Dec 3, 2023

Just Say "You're Welcome"

I’m not boasting when I say that I get a lot of thank you notes. It’s a common experience for anyone who teaches for a living. Students are naturally kind and many were raised on the idea of thanking their teachers. Also, when teaching at a university, we’re often asked for help by writing a recommendation letter or giving career advice. Students typically follow up with an email or note saying thanks.

My students will also sometimes apologize when asking for help, feeling guilty at the inconvenience they think they’re causing me. I have to remind them that helping students is my job, and I love my job. When students seek help from professors, they’re just getting their money’s worth. I’d much rather accept their thanks than fend off their apologies.

When Accepting Thanks Is Hard

You almost certainly have a typical response when someone says “Thank you.” There are, for new students of English, at least 16 different expressions to accept a person’s gratitude. You might also be surprised, like me, to learn that there’s controversy about the expression “You’re welcome.” (Such nonsense!)

But some of you—and you know who you are—recoil a bit when people express their thanks. For many, gratitude feels unnecessary because we see helping as expected behavior, not deserving any special recognition. For some it’s hard to accept gratitude because we don’t like feeling superior to others, and gratitude implies indebtedness. And for some gratitude causes serious discomfort because it conflicts with a poor self-image or sense of inadequacy. In this last case, being unable to accept gratitude could be a symptom of depression, OCD, or a similar mental health concern.

Do you ever feel guilty when you get a thank you card or, worse, a gift?

It might feel even worse when the gratitude is more than a quick thanks. Do you ever feel guilty when you get a thank you card or, worse, a gift?

Receiving Thanks Helps Them

If you have a hard time accepting thanks, here’s a wonderful reason to do it anyway: it helps the person thanking you.

The benefits of gratitude are abundant and extensively demonstrated in research. Gratitude practices make people happier and healthier. Grateful people have better social relationships. They even enjoy better sleep and immune systems. Gratitude is, in my opinion, the most effective-but-overlooked daily practice to improve your life.

Accepting gratitude helps with all of this, of course. The opportunity to express gratitude—in small or large ways—enhances our self-efficacy, a critical component of mental health. (Being thanked helps your self-efficacy, too.) We feel empowered when we can effectively and meaningfully express thanks to someone. It helps reduce our sense of unmet obligation and rebalances important relationships.

It’s far more beneficial when we accept gratitude with grace.

Refusing or deflecting thanks can temper or even ruin all of these benefits. It’s far more beneficial when we accept gratitude with grace. So next time someone extends their sincere thanks, help them out by accepting the offer. It’s just another way to help.

Nov 15, 2023

Does #GivingTuesday Work?

On November 28, you can expect a deluge of unsolicited emails. That might not seem out of the ordinary, but this particular day will bring a batch of messages that all have two things in common: nonprofits will send them and they will all use the same phrase in the subject line, “Giving Tuesday.” Social media, too, will be awash in the hashtag version, #GivingTuesday. Expect to see it all over Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, and X (r.i.p Twitter).

First launched in 2012—as a collective endeavor by the 92d Street Y and the UN Foundation—#GivingTuesday has become a global campaign to invite more charity and volunteering. Last year, in its tenth iteration, the event accounted for $3.1 billion in charitable giving in the US alone.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for being impressed by this accomplishment. I’d also caution that Giving Tuesday might not be as impressive as it seems.

To be clear, I’m focusing on the day, #GivingTuesday, and not the nonprofit, GivingTuesday.org. A few years ago, the movement garnered enough support from major givers like the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott, that it spun out into its own entity focused on enhancing radical generosity around the world. They now have multiple programs focused on youth and adults in a variety of regions. The programs reflect novel ways to inspire more generosity.

The day of #GivingTuesday, however, probably isn’t doing as much as we think. Maybe there’s value in having everyone celebrate a day of giving. But if there is, then it’s not clear what that value is.

The question I keep asking is this: If we want more charitable giving, is #GivingTuesday the answer?

Considering the Counterfactual

This question is an invitation to use counterfactual thinking, a core paradigm of all impact measurement. In evaluating everything from medical treatments to government programs, we don’t really know whether a well-intended effort is working unless we understand what the world would be like without it. The key is to measure causal inference—does A cause B?—using tools like randomized control trials.

In this context, the question is: What if #GivingTuesday never existed?

You might be surprised to learn that scholars haven’t answered the counterfactual question for #GivingTuesday. Despite ten years of data, including that offered by the Giving Tuesday Data Commons, there are no published studies assessing the giving day’s impact using a counterfactual approach.

In fairness, a randomized control trial for #GivingTuesday would be quite difficult because there are so many variables to control. This is a common challenge for advocacy programs. The impact of a worldwide effort like #GivingTuesday is difficult to measure.

There is an annual #GivingTuesday report, but a broader context actually dampens the otherwise impressive numbers. Take the top-line number for example: $3.1 billion in US donations last year. That amounts to 0.06% of the total charitable giving—$499.3 billion—in 2022, or roughly two days worth of giving if you divide the total over the year. (Of course, charitable giving isn’t spread evenly over the year and the most popular days for giving continue to be at the end of December to capture tax deductions for the 10% of Americans who still itemize.)

There’s little evidence that #GivingTuesday actually increases the total charitable giving much at all.

More importantly, there’s little evidence that #GivingTuesday actually increases the total charitable giving much at all. The event claims a larger share of giving each year—up by 15% compared to 2021. But this doesn’t mean total giving increased. The more likely result is that #GivingTuesday changes the timing of a person’s giving instead of increasing the amount that person gives.

Although charitable giving in the US does shift up or down from one year to the next, the defining trait is how little it changes over time compared to the overall economy. For as long as we have reliable data, measures show that Americans give around 2% of GDP. Even massive things like tax policy only change when people give and not how much. Academics and fundraising professionals have long wrestled with this stubborn statistic, and there’s no counterfactual evidence that #GivingTuesday has moved the needle to greater giving, even if it’s claiming an increasing share of the giving that does happen.

Making Things Worse

Like any major endeavor, #GivingTuesday has its critics. Common complaints include favoring large organizations over small ones, disfavoring minority causes, and adding stress to an already busy time of year for nonprofits.

There are two criticisms, though, that are especially important. The first is the intensity of competition for donors on #GivingTuesday, and the second is the consumerist approach to the cause.

As more nonprofits participate, the competition for donors gets even sharper on #GivingTuesday. For this reason, you won’t be surprised to hear nonprofit managers complain about the day. If you search Google for the term, you mostly get pitches by fundraising consultants offering to help you raise more money.

But the problem could be even greater. Research shows that as competition for donors increases, fundraising becomes less efficient. In other words, the bigger #GivingTuesday gets, the more wasteful fundraising becomes as nonprofits fight for their share of the 2%.

Charitable giving is treated like an impulse buy instead of a thoughtful strategy.

The other concern is how #GivingTuesday campaigns behave. They rarely focus on building enduring relationships with donors, but instead are designed to be shareable on social media. Charitable giving is treated like an impulse buy instead of a thoughtful strategy.

The original idea of #GivingTuesday was to be a counterbalance to the consumerism of Black Friday, but nonprofits instead campaign in an especially consumerist way: offering donor matches that give the sense of a great deal, using urgent offers that expire on the day, and deploying social proof marketing through shares and likes. Compared to something more meaningful like a monthly donation to a carefully chosen charity, #GivingTuesday feels like Black Friday deal shopping. It encourages the opposite behavior that we need from donors who ought to be more impact-oriented and strategic in their generosity

What Would Actually Increase Giving

Even though the relative share of charitable giving is stubbornly stuck at 2% of GDP, there are more recent trends changing philanthropy in larger ways than #GivingTuesday can handle.

Most recently, inflation and other economic pressures led to a real decline in charitable giving, something that’s happened only a few other times in the last four decades. These are not permanent conditions, however, so the pattern isn’t likely to be long-term.

There are two other changes to American charity, though, that are worrisome. The first is the increasing concentration of wealth in the United States. A larger share of the economy in the hands of a smaller few will inevitably change the landscape of philanthropy, including the total amount giving, the timing of giving, and the kinds of causes receiving support. Donations by the wealthy, for example, favor large organizations over small ones, even if the small ones have higher relative impact. It’s simply easier to write one big check than many small ones.

The second big change is a decline in religious activity. Regular participation in religious worship has long been one of the strongest predictors of charitable giving, even if you remove donations made to churches. Community connections that bring us proximate to the needs of others simply induce more giving. People give more when they are asked in personal ways, and most religious worship involves a call to share with others.

Both of these—concentration of wealth and declining religiosity—would predict less charity by everyday households, and that’s exactly what’s been happening. Less than 50% of Americans are engaging in philanthropy for the first time ever measured. Thus far, large donors have made up the difference, but we don’t yet know what will come as the trend continues.

People need more money to give and community connections that encourage giving on a regular basis.

To induce more charitable giving, the needed changes are obvious. People need more money to give and community connections that encourage giving on a regular basis. Obvious though they may be, these problems are not going to change much on any given Tuesday.

Of course, none of this means that people shouldn’t give, or even that they should skip #GivingTuesday. What all donors should do, though, is give thoughtfully and strategically, focused on how their gifts and time can have a lasting impact. That kind of giving is a very good deal.

Successfully Navigating #GivingTuesday

So what does this all mean for someone who does want to participate in the day of giving? I recommend these three things:

Find an organization that measures outcomes, not just outputs. (ex. In education, pick an organization that reports improved grades, not just the number of students enrolled.)
Instead of a one-time donation, choose an organization that you’ll support in the long-term. Set up a recurring monthly donation that automatically comes out of your bank account.
Spend some of your giving budget on a book written by an expert. You can’t learn everything about every topic, so invest some time getting deeper knowledge of the impact area that most interests you. It will make you a better giver.

Mar 1, 2023 Podcast

Explaining Science for Everyone • David Pogue, award-winning science and tech journalist • s02e08

Summary

We're bombarded daily with news about groundbreaking science or shiny new technologies. More than ever, we have to rely on the explainers who can help us understand why and how these achievements actually matter. Will they improve our lives, or more importantly the lives of the vulnerable, in meaningful ways? In this episode, we'll hear from one of the most prolific science and tech journalists of the last few decades to help us make sense of it all.

About Our Guest

David Pogue was the New York Times weekly tech columnist from 2000 to 2013. He’s a six-time Emmy winner for his stories on CBS Sunday Morning, a New York Times bestselling author, a five-time TED speaker, host of 20 NOVA science specials on PBS, and creator/host of the CBS News/Simon & Schuster podcast Unsung Science.

He’s written or cowritten more than 120 books, including his 2021 magnum opus, How to Prepare for Climate Change. After graduating summa cum laude from Yale in 1985 with distinction in music, Pogue spent ten years conducting and arranging Broadway musicals in New York.

Useful Links

The Unsung Science podcast: https://unsungscience.com/

How to Prepare for Climate Change: Amazon

David's Website: https://davidpogue.com/

Pleasant Pictures Music

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David Pogue: For this semester's essays, I don't know how you're going to know if they were generated by ChatGPT or not.

[00:00:06] Aaron - Interview: Yeah, I won't. I mean, the ship has sailed. It's 10 short answer questions, is my final, and it, you know, it went live last week and it's due on Friday and...

[00:00:16] David Pogue: oh my God.

[00:00:17] Aaron - Interview: Yeah, I'll have no way to know. Other than the hope that if you cheat in an ethics class, then I don't know what to tell you.

[00:00:26] Aaron - Narration: Hi, I'm Aaron Miller, and this is How to Help, a podcast about having a life and career with meaning, integrity, and impact. This is season two, episode eight, Explaining Science for Everyone. This episode of How to Help is sponsored by Merit Leadership, home of The Business Ethics Field Guide.

[00:00:49] Thank you for all the ways that you support the podcast, especially for sharing it with others and for leaving positive reviews on Apple Podcasts. Those two things make the biggest difference in helping us to grow and to reach more people.

[00:01:04] Take a moment to consider with me all that's changed in science and technology over the last 20 or so years.

[00:01:10] It was nearly 20 years ago now that the human genome was fully sequenced, all 3.2 billion base pairs. Since that time, CRISPR technology has been developed to allow individual gene editing in living cells. Advances in medical science are saving many more lives than before. If you live in the US and get cancer, your chance of dying from it has declined by about 13% compared to 20 years ago. That might not seem like much, but it amounts to around 3.5 million extra cancer survivors since 2002. During that same time period, global child mortality has declined by almost half. Mostly thanks to improved treatments for diarrhea, malaria, measles, and respiratory infection. This means nearly 5 million more children per year are living beyond age five.

[00:01:59] Consider the smartphone that you might be using to listen to this podcast. 20 years ago, this thing that fits in your pocket would've made the list of the five fastest super computers in the world. And it can do things computer scientists used to only dream of. It can show you every picture that you have with a dog in it. You can even use it to ask ChatGPT to write everything from an apology email to the essays for your college applications. Not that you should, but more on that later.

[00:02:29] In the last 20 years, NASA has landed not one but four rovers on Mars, and has even flown a drone there despite an atmosphere that's a hundred times thinner than Earth's. Scientists also have detected for the first time gravitational waves formed billions of years ago, like echoes from the dawn of the universe.

[00:02:48] It's not all rosy, of course. The 10 warmest years in recorded history have all happened since 2010. The global Covid pandemic probably killed around 14 million people, even with a record setting development time for a vaccine to treat it. Fueled in part by social media that didn't exist 20 years ago, Democrats and Republicans are twice as likely to view the other party as very unfavorable. It's easy to think that science and technology are causing serious problems and not just solving them.

[00:03:20] My guest today is the veteran science and technology journalist, David Pogue. He's reported on all that I mentioned and more for over two decades. He wrote The New York Times tech column, has hosted over 20 Nova specials for PBS, and is a longtime journalist with the CBS Sunday Morning program, winning six Emmys along the way.

[00:03:38] Aaron - Interview: I also have to say, I feel a little self-conscious interviewing a seasoned journalist like yourself, and so, so if you're thinking in the back of your head like, oh man, what a dumb question that he just asked, um, feel free to point that out. I'm happy for any tips or pointers as we go.

[00:03:55] David Pogue: Okay.

[00:03:56] Aaron - Narration: Throw in five TED talks, around 120 books, including his most recent one, How to Prepare for Climate Change, and his new podcast Unsung Science, and his 1.2 million followers on Twitter, and you're hard pressed to find any science communicator with more reach or experience than David Pogue. He has seen, heard, and almost done it all.

[00:04:23] Aaron - Interview: In a lot of your reporting, you've been a test subject or a Guinea pig, and I'm curious if you maybe had some moments that you, that had the biggest impact on you, for better or worse, that sort of felt most memorable.

[00:04:37] David Pogue: For both Nova and for CBS Sunday Morning, I've often served as the audience's stand in, you know, experiential television.

[00:04:45] I mean, for Nova, I joke that, you know, the basic formula for the shows we've done is they try to kill me on camera. I mean, I've been hang gliding. They sent me swimming with 13 foot sharks and handling them in The Bahamas. I mean, I rode in an Indie 500 race car with Mario Andrei.

[00:05:00] Aaron - Interview: Yeah.

[00:05:01] David Pogue: And at one point, they were studying a bizarre occurrence in the nineties where some Army Rangers were in training in Florida and it was 65 degrees out and five of them died of hypothermia. And the army couldn't figure out how you can die when it's 65 degrees out. So they built this amazing environmental chamber center in Natick, Massachusetts, where they can study the effect of wind, weather, cold, rain, you know, every, every different atmospheric effect on the human body, especially when it's tired or carrying gear.

[00:05:37] And they put me through the same thing. They sprayed me for 15 minutes with rain, 49 degree water. Then they chilled the chamber to 49 degrees. Then they turned on 15 mile an hour wind machines to make sure that I was truly cold. Then they put a hundred pound pack on my back. Then they put me on the treadmill for six hours.

[00:06:04] Then they put a rectal thermometer into me. By the way, the Army apparently can't afford wireless ones. These are corded, rectal thermometers. So you have this tail trailing out. I mean, it was so miserable. It was the worst, worst experience in my life, but it made very good television. That was pretty memorable.

[00:06:25] Aaron - Narration: The conversation about to unfold is going to cover a wide range of topics, but all around this idea of explaining the good that science and technology do in the world and where they're falling short. You've probably guessed that David is optimistic about what science can do to improve the world.

[00:06:43] Aaron - Interview: What do you think some of the ways are that science and technology are improving people's lives in a way that people aren't seeing? You know, telling Alexa to turn on your lights or changing your thermostat from around the world, those are cool but they're right in front of everybody and it feels like there are a lot of ways, and that you've reported on some of these, many of these, there are a lot of ways where science or technology are improving people's lives in a way that they don't actually see.

[00:07:06] David Pogue: Yeah, I mean, I mean, the answer is everywhere. I mean, everywhere. Every study, every experiment you know, every medicine you take, every you know app you run on your phone, the phone itself, all the transportation. We just learned last month that we can deflect an asteroid that might be heading our way to earth.

[00:07:29] I mean, everything. Food you eat, the clothes you wear, the internet. It's all science and technology. Every problem there is to solve boils down to science and tech. And, and it cracks me up that, no, it doesn't crack me up, it makes me sob that Americans have this sort of anti-science slant these days. They're, you know, people are terrified of 5G and, and vaccines and, you know, proven science. Everything you like in your life came from experimentation and study and science.

[00:08:04] Aaron - Narration: Looking around you, you'll see what David means. Much of the technology you rely on every day didn't exist even just 50 years ago. Our lives are constantly and immeasurably improved by the hard work of scientists and engineers.

[00:08:20] So why is so much of the public instinctively skeptical about their accomplishments? Part of it is that the work they do is complex, and the truth is nuanced. But it's also because science needs better communicators.

[00:08:36] Aaron - Interview: Can you talk about what it's like as a science reporter struggling with how you communicate that nuance, especially when you know better than anybody, how long you're gonna keep somebody's focus on, on the things that you're reporting?

[00:08:49] David Pogue: I mean, yes, nuance is a problem when you're communicating to the public. And fear is a problem. We naturally have a fear of the unknown, so any new technology that we don't understand, we condemn. This has gone back for, you know, centuries. People were afraid of the steam trains. People were afraid of airplanes. People were afraid of microwaves. Every new technology is terrifying because it's new and we don't understand it.

[00:09:15] On the nuance question, I very much feel that scientists, as opposed to science communicators like me, are too in love with nuance. They're too afraid to make bold statements. I feel like we, we cost ourselves decades of climate action because scientists have to couch everything and disclaimers and degrees of uncertainty and, and stuff like that.

[00:09:40] I mean, I get that you need to be careful and you can't make sweeping statements, but when pressed, you know, the scientists would probably say, I mean, yeah, what I said is true. Yes, of course there are footnotes, but what I said is mostly true. And right now I feel like that's not the way it goes. Right now, I feel like the, the certainty and the uncertainty are presented in equal-sized handfuls when, when new sciences presented.

[00:10:09] So it's, you know, it's tough because that's the way scientists are trained, is to make a big fuss over the possible exceptions to what they're reporting. But it does mean that action is slower to come.

[00:10:23] Aaron - Narration: Part of the communication problem in science and technology is also that we've learned to be skeptical because big trumpeted advances don't always pan out as promised. Put another way, where are the fusion-powered, autonomous, flying cars that we've been expecting since we were kids?

[00:10:43] Aaron - Interview: Having observed firsthand all the things that you have, what lessons should we take from the fads that sometimes get built up around science versus the, the real hard day-to-day grind of incredible science that diverts asteroids?

[00:10:57] David Pogue: I mean, first of all, you have to question who's doing the reporting and why. Is there, is there a motive? You know, in, in my tech reporting days, we would hear overwhelming numbers of headlines about 3D printers that everyone would have a 3D printer next to the toaster. When the door needed a new hinge, we'd 3D printed it. When a button would fall off our sweater, we'd 3D print it. It just never happened. I mean, 3D printers are there and they have their uses, but as an everyday consumer item that is on every kitchen counter, no.

[00:11:32] I used to laugh at the smart home push. You know, for 30 years I went to those CES, consumer electronics show type things out in Las Vegas every year. And every year the theme would be: your home is gonna be smart and everything will be connected. And when you unlock the front door, the lights will come on and the AC will come on and the music will play. And you know, it just, it just never happened. Like decades... they promoted that stuff.

[00:11:58] Yeah, but sometimes it just takes time. You know, electric cars, everyone said, "Ah, they're dead. Range anxiety. Nothing, nothing's gonna happen." It just took time. And now you couldn't buy an electric car if you wanted one. It's the, the waiting list is like eight months long and sales tripled during the pandemic.

[00:12:15] Aaron - Narration: Another legitimate concern is whether or not scientists and engineers are working on the right problems. Being able to turn your lights on with your voice isn't a massive innovation, even if it's convenient. But thousands of smart people work on how to make this better. What if instead they were working on ideas that improved the lives of the most vulnerable?

[00:12:38] Aaron - Interview: Do you have thoughts around this idea, like how science and tech ought to be focused more on the problems of the most vulnerable people in the world?

[00:12:47] David Pogue: I mean, I'm, I'm not an expert on economics, but I'm, my gut tells me it's, it's just a matter of a capitalist society. Most people go into most businesses to make money, and you don't make money from poor countries.

[00:13:04] There are, you know, some really noble and amazing efforts. You know, there's those incredibly inexpensive solar panels that have been distributed in poor villages in Sub-Saharan Africa where they had been burning kerosene, which, you know, makes them sick and makes their small homes very filthy. And now you can get a small solar panel for, you know, a dollar and it'll power your light, and you're fan, and and so on.

[00:13:34] There are these incredible advances in medicine distribution. You know, o one thing you don't have when you live in a desperately poor country is glasses. There's no, there's no CVS, there's no LensCrafters, and they have just as many eye problems as wealthy people do. So, you know, these cool vans that drive from village to village and fit people with glasses, which changes lives all the time.

[00:13:59] There is, oh, this one makes me crazy. There's a blindness that affects millions upon millions of children's from a lack of, of a certain vitamin or mineral, and we found a way to grow rice--they call it golden rice--that includes that vitamin that would prevent millions of people from going blind. So far the countries that need it will not accept the rice because it came about through genetic modification, which is of course an entire podcast topic, or 50, unto itself.

[00:14:31] But basically in this country, all the corn we eat, all the uh, soy we eat has been genetically modified and it's safe. It's just, we just accelerated what nature does on its own. But it's not trustworthy because it's new and people don't understand it.

[00:14:46] So point is there are companies doing some good work, but there's not a profit motive to it, and so it's never going to get the same balance of attention.

[00:14:57] Aaron - Narration: David's podcast, Unsung Science, is one of the best places to turn if you're looking for the science stories of good that are not getting enough attention. One of my favorite episodes is the one called "Chainsaws, Women and the Cape Town Drought." It tells the story of how climate scientists and the Cape Town community in South Africa came together to rescue the city water sources from going completely dry. It's an awesome story, and I saw the lasting effects of it firsthand when I was in Cape Town this past November. The innovation there really worked.

[00:15:32] Speaking of climate change, this is an area where the financial incentives and scientific consensus are finally coming together. Improvements in climate technology have been accelerating, but it creates an interesting new challenge for science communicators like David who want to motivate the continued changes needed in our behavior and economy.

[00:15:54] David Pogue: There has been a complete turnaround in the last two years regarding hope for our climate future, and it's tricky as a reporter or an editor, or a magazine, or a website because if you broadcast this good news too much, you worry about decreasing the urgency that people feel about making change. So you have a counter incentive to publicizing the good news when it comes to climates, and I, I totally see that.

[00:16:25] But on the other hand, the goal here is to decarbonize our species, to stop pumping carbon into the air from transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and so on. And power generation is a big one. And in 2022, we got 28% of our power from solar. And I mean, we used to, if you ask the average American, they're like, "Oh yeah, solar power. That's this fringe 1% thing." No, it's almost a third. And of all the new electrical capacity installed this year, 72% of it was solar and wind, and 0% was coal. This year we generated more power from just wind, just wind, than coal or nuclear. And that's, that's a first in history.

[00:17:18] Gigantic progress being made on decarbonizing and you just, you just don't hear about it. Of crouse, It doesn't mean we don't have more to go. That doesn't mean we're gonna meet the deadline.

[00:17:29] And it certainly doesn't mean we're ever going to go back to the weather of the eighties. You know, those days are gone. You know, most of the heat, 93% of the new heat trapped by the greenhouse layer is stored in the ocean. And the oceans take decades or generations to heat up or cool down. So basically in our lifetimes, our children's lifetimes, we will not see a return to the old, the old weather patterns. But the question is, can we stop the weather patterns from making it unlivable in most parts of the earth, and there is still some hope.

[00:18:07] Aaron - Interview: What should the typical consumer be doing? Because I've read different perspectives on this and one of them is that it should be an all-hands-on-deck kind of approach, and then others more skeptically have said that the average consumer actually has very little influence other than making sure they support policies that have the capacity for bigger change. So we're putting the right people in charge, but beyond that, the things I do in my day-to-day life have such a tiny effect on the climate that, you know, whatever I were to do wouldn't really move the needle in any way that's worth all the effort.

[00:18:41] David Pogue: Well, in one way that's true. If you change your light bulbs to LEDs or start taking the subway instead of driving, you will not save the planet by yourself. IN another way, taking those steps does have an effect, and it's this notion of social pressure. People will see what you're doing and people will suddenly consider, "Wait. That guy, Professor Miller does, does it this way. So clearly it's normalized. Clearly it's, it's possible to live a good life doing it the way he does. Maybe I should try that."

[00:19:17] Imagine a cafeteria where everybody's having lunch, and then on queue, 70% of the people in that room look up and to the left. What are you gonna do? You're gonna look up and to the left. You do what other people do, and that's, that's the effect that we'll have when a lot of people start making lifestyle changes.

[00:19:37] But in the larger sense, yes, your efforts are best spent affecting your institutions and your government and the companies you buy from. That kind of pressure will have a much bigger impact than any single thing that you do.

[00:19:54] And it doesn't mean you need to run for president. I mean, it can be your church or your temple, it can be your school board, it can be the local Chamber of Commerce, it can be the company you work for. You can make changes within organizations and institutions that have a big effect. Much bigger than a solo effect.

[00:20:15] Aaron - Narration: But, as individuals we do need to take some of our focus in trying to prevent climate change and instead start preparing for it. On this topic, David has literally written the book.

[00:20:28] David Pogue: And I should also say that, you know, as a guy who spent two years working on a book called How to Prepare for Climate Change, the other thing most people are not doing is preparing for climate change. That again, used to be a controversial stance, like should we tell people to accept what has changed and make changes to prepare changes in their insurance, and how they talk to their children, in what they grow in their gardens, and how they make their investments, and how they renovate their homes, or is that admitting defeat and getting people less excited about trying to mitigate the emissions.

[00:21:07] And I think now most experts agree that we need to do both. We need to mitigate the emissions and adapt for what has changed and will continue to change. So that's the other thing I think most people are not doing enough is preparing for what is now inevitable.

[00:21:25] Aaron - Interview: I think this illustrates: these problems are complex, the solutions are never one size fits all, they require people to have a sophisticated understanding of things. And that's not how the message typically gets out into the world. I think of like health reporting, for example, and how it feels like every year there's some newfad diet that likes to oversimplify the secret to weight loss or avoiding cancer or whatever. If you just eat eight cucumbers a day, you're gonna be, you know, much healthier. Whatever it is.

[00:21:57] David Pogue: That one works, actually.

[00:21:58] Aaron - Interview: Oh yeah. Well, my wife would agree with you actually. She's a very healthy eater.

[00:22:04] Aaron - Narration: Listening to David, you might assume that his science expertise started with something like a degree in biochemistry from MIT. This part of the episode will probably surprise you, because David's first career wasn't in the lab, but on Broadway.

[00:22:20] David Pogue: Yeah. I have the very definition of an unconventional career path. I grew up obsessed with magic. I loved I Dream of Jeannie and _Bewitched _and the $6 Million Man. And I just, I wanted to be magic. I became a magician. I did 400 birthday parties growing up as a teenager. I just, I wanted there to be magic, basically.

[00:22:46] That's my own self-analysis. That's how this whole tech thing began. You know, you could really argue that opening your phone right now and resetting your thermostat 3000 miles away is kind of magic. Or, you know, speaking aloud in your house to turn the lights off and having it happen is, is magic.

[00:23:06] But I was also really into music, so I, I wrote and played the piano for children's musicals growing up in Cleveland. And then I went to college and wrote musicals all through college. And then when I got out of college, I was, I was a music major and I went to New York and became, uh, a Broadway conductor for 10 years. I played in orchestra pits and conducted and did vocal arrangements.

[00:23:31] And that's really the key to my story because in 1986 or so, the, the Mac had just come out in 1984 and there was this music software that... for the first time since the monks started writing music on paper as notation, there was a new way to input music and it was a software program called Finale.

[00:23:58] And basically you just play on your midi keyboard, your synthesizer, and it would write out the notes for you. It's, you know, it's sort of the musical sheet music equivalent of Siri where you dictate, and it just changed everything. I mean, people did not have to write out every note by hand for the first time in human history.

[00:24:18] So I really wanted this program, but it was a thousand dollars and I was a struggling musician, couldn't afford it. So I was a, a member of a computer club, the New York Mac Users Group, and we had a newsletter and the editor said, "Why don't you write this company and tell them that you're a reviewer and they'll have to send you a free copy?"

[00:24:42] It was a great idea. Great idea. And so I did. And they did. And suddenly I had Finale for free and I wrote a review. And then I'm like, well, heck, I could do that for Photoshop. And then I did the same thing and I could do that for Microsoft stuff and I did the same thing. So that's how we started writing about tech is to get free apps.

[00:25:02] Aaron - Interview: That's so great. I love that.

[00:25:03] David Pogue: Yeah. And then eventually I started doing the same thing and getting paid for it with, I wrote for MacWorld magazine for 13 years and then the New York Times needed a new tech columnist in the year 2000. So I joined them and did that for 13 years, slowly phasing out of musical theater. But you know, it's never really gone from my blood.

[00:25:25] And then once the New York Times byline was there, then all kinds of doors opened. You know, Nova, the PBS science show, asked me to host one of their shows, and that led to a long career of hosting Nova specials. 20 of them. Also, CBS Sunday morning came a-calling 2002 and asked if I would do one story on what was then the hot new invention called the Digital Camera. And so I demonstrated that for, for the viewers. They asked me to come back and do another story, and another. And you know, 21 years later I'm still doing CBS Sunday Morning stories.

[00:26:04] Anyway, overall, the overarching themes have been, you know, science, tech, music, entertainment, showmanship, and explaining. I guess that's, that's ultimately what I do is I'm an explainer.

[00:26:18] Aaron - Narration: When you know this backstory, David's reporting makes sense, because he specialized for years in how to capture people's attention. Once you have that, they'll listen to what you have to say.

[00:26:30] His distinctive quality as a science explainer is how he can simplify complex ideas for non-experts to understand. For example, if you know that mRNA vaccines are a big deal, but you don't get the science of why they're a big deal, listen to episode two of his podcast. In it, David explains how these vaccines work by comparing them to ordering food at a restaurant, something we can all understand. He described this a bit in our interview.

[00:26:59] David Pogue: In the podcast episode I did about it, somebody made the analogy of there's a restaurant in every one of your cells and your dna in the nucleus. In the middle is the chef, and they send instructions to this little messenger chemical called Messenger RNA or mRNA that runs out to the dining room, which is the outer part of the cell, and gives instructions to your protein making apparatus to make things that fight disease. And so the idea is we are reprogramming the messenger from the DNA to the outer part of the cell to carry new instructions to tell the proteins to make defenses against these diseases.

[00:27:41] Aaron - Narration: I've benefited personally from David's abilities. Just after finishing law school, I was running a small blog about iMovie software, just as a hobby. David had written a New York Times tech piece about the new version of the software and I sent him links to my site. And he replied! After a few exchanges, he invited me to tech edit his next iMovie book, part of his long-running Missing Manual series.

[00:28:06] That turned into three subsequent books about iMovie that we co-authored, which was an awesome and empowering experience. David is an exceptionally clear and entertaining writer, and he taught me a lot. In fact, the experience writing with him led me to co-authoring The Business Ethics Field Guide with my friends Brad Agle and Bill O'Rourke. I credit much of its success to all that I learned by working with David.

[00:28:32] His talent for explaining things so well has opened door after door for David, too. It turns out that work as a science explainer can lead to a pretty adventurous life.

[00:28:43] Aaron - Interview: Are there moments that still blow your mind when you reflect on them, where it's like, I can't believe I'm here experiencing this incredible thing?

[00:28:51] David Pogue: I mean, I will say swimming with the sharks is pretty memorable. They had a shark wrangler, and an underwater cameraman, and an assistant. All of us did the dive. They all had full body chain mail suits, and I didn't. I was, I was just in a wetsuit. I'm like, "Can someone explain to me why I'm the only one who didn't get chainmail?"

[00:29:17] And the story was about why nothing grows on sharks like bacteria, barnacles, algae. Nothing grows on sharks like they do on, for example, ships. And it turns out it's because they have this wild, very fine micro groove pattern in their skin. They have like tiny, tiny microscopic scales called denticles. And if you pet a shark head to tail, you don't feel, it just feels like vinyl. But if you pet the shark, the other direction, you, you feel how it's rough and that's, that's those little grooves you're feeling. And that's why we needed to actually go down and touch them and wrangle them.

[00:29:59] And I remember when we were still on the ship, the shark expert said, "Now I'm going to wave these bloody fish guts in the water to attract the sharks to us. So I would advise that you, David, keep your arms by your sides. Don't wave them because the shark's gonna think you've got food and come at you."

[00:30:21] So if you see, if you see the finished, finished footage, like my arms are crossed under my armpits, I'm like,

[00:30:28] Aaron - Interview: As tight to your body as you can get them.

[00:30:30] David Pogue: Exactly. Like a stone.

[00:30:32] And it didn't work anyway. Like the shark came and got the chum and then saw me with these dead eyes and swam straight at my face like, "Do you have any?!?" It was just the scariest thing. I mean, if it had decided to eat me, there was just nothing I could do.

[00:30:50] Aaron - Interview: So is there something you haven't done yet or experienced yet that you hope to someday?

[00:30:55] David Pogue: I mean, someday I'd like to experience zero gravity. I, I don't know if I'm ready to ride on one of those experimental rockets, which seems still super dangerous. But at the very least, maybe on my 60th birthday, I'll sign up for the vomit comet. You know that airplane that right flies in a steep arc so that you experience 30 seconds at a time of zero gravity and floating in the air.

[00:31:17] I think that'd be really fun.

[00:31:18] Aaron - Narration: And now for a word from our sponsor.

[00:31:21] Leading an ethical career can sometimes feel like navigating through a wilderness full of pitfalls and other dangers. Having good intentions isn't enough. What you need are ethical skills.

[00:31:35] The Business Ethics Field Guide leads you through the trickiest of ethical challenges. Based on extensive research involving hundreds of dilemmas faced at work and written by authors with decades of experience, the book guides you through the 13 most common ethical dilemmas that people face. It gives you the expertise and tools you need to navigate them safely. But more than just keeping you safe, it also trains you to be an ethical leader that others can follow with trust and confidence. You can find The Business Ethics Field Guide at Amazon, Apple Books, Audible, and at meritleadership.com.

[00:32:16] Now that we know more about David and his decades of expertise, I wanted to ask him about a range of topics. So let's dig into them.

[00:32:24] Aaron - Interview: Let's start with this one: social media. Has it been, do you think, net positive or net negative as far as its technological usefulness?

[00:32:33] David Pogue: Yes.

[00:32:36] I mean, yeah. I mean, most of the focus is on the negative, which is, I mean, gigantic negative effects, polarization and depression and so on, but, you know, also wonderful effects. You know, uprisings against totalitarianism, and organizing events to fight for climate, or celebration of good deeds. I mean, just an immense amount of stuff that it doesn't get a lot of press.

[00:33:02] I've been assigned a story for Christmas Day for CBS Sunday Morning about the good news of 2022, and believe it or not, there was some. In fact, there was a lot, but it doesn't get press, and I think it's because bad news breaks, right? It, bad news tends to strike suddenly, but good news is just this constant river that's, that's more quiet and it's going on all the time everywhere. So it doesn't make headlines, but it's, it's happening.

[00:33:31] So, yeah, you know, I think the same social media, it's been a giant change with huge, positive and negative effects.

[00:33:40] Yeah.

[00:33:40] Aaron - Interview: What about crypto and blockchain? Are there things about those technologies that most people just don't understand enough?

[00:33:49] David Pogue: I don't think most people understand it at all. I think, you know, the whole thing was this, it was supposed to be unregulated. There weren't going to be middlemen. There weren't going to be banks. There was gonna be nobody charging fees. And I think that, you know, the irony is that already in its early days, we have most of that. There are middlemen. There are exchanges. You pay fees when you do transactions. There isn't regulation much, but it will be regulated. There's no question. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's just a free for all right now. So I, you know, I think most people don't understand that.

[00:34:26] Aaron - Interview: Are there any advancements on the horizon in health that are especially exciting or interesting to you?

[00:34:34] David Pogue: mRNA vaccines. It's a whole realm. It's not just the Covid vaccine. It's a new way of programming your own body to fight disease. And Covid is only the beginning of it. I mean, they're looking at diabetes and cancer and all kinds of diseases. HIV, Lyme disease, all kinds of things could be fixed, and some are already in trials, you know? So I think the mRNA vaccine revolution is just... we've just seen the tip of the iceberg. It's really thrilling.

[00:35:06] Aaron - Interview: As you look at all the fields you reported on. Are there fields where you think, "Man, we need more people in this one"?

[00:35:13] David Pogue: It's a weird time, right? Because it used to be that, you know, programmers would never be in short supply, and now of course you have these massive layoffs by all the tech companies and now you're, you're sort of crazy if you go major in computer science. But this, this could just be a, a glitch.

[00:35:30] I'd say obviously AI is just exploding right now and ethicists in AI, obviously. AI experts are getting massive, lucrative offers right now as they get out of grad school. In medicine, I'm probably not the guy to say, but obviously mRNA is a hot field and personalized medicine is a hot field.

[00:35:50] And you know, the world also needs attention. I, I don't know how we're gonna solve the rare disease problem, but there are no, no pharmaceutical company's gonna develop a drug for a horrible disease that affects only 150 people and we have no real way of solving that problem. But man, if you ever have an option of what you want to work on, there's gonna be a rewarding field for you if you can, if you can afford it.

[00:36:18] Aaron - Narration: David and I also found ourselves in a lengthy conversation about machine learning and AI. This past year has brought a dizzying array of technologies that can make art or write poetry at a level that's almost human.

[00:36:32] David Pogue: Right now, what's really hot on my mind are two gigantic innovations from this company, OpenAI, which is a Silicon Valley artificial intelligence company. A lot of your listeners have probably heard of Dall-E, which is across between Wall-E, the Pixar movie, and Dali, the artist. This is this website where you can type in a description of any kind of art. You want like a panda made of Legos, hula dancing on the rings of Mars, painted in the style of Monet , and in seconds it'll produce that piece of finished art.

[00:37:09] It can be a painting, a cartoon, a pencil sketch, a sculpture, a a knit something, photorealistic, CGI generated. You can make it look whatever you want in the style of whoever you want. And that's very thrilling and very terrifying because of course it instantly means who would ever hire an artist again.

[00:37:29] But then something even more radical came out, which is, it has the awful name ChatGPT. Basically, it's an artificial intelligence writer, so it's exactly the same thing, but for prose. So you can type in, you know, write a limerick about,you know, being an economics professor. Or write an apology letter to my wife for being late to her birthday dinner. Or this is the code I've written and it has a bug that I can't find. Solve the code. Or write the instructions for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, written in the style of the King James Bible.

[00:38:08] Aaron - Narration: You've almost certainly played around with these tools in the past year or maybe even used them for work. And if you haven't, then you really should. In fact, we all need to understand what they can do because the ground is shifting for all kinds of careers because of this technology, including mine as a college professor.

[00:38:26] This was a fun, if somewhat troubling, part of our interview.

[00:38:31] David Pogue: It's terrifying. It's the absolute end of the college entrance essay. It's the end of homework. It's the end of letter writing. My son is applying to colleges. He's, he happens to be a Scrabble champion and so he won the the Nationals twice a couple years ago.

[00:38:51] Aaron - Interview: That's amazing.

[00:38:51] David Pogue: So that's what he wrote his college essay. So I, to compare, I said to this thing, write a college essay about being a Scrabble champion. And it, it basically wrote the same essay. You know, "I've been fascinated by the construction of words since I was a little boy." You know, like, incredible. And so I'm trying to not freak out because my whole career has been observing that freak out. Things tend not to destroy the world after all. But I have a hard time seeing.

[00:39:23] When I was in fourth grade, calculators came out and I remember the same kind of hysteria. "Kids are gonna forget, they're gonna lose the skill of doing arithmetic in their head." And the answer today we would say is, "Yeah. So? Yeah, like that's exactly what happened."

[00:39:40] And I think that's probably what'll happen with this. Like kids aren't gonna learn how to write an essay anymore. They're not gonna be able to write a letter, they're not gonna be able to structure their thoughts. Like now we have this tool, people will use it. That's what I'm trying to, to do is my rationalization without getting upset. But I've shown this to a couple of other professors, Aaron, and they are absolutely terrified.

[00:40:07] Aaron - Interview: Well, and you know, it's so funny to think about that because I teach an ethics class. Right?

[00:40:16] Aaron - Narration: David and I tested how well ChatGPT could answer one of my exam questions for my business ethics class. Without giving away the question--it was about the history of the challenger shuttle disaster--I read the question to David and he read back the reply that ChatGPT generated in just a few seconds.

[00:40:35] Aaron - Interview: Yeah, I would not spot that as not being written by the student.

[00:40:39] David Pogue: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:40] Aaron - Interview: Wow.

[00:40:41] Aaron - Narration: Thinking through everything that we've discussed in this interview, I've gained a much deeper appreciation for the explainers of science and tech, not just for the people engineering or inventing it. It just so happens that my niece is heading into this exact profession, and I thought it would be fun to ask David to give her some advice.

[00:41:01] Aaron - Interview: I have a niece who just graduated with her bachelor's in aerospace from Cal Tech. She was at JPL and had those incredible experiences, but she's actually decided to, to pivot into science communication.

[00:41:13] David Pogue: Wow!

[00:41:14] Aaron - Interview: And so that's what she's doing for her master's degree right now. I, I wanted to ask what advice you have for her.

[00:41:20] David Pogue: Well, I'd say study the psychology of the public before you start communicating, because messages have to be phrased in a way that's reassuring. I mean, my whole thing about the unknown is that it's a hundred percent natural to be afraid of the unknown. We were evolved that way, right? Like our our ancestors survived by not going into the dark cave where there might be bears.

[00:41:49] And so what we need to do as new technologies come along is make them not unfamiliar. Make them familiar. So repetition, analogy, examples, explaining in terms that we are already comfortable with. In other words, the things people are afraid of, self-driving cars, 5G, mRNA vaccines, are only things they're afraid of because they didn't grow up with them.

[00:42:18] There's no such thing as a movement of photosynthesis deniers, right? There's no, there's no movement of people who say that baby humans do not come out of wombs. I mean, there's certain... that that ice does not come from water, right? There's certain things that everybody accepts as as scientific givens, and that's because we grew up with them.

[00:42:38] It's only technologies that are new, since we became adults, that people fear and mistrust. So that kind of thing. I, I'd say she needs to appreciate that before she starts just saying, this new AI program can write your letters for you. You know, you need, you need context, you need framing, you need an understanding of the terror.

[00:43:00] Aaron - Narration: No matter how well the explainers do their jobs, there's surely some of the responsibility that needs to be laid at our feet, the listeners. We have to be both open and discerning and that can be hard to do. David has some great advice for all of us as well.

[00:43:19] Aaron - Interview: What advice do you have for the public as they learn about new science, as they think about, you know, ways that science and technology can help or hurt them? Like are there big lessons that they should be taking away as they process the information tsunami that hits them every day?

[00:43:35] David Pogue: I think the main thing is to consider the source and what they have to gain with the announcement. So is it a commercial company that stands to make a lot of money from this? And in that case, you can afford to be a little skeptical about, you know, have, uh, have they covered all the potential downsides? Have they done the proper testing? Does it work as well as they say?

[00:44:00] On the other hand, if there is no particular beneficiary... For example, as we record this today, it was announced that the National Ignition Facility, this multi-billion dollar experimental lab in California that's been trying to get nuclear fusion to work. This would mean infinite, completely clean, non weaponizable, nuclear energy from fusion. They've been working for years and years and years and years, consuming billions and millions and millions of dollars to attain ignition, which means getting more energy out of this laser collision than they've required to produce the lasers themselves. I hope that makes sense.

[00:44:44] In other words, the first step in getting fusion to work is to get a reaction that generates more power than you put into it. And they haven't even been able to do that for decades. So they finally achieved that and that news just came out this week.

[00:45:01] So, alright, so do we mistrust that information there? There's lots of caveats. That doesn't mean we can immediately build power plants using it. There's a long way to go. But, is there a corporation who's going to profit from this? No, because it's a government facility. Who stands to gain? Well in this case it's the world. I mean, it would be free clean energy forever. So is there a reason to be skeptical that it really happened the way they say they happened?

[00:45:29] Mm, not really.

[00:45:32] Aaron - Narration: We're at this point in history when it feels like every day comes with news of some amazing human achievement: an invention that treats a previously tenacious disease, a promising next step in unlimited clean power, or an actual asteroid being diverted from its original course. But the news is also rife with announcements about a shiny new smartphone that's 3% better than the one that's already in our pocket.

[00:46:01] We're lucky to have the explainers to make sense of all these things, and we ought to make sure that we pay attention to the good ones who can help us see the new gadgets and discoveries for what they really are. I hope we can appreciate the important work that they do.

[00:46:19] I am so grateful to David Pogue for sparing his time and sharing his stories and insights. This episode, as you can imagine, has been a particularly gratifying opportunity for me. If you want to hear his podcast, Unsung Science, or read his book, How to Prepare for Climate Change, we have links to those in the show notes. You can also stay up to date with him by joining his 1.2 million followers on Twitter or by visiting DavidPogue.com.

[00:46:51] Next episode, I'll be talking with my dear friend and mentor, Todd Manwaring. Todd is the founding director of the Ballard Center for Social Impact at BYU. It's the largest center of its kind at any university in the world. We're celebrating its 20th anniversary right now, and the 25,000 student experiences that it's created over the years. We'll talk about how to pick good charities, how to empower young people, and how to find your own path in making a positive impact on the world.

[00:47:25] If you enjoy How to Help, please take a moment to give us a positive review on your podcast app. It really helps us to reach more listeners. And if you have a favorite episode, I hope you'll share it on social media or with your friends. It means a lot to us.

[00:47:40] If you want to stay up to date with the podcast and with my other work, subscribe to the How to Help email newsletter, where I occasionally share ideas for how to have more meaning in your life and in your work. You can subscribe or read the archives at How-to-help.com.

[00:47:58] This episode was written and recorded by me. Our production team for this season has included Ty Bingham, yours truly, and Joseph Sandholtz, who also mixes our audio. Our music comes from the Pleasant Pictures Music Club. If you want to use their music in your projects, you can find a link and a discount code in our show notes.

[00:48:19] Finally, as always, thank you so much for listen. I am Aaron Miller, and this has been How to Help.

Jan 31, 2023 Podcast

Expanding Access to Proof • Ashish Gadnis, CEO of BanQu • s02e07

Summary

How easily could you prove that you are, indeed, you? For most of you, it would be no sweat. In fact, you've probably done it hundreds of times. As a result, you can do things like get a bank account, rent a car, or buy an apartment.

In much of the world, proof is harder to come by. Many people don't have a way to prove things like their income or identity. And yet companies that rely on these workers claim to have sustainable supply chains while leaving behind the people who make them possible.

My guest, Ashish Gadnis, runs BanQu, a blockchain company working to make supply chains transparent and give access to proof for 100 million people so they can escape from poverty.

About Our Guest

Ashish Gadnis is the co-founder of BanQu, the first ever blockchain supply chain and economic identity platform for refugees and people in extreme poverty.

Growing up in poverty in Bombay, Ashish never forgot how it felt to stand in food lines to survive. He went on to build a successful career as a serial entrepreneur, serving as founder and CEO of multiple technology startups. In 2012, he sold his last tech company to a multi-billion-dollar consulting firm and soon after, BanQu was born.

In addition to his role at BanQu, Ashish is also a senior strategic advisor to the United Nations on the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 agenda.

(Adapted from https://sustainablebrands.com/is/ashish-gadnis)

Useful Links

BanQu: https://www.banqu.co/

Ashish's TEDx Talk, "Do You Know the Farmer?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBKOzJPazNM

Follow Ashish on Twitter: https://twitter.com/agadnis

Follow Ashish on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishgadnis/

Solvay Uses Blockchain Software: https://www.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/solvay-utilizes-banqus-blockchain-software-to-secure-guar-supply-chain-and-promote-farmers-digital-autonomy.html

Pleasant Pictures Music

Join the Pleasant Pictures Music Club to get unlimited access to high-quality, royalty-free music for all of your projects. Use the discount code HOWTOHELP15 for 15% off your first year.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ashish: And when I landed up in Bogota, I was just like, "Wow, I have my own toilet." You know, if you've not had that freedom, most people in America can't relate to this. But for me it was like this aha moment. I'm like, ah, that's what freedom feels like.

[00:00:14] Aaron - Narration: Hi, I'm Aaron Miller. And this is How to Help, a podcast about having a life and career with meaning, integrity, and impact. This is season two, episode seven: Expanding Access to Proof.

[00:00:32] This episode of How to Help is sponsored by Merit Leadership, home of The Business Ethics Field Guide.

[00:00:40] Before we begin, I just want to say thanks to all of you who are listening. The other day, someone shared this lovely compliment. They said, quote, "By the way, I loved the podcast episode with Walter Shaub. Definitely my new favorite episode. I think I've shared it with a half a dozen people already." You know, knowing that you enjoy the show and that you take the time to share it, it just means the world to me. So thank you for listening. Thank you for leaving reviews. And thank you especially for sharing the podcast.

[00:01:13] How easily could you prove that you are, indeed, you? For most of you, I think it would be no sweat. In fact, you've probably done it hundreds of times. You'd show me your driver's license or maybe your passport, and it's as simple as that. Other than waiting in line, maybe paying a fee or taking a test, you didn't have to do too much for this incredibly useful little card.

[00:01:40] Many of us are swimming in proof we didn't have to work to earn. We get a birth certificate just for being born. The same goes for a social security card if you're in the United States. As we get older, if we don't want to take the test for a driver's license, we can still get a government-issued photo ID just by showing someone a few utility bills and that same birth certificate that we got for free.

[00:02:07] When you want to open a bank account, a government-issued ID is pretty much all you need. You can then call the bank whenever you want and do business over the phone just as long as you can share something simple like part of your Social Security number and the name of your childhood pet. Or you can just log in on the web with your password. Thanks to programmers and encryption, you have all the proof you need.

[00:02:32] Now think of what all this proof does for you, because it does a lot. You can get a job more easily because of it, or rent an apartment. Quick and simple access to proof makes it easier to get on a plane, to borrow money from a bank, or to rent a car.

[00:02:50] Proof, if you think about it, is like grease that makes the gears of the economy turn more freely and it makes your life so much easier.

[00:03:02] Like most things we have in abundance, it's easy to take proof for granted. In much of the world, proof is much harder to come by. The government agencies that provided are slow or the process is expensive. You might be at the whim of people who cancel appointments on you or give preference to people with more money. And you might just not have a way to prove what's being asked for, like your income. My guest this week, Ashish Gadnis, has two stories that powerfully illustrate this difference.

[00:03:39] Ashish: When I came to the US I had $240, but at the end of the first week, I was able to open a bank account.

[00:03:46] There's a couple moments in life, at least for me, that have really shaped my understanding and I'm still learning. But it was a shock. It was a shock because you know, here I was a kid with nothing, but I was able to open a bank account because I was able to show my employment letter. I was able to show a copy of my passport and I was able to show that I had a pay stub, right?

[00:04:10] And I was able to get a bank account, and that was kind of this massively shocking aha moment for me because I didn't kind of exist up until that point. If you fast forward, and this might seem disjointed because I have adhd, but I'll make sense in a second here.

[00:04:25] But this happened in 1994 and 2014, you know, 20 years later, almost to the same date, I was retired. I sold my last startup. I'd spent a couple years in and out of the DRC in Congo. And the women farmers that I was volunteering with as a part of the USAID program wanted to open a bank account, right? And, and a lot of people have heard the stories that the local bank refused to, to let that mama farmer open a bank account.

[00:04:56] And 20 years apart, right? Two incidences, same incident, almost extremely different outcomes, right? So I got a bank account and there was no issue. I got it in 1994, began a great career, made money, blah, blah, blah.

[00:05:13] Fast forward, here's this mama farmer who was not able to open a bank account because she couldn't prove her harvest information. She could not prove the land that she was using. She couldn't prove that she was a farmer for the last 15, 20 years, and the horrors of, you know, death and rape and violence that she had seen, yet the bank said no.

[00:05:38] And, you know, I got in an argument and the guy finally said, look, I can't bank her, but I'll bank you. Right? That's where the name comes from. And that is kind of the bookends of, if you see, you know, where kind of my life bounced around is here's 1994, where, you know, even though I'm not white, I got a bank account. Right. Walked in. Got it. And fast forward in, in, in 2014, a woman who worked so hard is not bankable.

[00:06:05] And, and you don't even have to think about 2014. This happened to me two weeks ago. I was in Tanzania with the Maasai farmers in a place called Monduli, about a hundred kilometers south of um, Kilimanjaro. And the local banking system doesn't let them open a bank account without charging a 16% interest rate on a loan.

[00:06:29] Forget 1994, forget 2014. This is 2022 October of this year where smallholder farmers, especially women, are still refused a bank account even though they do the most important work in our supply chains, which is grow our crops. The hardest working people in our global supply chain are our farmers, our workers, our waste pickers, our miners, yet they are invisible, unbanked, and cannot prove their existence.

[00:07:02] Yet you and I, you know, we are claiming sustainability. We're claiming this climate, romance, we're claiming suddenly this ethical radar that we have trying to save the planet. But I'm like, but wait a minute, you know that mother in Zambia and Uganda and Tanzania is still unbanked .

[00:07:23] Aaron - Narration: Ashish is the CEO of BanQu, spelled B-A-N-Q-U. It's a blockchain company helping bring the power of proof to those who need it most, and it does this by adding transparency and simplicity to everyone in a supply chain. From the cocoa farmer in Ivory Coast to the waste picker who's recycling your bottle of chocolate milk. With BanQu, the mama farmer whom Ashish mentioned can finally have proof of the success of her business. BanQu is replacing a broken system where what proof there is can be easily destroyed.

[00:08:01] Ashish: In 2019, you know, when we were like growing crazy and everything, we were just starting to roll out BanQu for barley farmers. And we hadn't yet gone to this one mama farmer, Agnes, her name was. And we kind of overheard a conversation where the previous month she had been given a paper receipt because they didn't have cash.

[00:08:20] So she went home. By the time she got home, it rained, the receipt disintegrated. Think about that. It disintegrated. So she comes, four days--I'm not making it up--four days she waited for her money because the receipt had disintegrated. Now, fast forward, right? She is on BanQu today. She sells it.

[00:08:43] But the point I'm trying to make is that that is the power of restoring their rights. It's not even pity. It's not even help. It's just they, we owe the mother a receipt, right? Yeah. And that's what blockchain does.

[00:08:57] Aaron - Narration: Now the mere mention of the word "blockchain" might make your eyes glaze over like most technical mumbo jumbo. Or instead it makes you think of the scams that are perpetrated by Miami Crypto Bros who brag about their bored Ape Yacht Club NFT.

[00:09:13] If you don't already know how blockchain works, then I am not the right person to explain the technical details. What I can say is that at its core, blockchain is a technology that allows computers run by different people to all have verified copies of the same data. Because of how it works, it's impossible to make changes to the data without every other computer knowing what changed and how. In BanQu's case, blockchain becomes a transparent way of documenting the sale of things like cotton and cocoa.

[00:09:48] Ashish: So now put yourselves in the shoes of that farmer who has been growing cotton for the last 10 years, or coffee or cacao, or picking up the bottles and selling it in this unfortunate dance of buyer and seller, but cannot prove anything. You are never gonna break that cycle, right? And this is where the solution matters of blockchain, right?

[00:10:11] So in the non-blockchain world, when that--staying with cotton, right--when that bag of cotton changed hands, the person who buys it may have an Excel spreadsheet, may have a smartphone, may have a database. In that example, it's a one-sided transaction. All the data goes into a repository, Excel, or whatever, right?

[00:10:38] But that farmer did not have any say in terms of what was recorded on that centralized system. So that's the current world we live in, which is what I call the world of data dictatorship, right? Where somebody who owns the data controls, the data, dictates the data. And then if you are in that base of the pyramid when it comes to poverty, you don't have a say.

[00:11:05] Blockchain. What's the difference? The very basic premise of blockchain is that if two parties participate in one transaction, then both parties are owed a copy of the same transaction in a way that it cannot be changed. If the farmer sells a bag or a bushel of cotton, if I used blockchain, then a copy of that transaction of 40 kilos of bushel at 16% moisture and 400 kwacha, price quality and quantity. Both people should have a copy of the transaction in a way that nobody can dispute.

[00:11:49] And how do you do that? If I use blockchain, the mother has an SMS phone. And she's smart. She knows how to use SMS. What if, and this is kind of the premise of BanQu, right? What if we could deliver that same history through SMS, write it on blockchain so all parties have the same copy, but deliver it to her via SMS.

[00:12:10] If I can do that, then she can interact or react with it and say yes, no, or otherwise. And that for us was the aha moment. You know, when we started BanQu in 2016, we said, ah, why blockchain makes sense? Because for the first time, this farmer or this waste picker will be given their own copy of their data that they have always been owed for the last 300 years. And that same copy will then propagate all the way upstream so that nobody can deny it. It is extremely simple, yet extremely powerful, and never been done before. And that's the solution.

[00:13:00] Aaron - Narration: By now, you're probably wondering about Ashish himself. As is the case with my other guests, he has a remarkable personal story that brought him to this point.

[00:13:11] Born and raised in poverty, Ashish learned to code, worked around the world, built and sold multiple companies, and is now dedicated to spending the rest of his working years on this problem: helping 100 million people out of poverty. His story begins in Mumbai, India.

[00:13:32] Ashish: Growing up, uh, late sixties, early seventies, you know, we didn't have much. Right. You know, poverty was just what it was. Me and my brother, we broke up the week in terms of who got to stand in the ration line, and it wasn't, you know, it, we didn't know anything better, right? So I stood in last line for three days and my brother got the other three days, and it was for basic commodities, right? Wheat, rice, and oil. So we could eat.

[00:13:56] And it left this tug in my heart or a punch if, depending how you look at it, around poverty. And that kinda shaped my thinking at an early age. That was kind of like, someday I'm gonna get out. And then someday when I do get out, I wanna find a way for other people not to be a number standing in a ration line just to eat.

[00:14:19] Aaron - Narration: As a teenager, Ashish found that he had an interest and ability for software coding, something he shared with a lot of kids around that time. It was a skill that promised an escape from poverty.

[00:14:32] Ashish: You know, in those days you could learn programming and my dad said, you can beg or code. And you know, here I am. Pretty stereotypical, nothing, you know, smart about me. It just, everybody else had the same choices and I fell into that same bucket.

[00:14:47] Aaron - Interview: Learning coding and then sort of seeing the path, what was your vision like as you were first picking up this skill? I mean, what were you seeing ahead of yourself that way as you were learning how to code?

[00:14:56] Ashish: To be honest, nothing. You know, I'm lower than the doormat kind of guy, and no, I didn't have any vision, nothing grandiose.

[00:15:02] I was just like, I just don't wanna be poor. And you know, if the word on the street was, if you could code, um, you'll make money. And hopefully with coding you'll be sent overseas. So, you know, I was just like, oh, I wanna get out. So gonna code and that's it.

[00:15:21] Aaron - Narration: You might have noticed the way that Ashish hesitates taking credit for being especially smart or ambitious. He really doesn't see himself that way, as being smarter or better than any of those in his same circumstances. Mostly he sees himself and his path as fortunate.

[00:15:40] Ashish: It's a straightforward path. I think a lot of people, and I'll just speak for myself, right, give people like me a lot of credit, and I don't, because it's not, it's nothing special.

[00:15:48] If you were born instead of me in Mumbai, you would be in the same place. It has nothing to do with intelligence, in my humble opinion. So the path was simple, right? You, if you learn how you, if you're decent at programming, a good chance you'll get a scholarship to go to college, which I did. And when I finished my university, I was hired, you know, I was hired by Tata.

[00:16:09] Tata was all the rage. You know, they were the largest software offshore company in those days. I think they still are. I graduated with an engineering degree with software programming as one of my core skills, and next thing I know, I'm, you know, sitting in a basement and writing code, and in early nineties, got a passport and then landed up in Colombia as a coder?

[00:16:31] As an offshore coder, I didn't speak Spanish. I mean, it was nothing. You know, it was no slum dog stuff. It was just pretty basic. Everybody did the same thing and so did I.

[00:16:41] Aaron - Interview: Yeah. So Colombia, maybe you could tell what that was like going from India to Colombia.

[00:16:45] Ashish: That was a big one. Right? So that I think, you know, that, uh, had nothing to do with coding. I mean, honestly, that was kind of the first time I experienced freedom, right?

[00:16:52] I had my own toilet. I mean, you know, not to be crass or anything like that, but that's a, you know, it's a big thing. It's like, you know, I had to share a toilet growing up in India, and when I landed up in Bogota, I was just like, wow, I have my own toilet.

[00:17:04] You know, if you've not had that freedom, most people in America can't relate to this. For me, it was like this aha moment. I'm like, ah, that's what freedom feels like, right? To sit on a toilet seat and not be yelled at to vacate. It is freedom. That for me was this, oh, I am never leaving, right?

[00:17:20] Aaron - Interview: So, and when you say sharing a toilet, you don't mean with your family?

[00:17:23] Ashish: Oh, I'm not talking about, you know, like...now my kids have their own toilet. One human being per toilet. Right. This is America, which is insane. No, I'm talking about like other families. My grandmother used to live in a, you know, where you have like 16 other families, these are these little boxes or homes or whatever you want to call it.

[00:17:39] And then all the families have a common toilet. Well, it's like a public toilet, right? And that's a big difference, right? And, and for me, that kind of shaped kind of my thinking around freedom and my thinking around, uh...you can or cannot take for granted.

[00:17:57] I ask people like, what was their first experience of freedom, and most people can't answer it. I can. I can tell you the minute and the moment because I sat on a toilet seat and didn't get bothered. You know, I was 22 years old. So it's , you know, it's, it's what it is, right?

[00:18:15] Aaron - Narration: After working in Columbia for a few years, it was in 1994 that Ashish moved to the US to take a programming job in Boston, which then led to work in other parts of the country. And the timing was just right exactly as the internet boom began to take shape.

[00:18:34] Aaron - Interview: How did you pivot from just being a programmer, working for paycheck, to becoming a startup founder?

[00:18:41] Ashish: So again, nothing crazy. Pretty stereotypical, right? It was the late nineties, it's 96, 97. You know, internet was just coming to be, I wasn't poor anymore, but now I wanted to be rich.

[00:18:53] Right? So kind of the, you know, , the pride and greed, you know, kicks in, right? It's just, you know, we're all flawed. I'm probably more flawed than most human beings.

[00:19:02] And it was the right place at the right time. I took the leap. I knew there was a need for technology solutions that people were willing to pay a premium on. You know, developing a website, you could make 20, 30 grand. You know, today you can do it for free.

[00:19:17] And that's it, right? So again, I'm being, being very honest with you, right? I wish I could add a better story. It like, I'm just, I didn't have any this great aha moment. I'm just like, Hey man, you know, I can make some serious money and, and be my own boss.

[00:19:33] So I started a couple of companies got into the whole supply chain side of things, you know, that that's kind of where I spent most of my time in that period. 1994 through 2012 is kind of when I sold my last startup, and that was the, the ticket out of not just poverty, but you know, this is kind of where you start making money.

[00:19:57] Aaron - Narration: In my experience, successful startup founders also have plenty of failures. We don't often talk about these very much, so I made sure to ask Ashish about his. I anticipated a story or two about a business idea that fell apart, or that was too early for its time. But instead it prompted a story that tells about how Ashish came to the world of social impact. This experience almost derailed him entirely from his ambitions to do good.

[00:20:26] Ashish: It's interesting you asked about failure. One of my biggest failures was when the Haiti earthquake happened, and this has kind of shaped my path out of the startup world.

[00:20:38] If you may, you know, when the Haiti earthquake happened in 2010, we were doing really good as a business. I was running a company called Forward Hindsight, and you know, I always wanted to do something in poverty, right? Just going back to where I was born and everything. So I was doing, you know, cutting checks for NGOs and everything.

[00:20:53] But when the Haiti earthquake happened, my founder and I, and he's even my founder today, Jeff Kaiser, I think you've met him, we decided that we wanted to do something. You know, basically shut down the company for two weeks and we raised 48 tons of supplies, you know, using our business network, right?

[00:21:12] We leaned on our network and for Haiti in two weeks and man, it was an ego trip. Amazing. I mean, I was on every news cover, local channel, NPR. I mean, I have a big head, and my head was like, 10 times its size. It's this massive ego trip, right? Like CEO of a company does this, this, and that.

[00:21:31] Yet it's my biggest failure in life by far compared to anything else I've done is because yes, we got all that into Haiti, but six months later, what we found out was none of the stuff had moved. And Haiti was worse off financially, even though $8 billion had poured into Haiti.

[00:21:51] And people like me had taken a lot of credit for doing good work, yet I had nothing to show for it, right? And that's kind of when I realized that this whole notion of not really understanding the last mile is bad. You just take a philanthropy approach, which is what I had done.

[00:22:10] It was a great ego feeder for me, but it was a complete disaster. It was driven with so much pity and almost no dignity. That, that's kind of when it really bothered me that I'm like, oh my God, I failed so badly.

[00:22:25] Aaron - Narration: Ashish, around that time, sold his last company and found himself wondering how he could really help in a way that actually made a difference. It turned out the Haiti experience, as disappointing as it was, propelled him to a better understanding of how to help.

[00:22:41] Ashish: Kind of that oh, oh no moment in life, right? And I was just like, wait a minute. You know, all the money and effort is just wasted, right? It's, it's all driven by our need for pride and greed. Yet, at the end of the day, we are not solving problems.

[00:22:58] So when I sold the last startup in 2012, I always wanted to do something, but I didn't want to give away my money or any of that. I didn't wanna do an NGO thing. Definitely wasn't doing a Haiti 2.0 again, right.

[00:23:11] So I happened to know some friends who had mentioned to me about this USAID guys, and I know about USAID obviously, and that they were looking to start a social enterprise in the Congo and they were looking for a business CEO. But they didn't have a lot of money and it was a thing that they wanted to try and I didn't need the money, so I said, "Hey, you know, I'm, I'm happy to be CEO, but I don't want to get paid. So I'll be your volunteer CEO. I'll sign up for a couple years and see what happens."

[00:23:45] So one thing led to another, and I'm on a plane to the DRC as a, and they don't actually call it CEO. You know, it's like a goofy title. It's called Chief of, Chief of Party, right, which is like an official title that USAID uses for the guy or the woman who's in charge.

[00:24:02] So I was the chief of party for the social enterprise. So it was a public private partnership where, you know, USA puts an X amount of money and then private enterprises put an X amount of money and then, you know, you have somebody like me run it.

[00:24:18] Aaron - Interview: And what was the, what was the venture idea?

[00:24:20] Ashish: It's, it's a platform called Asili, A-S-I-L-I. And the idea was to create opportunity linkages for farmers and healthcare workers in a way that creates a job economy. But you know, has a direct impact on reducing infant child mortality, because of very high rates, right, in those parts of the world.

[00:24:43] I had this massive giant ego. I still do, but I'm much lower than the doormat today. But in those days I was just like, Hey, sold a startup. You know, how hard can it be? I've always wanted to end poverty, so let's do it. Right. So stupid. I mean, God, I look back at myself in 2013 and I'm like, you know, "idiot" would not even begin to describe who I was, but it's what it is. Right?

[00:25:04] And, and so I jumped with both feet in, and honestly, it just, it kind of destroyed me, you know. Because I think most people are able to separate what they see, and then they take this approach around charity and pity. You know, it's kind of...I talked to a lot of people, I'd read a lot of books on Congo and everything, and everybody had this kind of badge of honor of going and doing work in Africa and then coming and telling their friends and family about it.

[00:25:31] I couldn't do that. I, I just went toe deep and deep and deep and deep that I just, it kept eating at me. That we live in a world where there is disparity, but disparity to this extent that's intertwined with supply chains. That's the motivation that drives me today and, and then the live examples are the child labor that happens in places like Congo, even today.

[00:25:59] Yet, we would use a smartphone for $800, right? I'm guilty. I'm one on one right now. You know you'll pay $12 for a latte that says a hundred percent ethically sourced Congolese coffee. It's not true. Right, right. Uh, you know, or you will, you will basically buy a bottle of water that says a hundred percent recycled PET that I know is being picked up at a landfill outside of Lusaka, Zambia, right?

[00:26:27] And I think the, the two years, honestly, I did not do any good in my humble opinion. I just unlearned everything that I thought I knew and kind of really when that incident happened with the mama farmer, it was the lowest point in my life because I was just like--and I get emotional about it because I was just like--it just does not make any sense here is that if, if we cannot even let this mother have a bank account that establishes her existence as a human being, who is actually the most productive person of this supply chain at the end of the day, right? Right. And her children are being forced into child labor, then all of our, you know, victory that philanthropists or corporations claim of progress we've made...

[00:27:25] Yes, we've made progress. But man, if you're standing next to that mother, you will feel that you are in middle Earth and you have made zero progress. And that's the piece that kind of hit me. And then I quit. You know, I'm, I'm not a quitter, but I quit. I just, I couldn't deal with it. I just quit at the end of 2014 and I said, um, I just can't look these people in the eye. Because we were getting awards. I mean, we won awards. I mean, we won the Battery Ventures Award, we won the Design Thinking Award, and I won the Clinton Global Initiative Award, and I'm like, man, I, I feel ashamed here.

[00:28:04] Aaron - Interview: Your story about Haiti and your story about working in the Congo too. It's the same, it's the same story in the sense that a lot of resources and a lot of good intentions are not enough. We need better and deeper understanding of the problems we're trying to tackle.

[00:28:18] And it sounds like your time, there was just a really intense sort of like advanced degree, right, in what the issues of poverty are really about.

[00:28:29] Ashish: Yeah. And it turns out it was never about resources, right? And for me, that is the piece that I struggle with even today. It's like, you know...you hear a lot of these commitments and pledges. And I'm honestly like extremely vanilla, right? I try to de-complex everything. I just ask a very, very, very basic question. If that sweater is 100% ethically sourced then the CEO of the company that made it needs to sit down with me and show me the one or two or three farmers that grew the cotton, show me their last three years worth of income and that it has gone up.

[00:29:09] That's it. I'm not asking for anything more.

[00:29:12] Aaron - Narration: Let's take a break here for a word from our sponsor.

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[00:30:10] --

[00:30:10] The problem that BanQu is tackling today is not hard technologically. By that I mean to say that we have all the tools we need for truly transparent supply chains. We could, for example, know the name of the farmer who grew the cotton in the jeans that we wear, or the cocoa in the chocolate bar that we eat.

[00:30:31] The problem instead is that opaque supply chains serve the people who control them. It allows them to hide what they don't want us to see. This is what BanQu is working to change.

[00:30:42] Aaron - Interview: So supply chain issues are fascinating because they become really murky and blurry really quickly. Companies will buy massive amounts of inputs into their business, right? Whether it's like cobalt to go into cell phone batteries or, or cotton to go into the the sweater that you're wearing. But they don't even necessarily know where that comes from. Why don't they know?

[00:31:04] Ashish: So I think why they don't know the simpler answer is that they are accustomed to not knowing and making a lot of money on not knowing.

[00:31:15] So let me unpack that. Okay? Yeah. And this part is important. I'm a big believer, right? If you, if you really cannot explain the problem, then the solution is useless. Okay? So, so let's unpack the cotton piece. A smallholder farmer in Ghana, Uganda, Zambia, Pakistan, Uyghur region in China, wherever, right. When a smallholder farmer brings the first bale of cotton and gives it to a cooperative, or a trader, or a buyer--chain of custody, classic supply chain 101-- the problem is very simple to define, articulate, and pinpoint, which is: that farmer has no ability to prove their existence when it comes to quality, quantity, and price in a way that both parties have agreed, and in a way, everybody upstream agrees that that happened. Okay.

[00:32:18] And nothing to do with technology. It is basic human trade 101 going back 500 years. Right? And now the, the black box begins. Okay. Yeah. The black box begins when that middle man then says, I'm gonna buy from five other farmers at different qualities, commingle it and it sell it upstream where now there is no transparency of price, quality, and quantity.

[00:32:49] So then what happens? A certifying agency shows up, you know, fair trade or whatever, right? Everybody shows up and they start certifying saying It's ethical cotton, it's sourced good environmental practices and things like that. And everybody's looking at that black box.

[00:33:06] The problem with the black box is that that black box cannot tie back to the individual farmer, right? So if I have five farmers that are coming into one cooperative or one aggregation point, these farmers crop is co-mingled. So if I'm the middle man, I can squeeze them and because they have to feed their child. What leverage do you have as a farmer in that conversation on the Zambia/Congo border on the Uganda/Tanzania border? Your leverage is zero. If you're Uyghur Muslim in China, your leverage is zero. Okay? But then everybody shows up in the middle. They certify it. You walk into a store and buy ethically sourced cotton, feeling really good about it as a consumer, right?

[00:33:59] So the problem now is very simple to describe, which is that there are at least a billion people, maybe 750 million people in the world today, who are those farmers, who are those waste pickers--it's the same thing when it comes to recycling, no different on just on the other side of the supply chain--who on a daily basis are providing the raw materials for global supply chain, yet cannot prove their existence in that global supply chain beyond the measure of doubt.

[00:34:32] And, and that is why these people continue to be unbanked and in extreme poverty and no rights, human rights violations and everything, because they have no proof.

[00:34:48] Aaron - Narration: I called this episode Expanding Access to Proof, but it really is referring to two kinds of proof. One of them is the proof that the mama farmer deserves to show how much she made and why she deserves a bank account.

[00:35:01] But the other way that BanQu expands access to proof is providing proof to customers to know that the products they're buying really have the impact that they claim. BanQu is essentially offering a product to companies that helps them to prove it.

[00:35:18] So with this explanation of the problem, how is BanQu going to fix this? Humanity creates black boxes because somebody uses them to profit. What are the incentives for those running our supply chains to start adding transparency in a way that allows everyone to be treated with dignity?

[00:35:35] Ashish: Great question. In my opinion, the way to disrupt the black box, it relies on the shoulders of CEOs, boards, investors, and corporations.

[00:35:46] I love NGOs. I love government agencies, but the commerce piece, which is directly tied to the last mile, at least 75% of that is moving through global brands of their everyday products. Coffee, cacao, maize, corn, wheat, rice, plastic paper, cardboard, cobalt. Right? So the CEOs of these companies who are at the top end, right?Tier, tier zero, and the tier five is downstream.

[00:36:15] They have to have the courage to tell the black box that I won't buy from you if you can't show me the visibility. Look, 20% of the middlemen are gonna be horrible. I've had a couple of death threats, but I think 80% in my opinion, like I always look at the good side, 80% or 75% of the middle men are also poor people. They're just, you know, do a good living.

[00:36:38] The gap is that the CEOs are not really enforcing this level of traceability because they're getting away by saying, I'm gonna make a pledge for sustainability. I'm gonna say everything is gonna be great by 2030. Have an awesome brochure. Go to COP 27, tell the world a hundred percent of my farmers are gonna be regenerated by 2030. Get a awesome pat on the back. Nobody's really asking the question "But how?" So this is, disruption has to happen at the leadership level.

[00:37:12] Aaron - Interview: Are there examples of CEOs that are doing it right? I know you work with some. Are there examples that come to mind that illustrate the right way to approach this sort of transparent supply chain?

[00:37:23] Ashish: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know the one second share with you publicly, right? So like you look at Solvay. It, it's a big chemical company, and their CEO, Ilham, their Chief Sustainability Officer, Lynn. You know, we started working with them a couple years ago and they're like, "Hey, you know, we sell gum to L'Oreal, right?" The shampoo company and the cosmetic company. "But we wanna be able to prove that the farmers that we buy, the base seed," It's called guar, that makes it gum. "We wanna know who they are. We wanna know if they're being paid. We wanna know if their income's growing up."

[00:37:56] And they have now rolled us out in India, right? For thousands of farms. So you have a CEO of a chemical company who is a for-profit company--so is BanQu right, we're a for-profit company--but recognizes that I wanna actually do what I'm gonna tell the world I'm gonna do. Right. You know, we work with Coca-Cola, we work with Wilmer, AB and Bev, right? But honestly, I also tell people, right, look for every Solvay that we run, there's 15 of them out there that will tell the world that they're gonna have a hundred percent of their farmers, uh, doing regenerative agriculture, but they couldn't name one farmer and show their income history right? And that's the piece that unfortunately hasn't happened. The scale hasn't happened.

[00:38:42] Aaron - Narration: There are forces at work to incentivize companies to be more sustainable. The ESG movement is part of this. ESG stands for "environment, social and governance," and it describes efforts to account for the impact that companies have outside of their financial returns.

[00:39:00] But ESG has a long way to go.

[00:39:03] Ashish: So I think, I think honestly the ESG trend is the right thing. It's the right, you know, wake up call. Where it is headed in my humble opinion is in the absolute wrong direction. And, and that's why, you know, I call it this unfounded climate romance where yes, we wanna save every plastic bottle, but oh, by the way, a poor mother on the shores of Port-Au-Prince in Haiti is picking up the bottles and not gonna make $1.90.

[00:39:29] People are like, oh, I don't wanna worry about that right now. I am saving the planet because this bottle is 100% recycled. That's an absolute lie, right? What happened to the families? Were they compensated? If you are saying 100% of our cacao farmers in Ghana are gonna be regenerated farmers, and you are gonna charge me 14% premium at a Whole Foods on a bag of cacao that says that, then show me the income rise of those smallholder farmers in Ghana has not happened since 2018.

[00:40:06] So yes, you can put out an awesome ESG brochure that says region regenerative agriculture, water conservation, carbon credits, but if you can't back it...I'm yet to find one.

[00:40:20] You know, we've lost clients, right? We've lost clients because they'll say, "Hey, you're opening a can of worms that I can't handle." And that's the piece that, that what I call is the green washing, which is a danger, right? Because we are not solving the actual problem....

[00:40:37] Recycled batteries. Here's another one. Look at the amount of ESG press we're getting for recycled batteries because cobalt is going, you know, low. But where are these batteries being picked up at? They're being picked up at landfills across India and Nigeria by children under the age of 10!

[00:40:57] Aaron - Narration: As consumers, we also benefit from the black box supply chains. It's because we can buy what we want without having to know the consequences of our choices. There's a movement pioneered by companies like Ben and Jerry's, Method, Allbirds, and others to change this, to make us all more ethical consumers. Ashish is a skeptic though of both the power and the behavior of consumers in wealthy countries.

[00:41:22] Aaron - Interview: Consumers want to live ethically. I mean, you talk about the example of buying a, you know, an ethically sourced sweater. Ethical consumption, today in the modern world with supply chains the way they are, feels nearly impossible because it feels like every time you buy a product that makes a promise of some kind, you really have no way of knowing if that promise is being kept.

[00:41:44] So what thoughts do you have for the people who want to be ethical consumers? What are the things that you wish they were focusing on, the questions they were asking, the benchmarks they were looking for to add more pressure to the brands and the suppliers to improve this?

[00:41:59] Ashish: Man. Great question. I'm gonna give you unpopular answer. I think the, the, there's a misnomer that the consumer has a voice.

[00:42:08] Um, and this is gonna piss off some listeners here, uh, and I, I'll give you a simple example, right? If you ask a group of teenagers, right, "Here's a hundred dollars, and go purchase a ethically sourced pair of jeans or lipstick in Provo, Utah, right? Or you can buy four pairs of jeans at H&M." Okay. What do you think they'll do?

[00:42:31] Right? And, and yes, there's a lot of noise around, you know, the consumer's voice. Consumers are buying ethically sourced. But you know, I, I ask myself or ask anybody, you walk into a Whole Foods, you see a bag of coffee that says ethically fair-trade, organic source, right?

[00:42:47] Do you actually just buy it and go feeling good about it? Or you say, wait a minute, right? I'm gonna take the next three days, start calling and find out "What's the income stream of the Guatemala farmer that is on this bag of coffee?" You're not gonna do that, right? So, so I'm not saying...I love the consumer angle, right? But I don't think the consumer has a strong enough voice. It's just because our, our buying habits are tied to shiny objects.

[00:43:20] Aaron - Interview: Yeah. And we don't have the three days to go do the research to make sure the farmer in Guatemala has been paid well.

[00:43:25] Ashish: Exactly. I'm just trying to shine a reality light, right? The problem needs to be solved at the CEO purchasing and, and corporate governance and the board level, right? If, if CEOs can stand up and say, "If I said that 100% of my plastic is recycled and my packaging, then I need to know over the next five years, every single landfill where my plastic's coming from, and I wanna know if the waste pickers are getting out of poverty."

[00:43:54] Aaron - Narration: BanQu is now operating in 58 countries and 13 languages. It's also won awards or praise from the UN, the International Finance Corporation, Fortune Magazine, and host of others. Its clients include Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, and Mars. So what's next for the company and for Ashish?

[00:44:16] Ashish: I, I think the unique problems we are wrestling with right now is getting people to recognize that ESG and supply chains are intertwined and the blind spot is at the source, not upstream.

[00:44:34] So that's a big challenge, right? I mean, I mean, I have emails from CEOs who say, "Love what you're doing, but you know, right now we're focusing on our ESG commitments." I mean, think about that for a second. I have emails from CEOs saying that, and I'm like, "Am I like completely losing my mind?" Right?

[00:44:52] But, but in, in their mind, the ESG commitment is the end game, not the work. Okay. So that's, that's a challenge. Uh, the second challenge is that, you know, in a, in a recession economy, right, do people really follow through, right? In a recession economy, you are going to hunker down and squeeze downstream your suppliers. And the minute you do that, the suppliers are gonna say, "Hey, they're not really gonna care if I bought it ethically or unethically." Right? So that's, that's a challenge.

[00:45:24] And then the last challenge I always run into, which is this personal to me, is that oftentimes I find myself in conversations where people will go, "What are you talking about?" Right? Because they have not taken the time to understand their own supply chain. So when I say there's a farmer on the Zambia/Congo border who reads SMS uses mobile money and wants to prove that this is the cotton she sold her, they're like, "That's not on our radar for this year." And I'm going, whoa, whoa.

[00:46:00] So that's the challenge. I think. What's next? Is in my humble opinions, continue the fight, right? It's, you know, our goal is a hundred million people and a hundred million business. We're coming up about 15 million people by the end of this year, about 4 million in revenue. So it's still a long way to go, right?

[00:46:18] But a hundred million is a drop in the bucket, man. I mean, it's like, you know, we'll get to a hundred million. That's not an issue. The bigger problem is, you know, we need, we need more BanQus out there.

[00:46:28] Aaron - Interview: What advice do you have for the people out there who aspire to tackle the big, complex problems like you are?

[00:46:34] Ashish: Man, I'm nobody to give any advice. I'm a big believer in the power of one, right? Which is that no matter how complex your supply chain is, right, if you can go all the way to the one waste picker, or the one farmer, or the one worker, and ensure that over the next three years that you have step changed without any pity, with all dignity and commerce, right?

[00:47:08] That's the power of one. Help if it has an undertone of pity is the worst thing you can do to somebody. Help without pity is really dignity, and I think that's, it's a hard, hard thing to do, right? Because we were all raised with this, you know, "Let's help somebody." But it comes from this place of pity, and that's, in my opinion, pity then ties to your own pride and greed, and it's very hard to unwind.

[00:47:37] Aaron - Narration: What is it that keeps Ashish and his team motivated to reach a hundred million people? What is it about BanQu that makes all of these people wake up and work so hard at this every day? Well, it's stories like this one.

[00:47:51] Ashish: About three or four years ago, I met this young woman in Colombia, in Colombia. And she had a little child, maybe three or four years old. And she's a waste picker. And we were rolling out, you know, same software except on the recycling side. And I saw her at the corner, she was sitting, she had a book in her hand. And I walked up to her and I said, "Hey, what's in the book?" Right?

[00:48:12] And it was a notebook. It was a very neat leader in handbook. And it had three years worth of every single kilo of every single material that she has sold at that buyback center, the landfill. And you know, I still get the chills and I'm like, "You know, you are so smart." Right? She's like, "But it's useless because no bank is willing to give me a decent loan so I can take my kid out of the slum and we can buy a, you know, one room place. Because this book doesn't really validate who I am." You know? Now fast forward, she's on BanQu and everything, but I think the point is that I think that is the inspiration.

[00:48:58] Aaron - Narration: Ultimately, this is what it means when we have the luxury of proof. We can prove that we're a person who matters in this huge complex world that we navigate. We can get the loan, or rent the car, or buy the apartment because we can prove that we belong.

[00:49:15] When Ashish describes the power of the one, he's saying that nobody should be denied the right to proof. Blockchain for BanQu is just an efficient way to make that happen. But all the systems, tools, programs, or strategies we deploy in making the world a better place will fail if we don't make everyone count.

[00:49:38] I am so grateful to Ashish Gadnis for his time and for sharing his experiences. Talking with him is energizing, and I hope you felt the same thing listening to him. In the show notes, you can find links for all the things that we discussed, and there's also a transcript on our website.

[00:49:56] Next episode, we'll hear from the veteran science and tech journalist David Pogue. He's been reporting on human innovation for decades and has won multiple Emmys and other awards for his work. You've seen him over the years in programs and outlets like PBS's, Nova, CBS Sunday Morning, The New York Times, and his new podcast, Unsung Science. Our discussion will be on science and tech for good. We'll be talking about everything from AI to climate change, from sharks to space travel. It's going to be a fun and enlightening episode.

[00:50:31] If you enjoy How to Help, please take a moment to give us a positive review in your podcast app. This helps us immensely to reach more listeners. And the other thing that helps is to share. If you have a favorite episode, please put it on social media, send it to friends. It means a lot to us.

[00:50:49] If you want to stay up to date with the podcast and my other work, subscribe to the How to Help email newsletter where I share ideas for how to have more meaning in your life and in your work. You can subscribe or read the archives how-to-help.com.

[00:51:04] This episode is written and recorded by me. Our production team for this season has included Ty Bingham, yours truly, and Joseph Sandholtz, who also mixes our audio. Our amazing music comes from the Pleasant Pictures Music Club, and if you want to use their music in your projects, you can find a link and a discount code in our show notes.

[00:51:24] Finally, as always, thank you so much for listening. I'm Aaron Miller, and this has been How to Help.

When Accepting Thanks Is Hard

Receiving Thanks Helps Them

Considering the Counterfactual

Making Things Worse

What Would Actually Increase Giving

Successfully Navigating #GivingTuesday

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About Our Guest

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Summary

About Our Guest

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Pleasant Pictures Music

Transcript

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