TED Radio Hour - DIY

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

When problems arise, it's tempting to wait for someone else to address it. But sometimes, the only person who can fix it... is you. This hour, TED speakers share ideas on how to do it yourself. Guests include physicist and engineer Kate Stone, humanitarian programmer Tiffani Ashley Bell, builder and youth educator Emily Pilloton-Lam and videographer Jack Corbett.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/tedSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Minoosh Zamorodi. And our story today begins one winter night in 2013 in an isolated area of Scotland. A small, like a hamlet, called Loch Aylot, fairly near the west coast of Scotland. So, yeah, a very remote place. This is Kate Stone.

She's a physicist and the founder of an electronics company. But that night, she was on vacation. Some of my close friends, we spent the little time between Christmas and New Year in an Airbnb. And we went out to the pub, drank lots of Guinness, and some locals were playing music with their guitars and violins and things. And we listened to the music. And then they invited us to go back to their place, which was a little shed. in the garden where they played more music and drank more whiskey. So we said yes.

And we followed our Pipe-I-D-Piper through the dark woods at midnight. I mean, it sounds like the perfect evening. It was, it was perfect. It was all going well. And then something completely out of the dark happened. Something out of the dark happened, yes. I shouldn't really laugh. I think kind of what happened is the locals walked a little too fast.

disappeared into the darkness. My friends fell behind, and I tried to be that person that stayed in the middle to keep the two groups together. So I ended up on my own in the darkness. The next thing Kate knew? I remember just feeling a massive thud, hitting my chest,

and then a second thud, and then falling to my knees, and then realizing there was a hole in my throat from where the deer's antler had gone. A stag, a deer with massive antlers, had mauled Kate. And I found out later that it stopped two millimeters before my spinal cord. And as I tried to call for help, it was really more of a gargle.

Did you realize how, what had happened? I was conscious for 40 minutes. It took 20 minutes for an ambulance to come. And my friend came to my side and the one thing she said to me was just breathe. So I took my friend's advice and I put all my attention onto breath. lie very still and focus on the next breath in. And then when you get there, focus on the next breath out. And then I ask myself the question of like, you know,

am I happy with how I've lived my life? And I'm like, you know, I wish it was a bit longer, you know. And it's like, it's as if my life was like, you know, a TV show, a series. And I was like, I'm the protagonist. Like, I'm the main character in my show. And they've written me out as a great season finale. Like, come on, a couple more seasons. Exactly.

So, yeah, so my end of season finale was me dying in the forest floor. But I'm like, I'm really proud of who I am, what I've done. Okay, it's time to go out, but I'm going to go out calmly. But you didn't go out. You ended up being airlifted. Yes. They operated on me, reconstructed my throat, and then they decided to put me in an induced coma. So, yeah, it took a while to get back to reality.

It was a slow process. You've come to in the hospital. You know what's happened. You know you've got a long road of recovery. When did you first know that this had made the newspapers? This had been in the press. Your crazy freak accident, you know, tabloid papers love that kind of stuff. When did you figure that out?

Yeah, that was a few weeks. You know, I gave myself the sort of the luxury of not being on an iPad or any social media or anything for probably... My memory is about a month, but that, you know, that could be wrong. So I tried to really keep away from that. Said to my sister, has there been any, like, has it been in the news or anything? And she's like, oh, a little bit. She didn't tell me that newspapers wrote headlines such as sex swap scientist gourd by stag.

I just want to make it clear to the listener what ended up happening, which was that multiple newspapers, national papers like the Daily Mail, the Sun, Your accident was featured in all of them. But what they did was put it into the headlines. They called you sex swap Kate. Some of them did. And in some ways, they made the story about your gender, not the accident. And I guess just explain to people how it felt to read that. So, yes, I'm a trans woman.

But calling me a sex swap scientist is derogatory and not pertinent. to the story, but it implies that it is. And it tells everyone who sees that, which is probably a few million people, that when you see someone that's trans, you label them as someone that's trans, to say, you know, hey, Tranny, I'm talking to you, you know, when it's nothing to do with that. It's offensive. It's absolutely inappropriate. But worst of all to me is it tells a nation that this is how you refer to.

to a trans person. They wanted to know form a name, dates of operation, what operations. You know, they made that part of the story. It's not part of the story. It's absolutely irrelevant. You know, I was lay on a forest floor, gaud by a stag, and they wanted to sensationalize it. You know, my children had to leave that home because of the camera crews outside.

They had to leave where they were living to go somewhere else because people were interested in this and wanted to ask inappropriate questions. of people that knew me. And so I was like, I have to do something. I know I can make a difference. I know I can't stop them from doing this. But I know I can make them less likely to do it. For Kate Stone, this invasion of privacy,

well, it felt like the world had let her down. And as much as she wanted to lean on her family, her friends, her community, she realized she needed to take matters into her own hands. So today on the show, DIY, stories and ideas about taking on institutions, companies, and stereotypes in ingenious ways. Because sometimes you just need to do it yourself. Back in her hospital bed, recovering from her injuries, Kate began strategizing on how to confront the UK press for sensationalizing her accident and especially her identity. A warning. In this section, we will mention suicide.

I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility and duty, and I'd seen what happens to other people. What came to my mind was, I think it might have been the previous year, a newspaper wrote a piece about a trans woman called Lucy Meadows, who transitioned as a school teacher. And they wrote, in that the headline, not only is she in the wrong body but she's in the wrong job and she then committed suicide.

Oh gosh. And it's heartbreaking. And so I was like, I know I can do something. And if I don't and someone else dies, that's on my hands as far as I was concerned. So I knew I had to. And, you know, my kind of science brain is like identify the goal, which is reduce the chances of them doing this again to someone else. identify, you know, the resources I have at hand, which is connecting with them, communicating with them,

helping them see what they've done is wrong, and then identify what this is going to cost me. And what this is going to cost me is my privacy. You know, I take pride in talking about who I am as a scientist, being outside of that open about being trans, but not talking about it. And I only don't talk about it because I want people to know. know, but I want them also to know that I'm a pretty awesome creative scientist. You know, I want to be open about being trans in a way where people who maybe have never met a trans woman and maybe are a little bigoted for one moment might be, wow, I hope my children turn out to be like her.

You know, I want to be like that kind of role model. So for me to have to sacrifice my privacy and tell 10 million people, that's the price I will pay to, you know, hopefully achieve my goal. Here's Kate Stone on the TED stage. I'm a kindness ninja. I don't really know what a ninja does, but to me, they slip through the shadows, crawl through the sewers, skip across the rooftops, before you know it, they're behind you. They don't turn it with an army or complain, and they're laser-focused on a plan.

And so I didn't attack them, and they were defenseless. And I wrote kind and calm letters to these newspapers. And the Sun newspaper, the kind of Fox News of the UK, thanked me for my reasoned approach. And I asked for no apology, no retraction, no money, just an acknowledgement that they broke their own rules and what they did was just wrong. And on this journey, I started to learn who they are,

and they began to learn who I am. And we actually became friends. And after three months, they all agreed, and the statements were published on a Friday, and that was the end of that, or so they thought. On the Saturday, I went on the evening news, and with the headline, six national newspapers admit they are wrong. And the anchor said to me, but don't you think it's our job as journalists to sensationalize a story? And I said, I was lay on a forest floor gored by a stag.

Is that not sensational enough? And I was now writing the headlines, and my favorite one was the stag trampled on my throat, and the press trampled on my privacy. And it was the most red piece of BBC news online that day. And I was kind of having fun. I mean, you didn't ask for a retraction, right? You didn't ask for, did you ask for an apology? Like, what did you actually ask for in your letters? So in the UK, the press is self-regulated.

So most of the press sign up to the independent press standards organization. And there's a set of rules by which they have to abide by about reporting around, you know, diversity or around gambling or suicide or all those types of things. So I just asked them to acknowledge that it was wrong and acknowledge that it broke the rules. And I asked for that to be published in the Press Gazette, which is an industry newspaper that's really not read by the public, but I got it, I wanted it on record. and they responded in a really kind and a slightly shocked way. You know, Philippa Kennedy, the Ombudsman for the Sun, and was like,

well, we actually really respect the way you've approached us. They couldn't understand why I wasn't angry. And I felt a sense that other people, maybe in my community, were angry at me too for not using it as an opportunity to get people fired or to actually bring a formal complaint and get a judgment. against them, get a ruling made against them. I just didn't feel for me that was the most effective thing to do. I just like to say I'm not an angry activist. I'm a happy healer. That's a nice way to put it. Because I can see myself in these people. Like I just feel

there for the grace of God, you know, like I can see myself in these other people. I can see why they have their perspective from the journey that they've taken. In a minute, How Kate's budding relationship with reporters evolved. On the show today, ideas about doing it yourself. I'm Manus Shomerode, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know our latest bonus episode for TED Radio Hour plus listeners is out now. And it is me reporting from the annual TED conference in Vancouver.

My guest is our friend, Ted's science curator, David Bielo. And David explains his process for scouring the planet to find the next speakers to come on the TED stage. It's really interesting stuff, and you will only hear it if you are a Plus listener. So get access to these episodes and get all our shows sponsor-free when you sign up at plus.npr.org slash Ted, or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamorodi. And on the show today, D-I-Y. Ideas about rolling up your sleeves and fixing things yourself. And we were just talking to physicist and engineer Kate Stone. Kate had a terrible accident in 2013, which the British media sensationalized, along with her transgender identity. What I saw is on the Daily Mail online article, I saw like 180 comments and 179 of those comments were saying the way you've spoken about her and spoken about her being trans is inappropriate. So I saw an industry that was out of touch and old fashioned.

So it was really about holding a mirror up and all it was going to take is a gentle nudge and done in a kind way. So you got all six newspapers that had written about you to admit that they were wrong. And then what? What happened was I was encouraged by the newspaper industry to apply to this committee that writes these rules, which is formed of the editors chaired by at the time, the Daily Mail editor. So you have this room filled with the editors who make these decisions deciding what their own rules should be. It was recommended to them that they include three members. of the public and they put me on that panel. And six years later, I still sit on that panel.

Oh, you too. Yeah. In the room with the editors who respect me as a member of the public, who has a brain and can contribute, usually and nearly exclusively about things and nothing to do with being trans. I'm just a smart woman in the room who has a seat at the table. That makes a difference. And, you know, people can show and say how they still do some of these things. But I know, you know, a report was commissioned and it showed that one of the biggest impact on the press in the last decade to do with trans reporting was what I did. So I know it made a difference. I just don't claim it changed everything. No, but it goes to show that one person taking charge of a situation and being willing to sacrifice yet more of their privacy can have an impact. Yeah. I think there's three things that

decides what goes in the newspaper. One is what the editor decides. The other is, the fact that you click on it and read it as a reader. And the other is that you buy the products that are advertised in that newspaper. And as members of the public, we have to realize we hold the power over two after three of those levers. We can choose to not buy a product and we can choose to not click. Every time you click, you are the reason that thing is there. So, you know, that we do have the power. We have two-thirds of the power. Do you see yourself as an activist? because there are some people who might think, well, this approach, one woman, doing it herself, that can't be scaled. She needs to join, you know, organizations, activist organizations that are trying to change laws that are trying to change not just the way one industry works, but the way society works.

What would you say to that? I think it depends on the circumstance, right? you know, sometimes joining the movement, being an activist by joining another group is the right thing to do. But sometimes, you know, we can be in such an independent moment where we can see how we can make an impact by doing something directly ourselves, by not aligning us with other people and how other people do things, that sometimes the most effective way is to do it yourself. And honestly, personally, I'd rather be. that one person that tries to make a change that no one ever notices or hears and that change never happens, then the millionth person that joins the million person march. Because, you know, the biggest movement potentially can come from the individual who just says

enough. And so we should not be oppressed by our own feeling of insignificance. We should always speak out even when we tell ourselves no one's going to care because it actually makes a difference. I kind of believe in like what I call a quantum state of mind, which is everything is possible, everything has a probability. Are those newspapers going to be mean to me? Probably. Probably means they might not be as well. Everything in the future is a possibility and our job is to try and change the odds so that in the moment they're more likely to do the thing you want them to do. And that's the way I look at the world. That's physicist and engineer Kate Stone.

She's the founder of the tech company Novalia, and you can see both of her TED talks at ted.com. On the show today, ideas about doing it yourself. And for our next speaker, well, her story starts, by doing not much at all, just scrolling through social media. Yeah, so this was July 2014, and at that time, I fully would use Twitter and social media, but mostly Twitter as a sort of newspaper and just scroll through my timeline for any sort of news just to see what was happening in the world.

This is Tiffany Ashley Bell, and on that day in 2014, one news story caught her eye. I ran across an article that talked about how people in Detroit were about to have to live without running water. The article was in the Atlantic, and the headline read, What happens when Detroit shuts off the water of 100,000 people? At the time, I was a consultant for the city of Atlanta. So seeing the story where another major city was going to shut off the water of a ton of people, made me, you know, intrigued and confused. and so I also just decided to read it.

The crew came out this morning and cut her off by closing. What she learned was pretty jarring. For months, trucks had been going street by street, shutting off the water to nearly anyone who was overdue on their bills. I can't take a bath. I can't wash up. I don't have water to do anything. And it's me and my three children.

So people had started collecting rainwater. I think we're going into a third world direction. Others walk to relatives' houses. to fill up jugs or take showers. My neighbors who don't have water can come and get water. Even child custody was at risk. A child living in a home without basic utilities like water is living in a dwelling that's like the legal language,

unfit for habitation. And when that's a thing, then that child can be removed from that home. Turns out water in Detroit costs twice the national average. and one out of three residents live below the poverty line. So sometimes they just can't afford to pay for water. Tiffany also learned that the shutoff started after Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013. So a lot of it had to do with the city being under emergency management. Today we decided to file for Chapter 9 protection.

Chapter 9 filing came today. Detroit faces a long-term debt estimated at a whopping $18 to $20 billion. Detroit had a lot of bond debt that they needed to pay. And so the solution the city had at that time to collect the money they were not collecting was just to shut people off. And so what I ended up seeing was people who were in truly dire straits, effectively being bullied by their local government. And that's what really triggered me.

Let's be honest, most of us probably would have read the article, retweeted, and moved on. Not Tiffany. Here is Tiffany Ashley Bell on the TED stage. To me, how they were being treated and how easy it was to simply deny them, something that we all need to live, was disgusting. It's disgusting. But to me, this also felt personal, even though I have no direct family ties to Detroit. And here's why.

Many of the people who were facing shutoffs were black. Many were also, like myself, black women. and Lord knows it's not the first time in the United States that black people have been denied basic human rights like water. So to me, that created an overwhelming urge to do something to help. I mean, I couldn't just read that and then go on about my day. Then it became a question of what can I, sitting in my pajamas as one person at home, actually do?

Well, what? Oh, oh, but wait, I'm a programmer. and a heavy, heavy social media user. So I decided to tweet. I hate to hear people suffering and dealing with what is turning into a completely undignified situation. People are without water. July 17th, 2014 at 2.10 p.m. Is there a directory of any sort where people from Detroit can go for water relief? 4.05 p.m.

Info on what people owe Detroit for water is online. 10.26 a.m. 1027 a.m. 1028 a.m. We want to connect people who need water bill assistance to folks who are willing to help. Over the course of a few hours of back and forth about what to do, we resolved to do the simplest, most obvious thing. We decided to pay some water bills. To do that, I spent a few hours digging around on the water company's website. and I found something interesting that sort of jump started what to do for people. For some reason, there was a 400-page PDF of customers on the website that the water company couldn't deliver their bills to through the mail. One of the things that was interesting about this list is that it also included account numbers for people.

So you could just take one of those account numbers, and at that time plug it into the website and see everything about that account. So I did that. And one of the things that was interesting, though, there, was that I saw a make-a-payment button. So the idea then became, what if we got the account numbers of people that needed help and then made payments for them?

So a few hours later, I built a website to find those people and start connecting them to people that needed help. So you build the website, you figure out a way to get people who maybe have some money and are mad like you, that people can't pay their water bills, that there's a way to pay them. And you just put it out on Twitter? Like, what happened then?

Yeah, so we just tweeted it. My former co-founder and I, we just tweeted it. And, you know, people saw that. And they began to pay some bills themselves. I heard from people over the years that they saw the same article and just were like, oh, this is great. I'm happy I can actually help somebody. That's how, in the first 40-so days of doing this,

We paid over $100,000 in water bills by just simply... Thank you. Thank you. By just simply sending people directly to the utility company's website to pay $5, $10, whatever they could afford. I mean, so it's a decade later, basically, since that July day. And the Detroit Water Project is now called the Human Utility. Do you remember when there was a moment where you thought,

maybe this is something that needs to help cities beyond Detroit. I think some of the earliest stories, and despite the fact that our website originally said, Detroit, people from other places just started filing applications and asking if we could help where they were. And that's always happened. We've had people ask for our assistance in most of, you know, the states in the U.S., basically. And then also we ask on the application, too, what people's situations are. It's, you know, a lot of the same stuff. People lost their jobs or there was a death in the family. We've had people who have gotten terminally ill and they can't work and utilities don't have a lot of resources for folks even in just that situation. So we've

helped in a lot of situations that are pretty common across different cities. I'm sure you've heard all of the criticism out there. This is a much, greater problem than what you're tackling, isn't it? I mean, people need water to live. It's just that simple. What do you say to people who say, you know, that's a very nice short-term solution that you've created, but how do we change things fundamentally? I mean, I hear them. I think it's a valid criticism. You know, some people have referred to us as a Band-Aid solution. And, you know, The Band-Aid at least, you know, an appropriately sized Band-Aid at least gets you into the healing process. You know, I also want to emphasize that we're not the only ones that are doing something around this problem. There are a lot of activists and researchers and policymakers who are looking at this issue. And I think, you know, for us, we essentially give people a bridge to be able to still maintain access to water while these other folks are doing work around policy change. I always sort of believe we shouldn't exist, honestly.

It would be great in 10, 15 years if we didn't have to do this for people because water is affordable in the first place. So what has been the response from utility companies, places like the Detroit water system, what do they think of what you've done? Do you talk to them? Yeah, we do. I will say, and just be honest, initially, they were not happy to see us. We didn't mean to do this, but I think we embarrassed them. as far as having a program in place that worked in certain ways before they did. But I think we've really tried to do the work and built a lot of relationships with people at utilities so that they know we're not there to antagonize them in certain ways.

We're just there to help people. And once they see that you sort of have the same imperative they do, they want to serve the public and things like that, it's easier to work with people. When you put together and you start doing something that, that's imperfect. People will see what you're doing and they'll want to join you, make what you're doing bigger,

more impactful, more meaningful, but all in ways unique to themselves. For us, that was the city employees who answered our emails on weekends, and then during the week drove people to appointments to get their water turned back on. It was the people in mutual aid groups and nonprofits that partnered with us

to completely pay off the water bills for some families. It was the people who actually really made this work possible, some of whom had been in this situation themselves a few years prior, where they couldn't afford their own bills, but they now could, so they were generous about it. It was the people who held bake sales to help people that they didn't know and would never meet.

People will see you walking the walk, and you'll understand that that compassion is contagious. There's something incredibly, like, simple in some ways or forthright. You read about a problem. You got the information, figured out a system, built the thing, got people's bills paid, and then the water gets turned back on. It really is that simple. But what really seems like the hardest part, to me, in some ways, is not continuing to scroll in Twitter. stopping and deciding that in some ways the buck was going to stop with you.

Yeah. Again, I think some of that is just my personality. And for me, as a black woman in the United States, when you see like your people being impacted by something that's just indefensible, at least for me, it was easy to try to do something. And I also, I'm a military brat, and I grew up not wanting for anything. We didn't want for clothes, water, food, housing. And I just think that should be the baseline we provide for everybody.

Those are just human rights for me. But yeah, people really were enthusiastic about having a really simple, transparent way of helping their fellow man, basically. It was the case of if you build it, they will come. I think so. That's not always true, but I think it was a very, a very emotional thing. for people. Everybody sees problems in this country. People are not blind to the suffering of others, but there often is a sort of question of what can I do? People tell me this all the time. You made it very easy to do something. And I think just that resonated with people. Tiffany Ashley Bell is

the executive director of the human utility. You can see her full talk at ted.com. And a quick note, the city of Detroit is now piloting a water affordability program with 2% of its residents. You're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and we'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. Today's show, DIY. Do it yourself.

It's an ethos very often associated with hammers and nails. Oh, I can talk about tools all day long. My true favorite is a Makita impact driver. It is the best tool for driving screws. It makes a very satisfying noise. It's like a do-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But like way louder, and screws just go in like butter. This is Emily Peloton Lamb.

She has always loved building. Even as a young four or five-year-old, I was really drawn to the physical world, like building forts, going out in the forest, and making ad hoc tree houses. And so it helped me feel like, okay, I'm able to shape my own world. When she was 16, Emily worked on her first construction site. And that was the first time when the idea of a career in building became tangible and real for me. So she decided to study architecture in college and then in grad school.

And I loved my architectural education. I really, really did. But I think some of the rose-colored glasses came off when I left graduate school. And I was met with a little bit of disappointment that the love that I found of building physical things was kind of lost within the architectural profession. And she noticed something else. Within the construction trades, only 11% of jobs are filled by women. And then on an actual construction site, only 4%. So there's a huge gender imbalance.

And I have walked onto construction sites. I've walked into rooms where I have to do this social calculus and think, like, how do I prove that I'm smart enough to be here? How much am I going to volunteer? How much am I going to show what I know? How much am I going to just, like, sit back and try to understand the dynamic here? And it's exhausting. It's frankly exhausting. So when she turned 26, Emily decided to call a ton of time.

out on her career. It was a way for me to say, like, look, I don't know how I'm going to practice architecture, but I know how I'm not going to practice it. I kept thinking about young people. Like, how do young people think about space? What kind of future are we building together? And so I was super interested in these, like, one-off, really small, really localized projects that lived in your community.

And within a couple months, I was standing in front of a class of students in a barn that we had turned into a wood shop. She got a job teaching a co-ed woodworking class at a high school in North Carolina. Yeah, at a public high school, within a town of about 2,000 people in a way that really hadn't been taught before, thinking about shop class as a mechanism for community service instead of like, let's build birdhouses to take home to. our moms. So you're looking at these kids and are they looking at you blankly or are they thinking like, yeah, let's do this? I think it was a little bit of both. I mean, this is a school district where everything is pretty standard. You have five class periods. You have English math science, maybe an elective and a language. So to say, guess what? You're in this design build shop class now.

There was a lot of like, huh? And what about the gender thing? Did you see it playing out there? The class itself did have more boys in it. It was about two-thirds boys, but pretty much everyone's skill level was about the same. I mean, my female students knew how to use the chop saw as well as any of their male counterparts. The biggest difference that I saw was just in that social calculus. I would say, like, hey, I need someone to go cut 10 pieces at 96 inches on the chop saw, and I could just see that brief moment of hesitation where my female students would, look around and be like, should I raise my hand? Like if I'm the first person to raise my hand and say,

I will do it, who's going to be rolling their eyes at me? Like, what is that saying about the boys in the room? Are they feeling threatened? Like, these are not things we should be thinking about, but they're so ingrained in us. There was an ongoing and ever-present and nagging voice in my head that I think came from my own experiences on construction sites in architecture firms. There is a very gender dynamic within really any industry that is responsible for the built environment, architecture, engineering, construction trades. And as I was teaching these classes, I started to feel that that gendered dynamic was also something that my female students were experiencing, even with me as a woman as their teacher. And that was really the moment when I realized my female students really deserve to have a

safe space. We must create intentional spaces for the next generation of tradeswomen to learn technical skills while being unconditionally supported by a community of other women. Here's Emily Piloton Lamb on the TED stage. So in 2008, I founded a nonprofit to teach design and construction skills to middle and high school students, specifically young women of color. Now, nearly 14 years later, that nonprofit Girls Garage has taught over a thousand girls and gender expansive youth how to use power tools, weld, draft construction documents, and work on a job site. And together, we have built over 150 pro bono projects for other nonprofits in our community. When young women walk into girls' garage, they're acknowledged as capable and whole.

They're taught by female instructors who are architects and carpenters and welders, who've lived lives and who've walked paths similar to their own. When a student uses the chop saw for the very first time, I'm standing right next to them saying, you got this. And these are the things that make the difference. And so the next generation of tradeswomen, our students, will enter the trades, knowing what it feels like to be respected and valued and will know how to demand it when they're not. Hi, I'm Erica Chu. I'm 21 years old. So I've been part of Girls Garage for a decade now. When I completed my first weld, I was 11 years old. And you can imagine like a little girl in this like big welding gear with like the shield on. You have to put your hair up.

And I do remember being very timid, seeing those flames for the first time. I mean, I've never like felt that power of fusing two metal pieces together. It was exhilarating. I always say like, how many 11-year-old girls do you know that can weld? In college, I'm studying civil and environmental engineering with a focus in construction management. Learning how to build and construct really made me want to apply that into the real world and learn how to work in construction. Emily, your students are growing up. I mean, it is clear that you and Girls Garage made a huge difference in Erica's life.

But I just read a statistic that the number of young people applying for technical jobs fell by half last year compared to 2020. I mean, this country is facing a big problem. We are not going to have enough people to build new bridges or roads or fix our infrastructure. Yeah, the legacy of vocational. education is a complicated one, right? So I think we're kind of up against this pejorative history of like vocational used to be the track for kids that aren't going to go to college, right? It was for quote unquote those kids, which is horrible. I think our role in helping young people think about their careers is to ask, how do you take that power that you feel when you're welding and bring

that into your college applications or your gap year or your. Or your. your job. We've had over a hundred graduates and alumna and between a third and half have gone into a field related to the built environment. So that includes architecture or engineering or design or directly into the trades. For women, a job in construction can pay more than twice the hourly wage of a comparable job in child care or health aid work. And while the gender pay gap in the U.S. hovers around 82 cents earned by women for every male-earned dollar. In construction, the pay gap is nearly non-existent at 99 cents to the dollar. The trades desperately need women, too.

With over 300,000 jobs left unfilled, women are hugely untapped labor pool. And this is a time when the demand for infrastructure is only growing. We already understand the value of having more. more women in historically male-dominated spaces, like politics, sea suites, and STEM. What is it going to take for trades women to take part and to take over? Your talk is called What If Women Built the World They Want to See? In your mind, what does that world look like?

Yeah, so women do experience the built environment very differently than men. We think about safety. We think about how we navigate space with our families or with friends. And so I think a world built by women is more inclusive in its thinking about how the physical world serves people. And it's about rethinking the really old and tired narratives about who gets to build the world, that the authorship should not just be owned by white men, that we all deserve a say in what our world. world looks like. That was Emily Piloton Lamb. She is the founder and executive director of Girls Garage, a nonprofit that teaches design and construction to girls and gender expansive youth.

And many thanks to Erica Chu. You can see Emily's full talk at ted.com. So we've talked about people taking on the media, utility companies, gender stereotypes, and we want to end our episode on DIY with an individual who is taking on economics on social media. Because social media is, of course, a place where anyone, anywhere, can make anything and reach millions. Da-da-da-da-da-da. Yep, I'm recording. This is NPR's very own Jack Corbett. But you won't hear him on air.

I make TikToks for planet money. Yep, TikTok. Jack's job is making sure. surreal TikTok videos for NPR's Planet Money, videos that explain how the economy works. And what's happening when it doesn't work? Take the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank. We made a video that just kind of went through all the processes,

explained, you know, fractional reserve lending, how bonds and the bank run and pretty layman's terms. Just like, yeah, simplify it. Welcome to Silicon Valley Bank. I'd like to withdraw all my money. Yeah, our vote is kind of out of money. If you've never seen Jack's work, picture a very tall young man acting out strange skits where he plays all the parts that end up describing financial fundamentals.

So you guys screwed up. Well, no, this is how banks works. We only keep a fraction of our total reserves available for lending or for withdrawals at any one point. It's called fractional reserve lending. It's great. Unless everyone tries to withdraw their money all at once. So I can't have my money. No, everyone tried to withdraw their money all the once.

Jack writes, shoots, stars in, and edits the videos. It's like, like, amateur, but not in, like, the amateur bad. Like, amateur, like, just do it for fun. Even though I do it for work. And if you're thinking the audio from these videos sounds terrible, it's kind of the point. It's very low-budget kind of thing. Which is why he does his own sound effects.

That's the great thing about TikTok. You can get weird. You can get so weird. In fact, Jack's Dada-esque, hacked-together style, has helped grow the Planet Money TikTok account to over 750,000 viewers. And made him social media famous in the process. Sometimes people would come out to me and they'll be like, so like fractional reserve lending. And I'm like, man, I'm off the clock. The film school student turned online educator thinks he knows why he's hit a nerve online.

I think it's just like speaking their, like, language. I mean, in film school, I would just read a bunch of like film theory papers. And I became so frustrated with how like needlessly complicated all of these giant words and self-serving they were. And so I'm like, just like, just talk, talk like a normal person. Just like explain to me. It's like I'm from Ohio. It's like explained to an Ohio guy like me what's really going on. I, you know, I never studied economics. And so I would always hear these things, these terms like flying around. The S&P ended the day down 3.6%. We're talking about that death stealing debate. Now, federal reserve raising by one quarter point by 25 basis. And no one was like explaining them

in like a way that like I was keen on. I mean like to just put it simply, it takes some time just to like find out like what really is going on. I did a video on tax brackets and I made it entirely just because my mom didn't know what they were. And like she thought that like, you know, if you made like a little bit more money that you would like ultimately make less money because you would go into a new bracket. Tax taxes are confusing. But that's not how it works. Like the first $10,000 you make is taxed at 10%. The next $30,000 is taxed at 12%.

Between 40 and $86,000 is taxed at 22%. You're never going to bump up into a new bracket and make less overall money. And I was like, you know, there's going to be people in like my mom's position who like won't know this. But like there were so many more. people than I thought. Even my manager came up to me and he's like, oh, I saw this one video about like tax brackets. It was like, you know, and I'm like, that was my video. It's like you're, you're, you're telling me about the video that I made. Um, for you. Yeah. And it's like I never took any

economics or financial literacy classes. I always thought it would be like, you know, either too complicated or too boring. But I don't know. It's not, it doesn't have to be. If you just talk normal, if you don't make it complicated, it's fun. Are you concerned at all? I mean, TikTok is in hot water here in the United States. I'm not thinking of this at all from like a national security perspective. I'm just thinking of this as like a guy who likes videos. I mean, worse, you know, if TikTok is banned, that would, that would, you know, that would stink for me.

But in college, I didn't think I would be doing TikTok. Tell me what you thought you'd be doing. I thought I'd be making like experimental documentaries and getting like maybe like 20 people into a theater to see them. Instead, you're teaching millions of people about basic macroeconomics. I know. And I studied the least financially secure major out there probably, which is like experimental cinema. So I mean, you know, I got that to fall back on. I got experimental cinema, always.

That was Jack Corbett. You can see his work on the TikTok. app at Planet Money. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week, DIY. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, Andrea Gutierrez, and Fiona Giron. It was edited by Sanas Meskampore and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahousie, Hersha Nahada,

Lane Kaplan Levinson, Katie Montalione, and Julia Carney. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our audio engineer was Margaret Luthor. Our theme music was written by Romteen, Arablewee. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Michelle Quint, Jimmy Gutierrez, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballerzzo. I'm Manus Zamorodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.