When it Mattered

Ep. 42 — A voiceless young clubfoot patient grows into one of the most outspoken and renowned vaccine advocates in the world / Dr. Paul Offit, Professor of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

When Dr. Paul Offit was five years old he got surgery for clubfoot and was sent to recover at a chronic care facility in Baltimore which was also a polio ward. He spent six lonely weeks there, feeling like a prisoner, with virtually no distractions, recreation, or visitors like many of the polio patients in that ward.

"It was hell. This was the mid-1950s, it was a polio ward, people were scared of polio. There was one visiting hour a week on Sundays from 2:00 to 3:00. My mother was pregnant with my brother and had a complication, so she was unable to visit. My father who traveled often as a salesman, he tried to visit me actually on one of the hours that wasn't permitted, and from then on he wasn't allowed to visit me,” remembers Dr. Offit. "As a consequence, no one visited me, and you know, I just remember that ward, my bed was right next to a window that looked down onto the front door of the hospital. I just remember staring out that window waiting for somebody to come and save me."

That formative childhood experience put Dr. Offit on the path to becoming one of the most renowned vaccine advocates in the world.

The recipient of many honors and awards, Dr. Offit is Professor of Pediatrics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a co-inventor of the #rotavirus vaccine, estimated to save hundreds of lives of children every day.

Offit has published more than 180 papers in medical and scientific journals and is a prolific author of medical narratives including Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure which put him in the cross-hairs of the powerful, well-connected, and well-funded anti-vaccine coalitions.

His willingness to publicly take on the anti-vaxxers has made Offit the frequent target of intimidation and regular death threats.

Offit currently is a member of an NIH-led #COVID-19 vaccine innovation group. The sweeping public private partnership between federal researchers and 16 pharmaceutical companies is called Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines or ACTIV.

Offit believes there will be several #coronavirus vaccines soon and that the virulence of this virus will upend the traditional long FDA drug approval process, with both good and bad consequences.

"So I think this is going to play out in one of two ways. There will be a vaccine. I think there will be a vaccine soon. I think not a vaccine, I think there's going to be several vaccines, or many vaccines, used in countries throughout the world. Then we'll learn about it, after it's already out there, I think then we'll learn about it. It'll play out one of two ways, it'll be remarkably effective, stop the spread of this awful virus. That is the only way to stop the spread. I mean population immunity will only be achieved by a vaccine. It's not going to be achieved by natural infection, because it never is,” says Offit. "Either the vaccines will be a hero, much as in the movie Contagion, when the vaccine was the hero of that movie. Or because things have been compressed and pushed quickly, there will be a side effect that will be severe that people hadn't anticipated, and that could make people question whether we have done this the right way."

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Chitra Ragavan:

When Dr Paul Offit was five years old he was sent to a polio ward to recover from clubfoot surgery. He spent six weeks in the ward surrounded by young children suffering from polio. That formative childhood experience put Dr Offit on the path to becoming one of the most renowned vaccine advocates in the world.

Chitra Ragavan:

Hello everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When it Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory,

Ep. 41 — A young man gets held up at knifepoint and learns the value of grit and perseverance / Cliff Banks, Founder and President, The Banks Report.

When Philadelphia native Cliff Banks was 19 years old, he traveled to New York City to take a connecting train to Detroit to start a new job and a new life. But he got the fright of his life as he hailed a cab to get from Penn Station to Grand Central Station.

“Before I got into the cab, two guys came up and asked if they could help and I said, ‘No, thanks. I've got it.’ And next thing I know, I was up against the cab with a knife to my throat,” Banks remembers. “And they demanded my wallet and anything else valuable that I had and took off running.”

Although broke and in shock over what had happened to him, Banks somehow found his way to Dearborn.

Lacking the money to buy a car for himself or a college education for that matter but blessed with sheer grit and perseverance, Banks went from hitchhiking to get to that first job loading cars on trains at railroad yards to fulfilling his dream of becoming a journalist covering automotive news.

He founded The BanksReport, the most influential trade newsletter in the car retail space today. Now with 30-years covering the auto industry, Banks has a unique lens into the seismic impact of #Covid-19 and the unprecedented shutdown of car manufacturing in the United States.

With family friends getting sick or dying from the #Coronavirus in hard-hit Michigan, Banks finds himself both living and working through what’s likely to be the most historic story of his lifetime.

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Chitra :

When Philadelphia native Cliff Banks was 19 years old, he traveled to New York City to take a connecting train to Detroit in order to start a new job and a new life. But a scary thing happened as he hailed a cab to transfer from Penn Station to Grand Central Station. Although broke and in shock over what happened to him, Banks somehow found a way to make it to Detroit.

Chitra :

Hello everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan and this is When it Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative.

Chitra :

That same resourcefulness that allowed Banks to recover from the armed robbery got him into the Detroit area automotive industry where he fulfilled his passion for journalism. Joining me now is Cliff Banks, Founder and President of The Banks Report, the most influential newsletter covering the automotive retail space.

Chitra :

Cliff, welcome to the podcast.

Cliff:

Thanks, Chitra. It's great to be here.

Chitra :

So tell us what happened and how you got mugged in New York. I mean, this was back in the 1990s when the big Apple wasn't quite so sanitized, was it?

Cliff:

No. No, not at all. In fact, it did look a lot different back then. It was 1990, early as mid-March I guess, and at the time there wasn't a train that went directly from Philadelphia to Dearborn, Michigan. So I had to go to New York and get off at one stage, Penn Station, and then take a cab to Grand Central to grab the train to Dearborn. Coming out of Penn station and getting into the cab, before I got into the cab, two guys came up and asked if they could help and I said, "No, thanks. I've got it." And next thing I know, I was up against the cab with a knife to my throat and they demanded my wallet and anything else valuable that I had and took off running.

Cliff:

I actually chased the guy that took the wallet. I caught up to him and he turned around with the knife and slashed at me and I just, I backed off and told him to keep it. I went back to the cab thinking for sure he would be gone with all my luggage. Actually he wasn't. He was standing there with a few cops around him, but there wasn't anything to do that that they could do. So the cab driver very graciously offered to take me to Grand Central.

Cliff:

Ep. 40 – The granddaughter of a Civil Rights-era healthcare worker and union advocate grows up to become an employment mediator and arbitrator / Angela Reddock-Wright, Founder, Reddock Law Group.

For labor lawyer Angela Reddock-Wright, geography was definitely destiny. Moving from Birmingham, Alabama to working-class Compton, California at age nine and then winning a scholarship to the Brentwood School in the exclusive westside of Los Angeles would prove to be the most transformational events of her life.

Her dual existence commuting between her blue-color and privileged worlds reminded Reddock-Wright of the importance of honoring one’s roots while being open to new opportunities.

As a young girl in Birmingham, Reddock-Wright watched her maternal grandmother, a home healthcare worker active in the Civil Rights movement, take to the picket lines for better wages and conditions.

Not surprising then that Reddock-Wright went on to become an employment and workplace mediator, arbitrator and Title IX investigator.

She certainly has her hands full with the unprecedented shutdown of the U.S. economy because of #coronavirus and historic layoffs of millions of American workers.

Reddock-Wright's days are consumed with advising employers and employees of their rights, responsibilities, and protections as they struggle with the stunning job losses triggered by #Covid19.

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Chitra Ragavan:

Joining me now is Angela Reddock-Wright, founder of the Reddock Law Group. Angela, welcome to the podcast.

Angela Reddock-Wright:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Chitra Ragavan:

So where did you grow up, and what was your childhood like before you moved to Compton, California?

Angela Reddock-Wright:

Well, my father was in the military, so I actually was born in Frankfurt area, Germany, but I don't remember much about it, because we left there when I was one or two years old, and we went back to my parents' hometown, which is Birmingham, Alabama. That's where both my parents and their siblings grew up.

Angela Reddock-Wright:

So I lived in Birmingham, Alabama until I was nine years old, and from there, my parents divorced when I was young, and my mom, seeking a better life for us post-civil rights Birmingham, Alabama, moved to California as a part of the great migration of Southerners that either moved to the West or moved north, and so some of her siblings had moved west already to California, specifically Compton, California. So we moved there when I was nine years old.

Chitra Ragavan:

So growing up as a young girl in Birmingham in the black South, how did that initially begin to shape your views?

Angela Reddock-Wright:

Well, it had a great impact on me. I was born in 1969, and so I was young as the Civil Rights Movement was starting to close out and evolve into a different type of movement than the type that my parents and their parents and so forth experienced, one with Jim Crow and dogs and beatings and so forth. As a child, I was shielded from a lot of that, so I grew up in sort of an idyllic environment, with grandparents on both sides, where you would sit on the porch and you would say hello to people as they passed by. Everyone was referred to as kin folk, because we all knew each other. I remember Southern traditions like sitting with one of my grandmothers and drinking coffee with her, even as a young kid, out the bowl.

Angela Reddock-Wright:

So, on one level, it was idyllic. It had a lot of Southern traditions, but I do remember, obviously, even though I wasn't in the heart of marching or anything like that, I have memories of those conversations and of people still being very active in the movement. My maternal grandmother in particular, Frida Gills, she was a home healthcare worker and was very active in the Civil Rights Movement and in her community and in the union that represented the workers. So I remember, as a child,

Ep. 39 — A New York college graduate’s surefire path to success is upended by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks /Jared Carmel, Managing Partner, Manhattan Venture Partners.

New York native Jared Carmel was ready to take on the world in 2001 when he hit the job market fresh out of college. But his dreams of a cushy job at a big Wall Street investment firm evaporated in the dust of the 9/11 attacks.

Carmel eventually got hired at a boutique investment bank where he earned his chops wearing lots of hats and learning lots of skills.

Carmel became a pioneer in the development of secondary markets for pre-IPO technology companies. A founder and Managing Partner at Manhattan Venture Partners, Carmel has helped create nearly $2 billion of invested capital across more than 30 businesses with over 20 liquidity events including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Lyft, Spotify, and Alibaba, to name just a few.

Carmel's path to wealth was bookended by not one but two economic downturns – post 9/11 and the 2008 recession. So he has a wise perspective on the #Covid-19 rollercoaster.

He believes individuals and investors should look past the shock of the current U.S. crisis and read the global macro tea leaves.

A master venture capitalist's masterclass on weathering the #coronavirus catastrophe. That's on my leadership podcast🎙️When It Mattered.

⬇️ Link Below ⬇️

🎙️ https://lnkfi.re/chitra

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Chitra Ragavan:

Jared Carmel thought he was on a surefire path to success when he went to college in 1997 in Buffalo, New York to major in informatics. But by the time he graduated and was ready to hit the ground running in September 2001, the world had changed. Carmel eventually got hired at a boutique investment bank where he earned his chops by wearing lots of hats and learning lots of skills.

Chitra Ragavan:

Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When it Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, and advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. My guest today is Jared Carmel, Managing Partner at Manhattan Venture Partners and a pioneer in the development of the secondary market for pre-IBO technology companies.

Chitra Ragavan:

Carmel's primary focus is providing liquidity and diversification for shareholders of illiquid, high-profile, venture backed private companies. Carmel has helped produce nearly two billion of invested capital across more than 30 businesses with over 20 liquidity events including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Lyft, Spotify, Alibaba, DocuSign, and Airbnb. Jared, welcome to the podcast.

Jared Carmel:

Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Chitra Ragavan:

You thought you had it all figured out when you went to college back in 1997, but as it often happens life took a twist. What happened to you?

Jared Carmel:

You're right. I did think I had it all figured out. So I started school in 1997, probably one of the best times that the United States has ever seen. By the time I graduated in 2001, the world really took a turn for the worst. Nearly nine months after the tech wreck and about 90 days before September 11, I graduated. Started to look for jobs just like everybody else, and then September 11 occurred. I thought that I'd be working at a large Wall Street investment bank somewhere. And then all of the sudden, post-September 11, there was no jobs anywhere in the world. Ultimately, I think that really formed and helped shape who I've become today, but when you're from New York, from a family who didn't have a lot of connections, it was very hard to figure out where you were going to go from there.

Chitra Ragavan:

So what did you do? How did you cope with that and how did you even look for work?

Jared Carmel:

The first thing I did was try to reach out to friends and family to see if there was anybody with connectivity. My father, as I was sort of indicating before,

Ep. 38 — A father’s gift and a brother’s illness sets a young boy  on track to becoming a cryptocurrency pioneer / Joey Krug, Co-CIO, Pantera Capital, Core Dev, Augur.

When Joey Krug  was 10 years old, his dad bought him an old Apple computer on eBay. Although neither realized it at the time, it would prove to be a timely gift.

Around that same time, Krug's brother became really sick with a rare disease affecting only 600 people in the world. Krug quit school to be there for his brother during his year-long hospitalization, homeschooled himself and learned programming to help him cope with the family crisis.

Krug’s brother thankfully recovered and Krug pretty much forgot about programming till five years later when he discovered Bitcoin.

His exploration of bitcoin and cryptocurrency eventually led Joey Krug to pioneer Augur, a cryptocurrency online gaming platform.

The so-called "prediction markets" running on Augur have ranged from betting on benign future events — such as sports, weather, and political outcomes  to a few shock-value ones — including so-called “assassination markets,” where people could in theory bet on celebrity killings of politicians and other famous people or predict the number of people killed in a terrorist attack.

Krug, who is also the Co-CIO of Pantera Capital, a blockchain and crypto investment fund,  believes the decentralized, peer-to-peer betting exchanges like Augur will reduce many of the problems associated with traditional online gambling platforms and bring efficiency, transparency, and integrity to the opaque gaming industry.

Kruger is placing a big bet on the future of global online gambling, expected by some estimates to be worth more than $100 billion by 2025.

In this in-depth interview, Krug also looks at the roadblocks in cryptocurrency going mainstream and how the industry is likely to evolve in the next few years.

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Chitra Ragavan:

When Joey Krug was 10 years old, his dad bought him an old Apple computer on eBay. Although neither realized it at the time, it would prove to be a timely gift. Krug's brother did recover, and Krug pretty much forgot about programming until he was 15 years old when he discovered Bitcoin. Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. His exploration of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency led Joey Krug to develop Augur, a decentralized cryptocurrency gaming platform. Prediction markets like Auger can range from the benign, such as betting on sports, weather, and politics, to the sinister, including so-called assassination markets where people bet on celebrity killings of politicians and other famous people or predict the number of people killed in a terrorist attack. Joining me now to discuss how prediction markets work and where the cryptocurrency industry and markets are headed is Joey Krug. He's the co-CIO at Pantera Capital, one of the largest blockchain-focused investment firms. Krug also is co-founder of the Forecast Foundation, which developed Augur. Joey, welcome to the podcast.

Joey Krug:

Thanks for having me.

Chitra Ragavan:

Describe the computer that your dad gave you when you were 10 and what it was like to first start using it and to learn to program with it.

Joey Krug:

Yeah. My dad bought me an old Apple IIGS. I think it was one of the nicer models of the Apple II, but of course he bought it decades later, so it was pretty cheap on eBay. There were kind of a few things you could do. You could sort of program in the command line using an Applesoft BASIC, which is sort of a language that I think initially Wozniak did a lot of work on. Steve Wozniak built that. There wasn't a whole lot you could do with it. You could write fairly simple programs, you could write programs that would make small games like tech space games,

Ep. 37 — A tumultuous childhood filled with displacement and abuse draws a healthcare expert to the psychology of human behavior / Nicole Fisher, President of Health and Human Rights Strategies.

To say that Nicole Fisher's childhood was tumultuous would be an understatement. Fisher's world fell apart when she was two years old when she began to experience a pattern of psychological, and physical abuse by her mother.

When her parents divorced, her dad won custody of Fisher and raised her with the help of loving relatives. But Fisher still endured years of brutal custody battles in which the courts often sided with her mother and ordered Fisher to visit her or even live with her, creating massive stress and uncertainty, fueled in large part by her mother’s unpredictable behavior.

“There were many times, she was so loving, and kind, and affectionate, and there were other times she was the opposite. And I think that actually at its core, is part of that underlying instability,” say Fisher. “It wasn't just, whether my grandma was picking me up from school, or my aunt, or I was going to walk home with cousins, I think it was really, not knowing which sort of personality you were going to get, and that instability . . . really created a need for me, to have predictability in my life, and to understand, why, what were those triggers, what was within my control, what wasn't.”

Her chaotic childhood left Fisher with a deep hunger to understand the human psyche. She has devoted her career to working on issues of health and human rights, homelessness and hunger through her consulting firm, Health and Human Rights Strategies.

Fisher soon realized that the poor and underprivileged in the U.S. confront many of the same issues as those in the developing world. This chasm between the haves and have nots in America has only come into sharper relief with #Coronavirus.

In a strange way, the #Covid-19 pandemic has brought Fisher full circle to her own history of displacement, and resilience.

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Chitra Ragavan:

Nicole Fisher's world fell apart when she was two years old, and she began to experience psychological, and physical abuse by her mother. Fisher's dad worked three jobs, and despite his best efforts, had little idea how to bring up a daughter, but he had the help of her grandparents, and many other relatives. Her chaotic childhood left Fisher with a deep hunger to understand people, and a passion for health and human rights. Hello everyone, I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When it Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups, find their narrative. My guest today is Nicole Fisher, President of the consulting firm, Health & Human Rights Strategies. Fisher is a global health and policy contributor to Forbes, and the founder and curator of the think tank, A Seat at the Table. Nicole, welcome to the podcast.

Nicole:

Thank you for having me.

Chitra Ragavan:

Well, to say that you had a rough childhood, is a bit of an understatement. Tell us what happened.

Nicole:

Sure. It's not something I talk about very often, but yes, my childhood was, I think tumultuous, is a word. I had a wonderful family, a very big loving family, but my parents got divorced, for good reason, when I was very young, and there was, as you mentioned, some psychological and physical abuse. It went on for years, and so my dad got custody of me at two. We moved to be near his family. I was born in Louisiana, but we moved to Missouri, where his family was. And over the years, there were lots of custody battles, lots of court dates, lots of instances of having to choose which parent to live with. I of course chose my father, but the courts' system really believed, particularly back in those days, that children, girls in particular, should be with their mother. And I respect the mindset, and yet we had a loving... My father is the greatest guy in the world,

Ep. 36 — A succession of friends dying early propels a hospital revenue cycle consultant to rethink the foundation of American healthcare / Dave Chase, Creator, Co-Founder, and CEO of Health Rosetta.

When Dave Chase turned 40, he was stunned to realize that nearly a dozen of his friends all around his own age had died due to health problems.

One in particular hit him the hardest, a successful executive who got cancer. “And really, at every step of the way the system failed. I mean, she got the wrong diagnosis which led to the wrong treatment plan,” says Chase. “Ultimately, this devastated her physically, financially, mentally, and she ultimately passed, she left behind a 10 year old daughter, and she was a single mother. And I realized this was a complete system failure. And I'd been a part of that system. And that was one of those road to Damascus moments for me, realizing certainly I was trying to do the right thing. But the more I looked at the system I was in, the more I realized it was, in some cases doing more harm than good. And the effects were just dramatic the more I dug into it, basically.”

A successful hospital revenue cycle consultant at the time, Chase knew that he had to rethink his career and reason for being.

He began to think deeply about some of the most intractable problems in the American healthcare system: The high rates of misdiagnosis and over treatment; the direct link between the two-decade-long employee wage stagnation and the escalating cost of healthcare; the devastating opioid crisis, about which he's written a book, The Opioid Crisis Wakeup Call; and last but not least, how the average American is what Chase describes as just "one stubbed toe away" from medical bill-driven bankruptcy.

Since his existential crisis, Chase has become one of the most innovative thinkers on healthcare reform. As the Creator, Co-Founder, and CEO of Health Rosetta, he's working with employers and unions to transform the healthcare system. In this insightful episode, Chase lays out a concise roadmap of all the factors that have led to the national crisis in healthcare during this ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

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Chitra Ragavan:

By the time Dave Chase turned 40, 10 of his friends all around his own age had died due to health problems. There was one in particular that hit him the hardest. A successful hospital revenue cycle consultant at the time, Chase knew that he had to rethink his career and reason for being. Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. Since that crisis, Chase has become one of the most innovative thinkers on healthcare reform. Joining me now is Dave Chase. He is the creator, Co-founder and CEO of Health Rosetta, which he describes as a "do it yourself health reform movement" to help transform the healthcare system.' Dave, welcome to the podcast.

Dave Chase:

Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to our chat.

Chitra Ragavan:

So how did you end up in healthcare in the first place?

Dave Chase:

Well, initially it was random, I was working with a consulting firm that's now Accenture. And as a new consultant straight out of school, they put you on a project and I was put into a hospital. And turns out, it was enjoyable, liked the team, liked the work and just kind of one thing led to another and have had much of my career in the healthcare industry.

Chitra Ragavan:

So what were you doing in healthcare when you turned 40, and you were starting to see that a lot of your friends had died?

Dave Chase:

By then I had moved on to the technology side. So I'd had a company that I had started. I mean, previously, I'd been at Microsoft and started their healthcare partnership ecosystem, that's about 28,000 partners that they have on the Microsoft platform, believe it or not, just in healthcare,

Ep. 35 — A war photographer confronts her own mortality as she bears witness to the world’s worst wars / Lynsey Addario, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist.

Renowned photojournalist and war photographer Lynsey Addario and three fellow journalists were documenting the Arab Spring uprising in Libya in March 2011 when the unthinkable happened at a hostile checkpoint.

The journalists had lingered too long to complete their reporting on the front lines and were cornered and taken hostage by Col. Muammar Gaddafi's troops. They were repeatedly beaten, tied up, blindfolded and constantly threatened with execution before being released nearly a week later.

It was hard enough to recover from the trauma of her violent kidnapping, the second in her 15-year career as a award winning war photographer. A month later, Addario learned that two other journalist friends had been killed in Libya, leading to a profound existential crisis about the life-threatening career she had chosen.

Addario's soul searching led to her best-selling memoir, "It's What I do," in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, recounts the incredible risks she has taken covering every major conflict and humanitarian crisis of her generation, played out against the backdrop of the post-9/11 War on Terror.

A regular contributor to The NewYorkTimes, National Geographic, and Time, Addario has reported and photographed from some of the world’s most dangerous hotspots including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo.

Recently, Addario took on another difficult assignment documenting a very different kind of death that challenged her as a photojournalist in an entirely new way. I hope you enjoy this incredible story of courage, perseverance and sacrifice.

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Chitra:   Renowned photo journalist and war photographer, Lynsey Addario and three fellow journalists were shooting the Arab spring uprising in Libya in March, 2011 when the unthinkable happened at a hostile checkpoint. Addario and her colleagues were released nearly a week later. It was hard enough to recover from the trauma of her violent kidnapping, but when a month later, Addario learned that two other journalists friends had been killed in Libya, her world fell apart.

Chitra:   Hello everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Good Story, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. My guest today is Lynsey Addario, the Pulitzer prize winning photo journalist, who for the past 15 years has covered every major conflict and humanitarian crisis of her generation. A regular contributor to the New York Times, National Geographic and Time magazine, Addario has reported and photographed from some of the most dangerous hotspots in the world, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia and Congo. Addario also is the author of the bestselling memoir, It's What I do, a powerful narrative about her coming of age as a photo journalist during the post 911 War on Terror. Lynsey, welcome to the podcast.

Lynsey:   Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Chitra:   Did you always want to be a photographer?

Lynsey:   No, actually I never wanted to be a photographer. For me, I started photographing as a hobby and it was something I did sort of as I was growing up, I taught myself, I bought books on how to photograph, but it was never really something I took seriously, I guess because I didn't have exposure to photojournalism. And so it wasn't until I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in international relations and Italian that I moved abroad and I started really paying attention to photography as a form of journalism and storytelling. And that's really when I decided I wanted to become a photographer.

Chitra:   Your first camera was actually a gift from your dad. You were one of four sisters,

Ep. 34 — A Shanghai-based American journalist uncovers a Chinese spy caper that brings her full circle to her midwestern roots / Mara Hvistendahl, Author, The Scientist and the Spy.

When journalist Mara Hvistendahl began looking into the FBI’s arrest of a lone Chinese man behaving suspiciously in an Iowa cornfield, she was blown away by what she uncovered.

Hvistendahl’s two-year reporting journey led her into the heart of a massive FBI industrial espionage investigation into the theft of genetically modified corn seeds by Chinese agribusinesses, triggered by the arrest of that one individual, Robert Mo.

What began as idle curiosity ended in a gripping book,  The Scientist and The Spy, in which Hvistendahl documents the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government went to make its case against Mo and the implications for other U.S. based Chinese scientists and foreign scientists in general. And it is a microcosm of some of the issues confronting U.S. - China trade relations.

Hvistendahl’ s tour de force also offers a disturbing picture of the consolidation of U.S. agriculture in the hands of a few corporate giants, leaving average farmers fighting for survival. And she examines in detail the ethnic discrimination underlying many of these types of criminal investigations and prosecutions..

The story, which Hvistendahl now believes she was meant to write, also had a deep personal twist, bringing her full circle back to her own midwestern roots.

I hope you enjoy this saga of one reporter‘s long journey home.

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Chitra:   Minnesota native Mara Hvistendahl learned Mandarin because of her mom's history in China. Later as a reporter in Shanghai, Hvistendahl read about a Chinese man found behaving suspiciously in the middle of an Iowa corn field. That odd little story led Hvistendahl on a two year reporting journey that uncovered a massive FBI industrial espionage investigation into the theft of genetically modified corn seeds by Chinese agribusinesses. Hvistendahl's journey also had an unexpected personal twist.

Chitra:   Hello everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. Joining me now is Mara Hvistendahl, author of the book, The Scientist and the Spy. Mara, welcome to the podcast.

Mara:   Thank you so much for having me here.

Chitra:    You became a Mandarin speaker because of your mom's amazing story. What was that story?

Mara:  Sure. My mom was a missionary's daughter. She spent some of her high school years in Asia and then moved back to the Midwest and had kids, got married. After she divorced my father when I was four, she decided to spend a year applying to schools and studying Chinese again. The woman who became her Chinese tutor was also a single mom with a son around the same age as me and my brother.

Mara:   She's living in the dorm at a St. Olaf College in Southern Minnesota and nobody there knew that she had a child. Her name was Hung-yu, and so my mom thought, let's get her out of the dorm. Hung-yu and my mom ended up moving in together and co-parenting me and my brother and my Chinese brother for a number of years, for five or six years. We became quite close as a kind of blended family.

Chitra:   You took Mandarin in college and then you decided to move to Shanghai. Why did you move?

Mara:   I decided in college that I wanted to become a journalist. I took Mandarin, though, more just because of this personal interest and I'd always loved the language and the culture. Then I went to journalism school and I was in New York trying to freelance. I was working as a nanny and a waitress on the side and an editor said to me, "Do you speak some Chinese? You probably should just go to China and see if you can get your start there."

Mara:   I packed up one or two bags and just moved.

Ep. 33 — A writer-turned-filmmaker takes a mentor’s blunt advice to heart and becomes a pioneer in the art of visual branded storytelling / Megan Cunningham, Founder and CEO, Magnet Media.

Long before “narrative” and “storytelling” became buzzwords in the technology space, Megan Cunningham was pioneering the art of brand positioning.

At a time when YouTube, broadband and mobile phones were in their infancy and influencer marketing was virtually non-existent, Cunningham's brand studio, Magnet Media was putting her on track to becoming a media magnate in content marketing and branded storytelling.

But it wasn’t easy creating an entirely new media and marketing model and building a global business. Cunningham learned the physical toll of burning the candle on both ends on a business trip packed with back-to-back meetings.

“The first meeting, I honestly cannot tell you anything that was said during that meeting, because I was just sitting there, staring off into space, and in such agonizing pain,” Cunningham recalls. “By the end of the meeting, I just had to excuse myself. I went to the hotel room, and just called 911, because I was doubled over in pain.”

Her health crisis and her husband's intervention convinced Cunningham, who had a young son, to acknowledge that scaling a company meant operating at a whole different level, both personally and professionally.

Today, all the techniques that Cunningham began pioneering two decades ago –– branded visual storytelling and content, social media, and influencer marketing –– have become par for the course in the marketing industry.

Cunningham still remembers the day she got that fateful call from a Google executive asking what she could do with the nascent YouTube channel and when she went to the channel, all she saw were cat videos.

Don’t miss this great episode of how Cunningham has redefined the art and craft of brand storytelling.

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Chitra:   Long before narrative and storytelling became buzzwords in the technology space, Megan Cunningham was pioneering the art of brand storytelling through her content studio, Magnet Media. But, it wasn't easy creating an entirely new media and marketing model, and building a global business. Cunningham learned the cost of burning the candle on both ends, on a business trip one day. Hello everyone, I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered.

Chitra:   This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative.

Chitra:   Her health crisis convinced Megan Cunningham to acknowledge that scaling a company meant operating a whole different level, both personally and professionally. Here to talk about it is Megan Cunningham, CEO of the brand studio Magnet Media. Cunningham is a sought after speaker on media and marketing trends, especially how data informs the storytelling process to drive measurable impact. She's also the author of the book, The Art of the Documentary, and Cunningham has spoken at many events, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Wharton School of Business, South by Southwest, and the Consumer Electronics Show.

Chitra:   Megan, welcome to the podcast.

Megan:   Thank you so much for having me.

Chitra:   What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you want to be doing what you're doing now?

Megan:   When I was younger, I was really fortunate to be immersed in a house that just loved to tell stories. We have a really close family, and everyone's a pretty obsessive reader, but we also love to exchange stories. That was a big part of my life growing up.

Megan:   So, when it came to decide what I wanted to be, of course I naturally gravitated towards writing. However, after researching all the schools I could potentially go to, and looking into the writing programs, and visiting campuses, I chose Swarthmore. Yet, when I signed up for my first year of courses, the very first class I took was called,