Method To The Madness

KALX 90.7FM - UC Berkeley
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Celebrating the innovative spirit of the Bay Area - we explore the people behind the ideas, the problems they are trying to solve, and what makes them tick. Hosted by producers Ali Nazar and Lisa Kiefer. If you would like to contact the show, please feel free to email: ali at methodtothemadness dot org or lisamttm at gmail dot com. Transcriptions of these programs are available on this site dating back to 2018. The rest are coming soon. If you are interested in a transcription of an earlier episode, please contact us at mail at kalx dot berkeley dot edu. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 11/22/2019

    UC Berkeley Professor Gabriel Zucman

    Transcript Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:03] This is method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host Lisa Kiefer. And today I'm speaking with Gabriel Zucman Professor of Economics and Public Policy here at UC Berkeley. He has just co-authored a book with Emmanuel Saez  called The Triumph of Injustice --How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. Welcome to the program, Gabriel. Gabriel Zucman: [00:00:36] Thanks for having me. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:37] Why did you write this book. What was the problem or problems you were trying to solve? Gabriel Zucman: [00:00:42] So the main problem is the rise of inequality in the US. So if you look for instance at what has happened to income concentration, in 1980, the top 1 percent highest earners in the U.S. earned about 10 percent of total U.S. national income today they earn 20 percent of U.S. national income. Now contrast that with what has happened for the working class for the bottom 50 percent of earners. They used to earn 20 percent of income and now about 12 percent. So essentially the top 1 percent and the bottom 50 percent have have switched their income share. And the reality of the U.S. today is that the 1 percent earns twice as much income in total than the bottom 50 percent a group that by definition is 50 times larger. So you have this huge level of inequality and this big increase in inequality and the tax system is a key institution to regulate inequality. And so we wanted to know OK does it do a good job? Does the tax system limit inequality or does it exacerbate the rise of inequality? Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:58] And as you say in your book all the way back to James Madison the whole point of taxes yes is to raise revenue but the other significant point was to reduce inequality. Gabriel Zucman: [00:02:07] Exactly. Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:08] And that's something that's been kind of forgotten since 1980. Gabriel Zucman: [00:02:11] That's been forgotten despite the fact that it's deeply rooted in American society. The U.S. was created in large part in reaction against the highly unequal aristocratic societies of of Europe in the 18th century and ever since, many people in the US have been concerned about becoming as unequal as Europe. Europe for a long time was perceived as as an anti model, too unequal, at least until the middle of the 20th century. Now it's the opposite, it's funny to see how these beliefs and perceptions have changed over time. Now many people in the US feel that Europe is too equal, but in fact for most of US history it was it was the opposite. The US invented some of the key progressive fiscal institutions designed to limit inequality to regulate inequality. Let me just give one example. In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt goes to Congress. He makes a famous speech. He says I think that no American should have an income after paying taxes of more than twenty five thousand dollars which is the equivalent of a few million dollars today. Therefore I propose to create a top marginal income tax rate of 100 percent above twenty five thousand dollars. And that's the idea of a legal maximum income. That's an American, a Roosevelt invention. And people in Congress they hesitate a little bit you know 100 percent, maybe it's too much, but they agree on 93 percent which when you think about it is that very far from 100 percent. And then the U.S. kept these very high modern 90 percent top marginal income tax rates for a long time. So there is this deeply rooted tradition in the U.S. of using the tax system to limit the concentration of income. The idea being that wealth is a good thing for the working class, for the middle class. It provides safety, provides security. But for the very rich,wealth is not safety or security. Wealth is power. And an extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of power, of political power, of economic power, which is detrimental to the rest of society and so one key function of the tax system is to prevent such a concentration of wealth and such a concentration of power from happening. Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:52] You've been consulting with Elizabeth Warren and others adopting pieces of some of the ideas that you had. How does Elizabeth Warren's plan, when you plug it into your model in the book, your 1980 model,what was the outcome of plugging in her wealth tax. Gabriel Zucman: [00:05:09] So Elizabeth Warren proposes to create a wealth tax at a rate of 2 percent above 50 million dollars and 6 percent above 1 billion dollars. So just let me explain what this would do. It means that if you have 50 million dollars in wealth or less, you pay zero. One of the things we do in the book we tried to imagine how the U.S. economy would have looked like if such a tax had been in place since 1982. So let me first start with what has happened to wealth concentration since 1982. If you look at the 400 richest Americans, you know Forbes magazine has estimates every year of their wealth. And according to Forbes magazine, the 400 richest Americans owned about 1 percent of U.S. wealth in 1982. And today they own about three point five percent of U.S. wealth. That is their wealth has been growing much much much faster than the economy as a whole and than average wealth in the economy. If the Warren wealth tax had been in place since 1982, inequality, wealth concentration would have increased much less, it would have increased a little bit. That is, today, the top 400 richest Americans would own about one point five percent of U.S. wealth. So a bit more than 82 but that would be much less than the current three point five percent. So this shows something which is very, to me, is very striking, a 6 percent tax on wealth. It's a big deal. You know it means that someone who has a hundred billion dollars has to pay six billion dollars a year in taxes. So it's big. And even if that tax had been in place since 1982, billionaires would still have seen their share of wealth increase. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:00] In other words they'd still be billionaires. Gabriel Zucman: [00:07:02] Not only billionaires but multi billionaires. Some of them would still have tens of billions of dollars because the rise of wealth inequality has been so massive. The growth rate of wealth of billionaires has been so much higher than the growth rate of wealth for the rest of the population that even with a big wealth tax you know it would not have been enough to reduce inequality. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:26] Well you give a good example about Warren Buffett. You know he's always bragging about how "I pay taxes. I pay a lot of taxes." Gabriel Zucman: [00:07:32] Yeah. So Warren Buffett is a good illustration for why we need a wealth tax. He's one of the main shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. His wealth, according to Forbes magazine again, is about 80 billion dollars. His true economic income is his share of Berkshire Hathaway's profits. It's something like five billion dollars a year. That's his income. But what he does is that he instructs this company that he owns, Berkshire Hathaway, not to pay dividends. And so his only taxable income is when he sells a few shares every year of his company, is a taxable income of the order of 10 to 20 million dollars. And on that 10 or 20 million dollars he pays three or six million in capital gains taxes. And now you do the math. His true economic income is 5 billion. His tax bill is something like 5 million. So his effective tax rate is essentially zero percent. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:41] It's lower than his secretary. Gabriel Zucman: [00:08:43] It's not only lower than its secretary, it's it's zero. Essentially you know five million compared to five billion. It's nothing. Then you have a number of proposals such as oh but let's just increase the top marginal income tax rate or let's just increase the tax rate on capital gains.But you see the problem.... Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:01] That's what Bill Gates says. Gabriel Zucman: [00:09:03] That's what Bill Gates, Warren Buffett himself, there is this so-called Buffett Rule that was popular at some point among Democrats and the idea was we need to increase the tax rate on capital gains. Fine. You know it's not a bad idea. But you have to realize that the Buffett rule itself would make essentially no difference to Warren Buffett's tax bill, because even if you increase the capital gains tax rate to 100 percent let's say, then Warren Buffett would have to pay let's say 20 million in taxes. 20 million divided by five billion, which again is his true income, would still be zero percent. So if you want to tax billionaires like Warren Buffett or like Jeff Bezos or like Mark Zuckerberg, the proper way to do that is with a tax on the stock of wealth itself, with a wealth tax. Because when you're extremely rich it's very easy to own billions or tens of billions while having very little taxable income. And so you cannot tax billionaires well just with the income tax. You also need a wealth tax. Lisa Kiefer: [00:10:10] Gates also argues estate taxes and I like your argument in the book, you say well you know fine but are we going to wait around all these years? Some of these billionaires are very young. Gabriel Zucman: [00:10:21] Yeah exactly. You look at Mark Zuckerberg you know he's in his 30s. He's not paying much taxes today. Just like the Warren Buffett example because Facebook doesn't pay dividends. Facebook doesn't pay a lot of corporate tax. So is it wise to wait for 50 years or more before some of the country's wealthiest individuals stopped paying taxes. I don't think that's very wise.  You Know, essentially because there are all these needs for revenue for early education, for university, for health care, for infrastructure. These are immediate needs and some billionaires can contribute much much more than they do today. There's no good reason to wait for 50 years to make them contrib

    36 min

  2. 10/11/2019

    Ashley Grosh

    Transcript Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:06] This is Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with Ashley Grosh, the CEO of PIP's Rewards. Thank you for coming on the show, Ashley. What is PIPs? Ashley Grosh: [00:00:36] So PIPs Rewards is an app and it's a technology platform that is owned and operated by our company 3P Partners. We call ourselves an impact tech company. What we really do is we turn a verifiable engagement in beneficial behaviors, things happening daily, riding your bike, bus riding, taking a workout class. All these beneficial behaviors that you might be doing throughout the day, we verify that and we award you our digital currency when you do those things. So Pip's is our digital currency, which stands for Positive Impact Points. Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:09] That's interesting. It sounds complex how you would measure this. So walk me through the application as a user. An example. Ashley Grosh: [00:01:18] Yeah. So from a user perspective, it's actually very lightweight and easy. You just would download the app in the app store for iPhone or Android. You download Pip's rewards. Today we're targeted in higher education, so you would use your university email through a single sign on. We would capture who you are. You'd set up an account and then you'd really begin to start using the platform. It takes you through a quick tutorial of what you need to do. You'd want to have your Bluetooth enabled and it shows you ways in which you can now start going out into the community and around campus and earning the currency. So a day in the life of a Pip's user, you may wake up in the morning, you fill up your water bottle, which has our little QR code sticker on it, which you may have gone to pick up an environmental center on campus. So you carry that water bottle with you. But when you fill it up, you take your phone out, you take a picture of your QR code and then you've earned 10 points. You can only refill your water bottle three times per day. So if you try to do that again, you'll get an error message. And that's really more just the behavior, we want you just to be in the habit of carrying that water bottle. Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:19] You don't want people scamming this system. Ashley Grosh: [00:02:20] That's right. So we set barriers in place to make sure that doesn't happen. So then let's say you're going to a study group in the morning, so you hop on one of the bike shares programs that's here on campus and we are automatically already integrated with that bike sharing platform. So when you check out that bike, we know who you are. We know you're on that bike. And all the sudden immediately our currency goes into your digital wallet with inside the app. And now you've earned for refilling your water bottle. Now you've taken a bike to a meeting and now you've earned again. Let's say you're coming back up to campus for a class in the afternoon and you hop on the bus. Well, now we have either a beacon or an API integration installed with the transit company, and you don't even have to have your phone out for this. In some cases, we might use near-field communication. So we're using a lot of technologies, right, to integrate innovative technologies. If we think about the connected city, smart cities. Right. All these things to track and measure. So you come back up the bus to class and then again in your digital wallet, you see your currency being added for that behavior. :et's say in the afternoon then, there's a speaker coming onto campus that's talking about climate finance on an environmental or health related topic. So let's say you go to that event and that's one of the activities that we award for. We also capture that you've gone to that event and you've earned our currency than you maybe go refill your water bottle again. Then you go into housing and dining. You go have some lunch and let's say you brought your own silverware. So let's say you brought your own bamboo silverware and then let's say you're composting and you're doing all these things. We have different mechanisms to capture that as well within the dining hall. And if if the campus is interested in financial literacy, then students can take EDquity financial literacy modules and earn our currency. I'm giving you kind of a flavor, right, of you go about your day and you're earning all this currency. Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:08] And it's very transparent to the user, it sounds like. Ashley Grosh: [00:04:11] Yeah, it happens in real time. So you can see your digital dashboard in your wallet. Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:15] What is a a data point worth? Ashley Grosh: [00:04:17] So that's a great point. So one pip is worth one cent. And so then we we do this, you know, kind of carbon pricing on your actions. So when you're refilling a water bottle, you may only get 10 pips for that. But if you're riding the bus. Right, that's got a bigger implication in terms of your carbon savings. So maybe you'll get 50 pips, in that case, if you go to volunteer at a tree planning event in the community, maybe that's a thousand. So we work with the university to really put the value behind each of these actions. Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:48] And then is this accumulated reward money, can it pay for education and books and things to do with college? Ashley Grosh: [00:04:55] There you go. That whole secret sauce. So what happens is when you accumulate your your pips in your wallet, well, then the question becomes, what can you do with it? Right. And so there's really kind of three key things that you can do. We have an in app e-commerce platform. And so we screen for green, though, any company that we partner with in there has to be promoting sustainability or have a sustainable product. And so we have some food companies in there. So Whole Foods, Chipotle, Patagonia's an example. Roffey shoes, right? These are sustainable companies and brands. And so you can convert your pip's into either gift cards or discounts with those vendors. It's really cool. So you can, you know, use that in app e-commerce site to redeem your currency. You also could donate your currency. So we work with a number of nonprofits, both national and local. So if you're really interested in a cause, an environmental justice or the Nature Conservancy or something happening right here in your community, you can donate your pip's and we will cut a check to that organization from 3P on your behalf. And then the real secret sauce that we just rolled out last spring is the Pip's for Schools program. So this is where it now you can take the Pip's that you've earned and convert it to pay down tuition, books, school fees. We do that through the Office of Financial Aid and then we have a separate fund called the Pips Education Fund in which we provide a match. So let's say you have $100 that you've accumulated. You put that towards your books. We provide you a one to one match. Now you've gotten a $200 scholarship. Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:27] Who's matching it?  Ashley Grosh: [00:06:32] So we have a separate fund and it's a 501 C 3 non-profit. We're raising for that fund separately. Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:34] And so people can donate to that fund.  Ashley Grosh: [00:06:36] Absolutely. So, alumni or corporate partners, charitable institutions, community foundations, people that are really interested in supporting education, sustainability, student success and higher ed can make a contribution and donate to that fund. And then we use that fund to make the match. And our goal over time is to get to a two or three to one match. So all the sudden you go about your daily life, you're doing all these good things. You're earning the currency that has real value and you're putting that towards your education. When students are taking those earned pips and converting them to tuition dollars, the money's then flowing back to the university through the Office of Financial Aid. And then we are providing through our separate 501 C-3, the Pip's Education Fund, a match. And so really the university is recouping their initial investment of the subscription back through the Office of Financial Aid. So it's a really great ROI for the university. It's really a win win win. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:33] The technology behind this is mind boggling to me. It seems like there's a lot of tech pieces, a lot of data points. Ashley Grosh: [00:07:40] It is. It is. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:41] It's very I mean, it's transparent to the user. But can you talk to me about the technology that is in place and how that all works? Ashley Grosh: [00:07:49] Yeah. So some of it, you know, we install so there is an infrastructure component. So I mentioned on buses or on transit or if you're going to an event on campus, we may use little beacons or sensors. And these sensors can know that if you're in the building, it's Bluetooth enabled. And so we can pick up on that, that that student ID is there, we verify that you're there. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:10] So do you have to turn that on, the behavior tracking system? Ashley Grosh: [00:08:12] You just turn on your Bluetooth and actually people may or may not know this, but these beacons and sensors are used in retail stores. So if I go into Target, for example, they want to know how long am I spending in each section? How long am I spending in the food, in the women's clothing? I'm a mom. So how long am I spending in the baby section? Right. So beacons and sensors have been used in the retail market too. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:34] From your phones. Ashley Grosh: [00:08:35] From your phones through location based services. Right. If those are enabled on your phone to get data. And now that's a different use case. Right. So we're not using that. We're using it in more of a closed loop system. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:46] There's a lot of talk about giving you back money for your data that you're giving to like, say, Facebook or Amazo

    31 min

  3. 09/13/2019

    Mohamed Shehk

    Transcript Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:01] You're listening to Method to the Madness. A biweekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:12] I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with Mohamed Shehk, co-director and media and communications director of Critical Resources. Welcome to Method to the Madness. Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:28] Thank you for having me. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:29] I've been hearing a whole lot with the upcoming presidential election and all the debates, about prison reform. I find it kind of interesting that for the past over 20 years, your organization has said "forget reform, we need to abolish prisons." Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:43] Yes. Critical Resistance was founded in 1998. It was founded in Berkeley. There was a conference called Critical Resistance Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:53] Yes. And you had a lot of heavy hitters, Angela Davis. Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:55] Angela Davis was one of our co-founders,. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:57] And, Ruth Wilson Gilmore! Mohamed Shehk: [00:00:59] And we're actually doing an event with Ruthie down in L.A.. Yeah. So we began using a term that was actually coined by Mike Davis, the prison industrial complex. And it was a way to begin thinking about the interrelated systems of imprisonment, policing, surveillance and other forms of state violence and control. Really looking at this system as being built intentionally to control, repress and inflict harm and violence in communities. So if we understand that its purpose is to control communities, then we don't want to fix it. Right. We want to chip away at its power. We want to abolish it. So we really popularized the notion of prison industrial complex abolition. And for the past 20 years, we've been working on various projects and campaigns toward eliminating the prison industrial complex in our society. Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:51] So of all the candidates, who do you think is most onboard or at least understanding of what your strategy is toward prisons? Mohamed Shehk: [00:02:00] It's really interesting with the current presidential candidates that have approached criminal justice reform in a variety of ways. I mean, you just had Bernie Sanders release a platform that actually picks up a lot of some of the concepts and community based approaches rather than continuing to invest and waste millions and millions and millions of dollars into the system of policing, into imprisonment. What are the reforms that appear to be liberal or progressive but are actually entrenching the system? Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:36] Right. They're kind of co-opting. Mohamed Shehk: [00:02:37] Yeah. After the death of Mike Brown and Eric Garner back in 2014 with the, you know, upsurge of Black Lives Matter and the enormous amount of attention being focused on policing, and you had an array of reforms being discussed, such as body cameras, such as, more training for police officers. And we see that these kinds of reforms are actually pouring money into the system of policing. They're expanding the role of policing. We're giving surveillance technology to policing. Right. So these reforms aren't actually chipping away at the power, but actually legitimizing and entrenching the system of policing itself. So these are the kinds of reforms that we want to be cautious of and use this framework of thinking about abolitionist reforms vs. reformist reforms. What are the reforms that are actually cutting away resources from the systems that we're fighting rather than continuing to waste investments into these systems. Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:36] And so what are some of the strategies that you are using in your organization? And you're located in four cities. You're headquartered in Oakland in the Temescal. You're in New York City, L.A. and Portland. Mohamed Shehk: [00:03:48] Yes. Our national office is based in Oakland. We are a nonprofit organization and we function primarily through our chapters and our chapters, the ones that you named, our volunteer members really make up the bulk of the organization and we work with them and they decide what local projects and campaigns are most relevant to the political geography that they're operating in, to attack the prison industrial complex. So, for instance, in Portland, we started a campaign called Care Not Cops. Initially, that campaign was really focused on cutting policing away from mental health crisis response. We want to divest resources away from policing, take money away from the police budget and put that into community based and user determined mental health resources. One strategy is to really focus on the city budget and to use that as a method to organize communities and to say these are actually where we want our resources going, not continuing to go into the Police Bureau's budget. We use a variety of different strategies and tactics, so we do a lot of media and communications work to kind of shift how we understand safety, how we understand what strong and healthy communities actually look like. We do a lot of work around the legislative realm. We work with decision makers and also put pressure on decision makers to put forth policies that are actually in line with what we're advocating for. Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:28] So let's talk about what you're doing in the Bay Area... Urban Shield, for one thing. Can you talk about that a little bit and some of the other successes you've had locally? Mohamed Shehk: [00:05:36] Yeah. Thank you for raising that. Critical Re sistance along with a number of other organizations, including the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Chicano Moratorium Coalition, the American Friends Service Committee. We're part of a coalition called the Stop Urban Shield Coalition. And we came together to put an end to Urban Shield, which was the world's largest SWAT training, and also included a weapons expo. That organizing happened for five plus years. We built a grassroots campaign to essentially pressure and empower the Board of supervisors in Alameda County to say to the sheriff, no, we do not want this kind of program anymore. Urban Shield was justified under the guise of emergency preparedness. Right. And so the sheriff would say, well, we need this kind of program because of all these different kinds of emergencies. But obviously, just as with many programs that came after 9/11, it was funded through and bolstered by the logic of militarization and counter-terrorism and was effectively a program that endorsed war on black and brown communities. So last year, the Board of Supervisors made a decision to end Urban Shield. They said after this year, Urban Shield is no longer. Then this year, a gain, after some kind of foul play by the sheriff to attempt to kind of reverse their decision and even just ignore that it actually happened. Earlier this year, they reaffirmed their decision and Urban Shield was effectively defunded. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:08] Does that money then go to the programs that you are backing? Mohamed Shehk: [00:07:12] Yes. So we have been working alongside various city and county agencies to really put in place what emergency preparedness and disaster response looks like. So one of the things that we did with the Alameda County Board of Supervisors is part of their decision to end Urban Shield was to put together a task force to say, okay, let's actually look at how this money could be funded. And they adopted a number of recommendations, which was about 60 recommendations that called for things like no more SWAT centered scenarios. You know, we want inclusive programs and transparency that include community members in the planning and the implementation. And so these recommendations were adopted. We also took them to San Francisco because San Francisco is the fiscal agent of this money that's coming from the federal government. And they also looked and adopted many of the recommendations. And so for what comes next, we are hopeful that it really embodies the kind of program, the kind of framing that we were after. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:23] Can you tell me also about the project called Oakland Power Projects? Mohamed Shehk: [00:08:27] So there was a coalition, the Stop the Injunctions Coalition, that put an end to gang injunctions in Oakland. It was the first instance of a city in the United States ending gang injunctions as a result of grassroots mobilization and pressure. And so after that, we said, OK, we ended gang injunctions. This is tremendous. What do we want to do next? So we started surveying and interviewing Oakland community members around things like what does safety look like to you? Do you have instances where you feel like you need to call the cops? What kind of investments do you want to see in your community? And so we compiled all of these interviews. We started picking through them and found a common theme which was around health related emergencies and people saying, when these emergencies happen, I don't want to call the cops, but they're the only options that I have. Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:19] Give me an example of something like that. Mohamed Shehk: [00:09:21] So it could be someone gets in a car accident. Someone is having a or experience as someone else, having a mental health crisis or someone just badly cuts themselves or injured themselves. They have to call 9 1 1. And in many instances, the police show up and either don't really help in what's often the case or exacerbate the situation. Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:45] By criminalizing it. Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:46] Exactly. What we did is we got together a number of health workers from counselors to kind of traditional like EMT as doctors, nurses, acupuncturists, the whole range, right? Street medics and we said, okay, now we want you to come up with different resources and come up with a number of different workshops that you can provide to communities on knowing your options when situations occur. They did

    31 min

  4. 07/12/2019

    Saraswathi Devi and Claire Lavery

    Method to the Madness host Lisa Kiefer speaks with CALSTAR Yoga program faculty Saraswathi Devi and Claire Lavery about their innovative adaptive yoga class on the UC Berkeley campus that teaches students how to help members of the public with disabilities. Transcript Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:27] You're listening to Method to the Madness. A bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with faculty members of CalStar Yoga, a program that helps people with disabilities practice yoga. Claire Lavery: [00:00:51] I'm Claire Lavery. Saraswathi Devi: [00:00:53] And I'm Saraswathi Devi. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:54] Welcome to the program. And you're both on the faculty of Cal Yoga. Saraswathi Devi: [00:00:58] I guess you could put it that way. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:59] OK. Well, why don't you tell us about your program? Saraswathi Devi: [00:01:02] Well, we call it CalStar Yoga and at their recreational sports facility, the RSF, there is a little program called CalStar, which serves people who live with different kinds of disabilities and it's open to the public. So our part of that is an adaptive yoga class. Claire Lavery: [00:01:19] The class has been going on since 1996,. Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:22] Since 1996. Is it for just students or. Claire Lavery: [00:01:26] It's open to anyone with a disability in the community or in on campus, on staff, on faculty and any member of the gym or outside the community?, campus community can also join? Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:39] I thought it might be useful for our listeners to know how you define yoga and how you define disabilities. Saraswathi Devi: [00:01:47] Yoga is an ancient practice and it's a lot about body and mind health. It comes from an ancient root, yog, meaning to join. So it's all about balance of body and mind and the quiet aspects of the self and the more assertive aspects of the self. It has a lot to do with exercise, which is how most people in America know it. But it also has to do with mind training, with making your intellect more sharp and your emotions more clear and peaceful. And some people pursue it as a spiritual practice as well. Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:22] And could you define disabilities for this class? Claire Lavery: [00:02:25] We define it as someone who is living with some kind of an ongoing condition that limits their presence, their ability to move in the world. Most of our participants have physical disabilities. We don't work too often with people with intellectual disabilities. Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:44] Are you speaking of autism? Claire Lavery: [00:02:46] Right. Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:46] So you don't service. Claire Lavery: [00:02:48] We've had students with those kinds of disabilities in the class, but they've definitely been in the minority. And it's much more about the people who are living with more physical limitations, people with multiple sclerosis, people with cerebral palsy, people with post stroke syndrome, injury, trauma. So we've had quite a wide range of different kinds of disabilities represented in our class. And people with multiple disabilities are, have been long term members as well. Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:14] I didn't know that this existed, honestly, and I want to know how it got founded. What was the reason behind it? Were you there at the beginning? Well, Saraswathi is the one to tell you. Saraswathi Devi: [00:03:24] Well, I've been practicing and teaching since the mid 70s. And as the years went on in the beginning, in the early days, we just had everybody in class. We would have kids and seniors and people who were injured or disabled. Everybody would just be glommed together. Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:42] On campus? Saraswathi Devi: [00:03:42] No, in the community in Berkeley. I was trained by and served very closely a yoga master from India who lived here part of the year. But then as the years went on, we found ourselves specializing. So I began to teach pre and post-natal yoga and children of all ages and seniors and adults at different levels. And then I found myself partly because I have some of my own disabilities. I found myself very attracted to the whole subject, observing a person who was not typically abled and so found myself to the Multiple Sclerosis Society and other places and began to develop a practice that seemed to be really helping people. And that gradually led me to UC Berkeley, where I was hired. Well, at first at the Hearst Gym and then down at the RSF.  Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:28] Did they hear about you and hire you or did you know approach them? Saraswathi Devi: [00:04:31] They did. It's a kind of long, convoluted story. But there was a really forward looking woman working in the RSF who hired me. And what I have tried to do is in serving a person who is living with a profound disability or multiple disabilities, we're trying to offer them a practice that they would never otherwise have access to. So we're taking yoga to a place that you wouldn't imagine it could go, so somebody might not be able to speak or move outside of a power wheelchair, whose body might be contorted or who might be having a lot of involuntary movement and and meeting the whole person. So sometimes a person on the street will see somebody living with a disability and they'll either discount them or not have proper regard and respect for the humanity of that person. They just see a bunch of equipment on a wheelchair. But anybody who comes over the threshold into our class is automatically recognized for their rich humanity and just loved and respected instantly. So what I tried to do is take other disciplines that I recognize as another form of yoga in a way and sort of a broad way of thinking. So I'd like to add massage and acupressure and range of motion and sometimes even using free weights. Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:50] Do you use water? Saraswathi Devi: [00:05:51] No, we're not. I would... Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:53] There are pools here and I thought maybe... Saraswathi Devi: [00:05:53] True. Well, I love aqua yoga and if we had a way of somehow having a pool, we would do it for sure. But we lift people out of their wheelchairs who are not ambulatory. They'll be four or five or six of us carrying a person. Proper word is transfer out of the wheelchair onto the floor and then people who are much more mobile who will arrive in class with mobility aids like a cane or a walker, or even walking on their own in a maybe halting way. They're also in the class, so it's a broad range. Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:28] I can imagine that you've encountered some really beautiful transformations for people who have never experienced this before. Saraswathi Devi: [00:06:36] It's a lot of hard work, but it's a joyful experience for all of us. For the students themselves. For Claire, for me, for our volunteers and for our young undergrads who help us every semester. Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:48] And how many undergrads help you? Claire Lavery: [00:06:50] Well, we have a range. We often have up to 60 or 70 students. They enroll in an undergraduate course that gives them two credits. It's a DeCal course. So they come and help us every week. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:03] And they learn how? Claire Lavery: [00:07:04] We train them. We supervise them. We keep an eye on them and they blossom. They do wonders. Many of them arrive without any experience. Many of them arrive thinking that they're going to be doing yoga. And we tell them right away that's not the case. But some of them decide that's not for them. Some of them despite their fears or trepidation, stay with us. And just are wonderful helpers. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:29] Are any of these students disabled that come to you? Claire Lavery: [00:07:31] Yes, some of them are. We've had many students who didn't tell us right away that they had a disability and some are significantly disabled, but would gradually feel safe enough to reveal that. And sometimes they found that they couldn't do the kind of heavy lifting or harder work that we asked them to do. And we are fine with having them help in whatever way they can. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:54] It seems like they would have the most empathy and understanding of where that person might be. [00:07:59] Sometimes that's true. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:01] Not always, but. Claire Lavery: [00:08:02] Not always. And many of the students who come have a family member with a disability or an aging family member or have had an injury and and can apply that emotional information to the work that they're doing with the students. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:14] And how many of your students are Berkeley students and how many are community members generally? Saraswathi Devi: [00:08:21] At the moment, we don't even have one Berkeley student, but we've often had maybe four, three, four or five, maybe a professor or two. But actually the better part of the student population is from the surrounding area. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:35] Do you do this every semester? Saraswathi Devi: [00:08:36] We do it all year round and we have a summer session. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:39] OK. Claire, how did you get involved in this? Claire Lavery: [00:08:43] Well, I had started teaching yoga in the mainstream yoga classes here at Cal and had been doing that just for a couple of years. And the same wonderful woman who hired Saraswathi knew me and said, you know, there's this great class that you might like to help with. They're always looking for volunteers. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:59] Is she still around? Saraswathi Devi: [00:09:00] NO,Suzanne McQuade, she retired. We miss her terribly.  Claire Lavery: [00:09:06] Unfortunately, she's not there, but we're trying to keep it going. And she steered me to help out with this class. So I showed up as a volunteer. And I just kind of stayed. I learned a lot. Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:19] It seems so innovative. Do you know of any other programs, anywhere else that are like this or is this unique? Saraswathi Devi: [00:09:25] For a lot of

    31 min

  5. 06/14/2019

    Catherine O'Hare

    A trio of Northern California women (two of whom are UC Berkeley alumni) founded Salt Point Seaweed in Spring 2017 to harvest seaweed from the Pacific Ocean. They forage, farm, and do research along the California coast to offer the highest quality and most nutritious seaweed, responsibly sourced from the pristine waters of Northern California. Catherine O’Hare talks to host Lisa Kiefer about their business model, the different types of seaweed, and their commitment to ethical, sustainable solutions for humans and our environment. Transcript Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:08] This is Method to the Madness, a bi weekly public affairs show on K A L X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm speaking with Catherine O'Hare. She's part of a trio of female entrepreneurs who have started a company called Salt Point Seaweed. Welcome to the program, Catherine. Thank you. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:38] I have so many questions for you about this seaweed company, first of all. Are you the only women owned seaweed company in the world? Catherine O'Hare: [00:00:45] That's a good question. I don't think so. There's a seaweed harvester up in Sonoma County who's a woman. I don't know if her business is all women owned, but there's not many. Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:55] Are you an alumni of UC Berkeley? Catherine O'Hare: [00:00:57] No. Tessa and Avery, the other two women, are alumni. They did their grad program here at UC Berkeley. Tessa and I both went to Oberlin College in Ohio for undergraduate. Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:08] How did you get started in the seaweed business? What inspired you to do this? Catherine O'Hare: [00:01:13] All three of us have a background in agriculture, so we've always been interested in food. I was a biology major and then worked on farms. So I'd always been interested in local food and healthy food. But it wasn't until moving to the bay now like five or six years ago that I got connected with the seaweed harvester and started learning about all the local seaweeds that we have here on the Northern California coast. I grew up by the ocean in Southern California. So I loved the ocean. I loved the beach. I was always looking for ways to be by the water. They were the first to get involved. Of the trio of founders. Yeah. So we all have a background in agriculture. We also all have some ties to East Africa where we've either worked before or lived before. And there we all saw seaweed farming in Zanzibar. Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:58] Were you in the Peace Corps? Catherine O'Hare: [00:01:59] No. I studied abroad there when I was in college, just doing a coastal ecology program. Tessa and Avery both did their graduate program at UC Berkeley and they did a master's in development practice. So it's kind of sustainable international development. So that brought them to East Africa. Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:17] Did you all meet up over there or did you find out later that you had. Catherine O'Hare: [00:02:22] We found out later. Tessa and I knew each other from Oberlin. We both ended up in the bay. We each had independent experiences in East Africa. And Avery and Tessa met here at UC Berkeley. And during their during Avery's program here, she did work in East Africa. So we all just kind of had these in our weaving paths. So I was just living and working in the bay, working for a small food company and kind of learning more about seaweed harvesting and doing it as a hobby. And in the meantime, I was good friends with Tessa. So we were talking all the time about all these things related to food, just tossing around ideas about local agriculture systems, herbs, seaweed, farming, like we just were tossing around all these ideas every time we met up. And seaweed was always one of those things, I think because I had seen seaweed farming in Zanzibar and she was interested in these alternative livelihood systems for women all over the world. And so it was during that time where Tessa and Avery were finishing their graduate program here. Catherine O'Hare: [00:03:23] I was working and exploring where the seaweed on our local coast that we just started delving deeper and deeper into the world of seaweed and talking to everyone we can, emailing people, trying to meet up with people just to learn more about the seaweed industry, about seaweed farming. And it just has kind of. Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:42] How to harvest and all that?  Catherine O'Hare: [00:03:43] Yeah. Lisa Kiefer: [00:03:44] So what were your steps? Catherine O'Hare: [00:03:46] Well, so we're doing our pilot project with Hog Island Oyster Company there in Oyster Farm in Tamales Bay, because the legislation and regulatory agencies are you know, it's a long process to get your own aquaculture permit. So we're doing a research project. This Hog Island Oyster Farm is hosting our pilot, but Hog Island leases from the state, the state waters. So they have aquaculture permit from California Fish and Wildlife. And that's kind of one of the many, you know, permits that they have to be doing aquaculture. Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:19] Are you going to be a pilot for a long time or how long does that last before you actually have to get your own permits independently? Catherine O'Hare: [00:04:27] We're still figuring it out. We first talked to Hog Island over two years ago where we just showed up and kind of bounce this idea off them of, you know, we're interested in doing a little pilot to farm seaweed to see how these native species of seaweed grow. Have you ever thought about that? Would you be interested? And so those conversations happened kind of over the course of a year. Meanwhile, we were trying to apply for grants to fund this, I think because Tessa and Avery had this grad school academic background that was kind of the framework that that we knew of how to try to do a project like this. Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:04] So you got your funding via grant? Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:06] We applied for one grant through NOAA that was big. It like gave us the structure to really dive in and figure out all the details. We did not get that one, but because it had set us up to really have a project. Then Hog Island was still on board to do this. So we were like, OK, we'll find we'll find other funding. So then we got a smaller grant from California Sea Grant, which is like an affiliate of Noah. And that gave us ten thousand dollars That development grant is just to prepare mostly academics to go after a bigger grant. So it's kind of this like small bundle of money. So we were awarded that and then that really funded the pilot. Lisa Kiefer: [00:05:48] Have you continued to just use grants or or did you go out into the private equity? Catherine O'Hare: [00:05:53]  No. We. We all put in a little bit of our own money to start. We got another business, small business grant from Oberlin College where Tessa and I went. That was great. That was a huge help. We just finished a Kickstarter a few weeks ago. And other than that, we've just been getting some revenue from our product line of our wild harvested seaweed.  So we're kind of... Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:16] So you're keeping your mission in tact, keeping outsiders out. Catherine O'Hare: [00:06:19] Yeah. So far, we're also growing very slowly because of that, which is okay with us. We're not we're definitely not the traditional Bay Area business, I think. But yeah. So far, there's no other investment in the company. Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:32] Okay. This oyster company. What is the relationship between oysters and seaweed? Catherine O'Hare: [00:06:38] It's a really beautiful symbiotic relationship. Oysters are also filter feeders, so they're filtering the water and making it less cloudy and less murky. So more light can reach the seaweed. And seaweed is a really beneficial. You know, seaweed is just the term for marine macro algae. So any algae that's growing in a marine environment that's like seaweed is kind of this big, vague term. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:02] So it's kelp and there's all kinds. Catherine O'Hare: [00:07:04] Yeah. There's all kinds, kelp or brown seaweeds. There's also green algae and red algae. So what seaweeds do just like land plants, their primary producers, they're absorbing carbon and nitrogen to grow. And so unlike a land plant, that carbon and nitrogen is coming from the water. So in seaweeds, growing in an environment, it's, you know, kind of taking out some of those excess nutrients. Too much carbon in the water is what's leading to ocean acidification. And that's one of the factors that can inhibit shellfish growth. So if the water's too acidic, it's hard for their shells to form when they're young. Lisa Kiefer: [00:07:39] And seaweed helped with that. Catherine O'Hare: [00:07:40] Right. So seaweed is making the water. You know, so far the studies done show that it's just in a local area. Catherine O'Hare: [00:07:46] So right where you're growing the seaweed, there's hope that you can be moderating the P.H. of that water. So making it a little bit less acidic, making the water chemistry a little more balanced for lack of a better word. And also by absorbing nitrogen that helps, you know, too much nitrogen in a marine environment is what causes those harmful algal blooms, though. So the thought is by growing the type of seaweed that you want and then harvesting and getting it out of the environment, you're helping to kind of capture some of that nitrogen before it leads to. It's like using it for the seaweed you want instead of the algae that. Lisa Kiefer: [00:08:21] It's kind of like seaweed farming. Catherine O'Hare: [00:08:23] Yeah. What we're doing is technically under the umbrella of aquaculture, but there's a lot of different ways that aquaculture can look. Seaweed and shellfish farming are pretty low input like you need to put physical equipment in the water column. But then there's no feed, there's no additives, there's no additional fertilizer or anything. It's just, you know, they're using sunlight i

    31 min
  6. Rev Lebaredian

    05/17/2019

    Rev Lebaredian

    Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Simulation Technology at Bay Area based company, NVIDIA speaks about innovations in artificial intelligence, gaming, and robotics as well as how technology is impacting our humanity. Transcript: Ojig Yeretsian:This is Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Ojig Yeretsian. Today I'm speaking with Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation and technology at NVIDIA, where he leads gaming technology and simulation efforts. Welcome to the show, Rev. What is VR? Rev Lebaredian:Well, VR stands for virtual reality, obviously. What most people imagine when we say VR are these clunky headsets that you put on your face or some little receptacle you place your phone into before putting it on your face. VR is actually something that we've been experiencing throughout mankind from the very beginning. All of our perception actually happens in our brains. You're not seeing with your eyes, you're seeing the world around you interpreted through what your brain is actually doing. When we sit around and we talk to each other like we are right now, [inaudible] elephant, and you just got an image of an elephant in your brain. There's not one around here. You conjure up this image and that's me incepting this image into your brain a virtual reality that we're constructing. Here we are talking, having this conversation, we're constructing a reality amongst ourselves. These new versions of virtual reality that we're starting to see are just a more direct way to create an immersive virtual reality experience. It's not actually the end yet. We're not totally at the end of this thing, it's just one of the steps along the way. Humanity has figured out ways of creating this virtual reality, this just communicating, telling stories to each other verbally. Eventually we had books, you can write them in there. You could do recordings like the one we're making right now, movies, video games, but the end game is going to be where we can start communicating even without words, potentially. I highly recommend you look up Ken Perlin from NYU. He's one of the greats of computer graphics, where he describes what virtual reality means to him. I completely agree with what he's saying. My piece in this is construction of virtual realities and virtual worlds through simulation, that's fundamentally what we do at NVIDIA. Our core as a computer graphics company, we power most of the computer graphics in the world, at least the serious stuff. Constructing these virtual worlds so we can inject them into these virtual realities is what our currency is. Ojig Yeretsian:What is AR? Rev Lebaredian:They're actually related. So, virtual reality is a new reality that you create that you're completely immersed in, but it's on its own. AR stands for augmented reality. Another term is mixed reality, MR. Some people use that term instead. Currently we're in a reality of our own right here. We're sitting in this room talking to each other and I'm perceiving you sitting there. Mixed realities or augmented realities are ones where I can blend in other realities into this world more directly. The current manifestations of this, the beginnings of AR, we're seeing through your phones. I mean, every iPhone and Android phone nowadays has something, that crude thing we call AR, where you can point your phone at something in your environment and it creates a digital representation of some reality mixed into it. The first one to make this popular, the first app, was the Pokemon Go. It was very cool but still extremely crude. A few years from now it's going to be far more compelling and far more immersive. Ojig Yeretsian:AI versus deep AI. Rev Lebaredian:These terms are very contentious. What is AI? What is intelligence? We still haven't really defined that. Generally speaking, when we colloquially speak about artificial intelligence today we're talking about algorithms. Computers doing things that we used to think only humans could do. We've been going through series of these things throughout computing history. One of the first challenges that we had for computers that we thought only humans would be able to do is playing chess. In the 90s, Garry Kasparov, the world champion at the time, was beat by Deep Blue. It reshaped what we thought computers could do and what is the domain of humans. Interestingly, it didn't kill chess which is what one of the things that people assumed would happen once a computer wins. Turns out, we don't really care what computers can do. We mostly care what humans do. So, I'm sure we'll make a robot one day that could play basketball better than any NBA player, but that won't kill basketball. Ojig Yeretsian:It won't replace it, no. Rev Lebaredian:We have people that run really fast and we really care about how fast they can run, and we go measure that at the Olympics, but just because cars exist or even horses that can run faster, it's just not particularly interesting. What we've assumed all of these years, that there are things that only humans can do. It's something special. So, we've defined artificial intelligence as the things that computers can't do and that humans do. We're inching along over here, occasionally make big steps. We have computers do things that we thought would be impossible. The big one in recent history, it was around 2011 in Geoff Hinton's group at the University of Toronto, there were a few grad students, they took some of our processors, our GPUs that were used for gaming and they were able to use a machine learning, a deep learning algorithm to train, to create a new algorithm to do computer vision. To do classification of images. There's a longstanding contest called ImageNet where all these computer vision experts in the world would have their algorithms compete with each other to see who could get the highest accuracy classification. Look at an image and you say, "This is a dog. This is a blue bicycle." Traditionally extremely hard problem. It's been there since the beginning of computer science. We wanted to solve this problem. At first we thought that it would actually be pretty simple and then we realized it's extremely hard. I mean, I've been coding since I was a little kid. I never believed I would see the day when a computer would be able to tell the difference between a cat and a dog properly. This magic moment happened when these grad students took their gaming processors and they applied an older algorithm, but modified, using the computing available to them. This extreme performance that they could get was a super computer inside their PC, afforded to them by the fact that there's a large market that wants to do computer games. They took that and they created a new kind of algorithm where instead of them writing an algorithm directly, they trained this algorithm. They fed data into it which was only available because the internet had existed long enough for us to have these images to begin with. They shattered all the previous records in terms of accuracy. A few years later these algorithms started to become superhuman, and by superhuman I mean humans when they look at these images are sometimes not accurate. They don't know exactly what kind of dog is in the image, or maybe sometimes they think it's a dog but it's really a hyena in the dark. Humans make mistakes but now the algorithms are superhuman. Before that moment we believed that only humans could do that kind of classification, but that changed. That changed over night. Now computers are actually better than us for doing that. What does that mean? Is that intelligence? It's hard to say but the trend, if you look at it, we keep figuring out new ways to make computers do things that we didn't think was possible. It's happening so fast. If you extrapolate, you imagine maybe at some point we will have machines that are superhuman in a lot of the things that we consider the domain of humans. Emotions, humor, things that we call human. Or, maybe not. Or, maybe they'll be some other thing that we don't quite understand. Ojig Yeretsian:What are you working on these days? Rev Lebaredian:I've been here for almost two decades. I really found my calling when I was around 10 or 11 years old. I saw this image in an [inaudible] magazine of two spheres, these balls, floating above a checkerboard floor. They looked so strange. I'd never seen anything quite like it. I couldn't make out whether it was drawn or whether it was some kind of weird photo of something. I read a little bit more and I realized that it was an algorithm that produced that image. That it wasn't actually drawn by someone, nor was it real, or a photograph of something. I was hooked. This image was created by Turner Whitted, who invented ray tracing back in 1980. He published [inaudible] on this. Luckily I got to work with Turner years later. He was with us until he retired recently at NVIDIA doing some amazing work. I got to tell him that, that the reason I was there at NVIDIA working with him was because of that image. What really excited me was that I could finally draw without having to know how to draw. I could use the tools that I'm good at, which was programming a computer to produce these images. Ojig Yeretsian:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today's guest is Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation and technology at NVIDIA. He's speaking about gaming technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence.  Rev Lebaredian:So, what is computer graphics, what is a digital image that's been constructed? Basically, computers aren't really drawing or drawing in the traditional sense. What we have that computers do is through simulation. We have some understanding of how light works and the physics of light, and the images that you see are the products of this sim

    30 min
  7. Vincent Medina & Louis Trevino

    04/05/2019

    Vincent Medina & Louis Trevino

    Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, founders and chefs of Cafe Ohlone by Mak-'amham in Berkeley speak about their vision and experience with sharing traditional Ohlone food. They are reclaiming and reviving native ways while serving only pre-colonial foods. Transcript: Ojig Yeretsian:This is Method to the Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley, celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host [inaudible 00:00:12], and today I'll be speaking with Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, founders and chefs of Cafe Ohlone by Makamham, a restaurant serving traditional Ohlone foods located right here in Berkeley at 2430 Bancroft way. Vincent Medina is a member of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe from the East Bay and Louis Trevino is a member of the Rumsen Ohlone tribe, which originated in the Monterey Bay area. Together they now run Cafe Ohlone by Makamham, where they serve traditional foods and a very welcoming and engaging environment. I got to experience their cafe for the first time recently and was impressed by the design of the space, the meaningful exchanges, and the delicious food. Welcome to the show, Louis and Vincent. Thank you for being here. Vincent Medina: Thank you. [foreign language 00:01:01]. In our Chochenyo language, that means hello. Ojig:Your cafe is receiving a lot of positive attention and great press. Tell us what inspired you to open Cafe Ohlone. Vincent:Both Louis and myself, we grew up very proud of our Ohlone identities that was instilled in us from our families. Our grandparents had a lot of influence in our lives and our great grandparents. We saw how valuable and how meaningful our culture is. Our identities were able to be carried on, and in my family, our connection to our land has also been able to be carried on. In my family here in the East Bay, no generation of our people have ever moved away from this space. There's a lot of power in that. We see how hard that our families have worked to keep our culture alive, but we also know that because colonization hit us really hard here in the Bay Area, especially here in the East Bay with the urbanity that surround us, it meant that not everything could be carried on naturally because of very forced oppression that came as a result of people coming here, invading our homes and trying to erase the original culture of this place. However, our ancestors and our elders, the people who are even alive in our families today, were able to carry on as much as they could and the amount of what they are able to carry on it's amazing, and it gives us a lot of pride to know that in spite of those hardships, these things have kept going. The ancestors of our community found ways to keep what wasn't able to be passed down because of how hard again, colonization affected us, they found ways to keep those things alive as well through old ethnographic recordings that they wrote and recorded in the 1920s and the 1930s that gave us the hope that one day we would be able to have those things again in our lives. Louis and myself, we decided to create this organization called Makamham, which means, our food in Chochenyo language, because we wanted to be able to recognize those sacrifices from the people before us that they made. That one day when things were better and safer, that all these things could come back out again and we could have them in our lives and they could be passed down again to Ohlone people, and our elders can see these things respected again as well. We want to acknowledge that this work, it's not just being done by us, but it's being done by many people in our community. Many people who are doing this work quietly. A lot of times people don't get that acknowledgement and we want to give that acknowledgement to our people and to acknowledge that it's not just us doing this work, but we're part of this work and we can only do this work because of those people before us who allow us to have these things. It's disrespectful to those people not to be able to carry on our culture. We also want to create spaces, physical spaces, where we can see our identity reflected outside of our homes. It can be isolating and lonely when you're Ohlone growing up and you don't see any reminders that you exist or that anybody cares about you or wants to know about you outside of your home, even though you're right in your homeland. We wanted to be able to create the space because growing up we didn't have these things, but now the Ohlone kids who are growing up, they get to see these things and they get to go to a restaurant where their culture is reflected and their food is served. While it might be a small space right now, it represents a lot of hopes and a lot of dreams that our people have had for a long time and it also represents a lot of vision and to where our future is going as well. Ojig:Would you like to add anything to that, Louis? Louis Trevino:It's just that for our families, those living elders, people who are around today who remember these foods being eaten in their childhoods, they're the same generation that remembers also hearing our language when they were young people, who remember seeing those cooking methods, whose mothers and grandmothers took them out to gather plants for food. They're also the generation of people who, for many reasons, we're not able to learn to speak our language, even though they heard it. Who were not taught the proper names of these plants always, and that knowledge was not passed down to them. In the case of my family, specifically because that older generation of people was trying very hard to also protect their children from the harm that the world around us was putting on us. By doing this work, by bringing these foods back, by simultaneously continuing to work on reviving our languages, by bringing our family into this work and feeding them, we're also repairing that part of our family's history, that loss. By feeding our elders, we're also feeding their parents and also feeding their children and their grandchildren and their great grandchildren, so that we can all have these things again, and so that harm that was done can be undone by us. Ojig:Before Makamham, where would one go to eat native food in the East Bay or the Bay Area? Vincent:Before we started our organization, there were a few foods that our people were still continuing to eat. Especially, for our elders, because they reminded them of foods that they ate when they were a young person. I started to talk to my grandmother about foods that my great grandmother would gather, and she would tell me all these stories, Louis too, she would tell stories to him about how she would gather these foods, where she would gather them. Because she's in the city, she would even have to gather them sometimes that when she was waiting for the bus at the Hayward bus station, her native plants that she loved, that she would find there, and you think about that, there's just something that's so cool about that thought of like resilience right there. Like, this strong, Ohlone lady, right there in her home, right where that's in the same area that where she's gathering this that our ancestors have always lived in, right along [inaudible 00:06:48], [inaudible] creek is right there in that area, in this urban setting, waiting for a bus in 20th century at that point and still gathering plants. Probably, putting them in her purse right there. There's just something that's so cool about that with shows like how people just never give up these things no matter what's around us, how stubborn we are and how proud we are. Those are the people that I always look up to. I know that in our family though, only a few of these foods really could have ... They were continued. Not many of them though were, just because of how hard things impacted us here. How accessible is it to go and gather our foods when we're in the middle of the city? All of the inner East Bay where our people are raised, which is right in our traditional homeland as well is urban. It's definitely hard to be able to have access to these foods. And so, we wanted to be able to change that and that's why we created this organization before we even started with Cafe Ohlone. We named it Makamham, because again, that means our food, and we named it this intentionally because we believe these are our collective foods. These are foods that belong to our people. This is also representative of the fact that Ohlone people, our tribe, we don't just want one thing back. We don't just want just simply language back or just simply our stories back or just one particular item, but all these things are interconnected with one another. The truth is, we want everything back, because everything that was taken from us, was taken from us against our wishes. Those things that couldn't be carried on, we want to see all those things come back, including our land. Yes, that's the truth as well. One thing that I try to work for and envision with Louis and with our people is what it looks to have a holistic revival and a reawakening, where through being in our homeland and gathering these foods, using our language alongside of the gathering methods of this food, speaking our language to one another, we reconnect with those old villages that our ancestors directly came from where we gather for an example, the Yerba Buena that we make tea. That's right in an area that where my great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother was born. All the way back. As we do these things together collectively, it inches us back into that traditional world, and we see how much our people have always loved these things and it also is a reminder that when we are given the chance to be able to nurture our traditional culture, ever since colonization has come here, our people have always chosen to go back to traditional culture whenever given the chance. Right now, we're seeing that happen again in a modern day form and it's really exciting. Ojig:If

    31 min
  8. Nina Meijers & Claire Schlemme

    03/22/2019

    Nina Meijers & Claire Schlemme

    Nina Meijers discusses FoodBytes! (San Francisco event showcasing startups disrupting the food and agriculture space) and former FoodBytes! alumna Claire Schlemme, CEO & founder of Oakland-based Renewal Mill that is fighting food waste by upcycling okara. Transcripts: Lisa Kiefer:This is Method to the Madness, a public payer show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer and today I'm speaking with Nina Meyers of Foodbytes and Claire Schlemme, CEO and founder of Oakland based and alumni startup of Foodbytes Renewal Mill. Welcome to the program. Nina Meyers:Thank you. Lisa Kiefer:I'm particularly interested in what's coming up next week with Foodbytes, but first of all, Nina Meyers, tell us what you do for Foodbytes, how it got started, what's the history and what's the problems that you're trying to solve. Nina Meyers:Sure, happy to and thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here. Foodbytes quite simply is a pitch competition and networking platform for sustainable food and AG innovators. So it started four plus years ago. We're actually about to do our 15th Foodbytes, which is in San Francisco, which is where it all began. So it's founded by Rabobank. Rabobank is one of the largest food and agriculture banks in the world and in North America, our clients are some of the largest and mid sized food and AG companies. We started to see that we're working with a lot of our corporates and they're facing a lot of challenges in innovation where we're all faced with this idea that we're going to have 10 billion people on the planet by 2050. We need to feed those people and we need to do so efficiently. There's lots of environmental challenges and there's a lot of startups that are starting to create nimble ways and test and experiment and are basically building technologies and products that are solving those challenges. So we, four and a half years ago said, we want to do something that's just for food and AG. There's lots of pitch opportunities out there for tech startups. There's lots of things that are cross-disciplinary, but we said, let's bring our knowledge to the table. Let's bring our corporates to the table and investors that are just looking at food and AG start to create an ecosystem where those startups can make the connections to help scale their technologies and on the converse side of that that the corporates can start to build relationships and really start to think about these ways that innovation is happening to bring it to their own businesses. Lisa Kiefer:Tell me how it operates. Is it a competition? Nina Meyers:Yeah, so it is a competition in its most essential form. We look through hundreds of applications. We score them and we come to 15 startups that we select to come and pitch from all around the world and we're looking at on the product side, on the tech side, on the agriculture tech sides. We're looking at like AG tech, food tech and food products and they basically have a two day experience jam packed, but we basically bring together our network of mentors in the room, experts in legal deal structuring, branding, PR and they have intimate mentor sessions with them. They get to build camaraderie and relationships with one another as the entrepreneurs. They get to practice their pitches for the judges that are going to judge them the next day and they really have this full day of just like, it's kind of like a mini business school. Learn as much as you can. Lisa Kiefer:Do you find that many of these startups don't have business skills? Nina Meyers:I wouldn't say that. I think it's like you're just trying to build your business day in and day out and you have to focus on that and this, we're doing this one day kind of takes them out of it a little bit and that they're like, "Oh I've been a tech company. I've been really focused on how do I build a relationships with corporates or how do I build the MVP of my technology, but I wasn't thinking about the brand. I wasn't thinking about how I should structure my series B round when I'm fundraising, when I'm just in this infancy of my seed stage." They start to just have a lot of information around them. Lisa Kiefer:It would seem like creativity doesn't have to go hand in hand with business skills. I mean getting the right people together. Nina Meyers:To an extent. It depends on which entrepreneur, which startup, but I would say that they kind of say, "I took a day out of my life, my building, my business life, but I got to get all these different intros and different insights and also of course the insights from the other entrepreneurs that are there who are facing similar challenges, building similar businesses." So they do that and then there's a pitch day, which is a traditional pitch competition. There's hundreds of people in the room. It's focused on investment, but it's also focused on Rabobank bringing our corporates into the room so that they can pitch for these potential partners. There's a lot of media there covering it to see what's kind of the cutting edge of food and AG innovation and then what we started with was this pitch competition. Now it's built into two days and we started to build a continuous community around that. We say, "Hey, do you want to meet with X, Y and Z?" They're really interested in thinking about partnering with you. We have a database of thousands of startups and we're always thinking about how can we continue to build relationships? Lisa Kiefer:Do you sometimes do that with those who maybe didn't make it, but they have a great idea? Maybe they don't have the right skills but you match them up with somebody else? Nina Meyers:Yep, absolutely. So we have a database of thousands of companies that have applied, but we also, we have 250 now alumni of the platform. We're looking at everyone who's ever sort of come across our radar who is an innovator in this space. So that's what happens over the two days, but we kind of say that it's a discovery platform, but it's also like the beginning of a relationship where Rabobank can kind of be this connector, be this matchmaker, be this champion for both sides of- Lisa Kiefer:Tell me about the judges. How many and who are these people? Nina Meyers:They change. Every food rates has had a different grouping of judges. I think we've had something like 75. It's probably closer to a hundred and mentors, but essentially they're some of our sponsors and partners. They're legal experts who work with startups to help them structure their deals and figure out how to engage with investors. They are actual investors in need of a CPG space or on the tech side. They are sometimes policy experts who are really focused on sustainable food policy and- Lisa Kiefer:So some academics? Nina Meyers:Yeah, academics. Exactly. So literally we've had judges sort of from all across the board. We've also started having an alumni come on as a judge to sort of speak from that first hand perspective of this is what happened when I was there. We have- Lisa Kiefer:That's a great idea. Nina Meyers:Yeah, we have Abby Ramadan from Impact Vision who is an alumni of our platform and she's been very involved. She's also based out here. We want the judging panel to be able to provide varying expertise. Lisa Kiefer:Does it always happen in the same city? Nina Meyers:It's global. We've been in San Francisco the most. We've been in Silicon Valley the most. This is our sixth San Francisco edition, but we've been in Australia. We've been in London. We've been in the Netherlands, New York. We're headed to Chicago in September. Oh, we were in Boulder. We were in Austin, but yeah, we're- Lisa Kiefer:So how many times a year are we talking? Nina Meyers:So we were doing three to four for awhile globally for 2020 and 2019 we're doing two so that we can really focus on doing more and providing more value for everyone in our ecosystem and the in between. Lisa Kiefer:So this year you have how many participants? Nina Meyers:We have 15 companies. Lisa Kiefer:And two are from the Bay Area? Nina Meyers:Yes. Lisa Kiefer:One of them I'm particularly interested in. That's SnapDNA. Nina Meyers:Yes. We talk a little bit about some of the challenges that the companies are solving and one of them is sort of this idea of transparency. It's this idea of we all know about recalls that are happening in food all the time and there's a lot of opacity around what happens from the fields to your plate or wherever it comes from. So there are companies, there are a lot of innovation in this space that's happening around food safety and pathogen detection. So that SnapDNA is one of those companies that's really creating a real time test for folks in the food supply chain to get that information on whether food is safe or whether it has certain pathogens and we've seen a number of different sort of innovators come through that are focused on this, but this is something as a point I just made that's very, very well event to the corporate focus in the room. Lisa Kiefer:That can save so much money. Nina Meyers:It's about efficiency. It's obviously about safety. It's about consumer trust, which we know consumers want safer food, more sustainable food, healthier, more nutritious, cleaner and they're willing to pay more for it as well. So this is something that's important to all those players. Lisa Kiefer:Okay, and the other one is Planetariums and they're out of Palo Alto. Do you know much about them? Nina Meyers:Yes I do and the Planetariums is an up cycling company, which what does that mean? So it's and Claire I'm sure will talk more about this, but it is a waste stream that's up cycled into a new food essentially. So they are taking defatted seeds, which are a byproduct of the vegetable oil process and they are basically making that into a very nutritious protein rich flour. So they just announced today that they got, that they just raised a $750000 seed round and one of their investors is Barilla, which is the l

    30 min
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About

Celebrating the innovative spirit of the Bay Area - we explore the people behind the ideas, the problems they are trying to solve, and what makes them tick. Hosted by producers Ali Nazar and Lisa Kiefer. If you would like to contact the show, please feel free to email: ali at methodtothemadness dot org or lisamttm at gmail dot com. Transcriptions of these programs are available on this site dating back to 2018. The rest are coming soon. If you are interested in a transcription of an earlier episode, please contact us at mail at kalx dot berkeley dot edu. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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    KALX 90.7FM - UC Berkeley
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2019
  • Episodes
    112
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © KALX 90.7FM - UC Berkeley
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    Method To The Madness

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