths of the native greens that are coming up. We've been gathering those. And so, I'll just walk you through a few of our foods just based on seasons. Right now, for an example, we're having these delicious, delicious, delicious mushroom hazelnut muffins, where we get black trumpet mushrooms and candy cap mushrooms and [inaudible 00:23:16], and we saute those with bay laurel that we gather up in our village sites and in walnut oil and pickle weed from the East Bay shoreline. The salty succulent that we chop up, then our tribe gathers the salt from those old salt ponds that our ancestors, the same exact salt areas that our people have always gathered salt from.

We still go out there with digging sticks and chisel away at that salt and we add that to that mushroom mixture. We grind down the California hazelnuts and make a hazelnut flour, and then we bake that hazelnut flour with some dried porcini, [inaudible] base salts. We add those mushrooms, cook one of those edible flowers that are coming up right now on top of it, bake that. Serve that with an all native green salad of watercress and Indian lettuce that's coming up right now after the heavy rains, with that base salt and gooseberries, blackberries. A dressing of walnut oil and bay laurel, popped [inaudible] seeds and pinon nuts, roasted hazelnuts that we roast every morning before we have our events.

We'll have a vanilla chia seed porridge with blackberry sauce and hazelnuts that we crush a mortar right in front of the people who are dining, and we'll usually have like something like an acorn bread as well. A traditional bread that is one of our most traditional foods. A bread that's made out of the acorn soup that gets cooked down and has this crisp outside and this sweet jelly like pudding inside.

We'll have smoked venison and mushroom skewers, there's a hunter who hunts up a just a little bit north of here in the Pomo area, and often will be gifted venison. We'll butcher that and smoke it for hours and hours until it's soft and just has all of those wonderful smoke taste from the Oakwood.

We add the bay wood as we're smoking it, and we'll smoke the mushroom skewers as well, that's something that we've been doing recently and salmon that's smoked from Enterprise Rrancheria that's gifted to us.

All of these foods are flavors our ancestors would recognize, and I quickly would like to say, just in our language what these foods are so you understand that we have words. We have [foreign language 00:25:20] in the Rumsen language, [foreign language 00:25:22], the deer meatballs, [foreign language 00:25:26], the blackberry sauce. [foreign language 00:25:28], the acorn flatbread. There's [foreign language 00:25:31], the mushrooms, [foreign language 00:25:34], the popped [foreign language 00:25:35] seeds. [foreign language 00:25:37], the berries and the nuts. [foreign language 00:25:43], that's mushroom soup cow. [foreign language 00:25:44], that's bitter greens with flowers, popped [foreign language 00:25:54] seeds and berries. [foreign language 00:25:57] quail eggs. [foreign language 00:25:59], sweet acorn. [foreign language 00:26:03], the sweet a seed cakes.

These are foods our ancestors recognize, and when we eat these foods we commune with them.

Ojig:Since the Ohlone are the original peoples of the land on which the cafe is located, I would hope that you're being embraced and supported by Berkeley and East Bay communities.

How are folks responding?

Vincent:Extraordinarily. Yes, we're ecstatic to see the response from the community and it also gives us a lot of hope to what's possible. 10 years ago, this wouldn't have been thinkable.

Ojig:Moving forward, what would you like to inspire with Cafe Ohlone?

Vincent:Well, we know it will keep going, but we would like to see it expand as well. Can you imagine having, we have all of these beautiful place names all around the Bay Area and all around the East Bay that are Oakland, it's [foreign language 00:26:48], and if you want to go over to to where we live at, it's hulking. If you can imagine [foreign language 00:26:53], [foreign language 00:26:53] and [foreign language 00:26:54], [foreign language 00:26:56] in San Jose that are run by our tribal people, it would be such an exciting thing.

That's a big dream. One of the things I always imagine, and Louis and I talk about this a lot, is getting one of those old warehouses over in West Oakland or Emeryville, making that a cultural space for our people, but also having a large restaurant space there as well a few days a week for the public, but also making that like an urban rancher here as well for our people. Having a space where we can go and have language lessons, have basketry, have all these things that our people want to see in our world, but we always want to keep that small space that we have in the back because it represents a lot for us as well.

Ojig:I want to ask also, food sovereignty seems to be a large part of your space. Can you elaborate on your role in this movement and what you'd like to see moving forward with the food sovereignty movement?

Vincent:I'm a member of the [inaudible] Ohlone tribe and also a councilman representing my family's lineage and our tribal government as well, and this work that we're doing with Makamham and with Cafe Ohlone, it's very much connected on a larger scale. It's specific to us and we're doing this work for our people, but there's also a larger movement that's happening here, which is touching on many other indigenous communities, which is about decolonization, but also returning back to our traditional foods.

Louis and I, we're a part of this organization called Slow Foods Turtle Island, which works on an international level with other indigenous people to protect our food sovereignty and also working with agencies at the United Nations and with Slow Foods international.

It's really powerful, because there's challenges that we have to be able to gather these foods. We hope that we will be able to see our people though, our Ohlone people, specific here in the East Bay [inaudible] Ohlone people, be able to have more access to gathering, be able to have more access to going into those areas and gathering our foods without restrictions, because right now there are still numerous restrictions that exist against our people for gathering.

Ojig:How can folks get more information about your important work on the cafe?

Vincent:Our primary way of communicating our messages is through our Instagram, @makamham. Our Instagram, we specifically have chosen just because of we like to be able to share beautiful photos of our food and the work that we're doing. Instagram has just been a really clear platform for us. We're also on Twitter at @makamham, and our website address, once again, it's makamham.com. All of the information about our work and also our hours are listed there.

Ojig:Thank you Louis and Vincent for talking with us today and for your work.

Vincent:Thank you, [inaudible 00:29:32].

Ojig:You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University.

Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back again in two weeks.

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Transcripts:

Lisa Kiefer:This is Method to the Madness, a public payer show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer and today I'm speaking with Nina Meyers of Foodbytes and Claire Schlemme, CEO and founder of Oakland based and alumni startup of Foodbytes Renewal Mill. Welcome to the program.

Nina Meyers:Thank you.

Lisa Kiefer:I'm particularly interested in what's coming up next week with Foodbytes, but first of all, Nina Meyers, tell us what you do for Foodbytes, how it got started, what's the history and what's the problems that you're trying to solve.

Nina Meyers:Sure, happy to and thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here. Foodbytes quite simply is a pitch competition and networking platform for sustainable food and AG innovators. So it started four plus years ago. We're actually about to do our 15th Foodbytes, which is in San Francisco, which is where it all began. So it's founded by Rabobank. Rabobank is one of the largest food and agriculture banks in the world and in North America, our clients are some of the largest and mid sized food and AG companies. We started to see that we're working with a lot of our corporates and they're facing a lot of challenges in innovation where we're all faced with this idea that we're going to have 10 billion people on the planet by 2050. We need to feed those people and we need to do so efficiently. There's lots of environmental challenges and there's a lot of startups that are starting to create nimble ways and test and experiment and are basically building technologies and products that are solving those challenges.

So we, four and a half years ago said, we want to do something that's just for food and AG. There's lots of pitch opportunities out there for tech startups. There's lots of things that are cross-disciplinary, but we said, let's bring our knowledge to the table. Let's bring our corporates to the table and investors that are just looking at food and AG start to create an ecosystem where those startups can make the connections to help scale their technologies and on the converse side of that that the corporates can start to build relationships and really start to think about these ways that innovation is happening to bring it to their own businesses.

Lisa Kiefer:Tell me how it operates. Is it a competition?

Nina Meyers:Yeah, so it is a competition in its most essential form. We look through hundreds of applications. We score them and we come to 15 startups that we select to come and pitch from all around the world and we're looking at on the product side, on the tech side, on the agriculture tech sides. We're looking at like AG tech, food tech and food products and they basically have a two day experience jam packed, but we basically bring together our network of mentors in the room, experts in legal deal structuring, branding, PR and they have intimate mentor sessions with them. They get to build camaraderie and relationships with one another as the entrepreneurs. They get to practice their pitches for the judges that are going to judge them the next day and they really have this full day of just like, it's kind of like a mini business school. Learn as much as you can.

Lisa Kiefer:Do you find that many of these startups don't have business skills?

Nina Meyers:I wouldn't say that. I think it's like you're just trying to build your business day in and day out and you have to focus on that and this, we're doing this one day kind of takes them out of it a little bit and that they're like, "Oh I've been a tech company. I've been really focused on how do I build a relationships with corporates or how do I build the MVP of my technology, but I wasn't thinking about the brand. I wasn't thinking about how I should structure my series B round when I'm fundraising, when I'm just in this infancy of my seed stage." They start to just have a lot of information around them.

Lisa Kiefer:It would seem like creativity doesn't have to go hand in hand with business skills. I mean getting the right people together.

Nina Meyers:To an extent. It depends on which entrepreneur, which startup, but I would say that they kind of say, "I took a day out of my life, my building, my business life, but I got to get all these different intros and different insights and also of course the insights from the other entrepreneurs that are there who are facing similar challenges, building similar businesses." So they do that and then there's a pitch day, which is a traditional pitch competition. There's hundreds of people in the room. It's focused on investment, but it's also focused on Rabobank bringing our corporates into the room so that they can pitch for these potential partners.

There's a lot of media there covering it to see what's kind of the cutting edge of food and AG innovation and then what we started with was this pitch competition. Now it's built into two days and we started to build a continuous community around that. We say, "Hey, do you want to meet with X, Y and Z?" They're really interested in thinking about partnering with you. We have a database of thousands of startups and we're always thinking about how can we continue to build relationships?

Lisa Kiefer:Do you sometimes do that with those who maybe didn't make it, but they have a great idea? Maybe they don't have the right skills but you match them up with somebody else?

Nina Meyers:Yep, absolutely. So we have a database of thousands of companies that have applied, but we also, we have 250 now alumni of the platform. We're looking at everyone who's ever sort of come across our radar who is an innovator in this space. So that's what happens over the two days, but we kind of say that it's a discovery platform, but it's also like the beginning of a relationship where Rabobank can kind of be this connector, be this matchmaker, be this champion for both sides of-

Lisa Kiefer:Tell me about the judges. How many and who are these people?

Nina Meyers:They change. Every food rates has had a different grouping of judges. I think we've had something like 75. It's probably closer to a hundred and mentors, but essentially they're some of our sponsors and partners. They're legal experts who work with startups to help them structure their deals and figure out how to engage with investors. They are actual investors in need of a CPG space or on the tech side. They are sometimes policy experts who are really focused on sustainable food policy and-

Lisa Kiefer:So some academics?

Nina Meyers:Yeah, academics. Exactly. So literally we've had judges sort of from all across the board. We've also started having an alumni come on as a judge to sort of speak from that first hand perspective of this is what happened when I was there. We have-

Lisa Kiefer:That's a great idea.

Nina Meyers:Yeah, we have Abby Ramadan from Impact Vision who is an alumni of our platform and she's been very involved. She's also based out here. We want the judging panel to be able to provide varying expertise.

Lisa Kiefer:Does it always happen in the same city?

Nina Meyers:It's global. We've been in San Francisco the most. We've been in Silicon Valley the most. This is our sixth San Francisco edition, but we've been in Australia. We've been in London. We've been in the Netherlands, New York. We're headed to Chicago in September. Oh, we were in Boulder. We were in Austin, but yeah, we're-

Lisa Kiefer:So how many times a year are we talking?

Nina Meyers:So we were doing three to four for awhile globally for 2020 and 2019 we're doing two so that we can really focus on doing more and providing more value for everyone in our ecosystem and the in between.

Lisa Kiefer:So this year you have how many participants?

Nina Meyers:We have 15 companies.

Lisa Kiefer:And two are from the Bay Area?

Nina Meyers:Yes.

Lisa Kiefer:One of them I'm particularly interested in. That's SnapDNA.

Nina Meyers:Yes. We talk a little bit about some of the challenges that the companies are solving and one of them is sort of this idea of transparency. It's this idea of we all know about recalls that are happening in food all the time and there's a lot of opacity around what happens from the fields to your plate or wherever it comes from. So there are companies, there are a lot of innovation in this space that's happening around food safety and pathogen detection. So that SnapDNA is one of those companies that's really creating a real time test for folks in the food supply chain to get that information on whether food is safe or whether it has certain pathogens and we've seen a number of different sort of innovators come through that are focused on this, but this is something as a point I just made that's very, very well event to the corporate focus in the room.

Lisa Kiefer:That can save so much money.

Nina Meyers:It's about efficiency. It's obviously about safety. It's about consumer trust, which we know consumers want safer food, more sustainable food, healthier, more nutritious, cleaner and they're willing to pay more for it as well. So this is something that's important to all those players.

Lisa Kiefer:Okay, and the other one is Planetariums and they're out of Palo Alto. Do you know much about them?

Nina Meyers:Yes I do and the Planetariums is an up cycling company, which what does that mean? So it's and Claire I'm sure will talk more about this, but it is a waste stream that's up cycled into a new food essentially. So they are taking defatted seeds, which are a byproduct of the vegetable oil process and they are basically making that into a very nutritious protein rich flour. So they just announced today that they got, that they just raised a $750000 seed round and one of their investors is Barilla, which is the largest pasta producer in the world. So for a company like Barilla, to just give you an example is looking at this up cycling space and saying, "Yeah, of course we make pasta out of wheat, but we know that consumers want different things. Consumers want chickpea pasta. They want gluten free pasta. They still want traditional pasta, but let's look at ways that we can really provide something that consumers are starting to relate to.

Lisa Kiefer:That's interesting. I've had a couple of your alumni on this show and one of them was Andrew Brentano who does cricket protein.

Nina Meyers:Yes.

Lisa Kiefer:And the other people were in perfect produce and they also, we're trying to save money by getting rid of waste in the food marketplace.

Nina Meyers:Yep.

Lisa Kiefer:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today I'm speaking with Nina Meyers of FoodBytes and Claire Schlemme, CEO and founder of Oakland based Renewal Mill. So I want to kind of shift over here to Claire Schlemme and Claire, you were an alumni of Foodbytes a couple of years ago.

Claire Sclemme:Yes.

Lisa Kiefer:We got up to the point where it's talking about judging. You made it to the finals.

Claire Sclemme:Sure.

Lisa Kiefer:What happened?

Claire Sclemme:So as Nina mentioned, it's really it was a two day event for us. So the first day before the actual pitch competition, we had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different experts in different fields, which was, which was really great. So I think going back to that point, even with some business experience under our belt, it was a lot of really quick concentrated information that we were able to get from that day, which was excellent. So a lot of touching on all these legal issues, packaging issues, marketing issues, so really being able to touch all those different points and then also being able to have a pitch in front of the judges before the actual competition was also-

Lisa Kiefer:So like a practice pitch.

Claire Sclemme:It was a practice pitch. We got feedback on it, which was great. We could incorporate the feedback into our pitch for the next day, which was also very helpful and it really-

Lisa Kiefer:Maybe you should tell us about your company.

Claire Sclemme:Absolutely. So, so I'm the cp-founder and CEO of Renewal Mill and Renewal Mill up cycles byproducts from food manufacturing into high quality ingredients and products. So essentially we're building a portfolio of ingredients that are all being sourced from different byproducts. So the first-

Lisa Kiefer:Like what?

Claire Sclemme:So the first ingredient that we brought to market commercially is called Okara flour and it's made from the byproduct from soy milk production. So it's basically taking the soybean pulp that's generated when soy milk is made. We dry it, mill it and turn it into a high fiber, high protein, gluten free flour. So that's one example. There's a lot of other other places in the food system where this type of waste is happening. So particularly in food manufacturing waste is a really good place to be looking at food waste because it's kind of low hanging fruit in terms of being able to attack the food waste problem.

Things coming out of a food manufacturing facility are food safe already because they're in this facility and they're often very concentrated in their scale because it's food production is pretty concentrated. So you have the ability to hit that economy of scale that you need to make a profitable business or make a business that can make sense. So we're focused primarily on these fibrous byproduct streams. So anything that's coming from really coming from that first step of bringing in anything from the field, the fruits, the vegetables, the beans, things like that and you get a lot of fiber rich byproducts because a lot of what we're processing out of our food system right now is fiber.

Even though that's the one macronutrient that western diets are very deficient in. So we're starting with Okara. Okara production in the US is very concentrated actually. There's just a handful of major production facilities. So it's a strategic starting point for us from that point of view. From there we're looking at other byproducts of nondairy milk production. So within this big world of fibrous byproducts, we're looking specifically at these nondairy milk byproduct streams. So the byproducts coming out of almond milk production, oat milk production, that's where we're going to be headed at next.

Lisa Kiefer:So anything with [holls 00:12:31].

Claire Sclemme:Exactly, yeah.

Lisa Kiefer:So you're up before the judges and you know your company well. What happened? What did they ask you? Give us the scenario.

Claire Sclemme:That's it. That's a great question. So a lot of the feedback, the feedback always helps you kind of see things, obviously from outside eyes that haven't heard your story a million times. Basically a panel with different backgrounds be able to weigh in on things that are causing confusion for them or things that didn't quite come across.

So really being able to make sure that we can really hone in on the right story that we want to be telling and making sure that it's coming across that way and being received that way by the judges and also making sure that we're presenting all the information that somebody would want to know. So making sure that we've addressed issues like competition in the field or kind of what our growth strategy is and making sure that we haven't left something kind of major out that a judge would want to see. So that was very helpful and I think it was also just helpful to get a sense of what the space is like and it's a pretty big event with quite a few attendees. So it's nice to feel comfortable on the stage and in front of the judges [crosstalk 00:13:35].

Lisa Kiefer:How many minutes are you up there?

Nina Meyers:It's three minutes now. So as far as-

Lisa Kiefer:Wow, that's not much time.

Nina Meyers:[inaudible] competitions, it's pretty tight, but the judges also ask questions after the companies go. So that it's like another layer of sort of engagement and that's-

Lisa Kiefer:And do they get materials ahead of time?

Nina Meyers:Yes. So they spend, obviously they're with each other the day before, but they also get materials many days in advance and they now they have meetings with some of the startups. So Claire participated two years ago and we've really continued to evolve what the programming looks like as people. We always get feedback. So the entrepreneurs say, "I actually want more time with investors that are, I know I'm going to meet the right investors." So we're doing actually an investor power hour for the first time this time around where we're strategically matching them with one or two investors and we're doing, it's not a speed dating because it's like 20 minutes, but basically meetings with those specific folks whose investment these align with what the startups are doing.

Lisa Kiefer:Is the networking what they win or do you actually get funding?

Nina Meyers:There isn't direct funding as a result of Foodbytes, but there are a number of prizes. One of the main ones is for all the three winners is that they, Rabobank hosts a huge summit in New York at the end of the year. So December and all of our corporate clients, so big food and AG companies are there and the winners across all the events from that year get to come and pitch and have targeted meetings with the corporates that are relevant for their businesses and they have a few days where they're just really targeted and meeting with folks that can potentially help them as partners. So that's one main prize and then a lot of our sponsors who are, like we said, experts in many different fields, there's also consultations with them so that they can get five hours of legal consultation on how to structure their deal. They can get PR consultation and branding consultation on how to build the best investor materials and DAX and present their brand in the best possible way.

Lisa Kiefer:Claire, what was it you found to be the most useful out of winning this competition?

Nina Meyers:So we weren't the winners from our cohort. We were in the finalists but actually kind of going back again to all the people that we meet during the two days, that was a very valuable thing for us that made the participation in the event very worthwhile for us. So we actually continued to have some conversations with some of the lawyers that we met there to talk about some of the legal structuring, some of the agreements that we were currently in the process of structuring and we also had continued conversation with folks that were very knowledgeable about packaging for food products because there's a lot that goes into making sure that the product fits all the legal regulations and the requirements. That was great to have both of those connections coming out of Foodbytes.

Lisa Kiefer:Once you get involved with say a VC or some sort of funding source, do you ever worry about losing your company's mission? That it will begin to sort of move away from you?

Claire Sclemme:Yeah, that's a great question. So actually one of the things that we did when we first founded the company thinking about that very point was that we incorporated as a public benefit corporation. So we wanted that to be really built into our mission and so we structured that into the type of business we actually were and one of the pieces of kind of feedback that we got at the very beginning was that maybe you don't want to do that because you might be closing yourself off to investors that aren't interested in investing in a benefit corporation and we said, "That's exactly why we want to do this, because it essentially is going to kind of self select the types of investors that we're looking for." So that was kind of the first layer and then the second of course is making sure that when we're talking to investors that we do have that mission alignment as we're taking on investment.

Lisa Kiefer:Getting back to you, Nina, you've done this for several years now. What trends in agriculture are you seeing pop up from the startup companies? I mean, you talked about some of the problems in the AG industry. What are you seeing overall?

Nina Meyers:Yeah, well a major trend. I'd say a cross food tech, AG tech and CPG as is this idea of waste mitigation. So up cycling is one avenue in which that's happening. Another one is of course packaging. We're seeing more and more edible packaging. We're seeing more compostable packaging, plant based packaging. We have a company that's pushing in Foodbytes called Coremat and that's exactly what they're doing. They're making compostable, plant-based packaging that's basically-

Lisa Kiefer:That's awesome because all these cities are now saying it's too expensive to recycle.

Nina Meyers:Exactly and from a regulatory perspective that this sort of clampdown is increasing. It's happened in Europe, forcing lots of innovation in the packaging world in Europe and it's starting to happen here. That's one massive trend and huge need that startups are really looking to solve and obviously an incredible opportunity for collaboration on the corporate side of things as they start to realize we really, really need to be focusing on it. It's happening [crosstalk 00:18:31-

Lisa Kiefer:Why are you giving me a plastic bag?

Nina Meyers:Why are you giving me a straw? Right, exactly. So that's one place where we're seeing a lot of innovation and then on the waste mitigation side as well, right? Stopping waste before it can happen. So more and more technology companies are saying, let's use data and technology to stop waste before it can happen. So a company like [Winnow] who's come through our platform, they basically have a scale for food service and back of house at restaurants that weighs waste as it's going out and then gives restaurants a better picture of their wastage so that they can decrease that. That's the-

Lisa Kiefer:What's the incentive for someone to reduce their waste at the restaurant level?

Nina Meyers:Money. They save restaurants globally $25 million a year and they're not that big yet. I mean they're just starting out. So it's money.

Lisa Kiefer:It sounds like you've put together a lot of qualitative data.

Nina Meyers:Yes, we, like I said, we started with a very, very small team and over the last year or so we've built up the team like I said. So we've just brought in a data analyst who is amazing and we're sort of at the tip of the iceberg for what data are we sitting on and what are we saying? But yes, we have a really good picture of trends that are happening. That's one major, major trend that we're seeing. The other one is sort of just the environmental impact of food-

Lisa Kiefer:Climate change?

Nina Meyers:... Production, of climate change and also to hand in hand with that that consumers have more and more knowledge of that and are demanding better, cleaner products.

Lisa Kiefer:Yeah, look at the Midwest right now.

Nina Meyers:Yes.

Lisa Kiefer:All the flooding and that used to be our bread basket.

Nina Meyers:That's when it has to change and startups are really heeding that call on the plant based foods side of things as well. Just if we're talking about packaged foods in general, we're seeing so much innovation in that space. We're seeing at least 40% of the companies that apply that have a product that apply to Foodbytes are in some way related to the plant based space. To sort of talk about some of the companies that are pitching coming up in San Francisco we're seeing new and novel plant based proteins. So we have a company called [Tali] and they are making waterlily seed puffs. So we see the puffs as like a huge category in the food product world, but this is a new type of puff. It's basically bringing in an heirloom varietal.

It's gotten more protein, more nutritious. They're doing some really interesting flavors. So we're seeing companies like that who are bringing this plant based protein view to snacking. We also have a company called Gem and they basically have the first FDA regulated supplement product, food supplement. It's for women by women. It's made from algae and a number of different plants. Real food. It's clean food. So we're seeing things in that type of space. I was just at Expo West, which is the largest natural foods show in the country and I think it's 1500 exhibitors, 90000 people.

Lisa Kiefer:Where was it?

Nina Meyers:It's in Anaheim. It's 90000 people. So it's very, very intense and there's a lot of companies that are doing very similar things. There's the plant-based trend just continues to grow year over year. So whether that's new algae products, that's lots of cauliflower products, you see the confluence of a lot of trends.

Lisa Kiefer:Are any UC Berkeley professors or policy people judging this year?

Nina Meyers:Not this year, but next year we're going to make it happen.

Claire Sclemme:Oh excellent.

Lisa Kiefer:Can anyone go to this?

Nina Meyers:Yes. It's open to the public. We really want people there who care about these issues, who care about sustainable food and AG, who want to see what the innovators at the bleeding edge of sustainable innovation are doing. Next Thursday, the 28th of March, starting at 2:00 PM, it's really an opportunity to see these 15 startups pitch, to engage with them and see their products and technologies, have some delicious food and drinks and if you want to get into food or if you're a journalist or if you're a student and this is where the world you think you want to go into, we absolutely encourage you to come. If you're an investor or you're a food corporate and you're trying to figure out what's next, we 1000000% encourage you to come.

Lisa Kiefer:And you have a website?

Nina Meyers:Foodbytesworld.com. Instagram is Foodbytes by Rabobank. We've profiled all the companies who are going to be pitching. There's lots of content. Claire's on there somewhere. So check us out on Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and then Foodbytesworld.com is where you can get tickets to come and see us next week.

Lisa Kiefer:And Claire, your business is located where?

Claire Sclemme:Oh, we're in Oakland.

Lisa Kiefer:Okay, what have your challenges been since you participated in Foodbytes?

Claire Sclemme:Oh, that's a good question. Our biggest challenge I would say is that, so working in the byproduct space, we're really a bridge builder between the production and then bringing that into the market. We have less control over being able to scale in a way that other companies might be able to have as they're creating products. So we're really bound to the amount of byproducts that are coming out of certain facilities. So being able to match that production with the sales is really, I would say one of our biggest challenges. So it kind of swings back and forth from having more demands than we have a production for to having more supply of the ingredient than we currently have sales force. So it's kind of bouncing back and forth as we try to strike that perfect balance as we bring these ingredients on board.

Lisa Kiefer:And are most of your sources local?

Claire Sclemme:So right now they are. So our first source is in Oakland, which is why we started out in Oakland and why we're based there. So our first partner facility is Hodo Foods and they're a tofu manufacturer. So the first step of making tofu is making the soy milk and so that's where we're basically harvesting the Okara from is from Hodo and our next two facilities that we will likely be using as our sources of production are also in northern California.

Nina Meyers:When you sort of spoke about what do they get out of this, the alumni who come through our platforms have raised a combined 550 million. I believe it was something like 150 last year. So even though it's not directly a prize, this is what we've seen as the companies who've come out of who we've chosen, who we've selected, this is how they're moving forward and getting that investment to scale their companies.

Lisa Kiefer:You must be checking the failure rate of these companies as they-

Nina Meyers:Yes.

Lisa Kiefer:... they leave Foodbytes. What is the failure rate?

Nina Meyers:It's under 10% because we're doing really like a lot of due diligence in the process of picking the ones that we think are really going to be successful. It's relatively low. It's lower than the average.

Lisa Kiefer:Do you have a business background?

Nina Meyers:I actually went to college in upstate New York at Skidmore college. I studied at a liberal arts school and I had was working in a sustainable restaurant, a farm to table restaurant the summer after college and my Mom is a chef and so I grew up around food. Food is my whole life and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next when I moved to New York during the recession in 2009. I started working for a restaurant company in New York in the creative department. I got sort of my foot in the door there and started working on marketing and design for the restaurants.

So that was really a sort of honed my skills there on the marketing side of things. Started to realize through being in New York that what I really cared about was sustainability in food and agriculture and trying to figure out what to do next. I then went onto work for Food Tech Connect, which is a site of record for food innovation essentially. We did a lot of events in this space and meetups and consulting and hackathons, which is really all focused on sustainable food and agriculture. So I was there. I was working with startups directly. Spent about four years there and then we started working together with Rabobank to build Foodbytes out from its infancy.

Lisa Kiefer:Claire how did you get into this pat of the world?

Claire Sclemme:Yes. So my background is actually in environmental management. So I have in my masters in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry. I had primarily actually been involved mostly in the space of sustainability and energy and so I'd worked at a renewable energy startup in India and worked with UN climate change, but I started to realize how important the food system is in the space of sustainability and I, kind of my first transition into into food was actually co-founding a juice company in Boston where I was living at the time. So we started as a food truck and we were connecting farmers to folks in the city through juices and smoothies and then in that process saw how much waste is created when you're juicing. It was really kind of like this moral issue.

At the end of the day we'd sourced all this great produce from these farmers and it was all organic. It was mostly local. You'd spend a lot of money to buy all this produce and we're throwing out a huge amount of it at the end of the day, ll that pulp that's left over from juicing. On the the other side, of course we're selling the product that we are making, we're selling at a price point that's pretty high for the, it wasn't a super affordable food for much of the city and so those two pieces together kind of where you know really struck me as a challenge and that was a space that I really wanted to continue working in after I left that company.

So when I had really just a fortuitous conversation with the owner of Hodo Foods in Oakland, the owner of the tofu factory and saw that he had this challenge with his byproduct that he was producing, which was very similar to what I had seen at the juice company, but at this much bigger scale and that it wasn't just a Okara, it was lots of different opportunities and lots of different sources of these types of byproducts. That was really the beginning of Renewal Mill was looking into how we can solve both food waste and also increase affordable nutrition in the food system.

Nina Meyers:Claire really pioneered this space and now there's a company that's much younger than you, but it's called Pulp Pantry and they're doing, they're solving the problem that Claire just outlined. It's like entrepreneurial serendipity. They saw the same problem and they're making value added snacks out of juice pulp.

Lisa Kiefer:Wow, you should all join forces and become the next Nabisco.

Claire Sclemme:I know. Exactly, exactly.

Nina Meyers:[crosstalk 00:28:19].

Lisa Kiefer:[crosstalk] better.

Nina Meyers:That's exactly what Foodbytes wants to have happen.

Claire Sclemme:Yeah.

Lisa Kiefer:Well, was there anything else that is coming up with Foodbytes besides this conference next week?

Nina Meyers:Rabo has a whole other food and AG innovation platform called Tara. It is basically the next step in the cycle for startups to engage with Rabo after Foodbytes. That's what Tara is all about. We're going into our fourth cohort and applications are open now. Tara is like, how can we do the best possible matchmaking for startups and corporates? So applications are open now. That website is Taraaccelerator.com. They're open. They close on April 26th. So any startups, anyone you think is interested, you can learn about the corporates that are participating to see and so you can learn more there.

Claire Sclemme:In addition to kind of all of the structured support that's coming out of Foodbytes, I think the other piece that was really valuable to us was actually meeting the other companies that we're pitching and there there's been some valuable connections that we've had in terms of the the business and actually finding uses for our flour with some of the other companies that have been on the platform, but also just really to talk to other entrepreneurs and be able to just talk about some of the other challenges that you're facing from a business perspective and also from a personal perspective as well. So it's a really, I think it's a really great community of entrepreneurs that are being brought together as well.

Lisa Kiefer:Well thank you so much for being on the show.

Claire Sclemme:Thank you.

Nina Meyers:Thank you for having us.

Lisa Kiefer:You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks. [music]

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Ojig: This is Method to the Madness, a biweekly public Affair show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host Ojig Yeretsian. Today I'm speaking with Gina Colombatto and Meredith Hayes, death educators who recently led workshops entitled The Ultimate Shavasana where examining death makes life a little bit easier. 

Ojig:Welcome to the show Gina and Meredith and thanks for joining us. 

Gina: Great to be here! 

Ojig: Tell us what you do and the problem you're trying to solve.

Gina: The problem we're trying to solve is that everyone is going to die and no one wants to talk about it. But it's something that we all have in common and it happens all the time. We all have loved ones who die and as a death educator I want to continue to bring creativity and levity into the subject of death and dying so that it becomes something that is SO normal instead of fear-based, it would be much more a celebration of whoever has died. So we do death education.

Meredith: What I do is I work as a death Doula or an end-of-life Doula. And my hope is that we can fill the gap between over the nurses who were working so hard and the caregivers who are coming from their homes and they're exhausted. And both sides of the medical professional and the personal they need help, and so doulas can step in. We are not medical; we offer practical, emotional and spiritual support and we can be there when the caregiver needs a break or if the nurses are too busy and can't answer a call right away. We’re hoping to make it more of a normal, comfortable situation for everyone.

Ojig: And as a death Doula, can you describe things you would do?

Gina: Yeah, well first the word Doula comes from the Greek and it means to serve or a female servant or female slave and while I don't love that there is some truth to it. We serve, that's what we do and we don't have to be female, the majority of us are. Like I said before it's non-medical and we can do pretty much anything. Our job is to serve the family of the dying person and the dying person themselves and to a larger degree the community. And we do that however we can, whether it's running errands for someone, whether it's holding a ceremony of some sort, or calling in a spiritual counselor, whatever it is. 

Ojig: It sounds like it's really important. I'd like to follow up about the fear of death that Gina mentioned. There seems to be a taboo around acknowledging dying and there is silence around planning for death. Why is it so hard for us to talk about this?

Gina: I think it moved from being very home based during the Civil War when we had soldiers going across country and they would die somewhere else and we needed them to get home. We wanted their bodies home. Before that, someone would die in the neighborhood and you would bring them to the parlour, which we now called the living room, oddly enough. And you would gather and you would lay out your dying or your dead and everyone in the neighborhood would come and women would wash the body and there would be preparation of the coffin by the men. It was very divided. But it was also very familial and community based. You knew who was dying and you knew when they were dying and you knew how they died and it was all very open. Whereas for us, we've turned death into dirtiness and it's like you don't touch a dead bird, it's going to be toxic, or you don't get near a dead body, it’s is going to smell. We’ve really created that from the Civil War because these bodies were far away and we needed to get them home so we started the embalming process. The embalming made it easier to get a body across country, but what happened at that time, though, is we started looking at there are only certain people who know how to take care of bodies and those are the the embalmers. We shifted at that point that only people who knew how to embalm would take care of the bodies. And we are bringing back home funerals because we want to remind ourselves that death isn't scary, it's perfectly normal, it's not dirty. Yes there can be blood, just like in birth there is the birth doulas, in death, there is the death doula. It’s the end of life. It's messy. Life is messy. But it's also so amazing and brilliant and then we can all share it so when someone dies you don't have to say, ‘quick! get someone to take away the smelly body.’ A body can be in your home for three days. It can be even longer if you're just putting it on ice and everyone can come and say their goodbyes and reminisce about that person.

Meredith: I think we’ve made death seem like an emergency and it really isn't. When a person dies, there's nothing to do. The status isn't going to change. The first thing that I think people should do when someone dies is take a breath and just sit and be and don't rush and don't pick up the phone and don't call out for the nurse. You don't need to do that. It's not an emergency. 

Gina: And people do find things that are important to them at that time. And it may be something as simple as singing to the dead or reading a poem or telling stories about that person. And that person’s not going anywhere. They're not rotting away. They're just a body that's lying there and you can enjoy all the memories of who they are, right there. They’re right there with you.

Ojig: Your perspective is that this is just a natural part of the process of living. It’s just the end stage. 

Meredith: Exactly. Yeah, and we need to also, part of the education is letting our kids know about this and to open up the conversation for not just adults, but for the younger ones as well because we hide away our old people and unless you have the fortune of living with your grandmother or something, kids don't really talk to old people that much. And there's so much wisdom and so much beauty there. We need to work on that. We really, really do!

Ojig: Religion and medicine are the usual realms that death is discussed. However, in Mexico, loved ones who died are acknowledged and celebrated. Is our fear of death a western or American phenomenon?

Gina: It's hard to say American because we’re made up of everything right, but that's a little tricky but it's yes, it’s definitely more western culture. At the same time there is Mexico in the western culture, so it's very different group to group and how we've been raised. I like that you mentioned Dia de Los Muertos. Coco, the film that came out last year that just covered everything in a playful way. It was very joyous. It was very easy for everyone to watch. There's a little bit of the Disney piece in there that you just go ‘really?’, but it opened that door as culturally some religions do talk about it, you may also have someone that understands it from their religious perspective, but they still have terror.

Ojig: And what is thanatology? 

Gina: Thanatology is the study of death. We got into the study of death. That's where we met.

Meredith: Yes, we met at the open center in New York City four years ago. We did a 9-month study in a course called The Art of Dying and I think that's how I describe thanatology because it covers so much and we talked about every aspect-- the physical aspects of dying, spiritual, emotional, historical, you name it, we covered it.

Gina: Part of what the thanatology brought to us was that there are so many ways to look at death. And you had mentioned medicine and religion. And in medicine we study how to not die, and that becomes a real problem because doctors aren’t trained, raised, experienced in saying, ‘Oh, this person is going to die. How great!’ That's not a reality in a hospital. They’ve been trained to save us. That’s how we’ve given them that job. You need to save us. And you'll find some people who really, and we learned this in school from the palliative care doctor, there are some people who want to stay alive, to stay alive. What are you going to do by being alive? I want to have more chemo. What are you going to do with more chemo? Stay alive. Is that really living or is that just surviving or what exactly is that? And doctors are supposed to offer everything they can and as a culture again we don't say oh you know what that maybe pretty miserable do you want to go that route because otherwise maybe hospice and doula and end-of-life practitioners that know how to offer what can you do in this body that you can still do while you're here.

Meredith: Right. There's still definitely a way to live while you die and that gets overlooked and what matters to someone at the end of life may not matter to someone else. We've heard stories of people who all they want to be able to do is be with their kids and eat chocolate ice cream and that's, to them, that's living, and if they can't do that, then they're done. And those are the questions that doctors are now starting to ask. You know, what is it that makes you want to wake up in the morning? We hope to see more and more of that but doctors aren't taught that in their schools and we do see it changing now which is awesome.

Ojig: That’'s great.That gives us hope. And what is the standard practice in the field of thanatology? Is it bereavement counseling?

Gina: As a culture, we are very grief-based. Grief actually comes from a French word that is to burden and I think that we all sign up for the burden. By looking at death as grief, as loss, instead of as the joy of that person was with you for as long as they were, what a different experience we’d be having. Bereavement is one, that yes, it's very important to be able to sit with someone and, and this is one of the parts of an end-of-life doula, is being able to sit with the family in anticipatory grief in that place where the person is not all the way gone, but they may be gone in their minds but their body is still there, so that pain is, is pretty intense because you love someone that's really not the way that you want them to be. And so, those places of bereavement, to be able to sit it that and be able to say that’s painful, it really is, tell me more, who were they, because they lived, and we tend to focus on, they’re gone. 

Ojig: What have you found to be with a common need with patients that you’ve helped?

Meredith: Well, every person is different and every death is different. I try really hard. We were taught this too, you walk into a situation and let everything go. No expectations, your own baggage, you gotta deal with that first, or else it’s trouble. Walking into a situation, it can be anything and you have to be okay with that. People grieve differently. They can be freaking out and screaming and yelling. There could be tears or there could be silence. And as a doula, you accept that, and you just embrace it and let the people do whatever they have to. As for the dying person, again, it could be anything. I've seen a lot of sadness. I would call it sadness. I've seen fear and hope, a lot of hope. Also humor. Some very funny things happen at the end of life and I have some of my best memories, gosh, from people who were dying. That's a hard question to answer because it's all over the map. I think you get every single emotion. 

Ojig: if you're just tuning in, you’re listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today’s guests are Gina Colombotto and Meredith Hayes. They're speaking about their recent workshop series entitled, The Ultimate Shavasana, where examining death makes life a little bit easier.

Ojig: I wanted to now ask about your workshop. So the flyer reads: The Ultimate Shavasana-- where examining death makes life a little bit easier. Lose your fear of dying, get wrapped in a lively conversation, and then in a beautiful shroud or coffin. How are you innovating in this field of death education and tell us about your workshops. 

Gina: When we started, I was like, this is what I want to do. It’s a dream of getting people to get really close to their fears and really what their fears are is about the love of their bodies, or their love of someone that has left or their love of someone that they don't want to die. So it’s really all about love which sounds so corny, but it’s so true. To me, it’s like OK, how can we remind people that you’re invited to come look at why it’s so fearful and then touch upon how can we make it less fearful. I like to add art into it. I like to add creativity into it so it’s not all dark and black and dungeon-like.

Meredith:  I call it part death cafe, part meditation, part party, because there is a celebration aspect to it. There is a point where you're invited to climb into a coffin or get wrapped in a shroud and do a short meditation. People have come out of that, transformed seems like a large word, but I would say transformed, and there's this look of relief and happiness. That's not to say it’s super scary beforehand. It is for some people, but not for everyone. it's a safe place. It's very calm, but happy. 

Gina: We’re planning on taking this all around-- to continue to invite people to look more closely and laugh more closely with and around death and dying. We have been in Maine and New York and Berkeley. But it is a serious, it's a serious step. It's 2 hours.

Meredith: Yeah it's pretty powerful. And back to where we hope to have these workshops, we’re reaching out now to hospice groups, and hope to be part of their training and offer the workshop to the volunteers so the volunteers can get sort of up close and personal and take the experience when they go volunteer with hospice patients.

Gina: For anyone who doesn’t do yoga, shavasana is the corpse pose that is for the ultimate letting go at the end of oftentimes yoga classes. It has a long long history of being that hardest thing to experience. 

Ojig: You sound like you're both these containers for holding it all together for folks to take this risky step and check out their fears and demystify a little bit and think critically about what they’re wrapped up in. Who attends your workshop? Is there a cultural group or social group that’s more open to talk about our mortality?

Gina: I’ve been doing death cafe’s probably for 4 or 5 years and I've had so many people come through and usually I would expect it would be all elders, but actually there's quite a few of the 20-somethings, 18-35 somethings. It's a huge age range and people have different reasons they're there. Someone might come because they have cancer and they're in their eighties and they are kind of thinking, I have everything in order, but you know I'm here to learn anything else and you think, how great, they’ve shown up, and then someone else will arrive and they're 18 and their best friend just did an opioid overdose and it's a hard thing because nobody wants to talk about it. With suicide, I will always turn it around and say, instead of the person, you know they took their life, I will always say, they gave their life, because if you just look at it from that angle, they were here as long as they could stay, so maybe they were here for 18 years, like they gave their life for 18 years. What were they like? Tell me about them. We forget that piece because we focus on the end, that last hour, and that’s how we define the person forever after.

Ojig: You’re shifting the focus from the loss to the gifts, to what was given. So important.

Meredith: I just want to say, some people show up to these events, not knowing why they are showing up. There’s a lot of that. When we ask, ‘What brought you here?’ Oh, I don’t know. I’ve just always been interested in death.’ And in this circle of people, we have people nodding, ‘oh, I know what you mean, I know what you mean.’ When I say it now, it sounds a little weird, but it makes all the sense in the world. And people are exploring. They want a place to be able to talk about this.

Ojig: Yeah, because it’s not something you grow up with. You’re not learning it at school or in your family. If there’s taboos around it or it’s unsafe to ask anyone.

Gina: I think what the humor is is that we all are going there and when you start talking about it people will say the most amazing things. You know, we had a woman say ‘what is the worst thing that could happen to your body’ and she said, ‘I know this is odd, but I’d actually have my legs cut off and I think it's that wouldn't be so bad because I would become the best swimmer.’ Now we're just sitting there looking, going HUH, okay well, that's good, but she thought about it and she hasn't told anyone anything like that and yet that's her getting closer to letting go of her body. Like how can I let go? What would be comfortable? What would that be like?

Meredith: And then there was a woman who wanted her body to be eaten by alligators and she was dead serious. And when we said, how would you like to go, she didn’t miss a beat. She said, I’d like to be pulled apart by alligators.

Gina: And, don’t tell my mother until after it’s done. And for us, it’s amazing how hard it is for people to sign up for these workshops. People are so fearful that it’s ‘please, don’t talk to me about it. No, I can’t show up. If we talk about it, we’re going to die’. Yeah, that’s true, but maybe not tomorrow.

Ojig: When you educate about dying and death, do you also share information about what options folks have for what to do with their bodies? 

Gina: Yes, we have lots of what to do. And different states have different things that they can do with bodies. So first of all there are dead bodies everywhere and we don't know that. You know, in the hospitals, there’s tons of dead bodies. They're just not parading them through for you but that's where people go to die so we forget that and we think oh my god really there's dead bodies. It’s like yeah, and that's normal, and that's okay, and those people were loved, they're all fine. And then some of the green burial options, we like to think of cremation as a very green way to go but actually it’s incredibly toxic. The mercury and the toxicity that goes into the air even with all the filters is pretty extreme. In Maine, which is where I'm living now, has alkaline hydrolysis, which is water cremation. It’s also called aqua-cremation and bio-cremation where you put the bodies into basically a big canister and it’s all stainless steel. The body is on a rack. It fills with water. They put in potassium, I believe, to break down the PH level and then every part of the body except for the bone just disintegrates. And it goes into the water system as no DNA, there’s no DNA in the water. It's all just liquid and it's perfectly fine to go into the water system. People say YUCK, it’s going into the water system, forgetting that when a person is embalmed, everything that’s taken out of that body goes straight into the water system.

Ojig: This is fascinating. We are SO not informed.

Meredith: True. A lot of people are turning to green burials and choosing to be wrapped in just shrouds or bamboo caskets or cardboard caskets and and just being put into the ground. Also there's a lot of movement for making your own casket and I don’t know if you’ve seen these caskets that are made to place into furniture, like a bookcase that you can use until you're ready for it to use it as a casket, so you can get to know it--and like live with it for a while. Until you die with it. Yeah, so I’m sure there’s going to be more creative things coming up.

Gina: It’s exciting. There are different ways that we're looking and people are trying and planting bodies and what people have an illusion about is that when someone is burned in cremation and you have ashes, they said we're going to plant a tree in these ashes, well, that's not really good for the tree. They won't grow in ashes. There’s not a whole lot of good stuff for the tree in ashes. But you can put them around a tree.

Ojig: How did you find your way into this field?

Meredith: I was one of those kids who always liked to talk about death. It was a pretty open conversation in my family. We always talked about how we wanted to die and where we wanted to be buried or cremated and it was like a conversation around the kitchen table, so there was that. But then my dad died about six years ago and he and I didn't know much about the industry and he was in hospice his last 4 days. It actually was awful. I think in retrospect I think part of the awfulness was because I wasn't informed and everything came as a shock to me. Also I think we did not have a cracker jack staff at the time at the hospice. But it was painful for my entire family and my dad was someone who was in service of other people his whole life and for him to struggle and suffer this way, it just seemed completely wrong and extremely difficult to get through. And on the third day...he was there four days... on the third day I just, I had lost it, and I thought, why is this happening to this man who is like the greatest, kindest man. It was like a slap on the side of my head. I thought, oh my God, he's doing this for me. He was like YO, wake up daughter, and see what what I'm doing for you because this is what we need. We need people to figure this out and to make it so that no one else has this experience. Once that I had that thought, I thought, okay, let's do it then. It was his definitely, his last gift to me. I went away from there thinking, I got to do something. And it took a couple years to figure it out, Googling end-of-life opportunities, death jobs, you know, and then I made my way to the Open Center and that's where it all started. Yeah, so it was very personal and it wasn't until I worked through all this baggage with my dad that I was able to be ready to help other people because I think that's super important. You have to do the work. It's hard and it takes a long time, but you can't go on to serve others until you've got that figured out. 

Ojig: And how about you Gina? How did you find your way into this field?

Gina: I have a lot of people who've died and who I loved dearly and they've all had different deaths. I happen to have a larger amount of people who have given their own lives or taken their own lives. Even when I was younger and people would be very critical of that, I just had a different feel towards it and I thought well, it’s a another way to leave. And I know that just riles people. And at the same time, I think that we emphasize mental illness. And, yes, I think that that can play a part in it and I also think that there are some people who there just done, they’ve had a good life, they lived their lives and they're done. It's easier for us to accept that when they're 85 years old than if they're a 25 year old and who’s to know. We just don’t know. So I think it's always been this intrigue that I haven’t looked at death as the worst thing ever but more a real curiosity and how we all get there is so fascinating. 

Ojig: The poet Mary Oliver wrote “And When Death Comes”:

When it's over I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. 

What does it mean to die well and what does a good death look like to you? 

Meredith: Personally a good death for me would be I would like to be aware. I hope not to be in pain. I think that’s a pretty universal thought for people. But really, I want to know what's going on and I would like to be able to relay what's going on to those around me, especially my family and my son. If things go according to you know the laws of nature I will go before him, and I won't be there with him when he dies, and so I would like to give him the gift of explaining what I'm experiencing. So that maybe he'll experience the same thing or maybe he won't be scared when something comes up. And I think if he can then pass that on, then I guess a good death to me would be to leave that legacy.

Gina: I don't know if there is such a thing as a good death. And a good death, I think, as with everything, it’s individual, because if I weren't aware and I have been around people who are leaving with dementia and people say, oh I would just hate to have dementia, but you don't know and the person who has dementia seems, we don't know, but seems to be perfectly fine and it's almost a gift to those around. It may look like a very uncomfortable death but maybe that's the gifting like your papa gave you. That there's a gift there. I would love to say that I go with grace... who knows. And I ask in death cafes over and over and over what’s a good death and it's so individual. I mean a good death for one person is I'm all alone, I'm on a mountain, and I have a heart attack, and someone else's is I have my whole family around me and I've had cancer for 6 months so I can say goodbye to everyone and it's loud and the kids have pans and they're dancing around and you’re thinking, oh, well those are both good deaths.

Ojig: Young people, children, are not very prepared for talking about the last days. And most deaths happen out of sight in hospitals. How do you help youngsters navigate? What can we do to educate the next generation?

Meredith: I don't agree with the fact that they're not ready to talk about it. I think in fact they are more ready than anyone else. It's just that people don't know how to bring it up with them, how to educate them. I think we just need to start the conversations. There's a way to get some sort of education in schools and I I don't know what that is yet. I think if they can talk about sex ed why can't they talk about death ed? There’s no difference. At my house, my boy has a death plan for his pet snails. We know that he wants them cremated and and he wants to bury them then. And we talked about that and he knows what I want and it's a normal conversation for us. We went to the dentist and the fish in the fish tank died and the nurse ran over saying, ‘don't look, don't look, don't look’ and he said, he stepped right in front of her and said, don't worry, my mama knows everything about death and the nurse was like what are you talking about? That fish shouldn't be whisked away without any explanation. I think it just has to be normalized and I hope that there will be some programs. I hope to work on that in my communities.

Gina: And I want to add to that that we do talk to children about death. We just talk in the same mode of fear. Because we are taking kindergarteners to active shooter drills in their school. So you have five and six year olds who are learning how to not die because it's gonna be really terrifying and this is what we need to do to avoid that at all costs and that's what they hear about death. And then they hear that someone famous died and the flag is at half mast but we don't really talk about that, it's just you know you're supposed to be quiet and honor it, but not really talk about it and so I think as Meredith says, it’s so important to have the conversation.

Ojig: If people want to learn more about your innovative work and get more information about your workshops, how can people contact you?

Gina: I actually make contact on Instagram with just the Fine Art of Living and Dying. If you look up The Ultimate Shavasana we will be taking that around and so that will pop up. Another way to reach us would be through email: andthenwhathappens@gmail.com because we really don't know.

Ojig: We tend to think of death as a separate thing and not connected at all to the living process and that's where we need to shift our thinking and expand life to include the ending chapter. Similar to other transition points in life where we get help and guidance like with the birth process, college counseling, athletic coaching, career building, wedding or marriage counseling... end of life is just another phase for which we can also get support. And I want to thank you Gina and Meredith for sharing about your process and the important work that you do to bring death and dying into the discussion about how we live.

Meredith:Thank you! 

Gina: Thank you very much!

Ojig:  You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcast on iTunes University. See you again in two weeks. 

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Transcript:

INTRO: This is Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, your host is Ojig Yeretsian. She'll be speaking with Andrew Castro, a professional singer-songwriter turned author. He's recently written a book, Overcoming Your Anxiety for People on the Go. 

OJIG: Thank You, Andrew, for coming in today. Welcome to the show. Can you tell us about yourself and why you wrote this book? 

ANDREW: Yeah. So for me, the book wasn't planned. I kind of just spontaneously decided that I had all this information in my head, and I wanted to sit down and write it. And for me, it was just years of personal experience with the content that's in the book. And so I just kind of felt like a gut feeling that I needed to sit down and just put it out. So I just sat down at my computer, wrote it, and I'd struggled with anxiety and stuff. But it didn't really become like a problem for me until I was about twenty five, I’m thirty three now. It was just kind of built, kind of like happens for a lot of people like a hidden layer that you just think it's kind of who you are. And then all of a sudden, it just kind of explodes just from too much buildup. And that was kind of what happened with me, and I went through years of it, pretty debilitating stuff. And then then I kind of got over it, but I went back in the same patterns, and then I, uh, had another bout with it again for a couple of years. And then I decided that, you know, it's time to make an actual change, not just let's see if I can fix this a little bit, but go back to what I was doing. So I had to really change my entire life patterns along the way. Along the way, I've been a professional musician, too, and that lifestyle doesn't always give the best results for not having anxiety, you know, because you're constantly not knowing where you're gonna be next kind of thing. So but yes. So the book just kind of came out, and it didn't take that long to write. It's short, but I outlined it for a couple weeks and then took about two months on and off to write it. 

OJIG:How do you define anxiety? 

ANDREW: I wouldn't put any single definition on it because there's so many different variations of it. People have social anxieties. In a simple term, for me, it's just overwhelming. I think that would be the best way to describe it. It's just an overwhelming feeling that there's, you know, social anxiety people who, like I have a friend who has social anxiety. He has more panic, and I have more generalized anxiety, but it's all comes down to just being very overwhelmed by whatever situation you're in with that anxiety. I have small social anxieties like most people do, but nothing that's overwhelming for me. But, you know, for him, social anxiety is overwhelming, like interacting with new people or being in group settings. It just and I don't feel that. But I can understand what he's going through because I think the general of feeling of anxiety is pretty, pretty close to the same. Just depends. Some people have it in this situation, and some people have in that. For me, I would say it's over just overwhelming sensations in thoughts, and they can just cycle and go back and forth with each other. 

OJIG:It sounds like it's very common. 

ANDREW:That's the biggest thing I think I tried to come across within the book is that you're not alone. That's the thing that people see and struggle with the most is when they get these feelings. You can't feel what somebody else is feeling, so you don't know that the things you're feeling aren't just you going crazy that they're actually like a pretty common thing, and I don't usually use stats much. But like there is one that always stuck out was that there's about forty million people in the United States alone that suffer in their life with some sort of anxiety disorder, which is an enormous amount of people. And those were just the people that are telling the truth. You know, there are some that are hiding it or don't want to talk about it. I think in some way almost every human in their life goes through some form and some get caught in it more and it lasts for a very long time and some some don't, some just have, ah, easier time letting go of things. For me, it wasn't like that, I just got caught in a cycle. Habits are a big thing, but, yeah, people are alone. And when that's the first thing that I realized when I started reading other books and other people's blogs and stuff, and I was like, it made you feel a little like, ‘Oh, there's other people with this’. You take a deep breath and then a lot of them have gone through it, and they're like, Oh, yeah, things the anxiety doesn't really bother me anymore. And so you go, ‘Okay, how'd you do that?’ And then you start to learn. I try to tell people to educate themselves as much as possible. Understanding something is the first step to getting over it. I think I compared it in the book to when you have your ah, cell phone and they put, like, new software on it. And, you know, you don't know what the heck’s going on. You know, the apps are changing. You don't know what you're doing, and you get frustrated. But the more you do that, you're not gonna learn anything. So if you just take fifteen minutes and start to learn ‘ah ok’, then it's like ‘Oh, this is actually better’ and then you start to learn the phone then all of a sudden, like, just take the time to learn it and you're not afraid of using your phone. You were like, I mean, with anxiety prior to take a few months or even a year. But if you learn about it, it diminishes the fear that you have over it. 

OJIG: Take us through the process. How does anxiety start and how does it grow? 

ANDREW: For everybody is different. So I'll speak for me. It definitely started when I was a young. So I talk in the book about this thing called a snowball effect. And it's a pretty common thing that people use for a ton of things that I thought it applied well to this. I think you kind of have a point in your life where things start to happen and you can go this way or that way, you know. And, uh, I chose this way, whatever that way is. When I was young, I had this memory of being at a drive-in movies with my parents, and I was just I was four or five and I just started crying because I had these overwhelming thoughts that my parents were going to die someday. And I was really young, but the feeling that I remember is that I couldn't control, that was gonna happen. And that for me, it was like a big thing throughout my whole life is not being able to control things around me that are uncontrollable. And then I don't like that. And then, you know, you worry about those things, even though it's impossible to stop those things from happening. But I did that from a young age, and you just don't know. You're unconsciously you don't know what you're doing to yourself. So for me, it started like that when I was really young. And then I went down that way, and I would just constantly worry about things over and over and same patterns. And just after years of doing that, it just ballooned, snowballed. And then best way to put it is that it explodes. When I was in my twenties. I mean, I liked to go out on my friends and drink, and that doesn't help somebody who's already sensitive to anxiety. So then, ah, yeah, just just kind of exploded. So that snowball just builds and you don't know it's building and the only way to stop it from building is to change, and that's very hard. But if you don't change, you know it's like that, Einstein quote, paraphrasing: but the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over. So a lot of people want to not feel what they feel, that they're not yet willing to change what they're doing. But that's not their fault, really. It's just kind of a symptom of anxiety. They're afraid to do it, but when you get there and you start the process, it's well worth it. 

OJIG: There are a lot of self help books out there about anxiety. What makes Overcoming Anxiety for People on the Go unique? 

ANDREW: So I definitely took a couple examples from a couple books that I love. And I think what makes my book and those books unique is that there's no, it's not about tricks and gimmicks. No pinch this nerve or, you know, take ten deep breaths. I'll use this essential oil and that, and those are fine, like I'm not knocking those. Those are good, but they're all temporary things that are very impermanent, simple things that will help you in this moment. And my book is more about the long haul. So it's about the process of changing your perspective on your thoughts and your sensations and all that stuff. And I think a lot of books out there nowadays are doing that more. Ten years ago or so, it was just about the gimmicks and tricks. But we've learned so much about, uh, your your mind and, you know and sensations and your awareness that the way to get through anxiety is acceptance, and being aware of it, instead of just reacting to it. Had people interview me before, and they always they go ‘so what are some tricks and tips on how to you know’ and I was like, I mean, I don't really want to give those cause that's not what it's about. I've done those before, and they will, they kind of will help, like breathing obviously help. It does help. But it's not gonna, it's not going to do anything tomorrow or the next day. So you gotta learn, to just see things differently, and it takes a long time. But everybody's process different. Some person get over in two months, two years, five years. It's all different. Everybody's different in that way. Yeah so I think it's unique and just that it doesn't. There's no tricks or gimmicks. It's just everything in there is about how to take big steps to getting or little steps to where you want to be. 

OJIG: I found it to be engaging, humorous and a very quick read. Why only eighty pages? 

ANDREW: Because I think I just wanted to engage people. And I don't I don't like long books. When I get a book that's like four hundred pages and it looks like a daunting task. So when I see a book that short, but I packed a lot of content in it and just, you know, eighty whatever, pages it is. I wanted to be a book that people could read in the sitting or two to sitting three things, and then it's just something you can take with you, and you can just just reference it. 

OJIG: And its small so you can carry it in your purse, backpack, satchel.

ANDREW: Right and that's what I wanted it to be something like you said in a purse or backpack or whatever. And nowadays, to people don't have attention spans either, you know, so keep it short and the people love that, ‘Oh, I read your book and like to sitting down to go back and re-read some stuff’. So that the whole idea of keeping it short and carry it with you people are saying that they're doing that.

OJIG: That's great. So you've been getting positive feedback so far? 

ANDREW: Yeah, it's been it's been great. And it's a little overwhelming sometimes, like, because I'm not a doctor or , you know, a psychiatrist, or therapist and whatever. And sometimes I don't feel totally qualified. But I'm not, I'm not giving anybody advice for like this is what you need to do, I'm just telling you, here's what I did. And if you can try that and it works, then great. If it doesn't, then you know. But I try to encourage them to read other books, and if they're not going to therapy, they probably should. I think everyone should go to therapy like the whole world. Everybody should, have some sort of therapy sometime. 

OJIG: We're all the walking wounded. 

ANDREW: Yeah, exactly. Everybody everybody has, you know their things. And but I have given people advice, but I try to do it from my own experience kind like a book. I stick to that because I don't want to tell somebody that they need to do something for them because I could get in trouble with that, especially if they do something and it doesn't work or they hurt themselves or something. I don't want it. So I just ‘Here's what worked for me’. And yeah, a lot of people message me and told me that they're implementing a lot of things I said and that it's helping little by little. You know, basically, I try to tell them is to be patient. That's the hardest part. It takes a lot of a lot of courage and a lot of willpower, because sometimes I'll have really bad adrenaline. Just pumping through my body, and you just I have to sit there and just watch TV or read your book. Just sit through it, because if you start fighting it, it just gets worse. And the cycle continues. And I knew that I had just to be like, ‘Okay, come on and just let's just have it out’ and then you sit there and sometimes it last for hours. It's draining, and you want to quit all the time, but gotta find it in you to keep pushing through. 

OJIG: It sounds like it's a practice. 

ID/BREAK

If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today's guest is Andrew Castro. He's speaking about his experiences with anxiety and depression. He's recently written a book, Overcoming Your Anxiety for People on the Go. 

OJIG: What are you hoping to achieve with this book? 

ANDREW: Well, first I wrote it, I think a lot for myself, just like a therapeutic process. And I just want, if it could just help some people. I don't know how many that’s going to be, if that's a hundred, I mean, five hundred, as long as it helps some people that's it's accomplished its goal. I just wanted to get people and I want people to know that that you don't have to be like this forever. That's the thing that scares I think everybody. And still I get that sometimes, like, I'll get a little bit of anxiety, and then, you know, those old thoughts would creep in and be like, ‘What if it's like this forever?’ But then I now I just ‘No. Let's just give about thirty minutes’ and you'll see it's just gonna fade away, and it usually does.

OJIG: Is this the book you would have wanted to read when you first realized that you were dealing with anxiety, that this is what it was? And did you seek any medical guidance or advice? Did you see any professionals? 

ANDREW: Yeah. So this I didn't know it, but this would have been the book, you know, that I wanted to read. And then I did. There was a book called At Last The Life by Paul David. And my book is very much modeled like his but, just with my own experience. Yeah, that book was the book that was like that started me on getting to my recovery. You don't know what the time you're just looking for anything. I started therapy was in seventh grade. I remember just being overwhelmed by a lot of things then, and I, at that age, asked my parents to see a therapist. And, uh, it was very bene- I went to it for, like, ten, twelve years, something like that. And then I stopped. And now now I see one down the street from where I live in Sacramento every every few weeks or so. Just, you know, sometimes I don't even necessarily need it. But I talk about it. And then as far as medication and stuff for a couple months, I was on Xanax. But there was always something in me that I didn't want to be a slave to something. I think medication is great to help you get where you want to go. But if, I know a lot of people who take it just to get rid of their symptoms. I always try to, like, really walk the line here because medication is very beneficial in the right circumstances. But it just it could be a crutch, and you sometimes never want to let go with a crutch. And a lot of people just take medication and just don't change anything in their lives. That's when you ah, you don't go anywhere, you're just you're basically just you're numbing yourself and which some people you need it. At times, it's so overwhelming that you have to have it. But if you don't implement the other, the other practices that will actually change your whole perspective on what you're going through, then you're always going to need the medication. If you need medication, you should go to a professional and you should have a whole game plan and say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna be on this specific medication for four months and at two and a half months we're going to slowly wean off it, and while we're doing that we're going to get deep therapies to what's happening because what medication does it can take the edge off to give you room to, implement these things.’ Like sometimes people get so overwhelmed that they can't get their mind to accept what's happening because they're so overwhelmed. I've been a nervous flyer before too and still kind of am. And I've taken Xanax on a plane, and it works. Like you get you get really, you know, kind of mellowed out, and it gives you room to kind of organize yourself a little bit. But, you know, I always had the bottle, but it was almost like a comfort. And I remember, I go on trips and I always bring the bottle because I was like, just in case something doesn’t go over well. But I knew I wasn't gonna take it, like I just knew. But I knew if it was there and I had to or something that I could and then but when I really started noticed I was getting better was I remember that time I just had it and I was going on a trip and I just didn't bring it. I was like, ‘well, let's just see what happens’. And then I got through the trip and then you get confidence more you do that. So that's what from me, what it was was I felt personally that I could get through it without using medication. Not everybody can. I don't know if everybody should try either. 

OJIG: You have a phrase in the book you mentioned ‘Don't believe everything you think’. Explain what you mean by this. 

ANDREW: I got into meditation, like a couple years ago, two and a half years ago. That quote there didn't mean anything to me two and a half years ago. But, you know, I read a lot of books on especially on Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, you know, and, you know, my own personal perspective on is they seem to have something right on all that. And so what it is, what it means is that I have a section the book called The Thought Factory. And so I say that your brain is like a factory and its main product that it produces and exports are thoughts.

OJIG: Assembly line.

ANDREW: Assembly line, just thoughts. And they're just that's all they are. And if you really want to get really deep into it. You're really not even necessarily thinking all those thoughts. They're just just taking in stuff. And then, you know, smells will trigger a thought, or a sight will trigger a thought or a person will trigger something that just stored in your brain just keeps getting sent up. And then there's a great line in a book: Your mind directs your thoughts towards your awareness. So your awareness, you know there's awareness which we don't exactly know what it is. But there is awareness, and your mind projects these thoughts, and then they're so real and something overwhelming that we put all our energy in awareness into them so you can take a thought, like from get on airplane. And before I get on it, I just picture it crashing and burning and whatever. And that's not happening. That's not a real thing. That's hard for you to understand that, but like to not believe that is that's reality. That thought is happening right now. But you were projecting yourself into the airplane crashing and you're making yourself get all worried. But you're just sitting in the airport, doing nothing. So it's just a false, just false. 

OJIG: Having the space to ask yourself in the moment ‘Is this true?’

ANDREW: Right, yeah, especially during meditation. You, can see thoughts just pass. They kind of float and then they burn out. That's a big thing with people with meditation is they think they're not supposed to think like I couldn't stop thinking. Well, you'd probably be dead if you weren't thinking. One thing that helped me was that your heart its function is to pump blood to the body, your liver, you know, detoxifies, your digestive system digests your food, your eyes see and your mind thinks. It's just a function of your body, and that's what it does. It thinks, and you can attach your awareness to certain things to problems, all the do all this stuff. But if you attach your energy and awareness to every thought you have, it's going to be, it's going to be rough. And, um, that's what happened with me. I would have negative, scary thoughts, but I would believe them so much because they were in my head. So I was like they have to be true and you have thousands of thoughts all the time. Like if those are all true that the world would be a really weird place. You don't have to believe any of it. You get to choose what you want to put your energy into and believe and go from there. But meditation really helped me with that. There's a monk, who said, ‘Don't believe your thoughts. They're fake news’, which I thought was great, especially for this time. 

OJIG: It's the beginning of the new year, and people may be setting intentions. Can you share a nugget of how listeners can change their habits or make a change around this? 

ANDREW: Yeah, I think doing one little thing differently is a start. When I was younger, I had bad OCD. And I did a bunch of different things before I went to bed. Like it took me a long time before I could got to sleep, right To check the blinds. I checked the locks and do this. You know, one night I just decided to eliminate one thing. You know, one little thing like tonight, I'm not going to do that. It was hard not to do that one thing. And then I don't the other things, but And then once I didn't do that one thing you to try and take it. So I think for people you know the new year. I think if you have ten, you know, really crappy habits that you know are just these aren't doing me any good, get rid of one and go from there. Because the biggest thing is gaining confidence and they talk about that a lot in Buddhism too; it’s faith in the things you've done, give you the confidence in the faith in yourself to keep going kind of thing. And any faith is great. But that, for me, was a big thing. Because so when people eliminate one little habit like for a New Year's resolution and they see that after a few weeks and ‘oh the habit’s kind of gone or it’s changed’ and they start to go, well, I could probably that with another habit and then you slowly start to do that, and that changes your perspective on, on, things. Because humans, we are our habits. If you consciously go through your day, you'll probably notice fifty things that you do every day almost the same way. And if a lot of those things are negative, you're inflicting harm on yourself through some of those habits than it's just going to keep building. And that's when you're gonna have a lot of stress and anxiety and depression. You know all that stuff because you're like watering those seeds. So that's what's going to grow. 

OJIG: Can you read some passages for our listeners? 

ANDREW: Sure. So I really like this one here. This one I'd like to talk about with people, but it's hard for people to hear this. I'll read, and then I'll explain. It says the universe doesn't owe you anything. The sooner you realize that things are just the way they are, and sometimes they're crappy, the sooner you will learn to accept your situation from that point on, you can decide who you want to be and how you want to get there. It's all up to you, But please realize your anxiety is not special. I've been so lost my own anxiety that I didn't realize close friends around me were suffering from the same thing and vice versa. We're all in this together. We all share some form of suffering. The quicker we can all realize that suffering is a part of life, the quicker we can master our response to that suffering. Basically, a much more gentle way of putting it is you are not alone. Okay, so I like this one's in the afterward, and it says, anxiety is not something you need to carry with you the rest of your life. At least you don't have to carry it the same way you have been carrying it. I hate when people tell me to manage my anxiety. The only thing I'm going to manage is keeping myself on task and dedicated to eradicating old habits, to shift my perspective on life. We got ourselves into this mess so we can definitely get ourselves out. So I like those because especially the first one, there was a friend of mine who was going through the same the same thing. And I didn't even know that because you're so caught up in all this is my problem. No one's feeling the way I'm feeling. But there are millions people feeling not only the way you're feeling, but exactly the way you're feeling. This isn't something that's unique to me. Like I'm the only one who has this disease or something like it's not a disease. It's just, you know, it's a psychological disorder and millions of people have it. And there was something I learned from Will Smith actor and he said he was using much of examples. But one was like If you were abused when you were a kid, which is awful and you have trauma from it is terrible. And it's it's a weird thing to hear because I'm not saying anything negative. But it's still that person's responsibility to fix it and to deal with what's happening because no one else can deal with it for them. People can help them and support, but same with, like, if you have a death in the family, do you still have the things that are left inside you that you have to learn to accept and be responsible for 

OJIG: Healing yourself.

ANDREW: Healing yourself and you need you need support, you need people around you. But in the end, if you can't make the decision, the universe doesn't know anything. It's just, basically, you have to take the initiative to do it. What I've gone through is very minimal compared to someone who's like lost a parent when they're young or, you know he's living in some country that's torn apart by war. My problems are small comparatively, but I still need I need to sit down and go. These are my problems. I have to fix them. And if you want other people to fix them for you, that's never gonna happen. I wrote an article for this local online publication in Sacramento, and I said that I'm the one who built my life, so if I built it, I can tear it down and I can rebuild it kind of thing. And obviously, sometimes, genetically, you're more prone to things. But that doesn't mean that has to be you forever or whatever. It just means you have to work a little harder rebuilding it. My choices and habits built this building of anxiety. So, I can knock it down and I can build a new building next to it or far away, or whatever. You know what you're going through is not special. It's very common. And that's That's a good thing. I'm not trying to be mean about like it's just it's not special. Like I had somebody call me once. They were going through a really tough time they were asking me, How do I get rid of these feelings right now? And I just told him, You can't That's hard for them to hear. It was somebody close to me, so I was like to realize you can't get rid of it actually frees you from fighting them. 

OJIG:So it's part of the human condition. 

ANDREW: Yeah, that's like we were talking about Buddhism that we saw because there's lost there's disease, There's pain, there's all this stuff and you're never gonna be able to get rid of those things. You gotta learn to deal with those things. 

OJIG: How has anxiety or living with anxiety impacted you as a musician and as a performer? ANDREW: Started playing, writing songs maybe, like nine years ago. And I love doing it so much that I wanted it to be my career, But it's not a very easy thing to make into a career. So it caused for me a lot of stress because I just felt I wasn't made to have like a what you call a normal job. I guess, you know, you go to the office or you go work, whatever. But then I had this thing that I love to do that. I was getting better out, but it doesn't make any money, and money is a big stress builder. It's one of the biggest things that people have regrets about or, you know, are worried about in the future, and it causes a lot. And that caused me a lot of anxiety because I want to do this thing. But I couldn't make money at it. Then I move to Sacramento because a smaller area and I really networked and I made it my profession and I toured. It's a very exciting thing, so make a little exciting way to make a living. But it's very draining because you play shows sometimes with two people. When you leave town Or you're playing some restaurant or bar and no one's paying attention. Or you have ten shows booked in February and then four people call you cancel and you just lost like a thousand dollars. It's ah, the unknown cause me a lot of anxiety and stress. And so when I start writing this book, I took a break from music till about just a couple weeks ago, and I started writing again. I took, like, six months seven months. Just no, no writing, no recording and again changed my whole perspective on music. So before I was chasing it, like I wanted to be a star and beyond stage and playing music, and it was like getting competitive and stressing me out. I just now, I don't. Now they don't care. I don't want those things. I just don't I don't put my energy into go about a different way. I won't write the songs. I want to write a play. And people like him great. If they don't, no that’s it. 

OJIG: Did your anxiety ever prevent you from getting on a plane to go to a show or from going on stage? 

ANDREW: No. You know, I just have a weird way of doing things. I can't remember a time where I was just really terrified and didn't do it. I used to have to get drunk to get on the plane. That's how I used to do it. No matter what time is, the flight was at 7am and I got there. It was bad. But that's how I had to get on a plane. Because I was just, you know, on then that I've changed is now I don't I don't do that. The stage fright. I definitely had it. Remember, going open mikes out when I lived out here, I'd go to one's all around Berkeley in San Francisco, and I'd sign up. I go, Okay, I'm fifth, so I have about forty five minutes or an hour. So I go sit my car and I practice my songs over and over like two songs. That's all you get down like in there for like, an hour practicing. I get really nervous. But then once I get on stage, there's no nerves. And so I started to realize that, and I had a big show out here in San Francisco at The Independent and was opening for this guy, and I was like, sold out. No one knew who I was, and I was so nervous, so much adrenaline because, you know, it's five hundred people out there, and I was like, I'm solo act, or was, I’m gonna get a band now, so I was just by myself all the time. So I was just backstage. My friend came and I was just jumping up and down, trying to shake stuff out. Because I was just, like, really amped up. I’m gonna forget the lyrics, I’m gonna forget the melody. I’m gonna forget all this. And then I just got up there and the crowd just started cheering and screaming like I was the headliner. Well, all right, that's cool. Then I just started playing and everything's fine. So the anxiety has never prevented me from doing anything. Even when I was at my worst, I knew if I didn't do it, then it'd be easier to not do it the next time, too. Same with flying. I love to travel the one time I don't get on a plane then it's going to be easier to not get on the plane the next time. You know, the fear will just build and take over, and it’ll become easy not to do it. 

OJIG: Has writing this book helped you in your musical path? 

ANDREW: Yeah, it definitely has. Because at the time I wrote this book and made me take a break from music, which I never did. People would tell me this, this isn’t me saying like, you're the hardest working musician, it’s inspiring because I would just go to every open mic, play every show, I released four E.P.s within, like a twelve month span and then an album, and I just wouldn't stop. And then I took a break, changed my perspective, kind of like what's in the book. I just changed my whole perspective on it, and then my writing now is different than it was before. I think before I was trying to be something I wasn't. My first musical loves were like Tom Petty and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, all those. I want to got to go back to writing those songs, get a band and write like some pop rocks stuff that I really want to do . So that's what I'm doing now, and it's so it's learning more to just be myself.

OJIG: Andrew, what does the future hold for you in terms of next steps?

ANDREW: I'm going to start a podcast, so that's in the next. Hopefully in January, I want to talk a lot about the content of book, and just even it's going to be hopefully like bi weekly. And it'll even talk about the current state of the world because that causes a lot of people anxiety right now. I'd like to get into talks to in front of groups, especially places like here, like colleges with younger people that are at that point where these kind of things can really, creep up on them and then music for me. I'm gonna start a band, and I'm going back to the studio, hopefully this week with some new songs and try a whole different approach to it. 

OJIG: It sounds exciting. 

ANDREW: It should be hopefully.

OJIG: And where can our listeners get more information and find your book? 

ANDREW: Yeah, so the easiest way to find it on just Amazon. You search probably just search Andrew Castro but or the title of the book is Overcoming Your Anxiety for People on the Go. There's a Kindle version, and there's the paper back. I have a website, but I'm waiting till I get the podcast going everything before I start directing people to that. Right now, everything's going through Amazon. 

OJIG: Any parting words for listeners who may be anxious but struggling to name it? 

ANDREW: Yeah, I would say one is to educate yourself. There’s this book, mine, At Last a Life by Paul David. There's a book called Dare by Barry McDonough. Those are three, including mine. Three good books that you can go to, and those will help you and be patient. You're going to feel good when you read the books, like, Oh, you know, and then that's going to go away and you're going to go back to the way you felt. Never put a time limit on your recovery. You go into it with a full dedication and trusting the process. You're going to have setbacks, big ones. If you're having a setback, that means that before the setback you were doing better. Educate yourself, be patient, and you're not alone. I mean, there's probably hundreds of millions of people that are going through some sort of anxiety disorder at some point in their life. If you're not patient, you're gonna drive yourself into the ground. And if you don't educate yourself, you're not gonna understand that what you have is pretty common, and it's it's fixable. And then if you don't understand, you're alone, you're always going to feel isolated. So I think those three things are good to take with you.

OJIG: Thank you so much.

ANDREW: Thank you for having me.

OUTRO: You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today's producer was Ojig Yeretsian. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. See you in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Elie Katzenson:This is Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators.

I am Elie Katzenson. I am here with the organizers of EBABZ, which stands for the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest, which is coming up this Saturday, December 8th at Omni Commons in Oakland.

It's from 11:00 to 5:00. That venue, Omni Commons, is located at 4799 Shattuck Avenue, which is super close to the MacArthur Bar, and there's a drop off on the sixth bus line in addition to other bus lines. For now, I am here with Jill, June, and Mira. Hi y'all.

Mira:Hey.

Jill:Hey.

Elie Katzenson:Let's start by talking about what a zine is.

Mira:A zine, in my opinion, is really anything you want it to be. It doesn't even need to be printed. You can have online zines, digital zines. It's anything that you feel really passionate about or interested in that you want to share with other people, and you just kind of put together this little book.

It doesn't have to be a traditional book shape. It can be any shape you want. Staple it, copy a bunch of pages, hand it out. That's a zine.

Elie Katzenson:Zines are interesting because, as I understand it, historically they've been and they continue to be like an underground publication used a lot by activists, artists, and writers that are looking for the ability to self publish, which affords them total freedom.

There's a lot of identity exploration that maybe traditional publishing houses wouldn't allow for that space, and so you have lesser represented communities exploring their identities.

With this, I'm thinking queer people, I'm thinking like there's a lot of diasporic exploration, mixed identities, mixed ethnic identities, anarchist groups, a lot of unique politics are getting space. Then kind of nontraditional relationship models. I've seen some like polyamory and nonmonogamous related zines.

Really valuable information that isn't able to get exposure elsewhere, in zines gets massive exposure. These fests, which take place across the country, they are really hubs of, this is a big word to say, but like revolutionary information sometimes. It all starts it seems on a small scale, but this work can have major repercussions in a positive sense for a lot of people.

Mira:In my personal experience it has been revolutionary, because through zines that's how I have found the words to work through my own gender identity, and that was revolutionary for me.

Elie Katzenson:What Mira just said is proof of why zines are so important. In your experience why are zines so special?

June:I think the beauty of the zine is, as Mira said, the total freedom and creative control you can have over your publication, and because you don't have to go through the process of a publishing house, and you self publish, you can really make it anything you want it to be.

Jill:I also love the element of like speed and spontaneity. An event can happen and you can make a zine about it immediately. I think it's so great for like activism, or current events, because you can react, and share your ideas. Any idea, super quickly.

Elie Katzenson:When I think of something like writer's block, or like fear of showing your work, zines, in this punk way, emphasize the naturalness and the power of your first response,

and sort of like first thoughts. How do you let go enough to just say like I'm going to put myself out there. I'm going to put my work out there. How do people do that? I'm so impressed by that with zines that I've seen. They're very thoughtful, but they're not over-thought and they're not manicured to the point of perfection.

June:I feel like that's such like a classic problem with creative work or like an issue is at what point do I feel comfortable enough to like share my work. With zines I feel like there's such a broad spectrum. Even the range of zines that I've seen some look definitely more spur of the moment, first draft, made photocopies, and published versus zines that look more like traditional books.

I feel like the answer to like when do you feel comfortable? Like how do you get over that hump? Like is this getting over your own perfectionism to publish is something that zines kind of help with, because it is so easy to make. That's one less barrier for you to like put your content out there.

Elie Katzenson:How zines have been seen more in the mainstream, and so you're talking about the first draft zine, which is a little more, not less marketable. Then you have commercialized zines that maybe are a little less substance oriented.

Maybe a little less political, a little less extreme, a little more surface level, and I've been kind of curious about what the dynamic is within the zine community in regards to content.

Is there more collaboration in the same community? There seems to be maybe a little bit more friendship. I know that treating your zines is a big part of what you do when you table.

Jill:I've had really good experiences making friends through zines, and even making friends zines on Facebook groups, and then traveling to those people's fests, and let me stay at their house.

I've never met these people, and there's just a level of trust that comes in I think when you're sharing your work that's really personal. You kind of get to know someone and then they're like, "Yeah, I've never met you but I think you're not going to murder me, so come stay at my house for a weekend."

Thinking specifically about when I went to Omaha Zine Fest, and the organizers of that fest were super sweet. I think there's just a lot of camaraderie in the zine community, because we're all just kind of doing the same thing. Not the same exact thing, but we all have the same passion for this art form.

Elie Katzenson:This is the ninth year of EBABZ. As I understand it, it was kind of born out of people enjoying Portland Zine Fest, and San Francisco Zine Fest, and thinking that there was enough artists and creators in the East Bay to have a fest here, and even the organizers nine years ago are different than the organizers that are y'all, right?

Mira I know that you kind of had like this sub-zine fest, The Bay Area Queer Zine Fest. I think that the space that EBABZ creates, not only at The Fest, which I've been to a couple of years in a row, but the work that you're championing and really like helping proliferate, how can people and the community of the East Bay in general help EBABZ thrive and help zinesters thrive. How can we support the creation of this work?

Jill:Volunteer.

June:Yeah.

Mira:Show up day of. That's really important still.

June:Please volunteer.

Jill:It's crazy. My boyfriend especially lately has been in awe of all of the work that we've been doing. I think with events like this you don't realize, you always think, "Oh, someone's in charge."

No one's in charge. We're just kind of making all this up as we go, and like working together and like figuring out how to get stuff done. Like I'll come home from our meetings working sessions and he'll be like, "Oh what did you do today?" I'll tell him and he'll be like, "What? Like you're doing so much stuff. That's so cool."

So yeah, it would be great for people to get involved.

Elie Katzenson:What kind of things can people do?

Jill:So much, so everything, from all year long, we have different events. Mira's always really good, and June at like planning, fundraising events, getting in touch with like different organizations, figuring out how we can work together, teaching people how to make zines, like workshops like that.

We also do planning stuff throughout the year. We have to like send out applications. We have to figure out like what are our mission statement is.

Mira:There's administrative work, but all the way to like really fun poster makes.

June:Yeah, make a flyer. Instagram

Mira:Follow their Instagram y'all.

Jill:There's fun stuff happening. Voluntaring looks fun if you follow the Insta.

June:I think a lot of people are afraid to volunteer, because putting yourself out there is always really scary. Also maybe in capitalist society in general, there's the concept that you have to pay a lot of time in a place before you have any power or say, and so you think that you shouldn't be there helping, or deciding how things are run because you're new, but EBABZ is a democracy as far as I can tell, a major democracy, and people are really welcome, and like radically welcome. It's radically inclusive.

Jill:A friend of mine reached out to me and said they were too busy to volunteer but they know this person who's in high school who was looking for like some way to get involved with zines.

We brought them on, and they have just gone for it. They reached out to like all the different high schools in the area to ask for people to get involved, share their zines. Any level of effort is appreciated.

Mira:For sure. I feel like that can happen in such different ways too. Like so as we said, there's like many different capacities in which you can volunteer, but also like we all started volunteering at the same time three years ago, and how I showed up was I just saw like a volunteer meeting on Facebook.

I just like showed up without really knowing that much about The Zine Fest. I'd like gone the previous year, but my friend had posted it on Facebook, so I was like, "Yeah, well I'll just like show up, and now I've continued to stick with it for the past three years, so you never know how it's going to go.

Elie Katzenson:Tomas is one of the organizers who I think is not strictly active anymore, and he was talking about the idea that a zine more than maybe certain other mediums is really like a one-on-one interaction between the creator and the reader.

What makes a zine one-on-one interaction? Why is that one-on-one interaction really essential, especially when you're talking about subject matter that is frequently very intimate, and life changing I guess I would say, because I think so much of reading zines is related to identity, and people find a sense of belonging that maybe they're not experiencing as frequently in reading fiction.

Mira:In my experience it's been kind of like handing someone my diary, and they just happened to be standing right in front of me sometimes making really awkward eye contact. It's terrifying, but that's just kind of what it is.

I don't know. It's really cool to have these one-on-one interactions with people even if it's not in person, and then have them give you feedback, or tell you that, "Oh, this zine meant a lot to me, because x, y or Z," and then it's like, "Oh, I'm not alone in what I'm feeling. Wow, this feels great." There's like solidarity with other people over just, I don't know, stuff that maybe you felt like you were alone in.

Jill:There's those kinds of zines. I feel like that with a lot of mirror zines, and a lot of per zines, that are like diary type zines, but there's also the zines where it's more communal, and I feel like rather than like a one-on-one, it's this feeling of entering into a group just through reading.

I'm thinking of ones that are collaborative that community produces, or ones that maybe share like history of like a place or a thing that you weren't familiar with. It's like you're entering into this world more of a shared base instead of one-to-one. It's one to a bunch. Even if you've never met those people, or seen those people.

Elie Katzenson:When people think about getting involved in community, it seems like you have to be a people person, and really enjoy being extroverted all the time, etcetera. What's interesting about Zines is there's face for everyone, and there's sensitivity to whoever you are.

You are just radically accepted and loved, and that respect is just so special. I don't think that's really a question, but I think it's something that I want people who maybe aren't familiar with zines, or who haven't participated in an event where zines are shared to know that that is really the environment that is created at a fest.

Like Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory where you're going to find the level that you want. Maybe you find the blueberry early, and you get rolled away, or you make it to the end and you get your gobstopper. You know? So.

June:Yeah, totally. That reminds me of how earlier we were talking about how to support zine communities and stuff, and we talked about volunteering, but also what I found that has been super important to me within zine organizing, and the Oakland art community in general, is I found that people are so supportive and welcoming, and down to help you out with your projects.

People's generosity and acceptance has really blown my mind. It's super inspiring to see people be making things and helping other people make things, and being able to express their selves, and creative projects through helping each other out. That's another way to support is help a friend make something.

Elie Katzenson:Totally. I read this newsletter, it's called The Creative Independent. I'll have to send you a link, because it's really great. They interview an artist every day, and sometimes they talk about in different art worlds there's more competition than others. Right?

One of the pieces of advice that I read today was about being confident in charging for your work. People can pay for your work, and I don't know why that seems so radical to me, because it can feel so hard to say like, "No, that costs money, or that Zine is 10 bucks." You have really made something, and that's like a sacred exchange.

Mira:It's hard sometimes, but I feel like the time that I'm most able to stick out for myself and my work is when people just try to take it off the table like it's free.

It's the only time I'm really adamant like "No, I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this." That happened at zine event that I'm tabling at. It's hard to put a price on something you've created, but sometimes it's necessary because you have to even or you have to pay your bills.

Elie Katzenson:Right? I mean even beyond breaking even though, right? It shouldn't just be, I just had to pay for my materials. It's like, "No, it's okay for me to make money off of a work that I made."

Jill:Totally. Yeah.

Elie Katzenson:But why does it feel so hard to do that?

Mira:It can be hard to do because money obviously is not like the end-all-be-all of the world, but you also need it to survive, and pay the bills. It's something I do think about is why do we not hesitate to buy a five dollar coffee, but you have a problem with buying a five dollar zine, or something like that. I don't know. Not that it's always necessarily like that, but-

June:Yeah, I think it is important to keep in mind value and the effort that people put into making creative work that isn't necessarily sold in a store, and for some reason that seems more official. Okay to give money to.

Mira:Both as organizers charging for space, and on the zinester side of the table, charging for these things filled with ideas. We've been conflicted with anticapitalist sentiment too. Then like charging for things.

If I'm making something that's against consumerism, and then I'm charging for it, like, "Oh, what do I do? What's happening?" It's all about valuing yourself, and your ideas and-

Elie Katzenson:Right. You still have to function in the environment that we were functioning in, [crosstalk]

June:It's not that we like money, but-

Mira:Yeah.

June:Give me my moneys.

Mira:Yeah, that's, yeah. Personally I feel like that's been really hard.

Elie Katzenson:It's interesting to me, because the price that you're charging the zinesters is quite fair in my opinion. I think it's what, 50 bucks if you're accepted?

June:No, not even that.

Mira:It's less.

June:That's for a double.

Mira:For a half table we have a sliding scale, 20 to $40, and then if you have a full table, it's 50 to 75 I want to say. We also-

Elie Katzenson:You've always employed a sliding scale?

Mira:Always a sliding scale, and also if people have financial struggles, they could email us and we waive the fee.

Elie Katzenson:Wow.

Jill:Some zine fests are not like that. It's really nice to be able to be a part of one that is like that.

Elie Katzenson:I want to talk about The Fest schedule in general. I know the Rock Paper Scissors Collective did a memorial fund, The Rheo Memorial Fund, where they were giving away grants of $100 for people to make zines.

You could apply for this zine scholarship. That was really special, because again, $100 means a lot. Be it to EBABZ if they can get a table, or just being able to make 50 copies of their work.

Okay. So again, reminder the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest is this Saturday, December 8th it's from 11 to five at Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck avenue. It's free to get in. No admission. All these tables you can buy zines and peruse.

I know that there's some workshops happening. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Mira:We have three different workshops. They're each about an hour long. We have writing from the margins, creativity, and embodiment for artists of color with Fatima Nasir. This one sounds awesome. It's a writing workshop, meditative practices, some brainstorming, and sharing stories.

Elie Katzenson:What Times that?

Mira:That one is at 12 and then at 1:30 we have mixed media sticker making with Raphael Tapra the third. Sounds extremely fun. You just use a bunch of stuff and make stickers. Very DIY. That's at 1:30 until 2:30, but you can stop by. It's kind of like an in and out situation.

Elie Katzenson:Awesome.

Mira:Or you can say the whole time. At 3:00 we have letterpress basics with Christie Holahan, and she's gonna show how this tabletop water press works.

Then everyone's going to get to make good thing. They're gonna choose a phrase, and then everyone's going to let her press that phrase.

Elie Katzenson:Cool. What part of Omni are they doing those in? Do you know? Cause it's like those two big rooms, right? The entry room, and then the larger back room.

Mira:It's in the entry room and it's way in the back. You'll see these big wall partition screen things.

Elie Katzenson:Oh cool.

Mira:It's behind the partition.

Elie Katzenson:Awesome. Couldn't have asked for a better workshop description. I was reading online that you are doing something new this year. I think it's called a zine store.

June:Yeah. So the zine shop is something new that we're trying out this year. Mostly in response to how we were feeling that we wanted to include as many people as possible, because there are a limited number of tables, but we do get a lot of applications.

For people who either didn't get to table, or just have like one or two zines, and don't feel like they can fill a table, they actually still have time to drop off their zine at five Friday at E.M. Wolfman Downtown. It's a bookstore. The organizers will be there the whole day selling them instead of having all of those people having to table.

Jill:Another thing we're trying different this year one of our organizers had this cool idea. At all these fests, it's always a person behind a table, and it is super weird. I'm sure for anyone who's been to an event like this, or a craft show before, when you're walking around, and you're like, "Do I make eye contact? Do I not make eye contact? I want to look at this stuff. But I don't want them to feel offended if I don't buy the stuff."

It's this kind of tense relationship sometimes. Sometimes it's really fun and you make good connections and you have a great time. Sometimes different personalities, some people feel awkward.

One of our organizers was like, "What if we move the zinesters out from behind the table." It creates a more like open layout, and visitors can kind of like file through and peruse without having to have these tense eye contact moments.

The tabler will still be there, but it's off to the side, and it creates more opportunities for organic conversations.

Elie Katzenson:That's interesting.

Jill:Yeah it's our first year doing it. So we'll see.

Elie Katzenson:Oh I'm really excited to hear that, because I'm totally used to the awkward dynamic. I just put that Mona Lisa smile on my face for like an hour.

Jill:Yup. Same. It's like part of the thing.

Elie Katzenson:Yeah.

Jill:We still have tables like that, so you will get an opportunity to show your Mona Lisa smile. But yeah, it'll be cool.

Elie Katzenson:I think sometimes I personally want to engage in conversation, but I'm conscious of taking up too much space, or maybe they need to spend time with other people and I'm scared of taking too much attention, but sounds like people are maybe more open to speaking than I think that they are. Right?

Jill:Yeah. We should mention that we're only using the wheelchair accessible rooms, and it's kid friendly.

June:We have the childcare room, but we do not have childcare. BYO Care. You can use the room. That's what Rebecca said. BYO Care.

Elie Katzenson:It's wheelchair accessible and you can bring your kids. You can't bring your dogs.

June:No.

Elie Katzenson:I know. My life is not fair.

Jill:You can't have it all.

Mira:You really can't.

June:After The Fest, there's a EBABZ after party that's happening from six o'clock to around 10 o'clock at Classic Cars West slash Hello Vegan Eats. So yeah, come through.

Mira:There's going to be like 10 djs.

June:I think it's going to be like six.

Mira:Six to 10.

June:Six to 10 djs.

Elie Katzenson:If you each had kind of one last sentiment or thought to put out into the world as an EBABZ organizer, or something that you'd like to put out there for the end of this interview.

June:Just every year. I'm so grateful for zine community, the applications we receive, and the care that is taken in those applications. Also my fellow organizers I'm super grateful for it, because everyone really tries their hardest. Put's a lot of effort into it. Also, yeah, I'm eternally grateful to Aura for introducing me to this community and I think of her.

Jill:I went to cal, and I was super DIY, and in high school I feel I was super punk into all this stuff. Then you grow up, and you have to get a job and you have to make money. I have a mortgage now.

I start to get out of touch with all my roots and this happy community and what matters in life. Coming to Zine Fest, and volunteering with Zine Fest, reminds me of all that stuff, and keeps me connected, and keeps me grounded in reality, and what's good.

Mira:Sort of to echo what both of you were saying, I think organizing EBABZ has been one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done. For that I am eternally grateful to Aura for getting me involved. Also if you come to The Fest, please bring caffeine for the organizers.

June:Yes.

Jill:I don't drink coffee.

Elie Katzenson:The East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest is taking place on December 8th from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM at Omni Commons, which is located at 4799 Shaddock Avenue in Oakland. You can follow EBABZ online on Instagram at E-B-A-B-Z-I-N-E fest, or visit them at their website, EBABZfest.com. Thanks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Announcer:This is Method to The Madness, a biweekly Public Affair Show on KALX Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today, host, Ojig Yeretsian, is speaking with Mary Webb. She's a novelist, playwright, teacher, filmmaker, trailblazer and peace builder. Her latest short film is Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues.

Ojig Yeretsian:Hi, Mary. Before we launch into the film, can you please tell us what inspired you to create a dialog group in the first?

Mary Webb:In the first place, it was a film and it was called Long Night's Journey into Day, not to be confused with Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. It was two Berkeley women, Deborah Hoffman and Francis Reid who made this film. I saw it alone. It wasn't as if I was chatting with my friends afterwards.

I was thinking and thinking it was a film about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. I thought we used to pick at them because we thought we were ahead. Now, it seems as if they're ahead. A lot of people on the radio were talking about people should talk about race and they don't do it. I thought, "Well, I know some people. I have a living room. Why don't I do it?"

Ojig Yeretsian:Did you ever think in those days that whatever you created would move forward 18 years?

Mary Webb:We've started the 20th. I didn't think about it one way or another. I'm not a big think about the future person. Let's deal with what we're doing right now.

Ojig Yeretsian:You just had your 72nd meeting. What do you think it is about this dialogue group that sets it apart from other conversations?

Mary Webb:That's a great question. It's an attempt to get people from very different kinds of backgrounds to communicate with each other on a deep level about one of the worst problems in our society, namely racism. People have to say why they're there at the beginning. A lot of people say, "I'm here to listen and learn." That's kind of beautiful. I think that's true. We share food as they say in Africa first. Everybody brings food, no money exchanges hands. We have a topic each time. We have two moderators to keep us in check mildly. We go at it.

Over the years, relationships have developed between people who would never have met had they not come to my house for this event. That's a wonderful thing too.

Ojig Yeretsian:As a society, we're so entrenched in our particular set of viewpoints and polarized. Why are stereotypes and racism so hard to talk about and why is it so important to talk about these things?

Mary Webb:That's a big question. For certain African-Americans, for example, they would not particularly want to talk about what they really felt in front of white people or after all the perpetrators in terms of a group. Some white people are maybe carrying a lot of white guilt and they would think they didn't want to talk about that. But people, in general, if you can get them into talking as they eat and as they make personal contacts, I think do want to go deeper.

I was aware when I started this that I was probably going to give up a lot of my social life if I did this because it would be work to get it going. But it is a social life, and it's a social life on a much deeper level. I can remember going to parties when I was 19 and saying, "Why don't people discuss serious things at parties?" Everybody would say, "Oh yes." Then, they'd go back to what they were doing. And I'd say, "Well, why don't you do it now?" This was not a popular thing to say. I was a troublemaker even then.

Ojig Yeretsian:How do you create or ensure safety in this environment? What makes this environment so special?

Mary Webb:The moderators do that. We go around the room at the beginning and the moderators ask each person to say why they're there. We get a little sense of people if they're new people there. If you're having a dialogue in your house against racism, you try to make the house feel friendly to people.

I also teach classes in my house. For me, it's fairly easy. I love the idea of people using my home in this way to actually communicate with each other on a very deep level about important things and then they get to know each other and they come from different groups. Some people might never have gotten to this. Now, people say from Africa, one of our moderators, Deborah Hailu is Eritrean and Ethiopian and our other moderator at this time is African-American, Karl Debro. Those are the people who are "the authority figures" in the room, but it's very gentle in a way and yet there's a lot of freedom.

Ojig Yeretsian:With topics such as race and health, African-American, and immigrant groups, rivals or allies and parenting against racism, conversations can become heated. In my experience with dialogue, it requires a certain level of openness to being uncomfortable. How do you maintain respectful communication when there is strong disagreement in the room?

Mary Webb:Well, I have to go back to the moderators. The moderators are the main reason that that happens. Kate Mayer, who's my filmmaking partner, makes these incredible brownies. Every now and then, a few people would get too upset and it was close to dessert. Someone would say, "Give them one of Kate's brownies." It's become a joke that people come only for Kate's brownies. There's a lot of joking. There's a lot of laughter. If you look at the film Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues, 10 minutes, you'll see laughter there. That helps.

Ojig Yeretsian:Can you tell us about any problems you've had to face as founder and host of the Living Room Dialogue group on race, racism and ethnicity, and from where do you draw your energy?

Mary Webb:I think that, to the extent that I plan, that I always plan to have things I start continue. That's just the way I think. I have, they told me, a fair amount of energy. I think everyone has energy and they choose to put it somewhere or somewhere else. I try not to spend most of my energy watching other people do things. I like to go to the theater. I like to go to movies, but I've also done stage productions. I'm learning to make films. Kate and I made this film with Ed Hertzog who was our cinematographer for that Living Room Revolution: The Race Dialogues. That's how we learned to make a film.

I would rather do things with my energy than watch other people do things or sit around and talk about the world would be wonderful if only these people would do this. My reaction to that is, "But what are you doing?" I love doing things, and I love seeing these people come together and I realized that isn't just social, but it is social.

Ojig Yeretsian:I think people get inspired from seeing your commitment and your level of perseverance. Having been to a few of your meetings, I know how exhausting it could be afterwards because your mind is still spinning and your heart has opened in a way. It's like vulnerable making.

Mary Webb:The solution to that is that some of us sit up for three or four hours in process and then sometimes people stay over and we go to brunch the next day. Processing is helpful. You can do as much or as little of that as you want. I suppose you could have a small group meeting, say, the week after to see how something went if you wanted to do that.

I always meet with Deborah Hailu and Karl Debro way ahead of the date so that we can get a date, a specific date we can all do decide on the topic and talk about any difficulties that might have occurred at the last dialogue.

Ojig Yeretsian:What compelled you to make this film?

Mary Webb:I was thinking about that only yesterday. I always knew from the very beginning that there had to be a film if I was going to start the dialogue. Ed Hertzog happened to be in my class. He was in my writing class and I said, "Ed, would you make this film when we start this?" We hadn't even started yet. He said, "Sure." He could work it out. He did all the footage and then he had too many things to do.

Suddenly, he couldn't do the whole film and then I thought, "Well, Kate Mayer had actually made her living doing videos at one time, medical videos." I said something to her about, "Would you look at this footage?" She said, "I was thinking about the same thing you were thinking." It ended up that she took it all home and two weeks later, I was involved as a film maker with her because she liked the idea of us doing it together, and I did too, but there was always going to be a film. I don't know why because it popped into my head very soon after the idea of doing the dialogue.

Announcer:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, Ojig Yeretsian is speaking with Mary Webb about her innovative social justice endeavor, The Living Room Revolution: Race Dialogues.

Ojig Yeretsian:Do you think it's a resource and an example like a way to show people to demonstrate what dialog is if they might be interested?

Mary Webb:It's an amazing resource. We had Mark Verlander, graphic artist who made us a beautiful card, so I can give the card to strangers and say, "I have something I want to give you." Then, I showed them this and say, "This film will take only 10 minutes of your very valuable time to see and perhaps you'll be interested in starting one yourself or in coming to ours."

Ojig Yeretsian:The film is available for viewing by the public. It's available at livingroomrev, R-E-V.com, One word livingroomrev.com. Yes.

Speaker 4:People are talking about race and single race groups, right? When people get together with people are their own race, they're talking about their perspectives and what they think. But very rarely is it the case that people are talking across racial lines to each other about their experiences. That's what's missing in that sort of the national dialogue about race. It's almost exclusively a single race discussion.

Speaker 5:It brought to mind my own history of having been born during the Second World War Jewish and the tremendous push, unspoken push, to not connect with my Jewish heritage in any of the religious or history to feel culturally Jewish. Yet in terms of the interface with other kids at school, it was this message of don't forget you're Jewish and fit in. It's very painful, painful.

Speaker 6:When I speak about my experiences, no way intended to silence you for one or anyone else. If that needs to be the space, if I can't tell you that something bothers me, then I decided to myself that racism perpetuates itself in silence. I want you to always feel that you can speak up and I may not respond to you in the way that you might feel comfortable with, but that's okay.

Speaker 7:If I wanted to fill out an application, I'm supposed to really fill out the white. Did I feel the racism or anything in this country? I don't know if I can call it racism, but I never felt comfortable.

Speaker 8:My other friend was a little surprised. She didn't feel to me a minority. In some ways, when she came to the dialogue, she realized, "Oh my goodness, I'm a minority." I mean, who is white? I don't know. I don't feel white because even though I tell them, "I'm white." Who are you? What are you? I say, "I'm white."

Speaker 9:I'm trying to figure out what that means and what we're talking about when they say, "Iranians are considered white by who and where and how has it manifested?"

Speaker 10:It is great to have a place to come where you can commune with people, where you can break bread and share thoughts and feel like you have a community that provides you with a psychic support and spiritual support and, sometimes, even political support.

Speaker 11:That's really a joy to sing with that group of eight bases and I am the only white boy.

Speaker 12:What are you? People want to classify you. If they can put you in that kind of box, they don't feel good, I guess. I don't know.

Speaker 13:If you don't have a lot of color in your skin, you can't go around really saying that you're a person of color or can you?

Ojig Yeretsian:On there also are other resources such as starting your own dialogue in 10 easy steps. You're trying to get the word out and you really want to promote this as a way to navigate our political cultural terrain by having these civil conversations with each other.

Mary Webb:Yes, I want it to be a national movement and some have started in San Francisco, one in Half Moon Bay which is bilingual. As we build communities that are multicultural, as people begin to understand each other's points of view more deeply, that's conceivably a deep cultural change. If you feel that you want to start something like this and you feel you're not the most perseverant or extroverted person in the world, you need to get a partner to work with you who will do the things that you don't want to do. As we start the 20th year, we have had only two sets of moderators, one producer, me, one place to have it.

People feel good when they walk into my house. This is what I've been told. When you open the door into the living room, the living room invites you to come in. You could have arranged the furniture in 60 different ways that wouldn't have been as good. Everyone can speak from every chair in the room and reach everyone else. Occasionally, when we're really crowded, we have a few people sitting on the stairs and they sometimes have to stand up and come down so people can see them. But for a limited space, it works very well. I cannot emphasize enough how important food is.

Ojig Yeretsian:I'm more familiar with dialogues that take place with groups that are in conflict. There's Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Arab ones, and the one you host is unique because it focuses on the American experience with all the diverse cultures and the history and the background of racism. Tell us how you've come up with the topics.

Mary Webb:Okay. We have this thing called the box. It's a cardboard box, and I was trained in the south, although I grew up in New York City, I was trained in Letcher County, Florida, in doing things the grassroots way. That means the simplest possible way you could do it with the least amount of money spent. You take a cardboard box, and you cut a slot in the top. People can take three by five cards out of it if they're going to have to write down what they will say later because they have to wait. They have to raise their hands and wait.

They can also put a topic in the box on a three by five card. Then, we try to encourage people to give us a lot of topics, choices. Then, Karl and Debbie and I meet, and we go through all these. We try to either pick one or synthesize some and come up with a topic that will be interesting enough and popular enough so that people feel it is worthy of their coming to this event and giving up after all, in our case, it is a Saturday night when you could be doing many other things in the Bay Area.

If you knew this was going on, why would you want to be anywhere else? There's nothing like this anywhere else. Now, what I want to see happen is there will be things like it anywhere else. Yours is different. Each one is different and that's fine. They can be done in schools, workplaces. They can be done in people's homes.

Ojig Yeretsian:It seems like it builds community and promotes understanding and growth. Where can our listeners get more information?

Mary Webb:If you go to livingroomrev.com, and it will tell you some things about it and you can contact me through my email, maryh as in Harry, webb13@yahoo. Please, when you email me, give me your phone number too. It's much faster.

Ojig Yeretsian:That's Webb with two Bs. Why race, racism and ethnicity?

Mary Webb:I don't think I picked it. I think it picked me. I had been in the civil rights movement in the south. I had started an African-American dance troupe, which I was told by white people in Berkeley I couldn't possibly do. I did it. I ran it for seven years, and it's still going on with my lead dancer running it. Currently, it's called the LaVern Porter dance troupe because she's the one who's running it. This is something that's bothered me since I heard of it and I started studying in the Holocaust when I was eight years old because I went to a largely Jewish school and people were all impacted by that.

I thought if we have anything like this, I'm going to be involved in it. Of course, I didn't realize we had already had many, many things like that. That's always been something that I felt that I needed to deal with, and this was a new way of dealing with it. I'm very, very, very passionate about this and very, very committed to it. I believe that the more dialogues you start, the more you will see what a flexible way of getting people together it is.

People are always complaining about getting people together and my response to that is, "Fine. Get them together then." It's not that hard. It takes some work, but anything that's worth doing takes work.

Ojig Yeretsian:It seems like in Berkeley, it might be easier to get people together to talk about race. Maybe, that's an incorrect assumption. How about other places like rural parts of the state or in the country or other geographic regions?

Mary Webb:One of the reasons I get to do so much is because I do things rather than thinking about what could happen if I were to do things. I'm throwing this out to people right now. If you're interested in starting something in your workplace, I don't care if you live in Berkeley or Timbuktu. Then, you can email me. If you leave me a number, I will call you back, and we can talk about it.

I don't believe that it's much easier in Berkeley. I think it's different. I saw how things were done in the south. It was easier to build community in the south than it is here because, here, everybody thinks they're right and that they know it all. This is not good for learning and listening. It's nice to see those people get in there who know everything and have them say they'd like to listen and learn.

We're in a high-powered intellectual community. That doesn't mean that everybody's heart is educated. We're educating people's hearts. It's terrible what's going on in this country. Of course, there are terrible things that have gone on all over the world. When people get together and they respect each other and they learn sometimes to love each other, everything changes.

Ojig Yeretsian:In your group, it encompasses all different ages and ethnicities and cultures.

Mary Webb:We have someone from Zimbabwe who has very interesting things to say.

Ojig Yeretsian:And Filipino-American and South American and Asian like there's a breadth.

Mary Webb:A lot of-

Ojig Yeretsian:Of voices.

Mary Webb:A lot of African Americans, a lot of, say, European descend and white people. Those would be the two large groups. Then Africans, obviously, Deborah Hailu, Eritrean-Ethiopian and [inaudible] from Zimbabwe and [Anne Wigo]. It's different every single time. Wilfred Galila, our cinematographer, is Filipino and he's been with it a while.

Ojig Yeretsian:Having come from a deep tradition of activism, being the founder of these dialogue groups, what have you learned?

Mary Webb:I've learned more patience. I've learned flexibility about certain things. You think things should go one way, but maybe they shouldn't because you want to meet the needs of the whole group. I've learned that you can't keep everyone happy "at all times" but you can keep the group growing and going and being wonderful and everybody's sense of humor is enormously important in this.

Never think that you're not doing the work when you're laughing because that's one of the most important things to really understand the deep, deep, deep level. I learned this in teaching too. This is not about you meaning me. It's about the group. There are times when you have to sacrifice some of your own needs really quickly to get the group to be as powerful as you wanted. At the end of each dialogue, we stand and we hold hands.

I feel very strongly about this, and people can meditate or do whatever they want to do. But at the very least, the energy is going from hand to hand to hand. We take that out when we leave.

Ojig Yeretsian:Do you have any experience or any initiatives working with children in the schools?

Mary Webb:Well, I'd love to do it. I'd love to start dialogues there, but somebody has to ask me to do it. I did run a daycare center. When I ran a daycare center with two, three and four year olds, I had the children vote for the rules of the school. Then, we posted them at the height of a two-year-old, and you take a little two-year-old named Sabrina Boo and you say, "Boo, what did you do wrong?" She says, "Running in the classroom."

Then, I remind her that she voted for that rule, and I said, "You won't do it again, will you?" She says, "No." Two year olds are capable of voting for their own rules. These dialogues are perfect for elementary school, middle school and if you didn't get it before high school.

When I said that I was studying the Holocaust when I was eight years old, that's the most important thing in a sense because it was always there with me. I was very independent at a very early age.

Ojig Yeretsian:Was there a seminal moment that led you to your activism on the East Coast and was there a seminal moment that led you to your activism on the West Coast?

Mary Webb:No, I mean this is the way I've always lived. When something comes up, if I think of something, I tend to start with my own ideas. The dance troupe was my idea as far as I know. I was in Berkeley dancing to something called Very Last Day. That was the song, and I was a dancer. I had some dance training. I saw African-American girls in black leotards and tights doing a dance to this.

Now, did I really see them? No. I saw an image. If you use the word visionary and it doesn't get to, oh my God, a visionary kind of thing, I am a visionary because I see things like a picture of the dancers and I go, "Oh, I will do that." Then, white people in Berkeley tell me I can't possibly do it as I said before. Then, my vigor is a redoubled by people's projection. I have the kind of personality where if you say, "You can't do this," it's like in my head I'm going, "Just watch my fire."

Ojig Yeretsian:You weren't afraid of failing. It was a risk taking you were very comfortable with. As an innovator, that kind of courage and fiery spirit, I think, is what we want to hear about.

Mary Webb:There is a time to give up something that isn't working. That's part of it. Now, how do you get a fiery spirit? I don't say, "Try," and I don't say, "Despite the outcome." I say, "I'm going to do this." I have a living room. I know some people. With the dance troupe, I said, "They don't have an African-American dance troupe. I will start one." I got there. We were moving there from California, and I got there and they didn't have a dance troupe. I started one. I didn't know how to do it. I learn how to do it in the process.

Ojig Yeretsian:Is that the same with the Living Room Dialogue?

Mary Webb:Absolutely. It's what I do with everything. We'll figure it out. Not everybody has a seminal moment. I mean I know who I am very well and very deeply. I don't ever know what I'm going to do next. In fact, I have a website called Suck the Juice Out of Every Moment. It's about my experiences and my philosophy sort of.

Ojig Yeretsian:Can you please tell us about your published works?

Mary Webb:The first one I published, Dark Roads, R-O-A-D-S, under another name, Leah Ross because there was a Mary Webb already that people had heard of at that time, and I didn't want to go into competition. That was a novel about the south and some of my experiences in the south that has dance troupe in it.

The second one, which we're bringing out in a second edition within the next six months is The God Hustlers, which is about religious cults and the nature of evil. The question I'm asking myself in that book is when all around the world there are terrible tyrants and they want to take away everybody's right and kill them and torture them if they're not willing to give them up, how is it that so many people are willing to give up their own rights and join something where someone else is going to run their lives? I'm not a big fan of religious cults as you might imagine.

This took me five years. It was spurred in 1978 by what happened at Jonestown. If you turn over your paycheck and your personal rights to a group, there is no limit to what the leader of that group may ask you to do. Check out Alice Miller, the psychiatrist, her books, the ones that are really about the process that went on in various countries that allowed people to take over everything from other people.

Ojig Yeretsian:Okay, awesome. Thank you, Mary.

Mary Webb:Pleasure. I love it.

Announcer:You've been listening to Method to The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll see you again in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Ali Nazar:You're listening to KALX Berkeley in 90.7 FM and this is Method to the Madness coming at you from the Public Affairs Department here at Calex celebrating the innovative spirit of the Bay Area. I'm your host, Ali Nassar, and today I got with me Shawn Lani, he's the Director for the Studio for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Hey, Shawn, what's going on?

Shawn Lani:Hey. Nothing. Just here, jabbing this morning.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, thanks for jabbing.

Shawn Lani:Yeah, my pleasure.

Ali Nazar:Appreciate you coming in. So we're going to talk about a few things. Exploratorium, obviously, is a beloved institution in the Bay Area, but I always ask people when we first start out about organizations like the Exploratorium, they're very unique and they start out with a kind of a problem statement in mind. What is the problem statement that Exploratorium is trying to solve?

Shawn Lani:That's a good question. A lot of people think of the Exploratorium as a science museum that was formed in the way that a lot of things were formed, but the culture institutions tend to be a product of their times. They're responding to a need, and at the time, there was an educational reform movement going on in America and the 60s were happening. This is 1969, it was founded and Frank had spent many years-

Ali Nazar:Frank Oppenheimer?

Shawn Lani:Oh, yes. Frank Oppenheimer had spent many years as a teacher on a ranch kind of perfecting a hands-on method of learning and was convinced that people really needed a place where they can get their hands on things and figure things out for themselves. One of the things he used to do is take his kids out to a junkyard and a very non-traditional approach, take things apart, find out how they work. It was definitely a sense of the authentic was always a driving force and also a trust that people were naturally curious and could be inspired to kind of explore their own inquiry. And that turned out to be a very powerful model for teaching and learning.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, and I think any of us have been to the Exploratorium totally get that feeling because that's what the place is all about. But taking just one more kind of step down memory lane, can you tell us a little bit more about Frank Oppenheimer, who he was and how he came to found the museum?

Shawn Lani:Yeah. Frank Oppenheimer was Robert Oppenheimer's younger brother, he's sometimes called the Uncle of the Atomic Bomb. He worked on the Manhattan Project, and for many years after that he was ostracized from universities and ended up in a ranch in Colorado. He was a natural teacher. He was very much a humanist, and so as he spent many years out there kind of basically, surviving, he ended up coming to San Francisco. He still had a lot of contacts, a lot of people knew who Frank was and started the San Francisco Project and found the Palace of Fine Arts. He wrote up a rationale for a science museum and ended up stomping around the City Hall drumming up support for it and got a 30-year lease for a dollar a year at the Palace of Fine Arts. 

Ali Nazar:Wow.

Shawn Lani:Yeah. That's not a bad deal.

Ali Nazar:Wow, yeah, pretty good. San Francisco real estate.

Shawn Lani:Yeah, exactly. Well, the funny thing is even at the time when Frank walked in that behemoth of a building, he already thought, "This isn't going to be big enough," and, in fact, we added onto that building some years later, a second floor. And then eventually, we outgrew the building altogether and moved to Pier 17 just five years ago, Pier 15, sorry, in San Francisco.

Ali Nazar:Well, Great. So thank you for that story and understanding kind of where it came from. So we're almost 50 years into the Exploratorium's founding. What's the journey been like? Where are we today?

Shawn Lani:Well, the Exploratorium is, I think, necessarily evolving and I think this is true of any cultural institution. They need to evolve with culture in order to respond to it and be relevant. And as we started as a science museum with exhibits that quickly grew into a explainer program that integrated teens on the floor explaining and working with visitors. We started professional development of teachers very early. We were one of the first 600 websites when that started to evolve. And so the museum's always been kind of a slowly growing institution with new feature-sets and more and more of those have become interrelated over time.

And so when I think about the Exploratorium, I went there as a child, three and four years old, you kind of fall in love with the place. And even all these years later, I walk through and there's something familiar about the way that we respect humans as learners. And in everything that we do, the way that we approach the work is very much in support of somebody's own sense of wonder and inquiry and to enable people to ask questions of the world and find those questions useful and even to question the answers they get back when they ping the world. We want them to know that they are active learners, they're in control of what they understand. And so that's always kind of been a thread throughout all of our work.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, and it's so fascinating to me, as I'm listening to you talk, and think about many times in this show, we have people who have started an organization six months ago or eighteen months ago. They had this dream and this vision and I've been part of founding teams too and I think one of the things that a founding team dreams of is to have something be sustainable and go on for a long time and now, we're sitting with something like that in the Exploratorium. We're almost 50 years in. How does the governance work? How do you guys keep the mission vibrant and alive and even though Dr. Oppenheimer has long since gone?

Shawn Lani:Yeah, he passed in 1985. He used to say that the Exploratorium was anarchy and Frank was the anarch and there was a certain kind of a glue that he could bring just through kind of force of personality and his intellect was somebody once said, "Walking through the Exploratorium was like walking through Frank's mind," but in fact the places evolved a lot since frank has passed. And I think that was also by design because just like we've always treated visitors as part of the equation, staff has always felt like it was part of their job to generate new ideas and to figure out new ways of engaging with audiences increasingly diverse and in new ways and on subject matters that are important to them. When I first got there in '93, we were doing some work with the National Science Foundation, which is a long-term supporter.

But I was kind of surprised at the number of people doing things that I didn't think at all were related to the Exploratorium. And eventually, we had a Body Show, we had shows about memory, we looked at our Light and Color and Sound exhibitions, we renamed them Seeing and Hearing, thinking more about how people are not only sensing the world but perceiving it and the acts of perception is active. You're construing, you're making sense of the world as you find it. And so reframing the world is actually a really powerful tool for allowing people to see things in a new way, and then from that moment forward, carry that with them. It's not something that happens in the museum for that moment, which is static, it's dead when you leave. You might pick up some information, but that's just information. A way of seeing the world is far more influential I think.

And actually, it's far more respectful because what we don't do is say, "This is the right way to look at the world." What we do say is, "Have you thought of it this way? Have you thought about how when you look out at the Bay, say it just all looks like a bunch of water," right? But the long story behind that is where it comes from, the push and pull of the saltwater and the ecologies that live there. And once you tell that narrative, for a lot of people, I think it builds an appreciation for a way of looking at the world that's more animated. It's more animated and it's actually, it's much more fun. It's much more interesting. And so I think that's the way that we've drifted over the years as we added more and more program is how do we do that more? How do we connect with people in such a way that they feel like they're a little different from after they've brushed up against us? And likewise, I think the museum needs to feel like, "Hey, we're being changed by our visitors as well because we're in conversation."

Ali Nazar:Yeah. And it's so appropriate. I think for the spirit of the Bay Area because I always think of us being kind of like the furthest on the west of the Western civilization and kind of able to question everything. That's kind of where we're at and just geographically we're the most newest of all the cities to come. And so we can kind of look back and say, "Well, should we think about it this way? Should we be thinking about it that way?" And Exploratorium really embodies that kind of spirit.

Shawn Lani:Yes. It's easy to take for granted, especially if you grew up here and I know you're raising some children and once you have kids you start to realize like, "Wow, we are in the middle of so many things." We watch movies, there we are. You hear stories or you see movements come out of the Bay Area that are global. And I've been lucky enough to travel a lot because of the Exploratorium. We have a lot of global influence from the Bay Area and the Exploratorium itself. We do global consulting, we do a lot of professional development. We train over a 1,000 teachers a year. We've trained over 30,000 teachers since the inception of the Teachers Institute. And that's the kind of influence that that continues on. So those 1,000 teachers teach 15,000 students, right? There're 30,000 teachers. Think about all the kids they've reached. And all we've done is given that teacher a new tool, a way of using inquiry and informal approaches to learning about the world, and then they take it and move that forward.

So that's the kind of impact I think the Exploratorium, for me, in my mind, when I think of it, I don't think of it as a place as much as a kind of movement and I think it's continuing to be a kind of movement. We occupy space in people's minds sometimes because they went there as a kid or because they bring their kids or they ... But there's something about the place that just glows, and the more we can export that glow, the better. Right?

Ali Nazar:Yeah. Bottle it up.

Shawn Lani:Bottle it up. Yeah. But don't commercialize it. There's that beautiful blend of sharing. It's a kind of sharing.

Ali Nazar:Yeah. And the amplification effect is so much what's so special about founders in my mind is someone has this idea in their brain and if they're successful, like Dr. Oppenheimer was, look at the amplification effect and how many lives he's touched just because he pursued that thought in his brain of, "Well, people should have experiential learning."

Shawn Lani:That's right.

Ali Nazar:And look what's happened since 50 years later.

Shawn Lani:That's right.

Ali Nazar:And it's really amazing. So we're talking to Shawn Lani, he's a Director for the Studio for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium in San Francisco right here on Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. Shawn, so let's talk a little bit about the Studio for Public Spaces. So there're lots of programs there, but before we get into that, I want to just get a little bit of your background. Tell us about yourself.

Shawn Lani:Well, I grew up in the Bay Area primarily. I was born in San Leandro, lived in Oakland and so definitely a Bay Area person. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time out on a ranch in eastern Nevada and was inspired by just the raw nature of that landscape. And, in fact, it brought a lot of that work into the Exploratorium and that way of seeing those landscapes. And I studied at Davis and really enjoyed English and art history. I studied a lot of things. And the funny thing was I wasn't a science guy. I was handy and I could fix things on the ranch, but mostly when I was supposed to be digging holes, I was staring at springs or watching birds and so it wasn't a great rancher either.

So somehow I landed up, ended up at the Exploratorium. I got a Masters in Museum Education and Design at John F. Kennedy University. And I just never thought I could work in a place that wonderful. I didn't even think to apply and it popped up, but it seemed faded. I lived only three blocks away from it. I was just extremely lucky to find it and that place changes over time. We've gotten a lot bigger and its mission has shifted not unnecessarily. And I was able to slot into a place and then move through the museum and experience what the global impact is like, what it's like to work locally. And then in 2008, we opened a show at Fort Mason. It was an outdoor Exploratorium and rather than introducing phenomenon like we do in the museum, we capture it out there.

We framed it and we looked at the landscape as kind of a subject matter and tried to do these conceptual framings that allowed people to see the world in a new way and was really hooked, really fascinated with the idea that you didn't have to go inside the museum to have a really poignant experience. And, in fact, I was struck by how different it was. I wouldn't say better, but having it be a part of your daily life seemed to make it much more accessible and far more interesting as a developer, as a designer because then it's like you're in the ultimate a flea market, right? Like, "What's that? How did that happen? What the?" All these questions come to mind and sometimes when you dig a little bit, you find the most amazing answers. We're curious, Pete Richards, a senior artist at the museum, he'd heard the Golden Gate Bridge moved up and down because of the heat.

So we put a GPS tracker on it. We talked to Leica. We really did our research and it turns out, sure enough, it moves up and down a foot or two depending on the temperature of the day. And there's kind of a mean temperature in the middle. So we put a scope on the bridge from a mile and a half and actually, it's three miles away with a little line in the middle. And we called it a bridge thermometer if it was a hot day, the bridge would be low and it was a cold day, the bridge would be up. And it was just such a lovely kind of observation that Pete had brought along. And then we were doing evaluation later and a runner came by and she stopped and she looked at it and she took off and our evaluator chased her down and said, "Well, that's usually not a good sign if somebody just does a glancing blow."

And she said, "No, I just like to see where the bridge is every day when I went by, I want to see what the bridge is doing." So it was such a wonderful thing to think of reframing that big static thing in the distance, not as kind of a thing that doesn't move, but a thing that's being responsive to temperature. When the sunrises, it takes a couple hours for the bridge to heat up and sag. So there's all these beautiful thermodynamics going on and it's that kind of animation that really caught our attention.

Ali Nazar:That's super cool. I mean it reminds me of just in such a hyper-creative environment of almost in I would think like Saturday Night Live where you have all the writers around pitching ideas. There're like lots of ideas. How does it work? Because I would think that the staff there is super-creative and comes up with all sorts of interesting thoughts like that.

Shawn Lani:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:How does the process of getting something approved and funded go?

Shawn Lani:Well, we prototype a lot and you might have an idea, but if you don't test your idea, nobody's going to believe you. And the ultimate test is how the public responds to it in the final form. And so one of the things we do, we utilize evaluation in a more formal way but also in an informal way. We tinker about, we try things. And that's true of most subject matters. Even as we move into the social sciences and thinking about stereotypes and thinking about how do you exhibitize some of those experiences? You don't really know until you go out and you try it with people. And the beautiful thing about that isn't that there again to prove or disprove what you thought was right they're most likely going to inspire you to do something that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of. That collaborative effort extends far beyond your immediate development team. I mean we might beat each other up about whether we think it's a good idea or not, but that kind of healthy criticism can only really be verified by the end-users.

Ali Nazar:Sure, which is very much part of the spirit of San Francisco tech life. Lean startup and 20th-century design, hi-tech.

Shawn Lani:Starting in '93 there was no tech, there was no ... I didn't have a computer on my desk. If you wanted something, you called the old guy that worked at the part shop and you told him what you needed, right. But the language started to come from tech eventually started to seep and some of it was familiar and some of it sounded kind of, I wouldn't say naive but there was the beginnings of that ... Because that kind of iterative culture, the prototyping culture takes a long time to get good at. Not 20 years, but a few years, and the lessons that tech learned sometimes it's in this much shorter cycle so they'll learn part of the lesson. But the full lesson really is, I think, it goes to the maturity of an organization and as a creative person and who's able to work with others and also listen, it's not an easy thing, but when you get it right, you understand why it works.

Ali Nazar:Yeah. Well, so back to your story, so you joined in 1983. It sounds like you just lucked into the perfect job for you, which is congratulations.

Shawn Lani:Yeah. Yeah.

Ali Nazar:You've been there for a long time now, so that's awesome. So you're right now on this Studio for Public Spaces project. So tell us about that and how it came to be.

Shawn Lani:Yeah. So as an exhibit developer, back then, you would develop exhibits for the floor for people have experiences they learn from those. It was something that you learned. It took about five or seven years I got my chops. And that project at Fort Mason was interesting because we had this kind of instrumented landscape, right? You can walk through and experience it, but what I think we missed, I found out later with subsequent projects, is that places have people in them and those people are part of that landscape. That social landscape is also the raw material of future experiences, future exhibits, you can instrument the landscape, but you can also help instrument people's behaviors and how they're moving through the world. And so after we opened Pier's 15, 17 we did the first living innovation zone on market street.

And that was through the Mayor's Office of Innovation with Mayor Lee. And we worked with Neil Hrushowy over in city planning and Paul Chasan and others. And it was a remarkable experience because we put a pair of listening vessels, which are eight-foot-tall dishes done by Doug Hollis on Market Street. At the Yerba Buena Lane and nobody really knew what to expect, including us. But we had this notion that that inquiry's a natural kind of social lubricant and that there were lots of rules on Market Street. We know this, right? You don't look people in the eye, you don't talk to anybody, you don't put your bag down. It's like a human freeway. Right? So we put these listening vessel's kind of diagonal to that freeway and people really responded. I think they responded in a better way than I had even hoped.

They were willing to talk to strangers. They were kind of joyous and celebratory. They would watch each other play and figure this thing out. They tried to find out where it was plugged in. So these dishes, you can whisper in these dishes and hear each other from 50 feet away very clearly. And it's also very intimate because it sounds like somebody's just in your ear because the way the sound is focused with the parabolic dishes. And so after that, the Studio for Public Spaces was founded with the goal of bringing more of these inquiry-like experiences to public spaces because the audience is vast. The impacts are amazing really in terms of how it shifts people's behavior in real-time, in real space in cities. And so since then, we've done many projects throughout the Bay Area, San Leandro. We're working on a project currently on Fulton Street between the Asian Art Museum and the library across from City Hall.

And to bring this methodology work the way they explore terms work traditionally the prototyping, the integration, the respect for the learner to a public space. And I think especially with social sciences, understanding how we construe the world, what science can teach us about how we understand things and how and why we process the world. Exploring that in a public space, especially when it challenges you in Plaza and The Civic Center, it's improving. There're a lot of things going on there now, but there's also a lot of friction. It's right in the middle of it. I mean you had to put a pin in San Francisco and say, "Where's the middle of it?" It's right there. And it's a powerful medium to be in. And I'm exploring topics like how do we categorize it? Why do we so immediately categorize people? Why do we stereotype folks? What biases are driving ourselves? This is all a way of thinking about the human mind.

What you know of the world is directly proportional to what you know of yourself. And to understand how we're thinking on a meta-level is incredibly empowering because it allows you not to be a victim of your own fast-twitch thinking. You can slow down and you can reconsider. You can look for the options when you look at a scene. Not only, "This is what I think about what's happening," but, "Why am I thinking that and what other alternatives might there be?" So it's been fascinating and I think also humbling to have such a dynamic mix of emotions, cultural issues, and then trying to do this place-making maneuver in the middle of a place that is kind of inherently inhospitable.

Ali Nazar:We're speaking with Shawn Lani, he's the director for the Studio for Public Spaces at Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco here on Methods of the Madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. I'm your host, Ali Nassar, and Shawn, so you're talking about different projects that you might be doing in different municipalities across the Bay Area. So take me through how does that work? I mean, this sport team can't just parachute in, "Hey, we're going to do this," right. "Get out of the way."

Shawn Lani:That's the worst case, man. You never go where you're not invited. That's the rule.

Ali Nazar:How do you guys build these projects?

Shawn Lani:Yeah. They're very complex networks of partnerships. So that city is one level, but we also have formal relationships with the Gladstone Institute, NASA, the Smithsonian, UC Davis, UCSF. We've worked on the Resilience by Design design challenge with Tom Leader through the Bay Observatory. And so those networks have been forming over the last 50 years, literally. And I think the last 30 and even 20 years, we've really accelerated that partnership. There're strategic partnerships, meaning that we have partners where we benefit from each other's expertise. And we've always brought in a lot of Ocher Fellows, which is a program where we have visiting scientists who've had Nobel laureates, we've had Poet Laureates, right? We've had MacArthur Geniuses, four or five of those coming through the program in order to do enrich the work.

And I think that's the natural mode for the museum now is to have many, many receptors. Because what we can do, I think, is make some of that really important work, especially when it comes to the environment, environmental issues. We can provide a platform for people to understand that the complex issues that are going on around them, and a way of sorting through the information and figuring out what they think is important and not telling them what's important. It's not that kind of advocacy. It's advocacy for the visitor to feel like they understand what's happening. So they could make a more informed decision, which is very much about one of the tenants of Frank's founding, the Exploratorium was we need an informed citizenry to have a healthy democracy. You can't have it without that.

Ali Nazar:Now, more than ever.

Shawn Lani:Now, more than ever. And I think the need continues to increase. It's never gone away. And the notion of learning is what the body of work that we learn about is a bunch of facts. That's not true. It's the cultural pursuit of what we collectively value and that shifts over time. So only through partnerships and only through this way of thinking can the Exploratorium remain relevant. So with our work in the Studio for Public Spaces, we're working with urban planning. We work with the mayor's office, we worked with REC and Park, we work for the Trust for Public Land. We work with other people that are invested in public spaces. So oftentimes there're community groups, groups like Green Streets over in Buchanan Mall, Citizen Film.

They're smaller nonprofits, but they play an incredibly important role as guides in how to make this work. And guess what? Mayor Lee used to say for the first [inaudible], "We're going to make this a bureaucracy-free zone, so you guys going to come in and do ... So it turns out it was actually bureaucracy-light. There was still a lot of bureaucracy.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, that was aspirational.

Shawn Lani:Yeah, it was aspirational, but you got to reach and it got us in, right? It got us the gig. But to be able to go through those permitting processes with DPW or with MTA and have a good working relationship and even watching those departments bend a little when they're not totally sure it's going to be okay. I think it's really a hopeful sign. I mean there are so many good smart people working in city government. I know that sounds crazy, but I am shocked at how dedicated they are and how willing they are to bend a little and to help things that might not be known as this is going to be a total success. But the way we work is two-year pilot projects very often. It's worth the risk to find out does this help? Are we prototyping a way for the city to work in the future and what can we learn from this lesson? It's heartening to see how many people will support that kind of activity.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, I think so much as to do with the vision. So we had Ben Davis on the program who was the thought leader behind the Bay Light Shore Bay Bridge. He had to get a few different municipality organizations together to make that happen. But the vision was so strong and everybody loved that bridge. So they were like, "Yes." Like, "I get it, we want to do it," and I think you guys have that power too because you have a vision that people, like you said, you feel it's not just about when you're at the museum, it's about the next day or that night.

Shawn Lani:Right.

Ali Nazar:I feel that with my kids when we take them there because we're members of the Exploratorium and they talk about it for a few days afterwards, "Remember that thing? Remember that thing?" And it's a vision that's so powerful that I think is galvanizing for people to get behind.

Shawn Lani:Yeah. I always joke, "It's almost a cheat when you come into a situation that's in a public space." The Exploratorium comes and like, "Oh, you guys are here." Oh, he's always so happy to see you. Like, who's going to fight with Exploratorium? Like, "We don't fight. We just want to come here and have some fun and talk about things," and so it really is a leg up to build on that many years of goodwill and tradition and I think that's super important. When it comes to brand value, people don't want a brand the Exploratorium has always striven or strived, striven? Stroven?

Ali Nazar:Strove? [inaudible].

Shawn Lani:Thank you. To be authentic, it doesn't lie to people. I mean, I remember, this is how crazy we can get. If you have a box of wires, it's always a question whether or not you could make it out of plexi or you should make it out of wood because if you can't see it, you might not trust that it's not just going through or connecting up. So oftentimes we'll reveal the back of an exhibit just so people can kind of test it. And I wish government was like that actually, that radical transparency, right? "Is it doing this?" And like, "I don't know, try it out." I mean if you can't tell, that's not a good exhibit. Right?

That's not a good experience if you're wondering, you're scratching your head and wondering if somebody just put one over on you. And so we have always tried to have that kind of relationship and that really pays off when we go for partnerships. They sense that we're not going to get between what it is that they think is important and what they're trying to show and what the visitors are going to take in. We're all about facilitating that understanding.

Ali Nazar:Well, it's, it's super cool work that you're doing and thanks for coming in this morning. I do want to ask you just next year's the 50th anniversary?

Shawn Lani:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:So it's such an amazing institution that we're all proud of in the Bay Area. What can we expect for next year to happen at Pier 15 or across the Bay Area?

Shawn Lani:Well, we'll be opening the Social-Psychology show in July of 2019 and so that is going to be 12 to 14 exhibits outside Public Space Installation and that's going to be paired with a show about identity at the Exploratorium. This is a really interesting move I think for the museum to move into the social sciences because they're not traditionally easy to approach. But I think they are incredibly relevant, given the time. And so those are going to be two peak ... Now, we also have a lot of ongoing programming about the environment and ecologies. So we have conversations about landscapes, we have Lab and Lunch.

We just hosted the climate summit, several talks about the climate summit, so we're going to be continuing that work moving forward. And also our After Darks, are every Thursday nights and those are heavily programmed. So we're kind of like a piece of broccoli in that way. You have the broccoli sprout but then you have a lot of other little things going on and then you have a lot of other things going on. But those are some of the big lobes but there's lots of other stuff going on as well.

Ali Nazar:Okay, I'm sure everybody knows how to get ahold of the Exploratorium, so how about for the Director, for the Studio for Public Spaces? If people want to learn more about that, how would they learn more about it?

Shawn Lani:Well, just type in Studio for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium, and you'll see the website that has a list of our projects and also a lot of the thinking and the framing of the work. We have some publications there as well, and an ongoing blog.

Ali Nazar:Okay, well, great. Well, we've been talking to Shawn Lani this morning, the Director for the City for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Shawn, thanks for coming in.

Shawn Lani:Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much.

Ali Nazar:And you've been listening to Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM, University of California, a listener-supported radio. I'm your host, Ali Nazar. Thanks for listening everybody and have a great Friday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Lisa:This is Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host Lisa Kiefer. Today, I'm speaking with Andrew Brentano, the Co-Founder and CEO of tiny farms. Welcome to the program, Andrew.

Andrew:Oh, thank you.

Lisa:You are the perfect guest for a show about innovation. Co-Founder of Tiny Farms. First of all, tell us what Tiny Farms does, and what is the problem you're trying to solve.

Andrew:We are basically, precision ag company. What we're doing, is we're trying to grow a whole lot of crickets. The big problem we're addressing is that we basically cannot produce enough animal protein to keep up with the demand. We've got growing population, growing per capita consumption and also a really huge growing pet food market, which is consuming a huge amount of meat. Traditional meat consumption, your livestock, your pigs, your chickens and your cows, is a hugely resource-intensive endeavor.

You're concentrating huge amounts of feed, 25 30% of all the crop lands on earth are just growing feed for animals. Then we're also grazing about 25% of the earth's surface for cattle. There's really not any room to expand. We really have to find these higher efficiency ways to supply that animal protein that people need.

Lisa:You have found, what I think is a pretty unique niche in this market of cricket farming, protein farming. I know the argument about cattle using energy and all of that, but what you're saying is that dogs, chickens, all of these other animals. If we can feed those animals your product, we can make equivalent savings, maybe?

Andrew:Yeah. We can offset these huge resource environmental footprints. If we take the pet food example, in the US, we're feeding about 30 billion pounds or more of meat just to dogs and cats every year. That market is growing like 6% year over year. If we can, instead produce crickets, which use just a tiny fraction of the food and the water and the space required, we can essentially get more from less. We can meet this demand without just completely overextending our current resources.

Lisa:Okay. When did you start this company?

Andrew:We started in late 2012. We initially got the idea ... of course it took a while for markets to actually developed. We were a little bit ahead of the curve. We've been-

Lisa:Do you mind if I ask how you came to this? Were you doing market analysis studies or looking at big data? How did you figure out that this was a niche?

Andrew :In that moment, what we were doing was really just thinking about big existential problems. We were trying to decide what should we be spending our time and energy on and had really started drilling into food production. Everyone's got to eat. It's the largest and most resource-intensive endeavor that humans do on this planet and also one of the most immediately going to be effected by climate change, population growth, et cetera. What we realized when we were diving in was that meat production was this huge concentration of where all the resources were going, It was the most inefficient place and also the highest demand. Everyone wants to eat meat. We thought, wow, this is-

Lisa:Yes. Especially with incomes going up.

Andrew:Exactly.

Lisa:First thing they want to do is have the steak that you and I have.

Andrew :Exactly.

Lisa:Right?

Andrew:This westernization of diets around the globe, all these trends were pointing to essentially meat crunch in really the relatively near future. People need this protein, but how do we produce protein more efficiently but that still has a high-quality nutritional profile? We're looking at agriculture. We were looking at algae and fungus. Then we came across a body of research about insects and their nutritional values and their production efficiencies, historical uses around the world, and it just made so much sense.

Lisa:Who's using crickets? I assume some of these countries have been using crickets for thousands of years, is that correct?

Andrew:Yeah. Particularly in Oaxaca, in Mexico and some other Central American cultures. There are long traditions of eating crickets and grasshoppers, both interchangeably. A number of African cultures also like different types of crickets that are native, crickets and katydids. Then in Thailand, more recently, I think there's been a long tradition of eating different insects. Very recently, there's been quite a growth in, particularly the cricket market there. The Thai government has even, for the last 10, 20 years been sponsoring and promoting this. There's now tens of thousands of small backyard cricket farms supporting those largely street markets.

Lisa:How did you start? Were you right out of college, or what was your motivation here?

Andrew:I guess, I was about two and a half years out of college. I went to University of British Columbia, studied absolutely unrelated to agriculture, a program called cognitive systems. It was AI information systems, linguistics. What that did instill was this mindset of systems thinking. I'd worked an AI startup. My Co-Founder Jenna, who's now is my wife, had been working for an artist. She went to Rhode Island School of Design. She was managing an artist business in LA. We'd been living in LA for a couple of years and decided this wasn't fulfilling. This wasn't really where we wanted to be or what we wanted to be doing.

That was where we took a summer, went and started doing freelance web development just to pay the bills and took this time to decide what are we going to do with our lives that's can be meaningful. That's what led us into this. It was important that, you we found something that we could do that would apply our creativity and actually be meaningful. H

Lisa:You know how we're all about organic and sustainable. How does that fit into the cricket industry? What do they eat? How do you follow the path to make sure they're sustainable and that they're organic?

Andrew:Yeah. The great thing about crickets is they'll eat anything, pretty much. I mean, they're basically omnivorous. Anything you could feed a pig, or a chicken, or a cow, or basically any other kind of animal, they can eat. They really have a very high, what's called feed conversion ratio, which is basically the amount of food they have to eat to grow a certain weight as a ratio. With crickets, it's about 1.7:2 pounds of food to get 1 pound of cricket. To give comparison, chickens are more like 3:1. Pigs are between 4 and 6:1. Cows can range from 8:20:1, depending on what the diets are. Even if you fed them the exact same thing you fed a commercial chicken, you're using much less of that feed.

You've got this corresponding, way much smaller land and water footprint. Then because they are so efficient converting that feed and they'll eat anything, we can then take food by-product streams and agricultural by-product streams and incorporate that into the feed formula. That can range anything from stale bread, which commercial bakeries, large scale ones are producing millions of pounds of stale bread or excess bread. They essentially overproduce by about two what they actually sell. Then we can also go to agricultural processing. There are huge streams of by-products, like dried distiller grains that come out of ethanol production, spent brewer's grain, juice pulp from the citrus industry.

Lisa:The wine industry.

Andrew:The wine industry. Exactly. Almond holes are huge one in the United States, or in California alone, we're producing 150 million tons of almond holes every year.

Lisa:They're kind of like goats in the insect world.

Andrew:Yeah.

Lisa:They'll clean everything up.

Andrew:Right. All we have to do is balance the different inputs, so we get the nutritional profile that grows the cricket efficiently We understand that pretty well. We can basically say, okay, we'll take 20% of this, 30% of that, 50% of that, blended altogether, and then we can just grow our crickets.

Lisa:You been able to notice differences in tastes of your crickets by what you're feeding them?

Andrew:One of the reasons crickets are so good, is they have a pretty mild and generally pleasant taste regardless what you feed them. You definitely can tell different things. You'll get either a nuttier cricket. Sometimes it'll be because the cricket is a little fatty or a little leaner.

Lisa:What would you feed it to make it fatty?

Andrew:You could feed it, for one, more fat or a higher carb diet. You can make it leaner by having more of a protein and fiber formulation. We've fed them carrots in the past and they turn just a tiny hue, more orange. They actually pick up a tiny bit of that sweeter carrot taste.

Lisa:Do you ever feed them chocolate?

Andrew :We've never fed them chocolate. It's a bit expensive.

Lisa:How do your vegetarian or vegan customers feel about this product? Do they have any concerns?

Andrew:There's two camps. There's one camp where folks are vegetarian and vegan primarily because of sustainability issues, humane treatment of animals, ethical issues. Those are exactly the issues that we're targeting and trying to address with cricket production. Those folks are generally very, very receptive to incorporating insect protein into their own diets. What's really exciting for these people is when we say, yeah, did you know there's dog and cat food you can get with insect protein? You've got vegetarians and vegans, but they still have a pet cat that they have to feed meat too.

It creates a real dissonance for them. It's an amazing solution for those folks. Then there's folks that maybe have a religious or spiritual aversion to actually eating living animals. For those folks, that's fine. That's a different set of issues. Insects are living things, and if they decide that's not what they want to eat, it's not the product for them. We generally think that we have a great solution for the folks that really see the fundamental environmental and ethical issues around meat production.

Lisa:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, we're speaking with Andrew Brentano, the Co-Founder and CEO of Tiny Farms. Tiny Farms is building the infrastructure for a new category of our food system, cricket protein, one that will play a big part in ensuring future food security. Talking about your products, and you just covered one, which is feeding pets. What other products do you have, and who are your customers?

Andrew:Our core business is the design and development of a high-efficiency cricket production facility. That's really the big problem. We want to get crickets out into the market, but how do you do that? How do you produce enough crickets cheap enough that it can actually become this bulk commodity that could reasonably offset traditional meats. In a way, our core product is actually this method for producing them and then also how do you process them into palatable ingredient.

Lisa:I read that your method was unique in that it avoids the monoculture of most agriculture.

Andrew:Yeah. One of the fundamental problems that we see in traditional livestock production, farming in general, is that you have these huge centralized productions, whether it's, say 10 thousand acres of soy beans or if it's a mile-long chicken house with 4 million chickens in it. When you think about ecosystems and biology, that's a really unhealthy ecosystem. Also, it's incredibly risky because if something comes in there that's a blight, or past, or a disease [ 00:10:48], it just can, wipe out everything very quickly.

The approach that we take is a more distributed model where we'll set up smaller production units, and then we'll put them around in a cluster, in a region. That way, you never have this just huge, enormous centralized population issues of just having a lot of animals in place, breathing and pooping and eating and all of that mess and the potential for pollution. Also, that you significantly reduce this biological risk.

Lisa:Crickets get disease and die out like other ...

Andrew:We've been lucky. We've never had a blight. We have a very tightly controlled environment, keep the biosecurity levels pretty high. There have been, in actually a different species of cricket than when we grow, there is a disease. It only affects crickets. There's no risk to any people or animals but that have gone around and wiped out some of the cricket farms that have existed in the US. One of the cool things about insects, again, too, is that biologically they're so different from people that you don't have the same zoonotic transfer of diseases the way that you've got your swine flu or your bird flu, which can jump to humans. It's this huge health risk.

Every animal has diseases and parasites that can affect them. The cricket is so different. Its life cycle's so different. They don't carry that kind of disease that could jump to a human. It's much safer. Even with a mosquito or a tick, they're transmitting a disease, because they're actually holding some like human blood, Mammalian blood in them. It's not that that animal itself actually gets a disease that can transfer to a human.

Lisa:You have a cricket powder, but that's primarily for feeding animals. Does it also go into human-

Andrew:We produce this cricket protein powder. It's completely food grade. It's completely perfect to use in human food products or pet food products. We focus on the pet food market, because we see a really, really big opportunity to offset a lot more of the consumption in that space. There are a ton of human food products out on the market, and a bunch of being produced right here in the Bay Area. Chips and snack foods and energy bars and baking flour mixes and stuff that-

Lisa:With cricket powder.

Andrew:With cricket flour. Yeah. Exactly. In that market, it's awesome. It's a really great way to start introducing to people this idea that they can eat crickets. Long-term, the best possible thing is we stop eating animals as much and we eat much more insect protein. Put it in something that people want to eat anyways, crunchy, healthy snacks.

To really have the big impact we want to have, we have to figure out how we can start really replacing the meat that we're using as quickly as possible and as big of volume as possible. That's where we're really focusing on the pet angle. There's actually another company here in Berkeley called Jiminy's. They've released a line of dog treats. The only animal protein in that dog treat is cricket protein. Dogs love this stuff.

Lisa:You don't have any retail human products yourself as a company.

Andrew:We do supply another brand that is currently distributed at the Oakland Days Coliseum and it's called Oaktown Crickets. In the cricket production, get more into how that works. You harvest most of the crickets at a certain stage in their life when they've got the optimal protein content to make into the protein powder. Then you maintain a chunk of your population to go through adulthood and breed your next generation. Those breeders, we call them, they've got a higher fat content because they're, particular the females, are full of eggs. They're really, really tasty.

In Thailand, those are the prized ones that people want. They'll fry them up and sell them in the market. For the protein powder application, they're not very useful. What we do is, those get sold for culinary use. We had local chefs use them in different specials, and then they're being fried and seasoned and packaged in little snack packs and distributed at the Colosseum. [crosstalk] Extra tasty.

Lisa:One of your main goals is to address the challenges that are facing agriculture, what we just talked about. Are there any other challenges that you've experienced as you enter this marketplace?

Andrew:One of the big fundamental things about how the agricultural system is set up is it's very linear. You extract resources, you dig up phosphorous, you create nitrates and nitrites for fertilizers. You pour them on the fields, you grow these plants, you harvest them out, you process them. You throw away the byproducts. Then you feed the animals, and the animals create a huge amount of poop. You don't know what to do with that. It just sits there. Then the animals get eaten. It's this very just linear extractive system of production.

That's part of why we're having so many issues with soil degradation and waterway pollution. We're also just running out of phosphorus, which is its whole own problem. What we really see is an opportunity for insects is to help start close some of these loops and create more of a circular system. If you've got your wheat industry and it creates all of this chaff when you process the wheat into flour ... well if you can efficiently convert that, instead of just say composting it or throwing it out there or using it more inefficiently to feed dairy cow, you can turn that into a really high-quality protein, putting that through the base of the cricket as a bio converter.

We've spent the same amount of nutrients and water to produce all parts of that plant. If you only eat a little bit of it, that's not very helpful. Then the cool thing about the crickets is, the waste they produce is completely dry and stable. They're not releasing-

Lisa:The cricket poop.

Andrew:The cricket poop.

Lisa:What is it called?

Andrew:It's called frass. That's the technical term for insect poops. It's basically the consistency of sand. If you go by Harris ranch or the big feed lots, and they're just-

Lisa:Hold your nose.

Andrew:Exactly. Producing huge amounts of nitrous oxide and methane and ammonia. These are greenhouse gas emissions that are many, many times more potent than CO2. Instead, you've got this very, stable, safe product that can be applied directly as soil. It's actually produced dry. You can cost effectively transport it. You-

Lisa:And amend your soil with it.

Andrew:Exactly. Yeah. You can take it back to the source of production, or you can put out into gardens, community gardens, home gardens, anywhere. The frass, which is our by-product, we've just recently gone through the approval process with the California Department of Agriculture to sell that as a retail fertilizer. We now have one pound and five pound bags of that.

Lisa:Where could I find that?

Andrew:We've just listed on Amazon, and we're starting to starting in the Berkeley area. We're getting it out to some of the local gardens stores. We're hoping that we'll have a chance to really take on a life of its own. Besides that, we're also able to sell that wholesale to bigger garden and farming operations in the area.

Lisa:How did you find the funding to start all these operations?

Andrew:Definitely, financing is the least fun and hardest part of starting a business. We were able to bootstrap the first several years. We were just actually building websites on the side while the initial pieces came together. Then when we realized that we really understood what the business model was going to be and what the growth plan was, we were able to go out and convince a handful of angel investors to come in and put enough money that we were able to launch our first R&D farm down in San Leandro.

That was really just a process of getting out there, both going to pitch events, networking, going to basically the places where the kind of people are who care about sustainability and the food system, who understood the issues. Actually, a number of our investors found us, which was great. We had enough of a presence on social media and had been featured at a few events that they said, "Hey, I really believe in what you're doing." They understood why, and they knew it was going to be a long road to get there.

They were very supportive. Then, from there, once you've got initial traction, then as you need more funding, you go out, find ways of getting in front of the right people and being able to tell that story and show how the payoff is going to happen down the road.

Lisa:Everybody's pretty aware. It's a huge problem.

Andrew:It's amazing how the awareness and focus changed from 2012 to now, because when we started and we're going out there saying, hey, insect protein is this amazing solution. People just raised eyebrows. Now, we go out there and people say, "Yeah, we know, but how are you going to implement it?" Which is much better conversation, because we actually get right into the meat of what we're doing and how we're solving the problem. We don't have to worry about spending half an hour just convincing someone that they should even take us seriously.

Lisa:Who are your major competitors?

Andrew:The industry is so new, The demand for the product keeps growing at a rate that, essentially, we're not able to directly compete, because we're all just trying to keep up with the scaling of demand. There's a farm down in Austin, Texas, which has gotten some great funding and done some cool stuff, building their operation. There's a big operation up in Ontario, Canada that's been one of the major suppliers in North America.

Lisa:Internationally?

Andrew:They're a good number of companies in Thailand and Southeast Asia, starting to be a little more presence in Mexico. When we think about it, for us to saturate this market, they're going to have to be thousands of cricket farms, right? We have this concept of a benign competition. When they have a win, that's good for us, because we're growing this opportunity together. It's much less cut throat than you find in more matured and saturated markets.

Lisa:There's room to grow in it. Yeah. For sure.

Andrew:Huge, huge opportunity.

Lisa:Have you had any negative response?

Andrew:Certainly. Particularly early on, you got a lot of ew, yuck. What are you doing? What's great about people, is that we really quickly get used to ideas. The same folks we would talk to six years ago and say, "Hey, we think you should try eating crickets." They'd say basically, "No way in hell would I do that." My test is based. I'm sitting on an airplane and the person next to me says, "Hey, what do you do?" How does that conversation go? Six years ago, went one way. Now, Lyft drivers or just folks out of the coffee shop I say, "Hey, we do cricket protein." Almost immediately, people now start telling me why it's a good idea. I mean, it's amazing how the public perception has shifted. I think it's really just a consequence of exposure.

Lisa:If you can find a tasty way to get protein and not have to pay what you pay for meat ...

Andrew:The market's so young. It's still a pretty premium product. The price point is similar to that of an equivalent meat product. So like the cricket protein powder is basically a dried ... It's 60% protein, 20% fat. It's this really nutrient dense product. It costs similarly as if you bought meat and dehydrated it. What that would cost, 15 to $20 a pound, which seems like a lot. Then you think you're reducing that down. You can get your fresh crickets. The costs of production is similar to your higher-end meat now. What's great is that's with really barely any R&D that's been done over the last few years.

Lisa:Barely anybody in the marketplace.

Andrew:Barely anyone in the marketplace. You think about what the price of chicken and beef is right now. That's the result of 50 years and trillions of dollars. Our industry, with five years and a few million dollars of development, is already getting competitive with meat. In the next few years, it's just going to soar below that, which is great. Up until very recently, there'd never been really any indication of actual opposition to the idea. It was just niche enough. No one was really worried about it. We did interestingly have the first high-profile shot across the bow.

What happened was, late in July when the Senate was starting to go through their appropriations bill process, Senator Jeff Flake actually introduced a amendment that would specifically ban federal funding for research projects around insects for food use. This really caught us all off guard, what seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere.

It was very strange and essentially someone had brought to the senator's attention that a handful of small innovation grants had gone out from the USDA to companies that were developing food products with insect protein. It's not the kind of thing that someone like Jeff Flake would just pick up. Someone out there suddenly cared enough to bring that to his attention. We don't really know exactly what went on there.

Lisa:You don't know what went on.

Andrew:Not yet. Yeah. We have an industry group. There's over 90 companies in the United States, Almost every state, there are companies working with insect protein, whether it's for pet food or animal feed or for human food, both on the production side and the product side. This is actually an amazing opportunity for American economic growth, American leadership. It's very surprising that something would come along like this that you would want to block federal research funding. Specifically, it's the small business innovation research grants that were being referenced. We've received some of the same grants as well.

Lisa:Was that this year?

Andrew:This was just a few months ago. Now, very luckily, that amendment was not accepted into the final version of the appropriations bill. We realize like, oh, there are people that care enough to start throwing up some roadblocks. That's actually a good sign for us that we're being taken seriously in that way.

Lisa:That's a positive way to look at it.

Andrew:For us, anytime that we have a conversation with someone and I convinced someone that they should take this seriously or they should go to A's game and buy a pack of crickets or they should go to the pet store and get some Jiminy's treats that they can feed their dog. That's a huge win for me.

Lisa:Yeah.

Andrew:Every time I'd ride in a Lyft or sit on an airplane, that's an opportunity. Yeah. I mean, there's already been this level of engagement, which is great.

Lisa:I wanted to ask you about other projects. One of them I'm intrigued with is the Open Bug Farm.

Andrew:In a earlier stage of our business development, we actually developed an open source mealworm farming kit, basically for people at home who are interested in this. The could either buy the kit from us or the designs were online. It was all off-the-shelf components, so they can make it themselves.

Lisa:Like having chickens in your backyard.

Andrew:That was the same kind of idea.

Lisa:Instead, it's crickets.

Andrew :Exactly how we were modeling it. In fact, a lot of the people who were interested in that, wanted to grow the mealworms to feed their chickens. That project didn't end up being really good business model for us. We didn't keep selling the kits, but we kept the designs for it out there. What was really great was around that project, we just launched a forum and a huge number of people came to that forum and asked questions and provided expertise. We were able to share some of our expertise on the topic.

Now, there's this huge information resource that just has tons and tons of discussion about raising different kinds of insects at different scales, from commercial to home scale. We're really happy that exists out there. We get a lot of inquiries from people that say, "Hey, I just want to start growing some crickets for myself or some meal worms" or whatever it is. We don't have time to help every one of those people individually. We're able to say, "Hey, go over to the forum here, because there's just this huge drove information."

Lisa:What do you see in the future?

Andrew:Looking at the future, there's just so much room for growth. For us, the key thing is just get more commercial cricket farms built over the next years. Get the production ramped up, instead of just being able to have niche premium pet treats on the market. There can be full-diet pet foods and then maybe even your mainstream pet foods. If the Walmart brand of dog food could have even 5% cricket protein instead of meat, we'd be saving millions and millions of pounds of meat, hundreds of millions of gallons of water. It's all just about being able to grow the production volume to be able to meet those demands.

For us, the path to doing that is not just building cricket farms ourselves but to be able to take the facility that we've designed and package that into a turnkey product that we could then license out to a production partner. Because we got a lot of inbound inquiry from folks that say, "Hey, I would love to start a cricket farm, but I don't really know how." There's great opportunity to leverage that and provide a ready-made solution where you can say, "Well, here's the setup and here's the training. We can provide the technical support." Then you can grow these crickets, and then we can help you process that into the protein powder that we can get out to the market."

That's really the longer term growth strategy, is being able to engage with all these partners. Over the last several years, we've had hundreds and hundreds of people contact us, say, "I'm a dairy farmer, but I want to get into crickets." A lot of folks with agricultural backgrounds, maybe they grew up on a farm, but their parent's farm isn't quite big enough to support them coming back to work on the farm. They say, "Hey, maybe I could throw up an outbuilding and we could have a cricket farm there."

There's a huge amount of opportunity for people that essentially have cricket production as their own business and be able to feed into the supply chain where we can have this huge impact offsetting meat. Fundamentally, what we are after is really converting, like I mentioned, this linear extractive food production system into a circular sustainable food production system. Right now, we're just so overextended on our demands, on the very limited resources that we have available in terms of water and soil and arable lands and even just nutrients available to grow crops.

We're going to stop being able to produce food. When we talk to folks in the chicken industry or the beef industry, they're actually all very interested in the potential for the insect protein in the feed for their animals. Because all these animals are not just eating plant-based proteins. Almost all the animal feeds out there also have some amount of fishmeal in them, which supplements key amino acids and fats that you don't find produced in plants. Fishmeal production is a really shocking industry. We basically send out ships that scoop up indiscriminately, all the small fish. Particularly, they'll go scoop up whole schools of anchovetas and anchovies. Then they just grind that up into a powder and send it off into the animal feed formulations.

Essentially, all that farmed salmon is basically eating wild fish that's been caught and ground up and pelletized and then fed back to that salmon. Something like 90% of fisheries are on the verge of collapse or have already collapsed. There's a huge amount of interest in introducing insect proteins into animal feeds. The FDA and AAFCO, which is the organization that controls what can go into animal feeds, have already approved soldier fly proteins, which is another insect that's being widely grown for use in salmon feeds. Now, the FDA has also just indicated that they think that should also be allowed in poultry feed. Poultry feed is one of the biggest consumers of fishmeal in the land-based agriculture.

Lisa:Do you have a website that people can go to?

Andrew:Our company is Tiny Farms. The website is just www.tiny-farms.com. Yeah. You can check out our basic offering. You can contact us through the contact form.

Lisa:Are you selling tiny farm hats, like you have on? [crosstalk]

Andrew:We've printed short-runs of shirts and had these hats made just for the team. There's enough interest that I think we'll get those listed up there soon. We just have to start thinking about the food system, in terms of a self-sustaining system and not like feel good sustainability. This has to be a system that can continue to produce food forever.

Lisa:There are a lot of us living here, and we'll need every tool we can use if we want to keep enjoying it.

Andrew:Yeah. Exactly.

Lisa:Thank you, Andrew, for being on program.

Andrew:Thank you. This was fun.

Lisa:You've been listening to Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks.

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Transcript:

Lisa Kiefer:Method to the Madness is next. You're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer, and today I'm speaking with Eric Leenson, the co-director of Business Alliance for a Healthy California. They believe that healthcare is a human right, and that all Californians should have affordable, high quality, cost-effective healthcare.

Eric Leenson:Hello. Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Kiefer:You have always been a person I think of around sustainability, and in this new venture, you're working to make healthcare more sustainable as we move to the future, all of us citizens of the US. Tell us about what you're doing at the business alliance for Healthy California.

Eric Leenson:Essentially, we created the Business alliance for a Healthy California about a year and a half ago, to support the implementation of a single-payer type system here in California. You know, we can get into discussion about what single payer means, but it was kind of a response to what's been happening in Washington, where we see all kinds of major roadblocks, as far as protecting people's healthcare and in not even talking about expanding it. So here in California, we have a very strong group of people who have been pursuing single payer healthcare for a long time.

And back in 2017, the California Nurses Association sponsored a bill called the Healthy California Act, Senate Bill 562, which would bring a single payer healthcare to the state of California, because we just don't see it in the cards on a national level for long time. But here we are in California, as everyone likes to say, the fifth largest economy in the world. We should be able to provide quality healthcare to all of our people.

Lisa Kiefer:But, as we all know, this SB 562 is dead in the water right now.

Eric Leenson:Right now, it's dead. Basically-

Lisa Kiefer:So tell us what happened, and what's going to happen.

Eric Leenson:Okay. The bill garnered really amazing grassroots support and it passed the Senate, so it was approved by the California State Senate. In the assembly, it was blocked primarily by the Speaker of the Assembly, who did not want it to come to a vote.

And he didn't want it to come to a vote, in my opinion, primarily because it's embarrassing to the Democrats. There's no Democrat these days in California, that's not "for single payer," but you know, we have people that really support it and are ready to implement it, and others who say they support it, because politically it's convenient.

Part of of where the Democrats are going, certainly in California, but also nationally, is in the concept of a Medicare For All-type program. So what you have is a situation where, on the legislative floor, if the bill had been brought up, then the Assembly people would've had to take a vote and show whether they supported this for real or not. And it was much easier just to sort of stall on it.

It wouldn't, he didn't allow it to go to committee. Even for further review and discussion, they were claiming, "Well, the bill's inadequate," and there's no doubt there was more that needed to be flushed out in the bill, but that's part of what the Assembly's supposed to do through their committees, and they wouldn't even allow it to go to committee.

At this point, there is no bill. What's happened is, I think everyone's got their attention really focused on the elections coming up in November, particularly the Governor's race.

Lisa Kiefer:Right. I want to talk to you about John Cox, the Republican candidate, versus Gavin Newsom's position on single payer.

Eric Leenson:Well, it's pretty much black and white-

Lisa Kiefer:Yeah.

Eric Leenson:In many ways, although there's always gray with, when you talk about politicians, the black and white part is that John Cox is absolutely opposed to any form of single-payer.

Lisa Kiefer:Is he fiscally opposed? I read that there's a range of, from $330 to $400 billion is what people are saying it's going to cost Californians.

Eric Leenson:Well, so what I would say is that as a Republican, he's opposed to it not only financially, but ideologically. He does not believe that government should play an extensive role in healthcare. So these would be the same Republicans that want to cut Medicare, because it's government-controlled, in a way.

Finance, I should say, not controlled. Gavin Newsom has been a strong proponent of single payer, and in fact has a history of introducing healthcare reform when he was mayor of San Francisco. So he has been an outspoken proponent of single payer, and that's the black part.

The gray part is, well, when you actually get elected, what do you do? Because health care represents 20% of the entire economy of California, and nationwide, as well. You're not talking about a small budget item, you're talking about an industry, whether it be pharmaceuticals, hospitals, physicians, insurance companies, that affects a huge swath of people.

And when this gets out, you know, it gets discussed. It affects people's interest dramatically. I mean, basically ,if single payer were to be implemented, there would be no role, not much of any role, I should say, for private health insurance any longer. Can you imagine how many people would possibly lose revenue, because they sell insurance, or the insurance companies are making a lot of money.

So, you have the problem, whenever you're dealing with trying to make major reform to the healthcare system. And it's extraordinarily complicated. I don't mean by any stretch of imagination to try to simplify it. You're going to have huge vested interests. Everyone uses healthcare, so everyone's concerned about what their healthcare is going to look like as a consumer. And you have, as I'm suggesting, a tremendous number of industries and businesses that basically survive on the revenues that are generated through healthcare.

So it makes it difficult, and it makes it difficult for an elected official to really implement. They're going to need strong support from backers in the legislature, and insistence by the general public that this is beneficial.

Lisa Kiefer:So I was thinking about this, a great percentage of money will be saved. It seems like if inefficiencies will be gone, so you're going to save a lot of money, but all of those people who deal with the phone calls to the insurance company are without a job. So whoever has to figure out this fiscal analysis has to incorporate job loss to the state. Very complicated.

Eric Leenson:It's very complicated.

Lisa Kiefer:And do you know if that cost-benefit works?

Eric Leenson:Well, let's put it this way. Virtually every study that's been done, that I'm aware of, shows enormous cost savings through single payer. If you look at the numbers right now, the administrative costs of private health insurance are around, between, let's say 10% or 15% administrative costs. For Medicare, which is, in fact, single payer-

Lisa Kiefer:Single payer, yeah.

Eric Leenson:The administrative costs are 3%, so you're talking off the bat, you know, 10-12% savings. Just by streamlining that system, number one, and part of that administrative savings isn't only on the insurance side of it, you know, who's financing. It's also on the doctor side.

You realize that in this country, every doctor has to hire me. I mean, every two doctors have to hire at least one or two administrative people, just to deal with the billing. I mean, we all have the experience of going to the office, and, "Are you covered by this, are you..."

They spend endless amounts of time, instead of giving healthcare, on the phone, arguing with the insurance companies, whether or not there's coverage. This simplifies that entire thing.

Number two, the other large savings is that if there were a single payer, they would be able to negotiate pricing, with hospitals and with pharmaceutical companies, because right now we pay so much more in the United States for healthcare than any other country industrialized country in the world. It's kind of ridiculous. I mean, we're spending, often, more than two times as much as any other country and not getting results that are even as good as those countries. It's all about the cost.

Lisa Kiefer:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay area innovators. Today I'm speaking with Eric Leenson. He's the co-director of Business Alliance for a Healthy California. He's working to educate and organize the business community to support universal health care.

Eric Leenson:Back to your question, there have been studies done, and serious academic studies. You can imagine, this debate's been going on for decades, and in the case of California, let's just hone in on California.

Yes, the cost of cost of healthcare in the system right now, everyone kind of agrees on, is about $400 billion a year. And the opposition, the single payer has done a great job in propagandizing the role of who's paying for what? So they come out with this phenomenal number of increase in taxes.

Well, let's walk through the numbers. So let's say it's $400 billion right now. That's $400 billion being spent, where you still have 3 million people in the state that don't have insurance, and you have 14 million people in the state who are underinsured. Under insured means they "have coverage," but the deductibles and the copays are so high, they can't afford to use their insurance. So they don't go for the help they need.

Lisa Kiefer:It's just catastrophic, at that point.

Eric Leenson:Yeah. Yeah. Well, it often gets a catastrophic, because they're not going on a preventative basis. But what people don't understand is, right now, of that $400 billion, 70% is already being paid by government, 70%, if you add in, you know what the federal government is paying through Medicare, through Medicaid, which is huge, especially in the state of California.

What local governments spend, think about it, all the government employees there are in the state. All the firemen, all the policemen, all the teachers, they have health insurance, right? So you're talking about 70%.

What you're really looking at funding is 30%. Well, where does that 30% come from? That comes from premiums, and typically, a lot of it is paid for by employers, and some of it's paid for by employees. And some of it is just paid by individuals who aren't employed at all.

Well, it's all about how you look at the pie. The numbers show that you could probably insure, you could probably implement a Medicare For All type package in California, for everyone, paying less than what we're paying today. So there's savings in the system. The problem is, where are those savings coming from?

And that is, I pay premiums for my health insurance. Is that a tax? I mean, we're playing a little bit of a semantics game. Someone's paying this money. There's $400 billion in the system. That's what we're paying. So why do people say, "Well, if we use single payer, and it costs," let's say, 400 billion, it'll actually costs less than that.

Why do they say, "Well, we have to raise all these new taxes?" Well, it's because, instead of paying healthcare premiums, people will pay taxes. That's the difference. So based on studies, serious financial studies, it appears that single payer is financially feasible, without the scare of all these new taxes. The money's there.

Lisa Kiefer:But will we continue to get the money from the federal government, if we win on single payer here in California? Or would it be cut off?

Eric Leenson:Okay. It is dependent upon continuing to receive the funding that exists in the system today.

Lisa Kiefer:Both state and federal.

Eric Leenson:Correct. One of the largest stumbling blocks is about the federal portion, because it's not impossible. In fact, it's very likely that Washington, under this administration, would refuse to go along with this. There are what are known as waivers available for states to experiment and do different types of financing within healthcare, still using federal money, but it's got to be approved by the federal government.

So it's not impossible. But when people raise the question about, "Well, it's going to be a really hard slog to get this done, because we're not going to have the federal government." Well, the reality is that shouldn't prevent us from doing it.

I mean, it's like saying, "Well, we shouldn't regulate our car emissions, because we got to fight the federal government." What's the difference, in some sense? And the reality is, given the breadth and depth of the healthcare system impact on the overall economy, this is not something that's going to happen overnight.

So it makes, in my opinion, lots and lots of sense, to get California prepared, to be able to launch a program. And by the time we have the laws in place and things happening, then we'll hopefully have a new type of administration in Washington, and see about those possibilities. But it's going to take time. If we don't start preparing now, we're really going to be caught cold.

Lisa Kiefer:Are there other states? There are other states that are experimenting with single payer.

Eric Leenson:Not really.

Lisa Kiefer:You know, I used to lives in Massachusetts, and that was-

Eric Leenson:What? That's Romney Care.

Lisa Kiefer:Okay.

Eric Leenson:Now, I mean, the difference between single payer is literally, you're taking private insurance companies out of the mix.

That's where a lot of the savings come from, because I would contend that they provide no value. What they are are middlemen who collect a revenue, for basically not doing anything, and they game the system so that they can maximize their revenues.

This is why you see, I mean, you know, getting into the business part of this... In the 562 bill, because you asked, there were clear provisions within that bill, there's a certain amount of money allocated for job retraining. So you asked about the people-

Lisa Kiefer:Yes, whenever there's a disruption, people retrain jobs.

Eric Leenson:Yeah. There's tremendous concern. No one wants anyone to get hurt on this, but you know, it's the reality. Okay, well, should we continue hiring longshoreman to unload ships by hand, and not use technology?

Lisa Kiefer:Right. So I think you explained what single payer actually is.

Eric Leenson:Well, [crosstalk 00:14:29]-

Lisa Kiefer:Why don't you say it again, for people who... unless you don't really care.

Eric Leenson:Okay, what's really important to understand, single payer is not what people think is "socialized medicine." It's not government control of the services, medical services, that people receive. Right now, the way Medicare works is, the federal government is the financer of this. They set the rules of what can be paid for certain services, devices-

Lisa Kiefer:Prescriptions-

Eric Leenson:Prescriptions, things like that. Although, unfortunately they can't set the prices for prescriptions.

Lisa Kiefer:The Veterans Administration can.

Eric Leenson:Yeah, the Veterans only, but it has nothing to do with the actual provision of medical services. So I, as a Medicare recipient, go out and I pick the doctor and the plan that I want, and the government does not control that. And all of the services I receive are run by individual plans, clinics, doctors. It's not owned by the government.

So, understand we talk about single payer, it's only the financing part. It's got nothing to do with the benefits that you receive as a consumer. If anything, it will help regulate them, so that you get better services, and you know what you're entitled to, rather than having to play this game.

I mean, you probably know, that you can go to eight different hospitals in the same area, if there were eight hospitals, everyone would have a different price.

Lisa Kiefer:Right.

Eric Leenson:And there's no way of knowing what you're getting, what the value is, and the prices are extreme. It could be 300% more in one place than the other, with absolutely no difference in service, right?

Lisa Kiefer:So you've got the support of nurses, and do doctors generally support this too? I would think they would.

Eric Leenson:I would say there are a number of doctors who do, and then there are many who don't, because they fear that since the government will regulate pricing, that they may not be as profitable as they were. I would say it kind of breaks down to the primary care physicians, for the most part, are in favor.

Think of it this way, in some sense, and I don't want to take this comparison too far. Kaiser's like a single payer. Kaiser has hospitals, Kaiser has medical staff, so they're providing a one-stop service. You Pay Kaiser, and then you have all your medical care taken care of. Unfortunately, Kaiser is also an insurance plan. So Kaiser is against this, because-

Lisa Kiefer:And they have high deductibles, depending on what you choose, I mean-

Eric Leenson:Yeah. They're an insurance company, and unfortunately, the insurance company kind of dominates, I think, when it comes to the issue of single payer. But no, I think in the cases you're describing, there would be huge benefits.

We allow doctors, and you talk to Canadians, doctors for example, who've been here and been there. It says, you know, single payer gives them a chance to really be doctors, instead of administrators and paper pushers.

Lisa Kiefer:And I've saw something like this, I watched a wonderful documentary that I got through you.

It's called, Fix It: Healthcare at the Tipping Point. And in these next few minutes, you'll see the history of healthcare. It hasn't always been like this.

Speaker 3:In 1969, Blue Cross Blue Shield had a community rating. Everybody paid the same rates. It was a truly nonprofit, and in every state, they were, Blue Cross Blue Shields were regulated to serve the public interest. That's what we gave up on.

Speaker 4:Some executives at life insurance companies saw an opportunity to come into this area, to come into this space, and make some money. So they came in and started offering cut-rate policies, but only to those who were younger and healthier.

Speaker 5:The group of people subscribing to Blue Cross Blue Shield became less and less healthy, more and more expensive, forcing the Blues to raise their rates more and more. And by the late '70s, early '80s, in every state in the union, the old Blue Cross Blue Shield model was dying. These companies were going bankrupt. Nonprofit companies couldn't make it.

Speaker 4:For-profit insurance companies over the years became so dominant that they actually controlled, came to control the healthcare system. They bought a lot of the Blue Cross plans. A lot of the Blue Cross plans now are for-profit companies.

Speaker 6:The US has, we're on the shortest length of stays in hospitals of any country, and we're told we have to shorten it. We go to the doctor about 4.2 times a year. The Japanese go 13 times. So we're told that we use too much healthcare, and we have to restrict access to save money, when in fact, we're below average when it comes to comparable countries.

Speaker 5:The whole system is set up to discourage people from using healthcare.

Speaker 7:The insurance companies are specialists at figuring out ways of covering less or paying less, the sicker you are.

Speaker 4:So not only are people having to pay more money out of their own pockets for care in these plans, or they're finding that the choice of providers has been narrowed.

Speaker 8:As a primary care physician, I have selected the specialists that I'm most comfortable working with. As it stands right now, I've got to say to my staff, "Check if Dr. Brown is a member of this patient's insurance." And so, referrals are so much more limited in the current system.

Lisa Kiefer:They interviewed doctors, they interviewed business people, and that was the fascinating part, and I wanted to talk to you about that as how healthcare today affects small and medium-sized businesses. What have you seen as the challenges it presents?

Eric Leenson:It's good that you've differentiated small, medium size from really big businesses, because they're two different animals entirely.

In the case of small businesses, single payer would be a huge boon to small business.

Lisa Kiefer:And why is that?

Eric Leenson:Because under the Affordable Care Act, they're, they're not required to have insurance unless they have, I forget the exact numbers, either 25 or 50 employees. So you have a lot of small businesses, let's say 20 employees that basically are on their own, have to deal with the private health insurance market, and simply can't afford to have insurance.

So right now, as I recall, of small business, only about 20% provide any health insurance for their employees. And it's not, they don't want to, it's, they really don't think they can afford it. So a single payer plan would really be beneficial to small business. Their employees would therefore have health insurance.

So what that means, in the case of small business, is first of all, it gives them a boost in competition. Because right now, what happens, you're a small business, and you can barely pay a wage, but you can't provide benefits. Well, guess what? If you get a good employee, if you're able to get a good employee, qualified employee, as soon as they get an offer at a bigger company that's providing even a comparable wage, but providing benefits, they're gone.

Lisa Kiefer:They take it. Because people need benefits.

Eric Leenson:People need benefits, because you can't exist in this society.

Lisa Kiefer:And they have children, and-

Eric Leenson:Right. So, basically, it would sort of level the playing field for them, in a way that doesn't exist today. It would also be a real boon for entrepreneurs. Because a lot of people that would like to start their own businesses don't do it, because they're afraid of leaving where they are, because I have health benefits. And they can't go out on their own, and you know, they're taking a risk already by opening a business. You're doubling that by the question of providing for healthcare.

Now I should mention this. I mean, the Affordable Care Act, it was passed,, Obamacare has helped the situation. I mean, a lot of people are able to get health insurance now, that are entrepreneurs, that weren't able to previously. But that's all up in in question.

Now this will be tremendously beneficial for small business. Large business is a different story. It's a different story, because again, they have the resources to function within the system. Warren Buffett, the famous investor, has called healthcare the tapeworm of the US economy. You can't have a globally competitive economy that has 20% of the cost of healthcare.

I mean, right now, the US businesses that go to Canada, and have the, the single payer system there, you know, are thrilled, because it reduces their costs significantly.

Lisa Kiefer:And they can put that money toward capital investments, and-

Eric Leenson:Employment, the whole, the whole business.

Lisa Kiefer:Yeah.

Eric Leenson:But you've got a situation in which, and in fact, there are a lot of initiatives now, starting up, of private companies that are beginning to do their own health insurance.

I know there was a very, there's a very famous new grouping formed by Warren Buffett, I'm going to get this wrong, I guess Microsoft, and Citibank, I guess, that is looking into how they can provide health insurance for their combined million employees. Because they can't fathom the present system as being so expensive, that it's just not workable for them.

Lisa Kiefer:And so, what you, backing up to what you said about large. So you're saying, it doesn't affect large businesses so much, because they have so much more money

Eric Leenson:Well, it does. I mean, it's gotten to the point where it is affecting large business so much, that they're looking for alternative solutions, but at the same time, they're not really interested in doing a generalized single payer type route for the whole society. They believe, first of all, for the businesses that don't want to do single payer, they believe they can handle it regardless, because of their incomes.

And the other thing that's important is, a lot of the larger businesses, especially in like a Silicon Valley situation, they use health benefits as a perk to get employees, to attract employees. So there are a lot of large companies that don't want to give up the control of healthcare, because they see that as a way they provide value for their employees-

Lisa Kiefer:Right.

Eric Leenson:In a competitive mode. The other aspect is, you know, ideologically, there's generally a distrust of government. And even though you can show the numbers till you're blue in the face, they're going to raise this as, "Well, you know, we prefer a private enterprise solution. We don't trust government. The quality's going to be bad. Who's going to really be responsible?"

So those are the issues. But at the same time, as I started to say, it's gotten so out of control, the costs, have gotten so out of control, that businesses now are beginning to set up their own alternative systems, in which they will negotiate the prices of services.

For example, now you have companies that are contracting with specialized hospitals around the country, whereby, if one of their employees needs a specialized operation, they send them to that hospital rather than a local hospital.

Lisa Kiefer:To most people here, it's a no brainer. Is there anything that could go awry with a single payer system here? What could go wrong?

Eric Leenson:What could go wrong?

Lisa Kiefer:Yeah.

Eric Leenson:The people putting it together could be incompetent, and really not make it as efficient or as beneficial for the general population. I mean, it's got to be done carefully. It's complex. You run into a situation where you're now giving all these wonderful benefits to citizens. What happens in the case of an economic downturn? The government's on the hook now.

Lisa Kiefer:Yes, in this case, it would be the state of California.

Eric Leenson:Well, if there were single payer in California.

Lisa Kiefer:Yeah.

Eric Leenson:Yes, yes.

Lisa Kiefer:And Jerry Brown had said that he, in 10 years, he predicted a serious downturn.

Eric Leenson:Right.

Lisa Kiefer:I don't know what he was basing that on specifically, but-

Eric Leenson:Right. But then, I think it's important to look at values. I mean, you look at what a government is for, what our society should stand for. Well, it seems to me, that healthcare is a right, that everyone should have access to good healthcare. And if you have to pay for it, well guess what? You have to pay for it. And you figure out how a society should do that.

Maybe there are other parts of the budget that are not so important as healthcare might be, especially for people that don't have any, or are really underserved.

Lisa Kiefer:Well, what is it people should be looking at?

Eric Leenson:We have the elections coming up now in November. I would really encourage people to look at the candidates, and what their standards are on this issue of single payer.

And again, unfortunately, you have to go below the surface, because rhetorically, all the Democrats are going to be it. But within the Democrats, you have people that really want to push it now, and others who are gradualists, that say, "Look, we can't do anything for the foreseeable future. It's not worth the time."

Well, that I think that's a defeatist attitude that we have to, you know, look out against. I mean, I know, here in this Assembly race, we have a situation like that, where there's one candidate who probably is mouthing the words, because they sound good, and one who's really serious about it. Then I would say, once the elections happen, to really hold people's feet to the fire, if they're elected based on the fact that they're going to do something, really, don't let them get away without doing anything. Just sort of, you know, work.

There'll be groups organized to put pressure on legislators to continue to fight for it. I mean, again, it's going to be a process. There's so many stakeholders involved in this issue. There needs to be coming together of the various groupings.

And one thing that has happened, you're probably not aware of, is that in the last budget, there was a $5 million allocated to set up a commission to study how to implement what they call unified healthcare financing. Now, they specifically didn't say single payer, but we believe the intention is to certainly consider single payer within that. Because it'd be very interesting to see-

Lisa Kiefer:You're not involved in that-

Eric Leenson:How it goes.

Lisa Kiefer:Are you, on that committee?

Eric Leenson:Oh, no, no, no. This is going to be, this is a five-person committee, that three people were selected by the Governor, one by the Assembly, and one by the Senate, and we're hoping to get at least one strong single payer representative on that grouping.

We're going have to see, because again, it could be, we've seen it before. This could be a bluff, where they put together a commission to study something, which means, "Okay, we don't have to deal with it for two or three years."

Lisa Kiefer:"We're still studying it."

Eric Leenson:Because we've got a commission going on it, right?

Lisa Kiefer:Yeah. Well, Eric, if people have questions for you, or do you have a website you would direct them to?

Eric Leenson:Sure. They can go to the Business Alliance for a Healthy California.

Lisa Kiefer:And I have to say it's a good website. That's where I found the link to the documentary, Fix it. I really highly recommend it to anyone, and you can watch it on Vimeo, online and everything, and-

Eric Leenson:And we're sort of in the, in the process of repositioning, because as I say, things are going to change dramatically, once we see who become the new elected officials, particularly on the Governor's side, and the poss... It's going to open up a whole, especially if Gavin Newsom wins election, a whole new set of possibilities to be explored about really trying to do something positive.

Lisa Kiefer:Well, thank you for being on the program.

Eric Leenson:Sure. Thank you.

Lisa Kiefer:You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay area innovators. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back again in two weeks.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Ali Nazar:You're listening to KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM, University of California and listener supported radio. And this is Method to the Madness coming at you from the Public Affairs Department here at CalX, exploring the innovative spirit of the Bay Area. I'm your host, Ali Nazar. Thanks for joining us today. And with me in studio I have Jason Marsh, the founding editor-in-chief of Greater Good magazine. Hey Jason, how's it going?

Jason Marsh:All right, how are you? Thanks for having me.

Ali Nazar:I'm good, thanks for coming in. And so, we have lots of founders on of organizations and I always asked the same question to start because you usually create something because you see like a gap. You're trying to fill something. So what's the kind of the problem statement that Greater Good is trying to solve?

Jason Marsh:Sure. Well they're really to kind of at the heart of of Greater Good. And one is that there is a whole lot of great research and big ideas generated within universities like Cal, that never really see the light of day, never really make it out into the world and have an impact to improve peoples' quality of life, to improve relationships, to public policy or education. And so, Greater Good was really born to this idea that we should have a more of a bridge between science and practice. There should be ways where the fruits of research, should really make its way out to the public, to really benefit the public, improve public wellbeing really broadly and improve individual wellbeing, improved the way people relate to one another and improve institutions, like schools and workplaces and healthcare systems and and political systems as well. And really, the second animating idea behind Greater Good was that there's this fundamental misconception about human nature.

There is, has been a prevailing belief that we're sort of born bad, born aggressive, born antisocial. And yet, there was this emerging body of research over time really pointing to this more positive narrative about human nature. Suggesting that actually there are really deeply rooted propensities for goodness, for altruism, for compassion. And by changing that narrative and changing what people expect humans are capable of, we can really change behavior and really change some of those institutions as well for the better. So there was really this marriage of ideas that there's a real need to get the word out about this research coming out of academia, coming out of social science, to really change people's understanding of who they are, what they're capable of and in effect, provide a huge bridge between what the scientific community was starting to understand and what the rest of the world could really benefit from.

Ali Nazar:Wow. It sounds amazing and so needed in these times. And it makes me wonder about kind of the history of the science of happiness. Like that doesn't seem like a science, when you think about sciences. What is the history behind this study?

Jason Marsh:Sure. So, backing up, for decades really, for much of the 20th century, a lot of psychology and other behavioral, cognitive, social sciences were really focused on the roots of pathologies. The roots of why is it that people do evil, do bad things, how to institutions become corrupt. But starting, there had been this strain of research that really toward the late nineties started to take off and focusing on, let's look not just at human pathology, let's look not just to what's wrong with people, but really try to understand what can go right and how we can actually help people have a greater sense of thriving and happiness and wellbeing, both to address some of the deficiencies that we experience and also to take certain situations where people might feel like they are just sort of getting by in life and to really infuse a greater sense of thriving, of happiness, of wellbeing, to really create in some ways a more positive ripple effect through society as a whole.

And so, that there has been this growing movement, some call positive psychology, in some ways to distinguish it from other strains of psychology. Focusing really on happiness and wellbeing, and our center has in some ways built on some of that research, but we've also really drawn on work, not just on individual happiness and personal wellbeing, but really social relationships. And there's, at the same time, it's been a growing emphasis, not just on personal happiness, but on social relationships, on compassion, on altruism, really what makes people do good and what makes people feel good.

Ali Nazar:So that it's a relatively new science is what you're saying.

Jason Marsh:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:Late nineties, so it's a 21st century type of study.

Jason Marsh:Exactly. Yeah.

Ali Nazar:Interesting. Okay. So before we dive further into what Greater Good does, can you tell me a little about yourself? Like how did you come to become founding editor of a magazine dedicated to this topic?

Jason Marsh:Sure. Yeah. I sometimes think of myself as like the luckiest guy in Berkeley. I came out here in the early 2000s, about 2002, just at the time, the center ... At the time, the center was called the Center for the Development of Peace and Wellbeing. So it was a a real mouthful. And it was a bunch of psychology faculty who kind of knew, really broadly that they had this mission to take this new research of wellbeing, new research of compassion and generosity and help get it out to a wider audience. But they didn't quite know how to do that. They didn't have as much experience on the communication side, on the journalism side.

My background's in journalism, I got connected to the faculty. They basically invited me to pitch what I would do with some kind of publication focused on this research, on these topics. I had been doing something sort of coincidentally somewhat similar type of work in Washington, DC had been editing this more political journal on civic engagement and community building. A lot of overlap and so put together kind of my dream job basically for what I would do with a a magazine along these lines that I thought would really be beneficial and really make a big public impact and really help people. And you know the team, liked the idea, we developed the first issue as a pilot and that was published in 2004, and it's kind of taken off from there.

Ali Nazar:14 years later.

Jason Marsh:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:Still publishing, is it a monthly/quarterly, what is it?

Jason Marsh:So it started off as a print magazine. It became a quarterly, 2009 we shifted to be entirely online so it's now, Greater Good magazine is now entirely online. And then, since that time as well, we've grown other programs and projects out of Greater Good. So there's still the hub, Greater Good, greatergood.berkeley.edu, is still the hub of all kinds of content, thousands of articles and videos and podcasts. But we have also an events series, a couple of online courses, host of other programs, all basically focused on the same research.

Ali Nazar:Cool. Well I want to get more into kind of what you guys do and the breadth of it. Right now we're talking to Jason Marsh, he's the founding editor and chief of Greater Good magazine right here on campus at UC Berkeley. And before we get into the breadth of programs, I did want to get a little bit more into that founding story of the Greater Good center itself, because this show really focuses on this kind of spark of how do things grow from this one idea. So it sounds like you had could walked into an organization that would just kind of beginning, can you give us the history of it?

Jason Marsh:Yeah, so it's a really amazing and pretty powerful story. So, there were a couple Tom and Ruth Ann Hornaday, who graduated from Berkeley in the early sixties and then sadly in the nineties lost a daughter to cancer. And they both were trying to honor her memory and spirit and also build on their great love and affinity for Cal, and came to the university and said essentially, we want to do something to foster peace and wellbeing in the world and to honor her memory and honor ... But they knew it was really the great research and great ideas coming out of Cal. And they, together with George Breslauer, who was dean of social sciences at the time, came up with an idea for a center that'd be different than a lot of other centers at Cal or beyond, that it wouldn't just be focused on research. It would really be focused on taking research conducted at Cal and even more broadly and really focusing on getting that work out to the public. So it had a wider impact on families, on schools and society at large.

So there was sort of this initial brainstorming committee of a few psychology faculty at Cal. So Dacher Keltner was our founding faculty director, Steve Hinshaw and Phil and Carolyn Callan were all psychology faculty whose research in one way or another, all focused on, how do we not only address sort of what's wrong with people, but help them build really lives, positive relationships. And so, together came up with the idea of ... and I should say as well, Dacher and and Steve and Phil and Carolyn, all were committed in their own work, not just to doing really top tier research, but also really to find innovative ways to get that work out to the public and have it serve a real public benefit.

So, together they came up with the idea for a center that would do that, came up with the idea for a Center for the Development of Peace and Wellbeing. Fortunately, I was able to connect with them just at that moment where they're contemplating how to really get the center out to a wider audience, get the research out to a wider audience. And I should say a few years after that, after Greater Good launched as a print magazine, we changed the name of the center to be the Greater Good Science Center, instead of the Center for the Development of Peace and Wellbeing.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, Greater Good's a little catchier.

Jason Marsh:A little catchier, a lot of confusion about what exactly we did. And it was also really hard and long to say.

Ali Nazar:Okay. So you're ... Jason, you're someone who traffics in this knowledge of what makes people happy. So I have to ask you the question, what makes people happy?

Jason Marsh:A good question. So the simple answer is strong social connections and positive relationships. There's a line from the research though, sort of with a caveat, is a line from the research saying relationships are necessary but not sufficient to happiness, right? So, if you don't have positive relationships, it's going to be really hard to find true happiness in life. And yet, it's not just about relationships itself. There could be other factors, other extenuating circumstances, other things in play that could still hinder your happiness. But the relationships are often really a foundation and key starting point.

So out of that work, there's been a whole host of studies, lots of research looking at the benefits and also how do you then build successful connections? How do you build successful relationships that are so strongly linked to happiness? I should say as well, when we talk about happiness, we're not just talking about fleeting feelings of pleasure, and just feeling good. A definition that we use is, it is partly about positive emotion, but it's also about this deeper sense of purpose and meaning and satisfaction with your life, that goes beyond just moment to moment experiences of pleasure. So that's why our tagline actually for the Center is a science of a meaningful life. Right? This deeper sense of goodness or commitment to something beyond the self.

Ali Nazar:It's really interesting that that's the definition as you see it, because it speaks to the interdependence that we all have on each other, as opposed to like, you know, it's a very American, I think concept to be very independent.

Jason Marsh:Exactly.

Ali Nazar:To not need anybody. So, it's like our society is maybe not set up to be happy in some ways if that's what you guys have found in the science.

Jason Marsh:Right. Yeah, exactly. And that's, in some ways, makes the work somewhat challenging, we're running against some pretty big cultural currents. At the same time, that's what gets us up in the morning to feel like there is a need for the work, it isn't just something that people are already completely embracing, and you know that's already, totally dominant beliefs or practices in our culture there are these competing ideas. And don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot to be said obviously, for individualism and for independence, but part of our work and part of the research suggests is that it's really important to find the right balance, right? Between both pursuing your own personal goals and dreams and wellbeing and also recognizing the ways that you are also living in community. Your actions affect others and a lot of your wellbeing is both contingent on and helps to influence the wellbeing and contributions of others.

Ali Nazar:So have you ... I would think in the science of happiness, there's been studies of many different cultures and like this is a social science, right?

Jason Marsh:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:So that's a lot of like looking at long trends and surveys and stuff like that. So what are some of the learnings that have been found from other countries that maybe aren't as individualistic capitalistic as America?

Jason Marsh:Yeah, so you know, it's a great question. In the last five, 10 years or so, there's been, as the science of happiness has taken off and really gone global in a lot of ways, there has emerged a broader sense on happiness around the world. There is now a world happiness report, put out sort of in connection with the UN regularly, that often finds that the countries that are ranked the highest on measures of happiness, looking at several different factors, are the ones that have in some ways a a stronger egalitarian spirit, have a stronger sort of social democratic tradition of greater commitment to the common good and less inequality.

So, a lot of those values that are more community-minded, more civically-minded, often translate into greater happiness for individuals within the country itself. Which is sort of paradoxical, right? We often think about those two things being somewhat at odd, right? Like having to sacrifice your needs for the greater good. When in fact like actually having that commitment to the greater good, having a commitment to something bigger than yourself. Having a a culture and even on government that tries to foster that greater sense of like, we're all in this together. Actually, the individuals within those societies, do better, feel better individually as well.

Ali Nazar:Are there any places in the world, like if you're, you know, looking to be an expat American, you want to become a happy person, where should we go?

Jason Marsh:Denmark always ranks really high. Denmark, Norway-

Ali Nazar:Scandinavians.

Jason Marsh:And other countries. Yeah. Costa Rica does as well actually often in a lot of those surveys.

Ali Nazar:Is there a correlation between higher tax rates and happiness?

Jason Marsh:That's been looked at a little bit, because [crosstalk]

Ali Nazar:A little bit of theoretically that's the go for ... you're giving it to other people, right?

Jason Marsh:Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean there's, that the tax rate itself hasn't, I wouldn't say it's been proven as a definite cause or clear determinant of happiness, but certainly there were a lot of other sort of correlational data, a lot of other data suggesting that there is a strong relationship. At the very least, there's evidence suggesting that inequality is bad for happiness, right? And inequality is also bad for pro social behavior as well. Pro social as supposed to antisocial behavior, right? So in situations where there are greater power imbalances, it's not just bad for the person who is on the lower end of the totem pole, but also for someone who is in a higher level of status, there's evidence suggesting that they're actually their skills at connecting with other people being more altruistic, being more compassionate, those skills are actually compromised by their elevated status. So all the kinds of skills that you need really to make the kinds of connections that are linked to happiness are impeded by elevated status.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, it's really, really fascinating. We're talking to Jason Marsh, he's the founding editor-in-chief of Greater Good magazine from the Greater Good Science Center right here on campus. You're listening to Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM, I'm your host, Ali Nazar.

And so, one of the founding principles of this center is to bridge the gap between academia and the real world. And so, I was looking at your guys' website, you have a lot of programs for different types of real world applications. So I'd like to dive-in a little bit about kind of how you guys are delivering on that promise of the mission. So first let's talk about parents and families, it's one of the constituencies you kind of name on your website. And I'm a member of a family and it's hard, with little kids and all that. And so happiness is a thought that comes around a lot, because like you're kind of always yelling at some little kid to do something. So what have you guys found and how do you apply research to that setting?

Jason Marsh:Sure. So, I mean, one of the main things we've tried to do, really from day one, is to produce quality research-based materials, resources for parents who are often up at 2:00 AM, I've been in this case with a kid of my own, googling ways, looking for ways to be a better parent, to yell less at your kids, to be more understanding, be more patient. And so, part of our focus has been from day one, to really focus not just on common wisdom, conventional wisdom, but really what the research suggests are really effective ways to foster happiness and wellbeing within families. And also to raise kids with the kinds of skills that lead them to a sort of happy and meaningful lives. So from early-on we had produced, when we had the print magazine, a lot of articles on families and child development.

We had for a number of years a really popular parenting blog called Raising Happiness by actually a Berkeley PhD, Christine Carter, who wrote a book of the same name, that also proved to be a really great resource for parents. And more recently we've actually launched a new parenting initiative, we have a great parenting director at the center, Miriam Abdula who runs a program, where she's both writing about the science of wellbeing for parents and families. And also, running a program where we give out grants, sort of modest sized grants to different community-based programs around the country that want their work to serve parents and help their kids, help parents help their kids develop the kinds of skills that we know are linked to happiness and wellbeing and leading sort of positive, meaningful lives. So providing both funding and also helping to connect those programs to researchers who can help ground their work a little bit more deeply in the research to make sure that there's a really strong scientific basis to it.

Ali Nazar:Okay, cool. And tell me about some of the other programs. I saw there was a bunch of different people or constituencies that you kind of focus on, but tell me about some of the main programs right now.

Jason Marsh:Yeah, so like parents, we've also focused a lot on educators over the years. Really helping people who are trying to help kids, especially both so that they can provide useful resources and tools for kids and also to serve their own wellbeing. Right? I mean, educators, there's huge demands, a lot of stressors, a lot of evidence that there's really great burnout and turnover in the profession. So we've tried to provide resources both so that teachers can better serve their students and also so they can better serve themselves and make sure that they don't burn out.

So similarly, we've a whole host of resources on our website for teachers. We also for the last six years, have run a summer institute for educators. We've had teachers come from just about every state in the country, from dozens of countries around the world, to come to Berkeley for a week and get really a crash course in the science of wellbeing and explore together how they can take the science and really apply it meaningfully to their classroom.

And now more recently, our education team is developing a new resource coming soon, early in 2019, really to serve as a clearing house, really the best tools, best resources, best practices and strategies, so that to make it even easier for teachers to take all this wisdom from the science and really incorporate it into their classroom, into their school, without having to add yet another thing on their agenda to make it as seamless and hopefully as painless as possible.

Ali Nazar:Cool. Well it sounds like there's ... your website has a lot of tools it sounds like, for helping people to access the different programs you have. And then when I was looking through, there's a breadth of things you guys do. There's events, there's content being published and-

Jason Marsh:Yep, exactly.

Ali Nazar:So I did want to ask about, you talked about what makes people happy, but this science, I would think in the study of this would give you some tips on how to change someone who's not happy to become happy. Like that's the trick, right?

Jason Marsh:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:There's a lot of people out there who are weighted down by a lot of different stressors of all different types. So what's your recommendation? You guys have all access to all this knowledge. If there's a listener who's not happy, what should they do?

Jason Marsh:Yeah, so there are ... it's been a really big question in the field, right? Because early on, focus on happiness was like, let's just figure out if we can take people who are, you know, moderately happy and try to make them happier. More recently, there's been a focus on, let's look at more at risk populations and people even who are having suicidal thoughts are at risk for depression, and see if a lot of these same strategies can be effective for them as well. And fortunately, many of them have been. There are ... should say, like offer the caveat right up front for people dealing with serious depression or serious psychiatric problems, it's still, most important for them to see a mental health professional. The tools that we offer on the site are not supposed to be a substitute for therapy say.

But certainly there's a huge number of people who just feel like ... who are kind of unhappy, who are maybe struggling with maybe some symptoms of depression or just feel like they're not as satisfied with their lives they'd like to be. And so that, the research has found, successfully found that there are ways that they can actually benefit over time. One of the big focuses of that work has been on gratitude as a practice. Right? So there's been, for the last 20 years or so, a huge emerging science of gratitude. We focused on a lot, which in some ways is just really simply, recognizing and appreciating the gifts and good things in your life, that you might otherwise take for granted. Right? So they basic idea is, there are lots of positive things that might happen to us over the course of a day that we just kind of ignore or take for granted.

And by training our minds over time and focusing a little bit more deliberately on some of those good things, we can gradually kind of change the narrative that we're telling ourselves about our lives and change kind of the emotional tone of our lives, so that it ceases just to be about the ways that people have taken advantage of you or been mean to you. But you start to recognize ways that people have actually gone out of their way to be kind to you and nice things that people have done for you and you see yourself differently in relation to others. You see other people differently and you see sort of human nature differently as well. So, and at the same time, you're creating more of these positive memories, right? By actually noticing and appreciating and savoring more positive experiences, you're then creating these positive memories you can return to over time as well. So it provides both these greater momentary experiences of happiness and also these greater lasting memories and lasting resonating feelings of happiness as well.

Ali Nazar:It's so interesting that you say that we're speaking with Jason Marsh is a founding editor of Greater Good magazine. It's interesting that you say that because our society is moving to a place with less time and less and less time. So like you're talking about getting space to recognize positive things and have gratitude for it, but it feels like we have less and less space.

Jason Marsh:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a huge issue and I think that's been something we focus on in the last few years, especially is the impact of new technology, especially on wellbeing, on being able to hone a lot of these skills. Because yeah, I mean gratitude, there's also a huge emerging science, which a lot of people have read about on mindfulness. A lot of it places really strong emphasis on taking moments essentially to pause and notice your surroundings. Even savor and appreciate some of the good you might pass by otherwise. And that is really at odds both with the pace of our culture, with our work lives, with technology. And so, in some ways it's a great challenge, but in some ways it's calling for the need for these practices to be as widely spread and embraced or embraced as widely as possible because there are so many other forces that are pushing in the opposite direction.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, yeah, well the work is really needed. So I appreciate you coming in and telling us about it. I always end interviews Method to the Madness with the same question. This is an organization founded with a thesis to help bridge the gap between the academic research on happiness and getting it out there in the world. So, if everything went perfect five years from now, like what would the goal of Greater Good Center look like?

Jason Marsh:Yeah. So if everything went well five years from now, we've been asking this question of ourselves a lot lately. I think we would see a lot of the tools and ideas we're putting out in the world, embraced not just by more individuals. Like we were really pleased to see the growth in our organization as ... in general. We-

Ali Nazar:How many people work there?

Jason Marsh:When we are a print magazine, let's see, we have a staff of 14 but other Grad students and faculty who are involved. When we started as a print magazine, we reached 5,000 subscribers. We now have about 600,000 unique visitors to the website each month. We have an online course that's enrolled about 600,000 students as well.

Ali Nazar:Anybody can enroll?

Jason Marsh:Anybody can roll. It's a free course. Anybody can access the resources on the website, they're all free. So that's all really, really gratifying to see so many individuals really hungering for and based on our own surveys and research, seemingly benefiting from those resources. However, we feel like there's still just really huge needs in organizations and institutions. In our education system, in our healthcare system, in our workplaces. And we're starting more and more to work more directly with schools and districts and companies and leaders in healthcare, and where we'd really like to go and where we'd like to see the work go is to see it embedded even more directly to inform and really influence and shape the policies and best practices within some of those major institutions that just have influence over, millions if not billions of people worldwide.

Ali Nazar:Cool. Well, it's a great vision and mission. So thanks for coming in today, Jason.

Jason Marsh:Thanks for having me.

Ali Nazar:We've been speaking with Jason Marsh, he's a founding editor-in-chief of Greater Good magazine. And Jason, just a quick plug for people want to understand how to get involved and access these resources. Can you tell them how to do it?

Jason Marsh:Yeah, thanks Ali. Best place to go is our Greater Good magazine website, that's greatergood.berkeley.edu. And best way to stay on top of what we're doing and stay in touch is to sign-up from that site for our free weekly newsletter.

Ali Nazar:Okay, great. Well you heard right here, this is KALX Berkeley. I'm your host Ali Nazar and Methods to the Madness. Thanks for joining everybody, and thanks again for joining us, Jason, and everybody have a great Friday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Ali Nazar:You're listening to KALX Berkeley, 90.7 FM, University of California and listener-supported radio, and this is Method to the Madness, coming at you from the Public Affairs department here at KALX, celebrating the innovative spirit of the Bay Area. I'm your host, Ali Nazar, and today with me I have Shaun Tai on the phone. He's the Executive Director of Oakland Digital. Hey, Shaun, how's it going?

Shaun Tai:Hey, what's up, man? How are you doing?

Ali Nazar:Pretty good. Really appreciate you joining us today.

Shaun Tai:Oh, man. I'm happy to be here, man, and spread the knowledge. Spread that inspiration. I'm ready.

Ali Nazar:Okay. Great. I always start this program with the same question, because you are a founder of an organization, and founders usually come to the decision to put so much energy into something like starting an organization, and dedicating their blood, sweat, and tears to it because they see a problem in the world. Tell us, what is the problem statement that Oakland Digital is trying to solve?

Shaun Tai:Communities of color, specifically community college students, lack the same opportunities afforded to privileged communities. We focus specifically on artists of color, predominantly women of color, that are looking to break into a design career. 

Our problem really stems from, honestly, my own story of not quite the community college level, but the state level, of Cal State-East Bay, which I love. The teachers are doing a great job. They're teaching software. But they don't have the resources, and to be honest, the time, to be like, "Yo, check this out. Here's what they do at Twitter. Here's what they do at Facebook. Here's what they do at the local agency level." That's what Oakland Digital does, is we take those students and get their foot in the door, of not just tech, but business, non-profits, and some really cool creative agencies.

Ali Nazar:Cool. Okay. You alluded to a little bit about your background and how you got to this. Can you tell us a little bit about you and where you come from?

Shaun Tai:Man, well I come from the Bay Area, man. As anyone listening knows, the Bay is super real, authentic, dope, to be honest. It's just real. I've always wanted to do something real with my life. My dad passed away when I was two months old. I was raised by a single mother. Very small family. Born and raised by an entrepreneur. A woman entrepreneur of color. 

That was just the ultimate inspiration, from a work-ethic standpoint, of seeing my mom work seven days a week in Oakland, running a furniture design studio. Just seeing that work-ethic of not just her going to work, and showing up early, but coming back home and cooking for me and my brother.

Then, after she cooked dinner, sketching, so 10:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m., and faxing those designs to a factor in Hong Kong to just create some dope furniture. Create things. That mix of creativity, that mix of hard work, really passed on to me, and that's what gave me that spirit of not just creating, but doing something with meaning and purpose.

In my mom's case, it was making her customers happy with some great furniture. For me, it was how do I give back to the community with things that I love? Creativity, technology, community, social good, social impact. Really, my mom gets full kudos and credit for being my inspiration.

Ali Nazar:Nice. She sounds like an amazing woman.

Shaun Tai:She is.

Ali Nazar:She put that idea into your brain, and that spirit into you, but what about your training. Did you go have another job or a career before starting Oakland Digital?

Shaun Tai:Yeah, man, I'm, dude, I'm glad you asked. I know we were talking offline about music, and how powerful music is. In 2006, my partner Ray Luv, who's actually a Bay Area rap legend ... I grew up on Mac Mall, [inaudible] Tupac's music. We got together and created a YouTube channel when it wasn't hot. YouTube was cool in 2006, but it wasn't what it is now, with people getting billions of hits.

We created a show called Pushin' the Bay TV, where we chronicled the Bay Area hip-hop and rap history. Interviewing people from Shock G, Dru Down, Spice 1, Too Short, E-40, The Jacka, rest in peace, and all of these Bay Area rap legends who did not have an online presence, right? But we were the first to say, "Hey, why don't we do this and celebrate the beautiful rap history in the Bay?"

Ray Luv and I, we would just go around and interview people. We went down to L.A., East Coast. What I found was how powerful technology was. Specifically the YouTube platform. In one year, we received around 14 million views, and for that time, that was groundbreaking, and ground-shattering. What I found from talking to the young people was how influenced they were by these videos.

But what I learned about the game were some of the things that were, I don't want to say negative, but definitely not the things I wanted to promote. After a year of success, and things were going up, I actually decided to give it up, and to cancel, because I wanted to do something for social good. Not that it wasn't powerful. Not that it wasn't getting impressions, but I thought, "How do we use tech for good?"

That very simple core of "tech for good" is what birthed the Oakland Digital spirit of tech for good, and then, of course, myself being a designer and a creative, "creative tech for good," right? Those concepts birthed the idea of how do we help artists become professionals? Just like that young 13 year-old watching that YouTube video, how do I not just consume this technology, but create something cool, too, and then take those skills to get a career?

That's the birth of OD. Oakland Digital.

Ali Nazar:Wow, man. That's such a powerful story. Thank you for sharing it. We're speaking to Shaun Tai, who is the Executive Director of Oakland Digital, here on Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley.

Not a lot of people would have the guts to leave a burgeoning career like that, and take a left turn and follow their passion, so that's definitely commendable. I'd love to hear about, after you got to that point of understanding that, "Okay, I want to do something for social good? Creative tech for good." How did you then formulate the idea of how Oakland Digital would actually be an organization pursuing that goal?

Shaun Tai:Yeah, I mean, I did gloss over a few details, like one of the biggest things that I learned while doing Pushin' the Bay TV was, there was an event at Stanford. I know you guys are rivals, but Stanford. Shout out to them, too. I met MC Hammer, Chamillionaire, and Mistah Fab, and Quincy Jones III, with Ray Luv and Mac Mall. They're friends. Everyone in the rap industry is friends.

When I met MC Hammer, that day, he was introducing this crazy idea called Twitter. This is 2006, 2007. It was this thing that, in 140 characters, you could write about what you're doing. The whole crowd was confused, because here are effectively three rappers that are using this thing called Twitter, and in the crowd, I think very few people were.

That's when I learned like, yo, tech doesn't have to be disseminated by the top-down. It can be actually by the community-up. After that day, actually, that same day, I went up to MC Hammer, and I'm like, "Yo, I'm here with Ray Luv and Mac Mall, who you know. Much respect. I love everything from your music career, but also your entrepreneurship. How do I get in touch?" Because he's like, "I love Oakland. I love the A's. I love technology."

I tweeted him that night, ironically, I tweeted him, and from that year exchange, back and forth, we became friends. He's still an advisor to Oakland Digital, to this day. Between finding mentors, advisors, early on, to finding people that believed in the vision. Board of directors, co-founders, people that just believe in what you're doing.

Then, of course, here's the big thing. Legal. After MC Hammer's like, "Yo, I'm with that idea of tech for good." I was walking down, and this is a true story, I was walking down Broadway, and I see City Hall, in Oakland. I literally said, "I'm just going to walk into City Hall and find out how to start a non-profit."

I remember going up inside, checking in with the security guard, going up to the ninth floor, I believe. I met with this lady named Kathy Littles. I don't know if she's still around, but shout-out to Kathy Littles. I said, "I want to start a non-profit that's tech for good." She was like, "What is tech?" She literally said, "What is tech?" Because you have to remember, at this time, '08, right? "Tech" didn't exist in Oakland the way it does now. That was 10 years ago. Nobody even understood the word "tech."

I said, "Well, it's these companies like Google, and Facebook, and how do we use that for good?" She was like, "Oh, okay. Well, here's a stack of contacts." Literally probably 10 pieces of paper, front-to-back, of non-profit people. "Contact all of them, then get back to me." Literally, I looked at it like, "Yo, this is crazy." I asked, "Well, how do I get paid?"

She laughed. She said, "Non-profits, you've got to fundraise." I was like, "How often?" She laughed again. She said, "You've got to fundraise every day. Every week." I just didn't get the concept, coming from a for-profit background. I literally took that stack of papers, but I found one piece of paper where I started. I just called everyone. I just called everyone. Some had phone numbers, some had e-mails.

Then I finally e-mailed one person. She's an artist. She's the only person that got back to me from probably a week of phone calls and e-mails. She said, "I have an art non-profit. Now it's defunct, but a guy named Don Tamaki, who is the," I think she used the term "godfather of Asian law. He helped us get started, but he's too big for you, Shaun. He won't get back to you."

I remember cold-calling this law firm, Minami Tamaki LLP, shout-out to them. They're still in the SF. The receptionist picked up, and I said, "Hey, I'm Shaun. I'm just doing a cold call. Could I talk to Don Tamaki?" Just like wide-eyed, didn't know what the hell I was doing. 

He didn't pick up, but an assistant picked up and said, "Okay, I just shared that you want to start this non-profit. He said come in." On this date and that time, and I go in, and I think I'm wearing jeans and a shirt. I pitched this. There was two gentlemen next to him, who I found out later is his son and his son's friend, who go to Cal, by the way. They were interning with him for the summer.

I threw this pitch about "tech for good." Completely vague. It was so bad, I don't even know what it was, but it was really bad. But he saw that passion of helping people with tech for good, and with design. Just taking everything that I cared about and presenting that, right? At the end, he was like, "Shaun, I'm going to help you get incorporated. Get your bylaws. Build your board. I'm going to put my son on this project."

Really, that combination of passion, that combination of timing. There's a huge one for your listeners. Things have a time period and time relevance. You know what I'm saying? You can't come up now and start the next Snapchat. That's already over, right? Timing-wise, Oakland was not hit with tech yet. Timing-wise, Don Tamaki had his son interning, right? All of this things had, timing-wise, MC Hammer's talking about Twitter. You know what I'm saying? All of these things just were like a storm of positivity, and just relentlessness, to do something very positive for the community. Right?

After that, he helped get us incorporated. We got incorporated July of 2009. And yo, now we're in Downtown Oakland, and we have benches, billboards, bus ads, helped almost 5,000 people to-date. We're just doing big things.

Ali Nazar:That's awesome. Well, it's a great story, and I think a really great example of there is a serendipity to the formation of an organization like this. There's the timing, but there's also the passion. The passion that bubbling up from things that have happened in your life, is another thing that depends upon timing, and so-

Shaun Tai:Right.

Ali Nazar:We're speaking with Shaun Tai today. He's the Executive Director of Oakland Digital, on Method to the Madness here on KALX Berkeley. July 2009, and we're sitting here in 2018. It's been almost 10 years, so just tell me about that journey. You got some momentum there. You got your organization set up. But it's not a clear product or service yet, so how did you get to where you are today, with all of those numbers you just quoted. 5,000 people helped.

Shaun Tai:Oh, yeah. I'm so glad that you said that there's no clear purpose yet. I think what's wrong with now is that there's almost an abundance of resources. Speaking about UX and UI. You can download a mobile-UI kit and build a start-up right now, right? But I think what's so dope about that time is there was so much exploration to be done. Right? There weren't solutions, there were questions.

Think about that. There were questions, not solutions, at that time. The fact that people believed in the vision, at that time, says something. We had no product, and I talked to one of my advisors at the time. He was only 19 or 20, but he had worked at HP and AOL at 14 years-old. He's just a genius dude. His name is Jordan.

I was like, "Jordan, yeah, we're a non-profit now. What should we start doing?" He was like, "Shaun, what are you doing today?" I'm like, "Nothing." "Let's go downtown. Let's pick one block in Oakland." I think it was 14th Street in Oakland. "Let's just go up to every single small business there and ask them what do they need with design and marketing." Right?

I remember going to our first business, a small business owned by a Black woman, and she was like, "Oh, my God. I was praying to God, like literally, that someone would come and help me." She was like, "I can't find my phone line." Out of everything in the world, right? "I can't find my phone line." And we [crosstalk]-

Ali Nazar:You guys were a gift from God, huh? [crosstalk]-

Shaun Tai:No, no. I mean, it was like, she just was like, you know how it is, you're sitting there every day, no one comes through the doors. It's desperation, right?

Ali Nazar:Yeah. Yeah.

Shaun Tai:We did that, and we were like, "How do people find you?" She was like, "Yelp." That's it, it was like, "Yelp." We literally claimed her business on Yelp. We hooked that up, took photos of her studio, helped clean up the room. That was our first client. Then word of mouth, just going to businesses, talking to students.

Really, between helping these small businesses, predominantly women-owned businesses, just like my mom, and then helping local students, Laney College, we were like, "Great. We're helping these two different groups of people. How do we connect them?" Right? Get those young people skills, build up their resume, their portfolios.

It's not just pairing them with non-profits and businesses, but solving problems, right? What we ended up doing was start building out programs. One's called Inspire Oakland, where we go to community colleges, and state-level colleges, and we say, "Do you want your artwork on a billboard?" The whole room says, "Yes." Right? We're getting them inspired to have a professional career.

Right? Because at school, you're like, "Okay, I know PhotoShop. I know Illustrator. But how do you apply that to anything real?" We, effectively, with Inspire Oakland, are the clients for these students. They're designing billboards for us to spec. Literally, commercial-spec billboards, bleeds, color, visual hierarchy, following the creative brief, going through multiple revisions, iterations of designs. That's what gets the students really, really excited about their careers.

We only pick six winners, and those are the winners you see up all over Oakland right now, buses, benches, and billboards. But the question that we ask all of the students is, "Do you want to be an apprentice at Oakland Digital?" Once the billboard competition ends, while the billboards go up, we select, from around 70-80 students, a cohort of 10-12 apprentices. Those are the students that, yo, once they get through Oakland Digital, they're ready for hire. 

That's what we're doing right now. We have 10 apprentices learning UX. These are raw artists that are super talented with pencil and pen, but not so much the digital space, right? The reason we pick the tech space as the formats and the learning environment is that those are the highest-paying jobs. 

Now, here's the thing, brother: we're not telling them to get tech jobs. In fact, I'm very proud that a lot of them don't want to get tech jobs. However, the mindset of design-thinking, the mindset of design sprints, the mindset of creating products, of launching [tings], notice I said "tings," not "things." 

Those are the same tings you need to be successful in the non-profit world, opening a small business. I was so proud when we were at eBay with the UX designers, and we have super-exclusive events. We're at Twitter, Salesforce, Google, Google.org every Wednesday. They're in the tech world, and these professionals ask, "What do you want to do after this apprenticeship?"

I'm so happy to say 80% are like, "Do my own ting. Help our community." That's the answer I want, right? We're using tech as an educational platform, as a learning platform, to get those skills to game up, to level up, but the goal for us is how do we give back to our communities? Tech for good. Oakland Digital. Holla.

Ali Nazar:Wow. Wow. So much going on there, what you just said, and really impressive how it's come from that. You founded it with passion, with not necessarily the concrete of what the programs are going to be, and now you have so many different programs. I have a couple questions about that. One is, in a cohort of, what is it? 70 or so students-

Shaun Tai:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:... and they're getting to be up on billboards, and whatnot, where's the funding sources coming for the non-profit right now? Is it all through, is it earned income from you guys selling services?

Shaun Tai:Yeah, and I actually, I want to touch upon that, for anyone listening. What I hear from students a lot is, "I want a work-life balance." That's one. The second thing is, "I want to start my own business." My honest answer is, "If you want a work-life balance, do not start your own company." I want to make that very clear.

Ali Nazar:[crosstalk].

Shaun Tai:If you want a work-life balance, do not start your own company. Work for someone, go there at 10:00, go home at 5:00. You know what? Props to anyone that wants to do that. But just don't get it twisted that you can do both. I think you need to make that decision early on in your career, not later.

Ali Nazar:[crosstalk].

Shaun Tai:If you are ... How do you feel about that, brother?

Ali Nazar:Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. You can't have everything. They're all good things, but some of them are mutually exclusive. That's what you're saying, and I agree.

Shaun Tai:Absolutely. I'll start there, and I will say that for the first three, four years at Oakland Digital, I received zero dollars. I had a six-month gig at Facebook. I had a five-year gig doing marketing for the former Chief of Science at Amazon. Shout-out to Andreas Weigend, who teaches at Berkeley. I had all of these part-time jobs to pay the bills, but I realized that if I don't give up everything for one, I'll be good at few things, terrible at most of them, and not really great at one. Right?

I found that what's the one that I would call my baby? I was like, "That's OD. Oakland Digital." What happened was, I dumped everything, kept OD, and that next year, which was 2015, Google funded us. To your point, Google.org funded Oakland Digital, because they saw us as one of the only groups in the Bay Area really using tech in creativity to empower overlooked talent, specifically communities of color. I was really proud that Google saw that vision.

When we got that three-year grant from Google.org, shout-out to Justin, Adrian, [inaudible], and Chelsea. They saw that we were talented. We were raw. We were grassroots. We were making an impact, but we just needed some funding to make big tings happen. The question that we were addressing that they wanted to fund, the solution, was Bridgegood.com. It's a platform called BridgeGood, that connects talent to amazing opportunities.

Right now, if you're an artist, you don't have an online portfolio, you can go to Bridgegood.com, you sign up. By the way, we don't sell your data. We're not making profit. It's a completely not-for-profit platform. You can sign up, get a free portfolio. You can attend VIP events, including working out of Google every Wednesday, going to cool places like LinkedIn, design studios, even small businesses. 

That's the way that we wanted to scale Oakland Digital, in a very organic way, because everything that you sign up for, we'll be there. We'll also introduce you to some key connects. That's our biggest funding partner, is Google.org, but I would say the majority of our funding, in terms of year-round, is just ordinary people. Like, "Yo, I just saw your bus ad. I think it's dope. How do I make a contribution?" Things like $50. $100.

Another thing I'll say is, if you're trying to start a non-profit to make a living, or get money, I would also say don't do that. It's not necessarily rewarding financially, and I would say do it because you actually care about that, the mission, the impact. The non-profit world is equally as cutthroat as the business world. Everyone's fighting over the same funding. 

I just happened to be very lucky to have an amazing team around me that really cares deeply about the art community, but also about successful designers, and really getting involved in the tech world in a meaningful way. When I say "successful designers," I mean "making money from doing something you love," right? We all say that. We all hear it. But it is possible, but you do need to feel uncomfortable in the sense that you might hate tech. In the Bay, a lot of people do, but you still need to understand it, explore it, and break it down. 

Right? You don't want to just be ignorant towards it. You want to actually understand it, and see what makes it tick. Because we can take those same concepts and make non-profits blow up. I think that Oakland Digital is one of those examples of how do we use tech for good, and utilize those resources? Not just money, but talent, too. We have a lot of volunteers from the tech world. And give back to the community in real, deep, meaningful ways?

Ali Nazar:Wow, so that's awesome that you guys had Google as a benefactor, and I'm sure not just the money that they gave you, but the other doors that are opened are plentiful. We're speaking with Shaun Tai, he's Founder and Executive Director of Oakland Digital, right here on Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley.

Give us a little bit of a taste of what is the scope of it now? You went on this journey, it sounds like, almost 10 years ago.

Shaun Tai:Yeah.

Ali Nazar:How many employees? How many students have you had? Give me some of the breadth of this thing.

Shaun Tai:Yeah, no. One of the things that I learned about the non-profit world, I sit on the grants panel for the Cultural Arts Program, and we just distribute money to artists, and we distribute money to non-profits. Last year, so I've been doing it two years in a row, for the City of Oakland. I've been noticing how much non-profits are struggling. A lot of the non-profits were in debt. 

What I noticed was non-profits are paying staff full salaries, because they should get paid full salaries. However, it's hurting their impact, right? Let me give you an example. Those four years that we were figuring out what we were doing, and making an impact, I don't think I deserved pay at that time, because I was still learning, right? 

I think that it's keeping that lean, agile methodology of how do you run as lean as possible, with as much impact as possible? I feel that the non-profit world needs a shake-up to think that way. Because if non-profits are just, quite honestly, fundraising to pay staff, that doesn't equate to community impact. You know what I'm saying?

Ali Nazar:Yep.

Shaun Tai:I don't have the answer, other than what I said earlier about "How do we take some of the things that start-ups do?" Right? Contractors, and paying people per-project. Compensating them what they're worth, but maybe on a contract or project basis, to get goals accomplished, right? And build some cool products, launch some cool things, the same way a start-up would do in the tech world.

That, to me, I think that mindset, the growth mindset, is what the non-profit world may be lacking right now. But I do see things improving. I do see non-profits using design-thinking methodologies, and design sprints, and things that we in the tech world normally do to launch cool stuff.

One example is, on BridgeGood, we actually give our students the experience of working with engineers and becoming UX designers by working on the platform itself. They gain, because they don't have to spend $15,000 for a boot camp, and they have a portfolio piece that's actually tangible. That's a way where both sides can win, right? The student can gain experience, build a cool platform, but at the same time, they can build their own career, and impact the community.

Long story short, I think the non-profit world just needs to rethink how they spend money. Rethink, this is a good example, when we as non-profits apply for a government grant, which we don't even do that, you're tied in. Let's say you get a $1 million grant. Sometimes, you'll be doing more work than that $1 million, in terms of you'll run out of money. I've seen non-profits go under that way.

How do we just rethink non-profits? How do we rethink and re-imagine the way non-profits run? Grants? Grant cycles, you're applying for a grant a year in advance. I don't know about you, brother, but every month for us changes. Do you know what I'm saying?

Ali Nazar:Yeah, I mean-

Shaun Tai:How can you apply a year in advance? These are the things that, about the non-profit world have, these confuse me. I don't understand why they do things the way they've been doing them for 100 years, when society's changed.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, I think you're right on to something there. I have participated in the non-profit world, as well. That's why I asked the question around earned income, because that's ultimately what gets you sustainability as an organization, is that you don't have to rely on anybody else.

Shaun Tai:Right.

Ali Nazar:But you guys are in an interesting position, because you do have a product or a service you can provide, but monetizing that's a different question. It's a very challenging, I think, question, and one that I think many people are trying to answer right now.

Shaun Tai:Right, and so, the impact that we've generated from BridgeGood is, we have a calculation of how do students get a job in design and/or tech? We've boiled it down to these three things: education, whether it's a BA or an AA. Two, some sort of apprenticeship or internship, and then help with their resume or portfolio. The portfolio is like 90% of getting a job in design. 

We figure if we can help a student build all four of those, it's a 90% likelihood that they'll get employed in some entry-level design position. What is the impact of that, right? Times, right now, we have 5,000 users on BridgeGood. We calculated roughly 300 have obtained some type of entry-level work. That times between 20,000 and 30,000, that's a lot of impact. But now to your point about-

Ali Nazar:[crosstalk].

Shaun Tai:Yeah, I know. It's super dope. It's super dope. When we just did a study of going back seven years on LinkedIn, of all of the students that have been through our program. We've had people get jobs at Yahoo!, Apple, YouTube, local non-profits, which I was super happy to see. That's really the impact. There's no quick solve.

I mean, think about your career, right? You're like, "I've been in this for eight years." You and I, we're kind of a rare breed, where I think people growing up now, they just expect jobs right away. If there's one thing that I have learned, there's no free handouts. You've got to pay your dues. I feel-

Ali Nazar:Wow. Shaun, I ... Sorry. Go ahead.

Shaun Tai:Yeah. Nah, nah. I just feel like that's what we've got to get organizations to understand. Be committed. Stay committed, and keep doing things for good.

Ali Nazar:Yeah, and I think following your passion, which you've certainly done. Oakland Digital is a great asset to the community. We have about a minute left, and I always like to close organizational founders, like you, with the same question. If everything went perfectly for Oakland Digital over the next five years, where will it be?

Shaun Tai:Yeah, where would we be? We'd have a 15,000 square-foot building, with the ground space leased out, for some revenue. Then we would have a designer residence program, where we could facilitate, and make sure that the artists going through our program would actually be employed. 100%. 100% success rate, and really seeing the whole Bay Area respect artistry and creativity. Also, also be the Mecca of non-profits for the rest of the world. To be like, "Yo, the Bay Area has the best non-profits. BridgeGood Oakland Digital. Holla."

Ali Nazar:Nice. Nice. All right. I'm so behind that. It's very interesting, also, that you added real estate to that vision, because it's like with-

Shaun Tai:You've got to.

Ali Nazar:... the housing costs the way they are, non-profits have to own a piece of the land, or else they're not going to be able to survive. [crosstalk]-

Shaun Tai:I'm telling you, brother. I'm telling you brother, hey, and I appreciate what you're doing, because a lot of people behind-the-scenes do not get that credit. Thank you for what you're doing for the community. Let's keep pushing this, inspire the Bay Area together, man. Let's do it.

Ali Nazar:Thanks, Shaun. Well, you've been listening to Shaun Tai. He's the Executive Director of Oakland Digital. To learn more about them, you can go to oaklanddigital.org. Any other ways to contact you, Shaun?

Shaun Tai:Bridgegood.com. If you want to get a free portfolio and kick it, we can hang out. Let's do it.

Ali Nazar:Cool, okay. That's how you get ahold of Shaun. This has been Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley, 90.7 FM. I'm your host, Ali Nazar. Thanks for listening, everybody, and have a great Friday.

Shaun Tai:Peace.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript:

Lisa:Method to the Madness is next. 

You're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Jennifer King. She's the director of consumer privacy at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. We'll be talking about the problems with social media today. Welcome to the program, Jennifer. 

Jennifer:Thank you. 

Lisa:You've recently gotten a new job at Stanford Law School. Can you first of all tell us what you're doing down there? 

Jennifer:Yes. I just graduated my PhD back here at Berkeley. 

Lisa:In what?

Jennifer:Information science. At Stanford, I am the director of consumer privacy at the the Center for Law and Society at Stanford Law School.

Lisa:You just started though.

Jennifer:At Stanford, yes. I started in April before I graduated. 

Lisa:Last week, I had an interesting conversation with Jaron Lanier, who just wrote a book called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. I thought I'd have you on the show to talk about some of the ideas that we talked about since that is your area. Everybody knows there's something wrong right now in our society. Journalism is failing. Politics is failing. People are afraid they're losing their jobs to AI. Whether they are or not, they're afraid of it. There's a lot of social anxiety. What do you see as the problem with social media or do you?

Jennifer:With social media specifically? Because there's a lot there. I think one of the challenges with social media is that it de-individuates us or it takes us away from our humanity to some extent. It's the same way when you're driving in a car and there's that object between you and the rest of the world and you might be a totally reasonable person in real life and then you get behind the wheel and you get road rage or you just find that you treat people more like objects than other people. When you communicate with people through a computer, it's that same object between you and them. I think it prevents us in some ways from connecting with people. 

Lisa:There's a lot of research now that backs up, especially with young people, that there is more anxiety, there's more sadness. I don't know exactly how they're measuring sadness but that people are acting out differently, particularly young people, which is scary. I think we need to re-examine Google and Facebook and others. Some aren't in the business of behavior modification, but the business model, it's not that the people behind it personally are doing this, but the business model they've created with machine language literally takes us on a downward path. It's not left or right. It's actually down because the algorithm support and make money off of negative emotions. 

Jennifer:Sure. I've worked in Silicon Valley, and I can tell you having been-

Lisa:Who did you work for?

Jennifer:I worked for Yahoo. I worked for other startups too, but I worked for Yahoo back in the early 2000s, and was part of not directly developing social media software that was part of that scene, you could call it in the Bay Area back around 2000-plus where I was part of those social networks that emerged during that time. I think we were all very optimistic, and there wasn't a lot of thought about what the consequences were of any of these things people made. It was mostly like, let's just try this and see what happens. I think at first, there was an optimism driving it. We're doing this because let's see what happens. It could be really interesting. I think that shifted. It shifted over time from that to let's do this and maybe we'll get acquired by somebody to now let's do this and see how much personal data we can potentially mine from this product and from these people using it. Part of that is the consequence of building this entire infrastructure off the idea that it's free and not making people pay for it. 

I think the other piece of it too is that most of the people in this space, I would argue, are not thinking about what these products would do or these services would do to kids. It was one thing to put a lot of this in the hands of people who already had a solid footing on what it meant to talk to people in reality. We didn't grow up with phones and we barely grew up with computers, many of us, and so we had a foundation for what it meant to interact with people. Now suddenly, you have kids who've grown up immersed in this technology and it's shifted to where it's almost as if they don't know how to interact with each other. 

Lisa:Right. It's a big intermediary for them. 

Jennifer:Yeah. Professor Sherry Turkle has written extensively on this. I think she's done some of the best research on it. 

Lisa:Where is she?

Jennifer:She's at MIT, and she's published several books in this area and that's where I'm drawing some of my own insight. 

Lisa:It's an unfortunate collision of math and human biology. 

Jennifer:Yeah. I would say, too, part of the challenge is that being a technologist has suddenly brought with it a lot of power in the society. We don't educate technologists to think about other people. If you are a Berkeley or a Stanford computer science student, for the most part, I don't believe you even had to take any ethics requirements in the past. I know that's changing, but you've been able to tinker with this giant social experiment without necessarily having any education or training or having been challenged to really think about the consequences of your actions on other people. It's mostly just been a chase to see what cool thing can we make next. I think we're seeing the consequences of that.

Lisa:We are. There seems to be a groundswell now of people, at least researchers, academicians, economists, who are now looking at all of this behavior modification and the implications. They're also looking at data as labor instead of data as capital because for the first time ever, I think there are just a few people who own these big, what Jaron Lanier called siren servers, and they're making money on everybody else. There's only one buyer and multiple sellers of information so it's a monopsony. 

Jennifer:Yes, a very hard word to say. 

Lisa:Yes. I want to talk about that, all of the data that's been pulled from us with our knowledge and without our knowledge. 

Jennifer:That's a tough one because from my perspective, I study privacy and I study people. I try to understand how information privacy, how people think about it, what they care about. I'm willing to bet that most of us have figurative piles of digital photos hanging out either on our personal computers, on our phones, and managing all those things is really hard. I don't think I know anybody who actually has a grip on the number of photos they take. 

Lisa:I don't even look at them anymore. 

Jennifer:Right. I think you can extend that to your own data. We talk about a lot about we want to give people more control and we want to put them in control. If we could just somehow get our hands on this ephemeral data, then it will be okay. My skepticism with that just comes from the fact that it's such an information overload that it's possible we could build an infrastructure that makes it easy for people or at least easier. Right now, I think the push to get people's hands on the data isn't going to necessarily have the effect we want it to or that we might be hoping it will. I think there are good reasons for making the companies open up their platforms that have to do with issues of power and control and just trying to force a level of openness that doesn't exist presently. Whether that ends up with empowering people individually because they can actually see what data is collected about them, I'm a little bit skeptical of that actually.

Lisa:What about data? People talk about universal basic income, but now people are talking about you've gotten these companies rich off of all this data and with your consent. You've given this away, but now-

Jennifer:Kind of your consent. 

Lisa:Yeah. There are people, groups like datavest and researchers. Even at Stanford, they're looking at the idea of monetizing your data so that in place of a universal basic income, someday you might get every month a certain amount of money in return for the barter that you've given away your private life. 

Jennifer:Not to wallow in trendy technologies right now, but I think we've ... I don't know if your listeners or if you've talked so much about blockchain. 

Lisa:Oh yeah, I've had people on here actually from the UC Berkeley blockchain group. 

Jennifer:Great. I don't know if blockchain is the answer to that problem, but it seemingly could potentially be an answer to the data management piece. Every proposal I've seen in this vein has (a) put the burden on the individual to manage it in a way that I don't think most people want to do. You can't manage your photos. You don't also probably want to manage your personal data on a day-to-day basis. 

Lisa:Exactly.

Jennifer:I don't even balance my checking account anymore. I just ... What has to give? I have to say I don't know too much about the blockchain proposal insofar as I have seen it voiced as a potential solution for this distributed data management problem. 

Lisa:It seems to me that if Facebook and Google were smart, they would get off this business model that's on a downward anyway because it's going to implode. You can't take data as capital forever. If they would say, okay, we realize what we're doing and now we're going to turn around and give you back something, they'll probably never do that because their business model, they make too much money. There are groups like of datavest. They propose a co-op organization where they are the intermediary between the big computer monsters that they're leasing to do this complex mathematical, but blockchain would be part of that probably, keeping accounting records and-

Jennifer:Right. Making it manageable for end users, for individuals. I think that the challenge is that right now in some ways, collecting data is more valuable than it potentially has been before because companies are using this to feed their AI systems. It's a big training base. Given how much focus right now is on AI and improving those systems ... As an information scientist, I can tell you that you need data to train those systems to improve them. 

Lisa:Like language translation. 

Jennifer:Absolutely.

Lisa:You need real people. They're grabbing real people's translations in order to make the Google Translate work better. 

Jennifer:Which I think is actually a really excellent example of this being used for good in a sense.

Lisa:It is, but what about the jobs of human translators? At some point, there's real no artificial intelligence right now, but at some point when perhaps there is, they won't have a job anymore. 

Jennifer:Well, I don't know if it necessarily obviates all human translators, but I will tell you I was in Mexico last year. I wasn't going to hire a translator to go with me from place to place to place, but Google Translate was really helpful for trying to talk to a cab driver because my Spanish is terrible. 

Lisa:I agree with you there, but let's pay those human translators for that data. 

Jennifer:Sure. Yeah. Just to go back to that thought though. One of the reasons why I don't think you'll see the recognition by the companies that this could be a downward slope right now is because right now as they're trying to improve their consumer AI systems, there is probably a fanatical need or desire for as much data as you can get. Given that, I think if you want to see the changes you're talking about, it will probably emerge through civil society and other groups putting together proposals and pushing it. I think you'll have to see it from a government side ultimately. I don't know if you'll see it in this country. 

Lisa:There does have to be some oversight. I don't know. I feel like this problem is so urgent right now. When you look at the Annapolis shootings, which some people are saying were triggered by trolls online, and that could be misinformation. It's hard to find the truth that is hurting our society. Also with journalism, I use that as an example a lot because they missed the Trump election. They missed the recent Brooklyn, the young woman who beat out the stronghold Democrat challenger. That was completely missed. What's going on? They can't afford investigative journalists. Most organizations can't anymore, so finding out the truth is really difficult. 

I think that's changing us. In so many ways, it's making us more siloed. We don't know what red states are thinking because we only see what the algorithms want us to see. It's creating this bifurcated society. In fact, it turns out a lot of technologists send their kids to Waldorf schools and Montessori schools because they're worried about this. 

Jennifer:I don't let my kids use a lot of technology. 

Lisa:You don't? Why?

Jennifer:Well, I guess to go back full circle to the social media piece. Again, I think using social media is a different experience for those of us who have developed the skill in her personal communication and relationships in person and that it's a much different equation when you're talking about kids. It used to be that the internet was connecting us across space, and now we're seeing it used in a very hyper local way when it used to connect people who were sitting right next to each other. That's a very different vision, I think, than where we started from, and I don't think we've thought so much about what that means for the people inhabiting that space together. Certainly with teenagers, you see it in terms of the competition it fosters for I want the best Instagram photo. 

I would say it's a double ... two big parts to it. One of it is parents saying something, I mean really being involved and understanding what their kids are doing, which I realize is not always easy, especially if you're not particularly tech literate. I'm just, as a parent, I'm often amazed how many small children I see who are just given phones and parents are ignoring them and they're just going on and on and on. It just amazes me. There's definitely been greater calls to tech companies to really start thinking more about the implications of what they're doing, not only on this, but a lot of parts of their work across society. 

I think that the types of restrictions we have on phones, for example, are in their infancy. We could do a lot more in terms of thinking through like what's an appropriate set of parental controls you can put on a phone? For example, to get to meter kids' usage so you can teach them, bound it, like this is what it means to be on your phone for 20 minutes and when the 20 minutes are up, you're done. You're locked out.

Lisa:They can get around that stuff though. They're going to be so much more tech savvy than you or I.

Jennifer:I have younger kids, so I'm still-

Lisa:They'll just hack your restrictions. 

Jennifer:I'm still biased towards the fact that I can take the thing away from my five-year-old versus having a 15-year-old with a phone, which I realize is different.

Lisa:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Jennifer King. She's the director of consumer privacy at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. 

Well, I wanted to ask you about your new job at Stanford Law School. California just passed this pretty intense data privacy law. It isn't as restrictive as Europe, but can you talk about that and explain what's going on to our listeners? 

Jennifer:The law that was just passed was the result of we'll say panic by the tech sector with the upcoming ballot initiative that was to appear on the ballot in November. There was a ballot initiative or it was placed on the ballot that would have had placed some more restrictions on privacy with respect to tech companies. Some of the provisions in the ballot measure ended up in this final bill but not all of them. When I looked at this bill, again I'm not a lawyer so that's my disclaimer for my own analysis, but one of the things I actually was frustrated by, which I don't know if we'll see addressed ultimately because a lot of the talk last week was around the fact that doesn't go into effect until 2020 so we may see amendments to it. 

It was that it doesn't place any limits on the collection of data nor on the reselling of it. It gives consumers a little bit more power than they had before, but I'm actually fairly disappointed with the outcome of that bill because I don't think it really does much beyond allowing you to say, hey, don't sell my data. A lot of the big companies that we've been concerned about actually aren't selling your data to begin with. They're collecting it, and they're selling access to it, and that doesn't change at all under this bill. It doesn't curb some of the, I think, the worst cases we see of data being collected without your explicit consent. It does nothing about that consent issue. 

If you download a free app for a smartphone and the app developer is using a third party advertising service that serves ads in the app, that service is collecting data from your phone about your usage as you're using it. The same with any website that you're not blocking third party cookies or third party ad trackers on, if you're using a regular computer and a browser, those ad services are also collecting data from you or from your browser experience. This bill doesn't really do anything to curb that. 

Lisa:Does it do anything about the cameras on your phones and computers that are looking at your facial expressions and that goes into the machine language algorithm as well, the listening that goes on with your devices?

Jennifer:Yes, you have devices in your pocket that can listen to you and can take your picture. Certainly the way they get consent from you is often not clear. 

Lisa:Most of the time, you don't read the consent anyway on these sites that you go to. 

Jennifer:However, it is against the law for them to be surveilling you without you having consented. At the same time, you might be using a service that wants to capture your voice as part of what it does, so take a smart speaker, for example. That's an area I've been looking at a bit lately.

Lisa:Like the Alexis and Siri.

Jennifer:Right. They're voice activated. They need to listen to you. For how long and what it records and the duration and what it does with that recording is an interesting question, but that is the essence of a smart speaker so you do have to let it capture your voice. It's just a question of then what happens to that data. 

Lisa:In your capacity, in your new job, what are the problems you're trying to solve in the near term? 

Jennifer:My job is research focused, so part of it is about the type of research that I am looking to do. Because I just graduated with my PhD, some of it is about publishing my own dissertation work.

Lisa:Which was on what?

Jennifer:Privacy. I don't think I want to go into the details. It's a long and complicated thing. 

Lisa:It's private.

Jennifer:It's not private, but I think it would bore a lot of people. Some of the issues that I've been interested in exploring in this new role are genetic privacy. Actually, a part of my dissertation research was on 23andMe users. I was very interested in looking at-

Lisa:What they do with that information?

Jennifer:Yeah. Also just people's expectations around it and what motivates them to have their DNA sequenced and what happens to your DNA after you give it to a service like that. That's an area I've been interested in looking at, as well as emotional privacy because I think one of the things that's been a side effect of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and something I saw in my own work is that people often get the most concerned about their privacy when it comes to data about them that really gets to who they think they are. 

By that, I mean it's one thing for a credit reporting company to collect your address and your credit history. That's important information and, of course, we're upset if it gets breached. Your sense of privacy around it I think is different than, for example, another piece of my dissertation research was looking at people's search queries. One of the things I found was that actually of the people I looked at, I asked these 23andMe users about their genetic data as compared to their search queries. Most of them were far more concerned about the content of their search queries than about their DNA. That was mostly because they felt like their DNA, sure, it identifies you uniquely, but they felt like it didn't tell people about them. The way that if you looked at five years of your search queries, your unfiltered search queries, that could tell you much more about who they are, what they're thinking about, what they care about. 

Lisa:That's interesting. Maybe because search queries are free, but the 23andMe, you have to pay to join that service. I've done it, so I know there's a certain fee. With that fee structure, maybe that makes people think, oh well, data is private. It's not going to be-

Jennifer:The question of paying for it, yes and no. Yes, it definitely ... When people pay for something, what I've observed is that there are definitely more expectations around I paid for this, so they better not sell my data or at least I hope they won't. With free services, there's also an expectation of privacy. It's not as if most people use something like Google search and assume that their search queries are going to be used in a multitude of different ways against them or released to the public. People had privacy expectations in that data even if it was [crosstalk].

Lisa:That's important to talk about.

Jennifer:What Cambridge Analytica and Facebook has also shown us is the power of the emotional data, which is something I'm also trying to focus on because I think that's the next frontier. I think it's the next frontier in terms of the types of data we're going to try to let's say extract from people. There are people focusing on emotion recognition as a way to improve different experiences, technological experiences. I, of course, being a skeptic, I'm always skeptical leading into these things, so I'm really curious to keep an eye on companies that are doing emotion detection and see where that goes in terms of the next type of data we've been collecting about people would be your emotional state. There's lots of research into computer mediated communication that charts basically all of this. The research is there. You just have to know where to look for it and put it into play. 

Lisa:Maybe we should start educating people at a very early age, like elementary school about privacy. Is that something-

Jennifer:You can talk to my rising fourth grader.

Lisa:Have you thought about that? We need to institute this in schools if we're going to-

Jennifer:Yeah, there are definitely people in the privacy research field who have worked on curriculum for at least high school students. I agree that it should go probably at least middle school and maybe the fifth grade, fourth grade, fifth grade level. There are definitely people working on that. How widely distributed that curriculum gets, I think that's the challenge. It'd be nice if California as a state did something with it rather than it just being a one-off one teacher in one school being interested in that issue. 

Going back to the genetic data piece and the search query piece. One of the things though that is really interesting about the genetic data area is the fact that a lot of what you're doing with that is sharing it with other people in the service. Whether that's looking for relatives or with 23andMe, you can share it with the company for their development or for their research purposes. One of the things I thought was really interesting about the people I talked to who used it was how much they were motivated by that sharing, the research sharing with the expectation that, hey, if my data is used to develop a new drug that can help the world, great.

I'm a skeptic so my counterpoint was, sure, it could be used, but it might be used to develop a drug that then their pharmaceutical partner charges $50,000 a dose for. There's no-

Lisa:Right, or that you get absolutely nothing for-

Jennifer:Right. You don't get anything from it monetarily. That's another interesting area of people willingly contributing their data to a private database for private development with no guarantees that there'll be a public benefit from it. 

Lisa:I really think we need to innovate that business model and return, in some way monetize this data that is benefiting a few people. You look at Facebook. 60% of it is owned by Mark Zuckerberg. They don't have that many employees. It needs to be more democratized. 

Jennifer:Well, I would argue. I was reading something recently online that was asking four notable internet theorists about basically what went wrong. It got me thinking about like what would I do? What would I have changed about the last 25 years? I think that going back to the mid to late '90s, there was a real ... The drum beat from Silicon Valley as much as it was an internet business at that point was very much like leave us alone. Don't regulate us in any way. Don't crush the internet. Let it blossom. Let it grow. There was pretty much a total hands-off approach with a couple of small exceptions along the way. I think if I went back in time, the thing I would change is not necessarily regulating, but I think making this expectation that there needed to be a public benefit. 

I don't know how I would do that, to be honest, if it's that the companies needed to ... Actually, I think maybe not a bad model would be looking back at radio and the development of radio and the fact that you used to have the fairness doctrine and public service announcements. There was this explicit recognition that the radio waves were a public resource and that they would lease them to private broadcasters, but there had to be some public benefit that they gave back. I wish we could have made that more explicit in the development of the internet.

Lisa:Some people think what went wrong is that it was free, that if we would have had to pay just a nominal amount of money for the right to browse or whatever, we wouldn't be dealing with all the advertising and behavior modification and so on. 

Jennifer:I was interviewed recently by some undergraduates at Stanford, and they asked me some pretty challenging questions that I had to stop and think about it too. Part of it was like, why do you do this? Why are you interested in this stuff? Given how many bad things feel like they're happening today, it's a real challenge to think about why are we doing this? Why am I involved in technology? Why don't I just run away and do something else? I think because there have been some real positive changes, despite all of the negative ones. I guess at the end of the day, I feel like it's not worth giving up on it at this point. Not that we even could, but I think that we let industry drive everything for the last 25 years. 

I think what you're seeing is a real recognition by people that they have to take this back into their own hands to some extent, both in terms of how they're being used and their data and just the power these large companies have to shape society in a way that I think people are really recoiling from. How we do that, I think some of the things we've talked about today are some of the hints that people collectively getting together and thinking about what can we do to shift the power balance. I think it is important to remember that this technology gives you a lot. There's a lot of things. I think if you asked us, would we go back to 1995 and give up some of the things we have now such as your ability to use a map online or a map on a phone? I think that's a pretty powerful tool.

Lisa:[crosstalk] from your child at school. 

Jennifer:Right. I always joke when I first got a cellphone, the first thing, I was living in Hawaii, the first thing I did was went to the beach and called people back in California going, "I'm calling you from the beach."

Lisa:It's not the internet. It's not the technology that's a problem, I think. It's the-

Jennifer:It's the people.

Lisa:The behavior modification algorithms. I think it's just we need to change the model. We're not going to get rid of the technology, but make it better, like you say. I think that's wonderful. It's a good goal. You have a lot of work ahead of you. 

Jennifer:Yeah. I can't retire anytime soon. 

Lisa:I'd like to have you back on at some point and once you've been in this role for quite a while and see what you're thinking then.

Jennifer:Yeah. 

Lisa:You've been listening to Method to the Madness. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. We'll be back in two weeks.

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