Edit Section Landing Hero Title

Christopher Johns:

I wish people were more aware that those insignificant items that are on your shelf, there's someone who's sacrificed so much to get that jar of Marmite. Oh, I don't know if you have Marmite in Canada, I'm sorry.

Sonari Glinton:

Whether it's a jar of Marmite, a bunch of bananas or pharmaceuticals, Christopher Johns knows exactly what it takes to get us our goods.

Christopher Johns:

We're always up against it. Do you know, it's been so long since I remember getting to a destination early ahead of time. It just doesn't really happen anymore. You can be on time, but there's not enough of us.

Sonari Glinton:

The us Christopher's referring to are truck drivers, drivers who are right now in very short supply pretty much everywhere. In the United Kingdom, they've even called in the military to drive fuel trucks to keep gas stations running. Christopher has been driving in the UK and Europe for 15 years and the shortage is really no surprise to him. It's about more than resignations, early retirements and not enough new recruits. There are bigger issues that need to be solved in the industry, and they only got worse during the pandemic. But more significantly, the shortage of drivers is part of a huge labor crisis, a labor crisis that's making all the supply chain problems we've already talked about in the series much, much worse. So, what's going on and how is it going to get better?

Sonari Glinton:

I'm Sonari Clinton and on this episode of Now, What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley, truck drivers, labor shortages, and how the workforce of tomorrow is being shaped by the problems we're facing today.

Christopher Johns:

On paper that looked like quite an easy journey, but it was tight in the end.

Sonari Glinton:

It's evening and Christopher Johns is at the New Haven truck Depot in England.

Christopher Johns:

So I've used all 10 of my driving hours for the day near enough. So that's 11 hours working time roughly. By the time I get home, my kids will probably be asleep or in bed. So I don't really get much time with them, which really, really sucks. Fingers crossed, I might get to see them tomorrow night.

Sonari Glinton:

Sometimes Christopher is gone a day, sometimes a few days, but usually he's on the road a week or more at a time. The time away from his family is one of the downsides of truck driving and one of the reasons that the industry is in crisis right now. But at one point, that alone time on the road was a part of the appeal of truck driving. In the late '70s and the early '80s in American culture, truck driving was awesome. Anyone remember the CB radio craze? I mean, major movies with major movie stars were about long haul trucking. Every Which Way but Loose with Clint Eastwood. Burt Reynolds starred in Smokey and the Bandit about an outlaw trucker. It was the number two movie when it came out. The number one movie that year was Star Wars. Chris, like me, remember those trucker movies fondly.

Christopher Johns:

Convoy was a pretty great one. I think the way that particularly America portrayed truck driving was just it was quite this romantic idea. It was that kind of sense of freedom. You get to see these incredible sites and views. Yeah, that was one of the biggest draws probably, seeing the world.

Sonari Glinton:

You know what? Convoy was an excellent movie, but seeing the world freedom rambling, the call of the open roads, well, that's a cliche because it's so true. Christopher heard the call as a young single man who needed a break from studying graphic design and the idea of being alone on the road for long hours, well, it appealed to him.

Christopher Johns:

I thought I would be quite good at that. Quite naively I assumed that being on my own I'd be the best company. Me and my thoughts, in hindsight that was mentally a lot tougher than I had been prepared for.

Sonari Glinton:

A lot of it has been a lot tougher than Christopher was prepared for. For one thing, when he's not driving, he's got to eat, he's got to sleep and he's got to wash up. Sometimes that means getting really creative with his camping gear.

Christopher Johns:

I have a solar shower. I didn't realize how rubbish it would be because of course by the time I park up, there's not a lot of sun left. So it's always just a cold shower from a bag.

Sonari Glinton:

The brother is not exactly selling life on the road. When Christopher is fed and clean, he folds down the bed in the sleeper cab. It's in a big enough space that he can stand up. And yet...

Christopher Johns:

I'm always pretty desperate to get out of the cab. I always, if I'm able to get in a truck park or a secure parking, then I able to leave my truck under security so I can then go and jog. That's enormous relief just that freedom just to jog, run off somewhere, get lost quite a bit actually.

Sonari Glinton:

Now, the running hasn't been just for his mental health. Snacking on the job is a serious health hazard.

Christopher Johns:

So much self-control is needed because you are sitting on your bum for 10 hours a day. It's really punishing. I have friends of mine who are so overweight and they have serious diabetes and they have trouble getting in and out of their own cabs.

Sonari Glinton:

Being on your own for those long stretches, that doesn't help. Christopher finds some comfort though in singing along with his music, well, until his voice hurts, and listening to the podcast, you're welcome. And sure, he can talk to his wife and three kids over a screen, but that sometimes makes it harder.

Christopher Johns:

It just shows you where you are not. It's like a window into where you want to be, but you can't. My time is so much more precious than it was before. And time is everything in this job. It's the one thing that costs the most because you give up, sacrifice important moments like my little girl's first steps and things that you... Yeah, things that you regret. They want things done faster and faster and I think it's the victims of that day and age where people click a button and it's on your doorstep and it's a fight. It's a real fight to get there in time.

Sonari Glinton:

Not only are there not enough drivers, but traffic is worse. The weather and road conditions more unpredictable and the surge in online shopping has added real pressure. Plus, there's often a lot of waiting around to be loaded or unloaded, which in the UK and Europe only got worse after Brexit. This job requires a lot of patience, but it also requires a lot of skill, incredible spatial awareness, problem solving skills. To put it bluntly, it's an important job. It's an essential job even. And Christopher doesn't think that the industry gives the drivers the respect, the growth opportunities or the compensation that they deserve.

Christopher Johns:

It's sad and they're not going to attract any young drivers. And it is a young single person's career really. We're running out of drivers and we are going to run out of so much more. It needs quite a huge overhaul.

Sonari Glinton:

You could argue it already has. Despite all the challenges, Christopher doesn't see himself leaving the job anytime soon.

Christopher Johns:

I get frustrated at myself really because I went into this career eyes wide open. So it's the decision I made, but I feel like it was a selfish decision on my part. But this is the cards I've been dealt with and this is what I've become quite good at. So I have to play my deck. This is what it is.

Sonari Glinton:

Truckers and big rigs have been a part of Kendra Hems life for almost as far back as she can remember.

Kendra Hems:

We'd get ready for a road trip. My father would hook the CB up, put the big antenna on the top of the station wagon. And throughout the course of those trips, he'd be speaking with truck drivers and he'd find out were there cops ahead or road conditions or accidents.

Sonari Glinton:

All a while, young Kendra was in the backseat doing the arm pump to get the drivers to blow their horns. Now, as the president of the Trucking Association of New York, an organization that represents the trucking industry, Kendra spends a lot of time thinking about the kinds of issues Christopher talked about earlier and how to get more drivers out on the road again. So, take me from first memory as to how do you get into the trucking business.

Kendra Hems:

My stepfather, his family owned a trucking company. So around the age of eight, I was always around trucks and drivers and everything that went along with having a family owned business. Never initially intended to actually get into trucking, but ultimately I graduated college and was trying to save some money up to go on to graduate school.

Sonari Glinton:

Spoiler alert, life happens, she never went. Kendra's stepdad asked her to fill in when they were down a dispatcher, and well, she got hooked.

Kendra Hems:

I'm so glad that's how I started in the industry because it gave me such a profound respect for the job that our drivers do every single day. They want to know that there's somebody back there that really cares about what they're doing and making sure that they can get home at night. And no disrespect to men in the industry by any stretch but I think one of the reason why we're starting to see women succeed so much in management roles in the trucking industry is because they show that they care a little bit more openly, I think, than men often do.

Sonari Glinton:

As a dispatcher, Kendra got to hear firsthand about the problems that drivers face. And she knows that they're a part of the reason that the industry right now is struggling to hire them.

Kendra Hems:

Right now, it's the worst that it's ever been. We've increased over a three year period from 61,000 drivers short to now over 80,000 professional truck drivers.

Sonari Glinton:

You're short 80,000 professional truck drivers?

Kendra Hems:

We are, yes. We were already dealing with this shortage prior to the pandemic. And as with every industry across the US, we're struggling with getting individuals to come back.

Sonari Glinton:

You may have been hearing about the great resignation. Well, over the pandemic, record numbers of workers left their jobs. Now employers across many industries are struggling to fill those gaps and there are a whole host of reasons but I'm just going to list off a few. Mass layoffs at the start of the pandemic led to early retirements for some or finding new jobs for others. An aging baby boom population essentially left the workforce. And now, there are simply millions more available jobs than there are workers to take them. This hit the supply chain particularly hard, especially as our buying skyrocketed.

Kendra Hems:

There was a report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in July that indicated in transportation and warehousing as a whole, there's 490,000 job openings.

Sonari Glinton:

That's half a million jobs along the supply chain waiting to be filled.

Kendra Hems:

You're short with the crane operators that are trying to unload the ships at the port. You're short with warehousemen and forklift drivers to unload the trucks at the warehouse. We're short the drivers, we're short technicians to maintain the trucks. It's just every aspect of the supply chain right now is experiencing that shortage.

Sonari Glinton:

An aging workforce is a huge issue for the truck driving industry and the number of retiring drivers far surpasses the number of new recruits.

Kendra Hems:

The other problem is, to be quite blunt, the trucking industry has an image problem. They're not necessarily viewed as, I guess, a sexy career.

Sonari Glinton:

And that's something that the industry is working harder to change. Now, potential drivers here.

Kendra Hems:

You're not just a driver, you are a professional and you're doing a very important job that means a lot to a lot of people. You are essential to the economy. It's something that you can be proud of doing because you truly are supporting not just yourself and your family but the nation as a whole. We were seeing drivers come to grocery stores with our food and our toiletries and our cleaning supplies and they were delivering the PPE in terms of masks and gloves. And aside from our medical professionals, they truly were the heroes in this pandemic. I'm hopeful that that stays and the respect for our drivers stays, and I think respect will go a long way in terms of encouraging individuals to come into this industry and stay in the industry.

Sonari Glinton:

Look, respect is obviously important, see Aretha Franklin, so is knowing you're not in a dead end job. Career growth is now a key selling feature as they try to turn a new generation on to trucking.

Kendra Hems:

Ultimately, you can move up into dispatching or operations management, safety managers, even executive level positions.

Sonari Glinton:

Trucking companies are also finding ways to get their drivers home more often so they're not missing out on friends and family time as much. And well, what about the money? Well, in an economy where there are more jobs than workers, new recruits are demanding more and demanding better; better lifestyle, better conditions and better pay. Before the pandemic, salaries started around $40,000 a year.

Kendra Hems:

We have seen salaries for truck drivers increase exponentially over the last year. A lot of companies are doing sign-on bonuses. I saw one recently as high as $20,000. Obviously they're asking for a commitment for that bonus, but they're doing what they can to entice them in. We're hearing starting salaries up as high as $70,000 depending on years of experience and safety records. We have carriers now that are paying six figures to their drivers.

Sonari Glinton:

If salaries are up exponentially and these other things are happening, then why has it been hard to bring back drivers who got other gigs, do you think?

Kendra Hems:

There's been a lot of changes to try and improve, but the job itself is still hard. It really takes the right individual that enjoys being out on the road that is going to have an interest in the industry.

Sonari Glinton:

Industry leaders are pushing for changes on a lot of fronts. One of the big ones, lowering the age limit for drivers who cross state lines. Right now, they have to be at least 21, but the industry is lobbying the federal government to reduce that age to 18, with a lot of training.

Kendra Hems:

For us, it's not as much a skills gap as it is an age gap right now, and we lose individuals out of high school to other trades.

Sonari Glinton:

But nearly every trade is struggling to fill jobs. Many are being forced to reimagine their workforce altogether. In trucking, they're trying to fine tune their recruitment efforts to appeal to veterans, women, as well as people in the prison system who need a fresh start. But if hiring remains a challenge, how soon in the future are autonomous or self-driving trucks?

Kendra Hems:

Technology has already infiltrated the trucking industry. That's not anything new, that's been happening for years. But as far as what's coming, I don't think it's going to be driver-less as much as it will be driver-assist.

Sonari Glinton:

Now, Kendra doesn't see robots replacing truck drivers anytime soon, but she does think that trucking's transitioned to a more tech based industry that could attract more young people who've grown up with technology. In the meantime, she's been encouraged by what she's seen on the road.

Kendra Hems:

We were starting to see the arm pump come back. Drivers were saying they'd go down the road and they'd see these kids in the backseat pumping their arms for them to blow their horns. It had been quite some time since they'd seen that.

Sonari Glinton:

Technology clearly is going to be a huge part of the future of any labor force, but to what degree and how much it will help the current shortage. Well, Kunwar Walia is a design researcher recently with GE Transportation and he works on making the trucking industry more efficient through digitization, and he thinks putting too much emphasis on autonomy, driverless trucks for example, could actually be a problem.

Kunwar Walia:

I think we are solving for a symptom. That's a symptom that we are not trying to get to the root cause of it. I have spoken to truck drivers. They take pride in their truck driving and they know how much impact they have. But right now the problem is, I think it's the feeling of being non-productive.

Sonari Glinton:

Kunwar saw this firsthand when he was a grad student at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles and his class visited a container yard at the port.

Kunwar Walia:

I was just sitting there just trying to understand these operations and I was just questioning myself. Hey, there is like trillions of dollars of cargo that we move annually from this infrastructure and some of the practices are so, I think there's a common term we say in the industry called stone aged.

Sonari Glinton:

Stone age. Yes, it's true. You still see people with pencils and clipboards and carbon copies. It is shocking when you realize the immense volumes of goods moving through or stuck at ports around the world.

Kunwar Walia:

And that's because of the inefficiencies in the system, the bottlenecks in the system. It's just painful when a truck driver is sitting inside a yard and doing nothing and the cargo is not ready for it.

Sonari Glinton:

As you might imagine, those bottlenecks got really bad during the recent supply chain chaos. Drivers can wait up to 12 hours for cargo to be loaded onto their trucks, especially at a backed up port like the ones in Los Angeles and Long Beach. In normal times, drivers can still expect to wait up to two hours to either pick up or unload a container. Kunwar believes this has to change. After grad school, he went to work for GE Transportation, looking at the supply chain from every angle.

Kunwar Walia:

I've kind of understood what problems this industry is going through and then how it trickles down to an end user, like somebody sitting inside the office of a shipper and maybe trying to figure out where my cargo is, and what kind of challenges that person has to go through when it comes to the visibility of the cargo or just operational inefficiencies, whether I don't have a right tool, whether I don't have a right information, how should I get it, how can I optimize my operation. I think in the end it comes down to how I can make my life easy while I'm working.

Sonari Glinton:

And when Kunwar looks at the challenges in the trucking industry, he doesn't see driverless trucks as the first best solution. He thinks there are many more immediate ways to solve the stone age problems, and it starts with how the information is handled, stored and shared.

Kunwar Walia:

This industry needs to go through digital transformation and they have to understand how to function as an IT company.

Sonari Glinton:

Imagine a trucking company as an IT company. And one of the key steps in that transformation is making reliable information available and easy to access. For example, he describes what it can be like to work at a trucking company and be responsible for tracking down cargo.

Kunwar Walia:

I'm assigned like 100 containers to manage today, I'm just going through different website, finding that information container by container just to maybe have an understanding that what is the status of that container today.

Sonari Glinton:

Turns out it can be really hard to keep track of a container. So, many different parties are involved, often without a centralized tracking system, which makes it feel like a frustrating game of tag. The inefficiencies keep truck drivers waiting longer and longer to load and unload, extending their time away from their home and their family. Kunwar wants to see more data shared and standardized so that everyone across the industry can benefit.

Kunwar Walia:

It's not that this industry is not collecting information. They've been collecting information for ages. There is a lot of data which is somewhere in the books, somewhere in some spreadsheets and it's not made accessible to the right kind of stakeholders.

Sonari Glinton:

By making this data available and accessible, Kunwar believes we could reduce a lot of the bottlenecks and frustrations, making the work for truck drivers and anyone along the supply chain much more efficient and rewarding.

Kunwar Walia:

This person would feel more productive. He can enjoy going to the company and working. He's not frustrated from his job. So that's a kind of an impact this digitalization can create. It just makes life easy for a lot of people. And once a digitalization is done, then we have an opportunity to use these AI ML kind of technologies to really start looking ahead.

Sonari Glinton:

Well, that's the point that we're starting to ask, where does autonomy like self-driving trucks make the most sense? Kunwar gets excited. You can hear him tapping his desk when he talks about what he sees as the real goal.

Kunwar Walia:

What things I should automate and how I should automate certain aspects that really assist the users or the end user to make that person's life easy or more productive. If you're able to achieve that, maybe we don't need automation, maybe we don't need to replace that person because that person would be more productive anyhow because he's enjoying his work. We should start from, hey, this is not a human friendly job if it risks somebody's life, and that can be automated.

Sonari Glinton:

Now, the jobs that are high risk, that makes sense. But what about other jobs, ones that are not so high risk like driving trucks? Well, Kunwar thinks that although self-driving trucks will probably be a part of our future, especially for long haul trucking, for now the job remains very human. Automating certain aspects of the job though would make it safer, more comfortable, more efficient, which benefits everyone: the drivers, the businesses, the consumers waiting on their goods. It could also make the job itself much more appealing to those future recruits, and Kunwar thinks some of those innovations will likely come from within the industry, like the drivers themselves. And he says he sees that happen all the time.

Kunwar Walia:

If you see some of the technology innovations that are happening in this space and the people who are doing it, they have a history of doing these things themselves or maybe their parents and they actually use the current technology to solve the same problem from a different angle, from a technology perspective. So that's how things change.

Sonari Glinton:

Think of Kendra Hems, rethinking the family business on an industry-wide level, or think of Christopher Johns, the English truck driver and all the frustration and waiting he faces on the job. How much more would he enjoy his work if some of those bottlenecks and delays were reduced, if the riskiest parts of his work were made safer, if he had an opportunity to make the work better?

Christopher Johns:

I've spent 15 years now and I think the attraction is becoming less and less. The obstacles are increasing and there's no let up. A solution needs to be reached because, yeah, it's a constant battle for us and I don't see that getting any better.

Sonari Glinton:

That discontent is part of what's accelerating big changes in the trucking industry, from working conditions to compensation, to recruitment, to digitization. If there's any good to come from all this supply chain chaos, it's the opportunity to rethink our old ways of doing things, to get out of the stone age and make the work better, safer, and more efficient. Like many industries around the world, truck driving is facing a real reckoning and it's thinking hard about how to value the workers it already has because without them, nothing gets anywhere y'all. Coming up on Now, What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley, how supply chain disruptions and a shortage of raw ingredients have left pet owners scrambling to find food for their companions. See you next time.

Sonari Glinton:

In the wee small hours of April 6, 2020, Andy Artenstein started the six hour drive to his dealer in New Jersey.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

There was one thing going through my mind, I have to come home with something. I couldn't bear coming home empty-handed.

Sonari Glinton:

This was a big deal in every way.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

Millions of dollars, at that point, would've been changing hands for this. I had to get involved. One, I want to see it with my own eyes and two, if I'm responsible for this, I want to actually be there when this transaction occurs.

Sonari Glinton:

The rest of Andy's team flew in on a private jet and they all met at an industrial warehouse.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

It was a classic unit. You pull in the back and there's a bunch of loading docks. You pull in the front and there's just a storefront. It's on a strip mall with a bunch of other storefronts. And we meet up with the point person. They actually had product. We open some of the boxes randomly, and it was atmosphere of excitement at that point. That was the closest we'd gotten in weeks and there was hundreds of thousands, if not more. I thought we were in business.

Sonari Glinton:

Andy's team was getting ready to load the goods onto semi-trailers disguised as refrigerated food trucks. And then ...

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

I got a tap on the shoulder from the dealer, told me that the FBI wanted to talk to me.

Sonari Glinton:

It may have sounded pretty shady, but Andy wasn't breaking the law. Dr. Artenstein is an infectious disease specialist and he's in charge of pandemic response at Baystate Health in Springfield, Massachusetts. Now he was trying to get personal protective equipment, or PPE, for the thousands of workers in his hospitals and labs. When he got that tap from the FBI, COVID-19 was hitting the entire Northeast incredibly hard, and his staff had only a weak supply of masks. He was willing to do just about anything to keep them safe.

Sonari Glinton:

I'm Sonari Glinton. And on this episode of Now, What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley, how the just in time supply chain model failed us just when we needed it most. Now look, no one really wants to spend a whole lot of time recalling the early days of the pandemic. We all know what a scary moment that was, especially for healthcare professionals struggling to find PPE.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

It's like a firefighter going into a fire without adequate protection. You wouldn't do it. It'd be deadly.

Sonari Glinton:

As far as hospital in the US go, Baystate was well prepared to deal with outbreaks like COVID-19. They followed what was happening around the world and made early preparations. But when Dr. Artenstein's team tried to get more PPE in February and March ...

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

At that point, our traditional suppliers had already dried up in their capabilities.

Sonari Glinton:

In normal times, Baystate has a small supply chain team who keep the staff kitted out. They have systems in place that get what's needed when they need it in a cost effective way with little to no waste. This just in time model works most of the time. That is, well, until the pandemic.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

We had amplified our supply chain by about tenfold from three or four people to 30 or 40 people working around the clock, literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week to source leads. And we were taking every lead from every place. Many of them were while goose chases.

Sonari Glinton:

While goose chases, backroom deals, the FBI. Now, how did it get to this point? Well, Dr. Artenstein says there were a few key factors at play. Number one, the US government didn't have the PPE stockpile it needed, or I should say didn't have it in anymore.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

After 9/11 actually, there was a lot of interest in bio terrorism and there was a lot of interest in national stockpiles. That's when they were created in 2001 and two. The problem is that over time they weren't replenished.

Sonari Glinton:

To be clear, experts like Dr. Artenstein had been warning about how unprepared we were for an inevitable pandemic for years. But ...

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

When governments looked for ways to cut costs and resources like the rest of us, human nature, what are the things we're not using that we can afford to go without?

Sonari Glinton:

At the same time, more and more PPE manufacturing moved to China and it was produced on an a just in time inventory model. Now that means you don't get the supplies until you need them and then you only get what you need without a lot of buffer. And in this case, it was coming in on ships from Asia.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

The downside of that, of course, is number one, that a lot of us manufacturers have dried up, and number two, when Asia runs into a problem, everyone runs into a problem. When you put all your eggs in one basket and that basket gets disrupted, you have broken eggs.

Sonari Glinton:

Say for instance, when a virus breaks out in China and all the factories there grind to a halt and the ports close down slowing shipping to a standstill.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

The just in time became not enough time, and it's too late to be thinking about US manufacturing when it's the doors have been closed on some of these things. And so the supply chain was literally broken. The pandemic broke the supply chain.

Sonari Glinton:

I think that bears repeating. The pandemic broke the supply chain. And in those early months, too many doctors and nurses were improvising PPE out of whatever they could cobble together. Like Dr. Artenstein, they were figuring out how to solve a broken supply chain on their own, often by going through unorthodox channels and unproven dealers. So when a promising lead came in, Dr. Artenstein's team went for it and he went along to make sure it happened.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

Well, I mean, we were talking at that point about a million N95 masks, which would've been a pretty good score for anybody. And we were also talking about a lot of money, but my biggest concern was letting our staff down, who were literally feeling like they were risking life and limb.

Sonari Glinton:

So let's go back to that warehouse in April 2020, when Dr. Artenstein's elation at landing all that PPE was cut short by the FBI.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

And sure enough, there were two agents there. I asked to see their badges. One was an FBI agent and the other was with Homeland Security. They told me they were there to check my credentials to make sure that this was not going to a black marketeer or some other opportunist.

Sonari Glinton:

The agents seemed to believe his story. They said they needed to make some calls, hours went by then Dr. Artenstein got word the shipment might be sent somewhere else.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

I was heartbroken momentarily when I learned all that. It wasn't about me. It was about expectation that we'd be coming back with something to help our folks, was all about hope.

Sonari Glinton:

But there was no way he was throwing in the towel. Dr. Artenstein called his CEO and asked him to call their local member of Congress for help. Then Dr. Artenstein crossed his fingers and headed back home to Springfield.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

I left our supply chain people in the warehouse with instructions they couldn't leave until they saw wheels up on the trucks. And so this was like a classic Good Fellows movie.

Sonari Glinton:

Hours later, Dr. Artenstein finally got word that their trucks were loaded and on their way to the hospital's warehouse, a PPE warehouse that they had never needed in the past.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

Because of this pandemic, we actually leased 24 hour secure, double locked warehouse space with a live security presence and cameras and everything else just because of the environment.

Sonari Glinton:

And he got a photo and a phone call just after midnight and he saw the boxes of N95 mass getting unloaded.

Dr. Andy Artenstein:

It felt fabulous. It felt like finally something had gone right. I mean, I can't tell you how happy people were and how good they felt that our health system would go to any length to get what they needed.

Sonari Glinton:

The pandemic forced leaders like Dr. Artenstein to take risks, solve new problems and fill in gaps of the broken supply chain all while keeping their own team members afloat.

Vanessa Iarocci:

I felt a real personal imperative to try to figure something out. It felt like I was on like some kind of rescue mission.

Sonari Glinton:

Vanessa Iarocci is an angel investor, and she teaches at the University of Toronto's Business School. But at the start of the pandemic, she was running McCarthy's, it's a school uniform company that suddenly had no customers when schools shut down indefinitely. Tell me the world of running a uniform in business when a pandemic hits.

Vanessa Iarocci:

There was one word for it, and it was that it stopped. And it was like this moment where we thought, "Oh my God, what on earth are we supposed to do?" And so I thought about our team and all the families and how if the business shut down that they would be really severely impacted. Not figuring out a way forward, I didn't even think that was an option.

Sonari Glinton:

Now even before the crisis here, you were paying attention to what was happening in Italy. Why was that?

Vanessa Iarocci:

So my uncle was on the front line in Italy. Most all doctors in Italy were funneled into COVID crisis management. And in and around January, he called and said he's been putting in 14-hour days of the hospital and some people were just dying on stretchers, waiting for treatment. And they did close schools in Italy in February as well.

Sonari Glinton:

Staying in to her uncle's situation to help Vanessa make decisions about her own business. She sat down with pen and paper to break the company down to assess it.

Vanessa Iarocci:

We help communities do their jobs and learn together. We have warehouses. We have supplier relationships. We really understand how public procurement works and looked at the situation at hand, which was global pandemic, and tried to find some kind of intersection between those two things.

Sonari Glinton:

In March 2020, the demand for medical grade PPE was very high in healthcare settings and later in schools. And as we well know now, supply was low and Vanessa could get it.

Vanessa Iarocci:

We are lucky in that we take a relationship first approach with our supply chain. And so in March, I was able to connect with suppliers who trusted our team and who I trusted and we were able to actually secure that critical PPE very early on in the crisis from overseas.

Sonari Glinton:

When you say relationship first, what does that mean? How does that show up?

Vanessa Iarocci:

Really, I just made that up. Really, what it means is there's no official. I don't think that's any kind of official term, but essentially what it means is our suppliers are running businesses just like us and they're humans and they're people, they have families, their factory is their business. And so I made it a rule that you need to get to know your suppliers. You need to get on a plane and you need to go see them. You need to break bread with them. Certainly, that's what I did. I spent a lot of time in Asia and the Middle East, in fact, visiting my suppliers multiple times a year and we developed a relationship.

Vanessa Iarocci:

And when these factories had multiple people coming at them for PPE, they were more willing to do business with us.

Sonari Glinton:

Vanessa says long distance supply chain relationships too often are transactional. They get dehumanized. She took a different approach, building and nurturing relationships with her suppliers, which would prove to be critical to saving her business. And in the spring of 2020, those relationships made it easier for Vanessa to wire a million dollars for PPE, which is a lot for a small company.

Vanessa Iarocci:

At the time, it was a little bit like the wild west. It was an all cash economy in March 2020. And what I mean by that was normally when you order overseas, you might put something like a deposit down or get a letter of credit. There was none of that happening. It was basically, if you want to secure resources, you need to wire us the money in an hour.

Sonari Glinton:

McCarthy's donated a lot of medical grade PPE and sold the rest at a low margin to keep the lights on. At the same time, Vanessa was thinking long term and decided to pivot again, this time making kids masks.

Vanessa Iarocci:

And so that led us to talks to our supplier in Egypt.

Sonari Glinton:

Give me a window into some of those conversations.

Vanessa Iarocci:

Give you a window and you'll think it's pretty hilarious, because this is not at all how business would've been done in my previous life. It was pretty much a text that would say like, "Hey Sam, can you make cotton masks?" And he'd say, 'Sure. What kind of masks do you need?" And because supply chains were taking so long, this is where the trust comes in again. Normally in production like this, you would design something, you would prototype it, they would send it to us, there'd be all this QC. I was pretty comfortable with his quality standards and his fabrication already.

Sonari Glinton:

Is that normal? I mean, how common are these types of relationships?

Vanessa Iarocci:

It's not common. It's not. And the reason it's not common is because most businesses have pivoted to more of a just in time model where they just want the cheapest input. And so many, many businesses are constantly pivoting their supply chain and you really saw the consequences of this during the global crisis.

Sonari Glinton:

The just in time manufacturing model began with the auto industry. Henry Ford noodled with the idea, but it didn't take hold in the US until much later. Just in time's principles came from the Toyota production system, or what's called the Toyota way in the 1930s. And in a lot of ways, it was born out a necessity. As it developed in post World War II Japan, there wasn't much money for big investments as industries rebuilt themselves, and Japan doesn't have a lot of space or natural resources to begin with. The just in time model was meant to be efficient.

Sonari Glinton:

It's also called lean manufacturing. The idea cut down on inventory that you don't need. Your supplies arrive just when you absolutely need them. The system has gone global sense, and in many ways is central to how the supply chain works now. From car manufacturing to retail inventory management to PPE procurement, its principles were meant to save time, resources and money. And they have in many ways, but only if the system is working essentially perfectly. Vanessa says there are three assumptions that underpin the just in time inventory model. One ...

Vanessa Iarocci:

You can make things other places cheaper than here.

Sonari Glinton:

Two ...

Vanessa Iarocci:

You can get those things from another place into your country through air, ocean, and other sort of carbon intensive methods.

Sonari Glinton:

And three ...

Vanessa Iarocci:

You can sell it all.

Sonari Glinton:

Vanessa thinks the just in time model is going to remain a central part of the supply chain.

Vanessa Iarocci (16:01):

But in some ways, I think we found some pretty critical points of failure.

Sonari Glinton:

She goes back to the three assumptions, noting that China is certainly not that cheapest place to manufacture anymore and that companies are too often producing more than they can sell, which is just one of the environmental downsides.

Vanessa Iarocci:

I'll give you an example. I remember holding this mask, this $6 mask and I was thinking, this mask just flew from China to Vancouver in an airplane and then it was on a truck from Vancouver to Toronto, and then now I'm flying it to Yukon. What's the real cost of this mask? It's way more than $6.

Sonari Glinton:

The real cost of just in time also comes into play when the supply chain breaks down. The time and expense Vanessa invested in her supplier relationships, for example, really getting to know Sam in Egypt, that helped save her business and restore it to her profitability and that was central to her role as the company's turnaround CEO. With her mission accomplished, she left McCarthy's via a family buyout and now invests in new businesses and lectures at the University of Toronto, where she passes on what she learned to her students.

Vanessa Iarocci:

Any business is just a whole variety of humans connected in some kind of system. If you very deeply understand your customer and you treat your employees and suppliers as part of your extended work family, it's like an organic being, like you can continuously adapt and change it.

Sonari Glinton:

Kind of like how leaders have had to adapt and change to respond to the pandemic.

Vanessa Iarocci:

There's an expression that in good times, you lead from the back, but in crisis, you lead from the front.

Sonari Glinton:

That's something Gaurav Manchanda can relate to. He worked in Liberia in west Africa in 2007, a few years after the civil war ended helping to create a national health system from scratch.

Gaurav Manchanda:

This certainly brought out some similar feelings in terms of crisis response and the need for coordination and organization and multi-stakeholder engagement. And there were certainly days when it was hard to keep going on four hours of sleep, but it wasn't ever a question. It was just you are built for this, go and ask questions later.

Sonari Glinton:

Today, Gaurav is director of medical market development at Formlabs. Now that's a company that makes 3D printing tech analogy. And in March of 2020, he found himself running a supply chain solution network just as his wife started a new job as an ER doctor in Boston.

Gaurav Manchanda:

So we were certainly paying close attention to the PPE shortage and not only within my wife's hospital, but as my phone started ringing from the hospitals that Formlabs work with as well.

Sonari Glinton:

It may have once been the stuff of science fiction, but hospitals and other industries are using 3D printing technology, also known as additive manufacturing, more and more. Using a digital design, the printer precisely lays down layer after layer of a material, usually plastic, to form a solid three dimensional object. In medicine, 3D printers are making everything from surgical instruments to joint replacements. They can even use cells to print living tissue. Gaurav got into 3D printing after learning how it could help his own son who has cerebral palsy and uses ankle foot orthotics, or AFOs.

Sonari Glinton:

They're usually made using plaster casts and old fashioned, often uncomfortable methods. Gaurav's son had to go through that painful process in the past, but not anymore.

Gaurav Manchanda:

I'm proud to say that we sent him off to school in 3D printed AFOs that we printed here at the office. They fit him better, their lighter weight. They cost quite a bit less than the traditional devices as well. So, I'm a firm believer in the value prop that I've been talking about.

Sonari Glinton:

Back in March 2020, he was getting calls from other firm believers, physicians and hospitals, who had 3D printers and wanted to use them to make what the supply chain wasn't supplying.

Gaurav Manchanda :

There were really three buckets of supply chain issues. The first was PPE, as everyone is likely aware of at this point, the second was ventilators or ventilation systems, and the third was testing or test kits.

Sonari Glinton:

Gaurav remembers getting a text from a physician he worked with before, Dr. Summer Decker in Tampa.

Gaurav Manchanda:

Just said, "Can you call me? It's urgent." And what Dr. Decker and her colleague informed me of was that they had designed a nasopharyngeal swab, or an NP swab, that could be used to replace the traditional NP swabs, which were out of stock as the supply chain was completely disrupted.

Sonari Glinton:

These are the swabs that they used for COVID tests, you know the ones that go right up there making me squeamish to even talk about. Well, the doctors wanted to know how they could 3D print as many swabs as possible, and whether Formlabs had enough of the material to print them.

Gaurav Manchanda:

To get ahead of myself a little bit, that NP swab design ended up being printed about 75 million times last year, and used for COVID testing around the world.

Sonari Glinton:

As word got around that PPE and other supplies were dwindling around the country, Gaurav remembers the calls and requests coming in fast.

Gaurav Manchanda:

From another hospital or from another health agency or another state health department, or another volunteer saying, hi, I'm either a high school student, or I'm a medical student, or I'm a PhD, or I'm a surgeon, or I'm a dentist. How can I help? So there was just an outpouring of good will and on the other side, desperation where these clinicians were only innovating because they had to. I mean, it was really a sort of a crisis response or almost wartime response effort that was unfolding in late March of last year.

Sonari Glinton:

PPE designs were coming in from all over, but they needed first to be tested for use in clinical settings. Through partnerships with the National Institute of Health and the Veteran's Health Administration, a few mass designs were validated safe for use.

Gaurav Manchanda:

And I want to contrast that to traditional medical devices that take years to validate. So if you look at design, validation and manufacturing, it is significantly faster in terms of end to end design to patient or clinician use.

Sonari Glinton:

Speed of validation is just one reason healthcare systems turn to 3D printing to solve their pandemic supply chain problems. Another one, well, manufacturing what they needed when they needed it and where they were going to use it.

Gaurav Manchanda:

There was no truck to get on or container to ship the supplies on. It was printed within the hospital walls or within the health agency's walls itself.

Sonari Glinton:

Gaurav says 3D printing is a perfect example of bridge manufacturing.

Gaurav Manchanda:

So what do you do when traditional manufacturing shuts down or is not an option? And that bridge can be a one month bridge or can be a six month bridge or longer. Bridge manufacturing was really a theory in the past, now it's one that's been confirmed in a very public way.

Sonari Glinton:

And after getting a taste of what 3D printers can actually do, healthcare systems now see they have even more potential.

Gaurav Manchanda:

One phrase we've heard on that front from hospitals themselves is that 3D printers are an insurance policy for their supply chain. So you don't need to commit to a certain supply. You're committing to the infrastructure of the platform. It's the platform they can use to create whatever they need in the future.

Sonari Glinton:

While he's excited about that future, Gaurav is still processing the highs and lows of navigating the pandemic and running a 3D printing command center.

Gaurav Manchanda:

I get asked the question on a regular basis, what do you think we're going to need this year? And I hope it's nothing. And the supply chains certainly are stronger than they were last year and we all learned quite a bit. But we're one of the wealthiest nations on the country, or in the world rather, and it's hard to think about more resource limited settings or lower income countries who don't have the same resources.

Sonari Glinton:

Gaurav is disheartened that we're not out of the woods yet, but he's grateful to have had a role to play in helping out the best way he could.

Gaurav Manchanda:

I mean, it was really an honor to be part of that process last year, where it was all hands on deck across, dare I say, political lines and across national lines and as a really global movement with one goal. And I have a lot of relief and a lot of gratitude for living where we do when we do and the technology available and the people who worked and dedicated their lives to the COVID response effort.

Sonari Glinton:

The just in time model grew out of a time of scarcity in Japan and now strong leadership, new ideas, approaches and innovations are emerging from the pandemic. They're built around human ingenuity and networks of people working together, leveraging strong relationships across time zones and oceans to build new business ideas, save jobs and save lives. Now, supply chain resilience doesn't come from digital optimization or ditching one manufacturing model for another. It comes from us and the ways we bridge these critical moments together.

Sonari Glinton:

On the next episode, how the shipping container shortage and supply chain breakdowns are disrupting Santa's workshop for this holiday season and who's stepping up to save toy land. I'm Sonari Glinton. Thanks for listening to Now What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley.

 

Sonari Narration: The winds in Egypt were strong on the morning of March 23rd, 2021.

Sonari Narration: Sand and dust blew in from the Sahara, turning the sky yellow, making it hard to see the Suez Canal. ..Where 10 BILLION dollars worth of trade flows between Asia and Europe every day.

Sonari Narration: Getting through the narrow waterway is not easy. I want you to imagine pushing the Empire State Building on its side… for 120 miles. The winds press against the cargo containers like they're sails, enough to push a huge ship off its course. When that happens, it's hard to regain control.

But, you know what, this is NOT a story about what happened on a March morning when a cargo ship called the Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal. It's also not a story about who or what was to blame, about the billions of dollars of goods that got  blocked, or about the legal battles that followed.

Sonari Narration: It's a story about us.

About how we're all connected to a vast complex network of wants and needs, supplies and demands, creation and destruction., a network we rely on every day, a network that’s more fragile than we realized.

Sonari Narration: I’m Sonari Glinton, and this season on Now What's Next ...an original podcast from Morgan Stanley... we're bringing you the stories behind the global network called the supply chain,... stories about how our stuff gets to our front doors and why that matters, about current problems and future solutions, and why even those fixes can push us to keep innovating.

Most of the time, we don't give much thought to this network and how it works or - too often these days - doesn't... But when a ship with more than 18- thousand containers on it gets stuck in the Suez Canal... for 6-days in March ...well, we couldn't look away.

Jan Unander: on board the ever given ship. We had, one container, a 20 foot container, that consisted of 6,000 sets of wires

Sonari Narration: That's Jan Unander (Yawn oo-NAN-durr) . He's a Swedish business man who gets products made in and shipped from China to customers in Sweden. One of his customers makes computer systems for trucking companies. And they need the wires that Jan had aboard the Ever Given to make these systems work.

Jan was expecting the container in early April at the ship's first port of call in Rotterdam. It takes about a month to get there from China on a normal trip during normal times. But this time...

Jan Unander: it took four months and nine days

Sonari Narration: We’re talking four nail-biting months and nine days. But the drama for Jan started weeks before the Ever Given got to the Suez Canal.

Jan Unander: a week before we were supposed to, get the goods on board, the ship, the broker started to warn us that it was quite tricky to find a place on board a ship at all. It was a question over a shortage of containers

Sonari Narration: The container shortage. Have you noticed it? Think about it, it's one of the reasons why you're seeing out of stock signs, and you get notices for long shipping delays.

It's not that there's not enough containers. They’re just not in the right places.  In areas that import a lot of stuff- like let’s say Los Angeles - you have containers piling up in the ports, or waiting on ships in the harbour to be unloaded. If you export a lot - like , say in China - you’re running low on containers. And that’s just one of the issues slowing things down... and jacking up prices. The cost of container shipping by sea has gone up by as much as 10 times the amount it was two years ago. Lucky for Jan, his broker had friends who booked cargo space on ships.

Jan Unander: he came back with an email saying that he found a space on the ship called ever given, and we were very happy at that time.

Sonari Narration: Well, that joy didn't last. But when Jan saw the images of the ship stuck in the canal 17 days after it left China, he was of two minds - sure, he had a lot of money in goods aboard the Ever Given, but he's also a marine engineer and worked in the merchant navy in the 60s and 70s. He knows cargo ships - and he knows canals. He knows how tricky they can be.

Jan Unander:  I 'm sure that the crew would prefer to go around South Africa, instead of going through the canal. I heard, one captain that said I prefer to do colos--. What do you call it? Coloscopy instead of taking a ship through the canal, it's risky. I wasn't worried because my background said that this is going to be solved in quite short time. And I guesstimated three days or something, but, um, it took longer.

Sonari Narration: A little longer... It took 6 days before the Ever Given was freed from the canal. Then it was held for inspection and investigation. Two weeks later, the canal authorities seized the ship, demanding more than 9 hundred million dollars in compensation from its owners. The Ever Given ended up sitting there for over three months while the authorities and the shipping company figured out a deal.

Jan Unander: Uh, started to become, uh, not furious, but, quite upset I realized my customer didn't have much, extra capacity in their store so if this would be a long story, we could be in trouble, both the customer and we.

Sonari Narration: It's important to realize that Jan's company pays for most the production and shipping costs in China up front. He only gets paid when the customer gets their stuff. As the customer's supply dwindled, Jan sped up production in China and found a way to get more wires to his customer before it was too late -- by air. It also meant that Jan's company had to spend more money up front, before they'd been paid for that last batch.

Jan Unander: we could have, actually, been forced to file for bankruptcy. It will be very close. so of course we couldn't pay salaries, but that, that's another story.

Sonari Narration: Jan's rushed shipment - by air - made it just before his customer ran out of supply. But it was close. And he's already seeing a lasting impact from the Ever Given delay.

Jan Unander: it will have consequences because, the customer, they are now hesitating to produce everything in China, which means that, our business is at risk now.

Sonari Narration: That’s not all because of a ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal. Manufacturing in China ain't what it used to be. As wages and education rise, and the Chinese middle class grows, so do the costs of manufacturing. And China is moving toward producing more higher-end and high-tech goods.

Jan has thought about other ways of getting his goods from China to Sweden - without going through the Suez Canal. There’s a train route - but that’s more expensive and crowded… And then there's another shipping route that runs from China through the seas north of Russia.

Jan Unander: I think it's about two weeks less. So it's quite a quick route. And that is something that, if we have the opportunity or to do that next time, it's safer, you got the icebergs, but I prefer those instead of the canal authorities.

Sonari Narration: That’s saying something. But that route through the arctic is controversial. Some shipping companies have begun to exploit the shorter winters and lengthening summers, while others are refusing because of environmental concerns. As we'll see more and more in this episode and series, supply chain solutions don't always work well for everyone.

Despite it all, Jan still thinks shipping by sea is the best way to go.

 Jan Unander: I would say the only way to go, I talked to the customer the other day and we are planning for the next delivery. . And so we will fill another container hopefully in the end of this year. And then we do it again. That's life.

Sonari Narration: That may be life for now but things are changing all along the supply chain. Sustainability, automation, new technologies, human rights - these factors are all shaping where this global network is headed next - factors we'll be exploring more through this season.

 As for where the Ever Given was headed ... after eventually unloading most of its 18-thousand-plus containers, including Jan's, in Rotterdam in late July, it sailed on.. for less than a week ... across the mouth of the North Sea to its final unloading point... Felixstowe Port in Suffolk, England…

Jake/Port: On one side of me is the sea uh, so you get a lot of sea smell down here. Uh, the British, British weather,

Sonari Glinton: And that's where we meet Jake Slinn...

Jake/Port: there's a huge ship, at the moment is docked, five or six cranes working, unloading it, while panning round. thousands and thousands of containers stacked up, um, all different colors, sizes, shipping companies. Uh, yeah. It's, it's amazing.

Sonari Narration: Felixstowe is the biggest port in England. Over 50% of the country's goods arriving on 3,000 ships dock there over the course of a year, including the Ever Given.

Jake/Port: So the ever given, was, was docked right in front of me. Um, this is sort of the main dock of where most of the ships come into Felixestowe. And this is where a lot of people came down to, to view it when it came in

Sonari Narration: With dozens of ship enthusiasts watching, the Ever Given unloaded 2 thousand containers at this port in early August... and some of them were destined for Jake. He's got a pretty unique job on the supply chain. When he heard about the Ever Given delay…

Jake Slinn INVU: what went through my mind was, you know, slight excitement, of course, uh, lots of, uh, fresh fruit and veggies that were on this, on the ship. Um, we're, we're going to need to be destroyed

Sonari Narration: That's right. Destroyed.

Jake Slinn INVU: I own and run a company called JS global cargo and freight disposal. Uh, we specialize in disposal of container goods coming from outside the UK

Sonari Narration: Jake cut his teeth in the waste business.

Jake Slinn INVU: I've always been in the waste and recycling industry. Uh, since I was young, again, I'm still quite young. I'm only 22. My dad has been in it since he was a, he was a boy as well. So I've learned everything from him.

Sonari Narration: Now Jake saw a gap in the market -- a lot of goods arrive at Felixestowe but can't make it out of the port for a variety of reasons. His company destroys what’s not allowed into the country…like goods that don't meet safety standards, or foods that have passed their best before date. Jake also buys up stock that’s safe but has been left behind … like if a company goes under. He started his business three years ago... and there has not been a dull day since.

Jake Slinn INVU: It's a bit like, storage wars. The TV program, you never know what you're going to be going to be opening in the container. It's always something different every day.

Sonari Narration: As for the Ever Given cargo that reached Felixstowe... more than four months after it was due to arrive? Let's just say, not all of it made it there... intact.

Jake Slinn INVU: So we're currently dealing with, uh, around 10 to 15 containers of red cabbages.

Sonari Narration: Take a moment to let that sink in. That's 25 tons of red cabbage in each container

Jake Slinn INVU: they were kept at a certain temperature that they weren't leaking out of the containing or any juices or anything like that um, but yeah, the smell, was disgusting as you can imagine. So, we needed to act quickly to get this containers off the port into, into a disposal site. And, you know, as soon as possible.

Sonari Narration: So what’s a boy to do with 25 tons of rotten cabbage?

Jake Slinn INVU: all of our food waste goes into, an anaerobic digestion site. Um, sounds complicated, but it's, it's actually not, food waste gets turned into electricity, so it's, it's going into a good home, and we’re not putting it into the ground or anything like that.

Sonari Narration: Soon after the Ever Given got stuck, Jake started getting calls from business owners with goods aboard the ship and other ships that got delayed. They were looking for alternate ways to unload their stock if their containers didn't arrive by the time they needed them. And the calls were not just about food.

Jake Slinn INVU: People were panicking. Definitely. If you're a company waiting on, on, you know, 20,000 items of stock that you still haven't got and you need them for a certain time, then you're going to be panicking. Um, so we were getting calls from people who had, uh, televisions on board, uh, hot tubs, onboard, people sort of looking at other, other avenues instead of, uh, waiting for the goods .

Sonari Narration: Remember, Jake's company buys up stock that's still safe for the UK market, and destroys what isn't. And with over 200 hundred other ships in a traffic jam behind the Ever Given… that was a lot of business for Jake.

Jake Slinn INVU: These ships had a lot of fresh fruit and veggie on, ,so we were destroying, bananas, pineapples, oranges, you name it. We were destroying it.

Sonari Narration: The Ever Given delay may have been an isolated event, but once again, it points to bigger issues. Jake says supply chain problems account for a huge percent of his business.

Jake Slinn INVU: I would say eight times out of 10 it's a reason or an issue, or a fault with either shipping line or the customer or the container itself with the fruit. Um, as I mentioned, any of these are in the refrigeration containers, if they go wrong, which happens a lot. They're not safe for the UK.

Sonari Narration: There can be problems all along the shipping route, but also on ground as well. There’s a shortage of truck drivers....that’s something we’ll talk about later in season…and it’s causing major delays everywhere

Jake Slinn INVU: it's a bit like the Suez canal. It's it's just holding up people collecting their containers off the dock. Um, there's not enough container drivers out there. There's not enough lorries out there too. With the volumes that are coming in from these ports at the moment.

Sonari Narration: Waste is a part of the supply chain, and the delays along each link, since the start of the pandemic, have increased the volume of it...

Jake Slinn INVU: and the Ever Given just slowed everything up. It just slowed the whole shipping world up. Everyone sort of took a step back and realized, you know, how, how big this problem is.

Sonari Narration: It's a problem that for now, is going to keep bringing Jake back to the ports...

Jake/Port: And every time I come down, down to a port in the UK, especially Felixstowe because of the size of it, it never sleeps it, you know, there's always something going on. Um, and that's what Ilike about the shipping world it just never sleeps.

Sonari Narration: At any  time...day or night... thousands of cargo ships are crossing the world's seas, moving wires, cabbage, toys, you name it... around the globe. Lights blinking in the darkness, nothing but ocean in every direction. The shipping world never sleeps.

Sonari Narration: The 24/7 hour nature of the shipping world is something Julian Wong understands in a way most of us don't even think about. And it was on his mind when he saw the crowds watching the Ever Given pull in to Felixstowe in August.

Julian Wong: I have to say that when they see all these crowds, it saddens me in a way that all the interest is a size of the ship and what has happened to it. It got stuck in the Suez canal and nobody ever gives a thought of, uh, 24 people on board.

Sonari Narration: Those 24 people operating the massive Ever Given?.. They’re all Julian thought about when he visited the ship in August - one of the few outsiders to board the infamous vessel.

Julian Wong: They are to me are the unsung heroes. I make it a mission of mine to to try and make them visible to the general public.

Sonari Narration: Julian was permitted on the Ever Given because he's a Stella Maris Port Chaplain.  Stella Maris - latin for Star of the Sea - is a Catholic organization that helps seafarers in need. Julian is in touch with crews all over the world, and visits the port all the time... climbing up tall ladders to check on crew members... despite a debilitating fear of heights.

Julian Wong: when I take the first step of a gangway, I start counting 1, 2, 3, I don't look over the side.

Sonari Narration: Julian didn't hear directly from crew members that were stuck in Egypt on the Ever given and suspects it has to do with signal problems in the Suez Canal. They were replaced by a new crew while the ship was held by the canal authorities. That's the crew that Julian visited in August.

Julian Wong: I wanted to, to show them my appreciation. And there was why I just took three boxes of a Ferrero Rocher chocolates for the crew. And, uh, and just a simple thank you card.

Sonari Glinton: Why chocolate?

Julian Wong: The one thing that seafarers always us surprisingly, uh, chocolates it seemed to be universal there and they do love, Ferrerro Rocher

Sonari Glinton: a little bit of joy that is universal.

Julian Wong: Yeah.

Sonari Glinton: And when you, when you got on board and you got two or three boxes for Ferrero Rocher chocolates, how did the people respond to you on that ship?

Julian Wong: They were obviously very, very pleased. Appreciate it. You know that I call on them. And, uh, apparently for about three or four days also the only person that they went on board

Sonari Narration: Let's be real for a moment, when we buy stuff online most of us aren't thinking too much about how it will get to us - let alone who's going to help get it there. Seafarers often get stuck on ships - sometimes for incredibly long periods - during government disputes, weather delays, route changes and lately, pandemic lockdowns. As global trade increases and we rely more and more on shipping, we're also relying on these people who are vulnerable to forces way out of their control. Julian tries to make their lives a little easier.

Julian Wong: I'm there to listen to them, help them in any way I can, if they want shopping to be done it, then I'll do that for them because they haven't got time at the go ashore.

Sonari Glinton: It's about making connection.

Julian Wong: yeah, it's basically being their friend and, I always tell them if you ever need help with anything, wherever you are, anytime, anywhere, just send me a message and I'll do all I can to help you

Sonari Glinton: How many seafarers do you come in contact with or are you keeping in touch with, um, at any given time

Julian Wong: try and befriend at least one seafarer on each vessel I visit I will say I have a few hundred on my messenger contacts

Sonari Narration: With hundreds of contacts on social media, Julian wakes up every morning to dozens of messages, and tries to help in any way he can.

I asked Julian to help me understand who's working on these ships.

Julian Wong: They come from Indonesia, the Philippines, India. Basically the poorer parts of the world because it's cheaper to hire them. And they work as seafarers because they need a job to support their families and extended families. I have to say.

Sonari Narration: A usual contract keeps a crew member onboard for three quarters of the year... which means you miss a lot..

Julian Wong: your children growing up, you don't see them. The first day of school, you don't see them on their birthday. Apart from on the, your little, mobile phone screen.

Sonari Narration: And the pandemic has made this hard job harder. Crew members are often barred from getting off the ship when it docks, and lockdowns have made it impossible for some to find ways back to their families for months at a time.

Julian Wong: But then you also realize that they have to deal with it because otherwise they, there won't be a job for them.

Sonari Glinton: What were you doing before you were a chaplain?

Julian Wong: I was a psychiatric nurse 45 years.

Sonari Glinton: Wow. As a psychiatric nurse, what are those sorts of mental issues that you have to, that, that you noticed, or you have to deal with when people are on these ships with that amount of time?

Julian Wong: yeah. The rate of depression is quite high. The rate of suicide as well is quite high. ,

Sonari Glinton: You've said that that a ship can be like a floating prison.

Julian Wong: Yeah. They're always working 24 7. And if you get on with each other fine, but if you, if you have problems with a certain member of the crew or certain officer, you're stuck with a person for nine months, 11 months or more,

Sonari Narration: a big part of what we're doing this season is looking at problems along the supply chain and who's doing what to solve them. But some of these solutions can have unintended consequences. And this is something Julian thinks about a lot. For example, as shipping technology becomes more advanced, more automated, there's talk of reducing the number of crew members aboard a ship ....which not only means fewer jobs...

Julian Wong: I just dread to think how would they cope

Sonari Glinton: if the ships are getting bigger and the crews are getting smaller, what does that mean for the physical and mental state of the people who are doing this work?

Julian Wong: Yeah. it will get worse. obviously there's less human, interaction, so mentally. Emotionally, down fiscally, you know, it's going affect them.

Sonari Glinton: tell me if I'm wrong but I I Would say that, you know, the larger world looked at this vessel getting stuck and what happened as a logistics problem as a supply chain problem. And you seem to think of it as a human problem.

Julian Wong: It is a human problem because without human beings, those vessels wouldn't move.. I mean, it's as simple as that. Compassion has come into it . I think they have to take the human element into account without that I think is going to be a tragedy.

Sonari Narration:

The Ever Given ship delay put a spotlight on a fragile system in need ...not just of a makeover... but a big overhaul.

As we'll see this season, there are more than a few ways forward. Heck, there are innovative, compassionate and unexpected routes. Those routes are being forged by thoughtful, out-of-the-container thinkers who are making new connections all across this network

 On the next episode, we find out how the Just-In-Time supply chain model meant we didn't get the pandemic PPE we needed ...and how we could be better prepared the next time...

I'm Sonari Glinton. Thanks for listening to Now What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley.

Sonari Glinton:

Hi, I'm Sonari Glinton. Let me paint a mental picture for you. The year is 1984. We're in a mall. A man dangles a child over the second storey railing of a busy food court. Just as he's about to drop her, there is a crash. A dark haired woman smashes through the glass skylight, swings from a golden lasso, and carries the child to safety. Remember what shopping was like, y'all?

Sonari Glinton:

I am talking about Wonder Woman 1984, the movie. They filmed it three years ago at a dead mall in Alexandria, Virginia. The Landmark Mall. While the film crew was shooting that scene in the food court, nearby in the old Macy's department store, a very different kind of rescue mission was unfolding.

Monise Quidley:

We have veterans, we have domestic violence survivors or people currently going through it. We have people who this is their first time being homeless because they had some sort of tragedy or illness that just took all of their savings.

Sonari Glinton:

For two and a half years, all those people lived in the mall, in a temporary shelter set in an old department store. Now this shelter and Wonder Woman gave a dead mall a completely new purpose, a chance of renewal.

Sonari Glinton:

But what about the rest of the malls? Well, even before the pandemic, malls across America were dead or dying. Experts predicted one out of every four malls will close as more shopping moves online. Now months of lockdowns haven't helped.

Sonari Glinton:

On this episode of Now What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley, we're asking how are shopping malls adapting and how is the pandemic forcing that change?

Howard Lo:

This is a shopping mall that is probably light years ahead of 99% of the other malls in this world.

Stephen Choi:

Me personally, I hate shopping malls. I never go to them. It was really about building a building for people who might not actually like shopping malls as well.

Speaker 5:

I think it's great to have that space used again because it's right in the middle of the community.

Sonari Glinton:

Malls are dead. Long live the mall. Now, let's go shopping.

Sonari Glinton:

I definitely had a good 30 minutes this morning getting dressed because I was like, "I'm going to meet Ilse Metchek I can't come looking like ..." Did I do okay?

Ilse Metchek:

Good. I don't mind that at all. You're all right.

Sonari Glinton:

Note that she said she didn't mind my outfit. Ilse Metchek, mind you, is a legend in the fashion industry. For over 17 years, she worked her way up from being an assistant to becoming a designer. She ended up owning her own clothing manufacturing company, which she eventually sold and then became the head of the California Fashion Association.

Ilse Metchek:

We've been around for 25 years. I've been around for twice that. I've been a designer. I've been a manufacturer. I've managed 250,000 square feet of the California mart, and one of my functions is to know what's going on.

Sonari Glinton:

Now to do that, Ilse Metchek goes to a different mall every single week. I wanted to get her take on a newer shopping experience, so we went to Platform in Culver City, just outside of Los Angeles.

Ilse Metchek:

When you think of a mall nationwide in the United States, this is not what you think of. This is a structure that was really primarily for one kind of consumer. A contemporary shopper, contemporary clothing, contemporary apparel. It's not a general mall.

Sonari Glinton:

No, it isn't. It's got a lot of pop-up stores, open air walkways, cool seating areas and a courtyard. Very urban, very Instagram friendly. But for Ilse, now more than ever, malls need that extra special something to draw folks in.

Ilse Metchek:

I went to a mall last weekend, 50 miles out of Los Angeles. The stores looked so dated. They still had a t-shirt with a pair of jeans in the window. There was nothing compelling about bringing all of these eyeballs into the store. The people will be back in the malls. Now it's up to the retailer.

Sonari Glinton:

And they're just beginning to come to grips with this problem.

Ilse Metchek:

Before the pandemic, as a country, we were over retailed. Too many stores.

Sonari Glinton:

Too many stores, too many malls, and brands that used to be popular in malls have been closing or failing. Right now, we're talking about 2 million lost jobs.

You don't have to be a legendary fashion designer to know that all malls are not the same. They fall essentially into categories. A malls, well, they make the most money. Think high-end restaurants and Apple stores. B malls, those are the mid-range malls and…

Ilse Metchek:

Cs are pretty much over. Those are the ones that are blank spots now because they had JC Penny, Sears, May Company or a Macy's, and in the middle, they had all the same brands that you can find anywhere else. And anything that you can buy in a C mall, you could buy online.

Sonari Glinton:

With the pandemic's boom in online shopping, you would think that malls are in more danger than ever, but ...

Ilse Metchek:

50% of what is bought online goes back, it's returned. The boom is all fat, pumpkin. You'll buy online what you know will stick with you, what fits, what you know. But for new stuff, to be excited, to be engaged in what's happening, you have to get out. You're not going out to the mall with your wallet in your hand and seeing what you can buy. I think that's not what a mall is for anymore. A mall is a social experience now.

Sonari Glinton:

For many of us, especially anyone born in the suburbs after the 70s, the mall has always been social, and it's likely where you got your first taste of freedom.

Howard Lo:

Yeah, I think from my junior high years through high school, I'd ask my parents to drop me off there and then spend the day watching a movie and then waiting for other friends to show up and then just walking around the mall. It's not really even necessarily shopping. Back then, it was very, very exciting, just lots of people buzzing around.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Howard Lo. He grew up in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida, but the mall he's describing is actually every mall USA.

Howard Lo:

I remember it was a cross shape, so all four ends of it was anchored by one of the major department stores. There was a Sears, actually. Yes, I remember going to Sears a lot over there when I was growing up.

Sonari Glinton:

Now these days, Howard Lo spends a lot of time in a very different mall on the other side of the world.

Howard Lo:

Okay, so I can give you the exact sensation of what it feels like when you walk into Jewel. If you ever watched the opening scene of Jurassic Park. You know, it's kind of flying through the clouds, you're coming to the island and then you see the first dinosaur and you've got this music swelling in the background?

Sonari Glinton:

Howard Lo is describing the Jewel, an opulent mall attached to Singapore's Changi Airport. Now I'm not talking a regular airport. I may have left my heart in San Francisco, but Atlanta's airport stole my soul.

Sonari Glinton:

Changi is heaven in comparison. It's been rated the best airport in the world. Howard moved to Singapore in 2003. While working full-time at Microsoft, he opened a Japanese-style sushi bar where he met his wife and future business partner. They took that sushi bar and grew it into a group of restaurants and bars called Empire Eats. They chose to put two of their places in the Jewel because well, they knew it was going to be a hit.

Howard Lo:

When you come in from the main entrance, as soon as you walk in, it's grand. There's just so much space as the hallways are so wide, but straight in front of you is the amazing rain vortex.

Sonari Glinton:

That is the world's largest indoor waterfall, dropping down from the glass ceiling, and it's surrounded by a forest that stretches over five storeys. There are also garden mazes, climbing nets, a museum, movies, lots of places to eat, bars, and oh yeah. Shopping.

Sonari Glinton:

It's an all-day experience and you don't have to be inside of the travel part of the airport to go to Jewel. It is open to everyone.

Howard Lo:

Even before Jewel, the locals have always gone to just hang out at the airport. You go there at any time and you'll see students using the restaurants to hang out and study at. You'll see families coming in with their kids since there's all kinds of rotating exhibits and road shows that are going on at the airport.

Sonari Glinton:

Now during the pandemic with most travel suspended, Changi Airport has taken a huge hit. Passenger traffic dropped nearly 83%, but Howard's noticed the locals have embraced Jewel even more.

Howard Lo:

I think it offers a little psychological escape. The fact that you do go to the airport to go to this mall helps trigger those associations in one's mind that they're getting away. Then once they're in the mall, because it is so different from the other shopping malls out here, it feels like a comfortable mini-vacation.

Sonari Glinton:

And while Howard says Jewel is light years ahead of malls around the world, there are signs it's changing stateside as well.

Sonari Glinton:

Probably the best example is The Grove in Los Angeles, which is sort of like a theme park with restaurants, shops, live events. They tape TV shows and specials there, they have valet and concierge services. There are fountains and lawns, even a trolley that goes ...

Sonari Glinton:

Developers have been forced to experiment. Heck, they should have been experimenting all along, especially with traditional mall tenants looking to leave. Now last fall, The Gap, which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic, said it essentially is moving out of the traditional mall. It's moving 80% of its stores out of indoor shopping centers over the next two years.

Sonari Glinton:

Now, this part is huge. At the most successful malls, to keep the existing tenants and attract new ones, malls are offering smaller spaces and shorter leases. They're replacing the old school department stores and food courts with bars, gyms, art installations, and most importantly, pop-up stores and restaurants. They're fighting to stay alive and they could take a cue from Singapore, where extremely competitive real estate means developers have to make it work, right quick and in a hurry.

Howard Lo:

There's been a few examples where of all that was, maybe only three or four years old, parts of it didn't seem to be as popular as maybe its developer wanted it, and they would just totally gut the inside and redo it within a couple of years. That'll work. I think in Singapore, the malls seem to have that pressure where they need to do that. They don't just let it kind of fizzle out.

Sonari Glinton:

Fizzle out. That's exactly what happened to the exciting mall from Howard's teenage years in Florida.

Howard Lo:

It was very sad to see that this place that was so iconic in my youth is now this almost empty shell of a large building. It makes me feel a little bit sad every time I go, because malls have a very romantic place, I think, in especially American history and the development of American towns, American city life.

Sonari Glinton:

Let's take a moment. I'm going to try to put this in a bit of context. While Howard may be nostalgic about the good old days of the American shopping mall, shopping malls actually are kind of new. The designer of the first fully enclosed indoor shopping mall was Victor Gruen. He was an Austrian-Jewish architect who fled the Nazis during world war II. Eventually, he settled in Los Angeles. Gruen's malls are a post-World War II invention. Like a lot of mid-century designers Gruen was looking to solve social problems with good design. In his own words ...

"Shopping centers can fill an existing void. They can provide the needed place and opportunity for participation in modern community life that the ancient Greek agora, the medieval marketplace, and our own town squares provided in the past."

Sonari Glinton:

Oh, architects. Always dreaming. But you can see Gruen's influence in almost every corner of the US, and some of his malls still break records for foot traffic and sales. That's something Gruen came to regret toward the end of his life when he said ...

 

“I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.”

Sonari Glinton:

The irony, or maybe the tragedy, is that during his lifetime, Gruen's malls veered far away from his core ideas. They became car first, retail first, huge rigid structures that didn't always meet the needs of pedestrians, the community, or the environment.

Sonari Glinton:

Now let's head to a mall where those are the priorities.

Sonari Glinton:

So why don't you give me a little bit of a tour?

Stephen Choi:

Absolutely. One thing worth, whilst we're standing here, I'm not sure if you can hear it, but there's a soundscape of native birds indigenous to this area. Every entrance to the building that you walk in, you have this sense. You walk in, there's a soundscape. There's also a smellscape. In this particular entrance, there's a subtle smell of burning eucalyptus trees.

Sonari Glinton:

That's architect, Stephen Choi. He's giving me a tour of the Burwood Brickworks, a shopping mall he designed in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Like Victor Gruen and so many other designers and architects, Stephen Choi is a dreamer.

Stephen Choi:

If I'm honest with you, when we first took on the idea of building a shopping mall that could generate its own energy, recycle its own water, be full of food, no toxic materials, among many, many other things, I actually thought it was impossible. I really didn't think it would be possible.

Sonari Glinton:

But here we are, just inside the entrance, looking up at a reed ceiling covered in black and white waves, arrows, and other shapes designed by a local Aboriginal artist.

Stephen Choi:

The ceiling's actually about telling us where we are in the world. This mall, built 10 years ago, would have been more like a casino. You can't find your way in, you can't find your way out. You don't know what time of day it is, you don't even know if it's raining outside. In here, we try to flip that on its head.

Sonari Glinton:

The Burwood Brickworks upends a lot of things we assume about how malls operate. For example, the kind of stores that go in it.

Stephen Choi:

There's a pharmacy just in front of us. Just above that black sign, you see there, is a medical center. There's a large supermarket or grocery store.

Sonari Glinton:

There are no fast fashion or luxury shops here, mostly just services and food.

Stephen Choi:

There's a butcher shop, and then just above and behind that butcher shop where you see the timber in the far end, that's a childcare center.

Sonari Glinton:

And the prime real estate, the north facing wall with the afternoon sunshine pouring in, features a giant staircase.

Stephen Choi:

So that when you come here, you're encouraged to take the stairs rather than take the lift. So save a bit of energy, but it's really about people's health and wellbeing. We're going to walk up those stairs and then we're going to go up to the first floor.

Sonari Glinton:

Now, why was that important as you're walking up?

Stephen Choi:

When we think about sustainability, we're only ... often, we're just talking about energy, water, materials, waste. But actually, the most important thing is that we're healthy as people and so emotional health is important. The stairs relate to physical health. The ceiling relates to the spiritual health. Often we don't think about health when we're talking about buildings, but that's really important.

Sonari Glinton:

Here's something important to know about Stephen Choi.

Stephen Choi:

Me personally, I hate shopping malls. I never go to them.

Sonari Glinton:

How does a guy who believes in sustainability and doesn't particularly like shopping malls, get into the making the shopping mall business?

Stephen Choi:

It's a great question, because I'm an architect and I realized that everything that I was doing was actually not helping the world, it's actually just making it worse. So I embarked on this adventure to try and change it.

Sonari Glinton:

Now, when Stephen says making it worse, he's referring to a whole slew of environmental problems we're facing. Water pollution, habitat destruction, air quality, global warming, and of course, climate change. Now remember Ilse Metchek, our mall expert from the beginning? She might object to a mall without, I don't know, fashion, but she and Stephen share a common vision of how a mall needs to be forward-looking.

Ilse Metchek:

People build malls based on what's coming. They don't build them all based on what is.

Sonari Glinton:

Global warming and climate change are here, not just coming.

Stephen Choi:

So every time you build a building, it makes a lot of those environment problems I mentioned much worse. We wanted to build a building that wouldn't do that and also a building that was completely accessible to everyone in society.

Sonari Glinton:

That's a key for Stephen Choi, building a green building for everyone. Now usually, ultra-green buildings are private homes or corporate spaces.

Stephen Choi:

But generally for the everyday person, they never get to interact with a building that doesn't just do less damage to the environment that it's in, but could actually regenerate it.

Sonari Glinton:

The architect and dreamer, Stephen Choi, wants this building and the lessons that went into making it to be easily replicated and improved on, so he's sharing the plans and the data with other architects. That used to be unheard of.

Sonari Glinton:

We end our tour at Stephen's favorite spot in the mall.

Stephen Choi:

We're standing on the roof of the shopping center. It's an urban farm up here, so there's thousands and thousands of square feet of food that's grown. Also, there's chickens, quails, bees, butterflies, and many other insects that we don't control.

Sonari Glinton:

Many other insects you can't control. Let me just take this opportunity to remind you that we're on the roof of a shopping mall.

Stephen Choi:

And there's kids playing and people eating food that was grown right next to them. Then those people, when they go home, and I hear about this every day, they start planting the same crops. Or they come to the farmer and they start talking about what they should do about their chickens or whatever that they own. I think that's happening at the community level and it's happened at the industry level.

Sonari Glinton:

It seems like your work has been focused on a couple of these ideas. One, the environment and two, bringing the ideas sort of off the mountain. Is that an over simplification?

Stephen Choi:

It's a really lovely analogy. I'd never thought of it that way. If you think about the things that are here — medical center, childcare, yoga, cinema, grocery store, cafes, and so on, they're not really part of that same consumer's culture that you'd normally get in the retail environment. They're really about how and where people connect to each other. That for me is just at the heart of all the work that I've wanted to do.

Sonari Glinton:

From the lush green gardens of Melbourne, Australia to the cobblestone streets of Alexandria, Virginia, and that temporary shelter in the Landmark mall.

Monise Quidley:

Since the mall was shuttered and had been for a while, we had to actually go in and retrofit the building for the shelter. I mean, our offices were in lady's active wear section and where the administrative offices were, you can go through a door which would take you into the mall. It was really, really kind of interesting, dark, scary. When we first got there, I would be like, oh, we would go out and I would look and see if I could find a diamond or something.

Sonari Glinton:

Monise Quidley was looking around for signs of life. She's the director of development for Carpenter Shelter and was one of the people in charge of finding a temporary space for the shelter while its new permanent home was being built. When she found out they were moving into the Landmark mall ...

Monise Quidley:

I was like, "What? We're moving where?"

Sonari Glinton:

Monise knew Landmark in its better days. It was her first shopping experience after she moved to the area in the 90s.

Monise Quidley:

It was booming, it's where all the high school students and people hung out, movie theaters. So it was busy, it was a hub bringing all kinds of people together because this was central in the community.

Sonari Glinton:

Until it wasn't. Demographics shifted in the neighborhood and shoppers shifted to the newer upscale malls. Redevelopment plans for the Landmark fizzled in 2008 when the financial collapse bankrupted the owners. Retailers started closing one shop after another until all that was left was the Sears and long corridors of, well, nothing.

Sonari Glinton:

In 2017, the Landmark mall went dark as the owners finalized new development plans and renegotiated with the community. They agreed to let the Carpenter Shelter have the old Macy's space rent-free.

Monise Quidley:

It was interesting to hear some of the residents' stories and the fact that many of them had shopped at the mall when it was a mall. Some of them have even worked in the mall when it was a mall.

Sonari Glinton:

I think that bears repeating.

Monise Quidley:

Some of them have even worked in the mall when it was a mall.

Sonari Glinton:

So how did living in it as a homeless shelter go over?

Monise Quidley:

Well, I think they were a little happy in one aspect because since everything was brand new, they were getting brand new rooms and brand new beds and mattresses, but it was also, for some, reminding them of where they had been previously.

Sonari Glinton:

Is there a more tangible reminder of your town's better days than an abandoned mall? But there were bright spots.

Monise Quidley:

At one point, we had a carnival that lasted about a month, which was right outside. Because think about it, there's lots of parking.

Sonari Glinton:

The children were all excited, but the shelter didn't have the funds to cover the tickets. And then a donor came through and paid for everyone to go.

Monise Quidley:

It was really nice that people who were experiencing a crisis were able to just let their children be children for two hours and not have to worry about how the ice cream would be paid for or what rides they could get on.

Sonari Glinton:

The carnival left, as they always do, and a Christmas tree vendor showed up in the lot. Monise says there was always something going on.

Monise Quidley:

Was kind of like we came and then life came back to the mall. Because at that point, it was kind of like nothing really much going on, but it was like we bought the community back to it. So that was good.

Sonari Glinton:

We brought the community back to it. Can you hear that, Victor Gruen?

Sonari Glinton:

One of the things we often forget about malls is that they weren't built with flexibility in mind.

Ilse Metchek:

If the people move away or the people change, then the mall can't move. It's there. The mall can't move. People can move.

Sonari Glinton:

But malls can reinvent themselves to meet the changing needs of people. Carpenter Shelter moved out of the Landmark and into their forever home last November, and early this year, Landmark developers announced the plan to turn them all into a hospital campus with mixed use housing, retail, and green space.

Monise Quidley:

Designs and things of that nature might have to be tweaked, but I think it's great to have that space used again because it's right in the middle of the community.

Sonari Glinton:

And that makes very valuable, valuable real estate. Some of these dark malls have already become offices, colleges, recreation facilities, senior housing complexes, even churches. Some have become Amazon fulfillment centers. I think that's called the irony. Here is a huge opportunity here, and developers are always trying to find the most financially rewarding solution. They need to make money. Best case scenario ...

Ilse Metchek (26:29):

That they'll be the social framework of a community. Everything will be repurposed, but they will be the centers of a community.

Sonari Glinton:

I was thinking about my conversation with Ilse Metchek. You know the only thing that I bought in a mall the whole year of the pandemic is a refurbished army jacket that has a giant image of Muhammad Ali on the back. I bought it from a local artist in a pop-up shop that definitely wouldn't have existed at a mall a few years ago. Now, to be honest, I might go back and see what shows up there next.

Sonari Glinton:

As Ilsa Metchek would say, fashion and malls are about being relevant. And what's more relevant at this moment than community?

Sonari Glinton:

The mall is dead, I guess. Long live the mall. On our next episode, we study up on how the pandemic has created opportunities to rethink college. I'm Sonari Glinton and this has been Now What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley. Thanks for listening.

 

Sonari Glinton:

A quick note before we begin, this episode is about mental health. If you feel like you need help, trust me, you are not alone. So look at the show notes on your device. We put some links to organizations that can help you get the support you need. That's something we could all use right now. It's okay to not be okay.

Sonari Glinton:

I'm Sonari Glinton, and welcome back to Now, What's Next? An original podcast from Morgan Stanley.

Sonari Glinton:

All right. See, these guys are going to be hungry.

Sonari Glinton:

Maybe the only glamorous thing about the strip mall that contains Yo's Aquarium is that it's near the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It's where Judy Garland and Rudolph Valentino are buried. I bought a 20 gallon fish tank this year from Yo's Aquarium, got all my fish and most of the equipment from Mr. Yo himself. He's more than a pet shop owner. He's a fish whisperer of sorts, and business has been booming, probably because, like me, there's a lot of folks out there who need to get their minds off the state of the world.

Sonari Glinton:

And they're off.

Sonari Glinton:

My friend, Steve Lombardo, he wanted a hobby to soothe his mind in this past year. And if you've been following the series, you might remember Lombardo from our restaurants episode. It's a stressful time to keep a restaurant open, trust me, and it's been getting to him. So he got into bonsai trees. You know, those tiny meticulously pruned trees that are part of Japanese culture? And he told me I definitely needed to get a hobby as well. And so I got a fish tank, and a dozen small fish.

Sonari Glinton:

But this year has been hard, hard, no matter who you are. And I thought I was just fine. I'm strong. I exercise. I see a therapist. I meditate. I thought I had the tools to handle this pandemic. The key is thought.

Sonari Glinton:

For many of us in the early days of this crisis, alarm bells weren't ringing, at least when it came to the mental health part. Here's what I mean. During the first part of the pandemic, some hospitals and emergency rooms experienced a drop in mental health patients.

Curtis Wittman:

We ended up going from these really intense, busy days where the psychiatric part of the emergency department was completely full. We were overflowing into the main part, to almost everybody disappearing. We dropped down to volumes that we hadn't seen, at least routinely, in 10 to 15 years. And it was really unclear what happened to people.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Dr. Curtis Wittman. He's an emergency room psychiatrist at Massachusetts General, popularly, Mass General, in Boston. Now usually, the ER psychiatrist sees a lot of patients who are facing some of mental health crisis. There are people who need help with severe anxiety and depression, substance abuse, psychosis. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Sonari Glinton:

For a moment, in spring, they all seemed to vanish and he wondered, "Well, where did they all go? Well, the doctor didn't have to wonder for long. That's because not only did they all come back, a lot more of us came back with them.

Sonari Glinton:

By July, 2020 surveys suggested more than half of us were suffering mental health problems because of COVID's impact. Public health professionals say we're on the brink of a huge mental health crisis. A Harvard University study suggests that the mental health costs from this pandemic could be as high as 1.6 trillion, with a T, dollars. That's the a number that's hard to wrap your head around. What it says, though, is that a lot of people face serious mental health challenges right now, whether it's ourselves, our friends, coworkers, family, or all of the above.

Sonari Glinton:

This season on Now, What's Next? an original podcast from Morgan Stanley, we're trying to figure out what life after a global pandemic looks like or can look like. Some of these changes will be subtle, others dramatic. But no matter what, even after the dust settles, life is not going back to the way it was before. We're exploring how the world continues to evolve in the face of a global crisis and the rare chance it gives us to rethink our old assumptions. This may be a once-in-a-lifetime challenge, but it's also an opportunity to create real and lasting change. Today, what's next for mental health?

Sonari Glinton:

Curtis Whitman's emergency room did not stay quiet for long.

Curtis Wittman:

We had one day where we had 44 patients in our emergency department seeking psychiatric care, which is really intense and way beyond what we are ... We have six specific beds designated for psychiatric patients, and so ...

Sonari Glinton:

Six beds, 44 people. That's one single day of Dr. Whitman's life under COVID. We talked to him in late November of 2020, long past those early quiet days in the spring. He now sees his workplace in a much starker light.

Curtis Wittman:

It looks much more like the kind of crisis hospitals that get set up after a disaster or in a war zone or someplace like that. It's painful to watch.

Sonari Glinton:

When your job becomes this overwhelming, you can't help but feel like you're just not doing enough.

Curtis Wittman:

It's painful for me to see this and think about how hard it is to be a person who's already in crisis, already struggling with feeling very depressed or hearing voices, and then we're asking them to sit in a chair for 24 hours to wait to get care, which feels terrible.

Sonari Glinton:

Now, amidst all this chaos. There are moments, ones in which he can pause and listen to his patients. They tell him the same thing again and again.

Curtis Wittman:

We're hearing a lot of, "I couldn't see my provider anymore because I didn't have access to telemedicine, and my provider is 100% remote," or "I am struggling with not having social connections anymore because the people that I would have normally seen are trying to remain socially distant, and so I'm not seeing people who I use for supports as often."

Sonari Glinton:

If emergency psychiatric units like Dr. Whitman's are overcrowded, well, it's because people are suffering like never before. We saw it ourselves making this series.

Sonari Glinton:

Our own guests said they were struggling. Here's just a few of them, including my buddy, Lombardo. The one with the bonsai tree.

Steve Lombardo:

It's been one of the hardest things that we've ever had to deal with, and you want to talk about what kept me up at night praying, it was that.

Alison Harsh:

I didn't imagine that I was going to be going through so much stress that I did.

Jessica Nabongo:

Rock bottom was definitely around the end of March.

Ashley Mitchell:

I'm working by myself, indoors alone, and then I found the winter was coming around the corner, and I knew what a state I was going to get myself then.

Valerie Workman:

I knew depression set in for a lot of people because there was no light at the end of the tunnel. For some people there still is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Tiffany Smith:

You could see the level of stress and frustration in people's faces.

Jessica Nabongo:

It doesn't matter, race, gender. It doesn't matter income. It doesn't matter class. Everyone was affected in some way.

Sonari Glinton:

Right now, it's totally normal to wonder if the entire world is going mad, except mental health has always been at near crisis levels. Dr. Whitman says this problem predates the pandemic.

Curtis Wittman:

There was absolutely a crisis before. I think what's different is there's just extra. But I don't think society as a whole has really grappled with the fact that we have a lot of need for psychiatric care, and we are not meeting that need, or we're not close to meeting that need.

Sonari Glinton:

Meeting that need is going to take some creativity and a few new ideas, and we'll get to that in a few minutes. Some of us, though, are seeking help for the first time.

Sonari Glinton:

Tell me who you are and something interesting about you, I guess.

Ghazal Azarbad:

Something interesting about me? Oh God, this question always stresses me out. I guess I have-

Sonari Glinton:

I don't want to stress you out.

Ghazal Azarbad:

No, no, no. I'm kidding.

Sonari Glinton:

Ghazal Azarbad is a 27-year-old actor from Vancouver. Born in Iran, she moved to Canada when she was a toddler. This year, she took therapy seriously, which for her, is a little unusual. She was raised in a family and a culture that didn't believe in therapy.

Ghazal Azarbad:

Any other Western therapy jargon that you would use today wasn't really in my household. So whenever I would go through periods of depression, I would be told, "Oh, you're just sad," or it's just something that you got to bounce back from.

Sonari Glinton:

Yeah, or in my tradition, it would be, "Baby, you just need to pray on that."

Ghazal Azarbad:

That's right, that's right. Any time I felt pain or sadness or anger, or any overwhelming emotion that needed some sort of attention, often what would happen is I would be told, "Well, you don't even have it that bad. We came from Iran. Here are the stories that we can share." And then they would share these traumatizing stories, which would make my stories feel like a Tic Tac in comparison to them.

Sonari Glinton:

But as the awfulness of this past year crested, Ghazal realized she needed some professional support. She saw beyond her family's traditional resistance to therapy, and all because she witnessed the rising of a different kind of resistance.

Ghazal Azarbad:

The pandemic was one thing, but then, yeah, the reemerging of Black Lives Matter and anti-racial conversations that have been percolating over the last few years, but then this year it became impossible to not persist. I wasn't able to let it go. I wasn't able to just be like, "Yeah, you know what? Let's just whatever. Let's keep the peace." It became very necessary to drive the point all the way home.

Sonari Glinton:

Ghazal engaged, stood up against racism, defended her ideas. It cost her friendships, damaged relationships with family, but she persisted. And it may be because this moment echoed moments from her own past.

Ghazal Azarbad:

When 9/11 happened, I was nine or 10 years old. And the treatment I received after that was a night and day. I have been called terrorist a lot, and by the time I hit high school, it was one of those things where the thing I cringe about today is how I then internalized comments like, "Oh, you're terrorists. You're going to blow the school up one day."

Sonari Glinton:

That terrible time plays like a loop in her head still. She found her life collapsing into itself. So she went online, asked friends for advice, and found herself a therapist.

Ghazal Azarbad:

Yeah. I actually posted on Instagram. I shared a story saying, "I'm looking for therapy. Please send me your recommendations." So links were shared and resources were shared. And it's funny because I actually ended up going with a white guy, which is the last option that I thought I was going to go for. But he happens to be exactly the kind of therapy that I need, and his understanding of racism is really ... It's just really deep, so I'm able to open up to him.

Sonari Glinton:

Ghazal could have kept on internalizing the racism, but this year she confronted it.

Ghazal Azarbad:

The beautiful realizations I've had through therapies since I started in June has been that I'm allowed to say no, and that's okay. And I'm still deserving of love. I'm allowed to stand up for my voice, and that's okay. I'm deserving of love.

Sonari Glinton:

Part of it Ghazal's path to therapy included rejecting our family's cultural resistance to therapy, and it's a variation on a theme. Lots of folks resist reaching out to a therapist.

Camesha L. Jones:

I think part of the stigma that still exists is our narrative as black folks of being strong and resilient. And in some ways it's powerful, and in other ways it is hindering. And then sometimes just feeling shame about even needing mental health services is something else that comes up for people, specifically, people who are first timers.

Sonari Glinton:

This is Camesha L. Jones. She's a licensed clinical social worker in Chicago. She's a therapist, and she's a bit relieved to see that despite continued doubts about therapy, people are finally coming to see her.

Camesha L. Jones:

I hear women who are like, "I've had to choose between my career and my family. I had to quit my job to be at home with my family for e-learning, and my cousin just passed away from COVID, and I am now having to also be away from my family." And then I think that people are also realizing like, "I need to get help for this thing, because if I don't get help, I will completely fall apart."

Sonari Glinton:

Now Camesha says the majority of her patients this year are a bit like us all, first timers.

Camesha L. Jones:

I would say maybe 60% of the people that I see are coming to therapy for the first time. They call us for a consultation. They're like, "I don't even know what this therapy thing is. I don't know what to expect."

Sonari Glinton:

How many people do you think are out there who are suffering and aren't getting the help of any sort?

Camesha L. Jones:

The average time that people take to actually get mental health services when they've experienced symptoms is 10 years, 10 years.

Sonari Glinton:

Hold on a second. Hold on a second. So I'm upset because my dad dies. A decade later, I go to try to figure that out.

Camesha L. Jones:

Exactly. Exactly. Even in the data that we take, we ask, "How many years have you been living with your mental health condition? Zero to five, five to 10, 10 plus years?" And most people put five to 10 years.

Sonari Glinton:

10 years, 10 years before someone asks for help. That is a long time to live with an untreated, potentially debilitating mental illness. There are plenty of reasons for that, though. Social stigma, that's one. Poverty and institutional racism are others.

Camesha L. Jones:

Historically, the black community has not had a good experience with the healthcare systems, still are not having a good experience with the healthcare system. There's so many people who need care that aren't able to access it. So one of the things is, statistically, black folks are the highest uninsured in the country. So say I don't have insurance. I cannot pay for my mental health services.

Sonari Glinton:

Affordability and access to different, but linked barriers to getting support. To challenge this, the pandemic forces some of us to push past, as Camesha's growing list of first-time clients shows.

Camesha L. Jones:

I think what has changed is people are like, "I don't have any other options. What are my other options?"

Sonari Glinton:

There are, in fact, more and more options available to manage our mental health, options that can help break down some of those barriers. And it goes beyond the traditional solutions like talk therapy and medication, or fish tanks in my case. For instance, major money has been invested in wellness apps.

Sonari Glinton:

My favorite example is that for months there was an eight story tall billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with LeBron James advertising a meditation app. Can we reflect on that for a moment? LeBron James, one of the greatest athletes of all time, leader of the current NBA world champions, and the face of a meditation app. These apps are having a moment. Downloads were up at least 20% this past year.

Kristen Choi:

I've tried a few of them. I've tried a Headspace and Calm. I really like them.

Sonari Glinton:

Kristen Choi is a practicing psychiatric nurse. She's also an assistant professor of nursing and public health at UCLA.

Kristen Choi:

I do notice that when I did use them consistently, even though it's hard to do it, that they really helped me in terms of how I was feeling and just my general mood during the day.

Sonari Glinton:

Like Dr. Whitman, Kristen has experienced the effects of the pandemic from the front line. She sees how the need for mental health services is skyrocketing, and yet some of us still aren't finding it.

Kristen Choi:

We know that there are really big gaps in mental health providers for both children and adults, and that many Americans live in areas where there simply are no mental health care providers.

Sonari Glinton:

So Kristen understands why wellness apps are filling a need in this space. Apps lower the bar to entry, they're accessible to anyone with a smartphone, and relatively inexpensive compared to a doctor's bill. And Kristen also thinks the virtual medical appointments will only get more popular. Nearly 70% of all doctor visits this past year took place online, that includes therapy.

Kristen Choi:

For a lot of people, I think that being able to maybe text a therapist or have a phone call with a therapist is more accessible and less scary to try, and so I think that those lowered barriers to starting mental health services can really be a great thing to getting more people into care who might be willing to try something that doesn't feel quite so intense as a face-to-face session with a therapist.

Sonari Glinton:

And because apps make it easier to find help, it can push us past the stigma some of us still harbor. And if that's still not enough, Kristen says the future of mental health can benefit from giving nurses like her a bigger role to play.

Kristen Choi:

I see nurses as a really optimal solution to some of those mental health gaps for a couple of reasons. People have a tendency to just trust nurses more than they trust others and to assume that nurses are going to be on their team and have their best interest in mind. And people may be more apt to seek care from a nurse or talk to a nurse about mental health issues, where they may not be comfortable doing that with others simply because of this preexisting and fairly unique public trust.

Sonari Glinton:

If there's one thing about this pandemic, it has given us permission to admit that we feel terrible or bored or lonely or anxious, that we're not handling it. It may be that all you need is a bit of meditation and to turn off cable news, or maybe you just need a pet, like my fish. For some of us, it could be medication, or it's medication, meditation, a pet, turning off the news, and talk therapy.

Sonari Glinton:

However, you make the effort to look after yourself, it's important to do just that. Take care of yourself. We've been conditioned to associate mental illness with weakness. That attitude can leave you hopeless, but there is hope to be found out there. It's just a question of where you'll find it.

Sonari Glinton:

I want to come back to Camesha Jones, the Chicago therapist I chatted with for this episode. She shared a story that helped me reframe how I feel about what's going on right now. She visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Visitors experience the struggle of black people by walking through time. You move through the exhibits and witness the countless moments where black folks have been oppressed. And as you experience this, you're moving closer and closer to the present day.

Camesha L. Jones:

And then you're seeing all these things that our ancestors went through, and then you get to the top, and the last picture they have is of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, and you break down. And you break down because you realize like, "Wow. My people are amazing. We went through so much, but still there's something powerful within us."

Sonari Glinton:

Camesha found hope inside that museum, hope in defiance of generations of grief and mental anguish. I find comfort in that. And she knows that things can get better, that you can heal.

Camesha L. Jones:

Healing is not linear. It's messy. It's messy and it takes something within you to say that "I'm still going to show up and I'm still going to be determined to heal what needs to be healed in my life." And so I also want people to see that this thing, it takes a minute, but if you're determined, you'll find things in yourself that you never realized or never knew was there.

Sonari Glinton:

Right now, we're facing incredibly difficult times. What's next. hopefully, is giving ourselves the time to heal. Now, if you feel like you need help, and we all do at some time or another, please check in with a friend or family member. There are resources online to help you cope, and you can find the list in the episode show notes.

Sonari Glinton:

That's the season, and this was our last episode for now. We're already working on the next season. So in the meantime, let me know what you think. Leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcast and subscribe if you haven't done so already. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy. Don't text and drive. I'm Sonari Glinton. This is Now, What's Next? An original podcast from Morgan Stanley.

Jacob Sarasohn:

So I packed one travel sized suitcase, and I got on a plane, I was the only person on the plane. And I flew home from Chicago. And as soon as I landed, and I wheeled my suitcase into my parents' house, I realized, this is real, this is something bigger than a little break from school.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Jacob Sarasohn.

Jacob Sarasohn:

I'm currently 21 years old. And I go to school at the Art Institute of Chicago,

Sonari Glinton:

Or at least he did. When classes first went online last spring, Jacob and his friends were thinking.

Jacob Sarasohn:

Let's just get through this month, we can all handle it and we'll figure it out. And then next year it'll be different.

Sonari Glinton:

But it wasn't. A weekend into Zoom classes in September. And he began to weigh his options.

Jacob Sarasohn:

I thought that I could do something else with my time that's more valuable. It wasn't worth paying that much money to take classes that I felt were subpar. Not because of the professors, or the students, or the content, but because of the delivery.

Sonari Glinton:

So the idea of you stopping school, in my mind, was kind of crazy because I think of all the angst and anxiety that I had about you choosing your damn school. You know what I mean? You should know, Jacob's mom is a very good friend of mine and he's kind of like family.

               

Sonari Glinton: And you get into the frigging Art Institute of Chicago. And now you're like, "Nah, this is not interesting. I'm going to go do something else." So what did you decide to do?

Jacob Sarasohn:

I decided to take a course to become an EMT, which is a little different from art school. I will say.

Sonari Glinton:

A little different?

Jacob Sarasohn:

A little different.

Sonari Glinton:

Well I want to be clear, Jacob left in-person art school because he felt it was too dangerous to be in classrooms during the pandemic. Then he decided to become an emergency medical technician. He wanted to learn. He just didn't want to do it over a computer screen.

Jacob Sarasohn:

I'm doing CPR for the first time, or I'm trying to help out on a patient that was pulled from a vehicle in the emergency room.

Sonari Glinton:

Now those are lessons that you definitely won't get in an art school studio.

Jacob Sarasohn:

There's those moments where I'm sweating and stressing out, but it's never a yearning to go back. It's just a broader understanding of how privileged I am and just expanding my landscape of how I see things.

Sonari Glinton:

I have to admit. It is hard for me not to admire that choice. We all know that college can lead to great things. Better earning potential, a longer healthier life, even having healthier children. Then, of course, there's learning for the sake of learning. The intellectual and spiritual growth that happens. College, it can make us better people and better citizens. But when the pandemic pushed college into a long pause, it made way for big questions and new insights that could change how we think about higher education for good. From how we teach.

Elizabeth Grimm:

I acknowledged my own personal vulnerability in ways that I never would have done in class before.

Sonari Glinton:

To the rewards of living on a college campus.

Brenda A. Allen:

Those are life skills. Negotiating a bathroom and you share it with 16 other women. If you can figure that one out, you can probably close the biggest deal ever in business.

Sonari Glinton:

To the deeply held beliefs about what it takes to succeed.

LaShana M. Lewis:

The first thing that comes to my head is that people lie to me.

Sonari Glinton:

I'm Sonari Glinton, and on this episode of Now What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley. We're looking to get schooled on higher education.

Brenda A. Allen:

These are good questions because these are things that people are really grappling with right now.

Sonari Glinton:

Now will Jacob continue being an EMT or will he go back to school? Well, we'll find out about that later in the show. One thing is certain, Jacob is not going back to Zoom classes. I don't blame him. But would he have stayed if he could have gone to an online course that made him feel something like this?

Bushra Shaikh:

I would be engaged, energized. When I imagine international law, I just imagine a bunch of happy students. I just think of having this motivation to learn, but also this positive energy. That's so hard to get across on Zoom.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Bushra Shaikh. She's a long way from her home and family in Kashmir. She's finishing a very strange senior year at Georgetown university in Washington DC. Now the course Bushra was talking about, international law, is taught by Dr. Elizabeth Grimm.

Elizabeth Grimm:

I've taught it for many years, many different semesters, many different iterations. And I thought that had been working really well. If I had not had the forcing mechanism of COVID to change the class, I would not have changed the class in the way that I did.

Sonari Glinton:

Dr. Grimm taught the course last fall when the long-term reality of the pandemic really started to set in.

Elizabeth Grimm:

I think all of us, at the beginning of March, went into it saying, "All right, we've got this, we're tackling this." And that adrenaline very much had evaporated, I think, by August of 2020. And given rise to frustration, and given rise to loneliness.

Sonari Glinton:

Now that summer, instructors at Georgetown got training in online teaching.

Elizabeth Grimm:

In every single training session, we received this guidance of, just so you know, students' attention span on Zoom is eight minutes long.

Sonari Glinton:

Now as she sat through those Zoom classes, Dr. Grimm had to think about how her own lectures, that clocked about 50 minutes, would translate in this new world.

Elizabeth Grimm:

I spent the whole summer basically, about an hour or two hours every day, reworking the lectures into about 10 or 15 minute videos. Because let's be honest, unless Beyonce records a 15 minute video, I'm not going to watch a 50 minute video. And so I'm not going to ask my students to do that either.

Sonari Glinton:

Writing, recording and editing video lectures wasn't easy at first.

Elizabeth Grimm:

Well lets say, as we're recording this, I'm looking at my paper planner, my multiple colored post-it notes and colored pens. I mean, I am very much a child of the 1880s as far as technology is concerned.

Sonari Glinton:

But Dr. Grimm realized that teaching online during a pandemic was about much more than the course material.

Elizabeth Grimm:

Georgetown university is a Jesuit university, and so one of the things that that means is that at the core of our mission, at the core of what it means to be at Georgetown, is this concept called cura personalis, and so that means caring for the whole person, taking into account their individual stories, individual needs.

Sonari Glinton:

I was educated by the Jesuits myself, and the tradition is that who the graduate is at graduation is as important as any skill-set.

Elizabeth Grimm:

And I think in the old world, for me what would be important is both the grasping of the details of the law and facts and various key tenants and debates. And also the ability to critically analyze and ask deeper questions. But in this new world, I think for me the emphasis on empathy, the emphasis on humanity, became even more important. I would say almost of equivalent importance to simply just the course material.

Sonari Glinton:

So when Bushra came to Dr. Grimm's international law class in September, 2020, it felt and look different. Well, for starters, Dr. Grimm split the class of 50 students into two smaller groups. So there would be fewer faces on those Zooms. And then she sent out short video lectures and readings in advance.

Bushra Shaikh:

And then when we came to class on Wednesday, then we'd get straight into it. We'd hop on, talk a little bit about how our week was going and then we'd dive into the material. And then everybody had something to say, so we spend a lot more time analyzing than just taking down notes.

Sonari Glinton:

And to Dr. Grimm, the difference was stunning.

Elizabeth Grimm:

It is hard for me to even put into words, the depth of engagement and the richness of conversations. It was categorically different.

Sonari Glinton:

But it wasn't just because her students had watched her bite-size lectures in advance. Now, remember when Bushra mentioned...

Bushra Shaikh:

We'd hop on, talk a little bit about how our week was going, and then we'd dive into the material.

Sonari Glinton:

Well, that was part of Dr. Grimm's larger design to keep her class feeling happy and connected.

Elizabeth Grimm:

There's such an importance of the sound of a classroom and so I wanted to replicate that. So we would hop on, we would even talk about mundane things about what they did over the weekend? Things like, what did they have for breakfast? What were crazy things your pets did?

Sonari Glinton:

This is really important. Professor Grimm doubled down outside of her lectures. She hosted online tea times, happy hours, there were chat rooms for grad students and peer meetings for her undergrads. She checked in with each student directly and even held weekly, ask me anything sessions.

Bushra Shaikh:

It was everything from, oh gosh, I feel like I picked the wrong major and it's too late to change now to, should I get a pet cat? Stuff like that.

Sonari Glinton:

Professor Grimm, who lives on campus with her husband, three kids and a dog Crouton, even offered her students the option of meeting for socially distanced walks.

Bushra Shaikh:

You would schedule a time usually early in the morning and then you kind of go on this 45 minutes, 50 minute walk just around the neighborhood, talking about everything from our life stories, her life story, just in an environment that doesn't feel like a pressure cooker.

Sonari Glinton:

The pressure cooker of the pandemic changed professor Grimm too.

Elizabeth Grimm:

I acknowledged my own personal vulnerability in ways that I never would have done in class before. I should note that throughout the entire fall semester, I was in a high risk pregnancy and I contracted COVID in November. And I would have never shared details like that with students in class before, but I wanted them to know that they are not alone, and that sense of fear and confusion that they felt about their own families and their own communities was a sense of fear and confusion that I felt as well. And I think that helped them gain a greater comfort, a greater understanding, and a willingness to take risks in ways that I don't know that they would have taken in a brick and mortar classroom.

Bushra Shaikh:

It was a hard class, she did challenge us, but it was so worth it. I like to tell people that it was kind of my highlight of last semester and one of the best I've taken at Georgetown. It didn't feel like a Zoom class.

Sonari Glinton:

But what happens when classes don't have to be on Zoom anymore? Dr. Grimm says the tea times, the book clubs and the dog walks are going to continue and possibly videotape lectures as well. But our big lesson from the pandemic was...

Elizabeth Grimm:

Recognizing that empathy and humanity and vulnerability, they are not ancillary to the teaching and education process, they're central to the teaching and education process. And I think I recognized that at a sort of base level before, but this experience has really embedded those lessons for me, both as a professor, as a mother and as someone who cares very, very deeply about her students and her community.

Sonari Glinton:

Now if we are lucky, we all have at least a few teachers like professor Grimm. For me, it was Selma Coates, may she rest in peace. And in the best possible scenario, we find a program or maybe an institution that's a good fit for us, one that meets our needs socially, academically and financially. But trust me, that is a lot to ask. Students have to think really hard about what kind of higher education experience, what actually serves them best. Now it took LaShana Lewis a very long time and a lot of determination to find the right fit for her. Even though she found her calling when she was only eight years old.

LaShana M. Lewis:

So I first got my hands on a Commodore 64 that was used and junk from one of my mom's family friends. And it really started getting me interested in electronics in general and computers specifically. And then that's when I was told about how people go to college for these kinds of things.

Sonari Glinton:

LaShana grew up in East St. Louis and her mother had her at 15. LaShana was the type of kid that in fifth grade, she had already won her first scholarship. For years, she knew more about computers than her teachers. She got accepted to all the colleges she applied to and a recruiter convinced her to choose a college in Northern Michigan.

LaShana M. Lewis:

I was well aware that this was supposed to be the gateway for me to not be poor anymore, not to be in the Projects anymore.

Sonari Glinton:

College was her ticket out, that's what they told her. But when she had trouble with coursework and asked instructors and classmates for help, she kept hearing things like this:

LaShana M. Lewis:

Maybe you shouldn't do this major at all. And at the time I didn't know what implicit bias was, so I didn't know that at the time they were saying that because I was black, because I was a black female trying to be in something that was stereotypically white male, but that's pretty much who I had as classmates.

Sonari Glinton:

LaShana, the only black woman in her program, was at a loss. And she turned to counseling where she was told:

LaShana M. Lewis:

This is what discrimination is and that's what you're going through. And I had to do all of this learning. I'm what? 17, 18, 19 years old, away from home for a long time, for the first time, and I had to figure all this out. And then finally talking to my counselor and she's like, you're out of money, you are stressed out, you're going through discrimination, you need to possibly consider leaving. So I did.

Sonari Glinton:

How did that moment feel for you, leaving college?

LaShana M. Lewis:

Oh, it felt like giving up. I felt like I failed. If you could paint a Scarlet F on the front of my clothes or on my forehead, that's literally what it felt like.

Sonari Glinton:

Even though you had been in a school and you're the one black girl in the computer science program. I mean, even after the therapist tells you, Hey look, this is what discrimination. You still felt like you had failed and not your teachers or-

LaShana M. Lewis:

The system failed me. Yeah.

Sonari Glinton:

Right.

LaShana M. Lewis:

My mom was actually very supportive because she knew how depressing this would be for me. But everyone else from within my community was like, oh, you're leaving, you're never going back. You're just going to be a dropout.

Sonari Glinton:

Despite her strong skills and three and a half years of college, as well as experience doing an office internship, without a degree, LaShana couldn't get an IT job. But she could get a job driving high school students to an after-school tutoring program. She somehow managed to turn that into tutoring and then eventually with a lot of work, a job at a different college as the IT help desk manager.

LaShana M. Lewis:

And I kind of got the same spiel again. You are really good at what you do, but unfortunately you don't have a bachelor's degree, so you can't move up certain ranks. So I said, you know what, let me sit down, take some courses…”

Sonari Glinton:

LaShana was back at college, this time in St. Louis, 16 years after she'd left six credits short of graduating. LaShana's instructors noticed her skills immediately and told her to apply to a new apprenticeship program called LaunchCode. It did not take long before she got noticed there as well.

LaShana M. Lewis:

This facilitator is like, "When can you start?" And I'm like, "Start what?" She said, "When can you start your apprenticeship program to be a systems engineer at MasterCard?" And I was like, "What are you talking about?"

Sonari Glinton:

Just two months after LaShana started as an apprentice at MasterCard, they offered her a full-time job. Seven years later, LaShana is now the director of IT at Givable and the CEO of her own consulting firm. Her experience taught her that traditional college is definitely not the best fit for everyone.

LaShana M. Lewis:

I would be remiss to still send people of color down a path that could end up in financial ruin for some, when there are other viable paths that... With LaunchCode I paid $0. I didn't pay anything. The apprenticeship actually paid me. I was paid at that time, what? $15 an hour. Which ironically, was more than the job that I had left. And I was a manager at that job.

Sonari Glinton:

Now for her, the apprenticeship program was life-changing in more ways than one.

President Barack Obama:

Let me wrap up with just the example of one person, a woman named LaShana Lewis.

Sonari Glinton:

In 2015, President Barack Obama invited LaShana to Washington for the launch of TechHire, a talent initiative that built on the success of LaunchCode. And as she sat in the audience, he suddenly called her by name.

President Barack Obama:

Where's LaShana? She's here today. There's LaShana. Now...

LaShana M. Lewis:

And he points me out in the audience. And I stand up and in the whole entire room wrenches and looks at me. I blank out because I was just like, everything is kind of in slow motion.

President Barack Obama:

So we got to create more stories like LaShana's.

Sonari Glinton:

The TechHire initiative was all about pipelines, helping people like LaShana get past barriers keeping them out of the tech industry. Now, companies like Google, Apple, MPR, and IBM, no longer require all applicants to have degrees, especially for tech jobs.

LaShana M. Lewis:

Going through that whole entire process, the first thing that comes to my head is that people lied to me. They lied to me about all of these things that they need and the type of person that I needed to be in order to get to this level. And it made me feel sad. I still tear up at this point to say, 20 years of just going through all of this. And what I knew was actually more than what I needed to know to do the job that I was doing.

Sonari Glinton:

These days, LaShana thinks it's incredibly important to share her story with kids.

LaShana M. Lewis:

And when I tell kids the story and I tell them the Obama story, I say, "I didn't get there using traditional ways," because we need to let people know what our stories are. So I tell them, "Whatever you're doing, as long as you've taken the time to think about it and explore other options, I say to keep going."

Sonari Glinton:

When you think of how much LaShana had to push through to keep going, you’ve got to wonder about all the people who were just like her who didn't, who couldn't, or who were told not to. You have to think about also, how much we all lost. And yet, the US still lags behind when it comes to earn and learn programs like the one that launched LaShana. But there is some hope. After winning bi-partisan support in the house of representatives, the National Apprenticeship Act of 2021 is now working its way through the Senate. Now, if it passes, that means three and a half billion dollars would go to creating 1 million new apprenticeship opportunities.

               

The pause on this academic year has given a lot of students and their parents who pay all that tuition, the time to take LaShana's advice and explore other, maybe better options. But what about colleges? What have they learned about higher education this year?

 

Sonari Glinton: Take me on the quad on a crazy spring day. You know that first spring on a college campus?

Brenda A. Allen:

Yeah. Yeah. So, I expect to see some group of students coming back and forth from the library, which is right across from the quad. There'll be another group of students who will be coming out of the student success center because they've been in tutoring or they've been in advising. There'll be another group. Now we have Bluetooth speakers on the yard somewhere, doing the Wobble. Another group somewhere, throwing a frisbee.

Sonari Glinton:

What's the Wobble?

Brenda A. Allen:

You don't know the Wobble? We have to show you the Wobble. You have to come party on the yard. Come on.

Sonari Glinton:

I did not go to a historically black college. I need to learn the Wobble. I need to know how to step.

Brenda A. Allen:

You got to learn the Wobble. It's the new version of the electric slide. Come on. You got to know electric slide.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Dr. Brenda Allen. She's president of Lincoln University in Chester County, Pennsylvania. It's a public, historically black university where all the students, in normal times, live on campus. Now, Dr. Allen taught at Yale and Smith. She started in administration at Brown University. She wanted to bring what she learned in the Ivy leagues back to Lincoln, her Alma Mater.

Brenda A. Allen:

I'm telling you, I loved it here. I loved every bit about it. And again, I tell my students, many of the skills that I use today in this job that I have, I began to hone those skills on this campus. Planning, balancing, work and school.

Sonari Glinton:

Listening to Dr. Allen. I can't help but wonder how things might've been different for LaShana if she had gone to a black college.

Brenda A. Allen:

What really matters, I think, is how a student feels on a campus. And I think it's also what they may need, both personally and professionally. So, at historically black colleges, one of the things that's really important about this environment is that it's a very supportive environment. And I think that's consistent across most HBCUs.

Sonari Glinton:

Now let's face it. When it's the right fit, a college campus can be transformative if not downright magical. But during the pandemic, well, it's been empty. And that quiet has given us time to look at what's working and what isn't.

 

I wanted to find out what Dr. Allen learned from this past year and how she saw the experience of college changing. She says skill-specific training, like what LaShana had, has its value. But for Dr. Allen, the real value of college, in person, not virtual, is that it introduces you to ideas and whole possibilities you could never have considered.

Brenda A. Allen:

I don't think anything can take the place of, for example, a student just wandering through our student success building, seeing a sign that talks about study abroad and just wandering in. And the next thing you know, they're spending a summer in Ghana, or in Egypt, or in Ireland, or something like that. The serendipitous sort of things that can happen, I think in a real environment, it's harder to do that in the virtual world.

Sonari Glinton:

I mean, I really wonder about this because with the move to remote learning, in some ways doesn't that open up the question about how much of that serendipitous experience do I need? Do I need four years of it?

Brenda A. Allen:

And so again, I think that there are some people who will make the choice and they can thrive in a partial environment or do some years online, do some years on campus. Some people do community college first and save money and then transfer and finish their baccalaureate degree at a four-year college. And for many, having four years on a campus can be the most transformative experience that they can have.

               

I also was a statistician for awhile, and I look at this from the perspective of data. And not every online environment is the same, but disproportionate numbers of African-Americans have gone to online schools and the graduation rates, the completion rates for them is just not as great.

Sonari Glinton:

You know what I can't help thinking about? That. I keep thinking about the students and graduates all over America, carrying a crushing 1.7 trillion with a T dollars in student debt, a number that goes up every single semester. And some of those students, just like LaShana, end up with debt, but no degree.

 

Now, no one felt good about paying full or even discounted tuition for Zoom courses over the last year. But are there any signs that a year of remote learning is making colleges rethink the return on investment they're offering? Not counting scholarships and financial aid, a new student at Georgetown, the private university where Dr. Grimm teaches, will pay around $75,000 for a year of tuition of room and board. And a year at Lincoln, a public university?

Brenda A. Allen:

Full cost of attendance, tuition, fees, room and board is about $22,000. So in the scheme of things, we're still pretty affordable.

Sonari Glinton:

But then we need to think about it though. I mean, at $22,000 for serendipity, that's a lot of money.

Brenda A. Allen:

Well, it's really about the total experience. These are good questions because these are things that people are really grappling with right now. So surely you can probably deliver education much more cost-effectively if you do it virtually, but it's really not the same. And I think as a residential campus, we offer a special experience that really our data shows helps individuals to go on and become very productive citizens. So Lincoln University, for example, is number one in Pennsylvania for moving students from the lowest socioeconomic level to the highest. They graduate and are able to be employed and earn at the highest socioeconomic ladder. That's social mobility.

Sonari Glinton:

Mobility, transformation, belonging, employment, there are no easy answers when it comes to evaluating the impact of college or a higher education on the quality of our lives.

 

Sonari Glinton: Is there a question I should've asked you?

Brenda A. Allen:

No, but you were hard. You were pushing me. So, I appreciate that. I think I am walking away really still committed to my thought about the importance, but you got me thinking about some other things that I need to consider in this as well, so I appreciate that.

Sonari Glinton:

Growing, reconsidering our ideas. These are all things that are supposed to happen in and around college, but they happen off-campus as well. I remember Jacob, my friend's son who opted to step away from online college to become an EMT. Well, he's going back.

Jacob Sarasohn:

I think a post-pandemic life for me is ideally... it's finishing school. But I think it comes with all these experiences and understanding that this little bubble that I've existed in that I want to go back to is so small compared to all of the whole world.

Sonari Glinton:

You know what the irony of that is, knowing you a bit, I feel like it took leaving school for you to grow up. You're like a grown-ass man now.

Jacob Sarasohn:

I think so. I think so. And for me, there are so many things that college teaches me that I couldn't learn anywhere else. But college is a very small part of learning how to be an adult and how to be ready for a world where you're not a student.

Sonari Glinton:

That's called growing up.

Jacob Sarasohn:

But I wasn't supposed to grow up. I had another year of this, another year of not growing up and here we are.

Sonari Glinton:

And here we are, the pandemic has forced a lot of us to grow up and adapt regardless of how old we are. It's also taught us a lot about higher education.

               

We saw during all this, that some colleges and universities, even ones with long histories and traditions, they can adapt and some can even do it quickly. And perhaps they will take the lessons that they learned over the pandemic and make higher education even more accessible, more connected to the needs and dreams of this disrupted generation of students and those still to come. For their sake and for our sake, I really hope they do. I'm Sonari Glenton and this has been Now What's Next? An original podcast from Morgan Stanley. On the next episode, working nine to five, how we got the 40 hour work week and why it is not working for us. Thank you for listening.

Sonari Glinton:

Hello. Sonari Glinton, and I'm walking down Hollywood Boulevard to begin our new season of Now, What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley. Welcome.

Sonari Glinton:

We're starting at Hollywood Boulevard because it's not that far away from my house. After doing a year of interviews and recording podcasts from my apartment, I thought it would be really good to get back out in the world again.

Sonari Glinton:

I'm standing here on William Friedkin's star in front of Sid Grauman's Chinese Theater in the middle of downtown Hollywood, which is kind of like New York's Times Square. It's just smaller and probably weirder. There's jugglers. You might hear the world's worst drummer occasionally. There's always people...

 

Right now there are tourists walking up and down the street, taking photos of their favorite stars. There's usually a Spider-Man or Wonder Woman impersonator, as always, trying to take a picture with you. I'm right down the street from the Dolby Theater, where they usually present the Oscars. It's also where they hold a ton of movie premiers. The last time I was here was actually to see The Avengers: Infinity War.

Sonari Glinton:

Normally for big premiers, they close off the middle of the street, roll out the red carpet. There's usually a big tent with tons of reporters and fans. The last time I was here, I saw Angela Bassett wearing a beaded white suit with her hair in a blowout, just like Diana Ross in the '70s. It stopped tons of people dead in their tracks. You got to love Hollywood.

Sonari Glinton:

The Avengers premiere was in January of 2018, but it feels really like yesterday. It also feels like a crazy pre-pandemic dream. Today, there's still the Spider-Man dude here. There's a woman who's watching me recording. But this could be any weird downtown area anywhere. What makes Hollywood special, though, is the movies.

Sonari Glinton:

The movies are slowly getting back into business. Cinemas are reopening again. But while the screens were dark, a whole lot has changed. From the theaters fighting to stay alive ...

Shelli Taylor:

We've laid off a majority of our team in theaters, behind the scenes. It is very scrappy, to save as much or conserve as much money as possible.

Sonari Glinton:

To rethinking which movies get made and who makes them ...

Cameron Bailey:

It's not a very diverse crowd of people who are making the big decisions. This is not news. Everybody in the film world knows this, right?

Sonari Glinton:

To, who are the new power players?

Vicky Ding:

People are starting to pay attention to Chinese cinema.

Sonari Glinton:

This season on Now, What's Next, we're looking for scenes of rebirth and change. We're focusing on the same old problems, problems that have been exposed or possibly made worse by this global pandemic, from daycare to shopping malls, colleges to nursing homes. We're meeting folks who are trying to reimagine a better future.

Sonari Glinton:

Right now, because I'm in Hollywood where people dream for a living, let's go find some folks who are dreaming up solutions to our current problems. Let's start with the movies, of course.

Speaker 1:

Quiet on set. And action.

Shelli Taylor:

I didn't tell my parents, because they would have been like, "Oh, no, you don't."

Sonari Glinton:

That's Shelli Taylor. Just over a year ago, she started a job that all of a sudden got a lot more difficult.

Shelli Taylor:

Everyone asked if I was crazy, and I said, "Yes. I'm clearly crazy." But, at the same time, this will pass.

Sonari Glinton:

Just to be clear, I am taking the job as a CEO of a theater chain during a pandemic.

Shelli Taylor:

A pandemic. Yes, yes, and yes. Absolutely crazy.

Sonari Glinton:

Shelli Taylor is not crazy, but she did walk into a really bizarre situation when she became the CEO of Alamo Drafthouse, which is a movie theater restaurant chain, just weeks after the pandemic temporarily closed all their locations.

Shelli Taylor:

I don't think anyone believed it would last that long. Two or three months, and we'd be back to normal. The feelings were nervous, and then truly didn't believe it could ever take this long.

Sonari Glinton:

She's taken big risks before. Her dad thought she was nuts when she went to work for Starbucks in the '90s. You didn't have to go to college to work at a coffee shop, he said. Eventually Shelli took Starbucks to China, and then moved on to Disney and Planet Fitness.

Sonari Glinton:

When you think about your first CEO role, nobody hires a CEO because they want them to "hold on" to the business.

Shelli Taylor:

No.

Sonari Glinton:

Shelli's experience expanding companies is why she got her first CEO gig running Alamo Drafthouse. Pre-pandemic, they were a success story in a declining industry. Alamo was actually growing and opening new theaters with their mix of super local food, and high quality movies, and cool events. Then COVID entered the scene.

Sonari Glinton:

2020 turned out to be the worst year ever for movie theaters. Ticket sales dropped 80% while streaming services such as Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix ate their lunch. AMC Theaters lost nearly $5 billion, and came close to bankruptcy.

Sonari Glinton:

With Alamo Drafthouse, Shelli and her team tried to find ways to keep the movie magic alive. For instance, they promoted a streaming site with specially curated movies. They offered curbside food pickup. Like many of us, they found themselves on Zoom, organizing Zoom cast reunions for Lord of the Rings and Dazed and Confused. When they finally began reopening theaters, it was at reduced capacity.

Shelli Taylor:

Then the hard realities of business, which have been so incredibly painful, is we've laid off a majority of our team in theaters that are not open, but as well as in our support center. Then minimized every account, every everything behind the scenes so that we're providing the experience, but there's really, behind the scenes, it is very scrappy, to save as much or conserve as much money as possible.

Sonari Glinton:

In March, 2021, Alamo Drafthouse filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with Shelli Taylor less than a year into her job.

Shelli Taylor:

Messed up as this has been, in some ways the pandemic allows us to start from scratch and to really look at our business from a clean sheet of paper. How do we want to continue?

Sonari Glinton:

Shelli thinks that something is happening around the industry, and here's an example. Until the pandemic, studios and theaters had a rule. A new movie had to play in theaters for at least 90 days. Then, and only then, after that 90 days, could it be released to streaming. That's essentially how theaters made money.

Sonari Glinton:

But the pandemic completely obliterated that rule. Some movies, like Wonder Woman 1984, came out in theaters and was released to streaming at the same time. Shelli thinks the movie got shortchanged.

Shelli Taylor:

That movie was meant to be seen in a big cinematic experience. If they watch it on their phone, or iPad, or at home, it's not the same experience, and that's what was getting reviewed. That was just not ... It just wasn't fair, and it shortchanged the movie.

Sonari Glinton:

You only talk about the genie when it's out of the bottle, and this genie is definitely out of the bottle. It's unlikely we're ever going to go back to the old system. Shelli hopes there won't be, though, a one-size-fits-all release for movies in the future.

Shelli Taylor:

My hope for the industry is that we wouldn't get stuck on a number, but what we would think about is, what does that movie deserve? How should it be best shown? Some movies, maybe they go to the theater for a week or less, and then they go to streaming. But others, they deserve the time on the big screen.

Sonari Glinton:

Will folks who got used to streaming new releases be reluctant to go back to the movies? Shelli thinks ...

Shelli Taylor:

That's just not true. I think that content is content, and the way in which people consume content is-

Shelli Taylor:

And the way in which people consume content is forever going to evolve. But when I look into the future, people are not standing in line for a vaccine to stay home. That is super clear. People are getting vaccines because they want to get back out and have experiences, be social, be human again.

Sonari Glinton:

And Shelli thinks going to movies is still relevant.

Shelli Taylor:

There will be nothing like sitting inside an auditorium with 50 to 200 people, having a shared experience, big cinematic experience, watching a movie, and a movie that changes you. And then when I think about the movie that just blew my socks off, where I walked out of the cinema moved and thinking I could be a different human being was the first Star Wars movie. And wrapping my hair up into buns on either side to be princess Leia and practicing mind tricks, or thinking I was. All of us kids that saw Star Wars, that first experience in the movies, we still talk about it. It connects us and it spurs the excitement to go back to the movies.

Sonari Glinton:

And Shelli's watching what's going on in places where the virus is under control and movies are back in business. Think China. A movie making Mecca we'll visit later on this episode.

Shelli Taylor:

The box office is just exploding there. But as people are going, the question is going to be yes, there's great content, but what's the experience? The biggest risk we face, in my mind, as a cinema is poor service and poor experience. And as long as we continue to provide just the best experience, best reason to go out, we're going to have plenty of business.

Sonari Glinton:

But the business has changed. Shelli predicts we'll see fewer Megaplexes and more medium or small theaters. And then there's this game changer, and it's accounted for about 50% of Alamo's revenue over the pandemic. Going to say it slowly. Think about this. Private theater rentals.

Shelli Taylor:

So over the holidays, I rented a theater to see Love Actually, so a rep film, but it's my favorite Christmas film. I watch it every year. And invited my group of friends and was able to have a really cool party in a safe way at Christmas. And so I think that hadn't been available or had been very limited prior to the pandemic, and we're seeing incredible success. And that's a long-term experience that we'll innovate against.

Sonari Glinton:

Now this makes me want to rent a private theater and explain to people why Cool Hand Luke is the best movie ever.

Shelli Taylor:

Well, here's the deal. When we reopen our theater in LA at the block, I'm going to call you and we'll go see that together or another movie and get back into the business of seeing movies.

Sonari Glinton:

All right, I'm all in. But I can't help but wonder, how are the movies themselves changing after this most unprecedented year?

Cameron Bailey:

I was born in England, left England when I was four years old. Went to Barbados and lived in essentially the back of beyond on a farm with my grandparents. We didn't have movie theaters where I was. They existed in Barbados, but I never saw a movie until probably eight, nine years old in a movie theater.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Cameron Bailey.

Cameron Bailey:

I'm the artistic director and the co-head of the Toronto Film Festival and the TIFF organization. I've been working in movies for over 30 years.

Sonari Glinton:

But Cameron's first vivid movie memory is a classic.

Cameron Bailey:

It's playing at some old rickety drive in and we kind of had to hide in the back of the car, because I wasn't old enough to see Jaws at that point. But we wanted to all go see it, and I remember being terrified at that movie, watching it on the big screen from the inside of our car with no water around, but still terrified. And that's kind of when I knew what movies could do.

Sonari Glinton:

Cameron's been figuring out what movies can do ever since. Now for those outside of Hollywood, you might not get the importance of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Cameron Bailey:

We're the biggest public film festival in the world, so in a normal year when we don't have a pandemic, we have about a half a million people who attend our screenings and events every year.

Sonari Glinton:

The festival, affectionately known as TIFF, has become a predictor of sorts.

Cameron Bailey:

American Beauty won our audience award in 1999 and that was maybe one of the first times that Hollywood kind of sat up and took notice of our festival as kind of a bellwether for award season. But many other films, Slumdog Millionaire, many others that have gone on to Oscar victory started at our festival as well.

Sonari Glinton:

A bellwether, not just for award season, but for the box office as well. In the last two decades, films that won TIFF's people's choice awards made $3 billion globally. Now that's not just serendipity, there's a lot of consideration behind what gets picked to screen at TIFF. And Cameron and his team watch thousands of movies every year.

Cameron Bailey:

There's a lot of movies that are just a basic level of good that could work at our festival, but we can't choose all of those. So even among the good movies, we have to make some very hard decisions about which ones we invite. And then also once we've invited the films about how we're going to position them.

Sonari Glinton:

I wonder about you in your role. It's like in many ways you were born for this moment, right? I mean, how do you see yourself changing in this last year, pandemic and racial almost awakening?

Cameron Bailey:

Yeah. Well, it's complicated, I guess is the short answer. It's almost like a veil was lifted or something, because a lot of the things that were quiet or even silent suddenly were very loud. I'm always aware of myself as a Black man in this role and in this industry. It was not a very diverse crowd of people who are making the big decisions. This is not news, everybody in the film world knows this, right? So as one of a fairly small number, a too small number, I'm aware of how those decisions that I make about what films we invite, about what filmmakers we decide to really get behind, how that all matters.

Sonari Glinton:

To get a sense of what he means, I want to take you back to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in a screening of a movie called Precious. When it ended, Cameron...

Cameron Bailey:

Was just euphoric. It's a tough movie to watch for some people. It's definitely about trauma, but it is, I thought so well directed and performed that I wanted to invite it right on the spot.

Sonari Glinton:

He starts negotiating to bring it to Toronto to give it the biggest audience possible.

Cameron Bailey:

That was when I felt like if I wasn't in this role, and at that time I was I think co-director of the festival. If I wasn't in this role as a Black man, that would not be happening.

Sonari Glinton:

Why is that?

Cameron Bailey:

I think if it wasn't me at that particular moment, if somebody else might've said, oh, it's a good movie. It's all right. Maybe we'll take it, maybe we won't for Toronto, but it was much more powerful, much more visceral for me. Suddenly just comes to mind, Billie holiday singing Strange Fruit, it's intense, it's painful, it's powerful, but it's necessary. And that's how I felt about Precious.

Sonari Glinton:

And when it came to the festival.

Cameron Bailey:

This is going to be Tyler Perry and Mariah, and Mary J. Blige and Oprah and everybody coming to Toronto to our biggest theater, the Roy Thompson Hall. 2000 people, big red carpet. My own mother, my late mother was there and I got the opportunity to introduce her to Oprah and that was a dream come true for her. She was one Black woman among many in the room that night, but it meant a lot to have that space, the biggest, most prestigious space in our city, during the festival be taken over by Black talent. That meant a lot.

Sonari Glinton:

All right, so Precious one TIFF's audience award and then went on to win two of the six Oscars it was nominated for, team Monique forever. It also brought in more than $63 million on a $10 million budget, and it was said to over-perform. A term that is often used when a film by a person of color hits big at the box office, which happens all the time.

Cameron Bailey:

Then that annoying word over performs has been part of Hollywood history for decades, because people are surprised when audiences go out to see a movie with Black people in it. And I don't know how you can be surprised for your whole career by the same thing happening over and over-

Cameron Bailey:

... whole career by the same damn thing happening over and over and over again.

Sonari Glinton:

Earlier this year, McKinsey Consulting released the report. Hollywood is losing $10 billion a year. That's $10 billion because it ignores minority audiences. In particular it found projects led by black talent were systematically undervalued despite their amazing return on investment. But will the film industry do anything about it permanently?

Cameron Bailey:

Change is not a straight line. It is not an upward path to progress, right? That does not happen. Let me take one example. There's a Canadian film that we showed called The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, directed by a couple of filmmakers, both women, one indigenous, one not, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn. It's a small, low budget film but super smart and very powerful emotionally. Ava DuVernay's company bought that film and suddenly she's out there bigging that movie up, talking to people about it, more people are seeing it, and that affects the lives of indigenous women because that's who's on screen in that movie. People watch that film. They have a much deeper, richer understanding of what the life of an indigenous woman in contemporary North America might be like. The risk, the danger, the things that they're dealing with. And that actually increases empathy, increases understanding. It also allows these artists to make more work and to sustain careers because too many people burn out or can't continue, but I think on a very basic level, it allows more people who are too often erased or unseen to be seen.

Sonari Glinton:

When he says that I'm thinking of last year just before the pandemic hit, I got the chance to attend the Black Film Critics Awards. Now the Korean film, Parasite, got multiple and I mean multiple extended emotional standing ovations and it won almost every award. I said that night, it felt like the blackest movie I've ever seen, but I couldn't quite figure out why. So I asked Cameron who started off acknowledging, "Well, it's a masterful film."

Cameron Bailey:

But I think there is also something that's powerful about just kind of taking a bit of a break. Like just taking a breath from always putting the effort in to enter a white story. We all grew up with that. It becomes second nature to us, right? We identify with white protagonists, white heroes, white villains, because that's what we mostly see. And so I think there is something that even if it's not your own culture and your own particular background, that if it's not the dominant culture, it just feels like, oh yeah, I'm ready because I'm not getting enough of that.

Cameron Bailey:

But then I think Parasite is so sophisticated about class, about what it's like to have nothing, to be scrambling for wifi and all of that kind of stuff. Black people I think understand that. And there's some black people who are lucky enough to understand what it's like to go from one to the other, to really cross the river from poor to rich and to understand how you can also slip from rich to poor, right? And that dynamic is something that I think any marginalized group understands well that wherever you are right now in society, it's precarious. Do you know what I mean?

Sonari Glinton:

Actually, I do. In the middle of all this turmoil, Cameron sees hope in stories like Parasite and Precious and The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. And to be honest, in streaming.

Cameron Bailey:

Yeah, I think the pandemic is accelerating things because we've all been at home for a year watching stuff on our TVs for the most part, mostly from streaming services. That's accelerating things, but it was already underway.

Sonari Glinton:

Cameron points to an independent film called [inaudible 00:22:00] about a group of Arab women in Paris. Netflix bought it, which meant people in 192 countries around the world could see it.

Cameron Bailey:

And that I think is the game changer. But when those personal stories resonate enough and they have the opportunity to go all around the world and you have people in Mexico watching Korean melodramas, that kind of thing, all of a sudden you begin to see a whole new world. We don't all have to consume the same thing.

Sonari Glinton:

You can begin to imagine a whole new world. For so long, Hollywood has been the center of the movie world and we've slowly, I mean too slowly begun to acknowledge the other woods around the globe, Bollywood, Nollywood, Ollywood in East Asia. Now thanks to the pandemic, other countries are getting their close-up.

Vicky Ding:

Well, I think the very first time that I have a strong memory to film is when I was like eight or nine year old watching Titanic at home with my parents.

Sonari Glinton:

Vicky Ding grew up in Beijing, China, and today she sells Chinese films internationally through her company, Blossoms Entertainment. But Vicky's first movie memory is pure Hollywood.

Vicky Ding:

And the scene that I'll remember forever is when the ship's sinking gradually to the ocean. It really strikes me because I've never seen something like this.

Sonari Glinton:

For children like Vicky who grew up in the '90s, Titanic was a generation defining Hollywood blockbuster. It was also a massive hit. It broke Chinese box office records in 1998. And when the 3D version of Titanic came out in 2012, hearts went on. Chinese audiences flooded theaters. The opening weekend box office more than doubled the US numbers. Back then in 2012, film industry experts were saying it was only a matter of time before China eclipsed North America as the biggest movie market. Fast forward to 2020, Vicky started Blossoms Entertainment just as theaters in China reopened in July.

Vicky Ding:

And there was a capacity of 50% or 25%. You can bring any food or beverage into theater and you have to wear masks throughout the film. And the very first blockbuster new title came into the theater is The Eight Hundred. And well, it froze the highest box office last year in China and internationally.

Sonari Glinton:

Let's think about that for a moment. For the first time China was behind the highest grossing film in the world. It's called The Eight Hundred. It's a film Vicky's company sold to buyers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The Eight Hundred is an epic historical film set in 1937 in Shanghai. A Chinese battalion of soldiers defends a warehouse against the invading Japanese army. Think Saving Private Ryan or Pearl Harbor. Lots of special effects, incredibly loud, and shot entirely in a giant IMAX format, [inaudible 00:25:23] China.

Vicky Ding:

So it's heavily on the special effect and also with the production budget that some Hollywood titles couldn't really reach. So I think yeah, from the box office side and also from the investment side, it really shows that China is becoming or is on the way to become the largest market in the world.

Sonari Glinton:

Between those two poles of Vicky's life and movies, Titanic and The Eight Hundred, there's a lot of ground to cover, but I'll go out on the limb and say a lot of us don't even know where to start. That's what Vicky discovered when she left Beijing to go to film school at the University of Southern California in 2012.

Vicky Ding:

Well, I think it really shocked me that even starting at a film school and a prestigious film school, my cohorts were not interested in Chinese cinema alone. Scholars who study international cinema don't really care about Chinese cinema. And I felt no one knows what it's showing in China.

Sonari Glinton:

And when they did know something...

Vicky Ding:

People will first remember all those classic titles in '80s, which is really a... How can I say that? It's like, well, we call it like fifth generation of Chinese directors.

Sonari Glinton:

Did you catch that? Fifth generation. Now, it shouldn't be a surprise that China like many places in the world has a long and rich film history. If I asked you to name five Chinese actors, films, or directors that aren't Bruce Lee, Jet Li-

Sonari Glinton:

Five Chinese actors, films, or directors that aren't Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, or the recent Oscar winner, Chloe Zhao. [inaudible 00:27:08] Vicky wants that to change.

Vicky Ding:

I chose to do international sales for Chinese titles because I think that's my personal mission because I really want to introduce good Chinese titles to the world.

Sonari Glinton:

Before she started Blossoms, Vicki sold one of 2019's biggest movies, The Wandering Earth, to Netflix. It's a Chinese sci-fi special effects extravagance.

Vicky Ding:

We are so used to watch something from The States in terms of space story, the story happening the space like Gravity or Interstellar, but we really want to see something original from China. So The Wandering Earth really gained the success and very positive reviews from the audiences.

Sonari Glinton:

And while traditional Hollywood blockbusters like The Avengers franchise to bring it full circle on Angela Bassett are still one of the strongest box office draws in China, people there are hungry for something homegrown. Vicky sees the Hollywood China co-pro relationship as a thing of the past.

Vicky Ding:

There was quite a plenty of co-production going on and got released, but the box office performance was really bad in The States and in China domestically. So I think people are more confident now to tell the story in the Chinese way. The foreign audiences, I think the international audiences are willing to see something authentic Chinese.

Sonari Glinton:

But also Hollywood and all the other woods, frankly, one a piece of this growing Chinese market. As a reference point, as of 2020, there were 44,000 movie screens in America, keyword now because of the pandemic. With 75,000 screenings and a population of 1.4 billion people, China is an appealing and very lucrative destination. And like everywhere else, China's film industry isn't immune to challenges from streaming services, but they're innovative. Does this sound familiar?

Vicky Ding:

In China, we do have something so-called private cinema. So it will provide a mini room for you and you can choose the film you want to watch.

Sonari Glinton:

Whether it's a private movie rental or a multiplex, there's no doubt China's gone back to the movies in a big way.

Vicky Ding:

And for the first time in my life, I couldn't buy a ticket during Chinese New Year holiday because it sold out everywhere. So I only want to see one film during the holiday and it's completely crowded, like there's no empty seat at all.

Sonari Glinton:

Imagine that.

Sonari Glinton:

I started this episode on Hollywood Boulevard and I'm ending it on another iconic movie street, Sunset Boulevard. Now I'm in front of the theater you would consider my own theater where I see most of the movies I go to, the ArcLight's Cinerama Dome. Now it's about 60-years-old and it looks like the top half of a giant golf ball that's been lit from underneath. The last movie I saw here actually was Fences with my mother at Christmas time. But this time I'm here because the Cinerama's future is uncertain. In April, ArcLight announced that after a year of struggling through the pandemic, they're closing their doors for good, with 300 other screens.

Sonari Glinton:

Now there's a chance that someone will step in and save them, maybe even another movie chain. But the idea of losing this place is a big blow to movie lovers who kind of think of it as home. Now, it was never just about the movies I saw here. It was about the people who were here to watch along with me, laughing, crying, talking back to the movie. It's the whole experience. But as I look at this theater waiting for someone to swoop in and save it, you can't help but think of the theaters in China that are busier than ever. And I think of the cross-cultural pollinating that goes on with those films.

Sonari Glinton:

I think of the cinemas that will survive, that are finding new ways to show the movies of tomorrow, movies that will tell our stories and help us better understand what we're all going through right now. I'm Sonari Glinton, and this has been Now What's Next, an original podcast from Morgan Stanley. Now, if you liked this, do us a favor. It'll help us if you leave a rating and a review at the Apple Store. Next time, I'll take you on a trip to the post pandemic shopping mall where what's in store is not exactly what you'd expect. Thank you so much for listening.

 

Sonari Glinton:

I'm Sonari Glinton and this is Now, What's Next? An original podcast from Morgan Stanley.

Escher Olson:

The worst thing about online learning is everything.

Sonari Glinton:

This Escher Olson. He is eight years old and that makes him a third grader. Education-wise, for boys, this time is pivotal. Escher lives in Los Angeles and we should note he's the nephew of one of the show's producers. Like a lot of young folks his age, Escher's school life took a nosedive when our lives got interrupted by the pandemic.

Escher Olson:

I've learned to live with it. I wish we didn't have any school.

Sonari Glinton:

When Escher's school, his physical, actual school, shut down in March, he had mixed feelings, as you can imagine, about school closings. Come on. You all remember third grade?

Escher Olson:

Happy I didn't have to go to school anymore but then I got sad and got too emotional. I needed a vacation.

Sonari Glinton:

Problem was it wasn't vacation time. School didn't stop for long, it just went virtual.

Escher Olson:

I hated the weekly Zoom meetings with my class and my mom made me stay for the math class. It was awful.

Sonari Glinton:

There's near universal disdain for online learning at this moment. One survey says 75% of students are unhappy with it. As my own great niece says, "it's like, take school, then take all the fun stuff out." For Escher's parents, their challenge was overwhelming. So they did something a bit drastic. They pulled Escher out of school, packed the car, left Los Angeles and headed North to Canada and to a school set to reopen for the year. They gave up on remote learning and hoped for something better in another country.

Sonari Glinton:

This season on Now, What's Next? An original podcast from Morgan Stanley, we're trying to figure out what life after a global pandemic looks like or can look like. Some of these changes will be subtle, others dramatic, but no matter what, even after the dust settles life is not going back to the way it was before. How is the world evolving in the face of a global crisis and what do we do with this rare chance to rethink our old assumptions?

Sonari Glinton:

This may be a once in a lifetime challenge, but it is also an opportunity to create real and lasting change. Today, what the pandemic teaches us about learning.

Sonari Glinton:

For a lot of families, the urge to flee their local school system for something better, likely predates the pandemic. Education, especially in the United States, has long been in crisis. Individually and collectively our primary and secondary school systems are overcrowded and underfunded. COVID-19 though, forced an urgent and harried pivot to some kind of online learning. Now that rush highlighted problems we knew were already there, like how 20% of students don't have access to decent internet at home and how many don't even have a computer.

Sonari Glinton:

One study predicts that if this continues, low-income students will have lost an entire school year's worth of learning. It's been hard to keep kids engaged in their education right now, let alone keep them socialized, keep them developing and mentally healthy.

Sophie Olson:

He would say things like, "Mom, I feel angry and sad at the same time and I don't know why." And I'd say, "Oh, well maybe you're tired." And he'd be like, "I'm not tired, I'm angry and sad at the same time."

Sonari Glinton:

When school moved online, Sophie Olson, that's Escher's mom, she saw the impact on her son right away.

Sophie Olson:

Then he'd go on a trampoline and just lay there and read books. So seeing his personality change, that was like, "Oh crap. How can we work through this?"

Sonari Glinton:

For this mom and dad, the dominant emotion was exasperation.

Sophie Olson:

They said, "There's no school. Here's a packet of 15 worksheets. We will see you at some point."

Sonari Glinton:

What was the thing that got you concerned or worried?

Sophie Olson:

Well, one of the things that was like a huge slap in the face was that, "Okay everybody, in two weeks we will meet online somehow and you'll get an email and we will do schooling online." So I was thinking, "Cool, let's all figure this out together. Let's all stick together as a community, let's figure this out." And then we started and no one knew what to do.

Sophie Olson:

Parents weren't able to log on. They were breaking down. They were crying. Kids were freaking out. Outside of my child, I heard it from all my friends. They were frustrated, they were cooped in, their routines were completely busted.

Sonari Glinton:

It was clear the school wasn't prepared for this moment. The shift to online was a stop gap and the cracks were showing.

Sophie Olson:

What was missing was the encouragement. As a parent, you can't do it all, but your child is required to show up online every day. So they're supposed to show up. They're supposed to turn in their work. The online learning system last spring did not work.

Sonari Glinton:

Escher's family gave up on online learning. They left the city and moved to Canada because well, they could. Sophie is from Canada. The option to move was available, so they took it. Now, that's not true for most students. Most still struggled to make sense of this. One of those students is Olivia Clark.

Olivia Clarke:

Well, at first I was like, "Yay, an extra two weeks of spring break." And then two weeks turned into six months and I was like, "Wow, okay." But originally, I tried to make the best out of it. I think a lot of people, including me, were like, "Okay, this is my chance to fix myself and I'm going to get everything done and I'm going to come out of quarantine and they're going to be like, 'Wow, she's Oprah now.'"

Sonari Glinton:

Olivia Clark is a 16 year old student in the very underrated city of Columbus, Ohio. And if there ever was a doubt that this young woman is a high achiever, well, in the middle of all of this, Olivia published a book.

Olivia Clarke:

I'm a 16 year old senior, and I am the author/editor of Black Girl, White School, Thriving, Surviving, and, No, You Can't Touch My Hair.

Sonari Glinton:

What leads a 16 year old? When I was 16, you could barely get me to write an essay, let alone a book. What prompted it?

Olivia Clarke:

It was out of hope, I want to say. I've had past frustrating or angering experiences or whatever, but I wanted to help other girls and other little brown and little black girls like me when I first started going to a PWI. So it was less out of anger and more out of frustration that there wasn't anything like this out there already.

Sonari Glinton:

A PWI, that's a Predominantly White Institution, and speaking of which, Olivia's school gave students a choice this year, come back to the classroom or learn from home. Olivia chose remote learning and seeing who else opted out was telling.

Olivia Clarke:

So in my grade, there's only about 44 to 46 girls and all of the girls that chose to do virtual school this semester were black and that's something that... I didn't expect everyone to be black, but I did expect a lot of the people who chose virtual school to be black, just because we know how hard COVID has hit communities of color and the black community.

Sonari Glinton:

Olivia, being the student that she is, can definitely quote you chapter and verse on the health impact of COVID on the black community and she knows her mom is in a high risk category. So stay home, stay safe. She and the other black students at her school have the extra burden of feel like, Well, they have to represent, and I can tell you from experience, that's a hell of a lot of responsibility to put on 16 year old shoulders.

Sonari Glinton:

How do you feel about that, when the black girls are in virtual and the rest of the kids are not?

Olivia Clarke:

That was something I was worried about because there aren't that many. I mean, there's 30% girls of color throughout the whole school. I was like, right now, we just finished a widespread Black Lives Matter movement and a lot of schools are having to rethink how they approach diversity and inclusion. And all of the black girls are gone and I was like, "Oh great. That's good."

Sonari Glinton:

Olivia is asking herself a lot of questions about how her online education intersects with her identity. But it's not only that, the constant need be online for school, it can feel like a waste of time.

Olivia Clarke:

It has made me criticize the way that we do certain learning. Doing virtual school means that I'm just sitting there for 80 minutes and some of those 80 minutes, I really don't need to be there, but it's just me sitting here staring at a screen when I could be doing something else or I could be achieving something of a lot more important, or just do that homework later or do homework during that period.

Sonari Glinton:

Look, Olivia Clark is definitely a kid who is going places. Again, this is the kid who used the pandemic break to write and edit a book and her dissection of what can go wrong with remote learning is exactly on point. But it's likely that some form of online learning is here to stay. The technology itself is often the barrier but if this grand experiment is going to work, teaching methods, they need to adapt to a new virtual environment or else education will fail our kids.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton:

The problem is that when you're learning passively in the classroom to begin with, that is you're just listening, you're not really participating, and then you take that online, that passivity is magnified a thousand fold.

Sonari Glinton:

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a professor at Arizona State University and here's a bonus, she's the principal investigator of NASA's mission to the Slakey asteroid. When she's not educating college students or planning expeditions to space, she's thinking about better ways to inspire learning.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton:

What was not the best in the classroom becomes really ineffective online.

Sonari Glinton:

She points out that traditionally, education has been a one-way flow of knowledge from the active teacher to the passive student.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton:

What's boring becomes even more boring, but today the difference is information is everywhere. Almost no one is the secret owner of information that no one else can have.

Sonari Glinton:

You know and I know that it is not enough for classes to be just a data dump. Instead, the best teachers work to activate learning based on what the students themselves want to learn.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton:

So what we need to be teaching students to do is how to find, assess, and use the information on their own. We need to be teaching process, and that's a transition that hasn't really happened yet. We're just adjusting to living in the information age, we're just figuring it out. We're baby beginners at this.

Sonari Glinton:

Lindy's own classroom instruction is based on something called inquiry-based learning. Now it's an approach some educators have championed since at least the sixties. And she says, right now, it is a great way to overcome the barriers to remote learning. So fewer worksheets, shorter lectures, inquiry-based learning, encourages the students to not only ask the questions, but the find their own answers.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton:

In pure open inquiry where the students question really leads the process. What we do is we set a big goal for the semester. Goal might be, what does it mean to be an engaged citizen in today's world? And we give the students a little bit of content, just a 15 minute lecture or tiny reading, and then we ask for their first question. And here's where the magic really starts.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton:

We ask them, "What is your natural next question? What's the question that you think that if you answered it would take you a step toward that big goal question for the semester?" We're asking them to take a step away from what they know into the unknown. And this is a kind of question asking that students almost never get to practice.

Sonari Glinton:

What this does is motivates students to follow their own curiosity. And so at home, it liberates them from passive listening and instead inspires them to search out knowledge.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton:

And showing the students how that can work, how you can pursue your questions, do your research, come together, share your answers, help each other improve, all using online tools and working at home remotely, this is really preparation for work and life.

Sonari Glinton:

The best teachers are trying all kinds of ways to engage students, to keep and hold their fleeting attention over the web. One account on Twitter describes a man spotting someone lying on the sidewalk and thinking that he was hurt. It turns out it was a local science teacher with a GoPro strapped to his head capturing video of an anthill for his students. That is nerdy teacher dedication. Now I bet his students love him for this kind of stuff. In fact, the kids are starting to say things you don't expect to hear from them.

Ilana Drake:

I think one thing I took for granted, or I didn't realize how different it could be is not seeing my teachers and not having that face to face interaction.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Ilana Drake and she misses her teachers. She's a senior at the high school for math, science, and engineering at the City College in New York City. But now that she's stuck between the four walls of her family's New York City apartment, she is feeling the squeeze.

Ilana Drake:

We're in a two bedroom apartment and my brother sleeps in the dining room and I think working in a small space with everyone is just very difficult because our dad's in the bedroom and our mom's in the living room. But when you take exams or when you have assignments that are timed, there's a lot of stimulation in the apartment because everyone has their own work and everyone's on Zoom or doing work. So I think that's pretty tough.

Sonari Glinton:

And across the country in Dublin, California, high school senior, Pratham Dalal, is missing those everyday interactions that are such a huge part of the high school experience.

Pratham Dalal:

I think the human connection is really what I want. There's no way to goof off. There's no way to take your mind off of academics for a brief second.

Sonari Glinton:

Stuck at home, young people miss out on a key part of education, the social element. Like interacting with peers and teachers, joining clubs and sports teams, or participating in school traditions.

Pratham Dalal:

Senior year starts off as like a huge community bonding experience. The seniors get to go up on a mountain that's about a couple of miles away from our campus that you can directly see. Students will take bags of flour and they will run up to the mountain and paint their graduation year on the mountain. And that flour stays on that mountain the whole year and all the underclassmen, all the juniors, just look at it and think, "I want to be like that someday."

Pratham Dalal:

That's what we've been looking forward to since 2017, when we came to the school.

Sonari Glinton:

And right now the mountain is just empty. All of this, it's all a part of learning and without it, something fundamental is list. We already know that kids are reporting more anxiety and depression than ever. Is that really a surprise school is about more than just tests and passing grades. It is a rite of passage as much about discovery and interaction as it is about memorizing your times tables. Teachers know this and some of them are really leaning into it.

Sonari Glinton:

Eppie Miller always dreamed of teaching outdoors.

Eppie Miller:

There's a really beautiful wooded space that I just thought would make a beautiful outdoor learning classroom.

Sonari Glinton:

That's Eppie. She teaches pre-K at the Mendell Jewish Day School in Beachwood, Ohio. Eppie has always lobbied for an outdoor learning program, she just wasn't getting anywhere. But in June of 2020, she was winding down the remote school year and her principal gave her a call.

Eppie Miller:

I was told, "Okay, you have two months. When the students come August 26th, we'll be ready for an outdoor learning environment." And it was all because of rethinking the way we do education in the age of COVID.

Sonari Glinton:

Eppie's outdoor classroom is broken up into sections. Over in this corner, there is an open space dedicated to drama lessons, and in that corner, a spot for building things. There's also a meeting circle where everyone can gather and you'll find tables strewn about where students can spread out and do their written work, all while obeying social distancing protocols. And all of it is surrounded by grass, trees and nature.

Eppie Miller:

We also have an area that I call my science area, where I put out hand-held magnifying glasses and binoculars and different books on different subjects. I switch up what's in the science area every about two weeks. So there's always something new for the students to hold and touch and learn from, both visually and tactally.

Sonari Glinton:

Speaking of science, there is a lot of data showing the benefits of outdoor learning. Attendance up, ADHD symptoms go down. Students are more engaged, they actually want to be there.

Eppie Miller:

So much of the learning that's happening is that the teacher is getting out of the way and watching and supporting what these students are interested in and following their lead. So I've never done a unit on worms ever, but we did a whole unit on worms because my class is just fascinated by worms. These are opportunities that would never have happened inside my classroom.

Sonari Glinton:

One of the most important things I've learned studying Judaism is that in the Jewish tradition, the relationship between teacher and student or rabbi and student is sacred. What is taught is as much about the intellectual, emotional and spiritual development, as it is about learning history. That's a lot of weight to put on a Zoom call.

Eppie Miller:

As much as we made lemonade out of lemons with Zoom and we did as much as we could to keep that relationship going with each of our families and students, it's very artificial. I mean, it's over a computer screen. I mean, even in the outdoor classroom, we still have to be six feet apart and we can't hug. We do air hugs or we do elbow bumps if we're really excited about something. So it's not the same as pre-COVID, but we can be together and we can discover together and we can sit and look at each other, which is so different than being on Zoom.

Sonari Glinton:

Here's something, it's not the first time we find ourselves taking the classroom outside in response to a public health crisis. In the early 20th century, in the 1900s, schools held classes on rooftops and in parks to avoid transmitting tuberculosis. We're having to rethink the way we teach in much the same way as teachers did over a hundred years ago.

Sonari Glinton:

This pandemic is giving remote learning technology its moment in the sun and there's clearly an appetite for online learning tools. Programs like the Khan Academy or Coursera were around before this crisis. It can help in areas where students don't have access to quality education or where teachers lack resources. It's an example of how online and offline education can work together.

Sonari Glinton:

We have an opportunity to reimagine how we teach, otherwise families will continue to get frustrated and give up like Escher and his family did. Escher, his mom, dad, and baby brother are sheltering in a small community, not far from Vancouver, British Columbia and as of this recording, his school is still open.

Escher Olson:

Sophie Olson:

It's a computer from the principal's computer. Can I have a smooch? How was your day?

Escher Olson:

Good.

Sophie Olson:

Where's your jacket?

Escher Olson:

In my backpack?

Sophie Olson:

Can you get your hand sanitizer spray, please?

Sonari Glinton:

You can mistake this for a school pickup in the pre-COVID days without the hand sanitizer. But otherwise, this is very normal, somewhat mundane daily routine, helps the family rediscover the joy of education. Most of us took school for granted. It was just there to be experienced or endured, but this pandemic is reframing all of our assumptions.

Eppie Miller:

The most important thing for me as education is not only books or computer. Education is people and experience and adventure. And if you don't have that, I think for a lot of people, you become a shell of a person and you have your whole life to become a shell of a person, it should not happen when you're eight years old.

Sonari Glinton:

I genuinely hope that up in British Columbia, Escher has found that one great teacher to inspire him. Mine was Mr. [Kislefkis 00:21:54]. He was an English teacher with a chalkboard and a book, and he used both to open our minds. That my friends is the work of a superhero.

Sonari Glinton:

Now imagine your favorite teacher with the tools of a superhero. We have an opportunity to turn every class into an exploration and every student into an adventure. Oh, the places our classrooms, our Zoom chats and our students could go.

Sonari Glinton:

Special thanks to my friends at Wire Media who helped interview some of the high school students you heard in this episode. Wire Media is a nonprofit that takes young students and turns them into media professionals. I'm Sonari Glinton And this is Now, What's Next? An original podcast from Morgan Stanley.