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The Ford Foundation Just Made A Billion Dollar Bet On Impact Investing

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Like many major philanthropic funders, the Ford Foundation for social justice spends roughly 5% of its annual endowment on charitable causes, reinvesting the rest to ensure it will be able to recoup those costs and operate in perpetuity.

With a total endowment of about $12 billion, that means there’s about $600 million granted toward charitable programs each year. (That 5% figure is the minimum requirement to maintain nonprofit status under federal tax code.) But it also means that 95% of the foundation’s money is sitting in stocks, private equity, real estate, and venture capital, not leveraged in the same socially responsible manner that the foundation insists on when making its grants.

In recent years, president Darren Walker has grown uncomfortable with that imbalance, which he sees as another “classic disconnect” affecting well-funded but sometimes apathetic institutions, including Ford. “We won’t solve big problems without deploying some part of that 95%,” Walker says. “So what I’m hoping is that we are reaching an inflection point, a tipping point in which the momentum has shifted to normalize a conversation about how foundations use our endowments from the margins to the mainstream. For too long this question has been sidelined. And I think the time has come where we’ve got to take it on and we’ve got to demonstrate the capacity to use our endowment to advance our mission.”

Xavier de Souza Briggs, the Ford Foundation’s vice president for economic opportunity and markets, puts the value of the emerging impact investing market north of a trillion dollars. [Source Images: Tukkki/iStock, missbobbit/iStock]
To that end, Walker announced plans to use up to $1 billion of the foundation’s endowment over the next decade on more mission-related investments, investments in projects that generate the return Ford needs, but also support things like affordable housing or better financial services for the poor. The logic is explained in detail in a post entitled “Unleashing the power of endowments: The next great challenge for philanthropy” on Ford’s Equals Change blog. The commitment makes Ford the largest private foundation playing in this space.

According the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), an industry group that’s tracking market trend, impact investment has grown rapidly. In its network alone, there are over 2,500 different investors contributing to more than 400 funds, which have grown in size from $15 billion in contributions two years ago to more than $77 billion in 2016.

According to GIIN, typical investments include things like an organization that needs capital for their own revolving-loan-based community development program, or to fund wind farms in areas where the demand for power dwarfs the current supply, which in addition to putting clean energy back into the grid would generate revenue through carbon offset agreements. Another group could invest in a traditional company whose business plan, say, the launch of a shea butter company for organic nut farmers in rural Ghana, provides jobs and economic stability in depressed areas. Unlike traditional investments, these opportunities offer both money back and the chance to fix some larger environmental or social cause, often in a way that could draw more investors as the business model proves out.

Xavier de Souza Briggs, the Ford Foundation’s vice president for economic opportunity and markets, puts the value of the emerging market for impact investments at north of a trillion dollars, as managers of union pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and high net worth individuals start taking an interest. Part of the reason is that the IRS has formalized standards for using MRIs while various impact investment groups have created a fund and company rating program, and come up with a universal standard for performance metrics to show investors what combination of revenue, social, and environmental impacts might be expected. With that, the market has opened up to a wider swath of investors, and the money is flowing.

In a way, Walker set the groundwork for this kind of shake-up several months ago when he rallied against Ford’s inherent privilege problem, complaining that a feeling of self-importance often insulates foundations from auditing the effectiveness of their work. The goal now is to prove the potential of this new kind of investing so that other players, especially foundations, will follow suit and put their money to better use as it’s generating returns.

[Source Images: Tukkki/iStock, missbobbit/iStock]
More broadly, such moves would address a fundamental flaw of the in-perpetuity model of charity. While some organizations have converted to a limited-life philosophy, opting to spend down their endowments to create larger, more immediate impacts, many groups still follow the traditional model: allocating about the same amount each year, even as the complexity of global challenges continues to grow. “Too many people are being left behind today, that’s the larger challenge here,” Walker says. “And therefore we have to disrupt our traditional ideas about how we invest and we have to do it responsibly and prudently.” Ford’s goal is to build a large model that “demonstrates that you can achieve an attractive [financial] return and achieve a social return” simultaneously, giving foundations a chance to exist in perpetuity while also making change via their investment strategies.

Mission-related investments (MRIs) are different than program-related investments (PRIs), which generally fall under the umbrella of the 5% foundations give away. The key difference is that PRIs, which Ford has used in various ways starting in the late-’60s, can have a much lower rate of return and default risk than MRIs, which because of their sheer size and ability to shift markets must meet different IRS standards to be considered a sound investment–and must generate enough money to keep the foundation solvent.

Ford grants plenty of non-recoverable funds to causes–that’s why they keep the rest of their endowment invested elsewhere. But over the past five decades, they’ve made program-related investments in groups tackling issues like urban development, homeownership, and microfinance in hope of making change and recouping a bit of that up-front cost. In a sense, this was the group’s pilot program. The difference is that they were spending millions, not billions, so they could afford to watch a few ambitious plans default.

Plenty of other funders are also exploring the space, including, as Walker notes in his post, the Rockefeller, Kellogg, MacArthur, and Gates foundations. There’s also a formal network of groups called Mission Investors Exchange that are combining lessons to create more knowledge about the market. Ford plans to collect its own lessons, and share them at intervals.

“We have to disrupt our traditional ideas about how we invest and we have to do it responsibly and prudently,” says Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. [Source Images: Tukkki/iStock, missbobbit/iStock]
So far, there’s at least one takeaway for emerging entrepreneurs. “Increasingly we’ll be asking this question, ‘How are you thinking by the way about the social impact? How are you thinking beyond the financial bottom line?’” says de Souza Briggs. The hope is that Ford’s spending creates an environment that’s “mutually reinforcing,” meaning as more people become aware of the windfall available to socially good ventures, more founders will structure their companies accordingly. “We hope to both encourage more deal flow and encourage more product development, Walker adds.

Of course, nothing the foundation does will be able to offset the funding void that could happen if the Trump administration follows through with its deep cuts to domestic spending and foreign aid. Walker declined to directly address whether the foundation is critical of the president’s proposed budget. Instead, he offered a disclaimer (“without getting political”), and shared the obvious: “I think we are kidding ourselves if we think we can we can reduce inequality without a robust investment from governments. Or that we can build a more inclusive economy or ensure that more people are working without a robust investment from government.”

In his view, Ford’s shift may begin to make up for a missed opportunity but it’s not enough to let others fold at that table. “We’ve got to have an engaged private sector and a robust government investment to keep the kind of progress we need [going] as a society,” he says.


The Best Way To Get Cheap Solar: Shop Around

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If you’re thinking about getting solar panels for your roof, here’s two pieces of advice, free of charge. One, shop around. And, two, don’t be afraid to consider smaller, local installers. Bigger national brands may have the marketing muscle and marketplace presence, but they could be more expensive.

Using data from EnergySage, an Expedia-like site where installers quote for customer business, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) analyzed the relationship between installer size and prices. It found that large installers (which do more than 1,000 jobs a year) were on average 10% more expensive than “non-large” ones (performing fewer than 1,000 jobs a year). The difference, on average, was $0.33 per watt, which for a standard 6 kilowatt home system could mean paying almost $2,000 more on the total installation price, the report finds.

It’s possible that household solar isn’t yet a well-functioning market–with transparent prices and companies that compete vigorously for your business. [Chart: National Renewable Energy Laboratory ]
The results are intriguing because you’d normally expect larger companies, with their economies of scale, to offer better prices. Generally, Albertsons or Safeway have better deals than your neighborhood grocer because they buy in bulk. But then it’s possible that household solar isn’t yet a well-functioning market–with transparent prices and companies that compete vigorously for your business.

The report offers three reasons why bigger companies bid higher on EnergySage (and presumably in the wider solar market). First, and most likely, they have higher “customer acquisition” costs. In other words, they spend more on marketing and advertising than local installers that are more likely to rely on word of mouth to win business.

“It’s possible there are some diseconomies of scale and that larger companies have higher costs that would extend to them bidding higher prices,” report coauthor Eric O’Shaughnessy tells Fast Company. “As you reach national scale, you have to spend more money per customer than when you’re operating more locally.”

In the past, companies like Sunrun, SolarCity, and Vivint have reported spending 70 cents or more per installed watt on sales and marketing. For a 6 KW system, that means a whopping $4,200 outlay just to find a customer to buy it.

There are other (less powerful) explanations, says O’Shaughnessy. One is that larger installers have more market power, insulating themselves from price competition. In 2015, the top 10% of companies by size had 90% of the market. When customers seek out relatively few quotes, bigger companies can sustainably offer higher prices and not be undercut. Also, smaller firms might be forced to offer lower prices just to build up their businesses.

Moreover, says O’Shaughnessy, it’s possible that solar installers offer slightly different packages. Though the study compared bids for the same system size, it didn’t consider if the companies offered different warranty lengths or module replacement guarantees. In other words, there could be non-monetary reasons why customers accept higher prices even though lower prices are available. The research looked only at prices, not at other factors weighing on customer choices.

Either way, though, the research bolsters the case for more transparency in the solar market. The report says competition encourages installers to lower their bids. “Installers that provide quotes through EnergySage know that customers have access to other competitive quotes, reducing the probability that an installer could successfully win a high-price bid,” it says.

Operating in 34 states and Washington, D.C., EnergySage offers four to seven quotes for your zip code. It only includes installers offering transparent pricing and terms, and those that have been in business for at least three years. You plug in your address, locate your property from an aerial photo, and upload your electricity bill to see what savings you can make from generating your own power. The site then sends your profile to its dealer network, which returns quotes. (SolarCity, the largest U.S. installer, chooses not to bid on the site, though Energy Sage CEO and founder Vikram Aggarwal says its prices would definitely put it on the more expensive side of NREL’s pricing graph).

In an interview, Aggarwal compares EnergySage to Kayak or other travel-comparisons sites. He argues you would never buy a flight these days without checking out the prices of several airlines, and, indeed, it doesn’t make sense to do that with solar. “Marketplaces have transformed other industries. You would have a difficult time deciding whether to fly or not without a comparison site,” he says.

Comparison shopping tends to drive down every installer’s prices. “All customers could benefit from obtaining more quotes,” adds O’Shaughnessy. “Many customers will choose to work with a bigger company anyway. But, regardless, you may be able to save money by approaching smaller companies, even if you don’t ultimately adopt them. Shopping around has its own value.”

Learn The Facts Of Homelessness In The U.S. With These Data Visualizations

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While homelessness might be particularly visible in some American cities–driving past the rows of tents on Skid Row in Los Angeles or encampments under highway overpasses in Seattle–it’s a national problem. A new website called Understanding Homelessness maps out homelessness across the country.

On a single night in January 2015, when volunteers across the U.S. visited homeless shelters and city streets to take a census of the number of people living without housing for a HUD survey, they counted 546,580 people (though the number may well be much higher, given the limitations of counting by hand). The map shows their locations, and also overlays data about other factors such as unemployment rates and the cost of rent.

“There are all these other systemic factors at work that lead someone down the path that they become at risk of being homeless.” [Screenshot: Sasaki]
“Instead of just looking at the homeless population, I wanted to contextualize it within the rest of the systems or societal factors that we live with . . . there are all these other systemic factors at work that lead someone down the path that they become at risk of being homeless,” says urban planner Gretchen Keillor, who led the creation of the site. “I wanted to explore and draw parallels between what some of those systemic factors might be, and actually be able to visualize them side by side with information about the homeless population.”

Keillor began working on the website after moving to the Boston area two years ago, to a part of Cambridge where she saw people experiencing homelessness every day. Sasaki, the planning and design firm she works for, provided a grant for the work. “I think they saw, similar to what I had perceived, that we as a planning and design firm do so much in urban spaces, and this population is a huge part of those urban spaces, and it’s often a really challenging issue for our clients to address,” she says.

Gretchen Keillor [Photo: Sasaki]
The website helps put homelessness in context, explaining that the definition is broader than most people realize, including people who might be on the verge of losing housing, or who are sleeping on a friend’s couch. (The HUD survey misses many of these people.) It also talks about the most common causes of homelessness. The list starts with a lack of affordable housing and unemployment, not mental illness or addiction.

“There is this misconception or stereotype about the average homeless person that you see on the street, that they might have substance abuse issues or mental health issues,” says Keillor. “And I wanted to try and overcome that by presenting what you see on the home page of the website, which is kind of a 101 primer on homelessness.”

The last section of the site is a tool to help visitors find a way to help. On a city level, push your leaders to explore solutions like “housing first,” a model that tries to provide permanent housing as quickly as possible. Businesses might put stickers in their windows to let a homeless person know they’ll be welcome if they need a glass of water or a restroom. Architects might create flexible buildings that can convert to provide new housing when needed. Urban planners could help clients think about space differently–if one type of design involves spikes to keep a homeless person from sitting on a ledge, another might deliberately try to provide shelter. Keillor points to the example of a Danish city that designed space in a park for a homeless population to use during the day.

When Keillor wrote to the Danish park planner to ask about the project, his response illustrated how differently the city approached design compared to most in the U.S. “I asked, ‘How did you get the community on board?'” she says. “He wrote back and said, ‘That’s just such a strange question to me, because in my mind [homeless people] are citizens, too. They’re just part of our community.”

The new site is designed to help others think differently about how they could help address homelessness. “I just really hope that this helps reframe the conversation about homelessness to be about people,” she says. “I think we think about it as data or this weird nonhuman demographic that we don’t know how to interact with. It’s really members of our communities that have ended up in these less-than-ideal situations. It’s about humanizing the problem again.”

For Your Next Adult Coloring Book, Shade In Data On Climate Change

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In a new coloring book, you can trace a line around the border of arctic sea ice in 1996 and shade in what has been lost since then–an area the size of India–or you can color-code each day of 2015 based on the level of air pollution in Beijing. You can also color in coastlines to show the land that will be lost to sea level rise, or challenge yourself to color in 20 football fields in a minute, the rate at which global forests are disappearing.

“I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if you juxtaposed something that was calming and creative like coloring with something that was urgent and possibly anxiety-inducing like climate change,” says designer Brian Foo, who created the Climate Change Coloring Book, now on Kickstarter.

The data covers the causes of climate change, including deforestation and emissions from transportation.

“The hope is that if you spent 30 minutes or an hour actively coloring data related to climate change, the information would be more likely to stick and you’d have time to reflect on the underlying issues,” he says. “Even though a chart or graph may give the information more quickly, it may be less likely to leave an impression.”

The data covers the causes of climate change, including deforestation and emissions from transportation. It also includes the effects of climate change, from sea level rise to bleached coral reefs, and solutions like renewable energy. One illustration juxtaposes scientific consensus–the fact that virtually all researchers agree that human activity causes global warming–with public opinion (in a 2016 poll, a little less than half of Americans agreed with that consensus).

“I think that one of the problems is that climate change is now treated as a belief. [Photo: courtesy Brian Foo]
Foo hopes that the book is seen as a celebration of information and science, not a political statement.

“Over the past few years, I have been surprised that the issue of climate change has become so political,” he says. “I think that one of the problems is that climate change is now treated as a belief. Either you believe in climate change or not. When in reality, climate change is based on observations, science, and the scientific method. I wanted to design guided activities that focused on the data and science in an approachable way that would allow someone to take the time to come to the conclusions that climate scientists have come to.”

“Step To The Line”: How Prison Is Helping Oculus Expand VR’s Horizons

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I’m standing in the gym in B Yard at Pelican Bay State Prison, just outside Crescent City, the small, isolated, coastal town close to the Oregon border, where California sends the worst of the worst of its criminals. Traditionally, violence here has been off the charts and inmates frequently battle each other in racial gang fights.

But today, 37 Pelican Bay inmates–men of all races, many serving long terms for murder–are together in the gym, working side by side, laughing and even bear-hugging, and sometimes crying. Clark Ducart, the prison’s warden since 2014, is very impressed.

“Five years ago, you would have struggled to get the different races together,” Ducart told me, adding that B Yard had been on a full lockdown for two full years because of racial gang violence just half a decade ago. “Today, they’re hugging each other and putting happy-face stickers on people. I can’t believe it.”

So what’s changed for these inmates, and made it so myself and a few dozen volunteers have not only come to Pelican Bay but are mingling easily in the gym here with these hard-core offenders and feeling safe being surrounded by them?

The shortest possible answer: hope.

Pelican Bay State Prison [Photo: courtesy of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation]
Hope can come in many forms, but here–as in more than 20 prisons around the United States–it’s thanks to Defy Ventures, a rigorous, six-month nonprofit entrepreneurship program for inmates that aims to help them find employment or even start their own businesses when they get out.

Defy is centered around the idea of helping current and former inmates, both men and women, learn entrepreneurship and job skills through intensive training, resume preparation, mentoring by experienced and successful businesspeople, financial assistance, competition, and, perhaps most importantly, nonstop support and encouragement, both on the inside and, later, on the outside.

By engaging top corporate executives, investors, and entrepreneurs nationally,” Defy writes on its website, the nonprofit “catalyzes broad- scale personal and economic opportunities for people with criminal histories, and shatters perceptions of one of the most stigmatized and overlooked populations in America.”

There are plenty of prison programs aimed at helping inmates better themselves. They can learn through theater, and California’s famous San Quentin prison even has a novel tech incubator program. But Defy seems to be achieving success that professionals like Ducart, a 31-year veteran of the correctional industry, hasn’t seen before. He was supposed to retire recently, but decided to stick around, in part because of the promise for change he saw in Defy. “Right now in my career,” he said, “this is my opportunity to make the biggest difference.”

That same promise is what led Facebook-owned Oculus to fund a new virtual reality film by Brazilian Ricardo Laganaro, Step to the Line, that profiles Defy as part of its first VR for Good program.

[Photo: Nancy Rothstein Photography, courtesy of Facebook]
VR for Good is Oculus’s social good initiative. Conceived of and launched last year by Paula Cuneo, Oculus’s head of experience and partner marketing, the program selected and funded 10 films that utilized VR as an “empathy tool,” Cuneo said, and that “give people an opportunity to step into other people’s” lives.

More than 100 teams applied, each seeking the $40,000 in funding, a Nokia Ozo rig to film with, and access to experienced VR filmmaking mentoring that Oculus was offering those selected for the program.

The first nine films, covering topics like human trafficking, ocean conservation, domestic violence, and other topics, debuted at Sundance in January. But while moviegoers there were treated to a short Step to the Line trailer, the full film was held back because the organizers of the Tribeca Film Festival had hand-selected it to make its world premiere in New York City today.

Step to the Line is a piece that immediately moved me,” said Loren Hammonds, Tribeca Film Festival’s programmer for film and experiential. “There are several moments of transcendence in it, from the intimate conversation between a prisoner and a program volunteer, to the jubilant final sequence. The stereoscopic imagery is beautifully transportive, and the subject is compelling, but mostly the experience has heart that just can’t be denied.”

Catherine Hoke and inmates [Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
Step to the Line is named for an exercise that Defy founder and CEO Catherine Hoke, a former California state wrestling champion and venture capitalist, has run countless times at the many prisons with which she works.

During the exercise, which she admits she stole from the film Freedom Writers, Hoke has the inmates–who Defy employees and volunteers steadfastly refer to as “entrepreneurs in training,” or EITs, and not prisoners or criminals–stand a few feet back from a long line taped to the floor of the gym, while a prison guard with a rifle watches everything from a rafter above. Defy’s volunteers, who stand back from a second line, face the EITs.

The idea is this: Hoke reads from a list of statements, and if they ring true to any of the EITs or volunteers, they step forward, to the line. She’ll eventually read several dozen of the statements, and the group that steps to the line each time is different.

Here at Pelican Bay, it’s Hoke’s 40th birthday, so she’s in a celebratory mood as she begins. Wearing a train conductor’s hat that helpfully reads “Conductor,” as well as a thin-black-striped skirt and shirt, tall red leather boots, and a silver-yellow braided tie emblazoned with “Defy,” Hoke begins with simple statements designed to loosen folks up: “I was the class clown.” “I am madly in love.” “I am madly in love with burritos.”

Then she moves on to the harder stuff.

“I’ve had my heart broken.” Everyone in the room steps to the line except one EIT.

“I dropped out of high school.” Almost every EIT steps forward, but just one of the volunteers.

“I’ve been in a fight to prove myself.” All but three of the EITs move forward.

And then it’s time for the really deep stuff.

[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
“I grew up in poverty.” “My mom or dad has been to prison.” “At least one of my parents abused drugs or alcohol.” “I was born to a teenage mother.” “I became a teenage parent myself.”

Watching Hoke and the EITs, you begin to understand the life stories of the people in the room, just by how many stepped to the line, or who did so again and again.

“My parents tucked me into bed and told me I was loved.” Few of the EITs stepped forward. “Violence took place in my home growing up.” “Violence took place against me growing up.” Many more stepped to the line.

“When I was 18 I thought I wouldn’t make it to 21.” Almost all the EITs stepped forward.

To hear Hoke tell it, much of what Defy does is about helping EITs learn not just entrepreneurship but about how to forgive themselves, as well as the people in their lives who hurt them. Clearly, many people may care little about whether prison inmates forgive themselves, but to Hoke that’s a key element behind an EIT both staying out of trouble on the outside and being a productive member of society after being released from incarceration.

“Not forgiving others is hurting me,” Hoke reads from her list, adding that at this Defy cohort’s graduation “in June [when she reads this statement again] I want you off this line. But it’s your choice.”

Then she flips that notion on its head with the next statement: “Since joining Defy, I feel less ashamed of myself.” Many of the EITs step forward.

“I’m on a journey of self-transformation.” All the EITs step forward, and Hoke jokes, “I was going to say, if all the EITs weren’t at the line, I was going to kick their butts.”

[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
When you think about the people involved in this exercise, it’s stunning to see how they’re behaving. They’re showing weakness. Some are crying. There’s a lot of hugging among the EITs. In short, they are feeling supported–by each other, regardless of race or former gang affiliation, and by those in Defy. Even by the prison administration itself.

In the film, viewers are brought directly into the prison experience, in 360 degrees.

“In Brazil, we have a huge crisis in the penitentiary system,” Laganaro said, “and we’ve all seen lots of films [about prisons] in the U.S. The cool thing about the project and what [Defy is] doing, is [to] give a voice to the inmates. To talk to them and really understand their stories, and give them a chance to have a life. I was really curious about what they were doing, and I was really waiting to go inside and see with my own eyes, and try to put that in the film.”

Added Laganaro, “I think everybody wants to know how it is to be inside a prison, but nobody wants to be there, really. So the main thing about VR and this project is we could really put people there and let the actions speak for themselves.”

The movie brings viewers into a cell, providing a visceral sense of just how confining a 9-foot-by-11-foot prison cell can be. But it also brings you directly into the middle of the Step to the Line exercise.

And that’s exactly the kind of thing that a VR film can do that a traditional film can’t, Cuneo argues.

“One of the things that’s compelling with VR in terms of shooting cinematic experiences,” she says, “is that because it’s cinematic, you can showcase scale, size, and scope effectively. A VR camera can get in a space and convey a feeling of claustrophobia. . . . When shooting with traditional film, it’s hard to get a sense of that scale, the confinement of that small space.”

[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
It would be possible to show how close the walls of a cell are, she added, by using special camera techniques, but it would probably require constructing a cell. “It would have to be fake,” she said.

And when it comes to the Step to the Line exercise, VR is the perfect medium for bringing the viewer right into the middle of a group of people answering the questions that reveal their biggest secrets. “You’re not watching,” Cuneo says. “You’re participating.”

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, agrees. “Soon, more people will have the opportunity to witness [Hoke’s] program and hear the stories of her EITs through Step to the Line,” Sandberg wrote in a blog post introducing the film. “Virtual reality has the power to build empathy by putting us closer to walking in another’s shoes. Step to the Line helps us see life from behind bars–and how hard it can be to rebuild after past mistakes.”

Being able to get closer to state prisoners’ lives, Oculus believes, will instill a greater sense of understanding about the harsh circumstances that they face every day. Even if you have trouble mustering any kind of compassion for a group of hardened men who have been convicted of heinous crimes, it’s unlikely you can come away from watching Step to the Line without feeling powerful emotions.

The same is abundantly true if you happen to be in the room with Defy as Hoke, her staff, and the volunteers work alongside the EITs.

As I approached the B Yard gym, I heard a loud cheering inside. Not knowing what it was, I was unprepared for the “Tunnel of Love” that greeted me as I walked through the gym’s door: Two lines of EITs welcoming the Defy people and cheering their arrival loudly and boisterously.

There’s a real reason the EITs are full of so much enthusiasm: They know the Defy program may offer their best-ever hope to have an actual future on the outside.

[Photo: Daniel Terdiman]
According to Dave Long, Defy’s vice president of prison engagement and himself a former warden at California City Correctional Facility, Defy has led to profound changes at the prisons where it’s set up shop. He recalled the warden from the state prison in Lancaster, California, telling him that violence there was down 30% since Defy arrived. “People get hope,” Long said. “They want to go home. [So] they stay away from the gang violence.”

And it doesn’t take a lot of inmates participating in Defy to make a difference. “If you get 200 to 300 inmates to go through this,” Long said, “it tips the culture. . . . [Other inmates] see it. They see the hope in the [EITs’] eyes, so they want in on that.”

A lot of the inmates at Pelican Bay are in for life. And while recent state laws have made it more likely that prisoners sentenced to life will eventually be released, Defy nonetheless appeals to inmates who will never again be free.

Shortly after I entered the gym, a 38-year-old EIT named Adrian, locked up for the last 20 years and serving life, wandered over to introduce himself. He told me Defy was the best program Pelican Bay has ever offered, in large part because it promotes rehabilitation in a way most others haven’t. “Although I’m a life inmate,” Adrian said, Defy “offers a chance to rehabilitate yourself as a person.”

I asked him why he’d wanted to be part of an entrepreneurship program when he’d never get a chance to run a business in the outside world. “My son is really interested in business,” he said. “He’s really proud of me because of this.”

Here’s How I Complete My To-Do List Every Day

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I’m a big to-do list person. I’ve probably been making daily to-do lists on yellow Post-its for close to 15 years now. Every night before I go to bed I pen a bulleted list of all the things I need to accomplish the next day. However, inevitably, at the end of the next day I usually have a few items that aren’t scratched off the list. Those items get added to the top of tomorrow’s to-do. Yet the same thing happens the following day: I move a few uncompleted items to tomorrow’s list . . . and repeat the next day . . . and the next.

I rarely ever complete my to-do lists on the day I actually intend to. This invariably leads me to being a bit frustrated or even feeling a little overwhelmed at the end of the day. Surely I’m not the only one with this problem, so I looked for a solution for why my to-do lists were failing to get completed.

I read numerous articles about why to-do listssupposedly don’t work at all,why they work but I’m doing them wrong, andhow to make them work. I tried various methods over the course of the week and found that no one article I read had the exact advice I needed to finish my daily to-do lists like a pro. But by using advice from various experts, I came up with a to-do list workflow that works for me. By the end of the week, I was completing everything on my to-do list every day. And I did it by making four simple changes to the way I to-do’d.

My To-Do List: Before And After

Below is what my daily to-do list generally looked like for the last 15 years.

And now here’s my new to-do list. This is the format and method I hit on about day five, and I’ve been able to complete all my daily lists every day since.

Some of the changes may be immediately noticeable, but let’s go through them all below.

1. Get Rid Of The Obvious

First things first: Stop writing down the obvious things you do on a daily basis. I’m talking about things such as “get lunch,” “cook dinner,” “shower,” etc. Adding tasks like these only serves to clutter up your to-do list and make you feel overwhelmed. For me, I stopped adding “get lunch” and “go on walk” to my to-do list. I can trust my body to alert me to when I’m hungry or when I need to get up and stretch my legs. There’s no reason to keep these things on your daily list.

2. Organize Tasks According To Digital Quickies, Work, And The Real World

The next step I took was organizing my daily to-do list into three simple sections. The first section I call “digital quickies.” These are very short tasks I can complete on my laptop or even my smartphone. The next section is “work.” These tasks are among the most critical for the day. Why aren’t they at the top of the list, then? I’ll get to that in the next step. The final section is “real world.” These tasks are things that can’t be done at work or digitally. They’re the errands you need to run in the real world.

3. Get The Least Time-Consuming Digital Tasks Done Within The First Hour After You Get Up

The great thing about digital tasks is they usually do not have to happen in real time (an email can be sent whenever, versus a phone call that requires two people to be available at the same time). I found many of the tasks I had scratched down on my daily to-dos were really digital quickies. They could be be taken care of in a few minutes each, yet seemed like much more immersive tasks because they were not organized together and completed all at once.

Now my digital quickies get taken care of within the first hour I’m up in the morning. This allows me to scratch off almost a third of my to-do list before my day has really begun. Psychologically this makes me feel like I’m accomplishing a lot, and it also lets me focus on the bigger tasks to be completed.

Those tasks fall under my new “work” section. These are the most important, time-consuming tasks I need to get done each day. For me, items in this section almost always involve tasks I’m paid to do. There’s another trick I learned to completing work tasks, which I’ll talk about in the last step.

The final section of my new to-do list layout is “real world.” Tasks listed here are any things I need to complete that aren’t related to work. These tasks as less important than my work ones since the only deadlines for completing them are my own, which is why the “real world” section goes after my “work” section. Here, I add any task that is an errand I don’t do on a daily basis that I need to complete. These tasks also appear last since I can complete them outside of working hours.

4. Add Time Estimates To Big Tasks

The final step I took was adding time estimates to any big tasks. For me, this mainly includes my “work” tasks. I find adding a simple time estimate, for example, “Do FastCo News reporting – 3 hrs” allows me to allot enough time to get those tasks done. This allows me to make sure I actually have enough time in the day to complete everything on my list. If my “digital quickies” are all short tasks, I know they’ll take less than 30 minutes. From the time estimates for my work tasks (the most important ones), I know those will take six and a half hours to get done–easily accomplishable during standard working hours. That means I’ll have more than enough time to finish my “real world” tasks by the end of the day.

Ever since I started using this new format, I’ve completed every task on my daily lists. It’s a great feeling of accomplishment when you scratch the last item off and toss that yellow Post-it in the trash.

Keep in mind, my new to-do list workflow is tailored specifically to my daily work and needs. Yours will probably be slightly different. Still, by eliminating the obvious, organizing your tasks, getting short digital tasks done first, and adding time estimates to the biggest ones, you should be able to complete your to-do list items every day.

Could “Social Justice Benefits” Be The Newest Employment Trend?

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When Alexandra Millatmal, a co-instructor at Omaha Code School, wanted time off on March 8 to participate in a Day Without a Woman, she wasn’t sure what to do. “I didn’t know if I should be asking for paid time off, or if I should just not show up for work,” she says.

Even though she feels the leadership at Big Wheel Brigade (parent company to Omaha Code School) values her contributions and those of other women, Millatmal wanted to participate in the larger movement. “I think it’s important for [my students] to see my physical absence during the strike,” she says.

When Millatmal voiced this desire to her employer, they responded by adding two days of social justice paid time off (PTO). Rahul Gupta, president and founder of Big Wheel Brigade, says he considered making March 8 a company-wide day off, but he instead chose a more flexible policy to allow for different uses and causes. “The politics of my business partner and I are reflected by our employees, but that may not always be the case,” he explains. “We want to make sure that we’re inclusive of different viewpoints.”

While some protests fall on weekends, Millatmal says she appreciates the option to use her social justice PTO on state policy issues. “A lot of events that affect our state policies are happening in Lincoln,” she says. “If I want to go to the state capital and talk to [legislators], every hour counts.”

It’s not unusual for socially minded companies to give employees paid time off for volunteering, but in our hypercharged political climate, some employers like Big Wheel Brigade are taking the concept a step further by offering paid time off for civic engagement or supporting social justice initiatives in other ways.

Large employers like Comcast may allow employees to use their paid time off to protest, provided their department has someone else covering customers’ needs, but some employees have created more specific policies around social justice activities. Here’s a look at how other employers handle this issue.

One Day Of Pay And Matching Donations To The ACLU

Curtis Lee, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Luxe, an app that provides valet parking in several major cities, said he and many employees were upset by the news of Trump’s travel ban in February. “I’m not the overly political type of CEO who gets involved in politics, but I do have strong views, particularly around this topic,” he says. Lee’s parents are U.S. citizens who emigrated from Korea, and he says he had to reassure several of his foreign-born engineers who were concerned about their visas and status in the country.

“A lot of our workforce are not just full-time employees,” he explains. “They’re also valets [who are part-time employees], so missing out on a day of work is pretty meaningful. I didn’t want that to be the reason they couldn’t go out and express their views.” Valets could log into the app and get paid for a two-hour “vocalization shift” while protesting at the airport. Some were asked to provide protest selfies, but that was left up to the discretion of their city’s valet manager.

Full-time Luxe employees could get a full day of paid time off to use how they saw fit. “We broadened the scope of the policy to make it for anything that they chose to spend time on,” Lee says. “That’s also for people with opposing views, not that we had any, but if there were people that were pro-Trump or anti-immigration, we made that open to them.”

In addition, Luxe offered to match employees’ donations to the ACLU, up to $100 per employee.

Bail For Employees Arrested While Peacefully Protesting

Patagonia has a long history of environmental activism. For as long as anyone can remember, the outdoor gear and apparel retailer has had a policy of paying bail for employees who are arrested while peacefully protesting environmental or related issues. It will also provide paid time off for court appearances or other legal appointments related to the arrest. “We hire activists, we look for people who are so incredibly passionate about the environment that they want to protest,” says Dean Carter, the company’s vice president of human resources. “If you’re hiring a wild horse because of its passion and independence and then you keep it in the pen, that’s ridiculous.”

Carter says the company has never actually had to post bail for an employee, but he feels the policy encourages them to follow safe protest protocol. “We want them to participate in democracy, but we never want any of our employees in harm’s way,” he adds. To be eligible for bail from Patagonia, employees must undergo peaceful protest training (available through partner organizations such as Greenpeace) and must notify the employer of their protest participation in advance. Arrested spouses are also eligible, provided they’ve undergone the training.

Many Patagonia employees also participated in the Women’s March, and some assembled at a D.C. retail store. “Our retail locations are places where we mobilize communities,” Carter says.

Time Off To Vote

A 2016 survey from the Society for Human Resource Management found that 86% of HR professionals surveyed say their organization lets employees take time off to vote (53% paid and 33% unpaid; state law requires some of these organizations to do so). However, many employees try to keep politics out of the workplace, so just over three-quarters do nothing to encourage employees to vote.

Last November, Kasey Edwards, cofounder and CEO of Helpr, a Los Angeles-based app that provides screened babysitters on demand, wanted her employees to vote, so she sent everyone a gift card for a local coffee shop, saying, “Here’s the ballot pamphlet, give yourself an opportunity to make an informed decision.” She says her employees could take as much time as they needed to cast their vote.

When the Day Without a Woman came up in March, Edwards says there was a lot of interest among her employees. “We feel like our team is highly engaged with the mission of seeing more women in leadership,” she says. She and her cofounder gave employees the option to take the day off, but because Helpr provides child care and low staffing could negatively impact other women, “Most people did decide that they wanted to come in and do what they felt was impactful for other women . . . for those who needed child care.”

Travel Expenses To The Women’s March

A little over a decade ago, Vermont-based Burton Snowboards had what some would call a locker room or frat house culture. “We grew quickly and we were drawing from very male-dominated industries like surfing, and it really started to take on a masculine culture,” says now president and CEO Donna Carpenter. She’s been working to improve gender diversity at the company since her husband and founder Jake Burton Carpenter looked at his global directors and noticed a gender imbalance he wanted to change.

Carpenter took Hillary Clinton’s presidential defeat hard, so she knew she wanted to attend the Women’s March in D.C. in January. “I thought, ‘Hey, I’m sure there are Burton women who want to go and I can make it easier by getting hotel rooms and transportation and making an event out of it,’” she says. About 30 people from Burton attended the march, and the marketing department created signs with sayings such as, “1968 is calling. Don’t answer.”

The company suffered some pushback from customers who disagreed with Carpenter’s stance (some even claimed her employees were paid to protest, even though the Women’s March fell on a Saturday). However, Carpenter says the backlash has been less than she expected and the trip has boosted employee morale. “I think it has energized us to . . . think about how we double down on our efforts to get more women in the company and more female participants in our sport,” she says.

Can We Expect To See More Of These Benefits In The Future?

Yes, says Alexandra Levit, workplace expert and author of Blind Spots: The Ten Business Myths You Can’t Afford to Believe. She predicts that a general increase in corporate social responsibility and growing demand for more flexible work will drive this change.

“Boundaries between your personal and professional life are blurring,” Levit says. “We’re going to see more integration of what you believe and being able to come to work and say you support a certain cause.” Rather than just jumping on the bandwagon, she recommends that employers ask their employees for input first and give employees flexibility to use the time as they see fit.

Lynda Zugec, managing director for The Workforce Consultants, points out that this type of benefit makes the most sense when social justice activities align with the company’s goals or vision. “An organization whose mission it is to support abused women may decide to support any and all staff that would like to protest or support a similar and related cause against violence,” she says, adding that “if the social justice PTO furthers a cause for which the organization was designed to support, the organization is much more likely to encourage and establish PTO for such activities.”

This Year, Santa Claus Is Black and Gay–Thanks To This “Colbert” Writer

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Christmas is coming early for progressives this year, and it’s coming with a sense of humor.

Santa’s Husband, out in bookstores this fall, offers an unusual take on the holiday’s central representative. In this fresh reinvention, Late Show with Stephen Colbert writer Daniel Kibblesmith renders Santa as a black, gay man in an interracial relationship with a white Mr. Claus. Among other selling points for its existence, the book is sure to spur some heated cable news conversations about why exactly we hold our national beliefs about Santa–in essence, the mascot of Christmas–so, well, religiously.

Like many other hallowed projects before it, this one started off as a joke.

After observing the online uproar about Minneapolis’ Mall of America hiring a black Santa, Kibblesmith tweeted about a facetious child-rearing decision he and his fiancé, author Jennifer Wright, had just made: Their hypothetical baby would only know a black Santa, and this one wouldn’t be straight, either.

The ensuing rapturous retweets convinced Kibblesmith the idea could be something more. It inspired the writer, who pens books and graphic novels when he’s not on the Colbert clock, to try out a children’s book. Artist A.P. Quach quickly came on board, and so did Harper Design. Suddenly, it looked as though the venting of Kibblesmith’s annoyance might go on to have more impact than the source of annoyance itself.

“The part that bothered me most was that the outrage seemed so disproportionate and out of line with reality,” he says of the original reaction to a nonwhite mall Santa. “The Mall of America had introduced one black Santa. And every appointment to come see him was booked by families who couldn’t have been happier.”

It’s a familiar problem that could fall into the larger bucket of the so-called War on Christmas. Every December, a chorus of conservative pundits (often led by Bill O’Reilly, who will not be around on Fox News to bloviate about this book) polices the way America celebrates Christmas. They get apoplectic about those who say “Happy holidays,” a sticking point that forced candidate Donald Trump into the adorably childlike campaign promise of “saying Merry Christmas a lot more.” (He might as well have sworn to outlaw anchovies on pizza.) The reception of the Mall of America Santa among Breitbartians was in keeping with these rigid standards.

“This book is just as much a reaction to the infamous Fox News conversation where Megyn Kelly turns to the kids at home, Mr. Rogers-style, and tell them that Santa Claus is white,” the author says. “But these big lightning rod incidents are just the most memorable examples of a general Us vs. Them political tension around Christmas every year.”

Santa’s Husband

A sizable portion of America seems to spend their Decembers living out the classic Charlie Brown special in real-time–except instead of the commercialization of Christmas, they’re mad that other religions exist. But making sacred the depiction of Santa Claus as a white, jolly, fat man in a red suit has to be the most confounding aspect of all. It was a tradition that began in America in the late-1800s and has little to do with the Saint Nicholas of ancient myth. Of course, there might be just as big an outrage in certain circles if Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came out as gay, or was given a racial rebooting.

“I think anything associated with Christmas is always a little sacred, or at least has a lot of strong emotional attachment,” Kibblesmith says. “When things become traditions in our lives, it’s hard to imagine that they weren’t always this immutable thing, handed down unchanged from the days of yore — when actually, they’re evolving all the time and vary wildly even from household to household. For instance, I just learned that Elf On The Shelf has only been around for about 10 years. But there are some kids who’ve never known a Christmas without that tradition.”

For some kids, though, the new tradition may just end up being a gay, black Santa. Although the response so far to Santa’s Husband has been polarizing—Kibblesmith’s Twitter mentions are a mess—the book has elicited early praise from parenting blogs and LGBTQ press, perhaps enough to secure a place for its characters in children’s bookshelves for years to come. What could be a more fitting retort to those whose unwaveringly rigid idea of Santa Claus leaves others feeling left out?

The writer may have tweeted initially just to thumb his nose at those offended by a black Santa, but the book his tweet led to is mostly an attempt to be as inclusive as possible. With maybe a little nose-thumbing.

“I think if you promote tolerance, you’ll always raise the ire of intolerant people,” Kibblesmith says. “I write comedy for a politically-focused late night talk show, but I’m also just a human in America in 2017. So I don’t think of it as ‘trolling,’ as much as ‘being yourself.’ Isn’t that the lesson of most children’s books?


Your Hunch Was Wrong: Intuition Isn’t Inborn After All

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One reason we tend to think of intuition as a gift some people are born with is because of what it feels like to intuit something—you aren’t sure where your hunch is coming from, it’s just there. Some people have “great instincts” or just happen to be good judges of character; these traits are parts of their personalities, or so it seems.

But the more cognitive scientists understand about how our brains make decisions, the less this idea holds up. The cultural myth of “women’s intuition” is a nice way of saying that men are the reasonable ones while women just feel things. This sexist assumption was knocked down back in the mid-’90s with the development of the “cognitive style index,” which measures how people make decisions on a scale of intuitive to analytical, and found no evidence of gender-based tendencies in either direction. Two decades later, research continues to bear that out.

So where does intuition come from, if it isn’t innate? Like so many other things our minds do seemingly automatically, intuition appears to be learned. As we gain experience and expertise, we build up a foundation for making decisions intuitively. Here’s how.


Related:The Hidden Power In Trusting Your Gut Instincts


How Your Gut Instincts Grow Up And Get Better

As we get older some (though not all) research suggests we become more intuitive. This makes sense; when you’ve been around the block a few times, you learn a thing or two. Older folks can be more intuitive simply because they’ve seen similar situations in the past, which lets them recognize meaningful patterns.

In other realms, we just call this expertise, not intuition. An experienced dermatologist who’s seen thousands of examples of moles has picked up on data—some of which she isn’t even consciously aware of—regarding which ones are concerning and which aren’t. She has a vast reservoir of both conscious and non-conscious information. So when she jumps straight to a conclusion that something doesn’t look right, her intuition is based on years of analytical learning—study, trial, error, feedback, and trying again.

Brain research suggests that intuition develops with practice as well. Games like chess offer a great case in point, as a team of Japanese scientists discovered in 2012. For chess players, a hallmark of mastery is no longer needing to think about each possible move and instead being able to grasp all the options just by looking at the board. It takes many hours of analytical study—learning the rules, experimenting, and so on—to get good at this, no matter how gifted a chess player you might be.

By working with study participants over several months as they learned Shogi, a Japanese game similar to chess, from scratch, the researchers were able to watch players’ brains transform. At first the players had to make decisions analytically, then they gradually learned to do so more intuitively. As their proficiency with intuitive decision-making rose, researchers saw increased activity in parts of the brain, including the caudate nucleus, that are involved in non-conscious, automatic processing. These regions are critical for expert-level knowledge—the kind that’s that is so well learned that we don’t need to consciously think it all through.

Some researchers have argued that activity in the orbitofrontal cortex—which sits near the eyes and is highly interconnected with parts of the brain involved in emotion—is key to representing the feelings that help us make decisions. Damage to this region has been shown to make it hard for people to develop a sense of the value of a given decision, even with practice. Despite gathering experience in a card game about whether the odds are in their favor, people with this type of brain damage still can’t judge whether a gamble is risky or not.

By contrast, people with an intact and functioning orbitofrontal cortex do get to a point where they have a feeling for what the safe bets are. So perhaps even that “gut feeling” that forms part of intuition may develop through experience and practice, too.

Want To Be More Intuitive? Get Analytical First

Understanding the intuitive brain points to some opportunities for becoming a more intuitive person, but it may mean shaking some myths and misconceptions first. For one thing, intuition doesn’t develop from going with your gut when you have nothing to base it on. Certainly some people do that, but relying on instinct before you have any experience is just reckless. All the money lost by novice investors who bought stocks because they “had a good feeling” about them is a testament to this fact.

Counterintuitively (there’s really no better word for it in this case), intuition comes after working through thoughtful, analytical problem-solving. This way, by gathering experience over time, you’ll no longer need to be so analytical—you’ll simply have the expertise (think of the dermatologist). It’s like learning to play a difficult song on a musical instrument. You start slowly, paying close attention to each transition, focusing on the details, giving it lots of study and practice. Eventually, with repetition over time, it becomes second nature.

Whether you want to be more intuitive about sizing people up, making emotional connections, evaluating business decisions, playing chess, cooking, or any number of skills, you probably can be. The secret is practice.

Goodbye, Bill: How Late Night Tackled O’Reilly’s Departure

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As of yesterday afternoon, Bill O’Reilly will no longer factor into Fox News’ programming schedule.

The embattled TV news personality has been fending off speculation of his ouster ever since the New York Times first broke the story that Fox News paid $13M in settlements over the years to keep O’Reilly’s alleged sexual harassment under wraps. (Because these cases were settled, Fast Company still has to use the word ‘alleged,’ despite NYT reporting that two of the lawsuits involved audiotaped harassment phone calls.) After mounting pressure from advertisers and activists, Fox News parted ways with the top-rated broadcaster yesterday, with angrily befuddled nincompoop Tucker Carlson taking his spot. Considering how many people O’Reilly managed to rile up over the years with his bombastically smug, shouty version of conservatism, clearly he was bound to get one hell of a going away party.

The late night talk show circuit did not disappoint.

Trevor Noah spent nearly ten minutes of the Daily Show dragging O’Reilly last night. Of course, all he really needed to do was play old clips and the dragging took care of itself. Scene after scene in which O’Reilly goes deep on the persecution of hetero Christian white men paint a picture of an insecure fearmonger, unfortunately trusted by millions. (Noah can’t resist dredging up the viral ‘do it live!’ video, in which O’Reilly fully loses his shit between takes.) Over the course of ten minutes, Noah makes a case for the inherent racism of the departed host’s overarching thesis, and how it may have helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump. Overall, O’Reilly has given his detractors so much to work with over the years, Noah barely had to mention the sexual harassment that led to his downfall.

As he is wont to do, Jimmy Kimmel took a more lighthearted tact. After briefly explaining the circumstances of O’Reilly’s departure, Kimmel revealed some exciting news about his replacement: it would be his sidekick, Guillermo Rodriguez. What follows is a clip of The Guillerm O’Factor, a show in which Rodriguez delivers the news with an O’Reilly-like flair. (“Why didn’t Tom Brady go to the White House? Is he gay?”) Kimmel’s writers couldn’t resist referencing the “Do it live!” clip either, though, because, really, who could?

TONIGHT: We at The Late Show are proud to issue a statement from Bill O'Reilly's biggest fan: conservative pundit Stephen Colbert.

Posted by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Finally, and most thrillingly, an event as momentous as the top conservative cable news screamer going down in flames brought on the return of his bizarro-world opposite: Stephen Colbert. Not the Stephen Colbert who can be seen every night now, laying into Donald Trump, but “Stephen Colbert” the Comedy Central character mostly based on O’Reilly. Last summer, when Roger Ailes was relieved of command at Fox News, also because of sexual harassment, Colbert brought out Ailes’ old foe Jon Stewart to celebrate. This time, however, Colbert simply brought his alter ego, and it was more than enough. The rising late night host nimbly slid back into his alter ego, chiding the audience for “failing” O’Reilly by not having his back. There’s a bit of whiplash in seeing the swift change in personas, now that audiences are used to the new Colbert, but it’s nothing compared to the whiplash O’Reilly is currently experiencing as the tide finally turns on him.

Here’s How To Network When You Aren’t Sure What You Need

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Networking is something that makes a lot of people cringe—and understandably so. When people think of the word “networking,” images of forced and insincere flattery comes to mind.

But that’s more often the case when networking is an event—a ritual you perform every once in awhile. Practiced as part of a routine, it can be a lot more livable—just another way of building meaningful relationships. The best time to network is not when you need something, but when you don’t actually have a specific ask in mind. Here’s why, and how to get better at networking when there’s no obvious need you’re trying to fulfill.

Why You Need To Network When It Feels Pointless

Many will immediately recoil at the idea of networking outside the confines of specific events, purpose-built for the occasion, and when there’s a clearly defined need they’re trying to fulfill. After all, networking usually requires pursuing people individually, even if it’s on a casual basis and possibly getting rejected or ignored over and over again.

But there is a reason why many people don’t respond to those inquiries. If in-demand executives or investors said yes to every drinks invite they receive, their blood alcohol content would be high enough to count as its own kind of spirit. Not to mention, the idea of picking someone’s brain isn’t always comfortable or appealing, particularly if alcohol is involved.


Related:How To Enlist Other People To Do Your Networking For You 


So what should networking look like outside of, “Let me buy you a drink”—or even just a coffee? It shouldn’t look like anything in particular. Networking should be a habit, not an event that you put together at the last minute because your company finds its coffers empty or your career needs a reboot.

Being on the lookout for new contacts who might be instrumental to your business shouldn’t just happen at TechCrunch Disrupt or SXSW, it’s something entrepreneurs and professionals should do regularly. This way, you’ll train your brain to be more aware of any and all networking opportunities, and landing valuable connections will become a more intuitive practice that you don’t need to work so hard at.

Making Connections Without Making Asks

Fortunately, there are plenty of simple ways to network every day, when you aren’t looking for anything specific. Start with your inbox, your Twitter DMs, and LinkedIn. While most people are too busy to meet with someone they don’t know, they will often have time to read and respond to an email, provided that it’s executed properly.


Related:Why Facebook, Not LinkedIn, Is The Professional Network Of Choice For These 4 CEOs 


Each of these dispatches will look different case by case but should follow the same criteria:

  • Ask only one question
  • Take no more than 10 minutes to write
  • Clock in at no more than 100 words

The text of your networking emails should be uncomplicated, takes no more than two minutes to read, and a maximum of 20 minutes to reply to in around 200 words.

Say an e-commerce platform just launched a premium subscription option and you can’t help but notice the exceptional UX in the new interface. You can email the CDO, congratulating them on the new feature, ask what job boards and recruiting methods they’re using for UX work, and tell them that you’re always looking for the best designers. Or if you’re a designer yourself and might want to consider a new gig later down the road, mention a project you recently worked on and link to an example.

If you find out that an adjunct from your undergraduate days was recently made a tenure-track professor in a field related to your business, email them and recall their specific knowledge from class periods as a segue to ask for reading recommendations.

An up-and-coming startup hires a new CMO away from their job as a business school professor. Email the CEO to commend the new hire and ask if they think there’ll be a trend toward academics coming to tech as tenure-track positions dry up.

These messages don’t have to lead to drinks or formal meetings—they aren’t intended to. But they do forge new relationships based on authentic interest in other people’s  businesses and careers—rather than just what they can offer you. When the need does arise, you’ll have already left a lasting impression about your interest in their expertise.

This method of communicating is more effective than drinks, more polite than direct asks when you don’t have an existing relationship, and most importantly, a great way to just learn something new. Remember, there is no need to put some poor executive through yet another brain-picking exercise. It’s awkward and unnecessary—for both of you.


Emmanuel Nataf is the founder of Reedsy, a publishing startup that connects authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers to create high-quality books.

Gwyneth On What To Expect At Goop Summit (Hint: Collagen Martinis & Crystals)

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Goop CEO Gwyneth Paltrow likes her martinis shaken, not stirred–and with a dash of collagen mixed in.

I watch as Thea Baumann, the food editor of Goop, Paltrow’s lifestyle company, sprinkles white powder into a cocktail glass. Baumann holds court in the lifestyle brand’s test kitchen, where baskets full of fresh ripe fruit sit atop an expensive marble counter. “You can’t really taste it,” she explains of the skin-enhancing supplement she picked up at Whole Foods, “but it gives the drink a little… texture.”

Baumann is planning the menu for In Goop Health, Goop’s first foray into the conference space, which has become increasingly popular among media companies and brands in recent years. The Goop conference is the latest extension of Gwyneth Paltrow’s expanding lifestyle empire, which includes retail offerings spanning dresses to perfumes, Paltrow’s cookbooks, and a much-talked-about website that dispenses advice on everything from sex to cooking, travel to fashion.

“GP loves her dirty martinis,” says Baumann as she adds two olives to the drink.

These supposedly youth-enhancing cocktails, and other Paltrow favorites, will be on heavy display at the company’s June 10th conference in Los Angeles. The one-day symposium will serve guests a wide variety of experiences and lectures curated by the Goop CEO, ranging from meditation instruction to athleisure shopping to celebrity talks and sessions with alternative healers.

“We have incredible access to the best doctors, wellness experts, chefs, and products,” claims Paltrow, “and we knew that our readers would find an interactive symposium like this hugely valuable.”

Online And Offline Collide

I’m at Goop headquarters, stationed in nondescript and unmarked concrete bungalows off a side street in Santa Monica. Inside, a cursive millennial pink neon sign reads “goop” in all lower-case letters, the only marker of its name. I see a dozen or so employees who seemingly received the effortlessly chic Parisian style memo: skinny jeans, a simple billowy top (with a few stripes thrown in), and flats. They have mastered the all-natural beauty look: No one is wearing lipstick.

It is shockingly quiet, like a doctor’s office or a digital detox retreat. No one looks anxious or frazzled to catch a call. Either these people are too busy to interact or they all are overly zen from practicing the site’s meditation write-ups. It’s slightly intimidating, yet also intriguing: They all look so put together. I feel compelled to speak in a whisper.

That no seems stressed about pulling together such an ambitious event in under two months speaks volumes about the staff. Perhaps that’s what Goop does so well: make product launches and content, as her cookbook title claims, look like it’s all easy. 

In a way, the Goop conference will be a real-life version of scrolling the lifestyle brand’s website, where readers might encounter a highly recommended natural face cream or a spiritual healer’s advice. The difference is, of course, you’ll have to pay for the summit, depending on how close you want to get to Gwyneth. In Goop Health offers three tiers of ticket prices: clear quartz ($1,500), amethyst ($1,000), and lapis ($500).

The top two level tickets include access to an exclusive evening cocktail party hosted by Paltrow. The Crystal Quartz ticket also grants access to an intimate lunch where one can sit alongside Paltrow and her A-list panelists.

It might sound like a hefty price tag for a conference to which participants are encouraged to wear yoga pants. Conferences and events are nothing new; Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Forbes, and of course, Fast Company are just a few publishers that hold their own annual gatherings.

As the leader and chief guinea pig of the site, Paltrow has become a cult-like figure among those who share her approach to personal healthand to her fans, thanks to her glowing looks, style, and popular recipes. Meanwhile, of course, Paltrow has plenty of detractors who ridicule the New Age advice she and her team dispense on goop.com (a jade egg for your vagina, anyone?). While the conference is a collaborative effort between Paltrow, Goop editors, and the ad sales team, it is very much a conference based on her vision. Most traditional media conferences don’t boast in-house leaders with as much star power as Paltrow, who has scored an Oscar and countless magazine covers over the years.

As Paltrow explains it, her summit will bring Goop to life in a tangible way. Fans can try out for themselves the many (often expensive) therapies and exercises her editors dutifully write about. This isn’t the first time her brand bridged its online efforts with the offline world: Goop has, in the past, produced pop-up stores. But this new endeavor lets consumers test-drive more of Goop’s advice for themselves, rather than mostly just buy Goop-approved merchandise.

Her first conference is focused around wellness because that category is her website’s highest source of traffic—so much so that last month, the company launched Goop Wellness, a collection of nutritional supplements for women. Though the brand took plenty of heat in the press for moving into the controversial vitamin market, its product sold $100,000 worth of orders just on launch day. Goop is doubling down on the health sector and plans on releasing more wellness-focused initiatives down the line.

Paltrow envisions Goop as something between a trailblazer and a trusted friend you turn to for recommendations. “We’ve always been a lighthouse for wellness content that starts important conversations and pushes new ideas into the mainstream,” she says. That’s one way of putting it—after all, had you even heard of “vaginal steaming” before Gwyneth became its poster girl? Her summit, Paltrow says, is a response to what her audience increasingly requests: access to more wellness content.

“We constantly hear from readers that some of the stories change their lives—they bring our questions and answers to their own doctors, request specific tests, and ultimately end up solving a medical mystery in their own life,” Paltrow claims. “Our readers crave more of that category, so delivering content, programming, and products is a major focus for us.”

What Does Your Aura Look Like?

In Goop Health won’t just feature Paltrow’s personal doctors and trainers. Goop is going big. The event will kick off with panels featuring A-listers Cameron Diaz, Tory Burch, Nicole Richie, Lena Dunham, and Girls executive producer Jenni Konner.

Not all panels will be run by Hollywood celebrities; many will be hosted by names recognizable to loyal Goop readers and professionals familiar with the who’s who of the wellness industry. Esther Perel, a Belgian psychotherapist and author of “Mating in Captivity” (also known as “the new Dr. Ruth”), will lead a talk on how to achieve a more fulfilling sex and love life. Dr. Alejandro Junger, one of Paltrow’s doctors and a detoxification specialist, will discuss how to live a healthier lifestyle. Dr. Habib Sadeghi, a holistic integrative physician who also happens to be Paltrow’s mentor (and co-creator of the term “conscious uncoupling”), will also speak.

Authors Dr. Barry Michels and Dr. Phil Stutz are doing a panel on The Tools, a solution-based psychotherapy practice Gwyneth uses daily. That’s one the Goop founder is particularly excited for.

“The fact that our readers get to experience this live is a game changer,” she says. “I’m so excited that I’m moderating the panel.”

Basically, everyone involved with the conference has a connection to or has been personally vetted by the Goop CEO. “This is our A-team,” says Elise Loehnen, Goop’s head of content, of Paltrow’s cherry-picked panelists. “There’s really nothing we do as a brand that she’s not involved with. This [summit] is one of her babies.”

The panelists’ reputations vary. Some, like Esther Perel, are lauded by outlets like the New York Times. Others, like Dr. Alejandro Junger, have come under heavy criticism for alternative medical practices that lie outside of conventional Western medicine and sometimes lack scientific evidence. The merits and validity of these panels can (and are) debated for their various philosophies, but none will be administering one-on-one advice or treatments at the summit. They will be there more in a group format, expounding on ideas. Don’t show up hoping they’ll whip out their prescription pads.

In addition to the panels, a medley of “experiential offerings” will offer guests some time to relax. A typical attendee afternoon might include a sound bath with gongs and “singing bowls,” a shaman-led crystal therapy session, some chill-out time in the meditation lounge, and aura photography. The latter was tested last year by Paltrow, who sat down to have a photographer capture the electromagnetic field surrounding her body.

The Goop summit will feature aura readings by Radiant Human, which Paltrow has personally tried. [Photo: Radiant Human, courtesy of Goop]

These sessions sandwich the heavier topics like unfulfillment and anxiety, an intentional move. The health-focused panels might be a bit overwhelming, says Loehnen, so the more “fun” experiences help round out the day. “This could become a very intense experience, which is what some people want,” Loehnen says, but in case you need a break, you can always go have your tarot cards read while Goop’s in-house shaman, Colleen McCann, assigns you the best crystals to redirect your energy.

Participants who favor less adventurous offerings can get their hair done or a manicure from organic nail color line tenoverten. Taryn Toomey will teach her cult-favorite workout, The Class—a mixture of high-intensity cardio, mindfulness, shaking, and screaming—to relieve stress.

“Our reader is multifaceted,” says Loehnen. “She wants a little taste of everything.”

Alignment expert Lauren Roxburgh is a longtime Goop contributor who became famous for her foam-rolling workout. Her Goop article “The Secrets of The Pelvic Floor”, went viral in 2015 (thanks in part to the post’s recommendation that women pee while standing in their showers). The author of Taller, Slimmer, Younger trained Paltrow in private sessions over the years, but at the summit Roxburgh will instruct a communal class on how to elongate muscles, improve posture, and relieve tension with what is ostensibly a very pretty massage log.

Have you rolled out your hips today? #tbt ???? shoot with the talented @collinstark & @jessicastark_ @underarmourwomen #tuesdaytip ???? As if we need more reasons to roll ????New scientific research suggests the rolling may have a neurological effect, changing how the body perceives pain. Researchers believe foam rolling may trigger a release of the pain relieving, happy hormones called oxytocin and serotonin. A recent study found that self-myofascial treatment, in addition to home exercises, was found to reduce cortisol levels and increase heart rate variability. This indicates an activation of the para-sympathetic nervous system, crucial to healing, optimal recovery and decreasing stress. #fascia #foamrolling #bealignedforlife #happyworkout #fitfam #fitmama #science #mindbody #holistichealth

A post shared by Lauren Roxburgh | BE Aligned (@loroxburgh) on

How In Goop Health Is Bringing In The Green Stuff

Goop set up two ways for brands to connect directly with participants during the summit: a food hall featuring each brand’s favorite culinary vendors and a pop-up store hawking Goop and sponsors’ products. Tory Burch Sport athleisurewear, travel essentials from TUMI, and Sun Potion powders are a few of the brands on board.

Touch the sky.

A post shared by Tory Sport (@torysport) on

On the activation front, Bai Brands, a line of antioxidant and superfruit drinks, will provide the mocktails for lunch. Tropicana, jumping on the healthy gut bacteria craze, will release its new collection of probiotic juices. Tito’s gluten-free vodka will serve as the alcohol sponsor.

“We try to find brands we would truly cover from an editorial perspective and then work backwards,” says Kim Kreuzberger, head of brand partnerships and sales at Goop. Despite the obvious blending of sponsors and editorial experiences, she stresses the company will be sensitive to that “nothing feels forced or over-commercial within the environment.”

Readers of Goop are already accustomed to the integrated content that oftentimes recommends products sold directly on the website, many them produced by Goop. That such an advertorial experience is being presented IRL shouldn’t come as a shock.

“We built our media business by partnering with brands that we love and use in our daily lives—nothing that we do in terms of sponsorship feels like we’re undermining our brand,” says Loehnen, a former Conde Nast editor. “They’re all products that we believe in and would encourage friends and family to buy.”

Loehnen, along with the rest of the marketing and sales team, are hopeful readers will quickly fill the 500 available summit spots. If so, Goop definitely plans on launching more conferences in the future.

“I’d imagine we’d do more,” says Loehnen, who foresees moving the summit to different cities or even doing it digitally. “We want to reach as many people as possible.”

As for the cocktails? They’re still figuring those out.

Before I left the Goop kitchen, Baumann mentioned she was debating whether to put a charcoal-infused cocktail on the menu. Charcoal, with its detoxifying properties that allegedly absorb toxins, has quickly become a trendy new addition to the food and beverage industry. Baumann’s main concern was that it isn’t aesthetically pleasing. “[The liquid looks] so black,” she sighed with a laugh, “but then again, will it take the alcohol out of your system while you’re drinking?”

She seemed to quickly internally debate the question, before ultimately declaring, “Gwyneth will have the final say.”

Suave Fooled A Bunch Of Beauty Influencers Into Thinking It Was Luxury Haircare

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Would you eat more Spam if it was sold at Whole Foods in fancy packaging and cost twice the price? The impact of price and package design on how we evaluate the value and quality of a product have long been debated and exploited. Chevy’s been doing it for years. Even Pizza Hut did it a decade ago with a fake Italian restaurant in New York City.

Now Unilever’s jumped into the fray with its brand Suave, a standard off-the-pharmacy-shelf shampoo and haircare brand that wanted to test its quality against the preconceived notions of millennial shoppers.

A group of beauty influencers was given a new product to test called Evaus (Suave, backwards), presented with a slick minimal design and premium price tag. After gushing about its quality and style, they’re told it’s actually Suave. Doh!

The idea for the campaign emerged from brand research on millennial spending habits. Some standout stats they found included seven in 10 women feel that premium or higher-priced brands and products are more trustworthy than value or lower-priced brands and products, 89% of millennial women say they wish there were more value brands that did not sacrifice quality, and 92% of millennial women agree that they would buy a lower priced hair care product as long as quality was not sacrificed.

If the ol’ bait-and-switch, surprise reveal ad technique using real people to make a point feels very Dove-y, Suave’s brand director Jennifer Bremner spent years at the Real Beauty brand.

“We know that women are skeptical of quality if the price tag is too low, and we really wanted to get to the root of that dichotomy,” says Bremner. “Each time a Suave Professionals line is launched, it goes through rigorous testing against a salon brand benchmark line and every time we have been able to claim that Suave works as well as those salon benchmarks. Still, some women see our products as lower quality simply because they are at a lower price point. As a brand, Suave really aims to show women that value and quality can, and should co-exist, so we decided to peel back the label, and Evaus was born.”

Bremner says one of the biggest things she learned from her time at Dove was that the best work starts by really listening to women.  “On Suave, we learned from our listening that labels and price tags can play an outsized role in purchase decisions,” she says. “We also know from our research and social listening that women are often pleasantly surprised by the great results they get from Suave.  We thought there was an interesting story to be told around perceptions and how consumers don’t have to pay a premium price for premium quality. It also made sense for us to use beauty influencers, who are known to be very discerning, to demonstrate the quality of the Suave products.”

7 Better Questions To Ask Interviewers Than “How’s Your Work Culture?”

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If you want to know what it’s like to work for a company, you can’t exactly waltz up to a recruiter and ask, “What’s your company culture like?” Besides the fact that company culture covers a whole lot of ground, and summing it up in one answer isn’t totally possible, it’s more likely than not to yield a polished, marketing-approved answer than a candid discussion.

“If you are asking . . . about the culture, [recruiters] will know that and attempt to tell you what you want to hear,” says Henry Goldbeck, president of Goldbeck Recruiting. “So, if you are going to ask about company culture, it’s better to ask specific questions.”


Related:The 7 Questions Recruiters At Companies Like Amazon And Spotify Wish You Would Ask


There are a number of questions you can ask during an interview that, while seeming fairly straightforward on the surface, can help uncover deeper intel about the inner workings of a company. We asked a handful of career, recruiting, and HR experts to share a few of their favorites—keep these in mind the next time you’re in an interview and want to know the scoop.

1. How Long Have You Been With The Company?

“This is a question to ask each of your interviewers. If everyone you meet has only been there a short time, you need to probe further,” says career counselor and executive coach Roy Cohen. “Unless the company is a startup, expanding rapidly, or the department is newly established, this is a serious red flag. High turnover could be a sign of low pay, long hours, lack of opportunity for career advancement, or incompetent management.”


Related:The Questions Recruiters At Amazon And Spotify Really Want You To Ask


2. What Was The Last Big Achievement You Celebrated?

This question “gives [interviewers] the chance to reveal if employee efforts are acknowledged and appreciated and if people enjoy having company parties/gatherings,” says Valerie Streif, senior adviser at career services company Mentat. “If they don’t do anything to celebrate, it may be a thankless and cold environment.”

3. What Activities Do You Offer Employees?

“If companies have softball leagues, trivia teams, company outings, retreats, or other planned social events, it can often give you a clue to how important they think it is for coworkers to like one another, not just work together,” Santopietro Panall says. This can be especially important if you “have recently moved, are entering the workforce after college, or anyone else that needs a social aspect in the workplace,” adds Nikki Larchar, cofounder/human resource business partner at simplyHR LLC.

“On the flip side, that kind of togetherness may not be for everyone,” Santopietro Panall acknowledges. “If the thought of socializing with your coworkers leaves you cold, you may want to look for a company with a more nine-to-five environment.”

4. What Was Your Biggest Challenge Last Year, And What Did You Learn From It?

It may come across as an obvious question, but it actually does a great job at revealing “whether or not the company blames processes or people when something goes wrong. The former indicates that they are a continuous learning organization, and the latter may be a sign of a blame culture,” says Mary Grace Gardner, career strategist at The Young Professionista. “Listen to who or what gets blamed for the failure, and if they have taken steps to learn from it.”


Related: How Not To Discuss Your Strengths And Weaknesses On Job Interviews


Keep an ear out for how their answer hints at the degree of politics present in the office, too. “Company politics play a huge role in overall job satisfaction, and it’s important to know ahead of time how decisions are made and conflicts are resolved,” shares Natasha Bowman, chief consultant at Performance ReNEW and author of the upcoming book You Can’t Do That At Work! 100 Common Mistakes That Managers Make.

5. How Do You Measure Success, And Over What Time Frame?

If you want to avoid a boss with outrageous expectations, this is the question to ask. (And you can take it a step further and ask how those metrics are determined.) “Before you accept an offer, you need to know that your new boss has realistic expectations with respect to what you will accomplish and by when,” Cohen says. “No matter how attractive an offer may be, if you do not, or cannot, deliver results, you will fail. So, if you are told that the bar is outrageously high and you don’t have enough time to come up to speed, think twice before accepting the terms without discussion or negotiation.”

6. How Much Time Do The Owners/Leaders/Founders Spend In The Office?

“This question tells you whether or not you have leaders in place who are in touch with the work and making knowledgeable decisions. The best and brightest ideas oftentimes come directly from the people actually doing the work, so if a leader rarely spends time with staff, it points to a lack of innovation and support in their culture,” says Gardner.

This question may not be quite as important to ask of a large business, but “in a small business, that interaction with the top level may be key to you getting ahead, being able to get things done and having that person’s vision be carried out by their team,” Santopietro Panall says. It “might also give you a key to the level of the workaholism that you can expect there. If the recruiter says, ‘Oh, our CEO Sally is here 90 hours a week, she never takes a day off!’ you’re going to know that the culture is going to be very focused on putting in a lot of hours with a lot of face time.”

7. What Do Your Team Members Do For Lunch Every Day?

“Finding out what people tend to do on their lunch hour will tell you whether they are slammed with work, don’t want to spend time with their colleagues, or tend to be social and enjoy each other’s company,” Bowman says. “This information can also tell you whether or not your potential colleagues might be more extroverted or introverted. Depending on your own preferences, this response can give you some valuable insight into the team that you’re joining.”


A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted with permission.

This Incubator Is Creating The Next Generation Of Farmers

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As a child, Chris Wayne grew up watching his father tend to his 40-acre farm on the outskirts of Danbury, Connecticut. While his dad ran maple syrup lines from their trees and rotated chrysanthemums and tomatoes, Wayne picked rocks and dug holes for fence posts, and took the occasional ride on a tractor. This was the early 1990s, though, and back then, Wayne tells Fast Company, the idea of “agriculture as a sexy, cool occupation had not taken hold yet”; Agricultural dating site Farmers Only wouldn’t come on the scene until 2005. After leaving the farm for college, “I distanced myself from it to a certain extent,” Wayne says.

If, in 2007, you had asked a recently graduated Wayne where he saw himself in a decade, he would not have said managing the farmers’ technical assistance branch of GrowNYC, New York City’s network of farmers’ markets and sustainability resources. But as the director of FARMroots, GrowNYC’s wide-ranging incubator program that offers free support for both new and established farmers, Wayne has watched the industry transform into a viable career for people in the tri-state area, and has seen over 300 aspiring and experienced farmers move through the program.

“As the operator of a farm business, you not only produce the product, but you also have to distribute, market, and run various integrated components of the business. That can be overwhelming for a lot of new entrepreneurs.” [Photo: Chris Wayne]
It was the two years Wayne spent in Costa Rica after college that changed his mind about the agriculture industry. He traveled there for a gig as a carpenter on a home construction project, but while he was there, his Costa Rican neighbor asked if there was anyone who could help out on his farm. Recalling his childhood experience, Wayne volunteered. He was paid in meals and conversation. “Through the experience, I kind of rediscovered a love and respect for the occupation of farmer and agriculturalist,” he says. When he returned to New York in 2009, he interviewed for a job at GrowNYC, and spent a season managing Greenmarkets (GrowNYC’s farmers’ market network) in Manhattan.

At the time, GrowNYC ran a program called the New Farmers Development Project, whose primary mission was to support immigrant farmers in the “Greenmarket region,” roughly defined as a 200-mile radius extending out from Poughkeepsie, New York and touching eight states. Recognizing Wayne’s Spanish language skills, GrowNYC hired him as an associate for that program. While across the U.S., interest in farming as an occupation had fallen–the average age of farmers and ranchers throughout the whole country is nearing 60, and not getting any lower–younger immigrants were arriving in the tri-state area with incredible agricultural skills from their home countries, and a real desire to pursue farming in the region, but often without the resources to turn that knowledge into a successful business. “The small-scale agricultural operations here are almost vertically integrated–as the operator of a farm business, you not only produce the product, but you also have to distribute, market, and run various integrated components of the business,” Wayne says. “That can be overwhelming for a lot of new entrepreneurs; when you add in cultural and language differences it’s doubly so.”

“We began to notice a real uptick in interest in agriculture careers from a whole range of different people.” Photo: Chris Wayne]

Between its founding in 2000 and 2010, around 160 immigrants went through the New Farmers Development Program and learned the day-to-day basics of running a small-scale farm in the U.S., from how to assess land to generating an income statement and accessing capital; around 20 started their own farm businesses.

But in 2011, Wayne and the team at GrowNYC began to notice a change in farming and agriculture’s cultural currency. “More people were starting to consider agriculture as a viable career and something that connected them to their food and the natural environment and matched with a value system they were starting to develop,” Wayne says. While previously, the majority of people who wanted to start farm businesses were immigrants, “around that time we began to notice a real uptick in interest in agriculture careers from a whole range of different people,” Wayne says. For other low-income and socially disadvantaged populations like women and people of color, in particular, farming could provide a real economic opportunity.

GrowNYC launched FARMroots in 2011 as a way to open the door wider to the resources it had to offer the regional farming community. The New Farmers Development Program became the Beginning Farmer Program, which includes an eight-week course that covers how to scale up small-scale ventures, manage finances, and market products to any aspiring farmer, as well as a shoulder-to-shoulder mentoring program that connects new farmers with more established business runners. A grant from the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Project allows FARMroots to offer the program free of charge. (There is technically a sliding scale of up to $200 for the course, but, according to Wayne, “it’s not heavily enforced at all.”) Women make up around 60 to 70% of each class–a huge step forward for an industry in which women have been long underrepresented. Around 50% of participants are immigrants, and around 30% are African American. To date, more than 42 farmers who graduated from the program have started their own independent farm businesses. The program has fostered a cycle of good: Graduates of the Beginning Farmer Program are especially conscious of bringing their wares to low-income areas, selling at 23 farmers markets and through 10 community supported agriculture networks in areas that otherwise struggle with access to fresh produce.

To date, more than 42 farmers who graduated from the program have started their own independent farm businesses. [Photo: Chris Wayne]
The other two facets of FARMroots are geared toward established farmers. Through the Market Technical Assistance program, FARMroots offers marketing support for any farmer selling their wares through the Greenmarket network; Wayne says this year, they’re focusing on implementing point of sale technology, in the form of iPads or other digital cash registers, to help farmers collect data and optimize their sales. The Market Technical Assistance program is expected to boost farmers’ revenue at Greenmarkets by $1.7 million over the next five years. The Farm Succession and Land Transfer assistance program aids retiring farmers in passing their ventures along to the next generation of farmers.

While FARMroots is not unique in its multi-pronged approach to farmer support—the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association in California and the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project in Massachusetts offer a similar set of resources for immigrants and diverse low-income populations—but the proliferation of these types of ventures, is, to Wayne’s mind, a positive. Farmers, especially small-scale diversified farmers, have a huge range of things that they have to be really good at if they want to be successful, and inevitably support is needed to help people out in certain areas. Programs like ours keep farmers farming and keep the door open to the industry,” Wayne says.

But through keeping costs minimal and programs accessible, programs like FARMroots are also diversifying an industry long dominated by white men. “By supporting a range of socially disadvantaged farmers, we’re shifting the aggregate image of the agricultural industry to one that reflects the changing nature of the demographics of the United States.”


I Hate Pictures Of Food. Why Doesn’t Facebook Understand That Yet?

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This confession is long overdue, but here goes: I hide every single picture of food that shows up in my Facebook news feed—even yours. Your steamy steak shots. Your proud Thanksgiving panoramics. Your ill-composed close-ups of whatever that flaky dessert is supposed to be. I’ve been hiding them ever since I joined Facebook in 2009, and please understand it’s nothing personal. You see, thanks to some strange idiosyncrasy, I can’t stand looking at pictures of food. They gross me out on a visceral level that borders on pathological.

Cursed with aversion, I naturally try to avoid the triggering stimuli as much as possible, but even after almost eight years of willfully hiding food pictures on Facebook, I’m still assaulted with a fresh barrage of new ones each day. Restaurant promotions. Ads for Seamless. My cousin’s homemade quiche. Without fail, they flood my news feed, staring out at me in all their unappetizing glory.

Why is this? For all the talk of Facebook’s powerful algorithm and its ability to learn and adapt to our personal tastes, why hasn’t the world’s most advanced social network figured out my basic disdain for food porn? Clearly Facebook knows I’m hiding the pictures, but it doesn’t connect the dots. For whatever reason, the algorithm doesn’t see food as the common thread.

[Photo: Unsplash user Erol Ahmed]

Accounting For Taste

I set out to investigate this curious flaw by speaking with people at Facebook who are familiar with its news feed and machine-learning efforts. As it turns out, Facebook does have the basic ability to understand what’s happening inside a photograph. The company uses advanced “computer vision” technology that can identify and segment objects and even entire scenes. Is that photo you just “liked” a scenic view of the Space Needle or a half-eaten hot dog? Facebook’s AI robots are starting to figure it out. And according to Facebook spokesman Ari Entin, they’re getting smarter all the time. “From a fundamental tech perspective, certain capabilities are there,” Entin tells me.

The problem is, the technology isn’t being applied in a way that would protect me from the tyranny of graphic mealies. As we’ve written before at Fast Company, computer vision is already being used in exciting ways at Facebook. Notably, the technology is improving the accuracy of alt-text features that describe images for people who are visually impaired. Entin says computer vision also enhances Facebook’s search engine and helps keep the site free of objectionable content like violent images or pornography. (Facebook recently announced it was using image-recognition tech to combat revenge porn.) He says Facebook developers are just beginning to unlock the potential uses for the technology.

But food pictures in the news feed? That’s not on its radar. To understand why, you have know a little bit about how Facebook’s algorithm works. What you see in your news feed is determined by thousands of signals based on your Facebook behavior—who your friends are, what pages you like, what you comment on—and there’s a hierarchy to this ranking system. If Facebook knows I tend to comment on my cousin’s photos, it’s going to show me more of them. The system gets more complex as Facebook collects more data on my habits and is able to draw from more signals to further personalize my feed.

Computer vision is not part of this equation—at least not at the moment. When it comes to learning what you like, Facebook’s algorithm cares about who shares a photo, not what’s in it. This is why my hiding food pictures all these years hasn’t made a bit of difference. Let’s say my cousin happens to be a frequent traveler who posts beautiful photos of far-off locales. I’d probably comment on lots of her pictures, because I like travel. So even though I may hide a few shots of that homemade quiche (because gross), those signals aren’t strong enough to counteract the hundreds of travel photos I’ve already engaged with. Facebook just knows I like my cousin’s photos.

The same holds true for pages I’m connected with. Whenever the New York Times pollutes my feed with one of its recipe articles, I naturally get disgusted and hide it. But that’s just a small percentage of what the New York Times shows me. Sometimes I may even click the “see less from” button, but all that does is tell Facebook I want to see less from the New York Times, which really isn’t true. So I end up sending a false signal and making the news feed less useful.

This is where computer vision could conceivably play a big role, by adding a contextual layer that bridges the divide between disinterest and disgust. After all, Facebook is constantly telling us that the goal of its news feed is to “show people the stories that are most relevant to them.” And this isn’t just about food. Imagine the possibilities if Facebook’s algorithm knew you didn’t want to see pictures of scary dogs, or babies, or people who look like your ex.

[Photo: Unsplash user Brooke Lark]

Disgust Is Irrational

Granted, this is a tall order. Social scientists say the emotion of disgust first evolved as a simple coping mechanism to prevent us from ingesting things that would kill us, but in modern humans, it manifests in ways that are often deeply personal, complex, and—let’s be honest—downright irrational. My aversion to food pictures began with a childhood drenched in messy red-sauce Italian-American dishes that taught me to associate food with uncleanliness. That progressed to a reflexive instinct to flip over copies of Gourmet magazine at the dentist office or the change the channel whenever those cooking segments came on Good Morning America. To this day, I can’t sit through an episode of Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown.

For years, I was able to quarantine myself in a self-imposed filter bubble, but not anymore. By the time we entered the age of social media, I knew I had lost the battle against gratuitous culinary documentation. Food pictures on Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere, are as commonplace as selfies and pet shots. They’ve earned their place among established societal norms, whether I like them or not. My only hope is a smarter, better automatic filters.

I asked Facebook if it has any plans to implement computer vision into the news feed signaling process, but the company is not keen on talking about its future plans. A spokeswoman simply said they wouldn’t rule it out. Whatever the case, it’s clear computer vision is going to be a big part of Facebook’s future. Just this week at Facebook’s annual F8 developers conference, CTO Mike Schroepfer stood on stage and touted a new Facebook technology called Mask R-CNN, which can detect moving objects in photos. Another exec at the conference said Facebook is even developing computer vision tech that can analyze video.

For now, I’m not holding my breath that any of this will solve my problem anytime soon. Maybe that’s because learning what we like is more complex than learning what we “like.”

That’s not to downplay the inconceivably difficult task of managing a product used by 1.6 billion people. Facebook deserves credit for being able to make some sense of the chaos that goes with all that content. Still, whenever I hear talk of its enormous power, or the scary amount of data it knows about us, or the bold promise of artificial intelligence to understand our emotions, I always go back to my cousin’s homemade quiche. How can I not? It’s staring me right in the face.

Music History Revelations From The New Doc On Super-Producer Clive Davis

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The 16th annual Tribeca Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives, a documentary that chronicles the rise of one of the music industry’s preeminent forces.

Director Chris Perkel stitches together an array of interviews and archival footage to tell Davis’s story, starting as a young boy in Brooklyn to a bright law student at Harvard and eventually a powerful music executive who spun gold and platinum records across just about every genre.

Through his bevy of record labels, including Columbia Records, J Records, and Arista, Davis signed, developed, and/or revived the careers of artists including Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, Carlos Santana, Dionne Warwick, The Grateful Dead, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Kenny G, Barry Manilow, Alicia Keys, Rod Stewart, and beyond.

Whitney Houston and Clive Davis [Photo: courtesy of Tribecca Film Festival]
And in interviews with Davis and many of the artists he’s worked with, Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives unearths some interesting tidbits of music history that may have been forgotten.

Carlos Santana Intentionally Screwed Up An Audition To Sign With Davis

“I wanted to be with Clive and CBS because I saw a poster for Christmas and it had Paul Simon, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, The Electric Flag–it had everybody in it. But the whole band wanted to go with Atlantic. So I literally played horrible for [Atlantic Records founder] Ahmet Ertegün . . . with [Davis] I remember just playing my heart out.” — Carlos Santana

Bruce Springsteen Was Sent Back to The Drawing Board

“I sat down and played the songs [from the album Greetings from Asbury Park N.J.] and . . . he sat back and said there are no singles on the record. And I went down to the beach and I wrote ‘Blinded By the Light’ and ‘Spirit in the Night,’ so that was a good call.” — Bruce Springsteen

Clive Davis [Photo: courtesy of Tribecca Film Festival]

The Origin Of Davis’s Flagship Label Arista

“The term ‘Arista,’ which is known in the New York area where I live, is the name of a high school honorary society . . . in New York. So I felt that it was both personal and yet it was also synonymous with something that was first-class.” — Clive Davis

Dionne Warwick’s Second Coming

“I happened to be doing a TV show that he also was doing, The Dinah Shore Show. And he asked was I recording and I said, ‘no, I’ve probably had it with recording at this point in time.’ And he says, ‘well, let me tell you something young lady…you may be ready to give the industry up, but the industry’s not ready to give you up.” — Dionne Warwick

“I Wanna Dance With Somebody” Almost Went To Olivia Newton-John

“This demo I’m going to play for you, this, at the time, could’ve been done by Olivia Newton-John. It would’ve been somewhat surface-like pop, probably a hit record. But I knew and heard in my head that with a stronger beat, that the way with Whitney [and] her vocal genius, it wouldn’t be ‘I wanna dance with somebody’–it would sound like ‘I wanna go to bed with somebody.’ It’s going to have far more heat and it’s going to have far more sensuality and it’s not going to be this very pop-ish record.” — Clive Davis

Missed Opportunities and The Limits of Davis’s Golden Touch

“There were acts I believed would break and never did [such as The Alpha Band and The Funky Kings.]”

“There’s got to be misses. I didn’t sign Meatloaf. He was an unlikely figure, visually, so I passed. And John Cougar Mellencamp was too close to Bruce Springsteen who I felt to be the real deal. And of course [Mellencamp] went to become one of the great original American rock-and-roll artists ever.”

We Have Kevin Costner And Davis To Thank For The Version Of The Bodyguard We Have Today

“There was so little music in the film. You didn’t know why she needed a bodyguard. I wrote a letter and I said you can’t make her first movie be a spoken-word thriller with one song…this movie could be so much greater if we had Whitney being Whitney and do her stuff. And fortunately, Kevin Costner responded to that letter. It was Kevin Costner who asked for more songs and the movie was transformed. And it was Kevin Costner who had decided on the Dolly Parton previous hit of ‘I Will Always Love You.'” — Clive Davis

This Text Messaging Service Helps Inner-City Kids Recover From Trauma

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On April 11, when a 12-year-old on spring break walked to the corner store in his Chicago neighborhood with his brother and a friend to buy snacks, he watched as a car drove by and both his brother and the friend were shot–along with a dozen other people. The children survived, but now they have to deal with the next problem: trying to recover from the trauma.

Their experience wasn’t uncommon. One study of black students from Chicago’s South Side found that nearly half had witnessed an injury or death from gang violence. Across the U.S., one in three inner-city students suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by a variety of causes, from witnessing murder to experiencing neglect or abuse.

“We came to realize that text messaging was the delivery channel that works to reach most youth.”[Source Image: yamonstro/iStock (pattern)]
A new startup is designed to help low-income high school students recover from trauma through a medium that’s more accessible than in-person counselors at underfunded schools: text messaging.

“We wanted to meet kids where they are,” says Ashley Edwards, who co-founded the startup nonprofit, called MindRight, with Alina Liao. “Through interviews, we came to realize that text messaging was the delivery channel that works to reach most youth.”

Edwards, who previously worked at a school in Newark, New Jersey as a director of operations, had seen firsthand how little mental health support students often receive.

“At my school, I basically served as an impromptu social worker, because my school didn’t have the adequate resources to serve the needs of all my students,” Edwards tells Fast Company. “It was through that experience that I saw the huge gap in services in inner-city schools, and how much that impacted students’ long-term outcomes.”

“If we’re texting with a student and they’re angry that day, we can give them a practical tip on deep breathing to really sort of recognize their triggers and help them relax.” [Source Image: yamonstro/iStock (pattern)]
Kids with high exposure to trauma are three times more likely to repeat a grade, she says, and also more likely to be expelled or drop out of school; 90% of youth who are currently incarcerated have been exposed to trauma.

MindRight “coaches” draw from cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and other evidence-based mental health tools to text back and forth with students who need help throughout the day. Coaches are volunteers (vetted with background checks) who go through 20-plus hours of training on a framework the nonprofit developed with clinical advisors.

“Depending on how students are feeling that day, we’ll provide a tip that directly relates to that,” Edwards says. “So if we’re texting with a student and they’re angry that day, we can give them a practical tip on deep breathing to really sort of recognize their triggers and help them relax in that moment. Or we could help kids who might be catastrophizing and imagining the worst possible scenarios for themselves, which is a normal response to traumatic stress.”

Edwards and Liao began developing the service as students in a joint program at Stanford University that combines an M.B.A. and a master’s in education. Using the human-centered design approach that Stanford’s d.school is known for, they worked with students, social workers, and schools to better understand the need. One thing was clear: an automated text-messaging system wouldn’t be the right answer.

“After our interviews with students, it was very clear that kids did not want to talk with robots,” she says. “They didn’t want to feel like the response they were getting was cold and automatic. Especially for kids who have already been through so much in their lives and already have a general lack of trust for people and institutions. That personal touch is very necessary.”

The startup plans to use AI, however, to make it easier for its coaches to work with more students at once. Algorithms and natural language processing will eventually be able to suggest content to coaches and help track students.

[Source Image: yamonstro/iStock (pattern)]
Using text messaging could be a way to help students get help when they might not be comfortable talking to a counselor in person. “We’ve had students tell us they feel more comfortable expressing themselves over MindRight than in person because of the anonymity it provides,” says Liao. “We believe that by creating a space where students start to feel comfortable expressing themselves, we can slowly overcome the stigma around mental health. We also coach students in connecting with in-person services.”

In its current pilots, MindRight is working with 90 students, ages 14-18, in Washington, D.C. and New Jersey. Using a standard assessment to measure psychological well-being, the team has seen that all of the students have increased well-being since using the program; 97% have also self-reported that the texting helped them better manage stress. In the long term, the nonprofit plans to track how the service impacts school attendance, behavior, and graduation rates. While cost may be a challenge, since schools have to pay for the service, school districts have budgets to reduce absenteeism and serve at-risk youth.

As they scale up, they hope to make the service available to all students. “Ideally this would be accessible to every child because we believe every child can benefit from this type of daily, personalized support,” Edwards says.

Virgin Atlantic Is Launching Its Own Branded Podcast “The Venture”

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As you may have already seen in the latest issue of Fast Company, branded podcasts are now a thing. And it’s no wonder, since 57 million Americans tuned in to at least one a month last year, up 23% from 2015, and a recent study from NPR found that 75% of listeners took action on a sponsored message. Now Virgin Atlantic is getting into the podcast game with a new six-part series called The Venture.

Made with Gimlet Creative, the company behind branded pods from eBay and Tinder, The Venture aims to explore the adventures of starting and running a business, directly through the voices of those who’ve done it. Subjects include the team behind The Onion, Jonathan Murray, co-creator of MTV’s The Real World, as well as the founders of Kill Rock Stars Records, which has released albums for Elliott Smith, Sleater-Kinney, The Decemberists, and more.

Virgin Atlantic’s head of marketing Jenna Lloyd says the brand has been intrigued by podcasts for a while and felt it was a format that resonated strongly with their business travelers.

“Last year, when we were recording a radio spot with Richard Branson, and listening to him talk about his many adventures, the idea of doing some longer-form content struck us,” says Lloyd. “Listening to an entrepreneur talk about taking that first step into the unknown is equally inspiring and entertaining.”

Gimlet Creative creative director Nazanin Rafsanjani says the idea for The Venture came about through an interest in business stories with founders who did things differently, whether in personality, their approach to business, or what they were creating. “Virgin Atlantic’s founder, Richard Branson, definitely did things differently and we looked to his story for the inspiration behind this series,” says Rafsanjani. “In that same vein, we found pioneers in all sort of different fields–from TV to music to food– who are disrupting their industries and reinventing what’s possible.”


Related: The Next “Serial” Might Be A Podcast From Tinder Or Spotify


Since last year Lloyd says Virgin Atlantic’s overall content strategy in the U.S. has been underpinned by a mission to uncover how the best and brightest business leaders make their adventures epic, and what it takes for businesses to thrive in today’s global market. The brand ran a series of events, which Lloyd says were inspired by Fast Company‘s FC/LA conference, in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Boston, and most recently, Seattle.

“Gathering together a group of like-minded people, we were looking to provide an opportunity for both established and emerging business leaders to share thoughts and perspectives, as well as give our customers practical insight on what it takes for their business to fly on today’s global stage,” says Lloyd. “Demand for these events was extremely high and we started to recognize there was an opportunity for us to connect inspirational business leaders with audiences who wanted to share in, and learn from, their stories. Together with (agency) Figliulo & Partners and Swellshark, we started to explore the podcast medium as a natural next step to bring our mission to a larger audience.”

The first episode of The Venture launches on April 25th.

What Facebook Could Learn From Other Platforms About Content Moderation

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Facebook has a team of 60 engineers working on a brain-computer interface that will someday scan your brain a hundred times per second and translate your inner voice into text. Its Building 8 team is researching a way for humans to hear through their skin. And it’s reportedly developing eyeglasses and contact lenses that will bring augmented reality to the masses.

But they still can’t figure out how to prevent users from abusing the platform by uploading and sharing violent videos, such as Steve Stephens’s horrific murder of an elderly man in Cleveland last weekend (it took Facebook three hours to take down the video). And judging by the complications involved in such an effort, and similar attempts to tackle that problem by other social networks, it will take some time, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged at F8 this week.

Facebook’s content moderation system relies on users who flag offending posts, which are then passed on to an army of moderators who make the determination of whether or not they’re suitable for the site. Though it has thousands of human moderators, that’s hardly enough to handle the swarm of content uploaded by close to 2 billion monthly active users. That is supplemented by artificial intelligence “to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community, but that could take years to work effectively.

Other Platforms, Other Solutions

Other social-media platforms, though much smaller than Facebook, have had varying degrees of success tackling the problem. YouNow, a social live-streaming platform that’s primarily targeted at teens, has a fairly robust content moderation system. The site has been around for quite a few years, and given its user demographic it needs to be extra careful with everything it uploads. One thing that YouNow has, which Facebook lacks, is a cohesive user culture and set of values that makes the site a “safe space.” Those who use YouNow are part of a positive community that they don’t want sullied. This was created, in part, thanks to strict content moderation that is quick to take down any abusive content. The founders used a mixture of community participation and technology to try and ensure that only kosher content was presented to the teens’ eyes from the get-go.

Obviously Facebook can’t adopt this solution since it lacks a unifying culture due to its sheer enormity as a global media juggernaut. (For context, last summer YouNow said that it had 150,000 live streams uploaded per day; Facebook announced in 2015 that it hit 8 billion daily video views per day.)

Still, YouNow does employ a very thorough system to make sure that inappropriate content isn’t seen by minors. Like Facebook, users can flag offensive videos. The site also employs proprietary technology to filter out such content–both videos flagged by users as well as those detected via its algorithmic system. It does that partly by analyzing comments in real time, which helps detect content that should be flagged.

YouTube has been dabbling with a similar community-based moderation system. Called “YouTube Heroes,” it empowers an elite group of users to police the site and help weed out the flood of horrific videos that you can imagine gets uploaded every second to the popular platform. Similarly, Reddit has been working to curb its well-known abuse and troll problem by rewriting offending posts and having moderators enforce a new content policy.

Instagram too is known for its heavy-handed content moderation, via such methods as blocking the hashtags for groups and communities that share potentially harmful content. Through this method, it has successfully blocked content that promotes eating disorders. How Instagram decides which hashtags to block remains a mystery. This is something many social media researchers have looked intobut given that hashtags are a prime way for users to connect, these blocks help reduce the flood of potentially abusive content.

On the other end of the spectrum there’s Twitter, which has been plagued with abusive users for years. True, the company has been doubling down on the problem, with a slew of new tools aimed at giving users more power to combat offending content and trolls. But when it comes to live-streaming video, users might have a harder time. According to Periscope’s terms of service:

You understand that by using the Services, you may be exposed to Content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, or in some cases, postings that have been mislabeled or are otherwise deceptive. All Content is the sole responsibility of the person who originated such Content. We may not monitor or control the Content posted via the Services and, we cannot take responsibility for such Content.

Waiting For AI To Get Smarter

The real question that stands out in this debate is how long it will take artificial intelligence to advance to the point that it’s able to distinguish between a remake of Pulp Fiction filmed by some college freshmen and a real-life murder. YouNow is able to filter out such content through a blend of human moderation and technology, but that becomes much more difficult at the scale of Facebook. But the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years. Facebook told Wired earlier this week that half of the content it flags comes from its AI program. The Cleveland video fell through the cracks since it wasn’t flagged by humans immediately. Once it was flagged, says Facebook, it took a little over 20 minutes for it to be taken down.

Since such technological advancements could take years to implement, Facebook will have to adopt more human moderation and other methods—including the idea of making it more difficult to download videos to prevent users from quickly sharing them on third-party sites like Live Leak. But maybe it can adopt some of the solutions that have been used by other platforms or even partnering with them to collaborate on technologies that tackle the problem. If Zuckerberg is all about “connecting the world,” maybe one place to start is by partnering with allies in a shared campaign to keep out violent and hateful content.

For now, Facebook will be faced with a choice that cuts to the heart of its purpose: Does it want to create a safer space for users by implementing more rigorous safeguards, or does it favor a free space where there are only limited controls so that users can still upload their content in just seconds? Whatever the company says, it’s going to be years until it can have both.

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