An Army of Normal Folks - The Farmlink Project: Saving Over 200 Million Pounds of Food (Pt 2)

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

The COVID pandemic led to two problems that strangely existed at the same time. Millions of Americans were going hungry and yet thousands of commercial farmers were literally dumping food when customers such as restaurants and schools shut down. This didn’t make any sense to Ben Collier, Owen Dubeck, and their ragtag group of college friends, so they decided to become the link between these two worlds. Today, The Farmlink Project has delivered over 200 million pounds of food to people who need it!Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it's Bill Courtney with An Army of Normal Folks, and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Ben Collier and Owen Dubeck, right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. I'm Davis Miller, host of the new podcast, The Dow of Muhammad Ali. I met Ali back in 1988, and to my great surprise, we became friends. His influence profoundly changed my perspective on family, spirituality, and on the purpose of life itself. I'll tell you that story and also stories of others touched by

the champ, including people such as Reverend Al Sharpton and James Buster Douglas. We'll even hear from Muhammad's daughter, Rashida. Well, my dad was, he was Peter Pan. Like, he never really grew up. He was very mature when it came down to social issues. He was very in tune. He felt a responsibility to be able to share his connection to millions of people who were in need. In each of these stories, we share lessons. Lessons that have meant a great deal to me and that I hope will be meaningful to you. Listen to the Da'la Muhammad Ali on the iHeart I'm Solea Mosin, and I've covered economic policy for years and reported on how it impacts people across the United States.

In 2016, I saw how voters were leaning towards Trump and how so many Americans felt misunderstood by Washington. So I started The Big Take DC. We dig into how money, politics and power shape government and the consequences for voters. It's an election year, so there's a lot of focus on the voters that TikTok is reaching. The initial reaction is like, oh, things are looking so resilient. I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I just don't see the political will down in Washington

right now to change their tune. I think the American electorate has been signaling that it expects a rematch of the 2020 election. These are unprecedented times. With new episodes every Thursday, you can listen to The Big Take DC on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I never thought I'd take my three young kids to Sicily to solve a century-old mystery. But that's what I'm doing in my new podcast, The Sicilian Inheritance. Join us as we travel thousands of miles on the beautiful and crazy island of Sicily, as I trace my roots back through a mystery for the ages and untangle clues within my family's origin story,

which is morphed like a game of telephone through the generations. Was our family matriarch killed in a land deal gone wrong? Or was it by the Sicilian mafia? A lover's quarrel? Or was she, as my father believed, a witch? Listen to The Sicilian Inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As I'm listening to you, you're gaining a valuable lesson in ego, selfishness, business, and the reality of the world because there's a guy named Zig Ziglar.

You won't know his name. Maybe you do. Anyway, back in the day, he was one of these motivational speech or speakers, one of the greatest ever. If you look up his 80s tapes and you listen to them, they'll be dated. But there's they're full of wonderful tidbits of information. One of the things he said was you always share your go out, your give up goals with everyone. You share your go up goals with no one.

And what he meant by that was if you're going to quit drinking, or you're going to quit smoking, or you're going to quit somebody, that's a give up goal. Tell everybody. Because the minute that person sees you take a sip of beer or drag off a cigarette, they'll be sure to remind you, Oh, I thought you said you were gonna quit smoking. I knew you couldn't do it. You use human nature for your benefit, but your go up goals, you share those with no one's.

If your go up goals are, I want in two years to have this promotion, I want in two years to have this organization to be here. If you share those go up goals with everybody, the same human nature that helps you in your give up, they will help bring you down because they will be like, I don't want you doing that because that may tread on what I wanna do.

Do you see what I'm saying? So his deal was share your give up goals with everybody, share your go up goals with nobody. And it is a, it's actually a sobering look at the reality of much of the way humans interact with each other. But it's also, I wouldn't say any lesson is a hundred percent true, but you get the 30,000 foot view of what Zig Zig were saying.

I think you were experiencing that. I think our optimism at the time would have disagreed with that because in a world where, hey, we wanna be the most successful AI company, that means we wanna do that at the expense of everyone else. We wanna take all that market share.

In a world where the goal is to see everybody who is struggling with hunger fed and every organization in this industry has that goal. As their North Star, we felt that there would be something different. And by and large, that is something that people individually feel, but the actions and the structures that were being built

contradicted it. And you guys were very punny about to upset the apple cart. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that became our goal. And you guys were very punny about to upset the apple cart. Yeah. Yeah, well then that, I think that became our goal. And we had this weird stubbornness that came from conversations like that, cucumber conversation, where we thought, we're gonna make them work with us.

You know, we're gonna make these guys collaborate because we don't see a path to actually changing this system if all of these different organizations that stand to benefit from working together choose to. And so it's this weird thing where we almost wanna, I can picture like my parents sitting me and my twin brother down and being like,

you guys are gonna love each other. And it's like, that's such a weird way. But that's kind of what we've felt and continue to feel. I know you're gonna work together. So it feels contradictory in nature, but it's something that needed to happen. So a month in you get hit in the face with a cucumber to use your words, you get dunked on.

I did not say we got hit in the face with a cucumber. Oh, okay, well, you got dunked on. I did say that. So where do you go from there? LinkedIn. That's when we started recruiting. We thought, all right, now we have this first summer of the pandemic, no college student that we knew

was still going to do what they were planning to do that summer. So let's give them all a chance to be a part of this, or as many as we can. And I think within two months now, Farmlink has gone from an idea to something that over 200 students are now working on from across the country and even beyond everywhere. Right. Yeah. Another great thing of the ABC World News tonight segment was all these kids reached out and were like, I want to work on this. I'm not in school right now. I'm not. So they reaching you through your website. Yeah. There's a website with an email on it. So everyone was sending an email. And you know, if you see the film, the documentary, Joe in that film was one of those people who

reached out and yeah, our zoom chat of 10 people went to 200 and all of a sudden like to open every like meeting everyone singing together and dancing and like that community that we're all missing before it's starting to come together. I'll never forget one of the calls someone's grandparents started singing sea shanties like something you'd sing on like a ship in the 1700s to open the call and everyone was like energized. So fired up. Yeah so fired up and then and then we like dive into business and move like 100,000 pounds of food. It was crazy. So I was in that first year. We want to move a million pounds of food. Right. Yeah. So you'd already moved what 50 or 60 thousand

pounds of potatoes, onions and eggs. Right. So by that point, we're already at the point where we're coming towards like, I'd say like 250,000 pounds of food or something like that. Which is already, if that was the end of it, that would already have been a phenomenal thing. That's what we thought at the start. Yeah, we still thought it was maybe a summer project or something like that. There was no impetus, there was no like,

it was not supposed to be an organization. And reflecting on it now, I'm so grateful that we used 100% of that money towards transportation. No one was like, I want to be paid. I'm working hard on this. That was not it at all. Everyone had shared ownership, whether you were person number one to enter or person 200. This was all of our project and this belonged to all of us and that proved very important. Which is interesting. Shameless plug. My paramount belief is the only thing that's going to fix all the things that ALICE is when an army of normal folks come together, see area need and fill it. And in a microcosm of that 30,000

fit view, that is exactly what was going on three months into y'all's existence. Because now you have this army of 200 kids across the country, restless, wanting to be part of something good. And if it had been a summer deal, great. It's the same with, you know, your football team. It doesn't revolve around one person that everyone's catering towards. Everyone has an equal part in the season and needs to work together. And so that's what y'all are doing. And your goal was a million pounds, right? Well, initially, no, you're not, you're not wrong. That was, we thought, all right, if we move a million pounds of food, that'd be pretty special. And I think a month after we had that initial conversation,

I remember talking to Aidan. And we're like, well, that was quicker than we thought. And you want to do it a year and you did it in a month. And so we were just setting goals as quickly as we could break them in a weird way. And so I think we then made our goal. All right, this summer, let's move 10 million pounds of food, and see what happens. And I think going back to what you guys were just addressing, what we didn't realize would drive this was the community. And we were all stripped

of that right when the pandemic began. And suddenly no one, I had never had a pen pal. Do you ever become friends with someone before the pandemic that you'd never met in person? I hadn't. Suddenly we had a hundred faces that I felt like I really knew. And I was getting to know beyond just the food that we were moving and the farmers we were calling. And that was what made this feel like something that really had the longevity to go further and further and further. And so that summer was just so fast.

We had this partnership with Uber Freight where they gave us free transportation on anything we moved with them. And it's like an Uber, say it needs to go from point A to point B, needs to be this kind of truck at this temperature. There's a thing called Uber freight. There is, and we didn't know about it. But it gave us the space and a million dollars of free transportation to figure it out

because we were not the most efficient at moving food at that time, but we were contacting everybody. And so that first summer, because of that transportation buffer or that ability to be a little bit less efficient than we otherwise are now, we learned so much. And I think in that first year, it was all about just doing with the best intent of supporting everybody in mind. And going back to that piece I said earlier, we really wanted to make it

so that we could work with everybody. Our philosophy was if we're not as additive as possible to farmers and to food banks and communities that we're serving, we're not gonna actually work in this in-between space that we think we need to be. And so that's where we pivoted as much as we needed to in that first year to make sure what we were doing

was as supportive as possible. But then, kids start going back to school. And therefore your massive network of people have all this time to give and the restlessness. They don't have that time anymore. So now you got to pivot again, don't you? So we're looking at the end of the summer of 2020. We're about five months into farming. We moved 10 million pounds of food. 10 million in five months. Yeah, let's just stop and marinate on that for a minute. 10 million pounds of food in five months

for a bunch of kids who start off in a U haul picking up some eggs. I mean, that's really what we're talking about. And a network of 250 kids. Yep. And how much money raised? At that point, I think we were looking at it over a million dollars. Okay. In five months. Yeah. Right. Let me just say this real quick to everyone listening. These are college kids who don't know Jack about nothing. One of them just graduated college and was learning storytelling. Another was laid up from a leg injury and all these kids get together

because they see a line of people in Pittsburgh running out of food and they're seeing other stories about food going to waste and say, how can we put the two together? And they end up getting a U-Haul picking up some eggs. And in five months, you've got about a million dollars of donations. You've been on the New York Times, you've been on World News tonight, and you've moved 10 million pounds. Well, when you put it like that.

A food. Well, that's where we are in the story. So if you're sitting around right now, I want to remind you that the two adages I say all the time is the only thing that's going to fix this country is when an army of normal folks decide to bond together, rise up and say, the narratives out of the national press are set to divide us, the narratives out of DC are set to divide us. And the things that are really going to fix us is when an army of normal folks look themselves in the mirror and say, I'm going to announce those narratives that are dividing us, and I'm gonna join together with people

and say, yeah, I can help. And the second thing is, the magic happens when passion and discipline meet opportunity. When you have a passion and an ability to do something and you see an opportunity and you match those things together, magic happens. And these two guys are such beautiful examples of that.

You had a passion and ability in storytelling. And if you weren't able to tell stories, you're never on World News Tonight, you don't get your first $150,000. Your mother instilled a bad, I don't want to take away from who you are, but there's no way your mother did instill you a passion for people. All that can go to her. It's true.

And you saw an opportunity and as passion and opportunity and discipline collided, in only five months, these goofy dumb college kids who don't really know what the hell they're doing have moved 10 million pounds of food to food banks to fill the gap of hunger during COVID have raised a million dollars and still really don't know what they have on their hands. No, I remember there was a day where 12 people were all writing on Post-it notes, what do

you think we're doing here? Who do you think we're helping and where should do you think we're helping? And where should we go? And it was really still that arbitrary. It was like, we did not a hundred percent know where we fit into the terrible food system. And a lot. And what I said to echo what I said one more time is kids are also going to start going back to school soon. You're actually going to be in class.

And so this massive network of restless kids with free time that want to do something, their hearts may still be in the right place. But pragmatism says they're going back to class. So you have to kind of pivot at this point, don't you? Yeah. I mean, in August, so five months in, we look up and I remember having a conversation with a few guys where we say, if we don't get so many more kids on board to help us do this, this is just going to go away in a month when people do have to go back to class. Now, it's worth noting that first school year of the pandemic, so that September through the following spring, all class was still online.

And so I'll share my personal position. I'd finished my degree requirements. I was taking online classes that this my parents wouldn't love here in this. It was kind of a joke. And you didn't have the community that students lurk, looked to get from classes. And so, Farmlink could still provide that. And so for that first school year,

that carried us into the second year. That first semester or whole year? Really from September of 2020, five months into the pandemic, until May of the following year, we still could. That's a whole year, two semesters. Yep, now we're now a year into Farmlink.

We could still, every few months, go out and get another hundred students that were so passionate to be a part of Farmlink and help build that community. I mean, by the end of that first year of Farmlink, over 400 students had been a part of the Farmlink project. And the community, I think, at that point, was still only growing and becoming stronger.

That next September, a year and a half into farmlink. That was that transition you were really talking about. And that was really tricky. Tell us tell us how you did it. Well, we're a year into farmlink. We've moved 30 million pounds of food. It's unbelievable. That is a and this is fresh produce. It's stuff that is hard to come by outside of a pen still all all going to food banks, right? Still all going to food banks and no food bank is paying for it.

And that's when students are going back to in-person classes. I just graduated. Owen, you're trying to survive in LA. You have your balance of making money outside of Farmlink, trying to still support Farmlink. And this is when we made the really difficult decision. If we don't pay somebody to do this full time,

we're really concerned about the accountability of this project to keep growing in the way that we think it can. Yeah, Farmlink is now a 501C3 in a rural organization. It actually needs an executive director. It needed that and it needed. We knew that the the culture and the community, the energy was always going to be able to come from these young students. But there was experience that we could benefit so much from.

I mean, we're cold calling thousands of farmers a week. We could bring on one of the right people who just knows all of these farmers, and he can call them up and speak their language and get the same amount of food that 30 students spending 30 hours a week could do. And so I graduated at that point point and Aidan and I started working on this full time and the full time team began to grow from there. We'll be right back. I'm Davis Miller, host of the new podcast, The Dow of Muhammad Ali. I met Ali back in 1988, and to my great surprise, we became friends.

His influence profoundly changed my perspective on family, spirituality, and on the purpose of life itself. I'll tell you that story and also stories of others touched by the champ, including people such as Reverend Al Sharpton and James Buster Douglas. We'll even hear from Muhammad's daughter, Rashida. Well, my dad was, he was Peter Pan. Like, he never really grew up. He was very mature when it came down to social issues. He was very in tune. He felt a responsibility to be able to share his connection to millions of people who were in need.

In each of these stories, we share lessons, lessons that have meant a great deal to me and that I hope will be meaningful to you. Listen to the Da' dial up Muhammad Ali on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I never thought I'd take my three young kids to Sicily to solve a century old mystery, but that's what I'm doing in my new podcast, The Sicilian Inheritance. Join us as we travel thousands of miles on the beautiful and crazy island of Sicily, as I trace my roots back through a mystery for the ages and untangle clues within my

family's origin story, which is morphed like a game of telephone through the generations. Was our family matriarch killed in a land deal gone wrong? Or was it by the Sicilian mafia? A lover's quarrel? Or was she, as my father believed, a witch? Listen to The Sicilian Inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best informed business reporters around the world. Western nations like the U.S. and Europe. Mexico will likely have its first female president. And then you have China. And help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters. He'll get his yo-yos to Europe in time. But the longer this drags on, the more worried he's getting.

They knew that they needed to do this as fast as they possibly could to get a drug on the market as fast as they could. I'm David Dura. I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Saleh Amosin. We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets. Basically, everyone was expecting, if not a calamity, certainly a recession.

But the problem is that that paperwork, as our reporting showed, is fake. Someone who's covering the market, And then we brought on Luis Yepiz, who was the first real adult who came into this space. And he now he's the Mexican dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is Mexican. He is a big opera singer. He's a Mexican singer. Yeah, right. He's in a punk band.

He's incredible. Well, let's just step back. He's a Mexican opera singer who's in a punk band who of course fits perfectly with Farmlink. From a rural Native American community in northern Mexico who spent his entire life as both a rebel and someone working so hard to take care of other people. And the way he describes it is that he has been the crazy guy shouting in the corner his entire life that we need to rescue all this food, we need to collaborate and no one has ever listened to him. How did the two of you hook up? Luis? Yeah, how did y'all meet?

Luis was working, I could let Ben tell it in a second, but Luis was working moving surplus food in Los Angeles, an organization called Food Forward that he was help growing and we were partners with them. So we were moving food with Luis and I was getting videos in because we were asking for storytelling and if anyone went to the delivery,

just take a video on your iPhone. And here's this guy crying on camera about, we need to get food today to people. And he was so passionate. And I think there was a sense that, you know, the crazy ideas that he had dreamt of, they were possible at Farmlink. You know, you talk about a volunteer. He didn't work at Food Forward when he started and he woke up at 4 a.m. every day for years to go to the L.A. wholesale markets, build relationships with the vendors that were selling food to restaurants and grocery stores, and built a pipeline of food donations between

them and Food Forward that now recovers 40 million pounds of food a year. Unpaid. He was a volunteer. And he did not have the resources to really dedicate himself in this way, if it wasn't something that was his source of life. And I think that's something you can probably resonate pretty strong with. But Luis called us around that time and said, I want to do this. I want to do what I've been doing. I want to do it at a national scale. And I think you guys are the tip of the arrow that can really make progress here. And so Luis joins us in September, a

year and a half into farm link, and immediately brings with him, you know, the ability to connect with 10s of millions of pounds of food that we maybe would have one day reached, but he knew exactly where to go find it. He's the antithesis of the cucumber people. He is the antithesis of the cucumber. That's a great way to put it. He's the antithesis of the cucumber people. He is the antithesis of the cucumber people.

That's a great way to put it. And I think what we even had to train into Luis was he'd spent so long being rejected by these institutions within food banking. He almost was like, screw it, we'll do it without them. And so I had to sit with Luis for months to get him to even be open to collaborating once again, because not to his discredit, he'd been so turned,

they turned their back on him so consistently, he almost had given up on this idea that we could work with everybody. And he met all the cucumber people. Exactly. And now he's at a place where he's opened back up to it. I think that optimism has been reinstilled in him, but it's a good example of how someone

who's so well-intentioned can even be driven away from that spirit of collaboration, just because it's so difficult to hold yourself accountable to that level of optimism. It's just, I don't know, you hauled a thousand eggs, a sheet, a Mexican opera singer. You can't make this up, right?

That's why we made a film. It's never gonna happen again. You know, Owen's film, it doesn't even really tell you- What's the title of the film? The film is called Abundance. You look up Abundance Farm Link, you can see it on YouTube. Right, which I watched again today

in preparation to you guys, it's really, really well done. And, uh, I'm not doing your story, the credit that the film does. I'm trying to piece it together for our listeners, but I hope you all will go watch abundance. I think it was a, it had a moniker on, it was, uh, some film festival. Yeah, we just won best, it was some film festival. Yeah, we just won best documentary at Sun Valley Film Festival. Sun Valley, yeah. And we won Montauk Film Festival as well.

Congratulations, man. I know that is, that, I know you don't make films to win awards, but the awards verify the good work that you do. So congratulations on that. So take me from the Mexican opera singer to today. Well, that first year was really difficult from a cultural community standpoint.

Luis, right? Yeah, because I'm here with Aidan, with James. I mean, I had moved to Los Angeles after graduating and we have a few people that are being paid that cannot provide the level of accountability to someone like Luis or Emma, our new director of development. And these folks that came from real workplaces

where you expect a level of accountability from your teammates. And at the same time, we couldn't provide all of these college students, our peers and contemporaries and friends, the level of accountability from your teammates. And at the same time, we couldn't provide all of these college students, our peers and contemporaries and friends, the level of involvement and leadership that they'd once had. Not just because we had a full-time team, but because now their communities

were opening back up again. They couldn't work 30 hours a week, they could work five. Yeah, that's what I was trying to get to earlier. And so that first school year was really tough. And you had a lot of our teammates that had been around since the start, that just came to the conclusion that it was their time to go and focus on other things,

because Farmlink couldn't be what it was for them in that first year. And that's not anyone's fault. And it was really painful because you'd see people burn out and move on, but fortunately- That's the reality of philanthropy, though. Of course, and thankfully, what you'd see is they'd burn out out there'd be a period that was really tough and then the second they were gone they'd immediately look back on farm link with love and it felt like

immediately it was water under the bridge and so once we got through that first year it felt like all right the last two and a half years we've really been building this team building something and now it's a mix between the college students who you see in the film building this all, building something special. And now it's a mix between the college students who you see in the film building this all up and industry professionals who have left some of the biggest nonprofits in the country to work on this. And that hybrid model has worked really well

because you still have that imagination and that rebelliousness of young people. And you have older people who have these really strong connections and systems and mechanisms to move all this food. Ben, did you take some of those people jump and ship because of the reality of their burnout and that they had a life now that they had to pursue because we were returning to normalcy? Did you take that personally? I didn't take it personally. I knew that it had to happen. And at the same time it was deeply saddening and painful to,

to watch. And I think I've always been lucky to be able to look far enough ahead at things to see why some of the more difficult things are worth it, but it doesn't make it any easier to, to go through it. And especially when these aren't just colleagues, they are now some of my closest friends. That balance is so difficult because they're decisions that I know we need to make. And I know they're going to hurt my friends. You, you, you said you learned a lot about what the true definition of community

was during the pandemic days. Yeah. What is that? I felt we could give people a sense of purpose along with that sense of belonging. And that created something that was more powerful than anything I've ever been a part of. Um, I remember in the end of our first year, we did, we would do these seasonal ceremonies where often there were a lot of people moving on. We'd take a moment and we would have a session that we would just open up. We'd call it thank yous. And it would just be a space where anyone could unmute and give a shout out.

Thank you. A moment of recognition to anyone else. And they would always start pretty slowly. And within five minutes, you'd have people just completely opening themselves up. And I'm not someone who cries very often. We suddenly are on Zoom, people are in a hundred different places around the country and half of them are just bawling. And I will share one story.

You referenced Joe. Joe is this teammate of ours who had joined us in the summer. I don't think any of us had really met him in person. He was so bubbly and positive. And anything you asked him to do, he'd be like, sure, man, I'm happy to. He's that can do guy. So positive to the point where you're like, I can't believe how optimistic he is. And he gets on this zoom and he says, Hey, I haven't talked about this with a lot of you guys. But a couple weeks before I joined Farmlink, my dad passed away from COVID.

Even now, I can feel my heart pounding. And I'm not someone who cries that often, especially in front of other people. And on Zoom, I'm bawling in front of 100 people. I can barely speak. And I still felt so okay being there with them and being that kind of vulnerable. And I think that it was such a sign.

And Joe wasn't the only one sharing stories. You had all these people who were saying, I was so confused, so lost, so upset, so depressed. And this has given me something. And we're not even at this point, not even talking yet about the impact that this is having on the lives of people receiving the food.

We're just looking at these peers and colleagues. And I think that was that feeling of community that was so strong from all of these places around the country. When you did the pivot, what'd you learn about leadership? the pivot what you learned about leadership. I learned that we have to help people see why the work they're doing matters and really and ladders up to a North Star goal because I could tell you with confidence we have 21 full time employees, I could tell

you how every single one of them is doing something that if they weren't there, it would destabilize what we're doing. And I know there are times where that is lost for people. And that's when burnout and confusion and frustration, that's when it occurs. And I think my biggest job for Farmlink is as much as possible, helping people see that connection. And there are some times where we'll have a gap, where nobody has the ability to problem solve in an area.

And that's when it falls on my plate. And so along with helping people see this is your biggest responsibility the other thing that I think is my job at Farmlink is saying, okay this is a gap that no one's position to fill and I sure as hell shouldn't be doing it that's when we need to bring on someone else. And so it's just finding your position helping people see their role and then helping the team grow at the right time. We'll be right back. I'm Davis Miller, host of the new podcast, The Dow of Muhammad Ali. I met Ali back in 1988, and to my great surprise, we became friends.

His influence profoundly changed my perspective on family, spirituality, and on the purpose of life itself. I'll tell you that story and also stories of others touched by the champ, including people such as Reverend Al Sharpton and James Buster Douglas. We'll even hear from Muhammad's daughter, Rashida. Well, my dad was, he was Peter Pan. Like he never really grew up. He was very mature when it came down to social issues.

He was very in tune. He felt a responsibility to be able to share his connection to millions of people who were in need. In each of these stories, we share lessons, lessons that have meant a great deal to me and that I hope will be meaningful to you. Listen to the Da'ala Muhammad Ali on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I never thought I'd take my three young kids to Sicily to solve a century-old mystery, but that's what I'm doing in my new podcast, The Sicilian Inheritance. Join us as we travel thousands of miles on the beautiful and crazy island of Sicily as I trace my roots back through a mystery for the ages and untangle clues within my family's origin story, which is morphed like a game of telephone through the generations. Was our family matriarch killed in a land deal gone wrong? Or was it by the Sicilian mafia?

A lover's quarrel? Or was she, as my father believed, a witch? Listen to The Sicilian Inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best informed business reporters around the world. Western nations like the US and Europe. Mexico will likely have its first female president. And then you have China. And help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters.

He'll get his yo-yos to Europe in time. But the longer this drags on, the more worried he's getting. They knew that they needed to do this as fast as they possibly could to get a drug on the market as fast as they could. I'm David Guret. I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Saleh Amosin. We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets.

Basically everyone was expecting, if not a calamity, certainly a recession. But the problem is that that paperwork, as our reporting showed, is fake. To someone who's covering the market, I'm often very worried about an imminent collapse. I'm thinking about it quite often. Listen to The Big Take on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ["The Greatest Lesson"] What's your greatest lesson of documenting and being involved, but also documenting and telling the story. I think it's, it's how strong of a motivator hope is versus dwelling on the negative dwelling on the problem. I think I had grown up with nonprofit storytelling being show people how bad it really is. And you know, the Syrian crisis, there's actually a really interesting New York Times article on why the Syrian refugee crisis didn't raise very much money proportionally to other major

world crises. It's because the storytelling in many ways, it's because the storytelling, in many ways, it's because the storytelling did not provide a pathway for hope. If you see a kid whose house has just been bombed and they're covered in soot, and those are the visuals that you're seeing, it is good to communicate the truth.

You need to know what's going on, but someone who wants to help does not think they can. If you can tell a story going from the rubble to being in a more stable place where you have educational materials and access to teachers and more resources, and the donations are creating that pipeline and you can see that, that will rally people. That will get people to actually drive change. And we saw the same thing with Farmlink. When we post videos, if we lead with the problem in the first minute, people stop listening

after five seconds. People do not want to hear how bad the problem is. If you lead with some sort of teaser, leaving the door open, hey, there's something we can do here and we can do it together. People watch until the end. And I'd never get involved either financially or individually and get, get involved. Yeah. Yeah.

And similar to what Ben said, if you, if you give people purpose, they will, it will become a part of their identity. It's more than a job. It's more than a hobby. It's, you know, it's a hobby. It's a real passion. I dedicated 70 or 80 hours a week for a while to this. That's everything. You're eating while you're working and you're doing something like that.

And it's because we tied our identities to it. Something just about every guest will say after speaking with them is the payoff is regardless of how much you work or how many hours you put in or how much effort and blood, sweat and tears in it, you get exponentially more out of the experience than you ever put into it. And I hear your growth. How do you know? 25. You're a 25 year old kid

who has maybe a better take on community and leadership than many 40 and 50 year old people I've ever been around as, because you had to create it and grow it and live it. And you're a dude who graduated starving as a storyteller, who took what you learned working with some guys doing a story on Syria and have created, I assume, your first real project that is now winning awards as a result of the work you put in. And in that the payoff to all of it

is you get exponentially more out of it than you put into it all the while, motivating, encouraging, giving people hope, and feeding the hungry. Yeah. I mean, you're too young for that to be the pinnacle. You got more to do. But guys, it's, it's been amazing.

And I will say there's one moment where the payoff feels so much greater than anything else. It's when we're at a distribution, the truck gets delivered, there's a pile of food as high as you can imagine. And then throughout the course of the day it all disappears. It all, like you see every, with your hands, you hand, like every family like passes through, receives that food, and it's all gone. Like I honestly do not feel an ounce of happiness when we win an award or do a screening. I honestly get kind of anxious when I have to

speak or I have to go on stage. That part is like a necessary evil of promoting what we're doing, but it's the distributions where it's like, that is the real payoff. Like, like we did something, we built something that helped make this happen in collaboration with our partners. So tell me how many pounds as of today, How many pounds as of today, you goofy kids have delivered? Over 200 million pounds of fresh and healthy food and a few truckloads of ice cream when it's been donated to us. Barclay ice cream, the ice cream guy. We're not prescriptive about what communities

should have access to. We're just gonna focus on the stuff that's toughest to get, which is the fresh and healthy food. So if someone calls and says, Blue Bunny will call us and say, we have a truckload of ice cream. Sure, that's gonna make people more happy than the radishes we got, but we know that.

I will take a scoop of ice cream over a bushel of radishes for any day of the week. So, and you have 21 full-time staff. 21 employees, we've had over 700 students and young change makers, a part of the Farmlink project since 2020. And I just wanna agree with what Owen just said about being there in person.

I didn't hold a piece of food that Farmlink had helped rescue in my hands for a year and a half and There were millions. It was all virtual all virtual and I couldn't I couldn't even walk for that first year I wasn't anywhere near a distribution and by the time I finally saw I started crying too because There were moments where I thought man. This is what we're doing. It's great. We've moved 15 million pounds of food I've seen nothing that validates that I'm not just losing my mind in my bedroom right now. And so actually being there and seeing the impact. That's why we do all of this. And

what's what's what's what's a family driving through a food bank? Whatever stuck through their window? What does that look like? Is that a box and what's in it? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, it depends. It depends. Give me a taste of where you were. So one of our food distribution in Navajo Nation,

there's one where, you know, you'll receive a box of mixed produce. Maybe there's lettuce, tomatoes, apples, onions, oranges, a little mix of everything. Yeah. And then you'll also receive some non-perishables. So a box of what's in the non-perishables. Pasta, canned goods, etc. We're not we're we're a part of that. And that's where Farmlink needs to be seen alongside the thousands of other

organizations in this space. We could get we could get more fresh produce to every single community in this country. They're still going to need support with grains and non-perishables and dairy, et cetera. And so, um, it is a box of all of that. I think something that's worth saying is it needs to be so much better still. And how can it be? Well, I think there's the food access piece and then there's the social stigma piece. I'll start's the food access piece and then there's the social stigma piece.

I'll start with the food access piece. We believe FarmLink has a confident understanding of how we can direct billions of servings of fresh produce to communities around the country with consistency. That's so exciting. You've got that. You believe you've got that distribution and network down. And that's the story we're trying to tell over the next six months with Owen's next project. And it is that's a hard thing to figure out, but that's made to seem impossible. It's not. But the other. You've got it. I mean, are you able to do that?

You say with all confidence you can do that. I will say with all confidence. So what's next? So what's next is the social stigma piece. 50 percent of people that are food insecure and know where their local food pantry is will still not go. Largely because of the social stigma associated with that choice. I mean, you-

Because they feel like they're begging? You look at the beginning of the pandemic, there are millions of people that are food insecure for the first time in their lives. And if you're lucky enough to have never needed to go to a food pantry, you think, well, that's for them. That's not for me. That us versus them divide is what creates that stigma to begin with.

And a parallel we talk about all the time is that used to exist with water. It used to be if you could afford to drink filtered water, you would buy it. And if you had to, you drink that public well water. And that was especially when water was a leading cause of nonwar death. It wasn't as safe. But then it got safe and there was still that stigma. And over decades, huge investments were made in normalizing clean, safe, and dignified drinking water.

And by and large, now, whether you drink for free from a water fountain or buy a bottle of Fiji water, neither experience is more dignified than the other. And we're nowhere near that being the case with food, despite how necessary it is. And so a lot of people talk about the end goal being no one needs food banks. And I think that is a reasonable end goal. But another thing we talk about is what about a world

where food is so ubiquitous that like water, you can be in an airport and an afterschool program, wherever it is, if you need food, there will be food there and you're still buying food. But there is that there's not that divide where the concept of food assistance and food access are just blending together. That piece comes from one improving the actual quality of food assistance, but then challenging why people see food like that to begin with. And I think storytelling is at the center of how we can even make that possible.

Have you thought about as I'm listening to you? I have a friend named John Wolf on John played basketball for the University of Memphis back in the day when we used to go the Final Four and lead eight all the time. I bet you remember John Wolf on. John played basketball for the University of Memphis back in the day when we used to go to the final four and a lead eight all the time. I bet you remember John Wilfong. That's the other producer shaking his head. He had a stroke, bro.

He fired up. He and actually his son, and he started coaching for literacy, which is, I don't know if you've ever seen a coach on a sideline, they've got a little green ribbon. And it all started from finding out that if you're not reading by grade level, by I think third grade, that the data shows that an exponentially higher percentage of people who don't read by grade level by third grade will end up in poverty, in jail, dead, and all of that.

And so their goal is to work with the schools and communities and families and get kids grade level reading by third grade. Because if you are reading, the antithesis of the other side of that is if you are reading about third grade, your trajectory has all kinds of positive possibilities. But if kids aren't read bedtime stories, and if they are not some lullabies and they hear nothing but noise as infants and small children instead of educational stuff,

they're probably not gonna read about their grade level, but if they are read bedtime stories and books. So there, that's that. I also can't help think about when I'm hearing you say, okay, we can distribute food, but now we gotta work on the social impact to the stigma, which I get it because I've driven down streets we can distribute food, but now we got to work on the social impact to the stigma, which I get it because I've driven down streets and seen lines of cars of people waiting for

boxes of food at food banks and in Memphis, it's a lot of churches that do it. And there are people who drive by them and look down their nose at those folks. And, you know, those folks are faced with do I feel like a second class citizen or do I feed my children? And we need to get over ourselves a little bit. When we think about the people in those lines and whatever struggles led them to themselves, that their food insecure and the ability to get food and I think you're right but the other thing is this, I think there's an entire other social impact that should be communicated which is how does a hungry kid learn to read? If reading on third grade level is so paramount to the success of your entire life, then so

must be hunger. Because a hungry kid can't learn in school well, a hungry kid can't be happy, a hungry kid does not sleep well, and a hungry kid is not going to, and a parent with a hungry kid is not going to be thinking about Lollabonga bedtime stories. They're gonna be thinking about, how do I get food in my baby? So there's not only the social stigma about receiving food, there's also a social impact on people who are hungry.

Totally. We'll be right back. I'm Davis Miller, host of the new podcast, The Dow of Muhammad Ali. I met Ali back in 1988, and to my great surprise, we became friends. His influence profoundly changed my perspective on family, spirituality, and on the purpose of life itself. I'll tell you that story and also stories of others touched by the champ, including people such as Reverend Al Sharpton and James Buster Douglas. We'll even hear from Muhammad's daughter, Rashida.

Well, my dad was, he was Peter Pan. Like he never really grew up. He was very mature when it came down to social issues. He was very in tune. He felt a responsibility to be able to share his connection to millions of people who were in need. In each of these stories, we share lessons, lessons that have meant a great deal to me and that I hope will be meaningful to you. Listen to the dialogue Muhammad Ali on the iHeart radio app,

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So there's a lot of focus on the voters that TikTok is reaching. The initial reaction is like, oh, things are looking so resilient. I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I just don't see the political will down in Washington right now to change their tune. I think the American electorate has been signaling that it expects a rematch of the 2020 election. These are unprecedented times. With new episodes every Thursday, you can listen to The Big Take DC on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts.

The Big Take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best informed business reporters around the world. Western nations like the US and Europe. Mexico will likely have its first female president. And then you have China. And help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters. He'll get his yo-yos to Europe in time. But the longer this drags on, the more

worried he's getting. They knew that they needed to do this as fast as they possibly could to get a drug on the market as fast as they could. I'm David Duret. I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Solea Mosin. We cover the stories behind what's moving money and markets. Basically everyone was expecting, if not a calamity, certainly a recession. But the problem is that that paperwork, as our reporting showed, is fake. As someone who's covering the market, I'm often very worried about an imminent collapse. I'm thinking about it quite often. Listen to the big take on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We've already told our own story.

It's time to tell the story of the people that we're working with who are serving. And so on the operational side, we got the distribution down. Now we're going to work on the social impact side on the storytelling side. You've told one story. Yeah. What's next for you? It's time to tell the next. There are a bunch of things that are next, but along that point, it's, I think the traditional nonprofit will take a single portrait photo of a kid who's hungry and say, this kid is hungry, please help them.

And I think what we see in your story in Undefeated is it's seeing character transformation that is powerful, that moves people, that inspires people. So telling a story about a kid who's growing up without food, who all of a sudden has that access point and their grades go from C's to A's. They're reading level spikes. That, you know, that is the thing that unlocked that. That was the barrier. I could not imagine going to school on an empty stomach. I couldn't imagine being, you know, I think there are teachers out there who are paying for materials for their students instead of getting meals themselves.

They're all over the inner cities, the United States doing that, all over. Those stories are not well paid people. No, no, those stories need to be told. I'll never forget being in Dallas, Texas, in a community that had an 80% food insecurity rate. Almost the entire community did not- 80% of the kids in this district were food insecure. 80% of the people. In Dallas.

Not in Dallas, but in this community of Dallas. Okay. And you see it in the documentary, it's Karen Beltknapp, who's a teacher who's telling the story about a student who, you know, over Thanksgiving break, that student didn't eat for six days. And on the Tuesday that they got back from school, the student passed out. And from malnutrition.

And luckily was okay. But that's, you know, that's a moment where everyone in the whole theater. And isn't the one break she has that she gets no food is Thanksgiving? Is Thanksgiving. We're supposed to be thankful for food. Yeah, that's why we always make an effort. We do a huge push during Thanksgiving to make sure

like millions of people have food. That's really important to us. But that day I was working in the parking lot for the whole day, you know, just like pushing carts, making sure they all got back. And at lunch, I saw six nurses line up in line at the food bank altogether. This was their one hour lunch break and they had to spend it waiting in line at the food bank and it's nurses and it's COVID right now. And you would think these are the people in our society

that we are valuing the most. They're saving people's lives during a national crisis. And here they are needing food assistance because they're not paid enough or they're not receiving enough support during the pandemic. And that made me realize there's so many perspectives that are not shared here that I think, um, that I think are important and I think can be embedded in stories that motivate people

who can actually change things here. So the next action is to, is to positively affect and try to erase the stigma. And the next storytelling is going to be all about those perspectives. And I guess try to offer a hopeful view of how to race the stigmas. Am I missing that? I think that, well, it starts with who are the people who can actually change things here. I think in a big way, the first place to start is every community leader in the country, every person who runs a food bank or a church organization that gives out food. We can tell a story that hosts like a single screening or a series of screenings around the country

where we get eyeballs on every single person who's in that position. And if they see that story and it unlocks something for them that's like, hey, we've been doing this the same way for 30 years, we can make this slight tweak. And hey, we have a more dignified experience. I mean, it can be simple as, you know, this isn't just a food bank, but we're also doing live music. And all of a sudden, it's not just a place to receive food assistance. It's community center where everyone goes. And you're not segregating the population between, you know, you can afford food, you can afford food. This is just where the community comes. And I think if we target the right people,

like, I'm not afraid to spend a year and a half on a film that only 2000 people see. If it means those 2000 people are going to make more of a difference than, oh, my God says born 2000 people will see it. Yeah, you have something to tell you. It's an interesting, again, as I'm listening to you. This is the South. Church is a big thing here, still, and probably will remain so. One of the things we've talked about in the last decade is Sunday is probably the most segregated day in the United States when an actuality of faith is active in your life, it should be the most desegregated day. And my faith, Christianity, has done itself quite a disservice over the last five decades, allowing that truth to happen. And there is a stigma around my faith as a result of that.

And I hear you talking about the stigma of food banks and needing food and all of that. I hear you talk about the storytelling and it is interesting that when we're talking about food, that should not be apolitical. It should not be a segregating. It should not be a divisive topic. But in fact, when you talk about lunches, free lunches, and you talk about free breakfasts in schools, and you talk about government food assistance, it actually is incredibly political and incredibly has the

potential to be incredibly divisive when it really should not be. And I think your guys astuteness about how to remove that stigma goes a long way toward not only solving hunger, but maybe some things that divide us as well. I hope so. I think what we're doing can be as bipartisan as possible. How could feeding hungry people not be right? Well, I've had some real angry calls. I get it. I'm saying it real angry calls. I get it.

I'm saying it should, but. I think just let's just make sure people look at this through the right lens, you know, cause we're supporting farmers, we're feeding families, anyone who shows up should be able to be supported by what we're doing. And so I think that we will always try. And in the same way that I talked about

from the first month, we gotta be able to collaborate with everybody. We got to be able to support everybody. It needs to be that level of inclusive and, and collaborative for this to truly work. Yeah. We saw this, we world premiered the documentary at in the Capitol building in front of Congress and the months leading up to it, it was, you can't use that word when you're talking about hunger because then none of the Republicans will come. You can't use that word around climate because no Democrats will come. And yeah, we learned very quickly. It's a very political issue. But I think we can storytell in a way that rallies everyone.

Guys, keep doing what you're doing. Break down those walls, because that's when you transition things like hunger and stigma into cultural change, which my generation has completely screwed up. And I have all the hope of the world guys in your generation can fix for us. I'm encouraged by your story. It's phenomenal. If somebody wants to support you, hear more about it,

get involved, what do they do? Well, I would say, first of all, we've talked about it all day, but this film, Abundance, the Farmlink story is on YouTube and that'd be a great place to start. And we call it Abundance for this, the entire purpose of this conversation is to acknowledge there is more than enough food out there.

There is the opportunity for us to collaborate so much more. We can feed the whole world. We can feed, we grow enough food to feed the entire planet one and a half times over. And so that's done away 40% of all the food we grow. That's unbelievable. When you see the late night commercials of the starving kids with the flies buzzing around their heads, knowing that we make enough food to feed one and a half times the world population as it is today sure makes sense that we ought to figure out the logistics. And it actually makes this problem seem a lot more solvable. That's why we want to start by

acknowledging there is an abundance of food. It's a matter of logistics and collaboration to get it to the right people at the right time. And so go watch that film. And if you can share it with and you just pull it up on YouTube, right? You can pull it up on YouTube. It's 21 minutes long. Share it with your friends and family. Easy watch. Share it with everybody. Yeah, I've said this and it's really worked. If everyone thought of one person in their life that they think would most be able to connect with or support or help amplify this story,

just share it with that one person. That's been a huge catalyst for our growth. And how can they reach us? Yeah. So if you go to farmlinkproject.org, there are a few ways you can get involved. Everyone has a different way that they can help. So feel free to email us directly. If you have a kid who's in high school or college, you can still volunteer in the ways that you heard of in this podcast and help move millions of pounds of food. If you work for a company that donates to nonprofits,

that's been a great way people have gotten involved. And if you're an individual, yeah, and we're going at the rate we can fundraise right now, the food is there and we know where it is. And so for every dollar we fundraise, we're able to move over 20 pounds of food to communities facing hunger. And it's at zero pounds per dollar. And it's at zero costs to those community organizations that are working so hard to support each other.

And there's that what you said, 20 pounds per dollar. Yep. You're telling me a hundred bucks gets 2000 pounds of food, a ton of food, literally a hundred bucks for a ton of food. That's pretty cool. Thank you. So that's how they reach out.

So I'm hearing. I, you know, all politics is local, so I guess all philanthropy may be local, too. I don't know. I am. I'm hearing all this. And I'm, you know, in Memphis, there are churches and there's MIFA. And there is the Memphis Food Bank. And I can't help but think, you know, in Memphis, there are churches and there's MIFA and there is the Memphis Food Bank and I can't help but think, you know, what could happen in my town?

And other people listening are probably thinking what could happen in their town? What kind of local food bank and what kind of city like Memphis do to improve the amount of food they have and their service? I will speak for all of the nonprofits, the local organizations that are doing everything they can. Ask them, ask them what they need and really listen. Because if you're the food bank, ask those community partners what they really need. They might need the food bank to evolve in certain ways to better support

them. And if that food bank can really listen, it's going to create change. We hear so often how community level organizations actually struggle to connect with each other and with their food bank partners, et cetera. And so if you're in that world, talk to each other and really see how you can stretch each other's resources further, because you're always going to be greater than the sum of your parts when you're working together. And if you're an individual that's looking to support them, don't assume that you know exactly what's best because those people are doing everything they can

to support their community. If you ask them really earnestly and give them the space to be heard, I'll tell you as someone who's running a nonprofit, that's all I've ever wanted from our community and our supporters. And that's the thing that I think can help us grow the quickest and the most effectively.

When you hear that listeners, please remember that one of the most valuable life lessons I've received top five in my life came from a 19 year old kid that played football for me in the hood. You can reference the Turkey person story. If you want to know what I'm talking about. So when you hear this 25 year old kid give you that bit of advice, it's okay. There's a 25 year old kid. You need to listen because that is profoundly true.

What you just said and it resonates with me picked up. I hope people listen to you guys. When I first heard the story Owen in Nashville at the do good or conference, I was like, I can't wait to talk more about this and you guys have not disappointed in your uplifting and inspiring. The work you've done is amazing and it's not bad for a couple of idiots in college

with a U-Haul and a sheet going to pick up 11,000 eggs doing 15 miles an hour in the 405. I'm surprised, I bet you got flipped off and honked at the whole way. Oh my God. And we didn't even talk about the other trucks. I crashed into a tree parking and stuff like that. For another time.

Listen, there's a certain amount of naivete that also makes things like this happen. And I think you guys have proven that. Gentlemen, thank you for coming to Memphis. Thank you for sharing your story. You guys are normal kids who've done extraordinary things. And yet just another example of members of the army of normal folks making enormous change in our community. And guys like you make me hopeful that we can fix what else is.

So thanks for being here. Thanks coach. Thanks for having us. You inspire us too. And thank you for joining us this week. If Ben and Owen or other guests have inspired you in general or better yet to take action by volunteering with the Farm League Project,

by donating to them or something else entirely, please let me know. I really wanna hear about it. You can write me anytime at bill at normalfolks.us and I promise you, I will respond. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do us a favor, share it with friends and on social, subscribe to the podcast, rate and review

it. Become a premium member at normalfolks.us, all these things that will help us grow an army of normal folks. The bigger the army, the bigger the impact. I'm Bill Courtney. I'll see you next week. Hi, I'm Martha Stewart and we're back with a new season of my podcast. week. Dan Belkin about the secrets behind my skincare. Encore Jane about creating a billion dollar startup. Walter Isaacson about the geniuses who changed the world.

Listen and subscribe to the Martha Stewart podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My whole life I've been told this one story about my family, about how my great-great-grandmother was killed by the mafia back in Sicily. I was never sure if it was true, so I decided to find out. And even though my Uncle Jimmy told me I'd only be making the vendetta worse,

I'm going to Sicily anyway. Come to Italy with me to solve this 100-year-old murder mystery. Listen to The Sicilian Inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. mystery. Listen to The Sicilian Inheritance on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best informed business reporters around the world. We cover the stories behind what's moving money and markets and help you understand

what's happening, what it means, and why it matters every afternoon. I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Saleh Emosen. And I'm David Gura. Listen to the big take on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.