GOODSTORY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Managing Partner at Marler Clark Attorneys at Law
A lot of kids were going into college. Not to get into the war and being drafted. And so I viewed that that's what was going to happen. And it certainly focused one's attention on politics. But when I did go to college, I wound up being one of a handful of students that decided to run for the Pullman Washington, which is where Washington State University is. The Pullman Washington City Council. And what happened was that the four of us filed for four separate open seats, the seats were already filled with the incumbent and then another town's person had filed in three of those four.
So the students had to face a primary election where they got bounced out because the town's people voted for one or the other of the town's person. The person I ran against didn't have a primary opponent and so I got a pass through the primary. The students came back a week after the primary, which one would argue that that's probably why they had the primary when they had it, but we were able to register students to vote. And I won by 53 votes out of 5,000 cast and became the youngest person and first student ever elected to the city council, and for a short period of time at age 19, I was one of the youngest, if not the youngest people ever elected to a city wide or any sort of office, because we had just gotten the right to vote.
So, I also learned very early on the power of the vote and I've always been a big proponent of using the power of the ballot box. In addition to what we're seeing presently with people in the streets protesting righteously, it's, hope that translates to voting action.
Yeah. I mean, when I first started out, I worked in a large firm doing all sorts of trial work, whatever it was getting me into the courtroom, and some of that was defense work. And some of it was defending some pretty nasty defendants, corporations and manufacturers of products that harm people.
But I also had developed a practice on the side that was not in conflict to those, that work, where I'd represent victims in auto cases and slips and falls. And so as long as I kept up with all my other hourly work, I was able to do some other work on the side for the firm, and if it made money for the firm, they were happy.
In the winter in Seattle, 1993 in January, in the newspapers, there was a morning newspaper and an afternoon newspaper. I remember taking the ferry across from the Island that I was living on and still do.
I got on the boat in the morning and was reading the paper. And there was just a discussion about an outbreak of E.coli. That seemed to be linked to eating food at a Jack in the Box restaurant and by the evening paper, and then the evening news is all about really some kids really hospitalized on dialysis and nobody knew what was really going on. And I got a phone call from a former client of mine, who had slipped and fallen in a place of employment. And so she wanted to sue, but because it was in place of employment, then she had to deal with workers' compensation as opposed to a lawsuit.
So I helped her through that and never charged her for any of my time but helped her through getting her some compensation for her injuries. And a year later she calls me and says, "Hey, a friend of mine's kid is sick with this E.coli."
So I went down and met the family and was one of the first lawsuits that got filed. And from that case, it was one case to, within days it was 10 cases, ultimately hundreds of cases, including children who became deathly ill. So, I went from just being a standard lawyer to all of a sudden being the legal face of the Jack in the Box case on behalf of victims. So that was really the beginning of what now has been 27 plus years of representing victims in food poisoning cases all over the world.
A lot of lawyers don't like their jobs. A lot of lawyers represent people they don't like to represent, but everyone has a right to be represented. And whether it's a corporation or insurance company, a criminal or defendant. I get the best job. I get to represent victims of food poisoning, who through no fault of their own and most of the time it's children or people who are immune compromised. So I get to help figure out why the outbreak happened, and take care of people who sometimes need lifelong medical treatment and medical care.
So, I'm always every day in incredibly proud and blessed with thekind of job that I had been able to develop. Food borne illness litigation didn't really exist prior to Jack in the Box and what I have been able to accomplish in the last 27 years and starting Marler Clark in 1998. So 22 years at being the lawyer and having my own firm to do what I want to do has been a really exciting thing that I get up every day being thankful for the job that I have.
Well, I mean, the statistics are pretty, almost, even hard to wrap your head around. There're 67 million Americans getting a foodborne illness every year, 3000 hospitalized, excuse me, 3000 dead, over a million hospitalized, it's a really serious problem.
Yes, we do have laws, but bacteria don't pay attention to laws. And there are times where unfortunately, the people who manufacture our food, don't pay attention to the realities of bacterial and viral contamination. Yeah, we've had laws about selling adulterated and unsanitary food since the turn of 1900s after Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle and the work of the progressive Theodore Roosevelt.
And we've had changes over time. The Obama administration with the help of the Senate and Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, but we still have a lot of work to do. I've been involved in a lot of the legislation over the last couple of decades but we still have more to do. But we have the technology to do it and we've made some progress.
I always tell people like I was telling somebody on a International Association of Food Protection conference call that I was on the other day. And people felt like, "Oh my gosh, we really haven't made any progress." And I always tell the story that from 1993, Jack in the Box until early 2000s, 99% of my law firm revenue was E.coli cases linked to hamburger.
And because of a combination of litigation and legislation, hard work by the CDC and frankly hard work by the meat suppliers in many instances, I haven't had many E.coli cases linked to hamburger at all. So other than maybe my accountant not thinking that's a great idea. From the point of view of, from victims and I think point of view of society, that's a success story.
And I tell people that, yes, we still have problems, but these are things that with focus are, maybe not completely fixable because these bacteria and virus are very adaptive, but I think that many things can be continued to be worked on and progress can be made.
Yeah, I think probably because of frustration that the law… The law is a very blunt instrument of social change. It's a very useful tool and to understand the rule of law and to understand how the system operates is an important thing. But it's a case-by-case basis, and so it really, I think also, my experience in politics and working with coalitions to try to effectuate change, it really had to do with the fact that the law is a really blunt instrument for change.
Lawsuits are difficult on all the parties and sometimes it's a case-by-case-by-case basis. And it doesn't effectuate change as quickly as you'd like. And so and with respect to the E.coli thing, you can sue companies all day long and collect millions of dollars from them, but that may sometimes be just the cost of doing business to them.
But if there's legislation, if there's public outcry, if there's sometimes embarrassment from being outed by how the outbreak happened, I started doing a lot more things like that, that made more of an impact.
And I also think putting yourself out there, going to conferences, whether it's the American Meat Institute or conferences of food safety, the fact that you would go there and go into the lion's den sometimes where there'd be people who were quite angry or very upset that lawyers being invited. And I've had people walk out of a conference that I was speaking at. And not just because of what I was saying, but as a sign of protest that I was even there.
So I think part of what I'm trying to accomplish is, I have been able to be very successful by representing victims of foodborne illness and it's part of my feeling that I have a responsibility to help avoid these problems to begin with. Because sometimes, you can get somebody tens of millions of dollars, but because you got somebody tens and millions of dollars, it really means that their life has been so dramatically altered that even though they have the money now to take care of it, they would much prefer to have their kidneys. They much prefer to have a functioning brain. They much prefer not being a paraplegic. So, money is a very inadequate way. It's the only way, but it's an inadequate way of helping people through a catastrophic event.
Yeah, well, back in 1994, when Mike Taylor, who at the time was the head of FSIS which is the arm of USDA that regulates meat. They deemed E.coli 0157, which is the nasty bug that caused the Jack in the Box outbreak. They deemed that an adulterant. And what that meant was that the meat companies had to test for it and could not sell it, knowing that the product was contaminated. Where in 1993, '92 and earlier, they could knowingly sell customers E.coli contaminated meat.
That sounds a little hard to think about, and in meat, the meat industry is allowed to do that, but if you have a product over on the FDA side like lettuce, they've never been able to sell E.coli contaminated lettuce, it's against the law.
Salmonella, which is a bug that sickens and kills actually more people in the United States than E.coli does, salmonella is still allowed to be on and in hamburger, chicken, pork, turkey, and the company can knowingly ship contaminated product and expect the consumer to handle it and deal with it.
Obviously, that doesn't happen because we have lots and lots and lots of people that get salmonella illnesses every year and get severely sick and even die. So I petitioned the US government to do for salmonella, what it successfully has done with E.coli and deem it an adulterate, so the industry could not knowingly sell contaminated product to consumers.
And the whole idea behind it is to try to be as successful with salmonella as we have been with E.coli. And obviously that would entail having a lot less work for myself and my firm to do, which again is a good thing.
Yeah. This is going to be a challenge. And the challenge is because many of these workers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They don't have other marketable skills. And so being a farm worker, being in a meatpacking plant is what they know how to do, and that's what they can do.
The alternative is you come to work or if you don't work, you don't get unemployment, what are you going to do? You're going to come to work. If you have a family and you have to feed yourself and you feed your family. I think people who are in that position, that they absolutely require employers and the government to make sure that those workers are safe.
And that may mean a lot more PPE. That may mean a lot more physical spacing, slowing line speed down, it may well mean that the cost of food increases because the labor costs are going to go up. Safety costs are going to go up, but we've already seen the impact of companies not paying attention to the needs of their workers, because we're seeing beef prices go up, we're seeing meat be less available, certain kinds of meats being less available. So you pay for it now by protecting the workers, who also with COVID, go out into your communities and spread the disease throughout the community.
And so it's not just to protect the worker, which I think is the moral thing to do, but it's also to frankly protect yourself. And sometimes profits are the focus and we become so shortsighted about the long term costs to the people, long term costs to the community.
Chitra, that's a very good question and it's going to be a very difficult one. We do know for a fact that FDA inspections are down, FDA recalls are down. We do know that FSIS inspectors are getting sick in meat plants with COVID. So we do know that it is having an impact. Exactly what impact it's having, intellectually and thoughtfully, it has to be having a negative impact on food safety.
Part of the problem is because health departments who normally would also be surveilling foodborne illnesses are in the midst of helping society deal with COVID. And so part of the problem is, is it intellectually that this food safety is definitely taking a back seat.
Part of the problem is that we're not getting that kind of surveillance to know for a fact. And then you factor in the fact that we're not… Many people aren't eating in restaurants and they're eating at home. And so are the numbers down in part because of that or part because we're not surveilling what's going on. And it is a challenge that because of the risk of COVID, it doesn't have a great solution right now.
I have been having that conversation with my 21-year-old daughter who is putting herself in the middle of some of the peaceful protests here in Seattle. And I found myself talking about safety and talking about perhaps focusing on a different thing than putting yourself in harms way with thousands of people marching and police. I think most fathers would think that way.
So, I certainly have a perspective now of a 63-year-old guy that I probably didn't have when I was 16. I suppose if I was… I'm not sure I would really give that 16-year-old any advice. I'd probably listened to what that 16-year-old had to say to me, because even though I think there's a lot of that 16-year-old in me, and maybe even that 19-year-old city council member is still in me, 50 years has… And focusing on other things has taken me frankly away from some of the real issues that I think we're all facing, whether it's institutional racism, public health in a broader way than I focused on it.
I feel good about the work that I do, but clearly my 21-year-old is indicating to me that she appreciates what I do, but I'm perhaps not paying attention to the things that need to be paid attention to today that I haven't obviously been focused on the last 50 years.
I think my 21-year-old is teaching me that you can do important things and focus on the fact that you have and are doing important things, but that there may well be other things that you might need to find time to deal with. And I think that's pretty wise and I think that's probably the same advice I probably would be giving myself if I was a 19-year-old city council member giving a 63-year-old Bill Marler the advice.
What I'm learning through this COVID thing is we have a lot of work to do as a society. I think this COVID crisis, and some of the recent public killing of an African-American man has brought to the front some inadequacies in our society. That doesn't mean that food safety isn't important, but it means that we need to broaden our perspective and that's something I'm trying to figure out my place in that right now. And I very much appreciate my daughter pointing out my inadequacies.
I think not. I have the luxury that I may help focus my attention on some other things. The fact that I'm not spending two hours a day commuting, and sometime I spend most of my time nowadays, pre-COVID in a situation where I'm usually in an airport or some courtroom somewhere in the world, that's now not happening. So, my perspective on things may change given the fact that I have time to focus on them.
Bill Marler is managing partner at Marler Clark Attorneys At Law. A national expert in food safety, Marler has become on the most prominent foodborne illness lawyer in America, and a major force in food policy, in the US and around the world.
Job Titles:
- Expert
- Principal Cunningham, Levy, Muse, LLC
Bryan Cunningham is a leading international expert on cybersecurity law and policy, emerging technology and surveillance issues. He served as Deputy Legal Adviser to then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice at the White House. He also served six years in the Clinton Administration as a senior CIA officer and federal prosecutor. He drafted significant portions of the Homeland Security Act and related legislation, was a principal contributor to the first National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, worked closely with the 9/11 Commission and provided legal advice to the President, National Security Advisor, the National Security Council, and other senior government officials on intelligence, terrorism, cyber security and other related matters. When Bryan is not advising companies and governments about cybersecurity, you can find him visiting his two daughters or cruising the Puget Sound on his 30 foot boat "What's Next?".
I think I said earlier, I've interviewed all these amazing people. But Tom Waits is the one that I was the most nervous about and that I wanted the most, and Tim, who did maybe interviews with me, I think, felt the same way. He was on a major label, and we couldn't get to him for a long time. Then he switched to an indie label. We were able to get to his wife, Kathleen, who said that he said, "This just sounds like doing the SATs." But he told us to meet him at a truck stop in Sebastopol, which is up north of San Francisco and near Sonoma. We were suddenly in a Win Vendor's film like Paris, Texas, the perfect truck, stop with the perfect little cafe. We went in and sat in a booth.
Diana Nyad is an Olympian. And she's a swimmer. She's been a sports announcer. She's a very famous woman, but she had attempted to swim from Cuba to Florida, three or four times, and she had failed. And she said, when she got close to the age of 60, she was reflecting, and her mother had passed at the age of 60. And she thought to herself, "If I follow in my mother's footsteps, I'll be dead in a year or two, and have I done everything I wanted to do in life?" And she said, "No, I haven't. I want to complete that swim." So she got her whole team together and they looked at every single reason why they failed. And they addressed every single one of those issues. And at the age of 64, she successfully completed her swim from Cuba to Florida. And I saw her speak live about it, and I said, "Oh my God, this was so amazing." There was something about that woman and her story that just got into my bones. And I said, "I'm not done. I'm not done."
Job Titles:
- Producer
- CEO and Founder of Hark
When Seven Days went away, I decided to join forces with them. We founded Hear Music. That business plan actually won the competition. Then we founded Hear Music the day after I graduated from Williams, June 18th, 1990.
Yeah. I often say Hear Music, which went through all these evolutions was a format in search of a medium. The format was very much inspired by the work, the idea of the mixtape that you could listen to music in a serendipitous way and discover things and the narrative experience of an immersive visual experience of an editorial experience of a magazine. We created these beautiful magazines when years later met Bob Dylan's manager. As I was talking to him, I saw on his bookshelf, he had the Hear Music catalogs all in a row, wedged in there. That was great … delayed reaction catharsis.
I approached making it a little bit a mixtape in a magazine. I organized each of the spreads had a theme, whether it was songwriters, that could be novelists, or the birth of Bebop, or Amateur Night at the Apollo. Then I would also interview my favorite artists about the music they thought people should be listening to. Early interviews I did were John Lee Hooker and Rye, Cooder. And then that went on to John Prine, who passed away last year, just an incredible array of my musical heroes who loved participating in this project of trying to help people discover the music that they loved.
Many of those artists talked about the same artists. Lyle Lovett, and many other artists would talk about Willis Alan Ramsey, who I'd never heard of and Chitra have you ever heard of Willis Alan Ramsey? There you go. Willis Alan Ramsey made one unbelievable record in 1972 and was one of those seminal influential artists on so many of these folks that they were able to cast back out. But to your point about interactivity, we were doing everything we could. I think part of what … it was like an education trying to do this thing as a catalog at first.
The Artist's Choice influences, and how do you get people to want to discover something that they don't know, the mission of Hear Music was "How do I get you beyond the top 40? How do I help you want to hear something different?" One example of what we tried to do was, I interviewed Rye Cooder, the great guitarist, and genius musician, and he said, "What I think everyone should listen to is a blues musician from Mali called Ali Farka Toure." I said, "Okay, well, you got to explain why they're going to want to hear that. How would you recommend that to a friend?" He said, "Well, Ali Farka Toure is like John Lee Hooker played backwards."
I said, "that's great." We blew it up really big in the catalog, and it was beautiful. People would call in and say, "Okay, I'm almost ready to take a chance on that. But what does it really sound like?" We were in Boston. We had all Berklee School of Music students working for us. They would run into, "Hold on." They would run into the warehouse, grab the CD, put it into a boombox, and hold the phone up to the boombox. That was our version of on demand streaming in 1992 and '93 which was you could see we're doing everything we could to create an interactive experience. That's all the work we're doing to make catalogs work. But at the end of the day, it's incredibly capital intensive business.
It's that entrepreneur's dilemma where both of my original partners had left, Lisa Larman, who was another founder, who was the creative director, who we eventually got married and became husband and wife. We had all these amazing people working for us doing this catalog. We could just tell. We were trying to do this, but the limitations of the format were holding us back. That's what led us to feeling we needed to make a change. For those of you listening, who are saying, "The internet," there was no internet yet. It was too early. That's what led to creating the Hear Music stores.
Yeah. I mean, I think if you track the ships for Hear Music, it's like we created a magazine that was as interactive as we possibly could. We literally created 800 numbers you could call in and put in a code and listen to 30 seconds of the song. We just sort of did everything we could with that format. Then we said, let's create a store but make it essentially as interactive an environment as we can and as graphic and editorial an environment as we can. Again, the sounds absurd to listeners in the present day. Thinking about where we are with technology. But at the time that My mother likes to point out that in Toronto, Canada, when she was growing up, she could go into a store and there were … she could put an album and she'd go into a little booth. But that idea of an interactive listening station was something that hadn't been done.
We really tried to make the store an experience that you walked through, like people have described the Hear Music stores as a combination of Copenhagen coffee house, Japanese sushi bar, and the best indie bookstore, and an art gallery, or a museum. As you walked through, it was like you were walking through the pages of the magazine. Here's David Byrne recommending the music he thinks you should be listening to from Cuba. As you walk through here's Yo-Yo Ma helping you get into the music of the classical period. Here's an entire vault on how the best of '50s jazz. That real sense of curation.
It wasn't just about having listening stations but was around making a store that I don't think there's ever been a store before or since that had more words on its walls than that store than those stores did and using graphics to help people go places we had. As you walked in, there was a beautiful rotunda with a plaster wall and Lisa, our creative director, made actual slides, physical slides. We would pick for each song that played, I would pick a lyric, or we would write a little few sentences about it. She would make slides that were just projecting beautiful white type on the wall. It looked somebody's gone up and painted the quote on the wall. People would walk in and look at it, and then the song would change, and the slide would change, and people would look up and say, "Wait, how did that happen?"
We had motorcycle taillights under the CDs that were playing. All of this was super fun to do, and again, trying to build another form of interactivity. I think all these training wheels of interactivity meant that when we finally got the internet, we were … to the point of your question, we brought more to it, I think. I think it was helpful to have gone through those phases. Lisa herself, who had been before we met the designer of a number of music magazines, musician magazine, she redesigned Creem Magazine. She is of that generation, the last of the generation designers who were taught doing paste up, physical paste up of design before computers.
She actually took the job with Hear Music because we were going to buy her a Macintosh and let her learn QUIRK, which was the design program. She also feels strongly that learning analog allows you when you get the freedom of digital to be smarter.
Yeah. I mean, one of the most pivotal meetings of my life, we were in Boston, went met with a man named Charles Leighton, who owned a company called CML, which was a holding company. They own Boston Whaler and NordicTrack, and Smith & Hawken, and Nature Company. Smith & Hawken and Nature Company were companies that had stores and catalogs. We went and I was pitching him in a big trading places picture very severe businessy board room and I'm pitching this man on, yes, we're doing these catalogs, but I have a vision for creating an interactive retail environment.
He started smiling and kept smiling. Then he interrupted me and said, "Don, I would like to fly you to California to meet with a person who whether you end up working together or not, will be one of your favorite people ever." His name is Richard Altuna. Richard is one of the greatest retail designers in the history of that discipline. He designed the NBA Store in New York, Patagonia Stores, every Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn and William Sonoma you were ever in, all of those stores he did. He said, "Well, if we're going to think about interactivity, we have to go to Paris." I said, "Okay, I'm up for Paris."
Because there was nowhere to sort of … He said, "Because we have to think about how interactivity works in a retail environment." We went to Paris. First, we went to … it's an interesting, quick story. We went to Virgin Megastore, which had a bank of listening stations with the hits. You could listen to the new Madonna record, and you could listen to the new Mariah Carey record. Then there were acres of CDs and bins that you couldn't listen to. That didn't seem right. This is a Goldilocks story. Then we went to a store, a really beautiful store called Fnac, F-N-A-C, which is feels like you're in a house ware store, a home. It feels almost a residential environment, and then there would be a cushy chair with headphones, and there was one CD on repeat at a table. We sat there for a minute, and that didn't feel right.
He said, "This isn't right. We have to go to Frankfurt." We flew to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, at the top of a very traditional department store, there was a very stripped down record store. Above every bin, there was a shelf. On the shelf, there was a single disc changer with one CD on repeat. What was interesting about it was as people shopped, wherever they were, they would just take the headphone and put the headphones on and listen for about six seconds. Then they would either take them off, or they would look up and grab that CD.
That for me is the serendipity. It's serendipity versus discovery as work. They found their way to something they never would have found. That inspired us when we built the first Hear Music store. We actually built it. Our idea was that we were going to have single disc players. Then while we were building it, Sony came out with a cheap enough 10-disc CD changer. Again, your younger listeners have no idea what I'm talking about, that allowed us to go buy these and solder. We bought buttons at RadioShack and literally screwed buttons onto the shelves and soldered them back to these 10-dish changers.
We opened this store, and people came in. A number of people over the first month said, "Where's the computer?" They thought there was a giant hard drive in the back of the store. Again, it's that sense of trying to create a sense of magic around using analog. That when you ultimately get the magic technology of the internet and everything, you have a better sense of how to use it.
Right. Right. I think, just quickly … The first store we ever built was on Fourth Street in Berkeley. We built a store at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto that Steve Jobs shopped at regularly. When I met Steve Jobs years later, and I had them send me … fax me his receipts, the receipts so that I know what Steve Jobs has bought over those many years. When I finally, Howard Schultz introduced me to Steve Jobs, and he said, "I know. It's your music. My favorite store." I said, "You love Ennio Morricone." It was fun to break privacy for the man who created our lack of privacy. No.
One day, I got this call from Howard Schultz. We built a store on Russian Oak in Chicago, the corner of Russian Oak. We had built it next door at the same time as a really beautiful flagship Starbucks store. Howard Schultz called up and said, "I don't know if you know. We have a store next to each other." I was like, "I have many fewer stores than you have. I'm aware." He said, "The big thing that the customers are asking to do, all the comments are that they want to knock down the wall between the Starbucks and the Hear Music store, and they want to integrate the experience."
That was a pretty good opener. At that point, we were based in San Francisco and I flew up to Seattle. cThis is 1999. The Internet bubble is going like crazy. A lot of our investors were saying, "Hey, let's go raise a bunch of money and go on the internet." But the internet was still … We had just gone from 14 4 modems to 28 8 modems. It was still very slow, very hard to deliver that full experience there. Then when I got a call from Howard, I was like, "Look at this beautiful thing."
There was a great team there." Timothy and Holly and David, who were playing incredibly great music for people and one of the top questions to the baristas was always, "Excuse me, what is this song that's playing?" and the ability to take that incredible, that serendipitous moment and start creating real mixtapes. This takes us back to high school. Everything had been an approximation. But here, we can create compilations, and really mixtape at scale, and it was really, really fun.
Yeah. As I said, there were great folks there, Timothy Jones, Holly Hinton, and David Brewster who had started the … they were playing. It was very focused on jazz and world music. I felt there was a way to scale that until it was around … we built the compilations you saw, Artist's choice CDs. On my 35th birthday, we interviewed the Rolling Stones, one after another an hour each about their favorite music for their Hear Music Artist Choice CD, which was an unbelievable experience, and Opus collections where we would take an artist like Etta James and create our own mixtape of her, the best moments from her career.
Again, this was at a time where the physical distribution of music was going away. But digital hadn't really scaled yet. There was a real magic that was a magic moment where Starbucks was at the perfect place to collapse marketing, like discovery, and distribution in the same act. It was incredible. We did not only do we make the compilations. We put in the WiFi networks. I remember going to a meeting where the operators were saying the customers wanted more phone jacks that you could … if you remember that. Starbucks put in WiFi, which enabled an entire whole another level of experiences there. We did a Hear Music XM75 satellite radio station, which is now the Coffeehouse Station if you have SiriusXM, but, yeah, all sorts of amazing stuff.
They were in Toronto. They were preparing for the world tour of Forty Licks. They were all living on the … they had the entire top floor of the Four Seasons. The team took … Me and Tim Ziegler who did the interview to the suite at the end of the hall and brought them in one by one. They each have their own manager. We had been faxed separate lists by each of the people, for each of them. None of them had seen what the others had picked, which is funny. Of course, Charlie Watts came in first and said, "I just want to make sure I didn't choose Chuck Berry because I assumed Mick and Keith would choose Chuck Berry," and lo and behold, neither of them had and he got very upset.
Mick was incredible. There were really surprising picks. Mick chose a song by Sade, and that's not what you would think Mick Jagger would put. Then when Ron Wood came in, and they each had a rider for what would be moved into the room before they came for Charlie Watts. It was a big pot of coffee. For Mick Jagger, it was two wine goblets filled with cranberry juice. For Ronnie Wood, it was a giant ashtray. For Keith Richards, it was two bottles of Stolichnaya with can of Orange Crush open.
But when Ron Wood came in, he immediately said I need to see everyone's picks. He looked at Charlie's list. Charlie had chosen a song by Earl Bostic which I'm not sure any of your listeners have heard of Earl Bostic. I had never heard of Earl Bostic. Bostic was a pop, R&B, saxophone player from the '50s, I think, or the '60s. He got very upset. Ron said, "We cannot have Earl Bostic on this compilation. This is our legacy." He said, "Come with me. Come with me." He starts running down the hall. We follow him down the hall and he starts pounding on Charlie Watts' door. I am just trying to have the interview not end.
He's saying, "Earl," I won't say the word. I don't know. But Earl F-ing Bostic. Are you kidding me?" and shouting at the door. Finally, I'm thinking the managers are going to make us go away and everything. But finally Charlie Watts opens his door, like Lurch, and looks down at Ron Wood with a withering stare. Says, "I'll have you know, when I was nine years old, I heard Earl Bostic and it inspired me to rule up a newspaper in the shape of a saxophone and painted yellow." F-You, and … slams the door in his face. It was an amazing moment. Ron wood said, "Okay," and then we went back down the hall. That's my Rolling Stone story.
Yeah. I mean, it was beautiful. I have a lot of friends who are music journalists who have interviewed many of the same people. But it is different. It's a different conversation. Musicians talking about, "Well, this is my latest album." They have a formula they fall into when they get into press mode and they're talking about their new record. They have a little hard drive of quotes about it. There's a great moment where they realized … when we interviewed Lou Reed in his apartment in the West Village, he was very unwelcoming. We were in his home. But he was very … there's a lot of stories of Lou Reed and we were about to live one of those mean Lou Reed stories. He started just talking about the new record that he was making.
I interrupted him and said, "Listen, that's not what this is. This is about what music do you wish people would hear?" He said, "Can I talk about Doo-wop?" We said, "Yeah, absolutely." He was like, "Okay, can I make you some tea?" He started putting on Doo-wop records and playing them at top volume. It was just incredible. I feel like I created my dream job. It was a dream.
He came in carrying a stack of vinyl up to his chin and put it on the table. I almost had a cardiac arrest. I said, "So great to meet you. Thank you so much for bringing these records." He said, "Actually, if you can help me out, I got the rest in the truck." We went out and he had a big black suburban, and he opened the back doors, and it was filled with CDs and albums. He said, "Before I met Kathleen, these were all in pizza boxes." We carried them in and we sat in that truck stop diner, in that booth, and he just went record by record. It was an unbelievable experience. It went on for over three hours, just incredible.
I was thinking we would be finding upstart singer songwriter. But it was the greatest legend of them all, Ray Charles. He wanted to do a … he had been passed, dropped by, I think, Universal he had been passed on by all the major labels. Imagine that. What he wanted to do was a duets record. Now, I think it seems Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett do a duets record every four minutes. But at the time, there had been a very legendary one done by Frank Sinatra. But that was really sort of it. He was saying, "I want to sing with Norah Jones. I want to sing with Elton John. I want to sing with Diana Krall." We did it and it was an incredible year of doing the recordings.
We did not know what at the time, but he was dying of liver cancer. It's the same time that Taylor Hackford and Jamie Foxx were making the film Ray. I remember being at all of the recordingss. I love. There was one with Willie Nelson, where they recorded it on the Eastwood Soundstage at the Warner lot which is … you see that at the Grammys where there's the big … or the Oscars where there's the big orchestra there, and then there's sort of isolation booths, and they can score a film, and an incredible setting. They had Willie Nelson in one booth and Ray in the other, and this giant orchestra. You can picture Willie Nelson singing When I was 17, it was a very good year.
It's this wistful song. It was an incredibly emotional experience. The last recording he ever made was with Elton John, Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word and Elton was recording an album and they set up the studio across the hall and brought in Ray from the hospital and recorded it. It was an unbelievable experience. Then he passed away and that album one … it was the Adele of that Grammys. It won eight Grammys Record of the Year that Norah Jones song with Ray won Song of the Year. That was a pretty good way to launch the Hear Music label that you could never follow up on.
We did release, as you mentioned at the top, Bob Dylan's Live at the Gaslight, which are the Gaslight Recordings that had been around on bootlegs but never released and did a record with Herbie Hancock where it was duets record. But it was more than that. He went into the studio with John Mayer, whom he'd never met. They wrote a song on the spot. That was pretty incredible. It allowed albums that might otherwise never have happened to happen, and to get a broad audience. That was really satisfying.
I mean, I could talk about all the great stuff at Starbucks forever, which was an incredible company. I got there when there were 1,100 stores on from their 10th … I don't know what the numbers are. But it was there during this incredible period of growth. One day, Howard Schultz called me up and said "Bono is coming tomorrow." They won't tell us why he's … The people won't tell us why he's coming. I should be in the meeting, because it's probably about music. I, of course, thought, arrogantly thought, "Oh, of course, U2 must have a new record. We'll do an artist choice with U2 and Bono and it'll be great."
But that is not what the meeting was about. He was, at the very beginning, of creating Product RED, which was his organization to fight AIDS in Africa. At this point, I think Product RED to your listeners, most of what your listeners are wearing, gives back to some brand in some way. Gives back to some cause. From the remove of 2020, Product RED can seem pretty … I don't know, trite. But at that moment, it was a really incredibly innovative idea. Companies, Howard, actually had an offsite a few months prior to that, where he talked about how customers were going to take … do an audit of the businesses … the companies they did business with.
But at that point, so much of what companies thought about was having a corporate social responsibility tab on their website about what their maybe their foundation was doing. It didn't get into the dialogue with the customer. It didn't get into the brand itself. RED was this ability to … Bono's idea was this is an emergency, and it's an emergency, not just of raising money, but of helping people understand what's happening. We need the best in his words, the best storytellers in the world to help do that. I think it's to his credit that he would then say, and some of the best storytellers in the world are, Steve Jobs, Phil Knight, are these incredible brands.
If we could hijack their marketing in a way that communicated what this emergency is in an empowering way, and made it really simple to make a difference. I was completely blown up. He basically said, "I'm flying up the coast. Two nights ago, I was with Steve for Apple, and I got him. Last night I was with Phil Knight with Nike." That's how he says Nike. "And I got him and now in here for you." I was absolutely blown away by the idea. He also talked about we're going to have the most creative people in the world work for the poorest people in the world. That wasn't just sort of Nike, and its agencies. That was musicians and artists and writers and actors.
I really loved that idea. Eventually, I left. While we didn't do the Starbucks deal, at that moment, I did leave and join Product RED, which at that point was very small. A very small number of amazing people, as you mentioned, Bobby Shriver, Sheila Roche is just an … it was one of the most amazing people ever that made it happen. This tiny group of people were able to have the fulcrum of these giant brands to launch a brand on their backs. That's a really tricky thing, too. Steve Jobs was very … I can't have the Apple logo have parentheses around it. There is no way I'll let that happen. But he let it happen. It was an incredible experience.
Yeah. I mean, I think, when we launched on Oprah, there was a big Oprah show where we launched and Bono and Oprah went down Michigan Avenue. I was in the Motorola store with Kanye West, presidential candidate Kanye West. But I think if we did allow … we did create a way for musicians to turn their concerts RED, we created a thing called RedWire, which was a subscription music service that was essentially getting a mixtape from RED every month with exclusive. You would get an exclusive song from Coldplay or Jay-Z, and then an emerging song that you wouldn't have otherwise known about.
Some other piece of content that would help you understand not just the AIDS crisis, but the cultures of Africa that you were helping. We were helping you understand … that's a real … anyway, helping people really get a vision and understanding of the people they were helping.
I went back to the … I loved Product RED. I did it for five years. But we jumped. I wanted to get back to curation and discovery of culture. I created a company called MILQ, M-I-L-Q with two co-founders, Jordan Jacobs, and Tomi Poutanen. It was really … That's the company out of which we're sort of creating Hark, but MILQ was really saying, "Okay, we're now at a time where … now we have the internet, like Hear Music." You can share any digital content, any culture, a song, a film, clip anything. Yet, the way we're sharing on social media right now feels like we're atomizing culture, as opposed to organizing it.
MILQ was about finding a way to allow people who love and have knowledge about certain areas of culture, whether it's '60s film … whether it's Film Noir, or tennis, to be able to share with each other in a way that maps that area of culture. We launched a consumer business. We powered a book discovery experience for Barnes & Noble. We developed an AI algorithm that we spun out and sold to TD Bank about a year and a half ago, which was very successful for everybody. Then I really wanted to turn my attention to specifically solving the issues around podcasts.
I see a great sort of rhyme between the issues of around music and the issues around podcasting. I mean, first of all podcasting … I mean, one thing is I love podcasts. Part of what I love about podcasts is what I love about music. What I love about music is there's an incredible array of artists of incredible diversity out there and yet the music industry feels it's about self-fulfilling prophecy a bunch of music that sounds similar, and the same star system being re-circulated. Podcasting, it's that times a billion. What we love about podcasting is the means of production have been handed to the people.
There's an incredible diversity of voices talking about a truly infinite array of topics. There's incredible content out there. I want to tap into that. Yet, the tools that I'm given are … the current apps are here. I've subscribed to six podcasts. Those episodes pile up, like New York Times, New Yorker issues I haven't read yet, which is not to say, I don't love those episodes. But what I feel and as I've talked to other people who love podcasts feel is there's so much out there and there. It doesn't feel like podcasts are browsable. What I want is a prism that would refract it for me, so I could of tap into the genius conversations that are happening out there.
Exactly. I think it's a big problem for listeners. I know it's a problem for listeners. But it's also a really big problem for podcasters. Because it means that it's very … the Apple podcast chart is a self-fulfilling chart of its own. People will keep listening to the Daily or Joe Rogan and not get beyond it. The question of how to solve that though, it's different than music. With music, there was actually a really interesting podcast last week, Andreessen Horowitz podcast had the head of R&D for Spotify on. He talked about how … Spotify has made a major push on podcasts.
He talked about how … with Spotify Discover for music, you can … they give you a bunch of songs you've never heard of, and people skip the song within two seconds, like, nope, nope, nope. You can do that 10 times and then get to a song that you might like. But with podcasts that are … and he said with podcasts that are 90 minutes long, you can't needle drop into the beginning and understand exactly what it is that quickly. I think we need to take a different … if what we're going to do is create a serendipitous way for a broad audience to find their way to podcast that otherwise might not have discovered, I think we need a different model than that.
The idea for Hark at its simplest is to go and find those great moments within podcast episodes. You talking to Nina Totenberg about how as a young girl she loves Nancy Drew, and how that inspired her to become Nina Totenberg. There's tons of examples of like when we find ourselves telling people all of you podcast listeners, ‘I have that moment where I want you to listen to the whole episode. But you got to hear this one moment.' That one moment is the genius thing that will be their way in. The idea of Hark is, what if we could create an entire immersive listening experience out of the best moments from great podcast episodes where we organize those moments into, yes, mixtapes, because what else would it be after listening to me for an hour?
That would do two things at once. We could have mixtapes on all different topics, musicians telling the story behind their song, or what are different perspectives … what are the likely policies of Amy Coney Barrett, or different versions of history of the civil rights. Think of all the beauty of podcasts is all of the perspectives, and the ability to create a mixtape that allows you to hit Play, walk your beagle, and hear it move from moment to moment and clip to clip. But at the same time … you can listen to it the same as you listen to podcasts. But what's beautiful is each of those moments is an invitation to go, listen to the whole episode. Discover the podcaster that made it. You start from being dropped into an amazing moment and you end up discovering the voice you might never otherwise have found.
Well, I certainly didn't think it would have anything to do with anything I would end up doing. I think the number one thing I would say is find a way to keep pulling. Keep pulling at the threads, the sweater, keep doing the things you love and find finding ways to apply those to what you want to do in your life and that you feel can have a meaningful difference. I feel very lucky that something I love doing when I was 15 ended up being something that I could try to apply to what I wanted to accomplish. What I wanted to accomplish was have other people have that incredible experience of discovering an artist … discovering Ali Farka Toure, finding themselves listening to a Malian blues guitarist and loving it because Rye Cooder helps you understand how to appreciate it.
Similarly to with Hark, finding yourself listening to an incredible discussion of the Liscow Caves by John Green from the Anthropocene Reviewed, because you found your way there through a mixtape on Hark. That, to me is like why I feel lucky that I fell in love with the right hobby way back then.
It's been such a tragic year on so many levels. Not just COVID-19. I mean, I think COVID-19 all of the social justice, just the travesty of George Floyd and then the incredible partisan divide are the things that … I think having those things happen in a world where COVID was happening, which meant that some people were holed up in places of comfort, and some people were not, I think, again, really COVID has shown us that we are not all living in the same America. George Floyd has showed us that we're not all living in the same America. I think what's … I don't know that it's an insight. But it's an imperative of what can possibly help bring America together.
Another thing I work on is I created a website for Ken Burns called Ken Burns Unum, which essentially is allowing Ken Burns to create mixtapes of moments from his films, around themes where he's trying to help. You'd see a moment from our history and how it applies to now. For instance, an interview he did with James Baldwin around the Statue of Liberty and how it relates to Confederate monuments. My hope is that we can find a way. I mean, the thing that feels so powerless is how paralyzed we are and how we're not talking to each other, and different parts of America are consuming fundamentally different media, and getting fundamentally different perspectives.
One of the things to bring it back to Hark is I do think what's powerful about it is we feel like we're creating a new medium. There isn't a place where you can hear a playlist of short clips from different perspectives on one topic. I'm not saying that's all of what Hark is. But I think, as we've started to wear the sweater and try out the elasticity of this format that's what's been the most powerful of trying to create something that actually isn't just one perspective or another, but brings those voices together.
I'm not saying I think it's a silver bullet to solve the problem in America. But that's not so much an insight, but as a concern.
Don MacKinnon is the CEO and founder of Hark, a podcast, discovery, curation, and community building app that's launching tomorrow to help listeners discover podcasts that they otherwise might never have found. Thanks for listening to the 52nd and final episode of season two of When It Mattered. I'm really looking forward to bringing you season three in the New Year. We have some great guests lined up and they'll be sharing amazing stories that will inform delight and inspire you in your own journey as leaders.
Job Titles:
- CEO and Founder of Executive Podcasting Solutions
White also served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, looking at data-driven outcomes in conflict negotiations. And he became a Senior Ashoka Fellow.
But over time, White began to question his landmine survivor hero-narrative and dreamed of retiring his "landmine cape" as he likes to call it.
His soul-searching on how that accident changed his relationship with nature and why that landmine came to be on that Israeli hill in the first place, has resulted in a prolific body of thinking, speaking, and writing. White has a new book out this November, called Religicide: Confronting the Roots of Anti-Religious Violence. The book is now available for pre-order on Amazon. White also wrote a 2004 book on resilience, titled, "I Will Not Be Broken."
Today, White is an award-winning teacher, activist, and leader. He currently serves as a Professor of Practice in Religion and Political Science at the University of Virginia and teaches the popular course: Religion, Violence, and Strategy: How to Stop Killing in the Name of God.
My conversation with Jerry White about what happens when you dare to question your own narrative and when you lose touch with the earth was a profound experience and I am so glad to share it with you today.
John Barry remembers the exact moment he gave up his boyhood dream of doing medical research for his other boyhood dream of writing. He was 13 years old and had returned from summer camp eager to examine some bacteria cultures he had grown and left in the freezer, only to find them gone. Little did he know it at the time, but after a long detour away from his childhood love for medical research, Barry would write an award winning book on science and medicine called, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. The acclaimed book, which he dreaded writing because of its complexity, positioned Barry to give timely history, context and framing for the COVID-19 pandemic when it exploded on the world stage last year. The crisis of pandemics and how to deal with them would largely take over Barry's life. Don't miss my fascinating conversation with John M. Barry, prize winning and New York Times bestselling author of six books, two of which, The Great Influenza and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, have pulled Barry into various policy advising roles with state, federal, United Nations, and World Health Organization officials on influenza, water related disasters, and risk communication. Barry is currently a distinguished scholar at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.
Since most people didn't believe that he was right, so they didn't give him the prize. Of course, he was right. In the book, I quote about five or six Nobel laureates including Jim Watson, Peter Medawar, Salvador Luria, Macfarlane Burnet, all saying Avery was key. He basically launched the entire field of molecular biology, but he never got the prize. At any rate, Avery struggled with that paper for 25 years trying to solve the problem, which ended up in that conclusion. And knowing what he went through, it did kind of keep me going.
As I said, for five and a half years, it was hell almost every day, but it then came together in the last year and a half. Things worked out pretty well and obviously the book fortunately. I'm quite proud of it. Both in the scientific community and commercially it did pretty well.
It did. It came out by coincidence a year after SARS. Right around the time, H5N1, so-called bird flu surfaced. After, of course, 9/11, and the Bush administration was very concerned about pandemic preparedness. I've been told by many people in positions to know that the book was actually useful in terms of actually getting a $7 billion piece of legislation passed for preparedness. In fact, Secretary of HHS Mike Lovett apparently read portions of it to a handful of key senators in a meeting.
They went out the next day and took over the floor, so I've been told quite recently by a pretty senior person who was there.
Apparently. Anyway, at the same time, a lot of the planning was based on analyzing what happened in 1918. And since I knew about that, I was asked to get involved in the early days of those planning meetings, sort of conceptualizing how to respond to a pandemic. It was intellectually challenging and fun. I enjoyed it. I was very happy to participate in that and been involved in that issue ever since really.
Yeah, they're hard miss really. I mean, there are a lot of differences. There are also a tremendous number of similarities. Understanding what had happened the way the virus in 1918 had moved, it did I think give me some help in understanding what might happen this time. Even in January of 2020, it seemed apparent to me that that virus was going to be a pandemic. COVID-19 would be a pandemic. I wrote a piece of work entitled, This Virus Cannot Be Contained, which ran in January in The Washington Post.
It just seemed so obvious. I couldn't understand why other people weren't seeing it. I mean, obviously some were, but too many weren't. Based on what happened in 1918, I guessed in April I wrote another piece saying that summer was not going to provide relief. I think the virus is a seasonal virus, but in that under normal circumstances, summer does help contain the virus. Heat and humidity and so forth, the virus doesn't do that well as it does in other temperatures. But so much of the population in the United States during the summer was still susceptible.
I thought that was much more important than the fact that the temperature was going up. Unfortunately, that prediction proved true. That was based on historical evaluation. The so-called, the social distancing, the hand washing, ventilation, all those things were used in 1918. Analyses of cities that did more of them, did them earlier, and so forth demonstrated that they were effective somewhat at any rate in 1918. I mean, models suggest they did as well, but having that historical precedent, all those things combined to make them the policy of the preparedness plans.
Of course, you got to execute the policies. I think the single biggest lesson coming out of 1918, however, was that you need to tell the truth. If you're going to get the public to comply with your recommendations, they have to want to comply. They're not going to go ahead to do that unless they believe you. The truth is absolutely crucial to get that public acceptance.
Not in the United States. There obviously are countries around the world where that worked very well. A lot of countries have been very much more successful than the United States. Some of them have all but eliminated the virus. Their containment has been extraordinary. A lot of countries have done better than the United States, most of them frankly, and a few have done even worse. But I think if you look across borders, the ones that have done well that were not totalitarian countries have told the truth.
That was very important as part of their plan. Transparency is very high in the pandemic preparedness plan that was prepared by the United States. Very high priority. The highest priority really. It's the same in every state plan all of which are modeled after the federal plan. But as a football coach would say, you got to execute, and we didn't execute.
Well, not this administration. But the Bush administration, yeah, I did get pretty involved. We've already talked about the preparation of… I mean, the whole planning process and development of policy over how to deal with the pandemic. In 2009, I got pretty involved, not in an official way I guess, but pretty involved with their response from the Obama administration to H1N1, the so-called swine flu. Some people on the national security council and I are pretty friendly and we would talk quite often.
One thing that was interesting back then was scientists around the world were sending me fairly significant information, and I would forward that to my friends in the White House. They are pretty busy. At one point, I was asking them did they want me to keep sending this stuff because it takes time to open an email and was it worth it. They responded, "Oh yes, please do," because I was giving them information that they were not getting through official channels for weeks sometimes, whereas I was giving it to them in real time.
Those official channels are not always very good movers of information. I think we've discovered that again this time the way information has flowed to the World Health Organization from China, for example. Not exactly timely and not exactly with total candor, so-called transparency. I don't really like the word transparency, but everybody else seems to use it, so I guess I might as well.
Well, the Rising Tide was about a flood that nobody ever heard of really in 1927. The Mississippi River was the biggest disaster in American history, natural disaster in American history. It flooded just about 1% of the entire population of the country. It killed people from Virginia to Oklahoma all of which is in the Mississippi River basin. It elected Hoover president. It changed the way people thought about the federal government and its responsibilities toward individual citizens.
In terms of percentage of GDP, it was five times the impact of Hurricane Sandy and significantly larger than the impact of Katrina. A huge event, even though most people unless they lived close to the Mississippi River never heard of it. That book did come out. That also fortunately won some awards. In Louisiana, it was a huge bestseller. Nationally it wasn't quite as big, although it did actually make the bestseller list. I was pretty well-known in Louisiana.
After the storm, the congressional delegation and bipartisan based asked me to chair a working group on flood protection. Then the state passed a constitutional amendment to create a new levee board for Metro New Orleans. I was asked to serve on that, which I did. This was an extraordinary board. Levee boards normally are highly political and they spend some money, so they had resources. But they were all localized. Whereas we had on it from California, the head of flood plan management for the State of California who had before that been the chief engineer for California's levee system.
We had from North Carolina, the chair of National Academies of Sciences working group on coastal risk reduction. We had the past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers who happened to be local in New Orleans. Had a guy who wrote college textbooks on engineering. This was really an extraordinary board. We were determined to try to protect the city as well as we could. Louisiana has lost 2,000 square miles of land. Coastal Louisiana just melted into the ocean. That's bigger than the State of Delaware.
One of the main causes of this was oil and gas production in the coastal lands. Those lands serve as a buffer. If you put the State of Delaware between New Orleans and the ocean, you wouldn't need any levies at all. While our primary task for this board was to try to oversee the new levee system that was being built to make sure that it was done properly and make some suggestion where possible or where needed, because I hope your listeners understand, just to back up for a second.
The levee system that existed before Katrina was designed to hold a storm like Katrina. It should have held that storm. The levees that flooded the city, they're actually flood walls, not levees technically. They were not overtopped. The water never came within two feet of the top of those levees. They just collapsed because they were not well-designed. We wanted to make sure that things were done right. But looking out to the longer term to protect the city, we recognized that we had to restore some of that land that was lost.
That's very expensive. The oil industry by its own studies is responsible for roughly a third of the land loss. Other people think it's a lot higher, but the industry's own studies put it at a third. We did something extremely controversial in the state of Louisiana. We filed a lawsuit against 97 oil and gas and pipeline companies seeking their help in restoring this land. It did spark quite a political battle in the state legislature and gubernatorial campaigns and things like that.
It's kind of interesting. Our case was dismissed. We did take it to the Supreme Court. We never got to trial. It was dismissed beforehand, and the claim was that we didn't have standing to file the lawsuit. However, we did spark lawsuits by several parishes, counties, we call counties parishes in Louisiana, which explicitly do have standing in the law and a whole host of private land owner lawsuits. All of those are preceding. There has been a settlement in theory worked out between one company, Freeport-McMoRan, and the parishes.
That requires legislation and all sorts of things to go forward before that settlement can be truly worked out. It's not clear whether that will be resolved. And if so, whether it will be a model for the other companies that would have to come forward with a lot more money than Freeport-McMoRan has agreed to do.
I don't know. I was accused in fact in the state legislature of filing the lawsuit for the sole purpose of having a book to write about. They actually said that. I was just trying to look for a subject. West Virginia and coal. Louisiana and oil. There used to be a saying that the flag of Texaco flies atop the state capitol in Louisiana. Of course, Texaco doesn't exist anymore. Part of Exxon, I guess, or Chevron rather.
Well, obviously pretty depressing. In Katrina, we had water in our street, but it didn't get above the curb. Of course, I have friends who lost everything, so I had survivor guilt. The French Quarter was a desolate place a year ago at this time. There's a hotel next to me that had its very depressing large driveway. They put plywood over the driveway. Normally it's so active down here. You see nothing. Probably everybody listening can remember pictures of Beijing with these massive road systems that are about 12 or 14 lanes wide that don't have anything moving on it.
That was kind of like the French Quarter in New Orleans. My wife and I would walk around every day. There was one guy that used to play bagpipes a few blocks away. That's a pretty haunting sound. Of course, everyone has gone through something like that in the past year. Not fun.
Well, I do follow it pretty closely. I'm writing a book about it. I knew several members of Biden's advisory committee. A couple of them are friends. I knew a couple of others. So I'm reasonably plugged in. The variants are a real concern, but I'm optimistic. In 1918, there was a first wave that was not at all lethal. I'll give you one example. There were 40,000 French soldiers hospitalized, sick enough to be hospitalized. Fewer than a hundred died.
That's pretty mild, particularly back then when you didn't have any antibiotics and really not a lot of things you could do in terms of medical care. That virus mutated. The other thing about that first wave was it was not particularly… I mean, it was contagious, sure, but it had a tendency to peter out not nearly as contagious as it became. A variant of that initial virus emerged. And when it did, it was highly contagious and it also was much more lethal, much deadlier.
That's sort of what's happening now. Fortunately it's nothing like the difference in 1918, but these new variants, they are significantly more transmissible. The original wild virus was extraordinarily transmissible. Much more transmissible than influenza. Influenza is seasonal. Influenza has a reproductive number of about 1.28. 1918 was probably about 1.8, and the initial virus of SARS‑CoV‑2 was 2.5 to 3. That's much more transmissible than influenza, much more transmissible than the 1918 pandemic.
The variants are roughly 50% more transmissible than the original wild virus. The real concern is that they… Well, that's a pretty big concern just the numbers. But in addition, they are more lethal. Not like the difference between 1918, between the first and second wave, which were orders of magnitude, but there was a study saying that the B117, the UK variant, was I think the number was 64% more lethal than the virus that it replaced. The other variants, the numbers aren't really clear, but they seem also to be more deadly than the virus that they are replacing.
It's not an order of magnitude higher as 1918 was, but it's worrisome. They do seem to be vulnerable to the vaccine, all of the variants. My real concern is the variants that we have not seen yet. The possibility that a really nasty version of SARS‑CoV‑2 could be out there and could develop. Obviously we have some very effective vaccines. I'll give you a sense of just how effective. The best influenza vaccine we ever had was 62% effective. You were 62% less likely to get the disease. Normally they're about 40% effective for influenza.
These vaccines came in at the 90% level. Even ones that are a little bit less, the 70% level, and they've all proven to be 100% effective in preventing severe disease defined as admission to an ICU. It might even be half. I've got the precise definition. Everybody listening, if you've listened to this and you're probably interested in COVID, and then you know we are in a race to get enough people vaccinated before the variants really take hold and spread widely and also to prevent the emergence of a really nasty variant.
I do think we are in the United States just about dead even with the variants, maybe slightly ahead. We have a chance of winning that race in the United States. If we do that, if a really nasty variant doesn't emerge, then I would think you're going to have a lot of football stadiums with some pretty big crowds in the fall. But worldwide, the virus is going to be continue to be in check. It is possible you get a really nasty version of it that emerges somewhere, or it could emerge in the United States.
It could emerge anywhere, or it may never emerge. But it's not over yet. It's certainly in the self-interest of ourselves to make sure that the rest of the world gets plenty of vaccine and gets it fast.
I'm not very clever. Just keep on trucking. Do what interests you and what you're curious about and what drives you. Hardly an original thought, but it's not so much pursue your dream, but work hard and have a goal and pursue it.
Not really. I guess a moment of clarity is more a moment of incomprehensibility. What's so overwhelming in this whole thing is the incompetence of the response of the Trump administration. Everybody in public health, everybody who knows anything about pandemics is so frustrated, furious, depressed, because there are hundreds of thousands of people in the United States who should be alive. Practically on a daily basis, you just shake your head in disbelief over how poorly this was handled in the United States.
Nobody that I know of in the community ever imagined something like a mask could be politicized. Could we imagine that some people wouldn't want to wear them? Yes. But could we imagine that it would be part of a partisan political fight? No. That's sort of the clearest that comes through whenever I think of COVID-19 is that so many hundreds of thousands of people in this country should be alive who are dead.
John M. Barry is a prize winning and acclaimed New York Times bestselling author whose books have won multiple awards. His books include The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. Barry's writing has received not only a slew of major awards, but less formal recognition as well. A 2004 GQ named Rising Tide one of nine pieces of writing essential to understanding America.
Job Titles:
- Chief Technology Officer
- Chief Technology Officer at FluLab
Julie Schafer was sitting in her tiny office in a big office building in Washington D.C. having second thoughts about how the Presidential Management Fellowship that she had just begun fit in with her career goals.
Julie Schafer was pursuing what she thought was her dream career in public health, when a chance meeting at an impulse decision settle on a wild ride deep into the world of dangerous pandemics. Schafer's expertise could not be more timely given the COVID-19 pandemic. She works to apply new technologies and approaches to an old foe - influenza - and is applying that knowledge fighting this pandemic. Hello everyone, I'm Chitra Ragavan and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Good Story an advisory firm helping technology start-ups find their narrative. I'm joined now by Julie Schafer, the chief technology officer for the organization flu lab, where she seeks to stretch the boundaries of how technology is used to defeat influenza.
Right. You can't talk about BARDA without talking about how the context changed with influenza and after Hurricane Katrina and after all of that. The National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza was released. The reason, normally you wouldn't talk with in such excited terms about a government document but really it was such an important document because what it did was … I talked about how that first plan that we put out identified a lot of problems and didn't have a lot of solutions. The National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza laid out an approach, a really bold approach to address a really big problem. Looking at it from a federal government perspective, but also every level of government and also the private sector and in everyone else and families and individuals. But the other part that it did, and here's where it BARDA comes in, is that it put it significant money behind that planning.
That's right. I was so fortunate, and I think so many of us can say that we've had kind of helping hands along our careers that kind of led us into different directions. While I started in policy shortly after I moved to BARDA. I moved into the program part. Me with this liberal arts background and then more of a science based graduate school background, moved into the kind of the craft or the trade of what it takes to make a vaccine. Wandering around vaccine manufacturing facilities and figuring out how air handling systems work, and really the nuts and bolts of what it takes to make a whole lot of vaccine and using different approaches, using ones that we know of and also trying different kinds.
That's exactly right. So after I'd had some time both doing policy and then working in the program aspects of really the advanced development of vaccines and drugs. I was just starting to feel a little tiny bit restless. I guess the universe heard me and I wound up going over for a detail with the National Security Council. I think that I was suggested for that position because of my pandemic influenza background because it seemed it was a good time. It was shortly after the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa. It seemed like a good time to revisit our pandemic planning.
Right. I think that the experience that I had when I was at the National Security Council I went there to address pandemic planning, but almost immediately wound up responding to another outbreak, Zika. I think that there are some threads for influenza and Zika and a number of these other infectious diseases that helped shape why COVID-19 is a particular challenge. First I would say is that all of that time that we spent building that vaccine infrastructure for influenza, well, that just doesn't exist for COVID-19. We didn't have a vaccine backbone waiting to just pop in the exact virus strain that we are presented with and get going on manufacturing. We really had to, to start much closer to the beginning with COVID-19 than with influenza.
Right. In so much of the pandemic planning for influenza, the idea is immediately start making vaccine as soon as possible. Then all the other measures that you do like community mitigation guidance which a lot of that, we all have a lot of firsthand experience with dismissal of students from schools and everybody working from home and everyone staying at home, canceling large gatherings. Those are just things that pandemic influenza is that these are short term measures while we wait for a vaccine. For COVID-19 it's a much longer wait because we don't have that vaccine at the ready.
Right. I mean, if you really think about what are, how much technology we employ in our day to day life. You and I are not sitting in the same room right now. We are in different locations having a conversation. We carry in our pockets very powerful computers. Every part of our life. Our refrigerators can talk to us if we want them to. But how quickly COVID-19 brought us to our knees and had us rely on technology approaches, I wouldn't even call them technologies, but approaches that have been used for a very long time and that were used in 1918 for the great influenza pandemic of 1918 when we really didn't even have a full understanding of what influenza was. But we knew that covering, face masks were important and canceling large gatherings was important. Here we are again using a lot of the same tools.
You're exactly right. I think viruses are humbling. I think that that's one thing that they all have in common. They're somewhat mysterious in their own ways, but they're always humbling. In the same way that we can focus enormously and put great resources into addressing influenza and still not have a vaccine that works as well as we want, and still don't have drugs that work as well as we want even with all of that attention and focus. Now we're presented with a virus that we know even less about and that seems to have … We seem to learn every day the way that it affects seemingly every cell in our bodies when infected. I think it's very humbling. The one thing that I have been heartened by is to see that the incredible amount of research that is going on and how more readily available that research is, and having the rise of pre-print journals where new ideas which may be sound scientifically or not but they're out in the public discourse to be talked about amongst scientists early seems to be really key when there are so many mysteries.
Oh my goodness. What hasn't surprised me? I mean, I think the part that I find most daunting is what seems to be the asymptomatic spread. Because that really cuts right to the heart of how humans interact with each other and to enter every close interaction knowing that you could be at risk of infecting someone else or them and infecting you and neither of you have any knowledge. That makes things really challenging.
Right. Something that I think a lot about that doesn't make me the hit at any virtual cocktail party. But there's nothing about this pandemic, this COVID-19 pandemic that in any way lessens the risk of having an influenza pandemic. So we could have the severity of whatever influenza strains that we are presented with next. This current pandemic has no bearing on it. So maybe we'll have a mild influenza year or maybe we'll have a really hard one or maybe an influenza pandemic will emerge at the same time. I think that really is very daunting and makes me very worried and hopeful that the influenza will cut us some slack this year.
Yes. Well, I think we're really at that stage where we're watching and waiting. I mean, I think we don't know exactly which vaccines are going to work the best against this virus. There's a lot of unknowns there. I think the other thing that remains to be seen is how much the virus will change or not change. It seems to be right now, and of course everything we're always learning more that this virus doesn't mutate quite as often as influenza. Which doesn't say much because influenza just seems to mutate quite a lot.
So if the virus is more stable than that means that a vaccine in the same formulation, whatever is chosen, should be able to offer protection for longer. That's certainly everyone's hope. But there is a great deal of unknown and all of the variables are unknown. Unlike say an influenza pandemic where we know what platform of vaccine we're going to use. The exact influenza strain that's put into that platform would be dependent on the pandemic, but the technology and the approach which we already know what that is. And with COVID-19, we're figuring that out. So we really are, as they say, building the plane while flying.
Right. I mean, closer to influenza certainly than a virus like smallpox. We're fairly sure that this virus originally came from bats and we know that this virus can infect a whole, a wide range of creatures much like influenza can. That all makes it … That the goal is not eradication. The goal is finding a way to protect humans from becoming ill from the virus. We can't get rid of it, the idea is not to banish the virus from the earth, but to keep it from harming humans.
I mean, we're in such uncharted territory. The timelines that we're discussing are far faster than any timeline that anyone has, than we've ever tried. It doesn't mean that anyone is proposing taking shortcuts on the important safety and efficacy testing. It really means that they're looking at all the places where things can be accelerated and where we can apply the technologies that we haven't before toward this problem. The part that count the most in terms of does this, is this vaccine safe to use on people? Does it do what we want it to do? There are no shortcuts to that. That's the part that also has the greatest uncertainty.
Well, I don't know if there's any one person who has their full arms around exactly what the hang-up is. I mean, I think as many people has been documented in many places that we the US got off to a slow start and that has been really, it's a hole that's been hard to dig out of in terms of availability of testing. Good things that have happened, that there are plenty of different tests that are now available through the FDA's Emergency Use Authorization. The bad news is that as more of them are being used, because the process for an Emergency Use Authorization is a little bit different than a usual approval or clearance.
Not all of them have performed as well as we've wanted them to. I mean, so first we had problems that we had some constraints around getting those first tests going. Then now that we have lots of different tests available, we have some constraints around how well they perform. Then of course, we're always going to have constraints when everybody needs and uses the same materials at the same time, we will have constraints on availability of materials like swabs or the chemicals that are needed to make the tests work. When everything is happening at the same time around the world these kinds of supply constraints happen.
I mean, I think that that's not luckily the biggest reason but it is something that I think there've been spot kind of constraints around supplies, which is again to be expected. I think that all of those things make it … Then because of the unique way that the United States works in terms of how healthcare works with us and how our States and locals and federal different entities and it can make it really challenging to have kind of unified testing systems that might be occurring in other countries.
Well, I mean, I think a lot of us we think we've seen a pandemic, we've seen one pandemic. In 2005 we planned for a very severe influenza pandemic. Then we got one in 2009 that didn't look anything like what we planned for. Then now we have a pandemic that's not an influenza pandemic, but it has more elements of what we planned for in 2005 than the actual influenza one we saw in 2009. I think that one thing that I've learned is that it's important to do planning, but the actual plans are not used as often as what people learn from doing the planning itself. So the relationships that are built by doing those plans and the time that people take to kind of think through scenarios is probably more valuable than anything that's typed up and collecting dust on the corner of your desk.
Right. Gosh, that really is the hardest part. Because a lot of the stuff that is most important to do like stockpiling of key medical material that we know we're going to need like masks and respirators, gowns, certain equipment that we just … ventilators, things like that. It's very costly to purchase and then maintain these things, I mean, retained in the strategic national stockpile. They require … Everyone always has five different places that we could put a dollar in terms of any kind of budget, budgeting in our homes and then certainly federal budget. What it takes to set aside those enormous funds, enormous sums of money. Then pay into that to maintain their storage when they may never be used and then replace them when they expire.
It's very challenging. Humans have a hard time doing that kind of risk planning. Million books have been written on the subject so I won't attempt to write another one in this conversation. But I think that a lot of it really comes down to the real, the way that humans make decisions. That in this moment, right now in this crisis moment, people care more about masks and respirators than in any time during my career. When this is all over, they will go back to being what they were before, probably which is deeply unsexy to everyone but me and maybe 20 other people. So I think that it's that maintaining that attention to that kind of preparedness is incredibly challenging.
They are. As humans and as decision makers we tend to address what's right in front of us. So planning ahead for something that might happen or may not happen is really challenging in a context when five things are in front of you kind of screaming in your face.
I think early testing. I think that if we had understood, if we had had more testing available much earlier, we would have had a much better handle on what was going on in US, just within the US context alone. That could have really made a huge difference especially in environments like New York City.
Well, I think that I would say to her that, well, actually you know what I would say that I'm glad you did it just how you did it which is just keep saying yes to unusual opportunities that present themselves. Because it leads to some of the most interesting experiences that a person could have in a career or just even in a life.
We sure do. I mean, the great thing about a lot of the relationships that I formed during those early days of pandemic planning is that they are still good colleagues and Bruce and I collaborate on a project around universal influenza vaccine now. So we've continued our quest all these years later.
Yes. It's been such a pleasure, really feels like it combined so many of the things that have mattered so much to me throughout my career, even before I knew what my career would be.
I think that so many of the things that I think would be most helpful for addressing COVID-19 are the things that I'm most passionate about. In terms of understanding, having wearables that will tell us that we're sick before we're sick, presymptomatic identification of infection. And having testing that's available in our homes. Those things that I've always been so passionate about, this has only reinforced that I was passionate about the right things and that it actually, it fueled my fire to get there on those technologies.
Julie Schafer is the chief technology officer for the nonprofit Flu Lab, where she seeks to stretch the boundaries of how technology is used to defeat influenza. This is When it Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director
- Founder
Justin Richmond's twist in the road surfaced on September 29, 2009 at Camp Bautista, a Filipino military base in the Southern Philippines. Richmond was deployed there as a US army special operations team leader, helping the Filipino army with stabilization, counterinsurgency and information operations. Richmond's inability to convince his superiors to abort the ill-fated mission, forced him to confront the dissonance between America's promises and America's actions.
And the Tausugs in Sulu, that's the tribe that's down there, they made them pay. It was just a gruesome event. And I think we probably lost around two dozen Filipino soldiers or Filipino Marines, over the course of those two weeks. But the incident that obviously sticks in my mind is when two of my colleagues, Jack Martin and Chris Shaw were both killed in an IED attack on the 29th. Those were the only two combat deaths during the entire lifetime of that task force. It happened because we took for granted our narrative and we took for granted that everybody wanted us there and thought that we were there to help them and protect them.
Yeah, on the 29th of September, Jack and Chris hopped their Humvee and went to do a water resupply and in the middle of that road was a really big bomb and they drove over it and killed Jack instantly and Chris held on for a little while. He got medivacked over to us, myself, and one of his former teammates were on his Aid and Litter team, got them off the helo and prepared him for the forward surgical team, but the injuries were too significant and he didn't make it after that. That's just what happens because, I look back and I think time gives us the generosity of heart that we probably don't have in the moment and I look back and I think about the people that were involved in this decision and there wasn't maliciousness, there wasn't guile. It really boiled down to a lot of complacency and hubris.
And I think I keep going back to this word, because there seems to be a lot of data out there now, especially the data that's coming in around COVID, that suggests just the breadth of modern hubris and that these modern things like COVID, they're going to hit us where it hurts. And the data shows that we have to be much more responsive and understanding of the situations that we're finding ourselves in. I never understood that until 2009, but I really felt like had I the right information, I could have at least made a more compelling case that may have prevented that operation. It's the could've, should've, would'ves and everybody has these regrets after going to war. But it's something that changed my life and it led me to go to USAID and then led me to go to Palantir, where you and I bumped into each other a few times, because I was part of the problem until I learned how to do data.
Sickening, absolutely sickening. I knew Jack was dead, but he was up on the mountain and he was out of my mind. All the mattered was Brandon and I keeping an eye on Jack in the back of that Humvee until the surgical team got ready. And I'm embarrassed about the relief that I felt once we got Chris in the operating room, because I'm not going to lie to you, in that moment of adrenaline and high emotions, I really felt like we had … and really the medics who got to him before us, we didn't do much, the medics got there before us and stabilized him that he was going to make it. There's that mythology within the modern American military, that if you can get somebody to good docs within the golden hour, that they're going to live, and that's usually true, but it's just not true in this case.
And yeah, he passed away while he was in there with the docs. And yeah, that was when we had retired to one of our common spaces after Chris was getting worked on, they brought in Jack and it was really somber, obviously, the body bag and the flag over it. And I made the remark, "Well at least Chris made it." And apparently I was one of the only people that didn't know that he died. And I can't remember who it was that looked at me and they just shook their heads and Chris was dead too. He actually didn't live that long in the surgical suite at all. And man, that was tough.
And so that really brought it home and then going and talking to my two younger teammates, a 20 year old and a 21 year old. I think it was both their first times being out of the country, first deployments, first time in combat and they knew these guys, they knew Jack and Chris because we worked with that team all the time. And they had been in our office for the majority of that day and walking in, covered in gore and explaining to them what happened,. that was a really tough moment. That was a really tough moment, but war's full of that. And you think about all the conflict that's going on and I think it gives me a lot more empathy for what families are suffering. And I think that eventually led me to wanting to start an NGO and trying to work on the solution side of this.
I feel like special operations made me very survivable. I don't know how effective it made me and that's largely because what the special operations forces are asked to do now around the world is way more than we were ever trained in, in the school house we're selected for. Because the state department and the United States Agency for International Development personnel, who are like partners with special operations forces in the field, they can't go out to the dangerous areas, they don't have that insight. And so many times special operations soldiers, especially ones like myself, are tasked to being battlefield diplomats, battlefield aid workers. And yet we don't have the master's degrees that they get, we don't have the training, we don't have the resources.
So it's really quite problematic. And that's why after I got back from the Philippines, I felt like I wanted to go work for USAID and take that survivability skillset over to them and see what they could do with it, if they could teach me more of the methodologies and the approaches that I would need to be effective. And that's exactly what happened, I actually fell into a very good stabilization, first stabilization instruction slot, and then USAID deployed me to Afghanistan for a couple of tours in the East, where the ambassador that was out there took the advantage of me being a special operations veteran, and sent me to partner at the local level with military units that were struggling with their stabilization and counterinsurgency.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, since you were at Palantir, you know those pain points and we were spending millions of dollars of money in the East and there just wasn't … Number one, we didn't know what effects we're having positive or negatively. What I can tell you is that the broader trends were pretty negative, that we were seeing a lot more violence, that we were seeing not only violence against the security forces and us, but more importantly, violence of the Taliban against the community and just community, inter-community violence. And those are all just really bad indicators of vulnerability and instability on a local level, because it shows that there's just no mechanism right now to help people resolve their issues peacefully or legally, and they're resorting to violence. And that creates dynamics within communities, which are just very, very hard to start mitigating.
So data was the problem. And that's why when a good friend of mine who I believe you know, James Boyd. James Boyd came to me and said, after my second Afghan tour, he came back and was like, "Hey man, you should come join Palantir. I want you to take the stuff that you learned over there and build it into our system."
That's actually, how I first found out about your podcast, is through James. And what most people don't know is that James and I were in the same infantry platoon back in 2005 at Fort Benning. So we go way back and he's a good man.
Ah, yeah. So this is the great divide between the Silicon Valley narrative and the Silicon Valley reality. I really enjoyed working at Palantir and quite frankly, I enjoyed the people the most. It was just such a fantastic team. I love working in the field, I love working directly on problems and sometimes when it comes to technology, there's the narrative that you were solving the world's problems, but you're really writing the code that helps the frontliners solve the world's problems. And I think that therein lay the disconnect for me, is just that at the end of the day, I'm a field guy. And I gave two years of my time to help Palantir understand how to deploy this very strong technology in the field in really nasty environments. And particularly we did that large disaster response after typhoon Haiyan in the central Philippines in 2013. And I was the lead engineer in the field on that.
And that was great because I felt like I got to bring real value to the company and at the same time, really learn and test the things that I needed to know to make the impact that I wanted to make. I was a 34, 35, 36 year old combat veteran at a tech company, where the average age was, especially in my office, were probably around 23, 24. And so that fit only lasts for so long. And so I feel like I brought a lot of value to Palantir and I will be forever grateful for what I learned there. But in taking those lessons, we immediately founded impl. project with other stability practitioners from State Department and USAID, and have been going strong ever since.
Yeah. When you're a startup, you don't have the luxury of saying no too much, so that's actually given me the chance to work on some amazing problems. Our specialty is collecting data in very non-permissive, very dangerous, highly inaccessible areas, including police states. It's a niche that no one really fills and obviously coming out of Palantir, that is near and dear to my heart, we can't solve problems that we don't understand. So right now, we have better data out of some of the toughest conflict areas in the world. That's including Mindanao, Philippines, Benghazi, Libya, Tillaber, Niger. These are really rough neighborhoods. But I'm actually proudest of our work in Azerbaijan because that is a police state, where no data collection has really occurred at large scale, since 2013 and the crackdown on civil society. And yet 2018 and 2019, we were both able to secure permissions to get sample sizes over 3000 for face to face surveys, which is unheard of.
And so getting that data is really critical and that's how a lot of people know us, but we're not the data project, we're the implementation project. We're impl. project. And so we do the data simply so that we can get the programs right, and the projects right. So we really focus on building community resiliency by addressing the fundamental issues that are creating conflict and creating vulnerability and creating dysfunctionality. What that really looks like, is most places we're doing livelihoods projects that brings the community together to decide how do we build infrastructure that will benefit everyone? How do we build community toilets, irrigation canals? How do we teach the community to govern the irrigation canals and the water supply now that they have it?
Because as people all over the world, practicing development stabilization of past 19 years, it's just giving an asset like irrigation canals to a community isn't enough. You have to give communities the capacity to govern this. If you just give them something more to fight over, there's a chance that that'll happen and you've done harm. So we're really trying to approach this in a holistic but also very locally sensitive manner, gathering all that data when we conduct focus groups, because we do it all with disconnected technology and remote monitoring technology. And we can gather this clean data and then show it to the communities and you wouldn't believe what it's like to hear women on the border of Niger in Mali, unpack their own issues when it comes to subsistence farming, livelihoods, abuse, maternal health. I mean, all those issues are connected in their heads and in their lives, but very rarely does the programming help them and address their needs comprehensively. So that's what we're trying to do and it is an uphill battle, but most of the right ones are, and things have been going pretty well.
It's going really well. I never thought I'd have to apply my trade in the United States, but on some level, I'm humbled to be able to do so. My kids live in Frederick, Maryland, and I don't feel like there's any stronger motivation to help Frederick get it right then my own kids growing up in this community. So my team and I have been gathering community contextual indicators, here for the past six weeks and have seen the dynamics in some of the local economic issues, supply chain health, and the dynamics are fascinating. And what's interesting is that if you compare the actual cases and death rates across all 50 states, you'll see 50 different COVID infections and infection curves and the severity of these infections. And this reinforces the concept that data people have known all along, all programming is local.
If you want to have a genuine impact, you have to get it right at the local level, or it cannot aggregate up into a broader impact. And this is really inconvenient for people because everybody wants a silver bullet to COVID, just like they want a silver bullet to poverty and to malaria and to the biggest ills that our world is facing, and it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. Data teaches us that it is, it requires just hard work, consistency, and quite frankly, a lot of humility and just learning what we're doing right, and what we're doing wrong and adjusting that. And I think you can only do that when it comes to data.
So we look at our community contextual indicators as the same type of bio data that a nurse or a physician's assistant would take on a person going into the ER today, because they're worried about COVID, we're trying to diagnose the communities' COVID ills, just like a medical professional would be diagnosing this in a patient because we're going to have to treat this patient here in Frederick and down in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and in Marawi City, Philippines, where we're going to be operating within weeks and months, we're going to have to treat this patient according to the ills that we find here, not overall general trends that we see nationwide, got to address a problem locally. So that's why we're collecting the data.
There is an appropriate emphasis now on the need for more protective equipment for health providers and ventilators. The problem is it took so much effort to convince the American public of what is obvious, that we now lack the capital to tell everybody, "Hey, we need to start thinking about the economy. We need to start thinking about domestic violence. We need to start thinking about mental health resources." Nobody wants to hear it. People only want to talk about COVID. And the problem is a lot of states, like Maryland that I'm in right now, a lot of states have come up with good solutions to COVID, or at least the best solutions that they can, reflecting an environment where everybody was largely unprepared. But the problems, the social problems that will exist after the COVID infections and after the COVID deaths are going to be significant.
The level of unemployment, before COVID the single biggest response worldwide to our first question in every survey we ask, what is the biggest problem facing your community, was the lack of livelihoods. Worldwide 35 to 40,000 people in war zones and in police states over the past four years, 40,000 people, nearly 50% of them said, lack of livelihoods or some permutation of that. That was before COVID. That was before the American economy saw 30 million people unemployed. It's about to get really, really bad and there's going to be a reshaping of the economy, and people are grossly unprepared for that. However, like you said, we are a scrappy little NGO, and obviously we're not the fed, we're not going to be able to overhaul the US economy. What we are going to be able to do is work on an issue that I think demands a lot more attention and time and that is the effect that the quarantines have had on domestic violence.
The quarantines have forced families into situations that they wouldn't have gone into otherwise, if there wasn't COVID and there wasn't quarantines. And I'm a huge believer in the quarantines, I think they should have happened faster and I think they should stay longer because it's the only way we're going to save lives. Having said that, this puts people that are already in vulnerable relationships, really in the cross-hairs of their abusers and requires them to essentially shelter in place with people that don't have their best interests in mind. So domestic violence hotlines across the country are just exploding. I know in Virginia, we're seeing 75% more calls than we did at this time last year. And the problem is we actually have some of our Impl family that is affected by this, and we've had to resort to emergency funding. And we realized that this is something, a need that a lot of women have.
So we have been piloting efforts to provide emergency shelter to women and their children, to get out of domestic violence situations, to give them five days in a suite or a stable living situation, to give them the mental space, the physical space, to assess their kids, to assess their situation, to not face an additional financial burden, by making some space that's safe and letting them figure out their plans. And where we're piloting it early right now is among the veteran population and we really hope that we're going to be able to expand that more broadly, we're hoping to serve 10 to 15 beneficiaries in North Carolina and Frederick, at each location, hopefully by the end of summer.
Yeah, I wasn't quite expecting that question, but yeah, it really has. I'm not going to believe anybody that tells me they didn't completely reassess themselves and their careers and their lives during this time. I, for one, am spending way too much time on the road and not enough time with my children. And that is a sober reality that I am slowly, slowly trying to come to grips with. And I think telecommuting is absolutely going to become a much more fundamental part of impl. projects future trajectory. I just don't see the need in taking people away from their families to sit in an office all day. I think there's just a lot better ways to it. Now, one opportunity that impl. project has, that most other organizations don't, is that our scrappiness means that we're terribly resilient. We have had to endure tough shocks already. 2019 was a tough year in terms of foreign policy decisions being up and down and right wrong.
And there were a lot of disappointments, but all those disappointments refine your understanding. It is hard to have hubris when you were getting thrown curve balls. And quite frankly, we've been hitting curve balls for the past couple of years, and we're structured in such a way that is highly resilient to these types of shocks. Civil society is getting hit so hard by COVID and the lack of donations, and quite frankly, a lot of US local governments and state governments, aren't used to working with civil society because they'd never had to. American government has always worked enough, but we're going to see COVID break that and break those processes locally. And then each jurisdiction is going to have to figure out how they're going to solve that problem. So, for me, I think we've always had the motto within impl. project to be humble and be curious, because I think that it's in that humility and curiosity that you learn your own weaknesses, you learn your strengths and you become more self aware of where you can plug in.
And I think that's where we all come together. We all have to look at what we have to offer in this post-COVID environment and offer what we can and not do so with the idea that we got to get something out of it. I get a lot of questions for why I started a consulting business and run it like an NGO and don't have shares, don't have stocks and just really do it because I love this stuff. But that reason is because I think a lot of people are starting to get back to being neighborly and friendly and kind and generous because we have to, we don't have the luxury of being unkind anymore because we're all going through significant traumas in our own lives. And I hope this does lead to a little bit more, just generosity between all of us and some unity.
But man, I'm not exactly seeing that right now. I think people are really too scared for that. And the data shows that, data shows significant, just doubt and uncertainty. And that's never existed in our lifetimes in America and it does put a lot of the pressure on local jurisdictions to get this right, because there is a high chance, in some areas, that this will result in violence. So these are tough times.
Yeah. You know what, I would probably treat him like one of my own young soldiers and just look at him and just tell him like, "The storm that's coming, it's going to last a long damn time. And take your breaths when you get them, take a knee when you got to and prepare yourself for the long haul, because what's coming is tough." And I think my experience, in many ways, matches the national experience, the idealism of the post 9/11 world in which we have the mandate to go into other countries and to eliminate threats and then rebuild them in our own image, but then end up getting distracted by other foreign policy priorities. The idealism, and then being met with just the inability or a lack of desire to follow through.
And it's interesting because I'm starting to read the narratives that are coming out about the main powers that are going to emerge from this crisis. And one of the main narratives that's really hitting home to me, that I've seen particularly coming out of the subcontinent, is that China won World War III without firing a bullet. They won it with their pandemic response and they're providing aid, while we are demanding aid and stealing aid from different states. And that these points are not lost on our allies and adversaries throughout the world. The look in that America was more paper than tiger. That was a great line that came out of an article in Politico this week, on how the world is viewing the US's horrible response to COVID. And I don't know if it's quite to the magnitude of losing World War III without firing a shot, but it's bad. It's bad and it's way worse than Americans are really taking it. I mean, they're going to emerge from this and the American empire is in decline and there won't be any saving it this time, I don't think.
Yeah. I don't mean to be a Debbie downer, I think the Brits still doing really well despite having loss of their empire. So there is hope after hegemony. But yeah, I think that's where we're at right now. And I think it's good for us to take this time to take a nice deep breath. I really appreciate talking to you and highlighting so many good people. I love the podcast you had with James, so that's great.
And I was working on 20 to a hundred million dollar participation loans. We have huge construction projects on a global basis. And so, you'd be in conference rooms with credit officers and loan officers and attorneys from both sides and mostly all white males. And here's this little girl, 27, 28-year-old black girl sitting at the table. And what I realized, very quickly, is that I was comfortable. I was comfortable sitting in these conference rooms at these tables with these men who were, in most cases, much older than me, looked much different than me, were in a position of authority and power, a lot of them, especially the clients, millions and millions of dollars. And I felt comfortable.
And what I realized is that my father, through all the experiences that he gave me, he taught me how to swim with sharks. And I use that analogy, because a lot of people talk about swimming with sharks, but I don't think a lot of people really understand what the paradigm is. And what it is, a lot of people are afraid of sharks, because a shark will bite you, a shark can kill you, but a lot of species of sharks don't even bite. The thing that most sharks have in common, though, regardless of what species they are, is that they are very, very fast. They can sneak up on you. They can pivot like a dime. They can twist and turn. And they're extremely fast and responsive. And that's what it's like sitting in a boardroom when you're dealing with millions and millions of dollars and people in positions of authority and power that can snap their fingers and that hundreds and thousands of people working for them. And they're like sharks. They move quick. They make decisions quickly.
I mean, you got to be ready when you step into those conference rooms. Even now, but back then I realized my dad had prepared me to be very comfortable in these global settings with people that I, seemingly, don't have anything in common with. And so, I'm very comfortable in a room full of sharks.
Yes, so I got my first management assignment at Bank of America, and I was in commercial real estate. And there was a woman named Regina Chun, Reggie Chun, we called her, and she was a Chinese immigrant, who came to this country when she was a young girl, didn't speak any English. But when I met her at Bank of America, she was an Executive Vice Oresident, managing loan administration and some portion of credit nationally. And when I got my first management assignment at Bank of America in commercial real estate, Reggie Chun, who was three or four layers removed from me, flew down from San Francisco to have lunch with me. And she told me that I had a very unique opportunity. She said that, "You now have the opportunity to help minorities, in particularly, women, and, in particularly, black women."
And she said, "I tell you this, because if you don't accept this responsibility, if you don't understand this charge, who will?" She said, "I have, throughout my entire career, made sure that I was looking out for minorities, in particular, women, and, in particularly, Asian women." She said, "Because who else will do it?" She said, "But however, when you help these women, it's got to be so above board, it's got to be so pristine that when you're questioned, there's no doubt that you made the right decision in promoting this person or advocating for this individual, because you will always, as a person of color, as a woman of color, be under scrutiny with the decisions that you make." And I never, ever, ever forgot that lesson. It is my responsibility.
And so, that was the very first mentor. I didn't even know what the word mentor meant. And I would see Reggie from time-to-time in meetings, but we didn't have a formal relationship, but she always lent herself to a discussion or conversation or advice. And I learned that mentors can come in all shapes, sizes and forms. And whether they realize they are your mentor or not, they can be, if you want them to be, and they've created access for you. Just don't give up that access and you'll have a mentor.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so, I got into the diversity work in that very same unit. It was late eighties and the commercial real estate, the industry, had a very hard time, in the eighties, but in the late eighties, early nineties, things kind of fell apart in the commercial real estate industry. But Bank of America, around the same time, bought Security Pacific Bank. And they did two large asset sales, nonperforming asset sales to try to get rid of some of the nonperforming assets. And what was left, they split into three groups around the country, and one of them was here in LA, and I was managing the loan administration portfolio for a $7 billion nonperforming portfolio.
And we had a five-year plan loan administration credit to work through these assets. And we worked through that plan in three years, but the real estate market hadn't quite rebounded. And so, I had 30 women and one man reporting to me, and I had to make some hard decisions, because we had worked through our $7 billion portfolio, the "bid side" of the bank.
The bid side of the real estate portfolio was not well enough yet to absorb all of the workout people back into the unit. And so, I had to lay off a good number of people. I laid off, I believe it was nine people. Other people found their own ways, their own jobs, either at the bank or at a different bank. And then, there I was and I'm like, "What about me? What am I going to do?" And it just so happened that the whole online career thing had come on. And so, I was able… And I had taken classes, because back then it wasn't as simple as just clicking a button, and bam you're on the career side, or clicking a button and you can do an email, but you had to take classes to basically learn how to program your way into a program or a system. And so, I had done that. And so, I could get into the career side. And the bank was advertising for five positions in the brand new corporate diversity department.
And the bank had hired an organization called J. Howard and Associates. The J standing for Jeff. And Jeff Howard was the foremost cutting edge thinker, back in the early nineties, around inclusion. And the bank hired him to design a course that would address unconscious bias. And it wasn't called that then, by the industry, but Jeff Howard was already teaching, managing inclusion and he designed a two-day course that Bank of America was going to put 20,000 associates through on a mandatory basis. J. Howard and Associates had 12 trainers and they wanted to add five trainers from Bank of America. And the only requirements were that you were at least a VP and that you had managed people and you could apply. And I applied. I needed a job.
And the interviews consisted of making presentations. You would get a homework assignment and you would go into a room with a bunch of interviewers and you would present. And 300 people applied for these five positions. And lo and behold, I got one, and I went to Bank of America's campus in Concord and Jeff Howard, himself, and several of his trainers were there. And we sat in a classroom, the five of us for two weeks. And we learned how to deliver this course, Managing and Inclusion. And then, I co-taught with a Jeff Howard instructor until I was comfortable teaching the class myself. So, about two months later, I was ready to go. And I traveled the United States, as well as Europe, because the bank was putting every vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president and managing director through this mandatory two-day program. And if you worked in the United States, Europe, Middle East, Africa, you had to take this class. And the 17 of us trainers set about over the next three and a half years delivering this mandatory two-day class. And that's how I got into diversity and inclusion.
Yes, I have been doing it a long time. Let me just start with the net positive. There is a positive. The positive is that, at least now, there is a conversation about inclusion. There is a conversation about diversity. There is a realization in corporate America that you've got to be tapped in to different communities if you want to reap the benefits of their consumerism. Right? It really is in corporate America about a business case, but in the world, in general, it's about a humanistic case. And this work can be very, very exhausting, because it seems like we're always starting over.
One of the thought leaders at City National Bank that does this work with me, she commented one day that, "Until we start teaching these inclusion skills and tools at the preschool level, we will always be starting over when people enter adulthood and they get into jobs and corporations and positions where they're interfacing with different people." It can be exhausting, Chitra, because you're always starting over. No matter how much you win, today, tomorrow, you have to get up and start over because there's somebody who didn't get the message. And we can read that every day, in the newspaper, people still saying and doing terrible things. And the problem is that discrimination often results in harm and death. And that is the urgency of the issue. That's why we can't stop doing the work, though we may be tired, because it's more than just a negative comment that might get under somebody's skin. No, discrimination in this country results in people not being able to live well.
Well, one thing that we have been doing at City National Bank, since I've been there, and they hired me eight years ago to do this work. And my work is both external and internal. So, just as I work with communities of color and women inside the company, I'm also working with women and communities of color, and, particularly, businesses, externally. So, I'm responsible for multicultural marketing and advertising and a lot of the sponsorships and the partnerships that we do in the community, and businesses are very, very important to me. So, for the past eight years, what we've tried to do is provide thought leadership and fill in some of the gaps that we know minority businesses face. A lot of minority businesses don't have a history of business ownership in their families, generational businesses. So, they don't have a father that can tell them how to run this business or things to look out for, necessarily, or a mother who has handed this business down.
A lot of minority owned businesses in this country don't have that proper type of mentorship. We also know the research and the data is very clear that loans and access to capital costs more for minorities and women in this country. And so, a lot of the work that I've done, over the past few years, is making sure that people have the proper information to make sure that they're educated, to make sure that we are providing them the tools, the knowledge and the skills that they need to access capital or to grow capacity with their businesses. So, we partner, very specifically, with SBDCs and CDFIs, who are already doing that work, that we can lend support to them. They can support us. We also erected a branch in the Crenshaw District, in 2017, which was very important to us. And so, that's the work that we've done, historically, at City National Bank.
But your second part of the question. The lack of access for small businesses, through this PPP process, has been horrendous. It's been horrendous. Every day, you can read… And we have two people at City National Bank, who capture all of the media stories around PPP and put them out there for us, every day. And there are very, very few good stories. I think it could have been a little better thought out by the federal government to ensure that there was a tranche and an opportunity and a procedure for these small businesses, those who needed funds. Even under a $100,000, $50,000, $40,000, it should have been a process to ensure that those people have the opportunity to apply. And there wasn't.
And if you don't know who your banker is, if you bank with one of these mega banks, that's up 60, 70, 80,000 clients, and you're not a big client, you may only have an 800 number, or you may only have the number to your branch, which may be closed. And so, people couldn't even get access, in a lot of cases, because they didn't have a number to call. At City National Bank, people just happen to know who their relationship manager is, because that's the way we do business. So, for our clients, they knew who to call, but for the non-clients, we made a proactive effort and we went out to reach as many as we could that fit that very, very small business and that nonprofit category.
I'm seeing the same thing, Chitra, and it never ceases to amaze me how crises can, sometimes, bring out the worst in people. And I have seen the same thing. I've heard from some of my Asian colleagues that they've heard disparaging remarks. In fact, our Asian American resource group is going to have a panel discussion at the end of this month, and they've got two external speakers, talking about the dark side of COVID for Asian Americans, but it's just been horrendous. You've got black men wearing masks, of several who have been killed, now, because they had on a hoodie and a mask. You've got Asian Americans who not only are suffering from hearing disparaging comments, but their businesses are suffering as well, simply because they are Asian owned.
You've got an extraordinarily high number of Latinos who are out of work, because so many of them work at those minimum wage or less than minimum wage jobs, on top of the traditional jobs that family members have been laid off from or furloughed from, without pay. You've got the disparaging news about African Americans who are suffering this COVID virus at higher rates and dying at higher rates than others. You've got women, who, many of them, are not equipped to homeschool several children at a time, and also still have to work and take care of all of the family matters. We've got elderly, whom, in this country, we don't do a good job of taking care of or respecting, anyway, they are suffering the ill effects.
And, unfortunately, we do not have compassionate leadership. And so, we're pretty much on our own, but, as I always tell communities and I always tell people, we need to depend on ourselves, anyway. And we should not wait for a crisis to, once again, lament that the government has not taken care of us, because, very often, they do not when it comes to women and minorities, and that's just how it is. And so, we've got to come together as people, as citizens, as just folks here on the ground and help each other.
I always tell people, when I'm talking, especially young people, "Every single one of us has the opportunity to be an inclusive leader. And I don't care if you don't have a title. I don't care if you're not even 18 years old, yet, every single one of us has the opportunity to impact at least one person in a very positive way. It might be your brother. It might be your sister. It might be your neighbor down the street. It might be your coworker. It might be a student sitting in the class next to you, but every single one of us, pay enough attention to see when somebody is struggling, when somebody feels left out and every single one of us has the ability to just say a good word. How are you today? Is there anything I can do for you today? I'm praying for you today." And until every single one of us starts taking that responsibility seriously, every single day, we are going to continue to have an issue in this country. We have got to do better for each other, and we can, we can.
Yeah, well, it actually kind of does, but I started off as a dancer, singer, actor, growing up. In fact, my very first acting role, I played the role of Heidi in the fifth grade, in a production in Germany, on the Air Force base. And let me tell you, the military loves entertainment. So, any kind of entertainment was always a big deal on the Air Force base. And do you know, way back then, there were teachers in that elementary school who said, I should not be allowed to play Heidi, because I was black, but my parents and my teacher prevailed and I played Heidi, and that just solidified my acting bug. I was already tap dancing and doing ballet, into sports, very physical, physical person.
And so, I was going to be this big entertainer, but I wanted to go to college, so I could have a backup plan. And that's what I did. And then, my backup plan became part of my life. My backup plan was to get a degree in economics so that if my singing and acting didn't work out, I'd have a backup plan. But I always tell young people, today, "Don't worry about a backup plan. Wherever you put your time and energy, that is what you're going to see the fruit coming from." And so, I got into banking, I've been extremely blessed, but I never gave up the dancing, singing and acting. I produced so many shows over the year for different people, written plays, done a lot of gospel plays in churches. I've produced hip hop artists, my late husband and I, and then, before he passed in 2007, he's like, "Let's produce your CD. You've been wanting to do a CD, been on stage forever." And I said, "Yay." So, we did my CD. I dropped a CD in 2007.
In 2008, my husband passed, after 26 years of marriage. Just a fluke. He'd passed away of a heart attack. Hadn't even been sick. Then I kind of went dark for a few years. And then, I decided it was time to get up. And there was a couple of things that a couple of people I met that really, really inspired me. And one of them is a woman by the name of Diana Nyad. And I saw Diana Nyad speak when she was 64 years old. This was a few years ago. It was about, I don't know, three, four years ago.
And so, Chitra, I got up and I got a team together. I started producing my shows, again, got a band together, and I'm going to be finished with my third CD this year. I've got several books in process that I will be publishing, at least one, if not two of them, this year. They're done. They're basically done. I just need to edit them, package them up. And so, I'm on fire. And the reason I'm on fire is because God has been speaking to me.
After I heard Diana Nyad speak, God said, "What about you?" He said, "It is not time to sit down. I pour all of this knowledge and talent and skill into people. And then they get to be about 60, 62, 63, and they want to sit down. They want to retire when the world is ready for everything they have to give them." And I'm like, "I'm with you, God. I am with you." And I am almost 60. Chitra, I told you the other day, I'm saying it out loud. I have never been able to say that out loud, because age sets up limitations in people's minds. And that's what I don't want, but it's okay, because I need to inspire people my age or my generation, "Get up. The world needs us. Do something spectacular, because the world needs us." And that's what I'm doing, right now. God told me that, "I have given you so much talent." They're not done yet either.
Wow. That's so interesting, you ask that, Chitra. I have. When we first came home, and I've been working at home now for 10 weeks, and when we first came home, I kind of didn't envision anything beyond more than two weeks. And so, I was kind of checking emails and trying to do a few things, and then, I realized, I got get into a routine. And I don't like working from home. I've had the opportunity over the years to work from home and I just don't like it. But what I figured out is it's a real blessing, right now, because everything I need is here for me to thrive. I bought all my office stuff home. I have all my stuff here for my Karen A. Clark Project. Got everything I need here to finish my books. Got family here.
This is a real blessing. I can create 24 hours a day without even having to leave. And I'm so excited, now. And yes, this has been a moment of clarity. It's like, "You have an opportunity. Don't squander it." I am so much more blessed than many people, right now, who don't have a job, who don't have income, who can't help their families, because they don't have income coming in, who don't have a roof over their head, can you imagine being homeless during COVID, who are cramped in small spaces. I used to live in a two-bedroom, teeny, little 800 square-foot, two-bedroom apartment with my late husband and my two kids for a time when they were growing up. We would be driving each other crazy, right now. So, what I have come to realize is, I'm really, really blessed, right now, and I cannot squander this opportunity. I've got to use every minute that's in this day, do something spectacular for myself, for my family, for the world. That's where I'm at.
I talk to my father a lot. My father is 85 years old. My mother passed a couple of years ago at age 80, but my father is still alive. He's still active. He's still healthy. And we have discussions. I find it important to tell him how impactful he has been in my life. What an opportunity he has given me. And my dad is one of those really humble guys. He thinks, "Oh, Coco. Yeah, I didn't do much for you."
But I got to tell you. A couple of years ago, when my brother passed, my brother passed a year after my mother died, I think he had a broken heart, but we were at the funeral home, and after we'd done all the arrangements, I pulled out a checkbook and I wrote a check for the whole thing. And my father said, "Oh no, baby, you can't do that."I said, Dad, I'm going to do this." And he said, "That's my responsibility. Your brother is my responsibility." I said, "Dad, you always, always want to do everything." I said, "You are at an age, now, and you have raised wonderful children. It is a blessing that you gave me what you did so that I can sit here and write this check. You're retired. You're not even working, right now. You don't need to go into your savings to write this check. You prepared me to be able to write this check. That's what you did for me, Dad and I love you for it." And he didn't say anything, but he did not insist on paying me back. So, I think he kind of got it.
It was great to be here, Chitra. Thank you so much. You have a beautiful, beautiful day.
Job Titles:
- Coach
- CEO of Steinberg Sports & Entertainment
- Sports Agent
Leigh Steinberg was about a decade into his career as a sports agent when he had a crisis of conscience after watching his clients suffer from multiple concussions. Steinberg decided one day that he was going to make brain health seminars for his athletes a mandatory part of his core practice. Hello everyone, I'm Chitra Ragavan. Welcome to this very special 50th episode of When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory farm helping technology startups find their narrative.
This is all a brave new world because the brain is the last frontier of medical research. But the good news is there's a profit motive now because the same product that would protect a football player would protect someone who has a motorcycle accident or falls off a horse or is in another collision sports. So, hopefully, we'll see breakthroughs and advances here because this injury's different than anything else. We know that players because in a sport like football will break down all the joints in their body and may be difficult when they turn 50 to pick up their child. It's another thing not to be able to identify that child. The brain is the center of consciousness and judgment and memory and what it means to be a sentient being as opposed to this desk here.
Absolutely. And so you're presented with a choice. Knowing that brain damage may be at the end of the road for some of the athletes, if you stay involved or… The question is, am I an enabler? But staying involved and advocating reform probably does more to help. And concussions is the existential threat to certain collision sports because if half of the mothers understood the facts we just talked about and tell their teenage sons, "You can play any sport, but not tackle football," it won't kill football, but it will turn it into a gladiator sport where only people who are economically challenged will decide to do it. And sports don't succeed at the professional level, unless people are able to play them in large numbers. And so it's a disturbing longterm trend.
Well, initially, from my parents. So my father brought us up with two core values. One is treasure relationships, especially family, and the second was to try to make a meaningful difference in the world and help people who can't help themselves. So in our practice, we ask the athletes to go back and retrace their roots to the high school community where they can set up a scholarship fund or work with the boys and girls club or church, and then to the collegian institution where once again, they can endow the scholarship fund, and then at the professional level to set up charitable foundations, which have the leading political figures, business figures, and community leaders on an advisory board to execute a program.
So it's a former running back Warrick Dunn having a program called Homes for the Holidays where he has moved 175 single mothers and their families, since it's the first home they'll ever own by making the down payment and having a house outfitted. And messaging can also be powerful. So you mentioned Lennox Lewis, the boxer. Well, he did a public service announcement that said real men don't hit women. And that could do more to trigger imitative behavior and behavioral change in rebellious adolescents than a thousand authority figures could. So it's trying to not simply negotiate contracts, but it's stimulating the best values in young men, encouraging them to be role models. And then what we can do together to tackle problems like domestic violence and bullying and sex trafficking and racism and rolling back climate change.
Oh, no. There really wasn't an established field as sports agent when I was going to school. So I was either going to go into politics, work for a nonprofit when I came out of law school or I liked courtroom law. So I thought about working as a DA or a public defender. I was living in a dorm as a dorm counselor at UC Berkeley back in the tumultuous days of the '60s. Actually, I learned everything I needed to know about negotiating because every time when I was student body president that we demonstrated, the governor was Ronald Reagan and he cracked down. But I was a dorm counselor in an undergrad dorm, and one of the students was the quarterback on the football team. And in 1975, he became the very first player selected in the first round of the NFL Draft and asked me to represent him.
So there I was brimming with legal experience, never having practiced law before. And he was the first player overall, and we got the largest rookie contract. And really in that was a seminal relationship because I saw the idol worship and veneration that athletes are held in communities across the country, how they were the movie stars. And at that point, teams could just hang up the phone and say, "We don't deal with agents." There was no guaranteed right, so it was somewhat rudimentary. The economics were certainly had no relationship to what they are today, but it was only after seeing the power of role modeling that I thought I'd continue on in representing athletes.
So whenever people get disappointed in life, we always talk about the road traveled, the road not traveled. I took a tour around the world and when I got to Egypt, they had just had the Yom Kippur War. So the people I was traveling with didn't want to go, but I went. And I went out with a family that had one of those curved shell boats on the Nile and the kids were jumping in the river, and so I did too, only to find later that there are dozens of diseases endemic to the Nile River. So I got really sick and left Egypt, went to England and they immediately put me in quarantine. So I was six weeks in the hospital there. So I couldn't take the jobs as a DA or corporate litigation or politics or TV news that I'd been offered, and that meant that I was available when Bartkowski asked me. So sometimes when reverses can lead to amazing opportunity.
Oh, Warren Moon and I, for example, the former quarterback of Houston and some other teams and the first African-American quarterback to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and I were together for 23 years. She actually played six in Canada and 17 in the NFL. Bruce Smith, the all-time sack leader, 19 years, Troy Aikman and Steve Young, like 14 years. So the goal is if someone's going to choose our practice, we profile ahead of time, prospective clients, so that we're looking for athletes that are self-starters, that have ambition, that will be interested in developing second career plans, and that have a good heart and a sense of social conscience and understand the power that their profile gives them to be able to talk about non-athletic values and issues and really make a difference. So it's by profiling and then by an athlete having those qualities, then you know it will be a good match.
So it really does. And when a player talks about memory loss or different problems like that, there are actually proactive things that athletes can do. There are different clinics that treat them with nutraceuticals, some people believe in hyperbaric pressure, there are brain retraining concepts like biofeedback that can be done. So we try to be in solution and to have the athlete be proactive in protecting their brain health. My best allies in this tend to be the parents or the wife or girlfriend of a male player, because they care longterm more about that athlete being healthy than about him or her playing another year or two.
So I got a call back in 1993 from a director writer, Cameron Crowe, who told me he wanted to do a film centering around the character of a sports agent and asked if he could shadow me and if I take him to a variety of experiences. So we went to the NFL Draft in 1993 together where I had the first player picked overall. We went to NFL league meetings where he saw me trying to find the right place for free agents. We went to games together. He came to Pro Scouting Day at the University of Southern California, went to the Super Bowl, Super Bowl party, sat in my office and I told him stories, lots and lots of stories. And then he went off and wrote a script. And so my job as technical advisor was to vet the script to ensure that the suspension of disbelief necessary to keep you in the flow of a plot in the movie wasn't broken so we didn't have unrealistic dialogue or look.
And then I worked with some of the actors. I actually took Cuba Gooding Jr. down with me to the Super Bowl in Arizona and made him pretend for that week that he was a wide receiver client of mine. I showed Jerry O'Connor who played the quarterback coach had a throw spiral because he had gone to NYU and they didn't have a football program there. So it was a interesting experience, a lot of life up there on the screen. And I haven't been able to walk through an airport. We sat in an airport last night and somebody inevitably runs up and says those four words that start with "Show me."
It was. I thought it was very good there. Cameron saw the relationships I had with players like Warren Moon, where there's real caring in the relationship. And the stereotype of someone with four pinky rings and slicked back hair and only concerned with how much money they could make really doesn't characterize this work, which is taking young men and going through their maturation stage with them, and then trying to stimulate the best in them, both in terms of what they can do off the field, but then also second career. So that many of the athletes I've worked with are very successful in business or broadcast. Desmond Howard is a host on College GameDay and Troy Aikman the number one color broadcaster for Fox and they own businesses. And three of them are actually minority owners of the actual team themselves. So part of the empowerment is to try to encourage them that they can be the owner. That they can fulfill amazing dreams, whether it's media or coaching or business or politics, and help them really be the best they can be.
First of all, I decided not to practice for a while. I wasn't decertified. But there were series of reverses in my personal life, that. I had a father died of cancer, my two boys were diagnosed with a eye injury called retinitis pigmentosa that has led to total blindness in one and impaired vision in the other, we lost a house to mold, then my marriage started to break up and I turned to the wrong thing. I had not been a chronic drinker throughout my life, but sort of like Dr. Pavlov, when he comes in to do the experiment to shock the dog, he doesn't need to shock him, the dog just rolls over in anticipation.
And it got to the point in 2010, where I realized I had an epiphany that my life had become imbalanced. And so I gave up my practice. I went to Sober Living. I entered a 12 step program and I said to myself, the only important thing is that I maintain sobriety and that I'm a good father and everything else will just be the cherry on top. And so, last March, I celebrated my 10th year of continuous sobriety. And if there's someone out there who is struggling because of problems with addiction and is depressed and hopeless, there is hope. And you can reach out. There's help available and don't give up because that was 10 years ago and life is much different now.
So I ended up just going straight to Sober Living and that ended up working. Look, to confront the cravings that come with addiction, it really is necessary in most people's lives to hit bottom, whatever you perceive that bottom is. Your life is so unacceptable that you cannot continue like that. And, again, this was a period of personal reverse. There was nothing in my business life that particularly I found too stressful. I come into the office every day knowing that not withstanding our best plans, something will go awry. But I was simply unprepared because I had the illusion I could somehow protect my father and protect my kids with their eye disease and protect our home and hold my marriage together. And when all that began to crumble, I turned to the wrong thing. And so I was helped by a whole series of people, and I've been open about my alcoholism and hope that it will help someone else who may be struggling.
Giving my practice to younger people, it was closing up my condo and going to live for a little while with my parents. I was sitting on my father's bed, who was deceased, at our family home, and my only thought was where can I find more vodka? And it really is a sense of proportionality that I wasn't a starving peasant in Darfur, that I didn't have the last name, Steinberg, in Nazi Germany, that I didn't have cancer, I didn't have a problem, and that my kids didn't apply for citizenship in this world. We brought them into the world and the least I owed them was a stable, loving father. So it was that sense. And then I'd been brought up with a natural sense of optimism. And I think the key quality is resilience. Life will set you back, you will have reverses, but can you come back and see a new day? I'm a person who, if there's a barn filled with defecation, I think there's a pony in there somewhere. And so, resilience and optimism.
Oh, absolutely. And again, the most important thing is to be a great dad to my kids. And then are we addressing situations in the world that need addressing?
No. In football, for example, we had a draft that cut off the scouting process at a certain point. So it required adaptation and using Zoom to interact with teams, or in the case of a client, we had Tua Tagovailoa taping a workout in a pro passing day that would normally have been done in-person. And the first key and priority is safety, obviously. And none of us really know how the pandemic will play out over time, so we're trying to be sensitive to that. And so for the first time, we're going to have baseball and basketball and hockey with no fans. So that will be different. First of all, it has an economic impact because gate is a large part of the gross revenue. And second of all, we don't know, since performance seems to be tied into home field advantage and stadia filled with screaming fans, we don't know what effect it'll have on the quality of the play.
Fortunately, football comes the last of all the sports and they won't start their regular season until September. So while at this exact moment, we're seeing a spike in cases across the country, the hope is that things will calm down, but we'll deal with it, whatever the situation is, and athletes will deal with it. It's obviously probably the most extraordinary time in this country since World War II and the Great Depression. And so it requires flexibility, resilience, and creativity to think about how we can stay safe and normalize our existence.
I had a uncle who defended a whole series of black speck in the 1950s, who were victims of police brutality, and I remember my dad having me march in 1963 in the Civil Rights Movement. So, while this is a revelation to certain people who are just waking up to the problem, I've been aware of it forever and fought really hard. I created a group to fight against racism and skinheads and hate groups across the country and gave them training as an advanced guard against hate. I encourage our athletes to speak out. We've held internal town halls with our clients, which are listening situations. I actually think this will have been a healthy moment, although it may not seem like this now because it's started a dialogue where African-Americans can express their feeling and their reality. And hopefully, we can find our way to a better place.
But I think anytime you have mass social change, the real question is what in a practical sense, can people do? So we have our athletes involved in voter registration, we have a number of them speaking out in different ways. And again, you look at all these young people who were out on the streets for the first time and then the question is, will they be around in November to vote? And so what specifically can we do?
So the enemy in many ways for athletes is self-absorption. It's the concept of being passive, of living in a homunculus of athletes, which is a bubble, and not really understanding their other role as citizens and the iminence of second career. And so again, to get athletes involved here, it started with coronavirus, where we had someone like Patrick Mahomes donate some hundreds of thousands of school lunches for kids. He's spoken out on this issue and a number of the athletes have… We have a running back, Aaron Jones, who just wrote a great story about Father's Day, but also about the experience of being a young black man in this country. And I think the important thing for white people is to think about the fact that when I tell my kids about the police, I tell them they're friends and protectors.
One of the things I learned in my experience with alcohol is that the most horrific circumstances can come to someone's life. They can lose a child to drugs, they can experience cancer, but there's no causal connection between that type of adversity and substance abuse. In other words, you don't have to blot out yourself that way. So it's about learning coping skills. And what I would tell that young person is to make sure that you've done an internal inventory and are pretty clear on what your goals are in life, and understand that when we help other people and make a difference, it's…Human beings are social animals and we're really tied together in fundamental ways so that more than simply looking at your own personal goals, it's how you can be an active member of a community and bring uplift to other people.
I think we're going to look back in some ways and think the most amazing thing was that a country of 330 million people actually quarantined themselves and put themselves in economic problems and all the rest of it to try to fight this virus. I think it's going to the remarkable thing to me is not that you have people that are behaving in unsafe ways, it's just you have so many people that have sacrificed themselves to try to put an end to the virus.
And if you had said a country of 330 million people based on the concept that don't tread on me and individualism would be able to do that collective sacrifice. I think that's an extraordinary thing. Clearly, we're not out of the woods. But the point was not only are the first responders and medical community heroes, but I think every single person who sat at home knowing they might lose their job or that their economics were challenged or their ability to move and travel was challenged, but they sacrificed it and went through with it.
Leigh Steinberg is CEO of Steinberg Sports & Entertainment. Steinberg is a legendary sports agent who has represented some of the most famous athletes in sport history. He's the author of the bestselling book, Winning with Integrity, providing insight on how to improve life through non-confrontational negotiation. His most recent book, The Agent: My 40-Year Career of Making Deals and Changing the Game, details his decades of dominance in the sports industry and sheds light on overcoming his personal struggles to launch his comeback. Leigh has been rated the sixth most powerful person in the NFL according to Football Digest, and the 16th most powerful person in sports according to the Sporting News. And he was the only agent that made sports illustrated list of most influential figures that shaped the NFL's first 100 years. This is When It Mattered, I'm Chitra Ragavan.
Job Titles:
- Senior Vice President of Marketing at Career
- Senior Vice President, Marketing CareerArc
Linda Souza was driving home from her martial arts class one afternoon in the middle of a January snow storm in Pittsburgh. As she merged onto the icy freeway, Souza lost control of her Dodge Dakota pickup truck. The Mack Truck could not avoid hitting the back of Souza's pickup, but she was able to accelerate into a grassy ditch, narrowly avoiding serious injury. Hello everyone, I'm Chitra Ragavan. And this is When it Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Good Story, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative.
Yes, actually I was wearing a hand-me-down winter coat from my grandfather, and obviously it was way too big for me. And I was in the milk room, which is where all the milk gets stored in this big metal tank. And it has an agitator that keeps the milk stirred, it basically just continually rotates with a big paddle. And I got my coat caught on a piece of the machinery because it was too big for me. And it basically pulled it into the machine.
I ended up with a compound fracture. Basically the bones poked through my wrist. My forearm was kind of in an S shape, almost like having an extra hinge in the middle of my forearm.
Yeah, so they had to cut me out of the machine. I was fortunate actually that my sister, because we were in the middle of doing chores, walked into the milk room when she did and ran to get my parents. But they cut me out of the machine, out of the coat. And then I had to walk the long driveway between the barn and the car to then go to the hospital, which was about 25 minutes away.
No. Unfortunately the bones weren't set right. So actually I had, I used to call it my ski slope. So the arm was still not straight and it was just weak at that point where the bones kind of knit together. And six months later I broke it again. And again, it was set wrong by the same doctor. I'm not sure why we went back to him, but maybe we didn't have many choices given our financial situation and actually Shriner's Hospital for Children, the location in Montreal took me in. They specialize in both orthopedics and burns in children. And my case I guess, was fair enough that they accepted me into their program. And that's when obviously they had to rebreak the bones again and reset it and put in metal plate and steel screws.
Yeah. Unfortunately I think with the stress of farm life and financials and so forth, it kind of led to alcoholism for as far back as I can remember. So that's also something as a child that's hard to deal with. He was a little bit of an angry drunk. He didn't physically abuse us, but obviously he did a lot of yelling and breaking things. And sometimes there were times for example, he would send my sister and I out into the field to pick up stones and things like that until it rained or my mom came out to get us. So that yeah, definitely added another kind of layer of challenge to my childhood.
I mean, I think those difficult situations, anytime you're faced with hardship, either you fall victim to it, or it makes you stronger as a result. And I think for me, it was the latter. I think it was definitely a character building time. It gave me a lot of grit and perseverance. It gave me an appreciation for the value of hard work. And I would say also a great deal of resourcefulness, which comes in handy, especially in my role, working with startups. When we were working on the farm, you don't always have the luxury of being able to throw money at a problem, for example. So you need to find other creative ways of solving a problem that's maybe not the obvious path. So having done that as a child actually, has benefited me as an adult.
Yeah. In terms of worst jobs, one of my jobs you mentioned, because I was in upstate New York, it was very, very cold winters. And if our machines froze due to the cold, but continued to try to run, it would burn out the machine. So one of my jobs, when we were cleaning the gutters in the barn would be to, it was… I don't know even know what the official name was for it, it's kind of like a manure elevator that takes the manure from the barn up this almost like an escalator type thing.
It's like a big arm over this big pile of manure. And literally my job was to stand outside and to watch the manure fall off the end of this manure escalator type thing into the pile to make sure that it didn't stall, that it didn't freeze and cause the engine to burn out. So, when I think about, sometimes with any job, there's always things that you enjoy less than other aspects of your job, or even working up through the ranks and so forth, there are a lot of jobs that are maybe not the most fun or most glamorous or whatever, but you know what, in comparison, it's made me not… There's nothing that I wouldn't do within reason, of course. But there's no job that I feel is below me let's say, because there's no job that's worse than that, that I've done so far.
It was not my favorite, no. And I did when I was a kid, I did think about because I really do love animals. And one of the things that I thought about was, "Do I want to be a vet when I get older?" And I did think, "I don't want to… I'd like to work in a nice clean environment where I don't have to be surrounded by manure." So that's why I ended up pursuing business, which was also very interesting to me.
So when I was an undergrad, I was taking a lot of foreign language classes. I was actually majoring in foreign languages because I was always interested in people, in language, and communication and so forth. And I ended up taking a marketing class as part of my French marketing business certificate and just realized, "Wow, I really love this." For whatever reason, it just really clicked with me and was extremely interesting. And from there, I just took as many marketing classes as I could. And actually my Master's Degree is in marketing.
So we're an HR tech company that helps businesses basically recruit and transition the modern workforce.
Yeah. This has been a challenging time for a lot of companies that's for sure. And we did a little internal study a couple of weeks ago to look at the impact of COVID across all of our customers, both on the recruiting side, as well as layoffs. And what we've seen was that hiring, obviously hiring slowed across the board, but it has already started to come back, which is very promising. The impact has been different for companies both within and across industries. So for example, if you take an industry like healthcare, there are some hospitals for example, who can't hire quickly enough. And then there are others, for example, who have a lot of elective procedures and so forth, which was paused for a while. And so for them, the impact was quite different.
Same thing with, for example, senior living communities, where they continue to ramped up hiring because there was an outsized impact of coronavirus on the older population. So it's just very interesting that even within industries, and we've seen that even within regions where certain states, for example, based on the regulations and guidance put in place at the state level have been impacted differently, even if it's the same company and just a different location,
Well, yeah, I mean, I think right now it's causing a lot of us to reimagine the way that we're working. And I think some of the changes we're seeing will be a little more permanent. So obviously people were already starting to work from home. But I think a lot of companies still felt a little bit of hesitation in terms of can people actually be productive, will they be? And now this has proven, yes, in the majority of cases that model could work. So I think we'll see a lot more of that going forward.
What about employees who were coming in, were living in a very expensive area, but now they've decided if their role has been deemed okay for remote work. Now they're deciding, "Okay, I don't need to live in Silicon Valley anymore. I'm going to go live in Idaho." Should we adjust their salaries? Is that fair? Can we do that? These are the questions that companies are asking. And I think there's going to be many more questions and sometimes it might be on a case by case basis. Sometimes it might be setting a policy for new hires coming in versus how you handle existing employees, maybe it's a little bit different. I don't know, but I know a lot of HR people are already thinking about those implications kind of down the line, but there will be many more for us to address.
Right. Yeah, exactly. And I kind of wonder, how is that going to go over with existing employees too? Because yeah, once you've set a certain agreement and expectation with an employer, how do you renegotiate that contract in a way that's fair for both, but doesn't leave the employee feeling like somehow they've been devalued. So I think that's a real challenge and something that HR leaders need to look out for just from a morale standpoint, and how that's going to affect your existing workforce.
Yeah, totally. And I think that's why you're seeing some companies that are opting to stay out of the office longer. Some have already said, "We're not going back this year. Or some have even just said, "Well, we'll go back, but probably in the fall." Whereas other companies feel that having that face to face interaction is important, but I'm not sure how realistic that's going to be, how employees will respond to that. If I go into the office and I need to wear a mask all day and I need to sit behind a glass partition and I have to be careful, I can only walk one direction in one hallway. And how disruptive will that be?
We're rotating parts of teams in and out. Is that creating more disruption than working remotely or will that be to everyone's benefit? And you know, sometimes it even comes down to just the personalities of the people involved. So certainly, some people are very much reveling in this work-from-home opportunity and other people, if they're real social animals, they're really missing that social interaction. For them being back in the office is worth the trade offs. And yeah, so I think it'll be interesting to see how the model works. And I think it will have to be kind of on a case by case basis. I don't think there's one hard and fast rule that works for everyone.
Well, I think the positive thing is that now that this first time that the pandemic happened, none of us was really prepared for it. So there were just number one, there was just the sheer surprise of being blindsided by something on this scale that we never really expected to come to pass. And then the mad scramble to figure out what do we say? How do we communicate to our employees? How do we communicate to our clients and other stakeholders? How do we figure out how to work remotely? I was lucky I was in a tech company, so we were all set up for that. It was a somewhat easy transition, but that's not the case in all companies.
So we already had to work through those really big, gnarly problems, and the big surprises. I feel like if we go into a second wave, if that were to happen, at least we've already figured out the routines and the procedures and the communication patterns and things like that. We don't need to figure that out again. So yes, we'll still need to social distance and stay home and things like that. It'll just feel like more of the same, but I feel like people will be able to weather that a little better than this first time. I think it was really difficult, especially in the beginning,
I would say that this will only make you stronger. I think all of these challenges, I actually, I wouldn't change them, because I think it's the collection of all these experiences that really shape who you are. And I think it has made me a stronger person in general, a stronger person in business, an action-oriented, hardworking person, and a very resourceful person. And all of those traits have served me well, both in life and in business.
Honestly, it gives me a sense of calm, I guess, and a sense of confidence that when everything goes wrong and I need to act quickly, that I will have the presence of mind, the clear mindedness to be decisive, to act fast and to make the right choices. So I think that the unknown is scary. And this gives me a little bit of peace of mind that I have in the past reacted in the right way to get myself out of the situation, and I can do that again.
Oh, well thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be part of your podcast. You've had some wonderful guests and I've really enjoyed hearing all their stories. So thank you for inviting me.
Linda Souza is Senior Vice President of Marketing at CareerArc. Souza is a 7 x tech startup marketer… Let me say that again. Linda Souza is Senior Vice President of Marketing at CareerArc. Souza is a 7 x tech startup marketer with more than 20 years of experience helping early stage and growth stage startups to successful exits. Prior to CareerArc, Linda served as Vice President of Marketing for cryptocurrency and blockchain startup Gem, where she was my colleague. Souza also served as Vice President of Marketing for Deep Six AI, an award winning, artificial intelligence software company. This is When it Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan.
Linda Souza is a 7x tech startup marketer with more than 20 years of experience helping lead early-stage and growth-stage startups to successful exits...
Madeline Mann began her first job as a market research analyst as she was wrapping up her master's degree. But the super driven academic had a disastrous six months on the job. Humbled by the experience, Madeline went into her second job searching for what truly motivated her to perform and to succeed in the workplace. Hello everyone, I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative.
So one of the really defining moments was I, as a child, I was very… I was just, anything you told me to do, that didn't really matter what you told me to do or what the rules were, I would just go for it. You know, "Madeline, don't go over there." "Well, I feel like going over there, I'm doing it." "Madeline, it's time to be quiet." "Well, I have something to say, so I'm going to say it." I wasn't a mean child, but I just saw no boundaries. And my parents all year long when I was a four-year-old said, "You know, Madeline, Santa's watching. He's watching you. He's watching your every move." And I said, "Yeah, yeah, sure." And so it gets to Christmas, and I have an older brother, he's a year older. And we run out and see all the gifts. And at this point he's five, I'm four, so we don't really read. So there's stars and hearts on our gifts to determine… He was a star and I was a heart. So that's how we knew whose gift was whose.
And it was just a pile of, "Okay, I found another star gift to hand it to him. Okay, here's another star gift." And it was just star gift after star gift and there was no hearts anywhere, except for a letter that was from Santa Claus and my dad helped me read it. And it said that, "Santa's been watching and you're not going to get any gifts this year." And I sat and I listened patiently. I was like, "Okay, yep. That makes sense. I was warned about this." And I just walked back out into the living room and just cheered on my brother as he opened the rest of his gifts. And my parents were weirded out. They were like, "What is happening? She is such a firecracker and in this moment she's completely serene." And my parents said that forever I was changed by that moment of, "Oh, wow. Okay, there are rules. There is a way to act. There are consequences." And apparently, I was a pretty obedient kid after that.
Yes. I think it was a very interesting psychology experiment and they had no idea how it was going to go. But yeah, I mean, looking back in that Christmas, it's strange because I don't see heartbreak there. I just see, "Oh, okay. Yep. Yep. I was told, and this is what happens."
So what it taught me was that, yeah to really focus my strengths and values. So my strengths of, what are the things that really make it so that I am putting in that extra effort and wanting to learn more? And human resources is truly the space where I really found myself wanting to dive in deeper to the psychology of it, wanting to build different programs and measure the results. And so that really made me go head first into that profession and really not look back.
I would say that I really love… I've always read business books and I love the element of really behavior change. And there's lots of different ways to go about business. You can talk about how you're going to implement a strategy or implement a technology, but the underlying aspect there that is the most difficult part is the people, right? So you can come up with the best strategy and the best technology in the world, but if you don't get the right motivation for people and the right actions and the right people in the room, even, it's going to flop. And so I find that problem extremely fascinating. And so human resources has been a way for me to feel like I'm really flexing my muscles of working on a team and being collaborative, while also really taking my love for psychology and understanding human behavior and being a bit of a scientist of experimenting with different ways of helping people to be motivated, helping people to create behavior change if there's something that needs to change in an organization. It's just a really dynamic career path.
Yes. So at Gem, I was so fortunate to really have my hands in every aspect of HR. And that was exactly on the front lines of interviewing people, reading all the resumes, and then in the back room of understanding, "Okay, what are the things that are valued in order to give someone a promotion?" And all of those conversations. And I realized that if only professionals had this context and had this empathy for what it's like to be on the other side, they would make much different decisions in their career. And not only would it be better for their career, but both sides would understand each other better and it would lead to a lot more. So that's where, Gem is really where I dug my heels in and really got to know all these different aspects and I started helping people one on one.
So I would start responding to applications of people applied saying the reason why we didn't choose them. And I thought I was going to be everyone's hero. Everyone always says, "Oh, we never get any feedback in the interview process." And I was like, "I am going to change the game. I'm going to really improve the employer brand." Well, it ended up being a disaster. People, it turns out, which I know this very well now, do not like unsolicited feedback. So the responses I got were really negative and just like, "You don't know what you're talking about." And there were some people who absolutely did appreciate the feedback, but it ended up spiraling into more time commitment. So they'd say, "Okay, well, I'm going to reapply, and can you look at my resumé again? And can we hop on the phone and discuss this for 45 minutes?" And it got to the point where I thought there has to be a better way to help people. And that's when I started my journey of content creation and my whole business of Self Made Millennial.
Yes. So I, the day when I was like, "All right, I'm done with this one-on-one unsolicited feedback thing." So I went into my room and I just started typing away on a Google Doc of all the thoughts and all the things I wanted to share with professionals. And I went into this massive flow state of just like, I emerged with like 20 pages of content just instantly, and I thought, "Okay, I'm definitely onto something." And so I started off with a YouTube channel where I was giving a lot of career, job search, interview, resumé tips, and it was really resonating with people. And I got a reputation for giving very actual advice, giving it quickly, not really messing around, and also being specific. So giving people the actual email templates to send, giving them the exact script of what to say. And that ended up really flourishing into being featured by different outlets, like you mentioned earlier, growing my LinkedIn presence to thousands and thousands of people and having influence there and being a keynote speaker for different organizations and then building online courses and a coaching practice as well.
Yeah. That is another thing that I noticed with a lot of these career videos I was seeing is that they would always, not always, but many of them would give just enough information to where you kind of understood the concept, but you didn't know the next step to take. And they were all very serious and I am just not a serious person most of the time. And so, yeah, I think that I have really brought just that goofiness, that trying to adding lots of puns into what I'm talking about. If dancing is called for in the video, I will absolutely show up for that. And it's really… People have called it like edutainment, which I hope I'm at least making the process of job searching a little less draining because it is so emotionally exhausting. So at least I can help a little bit there.
Yeah. And I actually think that that's something… I never totally went down the road of being a full on singer or an actress or anything like that. But I do think that it's interesting and a message out to all of us is that you should notice those things about yourself, and even if you aren't going to pursue that exact path, there are ways that you can still bring out those hobbies and those talents. So that has been fun for me to kind of tap into that and bring those things to life.
LinkedIn is such a powerful place to build thought leadership and it's often undervalued and it's incredible. I mean, the last stat I checked is that only about three million LinkedIn users post on LinkedIn a week, which is, there's over 690 million users and only 3 million are posting a week. Compare that to Instagram where there's 300 million new photos a day. So it's crazy. The saturation is so much less. And so the virality that you can reach, the organic reach that you can have is incredible. And so what I've done is I've brought over a lot of the tips that were resonating on YouTube to LinkedIn. And the powerful thing about LinkedIn is that it's very relationship oriented.
So I show up on LinkedIn and I'm posting, I'm giving really actual content and people then start to feel like they know me, and then it makes it so that I never cold messaging or cold emailing anyone on LinkedIn because they see me pop up frequently. And so it makes for such an easy way to start a conversation. And so when people talk about keeping your network warm, just showing up on LinkedIn, being an active participant, then you are keeping up with your network in a way that is scalable, instead of you just like… People haven't heard from you in a few years and you pop up into their inbox.
That is just as much of a surprise to me as it is to you. That was a grand experiment. And yeah, I think at time of recording, I'm about 300,000 followers on there, which has been really fun to grow with that and help people with their careers through videos that are under a minute.
I was, yeah. In such a short amount of time. And the platform is constantly evolving, but yeah, that's actually a place I don't dance. I actually don't dance on TikTok, despite the reputation.
Yes. So this is something that I've been very hot on the pulse of. And what I've noticed from the job seeker side is the number one question I'm asked is, "Is there even a point in applying right now?" Or, "When should I start pursuing opportunities?" And those questions break my heart because the answer is yesterday, right? You should still be pursuing opportunities. But the thing is, is that a lot of people, it's a different landscape, things are shaken up, they don't know if the company had layoffs or not. They don't know if they're still hiring. They're posting job descriptions, but does that mean, was that just automatic? And, "Oh, I had an interview, but then I haven't heard back. But is it okay to even follow up with anyone during these conditions?"
And one thing, a metaphor I use is that if you've heard of this team exercise where it's about building a tower out of spaghetti, hard spaghetti and string and tape, and you're supposed to build the highest tower you can that can hold up one of those jumbo marshmallows, and you only have 15 minutes to build it. And they found, after doing this team building exercise across all different kinds of groups, really interesting results about who is really good at this activity and who isn't.
But the group that actually does the best with this are actually kindergartners. And the reason why kindergarteners are so good at this task is because as soon as the stopwatch starts, they just start building. They're like, "All right, let's put some stuff together. Okay, oops, first tower fell down. It's all right, we still have nine more minutes. Okay, let's build our next one." And by the end of the 15 minutes, everyone's tower looks different. All of them have a marshmallow at the top. And yeah, the solutions are very creative. And the reason why I tell this story is because I really want job seekers to be like kindergartners right now. I want you to move from a planning mindset to an experimentation mindset. Just try things, keep moving during this time, don't freeze, don't be in this constant getting ready stage, because while you're doing that, other people are getting these jobs.
And so don't be afraid to make that first move, to make that first reach out, because this is an unprecedented time, and the people who are getting jobs, and I have gotten literal hundreds of emails and calls from people who have said that I have helped them get jobs during COVID. It's happening, but you have to keep building, you have to keep experimenting.
Exactly, yeah. And so one of my best tools that I've helped people with is I wrote emails to follow up during COVID. So I tell everyone, persistence gets jobs. You need to be following up, but people say, "How do I follow up without being inconsiderate?" And so I wrote these email templates where it really allows you as a person following up as a candidate to respect that person's timing, to respect that they have other things going on, that things aren't certain, but still be persistent and positive. I think if you go to my website, madelinemann.com, it's the first pop-up that that happens that people can grab that download. But that has been a really big breakthrough for so many people. So many people email me saying, "Wow, just thank you for giving me that tool to actually move forward and follow up," because again, a lot of people are so frozen right now.
One of the things that I'm noticing a lot is safety is obviously a big part of coming back into the workplace. Are people going to… How are we going to utilize kitchen spaces? How are we going to spread out desks? And so those are the shorter term things. I think longer term, it has been an interesting challenge to show that remote work is possible for a lot of roles. I think that there's still a lot to be said for being in person, but this has been a really interesting challenge to the idea that you need to be in person. So I am thinking that there's going to be a lot more roles, a lot more distributed teams, and even a lot of companies may be getting rid of their offices or downsizing and having just shared desks in their space where people don't necessarily have a desk anymore. It's just, if you're coming into the office, take an open desk and possibly fewer days in the office.
I think that it's probably two things. So I think really, you need to look at what's in demand right now. I think the idea of "follow your passion" is a misdirection of energy. I think that there's people often that just want to go after a certain job that maybe isn't in demand, and COVID has caused certain jobs to be really high demand and others not. So I would say get a bit creative, right? Look at your skills and look at your strengths and your values and see what could be new for you. Such as I have been coaching a lot of event planners, because that has been a really tough job to get these days. And I have helped them to get jobs as like a webinar moderator. I have one person who is just raking in the money of just them branding themselves as a webinar moderator and helping all these companies to make sure that that runs smoothly and that their questions are getting to the presenter.
And I had another client who is now a COVID safety specialist for sets like in the entertainment industry. So there's a lot of different ways that you can rebrand your skills. And then I think the second half is focusing on personal branding. So just as I was talking about with, on LinkedIn, you… Familiarity breeds fondness. People want to hire people who they feel familiar with, and a great way to do that is to get active, build that personal brand and make it so that you are keeping your network warm because in a competitive landscape for the job market, you need to have that edge.
I would say that there's not actually a real structure to the recipe for success in the working world. I think so many people, and obviously me in that situation as well, we get caught up of like, "What's the right thing to do. What's the right way to format my resumé. What's the right way to ask for a raise?" It's not during this particular cycle or, "What's the right way to have a career that's like a ladder instead of…" I can consider most careers these days to be jungle gyms instead of like… There's lots of different places to go versus just straight up in one path.
And so I think that that's something, is that everything, or most of the things I've talked about today, like no one handed me, you know, "Hey, Madeline, you are now going to build this YouTube channel. You are now going to have this coaching practice. You're now going to have all these things." You just create it for yourself. And so that's something that I wish I would have known when I was in that first job is that it's not about just following the rules, it's about building your influence, and in contributing, and in finding ways to contribute, in not waiting for someone to grant you permission or tell you, "Here's the steps you take." Throw the playbook out the window, and really, I found that the best moments in my life have been times where I've zigged when everyone else zagged.
A viral insight. I would say that it really is this aspect of this persistence. As I've been working with all of these different job seekers helping them to obtain jobs, the number of success stories I'm getting from all this content hasn't decreased. And it actually, I think it's gotten, for those people who have been even more committed, there's been tremendous victories in this time. And so I think really just these moments of, wow, if you can just be really persistent, there's just amazing things that can happen. Obviously that's not true for everyone. Like there's a lot of people who have really difficult situations that just a bit of elbow grease won't get them through it, but I think it's been largely pretty incredible of the ability for people to build relationships and lean on each other and reach their next career goals.
Madeline Mann is a human resources leader and career strategist. She's known for her rapid fire career advice videos on her channel, Self Made Millennial, which has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms. Madeline transformed her experience as an HR and recruiting leader into advice on how to empower ambitious professionals to fast track their careers. Madeline's work has been featured on Business Insider, Newsweek, Thrive Global, and more. She was named a top 50 person to follow on LinkedIn and a top 10 YouTube channel for job seekers. Madeline currently also serves as talent development manager at Inspire in Los Angeles. This is When It Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan.
Wheeler also served as the Deputy Director for Nuclear Operations, U.S. Strategic Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Neb. As such, he served as the principal adviser to the commander on issues pertaining to strategic deterrence and nuclear operations. He served as the command's principal flag officer responsible for management and oversight of the nuclear enterprise. He retired in March 2016.
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Oh Danny, poor thing. Maybe, I still have the survivor guilt because I would tell Danny, "I'm so sorry that I couldn't save you." I mean, I have dreams where I say that to him sometimes. But if Danny were here, oh my gosh, if he were here and he were alive, first of all, he would be the most fun, right? Now, during quarantine, he would always have entertainment in any household in which he was living. But this is the same message that Danny gave to me too in life. And this is the message that I would give to that younger woman that I was, which is, live unapologetically. Don't live with shame, every voice that you have within yourself that questions you and second guesses you, just talk to that voice. Talk to that and get the bottom of it, but don't let it define and dictate your options in this world.
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