We're a glance shop foreman here at Township Chevrolet in addition to Tech Talk. We're going to stick to our how-to segment. We're going to show you guys how to get your car ready for this winter. Phil, roll the intro. All right, so to do your, check your own car out, get it ready for winter. Just a few quick things you guys can check just to give yourself some peace of mind. What you'll just need some basic tools. Some of the stuff you won't have, some of the stuff you will have, and anything you don't, you can either pick up online, you can pick up at your local store. And some of the stuff, if you want to bring it into the place, your local shop or your dealership, and have us do the few quick things you need checked. And that way you just bring it in and say, listen, I need this done. And we'll get you in and get it done for you. So Phil, come on in. We'll just show you the tools here. So this is something you can pick up pretty cheap. That's for checking the strength of your antifreeze.  So anyway, that's something pretty cheap you can pick up. Next thing here, you've got your tire gauge and your tire chuck for filling up your tires. If you don't have a compressor at home, you can use one of those little electric pumps you can buy, pick them up at any of the big box stores or some of your local parts stores. And they have a gauge built right in them, set your tire up and pump your tire up and get it fixed up.  Those are pretty cheap, most people have those. And this is our battery tester. So if you don't want to go into a shop or you don't want to go into the dealership, sometimes the place where you buy your batteries, if you're going to your big box place, like maybe a Canadian tire, or if you're buying your battery from your dealership, the parts counter. Sometimes you'll have one of these, a quick check or just a check and see if your coal cranking amps is good in your battery. So let's get to the car. All right Phil, so first thing we're going to do, we're going to use this tool here. We're going to check your antifreeze tester. So one thing you want to do, you want to make sure this is cold. If it's not cold, you want to release the pressure slow. We get another video on how to check your antifreeze, kind of the cooling system breakdown. You can check that out if you want, kind of goes into more detail. But you definitely want to, you can see that symbol on there. You want to make sure you're opening this when it's, when it's cold. Or if you know what you're doing, you can, but there is 20 pounds of pressure on this and it can be hot. So before we go and open this up, we're going to look. Phil, you just kind of get in there, you can see, you can see those little lines in there on the side of the cooling bottle. That's your level. The seam of this bottle is full, so this one is full. So just before you let the cap go, this one has been running a little bit. I got a little bit of experience doing this. So I'm just going to, you can kind of hear it kind of hissing there. Okay, it's done. So we're good to go. I'm going to go ahead and take the cap off. I'm going to stick the rubber hose in. I'm going to squeeze the bulb, just like an old turkey baster.  And you'll see there's kind of a cross hair mark up here. And you want it sitting roughly about there. So if you look, it's dead center, it's right in the line right now.  And so we're good. It's better than minus 45. Bubbles hit it every once in a while, it disturbs it once it stops. So this, this vehicle's good for cooling.  So coolant level, check, we're good. Let's move on to the next thing. So you've been driving around all summer long, maybe down some back roads, dusty roads, maybe near the beach. You're obviously going to, summer times when you're going to get all that dirt and debris into the air filter box. So you're going to go ahead and just take your, sometimes they have those clips on them, quick clips. Sometimes they have screws like this one does. I've gone ahead and removed these out of the way. There was a connector here for the mass air flow sensor, which you can take off. This one you don't really have to, there's enough slack on the cable you can whip it out of the way. So we're going to go ahead and lift this off. And then this is your filter. We're going to pick that up and flip that over. And obviously this one's just been done. This is on one of our certified cars that we sell. So the air filters get changed in there for the dirty. And you also want to just have a quick peek too, to make sure there's not too much dirt and stuff and debris in the box. There's a little bit in this. So I'm going to go ahead and just take some of this out and I'll blow that all in with the air blower. Now, if you don't have a air compressor home, which a lot of people don't, simple shop vac or vacuum cleaner is good. Go ahead, give that a little ball. Make sure that's all clean in there. I'm going to go ahead and throw the filter in, only sits in one way. So you can't really get that wrong. You're going to go ahead and you're going to put that back down into place. And I'll go ahead and we'll tighten these all back down again. And once you get them all tight, go ahead and reconnect any connectors you did. This little yellow piece says the lock, lock that back in. And now your filter's checked or replaced and you're good to go there. So let's move on to the next. Okay, so we're going to fill this, check the air pressure in the tires, especially coming on the winter time. Obviously, when the cold weather gets to anything and it's got air in it, the air shrinks, I guess is the best way to describe it. And you'll find your tire pressure dropping and air pressure as it's colder out, the molecules decrease in size and you lose tire pressure.  So anyway, you're going to go ahead and check your air pressure. If you want to find out how much air pressure to use, Phil, let's get up and let's go right around the car. We'll show you on this one right now. If you just look on this sticker, almost all of them look relatively the same. You can see on this car it calls for a 215-60-15 and it's 240 kilopascals or 35 psi. So depending on which way your gauge is going to read, the rear is same size, same kilopascals. And if you look here, the spare, it says what size the spare is. It also says how much air pressure's in the spare. Usually if it's a temporary spare, it's going to be, which this is because it starts with a T. We did an entire video there if you want to explain all these letters and numbers, you can check that out. I'll get Phil to drop that in the link below. And so you can go in there and you can see that that's a 60 psi because it's temporary tire. So it's a good time to check that out too while you're doing the tires. We're going to go ahead and remove the valve stem cap and we're going to insert this in here and check it. You can see on there, it's sitting right there at 35 psi right now. Each one of those is one notch. So it's sitting right at 35 psi, so it's good. If it wasn't, we'll go ahead and just let a little bit air out. So I can show you what we can do. So you're going to go ahead, take your chuck in. If you do have a no hose, if not, you'll have one of those clip on style ones and one of those electric compressors.  And you're going to go ahead, support the valve stem and just press firmly and you'll hear the air going in. And then you're just going to do it every few seconds. You can see that we pretty good size compressor here. So that's gone too high already. No big deal in the backside of your gauge here. There's a little button and you use that to push it in. Let some air out and keep dialing that in until you get it where you want it to be. Here we go, we're back at 35, perfect. Put our valve stem cap back on. We'll do that with all four tires. This is a good time, like I said earlier, just to pop the trunk, check the spare. Same as checking your batteries and your smoke alarms at home, right? Bear's kind of one of those things people don't really think about. So if you're doing your tire seasonal rotation or you're getting your air pressure set for the different change in the seasons, winter and summer, it's a good time to check that. So another thing I'll just show you right quick, Phil, there's a tire pressure gauge here, depth gauge, sorry. You can pick these up pretty cheap and some of them have color coded on to let you know when you're getting down. 230 seconds of tread is a safety requirement on PEI, which is crazy, it should be a lot higher than that. 230 seconds of tread in PEI is not good, especially on all season tires with winters we have. So I'll just show you how this works. You can see that little arm moves in and out of there, that little plunger, and on the top, you'll see the numbers here, it's in millimeters or it's in 30 seconds. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna push that up all the way, you're gonna line up where that is in between the tread.  Then you just lift it off, you're gonna pull that over, and you rotate that around till you get where the correct line is, right? So it's roughly about seven millimeters or right around nine 30 seconds of tread, which is great. So you can see how much tread depth that is by how much of that's showing. Now I'll just show you what they say is okay to pass inspection is right there. So you can see how little sticking out, that's what's inspectable for safety on a tire. So obviously you can see that's really not enough. Okay, so here we are at the battery. We're gonna do a battery test and check the cold cranking amps for the winter because when the winter comes here, requires more cranking amps to wind the engine over because the oil's thicker, parts are cold, and it's harder on a battery and a weak battery will rear its ugly head. So before we get to that point, and you're stuck somewhere, if you're lucky to have one of these babies at home, and if not, the parts department has one where you bought your battery normally or you can come in and see us and we can do the test for you. So the way it works is you go ahead and you hook up this red cable to the positive, black one to the negative. The screen will pop up here. Most of them kind of operate the same way. We're gonna go ahead and hit enter and we're gonna test it. It's in the vehicle, it's not out because you can do either one. So if you wanna just bring your battery into your parts place, they can do it without even having to have the car. It is a top post battery meaning the battery cables do go on the top. A lot of the sheds, especially the old ones have them on the side so you can go ahead and select that with everyone you wanna do. And then we're gonna go automotive battery because that's what we're working on. This is a regular flooded type battery. Sometimes the battery will be AGMs. It'll say, sometimes it has a gray label on it and it should say right on the battery. This one is a regular flooded style with the acid in it. And we're gonna go ahead and select CCAs which is what we use here for measuring the battery which is cold cranking amps. Gonna press enter. I've gone ahead and checked. You can zoom in on that baby. And that is 650 CCA. So we're gonna go ahead and use our arrows here and scroll this up and down. And we're gonna go ahead to cold cranking amps 650. And it's gonna go ahead and say it's testing.  You want no loads. It's gonna ask you if it's above or below temperature. So it's above 32 degrees Fahrenheit which is zero Celsius. I'm just gonna go with the test again. And it's gonna come back and tell us it's a good battery. Voltage measure is at 12.54.  This one will do a starter test too. We're gonna wanna print this off so we can get a better look at it so it's not gonna cycle in back and forth. If you come in and get this done at our shop here you can actually ask for this. Usually they put it with the copy or work order. So we'll go ahead and take a look. The measured voltage was 559. The rating was 650. And it was 12.54 cold cranking amps. So this battery's good. Yeah, it's not right up to par but it's not fully charged either. It's one of our lot vehicles. So chances are it's out in the lot for the last few days at least for sure, maybe longer. In between test drives it's only getting started and moved around in the lot. So I'm assuming once this battery was fully charged which is 12.6 volts that would bring that cold cranking amps up a bit even higher into the 600 mark and you're good to go. So if you test it, it's showing three, 400 cold cranking amps on this particular vehicle. That's getting weak. Anything lower than that, it's no good at all. Chances are it probably hasn't started for you already. And obviously the bigger the engine obviously the more cranking amps you need. You're gonna do a 750, 850 even a thousand cold cranking amps to get into the diesels and stuff.  So other than just checking your regular fluids holding the old dipstick transmission if you got it, checking all your fluids like your brake fluid in here you can see the max mark in there. You can check all that stuff pretty easy it's all kind of visual it's all there. You wanna just maybe stick your hand in give that cool fan a bit of a spin make sure it's good there. Good thing to keep cleaned out in the winter time when the snow and the ice do does start up. And yeah other than that that's the basic just kind of getting your car ready for winter. And if you're not interested in doing any of that stuff and you get stuff to do it or don't have a place to do it or maybe you don't have the ambition to it either way it doesn't matter just bring it down and we'll take a look at it for you and get that checked out. That's been another edition of Tech Talk and we look forward to seeing you.


So welcome back, are we live? Thank you, welcome back, HowlRoundTV, everyone watching. Welcome back to everyone in the space. We're live from Saturday, and I'm just kidding. We are live, and we are back with an incredible panel. I mean, it's immense in its knowledge. There are so many people, but you have to hear everything each one of these individuals have done. It has been an inspiration for me, I will say. And like I said, I track people down who do parent support throughout this country, and who you see on this panel today. These are individuals who I've been able to meet with individually, and it is my absolute pleasure to bring them into the same space. I'm going to do a brief introductions. Garlia, I mentioned her first, but we're just shifting her order after my call so that their content connects in an exciting way. So we'll start with the second one. So if you can raise your hand so we know who you are. Ariana Smart Truman, who's the producing director and vice president of Elevator Repair Service and the co-founder and director of the Summer Institute with the Wooster Group. And then we have Allie Lalonde and Libby King right over here. Allie is the producing director of the team ensemble here in New York. And Libby King is an ensemble member, correct? Yes. Don't worry if I've gotten this wrong before. And then we have Michael Sag, who is the managing director of WP Theater, formerly Women's Project, if you know it from that. And then Roberta Pareda is joining us again, producing director from the Playwrights' Realm. And then Ari Teplitz here, who is the CFP CHFC of the Teplitz Financial Group. He'll explain more. And then back to our wonderful starter here on the row, Garlia Cornelay-Jones, who is the founder of Blackboard Plays. Look them up if you don't know. Line producer of the Public Theater and our first Powell Grant recipient of a mother artist of color. So beyond well-deserved. And she's going to share a bit more about Blackboard Plays. But I will have a happy hour tonight. Garlia has also recently come on to be our Powell chief rep of New York City. So we're very proud to have her. Hey. She's been breaking ground for a long time. And now we're just drawing attention to it. It's exciting. So we're going to start with Ariana here and the work that you've been doing, because Ariana was one of the first people who interviewed with me when the Palhand books started, when it was just a few pages and an idea to gather interviews with people who had done this before. And in speaking with her, she quickly became someone that I looked to because she's so not only generous with her information and her solutions, but she also has a legacy of creating support now. So I'm honored to have her with me in this space. And so the first question that I wanted to propose to her is, Ariana, if you could briefly share with us how long you've been developing child care for the Wooster Group's educational program, as well as the history of ERS and its child positive practices. Yeah. I'm so happy to be here. And I'm here as a parent and as an administrator and also as a teaching artist. So I've been realizing, actually, while listening to everybody talking to you today, that I hadn't quite remembered the origin story for me of how providing significant support to parent artists came about. And that's because I worked with the Wooster Group for a very long time as an intern and then as an administrator and various things. And all along the way, I was working on the Summer Institute with Kate Valk, which we co-founded together about 22 years ago. And the founding members of the Wooster Group had all had kids like in the 70s and 80s. So as I was sort of coming up through working with the Wooster Group, I was several decades behind in terms of where they were at with child rearing. So when the Summer Institute, when my daughter was about two, I realized this is going to be really hard for me to do. And the summer, it's a three-week intensive program over the summer where we work with kids. I was like, she's not in regular school. And how am I going to do this?  Like, this is obvious. And I went, oh, oh, OK, great. And so then all the teaching artists who have ever worked on the Summer Institute since then, that's sort of one of the first things always is, do you need a stipend for child care? And they always go, mm-hm. So that is how that started. And what we do at the, because it's a very repeatable program and people come back and do it every year for many years, it's easy to just say, this is our policy. And we have a flat fee that is a stipend. And it offsets people's costs for child care. And some of the people say, oh, I don't need it this year, because my kid is going to go visit their grandparent somewhere else. And then we say, OK, well, great. Let us know if you need it next year. And that's a $200 a week stipend. So it's not a huge amount of money, but it makes a difference. At Elevator Repair Service, there's been a real evolution. And my daughter was born in 2007. I started working full-time with Elevator Repair Service in 2006. And I think in that year, the woman who was the managing director at the time, Tori Vazquez, had her first child. And that sort of began the Elevator Repair Service baby boom. And because Tori was working in the office, she was in a position to work with John Collins, the artistic director, about making policies. And they sort of figured out together how to make it possible for her to work and be a parent of a child. So it was very kind of like working around her and flexible schedule and that kind of thing. And then my daughter was born. And so there were some precedents in place for office staff about how to deal with that. And I had a flexible schedule. And I have also worked one day a week from home. I started that when my daughter was a little bit older. But that kind of like working in the office was very easy to figure out. And like Roberta said, because I was in the position to make the decisions, we would just say, well, what do I need? What does Tori need? OK, we'll do it that way. But then a lot of the artists started having children. And Elevator Repair Service does a lot of touring. We do a lot of extended rehearsal periods, sometimes in New York, sometimes out of town. There are the sort of main ethos or the mission of Elevator Repair Service is to make work with an ongoing ensemble. And so that means the ensemble shifts and changes over time. But there are all these people who, you know, the investment is in making repeated work experience with the same group of people. And so those people have a huge range of lifestyles. Some people are parents. Some people are teachers. Some people are working in law offices. Nobody's really a waiter anymore, but certainly people were for a time. So trying to sort of adjust to this huge range of lifestyles is very complicated. And it takes a tremendous amount of time and thought and some compromise from everybody in one direction or another. But a big part of what we were able to do for parents is to not rehearse at night all the time. Just could you do one night a week? So we do a lot of sort of asking people, what would work for you?  So we say, okay, we take that into consideration. So we create these very sort of complicated schedules to try to accommodate the greatest number of people with parents being one part of that. But we also early on tried to make sort of policies that we thought could sort of be a little bit one size fits all.  We take people on tour, we go out of town for nine days or 14 days or five weeks. And it seemed obvious that if somebody was breastfeeding, they needed to bring their child with them. And then if they were bringing a breastfeeding infant with them, they probably didn't want to just hire local babysitters on an ad hoc basis, but they would want to bring somebody with them who was, you know, very familiar with their child and their parenting style and could probably share a hotel room with them or apartment. So that meant, well, what do we need to do to make that happen? You don't have to pay for a plane ticket for an infant, but you do have to pay for a plane ticket for a caregiver. And you have to make sure that they have accommodations wherever they're going that are family friendly. And you probably need to pay per diem for that caregiver. So these are things that we would sort of build into our tour budgets. And certain things, some presenters of our work would be sort of willing to be a little bit flexible and accommodating around some of those, but more often they were not and put the burden back on us to make it happen. So that just became something that we budgeted for. So in addition to, so that made sense for a little while, but then also people started breastfeeding, some people only breastfed for three months and some people like me breastfed for three years. So then it was like, oh, there's like an inequitable distribution of resources here based on this breastfeeding per, maybe that's not the marker that we want to be using. So, and also there were some things early on of like, well, if like four people are bringing their similarly aged kids on tour, let's hire one babysitter and that babysitter can take care of all the kids, to which all of the mothers said, no, that doesn't, you know, my kid goes to sleep at four, my kid goes to sleep at six, that's not gonna work. So we couldn't impose anything on people that was one size fits all and that became clear very quickly. So then it became just a question of us always saying to parents, what do you need? How can this work for you to come on tour? Do you need money? Do you need more people to be there with you? What do you need? And then it was just always, just not being afraid that what they were gonna say is, oh, I need the moon, to which we would have to say, oh, sorry, we can't afford the moon. That never happened, instead what people said is, well, I usually spend $600 a week on childcare, but I'm gonna have to spend $725, you know, to meet this rehearsal schedule. We'd say, well, we'll give you the $125. You know, that's obvious, that's easy. So everything became a sort of personalized and individual conversation about that and we started building it into all of our budgets. Oh, one other thing actually that I thought of while I was listening to people talk is that we hire pregnant actors. So if somebody becomes pregnant, that doesn't disqualify them. Somebody could be eight months pregnant and playing Daisy in the Great Gatsby. And that meant that we were proactive about recostuming people and saying, let's think about what you're gonna need to wear. We might need to buy you two different costumes because you're gonna grow over the course of this. And instead of making a woman sort of say, like, you do realize I'm gonna need like five different kinds of spanks to fit into that costume. Like we would say, you need spanks probably, you know, or whatever, coming to people and saying, what are you gonna need? So over the years, it's become very normal for us to just think in advance about who our company is for any given production. We know people's lives, we know who is a parent and budget for what we think they might need. And if we don't know a full company, we say, like, well, maybe one of those people will be a parent. We build in a little extra cushion. And over, I have the data from going back to 2011. In every fiscal year, we have spent less than 1% of our entire budget on all of these really family friendly policies, buying plane tickets, paying extra for hotel rooms, per diem, giving childcare stipends. So much so that everybody in our company, you know, constantly calls us out as like leaders who make it possible for them to work with us. And it's, you know, 0.4 to 8%, 0.186%, 0.069% of the budget. It's such a small amount of money and it makes such a huge difference. And I'd looked also, I was curious, this year or this past fiscal year, we budgeted $7,900 for family friendly expenses. And we ended up spending 2,975. So we had all that money available and we weren't, you know, we were saying to people, what do you need, what do you need? And that's all that they needed. So that was, that I find so heartening when you think about what you might, what an institution might end up spending on this. People are so, and I'm speaking from my own personal experience, you just feel seen, respected, included, and like you belong, and it takes a very, very small gesture to make that true. And, you know, we try so hard to be proactive and as generous as possible and people don't even take us up on all the offer, all the help that we offer. That's great, thank you. And it raises just such a wonderful point when we're talking about investing in people. It's the human resources and extra benefits you can give people should not only be financial, right? It should be placing that value system on them and saying what do you need? So thank you so much for sharing that and those numbers. You can thank her too. I heard some snaps. That's so beautiful. So we're gonna shift now to Ali and Libby from the team because this is very much in line with the work that you are doing as well. And Libby, I believe we're starting with you. Yeah, because I would love to hear about the, Libby is also many of these people I've interviewed for the handbook that you're all gonna get, but this is the deep dive where I believe you were, Ali was saying, the first person to receive this support and the most recent. So I would just love to hear about your personal experience in receiving it and any insight you have on what it's done for the company. Awesome. I also wanna say Lucy Jackson's here who was, you were there when we started doing a lot of stuff. She was working for the team at the time. So anything you wanna add that I, I was thinking also of sort of an origin story which I was having these flashes of when I was pregnant, I had gotten a few callbacks into a really big gig and I remember like being so terrified that the moment that they found out that I was pregnant that I just wouldn't get the job and ended up not getting the job anyway but I remember that terror. And then I think about what being a member of the team and sort of what I was a bit forced into as I gave birth on October 28th, 2014. And we were set to perform in the Coral Festival at the Vineyard in January. So it was really only a little over November, December 28th like eight weeks after he was born. And I was like, I didn't know, I didn't really have a choice to be like, I don't know if I can do this. And I just, I did with the support of the team. We brought in my dad. He's become my major like he comes to tech with me all the time with my son. But we brought in my dad and the vineyard was like, you can absolutely like hold up shop in the green room or in the, you know, like I had a milk station. I was pumping during, you know, during tech. And it, what it did was just, it just clicked for me. Like nothing, me being a mother, there's nothing in my way. Like I don't have to say no because I can bring him with me in a crisis. I can, so I guess I just wanna point to that like switch that kind of, I got to turn in my brain, which then set my course for my ability and belief in myself and in him and my son to be like, I'm taking you with me to London and we'll figure it out. And it's been such a rich addition to his life being in the rooms with the artist he's gotten to be in the room with.  Like gets the physical comedy and is like, if this is boring, that's when I'm gonna leave. So, and I'm just kind of rambling, but if you could steer me back. I wanna talk a little bit about different modes. So like what we did for primer versus what we did for reconstruction this summer. Yeah, so again, kind of to what Arianna says, when the team has a development period or an upcoming tour or whatever, it is a dialogue between about what do you need? And it always feels like kind of an awesome creative problem solving. And first you're just relieved that you're being asked that in the first place. And so it often depends. And in the instance of this primer situation, there was two other moms in the company that needed support. Sorry, just for clarification. Primer for Failed Superpowers, the title of a show that we premiered in 2017. And that show involved a 32 member ensemble that was evenly divided between teenagers, 37 things and people 60 and up. Singing new arrangements by some amazing composers of iconic protest songs from America's history. And that fell at a time it was the summer and the people that needed childcare, our kids were toddler type, it was an age situation. So we were able to hire a company babysitter in that moment, which was also extraordinary for the kids. It was like a little kind of summer, mini summer camp for them. And then most recently we were up at the lumber yard and my particular needs, we were two weeks in the city and then one week upstate. Again, it fell in the summertime. So my son was not in school. And for the two weeks, usually the conversation around scheduling is a huge one.  So if you're doing a straight six and you're starting at 10 and you're getting done at four, it means, okay, I'm only gonna pay for this hour after school, it's such a conversation. And so the two weeks in the city, I was getting a stipend of compensation and then the last week, my heroic dad was given a plane ticket and he came up and we got family friendly housing and he got to take my kid to like little farm and all these things around the upstate area. And also it's just, it's hard to, you're given the ability to do the work that you need to do as the artist and it takes this huge pressure off whenever you're just even in some kind of dialogue with your employer as a parent. Absolutely, when we talk about resources and part of our resources being energy, like mental capacity, emotional sustainability for this work that we do, because everyone is under duress at some point in the process for an employer to open up to everyone, this is a conversation we're willing to have, alleviates that burden. And so that parents' emotional resources get to go to problem solving and get to go toward their child and get to go toward their art instead of trying to figure out, okay, how do I convince my employer that this is what I need? You're actually wasting your employees' resources on yourself when you could just come to them and say, I wanna know, I wanna learn. So this is so important to share and thank you. And Ali, you've been involved now in budgeting and fundraising for this conversation which is, I find so exciting and fascinating because my instinct for it, you were like, yeah, it's true. If you wanna share a little bit about that part of it. Sure, and before I do that, I just wanna mention that, so Libby is our second team parent. We are an ensemble of 15 members of which seven are now parents. There are 16 babies and at our gala this past November on our giant timeline of major events in the team's history, each of those baby's births was on there. And, but Libby was, in spite of being the second team parent, she was the first to receive a stipend for childcare and that's because the first team parent after, in the year after her son was born participated in a team process without any support. And so I just wanna recognize that that was a blind spot of the team and we're trying to, and Roberto was talking about blind spots before and we're trying to think more in the future about like how do we avoid learning from a mistake and instead just like learn proactively. But in terms of our funding for childcare stipends and so we, as Libby mentioned, offer a childcare stipend, it's $250 a week for any caregiving artist in addition to any other supports that we might be able to provide. But it started off with my predecessor, Amanda Martin with help from Lucy Jackson, started putting it, putting this line item in our touring budget. So when we tour we ask a presenting partner to offer us a fee for, to cover our expenses of bringing the show to their house. And so we would put childcare as a separate line item and ask them to pay us for that. And what, or what Amanda and Lucy encountered was that some theaters were totally excited and on board with it. Some were not, they got specific pushback against it and some just wanted us to hide it. So like bury it in another line item, just don't break it out because as we've been talking about of not wanting to set a precedent. And so that continued for a little while, specifically with the tour of our show, Rosa Valves that Libby was a key player in. And eventually there was this desire to, in cases where the presenting partner is pushing back and we're not in control of what this budget is and in the same way as we would be on a development where we're doing the fundraising to cover the expenses, how do we have like an emergency fund to cover childcare expenses? And so Amanda made a strategic ask to a donor of ours who herself had put her artistic career on hold to raise her kids to start us off with a major donation for this temporarily restricted fund to cover childcare in moments of emergency. And she did and then became a true champion for helping us to raise more money to put in that fund. And now we continue to fundraise separately for that fund. So if you're making a donation to the team on our website, there's two different buttons you can press. You can say I want to donate to the general fund or I want to donate to the childcare fund. And it has been the easiest thing in the whole wide world to fundraise for because I think that so many people who we talk to have had these experiences in their past of not being supported and are truly delighted that we are trying to do what we can to support our artists. So in our end of year campaign, for example, we send out a series of E-blasts asking people for money. And always every year we include one of those E-blasts that is specifically focused on childcare and specifically directs people to the childcare fund. Always it is our most clicked E-blast and our most donated to. And at our gala when we do the inevitable cash call that we all hate to do, there's always one of the donor levels that we ask people to donate is that $250 because that will pay for one week of childcare stipends. And it's always like the most hand raises at that moment. And I always have people like friends of mine who come up to me saying, oh my God, Ali, I just wrote a check for $250 that I can't really afford, but oh my God, I love so much that you guys support childcare. And not wanting to put people out of their houses and homes, but we appreciate the sentiment. And for context, Ariana, our conversation yesterday pushed me to look at our numbers. And similarly, so in our fiscal of 19, we spent $4,593 on childcare. And that was 1.6% of our budget the year before, very similar percentage. And so the percentage is so small and we have this flexible way of fundraising and accounting for it. And there are also so many ways in which we are supported by friends in ways that are not monetary. So for example, the hotel that we were putting up artists at this summer upstate, when I told them, I have an artist who's bringing her child and her father to care for the child. They gave us an apartment style room instead of a regular sized room for no additional cost. And I'm always surprised by how much people wanna help us in this effort. The other thing I will say is that we have been trying to expand the program. So now the language we use around it, although on our website it still says childcare fund, but we're trying to use the language around caregiving so that it can include people who are caring for a parent, et cetera. And we try and talk about it as the first step in any language, any communication that we're having with an artist. So if we're doing an availability check of an artist to see if they might be free to participate in a gig, we give them the salary information about what that gig is gonna pay and we tell them that the childcare stipend is available if they have caregiving responsibilities right up front. And for us that's about respecting an artist's time because time as money is a problematic phrase, but that the time an artist might take to figure out if they are available and to schedule the time to talk about the gig, to audition for the gig and then be told the terms and realize that they're not sustainable for them. To not give that information up front is not respecting their time and devaluing their time. So we're also trying to look forward about how we can continue to do better. I think Ariana's language about it being an individualized question for each person is something that we're trying to live into because equity and equality are not the same thing. Everyone's needs are different. So we've been trying to put specific language that Powell has been advising on in that information on the caregiving stipend. This is a starting point. Also please feel free to talk to us about what additional needs you might have around caregiving and we can see what we can do to address them and sometimes we can help and sometimes there are things that we just can't do. But really usually I'm always surprised by how very reasonable and not reasonable as a bad word but like how possible the requests are. We're trying to think forward about when we're on tour, much like ERS about how to bring our presenting partners on as partners in the childcare situation. So asking our partners to research things on the ground that might be helpful and fun for kids that we're bringing to do. To ask about instead of like putting a child in a sterile daycare center to ask about like are there baby sitters in your community who are doing mission aligned work who can take care for some of our children. We're also trying to think how to support the parent as well as just the child when we're on tour. So for example, when we're at home there might be after rehearsal one day the entire cast decides to go see a show and if you're at home you might have a support system to like a parent nearby or a partner or someone to help you be able to do that above and beyond the standard workday. But on tour you don't necessarily have that support system nearby. So how can we the team be that support system when we're on the road?  So we have a new program called the Petrie Projects where we invite like broad range of artists who have worked with us in many different capacities to bring a show to us that we can like fund the seedling of like early development on. And so we have, I have individual conversations with each proposing artist about like what they want to accomplish, how to budget for that. And every single time we have this conversation I ask if there are any of the collaborators that they wanna work with who have caregiving responsibilities. And who so that we can prepare for that. And I'm shocked by how many times someone who I've been speaking to about this has said, oh, you know I don't know. And I hadn't really thought about that or not right now, but now that you mentioned that there's this person who I know who has a kid and wouldn't normally do it. But now that you have like these supports in place they might be willing to work with me on this.  And it's really exciting and always surprising how invisible this conversation can be outside of spaces like this. So thank you, pal, for making it more visible. Thank you for doing it. Okay, I've been doing really well. I thought this would happen much earlier. Crying. Thank you for sharing. And just to like do a numbers comparison because both of these incredible ensembles are so well respected, I've been so grateful that you're being transparent about these percentages because so many times when you talk about childcare in a budgeting conversation, like everyone in the room tenses up who doesn't really understand what that access means because to them they have to pay for all the childcare of all the people in the world. And then the numbers skyrocket and they're like, we can't do that.  And so that's the accountability that we have to have. When we're looking at our numbers, it's not just the numbers of our organization that we have to make sustainable. If we want a high retention rate, if we want people to feel valuable, we also have to think of sustainability in terms of individual contributors. So to be transparent with my own numbers, I was recently contracted on a regional gig with one of the highest paying contracts. And the percentage of my paycheck that went to it, if I, because I kept my day job going while I did the show. So I had one of the highest regional contracts in the country and I had a full-time day job that I work remotely and got paychecks for on a bi-weekly basis. At the end of tech week, my bank account was $9. So, and this is someone who comes from a privileged place as an artist, as an individual in spaces, I have all the advantage in the world and my number is nine. So I know that with all of that advantage, if the number is nine, since we're so good at numbers, all these people who are terrified of these budgets, we need to look at these numbers and say, if the advantage number is nine, how can we approve upon that? Because when we take it on as an organization, actually the percentage is much lower of the cost impact of the organization than it is of the individual. That's just the reality because under 2%, and let's say $8,000 a year is very gettable when you have donors, but when it's almost 100% of your weekly paycheck, that's impossible. And when we ask the question, let's continue to connect this because we don't talk about this in a vacuum. When we connect it to the conversation of why is our field hemorrhaging women specifically? Why is our field hemorrhaging women of color? Why is our field hemorrhaging black women? Why don't they make it to positions of leadership? Do they need more mentors? Maybe yes, and also they need intentional financial support for the community to go back to our first conversation about this being a human rights issue, for the community to say you deserve to thrive while you raise your family because you're part of our institution. So thank you for sharing that. And we're going to move on to Michael who has also created a budget and a fund opportunity that we're very excited about and I would love to hear your origin story now as well. Sure, happy to share. It started about, hi everyone, hi. Hi, about two years ago I was in our theater, it was one of the first shows I had done at WP and two of the artists that we were working with had young children that they had brought with them but were sort of hyper cautious about how that child might impact process. Real tentative about asking for the things that they needed and as a parent myself I started thinking we should, there should be a conversation that we're having about this. Why does it feel so tentative? Why do they feel afraid to ask for the things that they need in terms of support? And then I was at a conference about a year and a half ago and I sat in on a session that Rachel was giving on Pal and she said a bunch of things that started resonating really, really strongly with me. Like one of the things she said was there, one of the roadblocks to providing the support is people feeling afraid to ask for the support. So what's a way that you can solve that issue and very simply put the challenge out to the group and said make the resource, then tell people you have it before they have to ask you for it and they will stop being afraid about asking because they will see that you have been thoughtful about what you're willing to put into the mix and how you're utilizing resource. And they're things, I mean the very specifically things that were zero cost. Literally things that I was outgrowing as a parent with my little kids that I said I'm just gonna throw this in a car and put it in my space and make a list and when someone, when I know that someone has a kid I'm gonna say oh by the way we have all these resources that are available and I'm trying to be even more front footed about not needing to know whether someone has a kid or not but saying to every single person that we work with we have these resources, they are available. If you need them they're here for us if you need something different communicate with us and we'll figure it out. Simplistic things like a pack and play. Like bulky things that you cannot bring with you everywhere you go.  They're here for you to use as necessary and we're a teeny tiny theater with a teeny tiny theater space and it still just felt like this is an easy step that I can take to signal to the artist I'm working with and that I wanna work with that there's resource there and that we as an institution are trying to be thoughtful about how we can provide that type of support. And then she made a second challenge which gave me a lot more pause but has turned out to be great which was allocate some budget. Figure out a way to put a dollar amount aside doesn't matter what it is, how big or small it is and then begin a process of offering that out to the artists and see what kind of response you got. So this last year when I was making my budget last March I just put $5,000 aside and I said this is gonna be a childcare fund and I have no idea if it's gonna be anywhere near enough once we start engaging with the artists. This is basically the point at which I knew what the roles were gonna be in the shows that we were doing so I had no idea who the human beings might be that would fill those roles. And so I was very, very nervous about it. I called her a bunch of times and I was like I'm insecure about offering artists this money because I know the need is so far beyond the resource I have and that I've only allocated the small amount of money which for if we're putting numbers is 0.002% of my budget. It is a small or 0.02% of my budget. Do the numbers. It was a very small amount of money given the whole and it was something that I didn't have to reduce a different expense category to provide. I just said I'm just gonna put this in here and it's gonna work out because it's gonna work out. And another thing that it's really important I think to mention is that I'm the decision maker and when faced with the question of who at the institution can make the change I said that is me. That is my job to do and while I did not have that resource when I was having kids I always wish I did and I wish that people were reaching out to me and saying here's the thing that we can do for you and so I decided and I think that's it's an important statement to say it's just getting the person who is the decision maker to say we're gonna do a thing and that sounds easy when you say it out loud and becomes more difficult in practice but it doesn't have to be much. You're not looking for $50,000 that you can distribute to people all year long unless you're a really giant organization you're looking for a small amount of money that can say I've tried to be thoughtful about this. I've tried to think in advance hear the things that I'm gonna try and provide to this group of people and signal to the community we are here to support you as an artist in this process and so at the beginning of the year I sent on our first production I sent an email to every single person that was working on the show including the 18 year old crew members and got such a volume of response that it was overwhelming but of the volume of response I got only two people on the entire team actually asked for a thing. I had a couple of people who said this is amazing I have an 18 year old who runs the household more than I do and I don't need that money but I'm so excited to know that it exists that is an incredible gesture and I had younger people in the show who were saying this is an amazing thing it just makes me reflect back on the institution in such an amazing and a positive way I wanna encourage people to work there I wanna tell people what a great experience that we're having and I had two people ask for money and when I gave them money they were weeping they were so full of gratitude not because the money actually offsets real world expenses but the way that it was presented was I'm trying to be thoughtful I don't know what your additional expenses are gonna be during tech week but let's presume you have some I wanna help cover that costs and here's 500 bucks and both of the people that got that money were extraordinarily moved and have you know that's the artist community I wanna make is for those folks to come back to me and say I'll do any job I wanna work for you again because at the end of the day you're at least being conscious and thinking what are the needs of the community what are the needs of the artist that I wanna wrap my arms around and so of my $5,000 fund I'm halfway through my year and I've only used $1,000 of it and I feel kind of incredible about that and I'm ready to offer that now in a more broad way to a more wide group of people and also making the conscious choice of echoing what a couple other leaders have said I wanna present that information to people when I'm first talking to them I wanna say to them here is the paltry fee that I can pay you because that's what I can afford but I have this other fund if your inability to say yes to this job is because the fee isn't high enough and your parent and your childcare needs are gonna go up here's a pot of money that I can allocate towards that because that shouldn't be the roadblock to you making art with this institution I want you to say yes I want you to go for it and I wanna support you however we can and so far I mean I'm literally my big toes in the water so far it's been amazing. Thank you, thank you. I'd love to hear from Garlia and then we'll move to Roberta and just so you know our close Q and A is our lunchtime session I just want you all to engage with each other after we hear from these two stories but Garlia I would love to hear I'm not using my microphone I consider Garlia a ground breaker in and of herself like for over a decade of her work with Blackboard plays probably longer sorry if I'm off on the numbers but it's extraordinary and then to also be the recipient of our own paltry amounts like we are only in our second year of our childcare grants which for anyone watching or anyone in this room applications are open and are open until December 15th individuals can apply and institutions for match grants if you want to create that budget line we want to help you with that but for us to say we have such a micro grant but we believe in your work we want to help like this because it also taught our organization about who this artist was I read her resume and was floored but I had not heard of her yet and I was also angry so I would just love to hear your origin story as a parent in your experience and then in the context of like what's been shared so far thank you Rachel and I'll promise there'll probably be tears as well so I've been in this space at this institution for almost a year and so when I applied for the the Papel grant I was on the edge of like final interviews and wondering where my future would lie and so when I received it it was at this very crazy time where I was both in this space of being a sole provider and then also like being here and my kids are in school and I'm like I have this paycheck which is a salary which I've been a freelance artist forever so that was like wow there's real dollars but then it's like oh there's childcare that's gone I mean you know what I mean so there's that and then it's like oh it's so there's so many things so when you talk about the nine dollars when you talk about the banks I know how to call chase and get you know fees reversed and those are real things that I think people don't talk about they're exposing but they're also true and so that grant kind of got me through at least a few weeks of childcare when I first really started this job and that was huge and just really and you know the times before, before you know so I started this series called Blackboard is for Blackfoot a playwright and we used to be we were with this one institution for about 10 year years of the cell and it was just it was a really be beautiful time to build both this support for Black a playwright and then also being a very very small institution but that was with moms and women women women women women women and so I was learning as the the artistic director there had her first child and was figuring out you know childcare and strollers and all these things I'm just like seeing all that she's going to go going through and thinking oh my god it's going to cost so much money and what's going to happen so you know I didn't know it was going to happen so I think a couple years later I was you know I got married and I was pregnant and then I was like what's going to what's going to happen here so just figuring all of that out and then ended up being being home and I stayed home and I stayed home until I got this job but through that time when I say this job I mean at this institution not specifically with that pal but over that time being home I just I took my kids everywhere and I was also I had a lot of fear about applying for a job because there wouldn't be the fun for childcare and so every time that my for a partner and I would kind of discuss it was it was okay well this salary is going to equate everything that we would have to pay for childcare so I might as well just stay home that's what I did I just stayed home but I did my best to be very active I'm a photographer you're seeing here so I photograph for a lot of theater and I still do and I also you know because I had both a blackboard which has been making space for black playwrights for 11 years now we worked with everyone and I feel like at this point but we gave Jocelyn BPO the first reading of school girls and then Jordan Cooper had the first reading of Aino Moe in our series and then it was really exciting when Jordan had a full production of Aino Moe at the public and I started the public at the same time I was like wow this is just really cool so those have been some really full circle moments with this with my experience but I had kids during all of those like I won an OB award with Harlem Nine so Harlem Nine is a group where a group of six black producers and we produced 48 hours in Harlem and then we also expanded to the Bronx and then we also last year won a foundation grant to do it in my hometown in Detroit so we went back to Detroit this summer and so we'll go back this next summer so we've been doing that so in like 2014 we won an OB award for our workers or producers and I was like nine and a half months pregnant and so I said to my child I said don't you dare come out when we get this award so we're sitting there at the OBs and I'm like just about to have a baby and I feel moving and I'm like uh-uh, and I go yeah and then a week later I gave birth on the sidewalk so yes it's a true story I wrote it in the New York Times you can go and Google it it really did occur but also right before I gave birth like a couple hours before I was at a meeting for Harlem Nine like just hanging out and a waddling like I was about to give birth and so my daughter was on my lap my kids have literally been through all this creative work because that was the only option I really had like if your other partner is a war working and you're gonna do your side projects which are not so side like an OB award isn't a side thing you just get you know so I just went and got one so you know through so like all of this I you know I literally drop kids on the sidewalk I'm gonna pick them up and I just keep on moving and so it's been the way for me to have my children but I also I did apply for jobs at institutions throughout that time and just hope and pray that the dollar amount would be something I could say okay I can figure out child care but it was always not something and so it's really like to hear the institutions of now are really advocating and making actual space for those things when you know in like 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12 that really wasn't the case and all of us are having our kids in hospitals or sidewalks and just really you know fearful I mean I was always fearful like I'm gonna have a job but then that means you know what does that mean? I mean when I see when I saw the child care space child care space upstairs it's like I just I think about all like I think of all the years I walked around this city with my ergo and my stroller and my kids and my nursing with my kids for like two and a half years and all the meetings I had and like taking them to theater and asking friends could they like my friends are fantastic they've been my free child care and sometimes they would refuse payment and help me in other ways but that community I built is literally the only way I got through all those years and then all of those experiences helped to put me here in this institute to do the work that I've been doing here which has a whole set of its own challenges as I've been working for Black and Black organizations all of this time so that's a whole other set of things so how does one human kind of balance both of those things? We can often follow up you know that is the challenge and question but so I mean so I just applied any institution that's making space for child care funds and I know that the grant I received was like if like and I would also say that just because you have a full-time job does not mean that those grants are not needed I think they're needed they're just as you're not gonna I'm not gonna say that someone who's working from home doesn't need it as much they are just as important I had this dream when my daughter when I had my first child that she would sit on a play mat and I would do all my work and I said I said oh it'll be great she has this high chair she's sitting there with a little toy and I will work all day and I was like that's happening why is it happening? Thank you, thank you Incredible Roberta is our final piece but we actually have a community session coming up in Ari community session coming up we're already over are you able to stay through lunch are you able to stay through lunch? we have time after lunch in our community session we just also need to allow parents to connect with their children in the childcare space right now please engage with each other over lunch we're gonna invite you two back to share our first in the community session I just want to highlight a few things before we sign out go on to HowlRound and find the series that was curated this week Nicole Brewer is one of the authors of a piece in there and also Mickey Rowe and Sally Lobel who are incredible artists and they also advocate for theater artists who have disabilities and we talk about interconnected access in PAL and that means creating access that applies to a larger group of people such as more humane work schedules stipends for major life events people who have elder care responsibilities and also PAL is interested in partnering with the National Disability Theater and other advocates to say you know for me as a pregnant woman I went a year knowing that the world was not made for my body and that was just one year and it made me a passionate advocate to say like how are we creating our spaces for people who have mobility that is different than mine so check out interconnected access check out those HowlRound article pieces and also just to speak up for parents who have children with disabilities who aren't able to bring them into the space or bring them into the office even if that's an offer we are going to be hosting forums to have conversations in how to create support if a parent has a child with disabilities because that is a unique circumstance that deserves just as much value and investment so that they can be welcome participants so thank you so much for joining us online enjoy your lunch, connect with each other we're coming back at 1.20 so thank you so much now you can clap, good, yay thank you so much


Hi, welcome to G-Side 10, Geology of the National Parks. This is our section on building mountains, tectonics and building mountains, and we're going to go to the Rocky Mountain National Park in the middle of the continental U.S. Take a look at it. My name is Shridharananda Krishna and I'll be your guide through this part of it. The Rocky Mountain National Parks are an absolutely stunning place. You have to go there. They're very near Denver. You can fly right into Denver, drive up to Boulder, where the University of Colorado is, and some of my colleagues work there, and right there are the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains, and then this magnificent panorama of mountains stretching for thousands of miles, a thousand miles north and south, and hundreds of miles to the east from there, to the west from there, and right up onto the Colorado Plateau. So it's just a beautiful place, a very dramatic setting.  It must have been quite something for those who first saw it. On the map here, you're seeing a map of the western U.S., California, is right off to the west, and then you have Nevada and Utah that make up the so-called Colorado Plateau, Utah and Western Colorado, and then right where that Colorado text is is the edge of the Rocky Mountains. That's where Rocky Mountain National Park is off to the east of that. It's all plains, very flat, lots of corn, soybeans, wheat. It is classic Midwestern plains country. It's nothing like what people imagine Colorado to be. When they think of Colorado, they think of majestic mountains. Eastern Colorado is very flat. It's Western Colorado that has those 12,000 foot mountains, 13,000, 14,000 foot mountains, Pikes Peak, all these amazing places. So all the skiing, when you think of Colorado, most people think of skiing. Well, Eastern Colorado doesn't have it. It's all in the west. We can zoom in a little bit, and you can see the transition from Denver there in the middle, and everything to the east of Denver is all plains country. It's all flat, and you can see as you go to the west from there, you get those dendritic valley patterns, those white snow-capped peaks, all of the complications that always go along with mountains. You get all of these little mountain valleys with little rivers and glaciers in them. Rocky Mountain National Park itself is right here in the front ranges, and you can see the transition there even more dramatically up into the Rocky Mountains, all of the snow-covered peaks. All right, so this is where we're going to take a trip to. Let's go look at some real pictures rather than looking at satellite maps. It's a place it's easy to get to and well worth the visit. Lots of fauna there, lots of critters, birds and mammals of many different kinds. You still have wolves up in there, still have bears up in there, lots of elk and big horned sheep, very common all over the place. Obviously, it's a national park, so hunting is forbidden, and so it's still in very much pristine condition. It is a very popular place. You drive up in there, going to the mountain, going to the Sun Road is one of the roads that goes through there. It's one of the highest roads in the lower 48, it's up to 12,000 feet, and sometimes it's just this solid mass of RVs and campers and pickup trucks and SUVs stretching as far as the eye can see.  Walk for another 10 minutes and 99% of the people will disappear.  I want you to get out and walk and walk for just a little ways, just for half an hour, 45 minutes to experience the solitude and the majesty of Rocky Mountain National Park. All right, here it is. Here's one of these Rocky Mountains, and in the foreground you have a glacially carved lake when the glaciers came down out of the mountains 20,000 years ago. They would have covered this whole area, they would have ripped up this area and pulled up this big hole, and then when the glaciers retreated, water filled in that area and now we have these lakes. There's a whole series of lakes, wherever you have glaciers, you usually have lakes that they leave behind. Glaciers are really good at digging deep holes, and this is one of them. Here's another picture of Usel Lake and looking up at this glacial valley behind it, really a magnificent place. This is up on top of Flattop Mountain. You have this classic alpine landscape, this short scrubby bushes, very hearty little shrubs that manage to eke out a living in the permafrost and the high winds and the cold. The weather can change really dramatically. You start out in the morning and you have blue sky and it's 70 degrees and you get up there and you need a jacket because the storm clouds have come up as they have in this case. This is looking down at a little tarn.  These tarns can be just a few hundred feet across and they have lovely cold water surrounded by all of that glacial marine material around them, a few trees, but not many. This is a very popular road that runs up. There's beaver ponds there in the lower part of it and then behind it a marine, that little ridge that you can see with a little bit of brown material on it and then some trees on top, that's a marine. That's what was left behind by a glacier. Glacier came down, pushed up this material and left that. We'll talk about marines next time, or not next time, but down the road. There's an alluvial fan. This is material that's brought down by rivers and sometimes landslides, just comes down these mountain sides. Lots and lots of flora, lots and lots of fauna. As I said, all of these pictures are available online on Angel. Go and take a look at these virtual field trips, orchids and the classic Rocky Mountain rock, this grayish-colored dark gray and light gray-colored rocks, metamorphic rocks cut through with agonist rocks. We'll talk about what a metamorphic rock is, what an agonist rock is over the course of this class. Let's hop over to the presentation and we'll begin our talk. The Rocky Mountain National Parks Rocky Mountains are a mountain range. They're quite high, 12, 13,000 feet high, but they're in the middle of the continent. They're 15,000, they're 1500 miles from the ocean. Why are they there? We talked about why the Appalachians are here. They're the collision of North America with Africa and Asia 300 million years ago. They created these high mountains. All right, that's straightforward. We talked about why Mount St. Helens is there or why Mount Baker is there or why Lassen Peak or all of those. Those were subduction zone volcanoes. The Cascade Range is a volcanic arc created when oceanic crusts subducted under continental crust. The question is, what's on with the Rocky Mountains? Why are they where they are? The short answer is normally oceanic crust will simply subduct under continental crust. If it's dense enough and cold enough, it'll just go straight down and fall as well. You will get the classic subduction zone situation that we now have in the Pacific Northwest. You'll get trenches and volcanoes. Occasionally, if that subducting oceanic crust is hot enough, if it was only created recently in the last half a million years or million years, it hasn't had a chance to cool off, then it's still buoyant. Remember, hot rocks are buoyant and low density. It's only when they get cold that they want to sink. If that oceanic crust was still hot, buoyant, low density, it would go under the continent, but it wouldn't subduct straight down. As it got pushed off to the side, it would continue to scrape underneath. I'll show you a picture of it here in a minute, but in words, that's what was going on. I grew up in New York City, and this next cartoon perfectly encapsulates my ignorance of this country as I was growing up. This is a very famous New Yorker cover called New Yorker's View of America. You have 9th Avenue, 10th Avenue, all of the buildings in great detail. You have the Hudson River. They might know a little bit of that New Jersey, but then the rest of the continent is just this vast blank space. They might know, oh, there's a few mountains somewhere in the middle, and there's something off on the other coast, and then there's a Pacific Ocean. This is a famous picture of what New Yorkers think of the rest of the country. To be honest, I have to plead guilty to that. When I was in college, I went to school in New York City. I had a friend who had an internship, a summer internship in Denver, and I had another friend who had a summer internship in San Francisco, and the two of them were flying out, and on the last evening as they were ready to go, I said, oh boy, you guys are lucky. The two of you will be able to visit each other on the weekends, and I'm going to be left here all by myself in New York City. The people that I realized at San Francisco and Denver are 1,500 miles apart, and so my ignorance was stunning back then, hopefully in a little bit more now, but there it is. This is our picture of how the Rocky Mountains were made. We think this is what went on with them. This is an animation that's available for you online, but the short answer is that an oceanic ridge, one of these mid-ocean ridges where material is coming up from deep inside the earth, used to be far offshore but was subducted under North America, but because it was so close to the edge of the continent, it's still warm, and because it was still warm, it didn't sink down, and because it didn't sink down, as it scraped along underneath the western U.S., it shoved up the Rockies way, way far inland. So even though subduction is supposed to sink down and only produce mountains at the coast, as we have in the Cascades, in this case, because that subducting slab was still warm, it went along for long ways underneath the continent, shoving up the Rocky Mountains far in the interior, until eventually it got cool enough and it did sink down far deep inside. This is the leading idea for why the Rocky Mountains are where they are and how they were formed. We don't really know. It's a little bit embarrassing to say this, but geologists have a pretty iffy understanding of the Rocky Mountains, but this is the leading idea. This is how science works. We come up with a hypothesis, somebody did. They said, we think this is what's going on. All the evidence seems to support it, but people are still working hard to try and figure out whether that hypothesis meets all the data, or if somebody can find some new data that show, no, that hypothesis is wrong, in which case we'll throw this slide out and we'll put in a new slide. That's the wonderful thing about science is none of these slides are ever carved in stone, if you will. At any time, I could just delete this slide and throw it away because somebody comes up and says, nope, I think that's wrong. As this warm oceanic crust was subducted and slid right underneath North America long, deep, deep under the continent, it shoved up the Rocky Mountains even though they're far, far inland. The Rocky Mountains are made up of something called metamorphic rock. Metamorphic rocks are rocks that have changed from their original form. There are three main types of rocks, sedimentary rocks, which are rocks that are formed when sediments collect and over time those sediments pile up and get cemented together into a more solid mass. Sandstones, limestones, these are all sedimentary rocks. Ignious rocks are another relatively straightforward type of rock. This is when you have molten material that comes up and freezes at the surface of the earth and produces an igneous rock. These are made in volcanic zones. They are basically frozen lava and very frozen magma, very straightforward as well. Metamorphic rocks are the complicated ones. If you take any kind of rock, a sedimentary rock or an igneous rock or another metamorphic rock and you squeeze it hard enough and you heat it long enough, it will change its form and turn into a different kind of rock called a metamorphic rock and where in the world can we find high pressures and high heat deep inside the earth. That's the only place that you can get pressures and heat high enough to cook these rocks and to turn them into metamorphic rocks. Whenever you see a metamorphic rock as we do in the Rocky Mountains and in a few places in the Appalachians, we know that those rocks at one time were deep down inside the planet. You better cut this Eric. I'll give you money. How's that? Keep rolling. Whenever we see metamorphic rocks up at the surface, then we know that those rocks at one time were deep inside the earth, that some kind of rock, either sedimentary rock or an igneous rock, was carried deep down into the planet down to miles and miles, maybe tens of miles down into the earth and at those depths the heat is high enough and the pressures are high enough that the rocks can be cooked and squeezed until they are a different form called metamorphic rocks and then they come back up to the surface. Here's some pictures of these metamorphic rocks, unlike igneous rocks which are more even looking are more regular in their form. These, as you can see, have all of these grains that are growing in them. They've been folded and twisted around because of the huge pressures that squeeze them together and the high temperatures, they can be right overturned and squeezed out like toothpaste, as you can see in the lower one over here. This, by contrast, are two pictures of igneous rock. Andesite, we've talked about andesite quite a bit. Those are the rocks that come up in the Andes Mountains and also in Mount St. Helens and all of these other subduction zone volcanoes. Pele's hair is a type of igneous rock that you find in Hawaii where you have the hotspot type of volcanism. Very different looking and very different chemically than metamorphic rocks. So why are these metamorphic rocks at the surface? As I said, the only way to form these rocks is deep inside the earth. You've got to take them, sink them down miles into the earth where the heat is high, where the pressures are high, you cook them and squeeze them and they turn into metamorphic rocks. So what are they doing up at the surface? In fact, what are they doing up at 12,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains? How'd they get way up there? And that has to do with isostasy. Deeper rocks rise up because of isostasy. So we're going to go to the drawing board here and take a look at isostasy again. Remember what isostasy was? This is a cross section of a mountain. So this is trees here and this is the very top of the mountain. If you were standing at the top of the mountain and you were to start to drill a hole down through it, you would go part of the way down and you would be at the surface of the, at what's the equivalent of the surface of the earth. But you wouldn't be to the bottom of the continental crust. The continental crust continues on under there and in fact it continues way, way down into these deep roots. So all of these mountains that stick up high have these deep continental roots underneath them because of the requirement of isostasy. You have to have the same mass of material above you at any point to have equal pressures. So if you imagine, if you imagine a line somewhere deep down in here, the amount of weight above you, the amount of weight above you is the same anywhere along that red line. That's the principle of isostasy. If you're over here, the amount of weight above you is the same as if you were in the middle of the continental crust over there. But because continental material is less dense, crustal material is less dense than mantle material, you need more of it. Remember that. If you want to have the same weight of two things but one is more dense and one is less dense, then you need more of that less dense material. You need more volume of it to get the same weight. And that's what these roots and this mountain above allow you to have is you have the same weight above you but because the continental crust is less dense, you have to have more of it which means you need a mountain rising up and the roots going down. So that's the principle of isostasy. It's a little bit subtle but I encourage you to go and read this section in the book on this because it's an important notion. But let's see what happens as we erode this mountain. Imagine if you will, a metamorphic rock that has been formed inside this continental root, this black blob here represents the metamorphic rock and we're going to somehow, we have to somehow bring that to the surface. How do we do that? The way we're going to do it is we're going to do it by analogy. We're going to go and look at iceberg. And iceberg is very much like a mountain and a mountain root. And there is an animation online that represents this and I'll just do it very briefly here and then we'll understand how it is that you can bring up this metamorphic rock to the surface. Imagine if you will, an ocean and floating in that ocean you have an iceberg. Ice should be white. It's a little hard for me to draw a white iceberg against a white paper here. So we're going to make it black. The blue obviously represents the ocean. Blue is always ocean. Okay, so here we have our iceberg floating in the ocean. Because of isostasy, a little bit of it, some of it is above the ocean, about one-tenth, and most of it is under the ocean, about nine-tenths of it. And that's because water and ice have almost the same density. So if I need to have the same weight of material above me, I only need a little bit extra ice. I can go over here. I can draw my same line that I did before. I can go here. I can figure out the weight of water above me. I can go to the same point in the iceberg, and I've got to have the same weight of stuff above me. That's the principle of isostasy. And I only need a little bit extra ice, but I do need that extra ice. And so I need about a tenth more ice because the density of ice is only a little bit less than the density of water. And so I need a little bit more ice to get the same weight, the same total weight of stuff above me. So that's isostasy once again. But let's see how this helps us with bringing metamorphic rocks to the surface. Same picture, ocean, iceberg. But this time, for the sake of argument, I'm going to introduce a space alien into this. We're going to take a space alien and imagine that a long time ago a space alien crashed into Antarctica and got trapped in this iceberg, and more snow fell on it, and more snow, and more snow. And eventually, somewhere down deep inside this iceberg, we have a space alien. Big eyes, antenna, stuck inside this iceberg. Stuck inside this iceberg. How can we get this space alien out? Well, it's going to happen naturally anyway. Why? Because as the top of the iceberg melts, the iceberg has to bob up to replace it. Let's follow that through. Let's do a little thought experiment. Let's say I could magically take everything that's above water and simply slice it off and cart it away. So we're going to just take everything above water and slice it off and cart it away. This is what we would be left with, and the space alien would be stuck down in here. Same as before. Nothing's changed, except that because of isostasy, this is unstable. That iceberg will want to naturally bob up. It has to, because at any given depth, the weight has to be the same above that spot. And in this situation, the weight here is more than the weight here. Water is more dense than ice, and so if you have the same amount of water and ice, then the ice has less total weight. So what happens next is that the iceberg bobs up in the water a little bit. Remember, what we did is we just sliced off magically everything above water. Iceberg bobs up and the space alien who is embedded in here also bobs up with that. Let's do it again. Let's once again slice off everything that's above water. I'm going to erase this ocean and once again we slice off everything above water and the iceberg would bob up again like this, and the space alien would now be at the surface. I hope you understand that that's an analogy. You don't really have space aliens in the Antarctic ice, although according to the X-files we do, that was a terrible movie by the way, but nevertheless, it did posit the presence of space aliens in the Antarctic ice. What we do, however, have is that the Rocky Mountains have blobs of metamorphic rock deep inside them, and erosion slices off the top. So erosion comes along and erosion removes the top of the mountain. And in the same way that the iceberg popped up, the roots of the Rocky Mountains also pop up. So after erosion removes the top, you end up with the Rocky Mountains rising up again and the metamorphic rock along with them. The mountains as a whole are smaller, but the metamorphic rock is at the surface, or nearer to the surface. So in much the same way that glaciers can bring up these supposed space aliens with them, metamorphic rocks come up. The idea of the metamorphic rocks is a little bit more well supported than that of the space aliens. We're going to hop back to the PowerPoint here for a second, and then we'll wrap up this session. The rock cycle is something that is fundamental to geology. All of the rock rocks on the surface of the planet have been cycled and recycled and brought up. And erosion will take sedimentary rocks and it will produce sediment, which will turn into sedimentary rocks, and then subduction will carry that down. And then that rock will come back up again either as an igneous rock or as a metamorphic rock, and then it will get eroded again and produce sedimentary rock. And so this whole rock cycle says that we're always recycling all of our material on the surface, and we have to work out their history by coming up with these clever ideas and these hypotheses. To summarize there are three types of rocks, igneous rock formed by melting and solidification of magma, sedimentary rocks formed by erosion of other rocks, and then cementing them together, and finally metamorphic rocks formed by the cooking of rocks. So that's the end of this part of tectonics. We've learned about building mountains, about how you can build them at pull apart boundaries, at push together boundaries, and at slide past boundaries. Next time we'll move on to new material.


Spain evacuated its diplomatic personnel and citizens as well as other EU and Latin American citizens from Sudan, the Spanish Foreign Minister said on April 23. The Spanish Air Force planes have just taken off from cartoon carrying our citizens and diplomats. Other EU and Latin American nationals also on board, Jose Manuel Alvarez tweeted. We reiterate the call for a ceasefire and resumption of dialogue in Sudan. On April 24 Spanish, the Spanish Defense Ministry said the evacuation was completed successfully as the military plane arrived in Djibouti for a stopover before flying to Madrid. Around 200 members of Spanish armed forces took part in the operation, the ministry said.


But y'all was touring, listen, pop, right? Rest in peace with pop, man. How was them studio sessions with pop, man? Y'all was like, how was it, man?  We like listen to songs. Like for example, if I made a song today, we listen to that motherfucker for like three days and just be stuck on that motherfucker. Every day we come in, we just listen to that motherfucker, right? When this nigga came, he changed the whole strip around. It was like, nigga, pull this song up. And everybody in the studio, he like, all right. I got four verses. Start writing, nigga, start writing. He going in, bus, you bus, you bus, song is done. Don't even listen to it. Pull the next track up. I got three verses on this because I'm doing one, I'm a lead two for y'all. Who won't slump, nigga's bus?   That was tight. You all in there, you out. Boom. Next song, we'll listen to it tomorrow. Nigga do like three, four songs. And then he come back and listen after the engineers fine tune it and move it around.  Like when you record and I record, you know, we just be listening. We don't wanna hear that. How long did it take that all I was on me to get done?  They did half of that motherfucker in like two weeks. When he got out, Daz was working on a dog father.  Get that nigga everything. So it went from dog father to him taking all of the ammunition and giving it to all the pot. And Cuzz went to work. That nigga pot was on it. He was on it. He was on it. It was one beat that I had that was a DJ pool beat.  Wham, wham, wham, boom, boom. All the niggas on there rapping. Do, do, do, do, do, do. I'm like, damn, that's my beat.  Like, you know what I'm saying? That gangsta party though. That gangsta party.  What's rock the hardest work that you ever was in the studio with?  He be smoking regular weed.    I think I smoke regular. I think Park was probably the fastest, most efficient nigga I ever worked with in the studio. A lot of niggas take a long time, you know that. Yeah, absolutely.   You took all that time for this.  For real.