Good morning, once again can I have your attention please, good morning, right we have been talking about mechanism of the production of speech sounds in natural languages and we have seen that we have a very versatile vocal apparatus that can produce a different variety of or a large variety of different kinds of sounds. We also saw that all speech sounds can be classified into two large classes, one class is called vowels and the other class is called consonants. Vowels and consonants differ phonetically in a very significant manner, all vowels are voiced, oral and unobstructed that is not the case with all consonants, consonants may or may not be voiced, may or may not be oral, may or may not be obstructed and even if they are obstructed or not obstructed the release of obstruction and articulation differs. We also saw that we describe vowels in different languages according to whether they are produced from the front of the mouth or from the back of the mouth, whether in their production jaws are closed or open, whether lips are rounded or unrounded. On the other hand we saw that consonants will have to be described by a different parameter, consonants require three term level of a different kind, we ask and say whether they are voiced or voiceless where is obstruction, the place of obstruction or place of articulation and the manner and release of obstruction, what are the three things we look at in the description of consonants, please close your eyes and tell me, voiced or voiceless, place of obstruction or articulation and manner of obstruction or articulation. Once again please tell me what are the three term levels for consonants, number one, voiced or voiceless, number two, number three, manner of obstruction. Let us apply it to the English language because you know fortunately or unfortunately that is the only language you and I and all of us here know, so let us take examples from English, these are the sounds in English. Let us try and describe, say for example, do not say pa, just say pa, a should not come in your articulation, otherwise a will make it voiced, if you say pa then it is voiced, but if you just say pa is not voiced, so this is, now is it voiced or voiceless, voiceless, where is the place of obstruction, both lips, so bilabial, I have said bilabial and then then what is the manner of release of obstruction, sudden, sudden explosion, so it is called plosive, there is a please write, there is a large class of sounds, consonant sounds known as, what is the characteristic of plosive sounds, all plosive sounds are produced with total obstruction, please write and sudden release of obstruction, all plosive speech sounds, no matter which language they are in, we in Indian languages, many Indian languages also have lots of plosive sounds, all plosive sounds are produced with number one, total obstruction somewhere in the oral passage and sudden release of obstruction, that is why they are called plosive, English has three pairs of plosive, six, what are they, first is what, how do we describe it, it is voiceless, bilabial, plosive, so pa as in pin, next is ba, what is it, ba, okay, make it plosive, do not add a ba, how do we describe it, this is voiced or voiceless, put your finger here, ba and just you see the difference, okay, is it voiced or voiceless, voiced, where is the place of obstruction, lips, both lips, so bilabial, what is the manner of release, sudden, therefore it is plosive, so we have voiced, bilabial, plosive, ba as in bin, next as in tin, okay, don't say ta, see ta, just you know, just release, take the tip of your tongue, take the tip of your tongue to the, take the tip of your tongue here, you know, take the tip of your tongue to the alveolar ridge, above the upper teeth, let there be full contact and release it suddenly, that is what you get, okay, how do we describe it, is it voiced or voiceless, it is voiceless, where is the place of obstruction, alveolar ridge, therefore we call it alveolar, and what is the manner of release of obstruction, is plosive, go to next, okay, can you find your own example rather than copy mine, in English word as in, write your own, no this is mine, take, find your own English as 599,000 other words, okay, find your own example, as in, write, now how do you describe it, it is voiced or voiceless, voiced, where is the place of obstruction, okay, lovely, and what is the manner of release of obstruction, plosive, then the next pair of sounds in English is back of the tongue, look at the process, back of the tongue here, you know, this rises and touches the soft palate, otherwise you cannot see, okay, back of the tongue rises and touches the soft palate, flow of air is totally blocked, no air can pass through this passage is blocked and you suddenly release it and you get, okay, do not add ah, do not say ka, just take the back of your tongue to the soft palate, let there be total contact and suddenly release it, the sound you get is ka, as in, give me your own word, ka, it, as in, king, as in, okay, now right, is it voiced or voiceless, voiceless, where is the place of obstruction, back of the tongue, or vealum, therefore vealer, you know, whereas we said alveolar for ta, this is vealer, okay, what is the manner of release of obstruction, plosive, lovely, you know, as in, give, give me your example, good, get, go, okay, right, is it voiced or voiceless, void, fairly mechanical, you know, you can, you can say it anywhere, voiced, what is the place of articulation, vealer and plosive, okay, come to another class of sounds, you might recall in the last class I told you that there are some sounds which belong to the class called africates, in this class of sounds, in this class of speech sounds, there is total obstruction, but gradual release, plosive sounds, total obstruction, in the plosive class of sounds, there is total obstruction, but sudden release, whereas in africates, we have total obstruction, but what shall we say, gradual release, gradual release, so you know, you have something like a friction, not exact friction, but something like friction, that is why it is called africate, you know, that is why it is called africate, friction like, you have words, for example, you have sounds like in English, not in our languages, most of the, most in most Indian languages, cha cha is plosive, you know, we do not say cha cha, we do not say cha cha, you know, this is how those people who go to English school, you know, when their Telugu becomes anglicized, they do not say bagunara, they say bagunara, you know, they looks like they are speaking American, you know, but smart people speak Telugu like Telugu and American like, complete the sentence please, American, so you know, in our languages, cha cha, cha cha is plosive, but in English they do not say church, they say church, what do they say?  Please write, this is the symbol and you know, by the way, as a footnote, I hope you have acquired the ability to recognize and write phonetic alphabet, am I right, because in the quiz, I am going to give you some text in phonetic alphabet and I will ask you to write it in normal English orthography, okay, please, so do have some practice, at least begin writing your name, okay, your SMS to your worst enemy in IPA symbols, right, please write it, so what is it, this is ch, as in chin, have your own example, do not use my example, please, English word, take an English word, yeah, as in cheek or as in chick, chicken, okay, right, okay, now is it voiced or voiceless, put your finger here and just say, you see, I am just not interested in describing English, I am, my sole job is the institute has told me, please, produce some two dozen good phoneticians, okay, so feel it here, keep your finger here and say, do you hear any vibration, okay, now say, do you hear any vibration, that is it, so is it voiced or voiceless, ch, voiceless, ch, is it, where is the place of obstruction, palate, hard palate, therefore you call it palatal, not palatial, palatal, okay, and what is the manner of release of obstruction, friction like, therefore we call it africate, so three term level here is voiceless, palatal, africate, okay, next, write the symbol, okay, take your own word, I have given you ju, okay, is it voiced or voiceless, voiced, palatal, africate, okay, now I am going to make your life a little more difficult than this, I am not going to show you any slides just now, we will come to it later, let us take this sound, I will give you the name later, let us look at this sound, write the symbol as in English word, as in English word, okay, how is it produced, is produced in the following manner, look at the diagram, look at the organs of articulation, you know lower lip comes close to but does not touch the upper teeth, are we together, are you with me please, yes I do not know, some people in the Kanyakumari region seem to be away from me please, are we together, lovely, that is good to hear that, okay, lower lip comes close to the upper teeth but does not touch it, okay, right, please produce this sound, do not say, do not add other, do not say fa, just any vibration here, is it voiced or voiceless, voiceless, please write, where is the place of obstruction, there is, you know, the passage in narrow, there is friction and you hear the friction, you hear, okay, so where is the place of obstruction between lip and teeth, so the Latin word for lip and teeth would be labio, labio dental, what is the manner of release, because there is no total obstruction, there is production only with friction, so we say, fricative, when it was friction like, then it was affricate but when it is, it is complete friction, then it is a fricative, what do we call it, entire class please, what is this word, it is not fricative, it is fricative, what is it, fricative, once again, what is it, fricative, okay, so now we have got the three term level for it, what is it, it is voiceless, labio dental, fricative, tell me, what is it, voiceless, labio dental, fricative, okay, let us look at another word, as in, now feel it, you know, feel it here, is it voiced or voiceless, voiced, labio dental, fricative, correct, let us take the next pair, so we call the third, not the third class, you know, the third type, okay, third class in India gives very bad impression, you know, looks like, I think you were not around when Indian railway trains have third class compartment, have you seen, no, you have only seen second class and fourth class, there was, you know, when I was your age, there used to be in Indian railways third class compartment but some socialist minister removed it and put half, about six inches of cushion, not six inches, fewer, some cushion on it, okay, so let us not call it third class, let us call it third type, third type of consonants are called, what are they called, please give me the, pronounce it, what is it called, fricative, not fricative, many of us in India pronounce it as fricative, it is not fricative, it is fricative, what is it, fricative, okay, let us look at the next example, look at the symbol carefully, you know it very well but please remember it, what is that, theta, okay, as in kin, thick, theory, through, thought, think, okay, what happens is, you know, English is the only language known to phoneticians, English is about the only language which has this sound, in our languages we produce th, with complete contact between tip of the tongue here, between tip of the tongue and upper teeth, you know tip of the tongue rests on the upper teeth and then we say th, the, the, the, the, not in English, in English what happens is, there is slight parting, no contact between the two rows of teeth, there is opening there and tip of the tongue goes close to it but does not touch it and then you say, say it, slight opening between the two rows of teeth, let the tip of the tongue go close to it and say, please come, okay, produce this, how do we describe it, is it voiced or voiceless, voiceless, where is the place of articulation, where is the place of articulation between two rows of teeth, so we will call it inter-dental, inter-dental, okay, is it produced with or without friction, is it produced with or without friction, with friction, therefore it is fricative, let us look at next, okay, this is very easy, you see, for Europeans, Greek and Sanskrit is the source language for technical terminology, most of the time, like we draw from Sanskrit, they draw from Greek and Latin, okay, so as in, as in this, that, where, those, these, breathe, breathe, breathe okay, with, right, feel it here, keep your finger here and say, opening between teeth, don't say da, da is our language, you know, tip of the tongue touches the back of the upper teeth and then we get da, we say ta, ta, da, da, but in English, there is opening between the two rows of teeth and the tip of the tongue goes close to that opening, but does not touch it, then produce, do it, so easy, you know, right, is it voiced or voiceless, voiced, same inter-dental, fricative, look at the next symbol, very, very easy, what is this, as in sip, sin, sit, sat, okay, as in sip, sin, sit, sat, you know, lots of words, this, okay, miss, right, so what shall we say, as in, I am sorry, I, I am sorry, please pardon me, I made a very stupid mistake, I did not write the example here, it should be, sorry, I am sorry, sorry, this and we are writing example first, as in sit, okay, underline it, is it voiced or voiceless, is voiceless, place of articulation, place of articulation, no, when you say, feel it, the tip of your tongue, actually the blade of your tongue rises towards the alveolar ridge, okay, there is slight expansion of the blade of the tongue, when you say, slight expansion of the blade of the tongue and it rises towards the alveolar ridge, here is your tongue, okay, is it your tongue, I guess, there is slight expansion of the blade, moves upward, moves upward towards the alveolar ridge and you get, is it voiced or voiceless, is voiceless, where is the place of obstruction, near the alveolar ridge, so we call it alveolar, is it produced with or without friction, is it produced with or without friction, with friction, so we call it fricative, this is, as we had, this is, feel it here, voiced or voiceless, voiced, very obvious, as in, zipped, voiced, everything else remains the same, feel it here, I am giving you a challenging example now, okay, this is, as in, as in sheep, sh-e-e-p, sheep or sh-i-p, ship, the symbol is like an s which has been pulled, okay, stretched, as in, ship, voiced or voiceless, voiceless, place of articulation, place of articulation, place of articulation, place of articulation, no, it's, you feel it, you see, don't be misled by terminology, feel it, you see, it's the blade of your tongue, keep producing this sound, keep producing, shh, it's the blade of your tongue which moves upwards towards the front of the palate, it moves upwards, shh, it's almost the middle of the tongue or the blade of the tongue which moves upwards towards the heart palate, you see, here, somewhere, okay, there is no close contact but there is extremely narrow passage, so that you have friction, you say shh, okay, many of us in, you know, I, in, in my part of the country, I come from North Bihar, so many people in Nepal, North Bihar, Vanaras region, Eastern Uttar Pradesh, that is, Assam and Urissa, we don't produce shh, we say sir, we don't speak English, we say English, so there is difference, you know, these two things come from two different places, lots of people have, you know, variations, if you go to Bengal, in Bengal you don't have shh, for that also they say shh, so they don't take a sip of tea, they take a sip of tea, you know, they don't take rasagulla, they say rasagulla, okay, you know, each region has its peculiarity but where does the peculiarity come from, peculiarity comes from difference in the manner of articulation, place of articulation, so where is the place of articulation in this case, the blade of the tongue rises towards palate or hard palate and then, you know, there is friction, so what shall we write it, voiceless, now give me the term, palatal, lovely, if there is a young phonetician award, I will recommend your name for it, okay, voiceless, palatal, what will be the third term, fricative, please write, okay, in English we also have a voiced counterpart for this word, Urdu and French have lots of words but in English we have, please note the symbol, please mark it, this is shh, as in pleasure, P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E, pleasure or measure, M-E-A-S-U-R-E, measure, okay, or laser, L-E-I-S-U-R-E, laser, pleasure, you know, a whole lot of words where S comes between, you know, vowels and is voiced, okay, so this is, as in, laser, okay, is it voiced or voiceless, voiced, palatal, fricative, okay, this is a large class of words in English, in our Indian languages, you know, in many Indian languages we don't have so many fricatives but English has, English has lots of them, there is one more, how many did we get, we already got eight, right, English has one more, and I'll write it here, English has, let me try and write it here, can you capture it please, okay, what is this, don't say ha, just say, no voicing, okay, it is not H, it is, okay, voiced or voiceless, as in, voiced or voiceless, please, the class, my friend on the last bench, please, voiceless, then what is the place of articulation, pharynx, therefore, adjective of pharynx would be pharyngeal, please write, pharyngeal, P-H-P-H-A-R-Y-N-G-E-A-L, and of course, fricative, this is voiceless, pharyngeal, fricative, okay, let's go to the next class, are we together, are we together, are you with me, is it becoming too difficult to understand, please be frank, okay, then I will give you some entertainment, commercial break, is it okay, shall we continue, shall we take a commercial break, okay, we'll take a commercial break, I will give you the three term level and you will write the symbol, please write the symbol, close your eyes, don't look into your friend's notebook, don't look into your own notebook either, and with closed eyes, write the symbol, okay, let me see how many, this is a party game, you see, best of learning has happened when you give a test to yourself, okay, did you have an end semester examination in cycle riding, or in quiz in eating, and we have learned all of these skills, okay, how to do this, how to do hair, you know, how to shave, all of these things, so give yourself a test, I will tell you the three term level and you will write the symbol, okay, ready, okay, write, bilingual, sorry, voiced, bilabial, plosive, write the symbol, write the symbol, I will come to your notebook, I will check, don't worry, is it this, voiced, bilabial, plosive, is it this, you got full marks, okay, next, listen carefully and do it, you see, this is the best way to learn some of these things, through tests, through questioning, checking, making connections, you know, suddenly you see, I am being cruel with you, suddenly I am asking your brain to take 44 new terms and 44 into 3, okay, so you know, so many new terms and terminology, I am asking you to write, so if you don't remember, it is not your fault, it is my fault, I am expecting too much from you, but the point is, this is life, we have to live, we have to survive, how do we do it, we do it by growing up, by taking more, by retaining it, how shall we retain it, these are the ways, tests, so you have, how many people passed this test, those who passed, those who failed, please don't raise your hands, those who passed this test, lovely, this time I want the entire class to pass, please listen carefully and do it, voiced, palatal, africate, okay, so you give me the symbol, write it on your notebook and then check with fine, don't liquid to others notebook, voiced, palatal, africate, please don't look at the board, don't look at anything, write the symbol on your notebook, okay, now check with me, is it this, did you get it, how many people got it, 2, 3, 4, my God, please don't tell my director, I will lose my job, you say at this age, if you can't get even 10 people to learn your subject, I should better get rid of you, God it's pity, are you guys, did you guys not sleep well last night, sorry, I wish I also had quiz, then you would have remembered, okay, now I will do one thing, okay, I will make it easier for you, I will write the symbol and I will expect you to have the three-term level, is that okay, sure, lovely, let's do it, give me three-term level, write on your notebook, don't mistake, please write, I will give it and then you check with mine, check against mine, okay, now please check, voiceless, did you get it, raise your hands those who got it, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, not bad, okay, get it right, both ways, you must have the two-way connection, symbol to description, description to symbol, two examples, I am going to give you quiz like this for your end semester examination, please and don't curse me if you get 0 on 30 or if you get 31 on 30, okay, then tell me, I will give you a cake or something, shall we continue, commercial break over, okay, let's go to the next class, sorry, okay, we will continue with this tomorrow and I will expect you to describe Telugu consonants, please can you bring it to the classroom, okay, the description so that we can share it with one another, also get, can I have your attention, please, also get symbols and the terminology, right, thank you, have a good day.


Hello, everybody, and welcome. It is 1.01 PM and time for the very first episode of Vision, a show peering into the trends, ideas, and disruptions affecting the future of our democracy. My name is Sam Gill. I'm the chief program officer and senior vice president at the Knight Foundation. And I am delighted to be guiding you on this incredible journey during an incredible and unprecedented time into some of the most vexing issues. Over the next few weeks, we're going to be focusing on a very particular disruption. And that is the infodemic that has been accompanying the coronavirus pandemic. And we're going to be talking to a number of experts, thinkers, and innovators about how we can sort of flatten the curve to use the vernacular of the moment on this infodemic. I am delighted to introduce our very first guest for our first episode, Jevin West. Jevin is an associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. He has been all over the news fighting misinformation about COVID-19. Wired called him one of the professors calling BS. This is an FCC approved show calling BS on COVID-Miss Info. I am absolutely delighted to welcome to join us Jevin West from the University of Washington. Jevin, great to see you. How are you? Thanks, Sam.  I think you are muted. Oh, am I muted? Because I can hear my. This is a classic episode one of a COVID-era webcast. No, folks can hear you. OK, good. All right, so this is a first up. This is a true first episode, as you say. All right, I can hear you now. OK, perfect. Episode one foyable. Well, it's very good to have you here. 265 people with us live right now. I assume dozens of them are digital propagandists from Russia and China, eager to see their work celebrated. And we will not disappoint them. Jevin, I actually, I don't want to start talking about COVID, because I think in so many ways, you were really built for this moment. This is a question that you've been thinking about for a long time. Tell us a little bit about the work that you've been doing on the type of issue that we're dealing with, which is the way in which misinformation or misinterpretation of scientific technical information is so easy in our era. Yeah, I mean, I'll start with some of my colleagues, just because I think this is a team effort for sure. And when I look to my colleagues in our new center here that you supported, and we're very, very thankful of, the Knight Foundation has made this happen. When I look at Kate Starbird or Emma Spiro, who are colleagues that sit next to me virtually and also physically in office space, they've been thinking about this for over a decade. Not just misinformation, but misinformation during crisis events. There's something special about crisis events that sort of really allow disinformation and disinformation to really explode. So they've been thinking about this, basically their entire career. And I get to sit next to them and think about all the work they've done in their career to set them up for this particular crisis. And then me personally, I mean, my colleague Carl Bergstrom and I have been thinking a lot about how the new world in which we live, both in our professional lives and science, this is the one thing I care a lot about, and also just in our personal lives with information just flooding into our brains at rates that are just way too much for one human brain. We wanted to figure out if we could sort of, teach the public and ourselves actually, how to become better information consumers when everything is just coming at us in many different forms. It comes in forms of in data. Of course, people all talk about fake news and all the different ways in which media can be distorted. But it's generally just trying to improve, all of us as information consumers. What's the, I guess one thing I wanna ask though is, what is it that's changed? I mean, technical information has existed for a long time. It probably was scrutinized more closely in a less democratic setting for a long time in the hands of experts like you. But is what's changed something about the kinds of information decisions we're making or is what has changed the means of dissemination? Is this an information problem or an internet problem? The problem of BS? You know, I think it's both. And so let me give you a specific example. So there's a lot of talk about synthetic media, deep fakes. And I've been talking to students and people in our research group about this because we're gonna have a workshop on this pretty soon. And for a lot of people that have never heard of deep fakes, they assume that's a new thing. That's actually not a new thing. A lot of the technology and the ability to manipulate videos and audio files and any form of information has been around. If you spend enough time, you know, in the early 2000s, you could have created some of the deep fakes that we're seeing. It was just taken a long time. The difference is that it's almost been commoditized. I mean, you can, anyone for a very small amount of money, we found out literally yesterday that it costs about $2 an hour to pay someone to create you a deep fake and it takes them about five or six hours. A deep fakes, just for our audience here, deep fakes is a video that is doctored to put, to have someone, so that it looks like Barack Obama's saying whatever you want him to say. But it's been created by someone in a laboratory, effectively, on a computer. That's right. Thanks for the clarity sound. And actually, we're gonna do a survey to see how many people are familiar with those because I think it will be an issue in the election. But with that particular example, we've had the technology. It's been around, it's that it's now cheaper to put together, almost anyone can put it together. You know, the actual seamlessness of the videos and the audio files are better. And so I see that more broadly in the information landscape. That we've had propagandists, we've had opportunists, we've had people that were, you know, at the time doing disinformation campaigns, that's the kind of term that we're using now. But that's been around forever too. What's changed is sort of the volume of information, the velocity, I'm almost sounding like I'm giving up a pitch deck for a Silicon Valley company. But it's the speed at which things are changing. And also the ways in which we can automate misinformation. So I think the ability for me to write a bunch of scripts in the time that we're gonna have this discussion, I could deploy, you know, a thousand bucks to say whatever I want, sort of thing. I mean, not to that, you know, it would take a little longer than that.  Cause I think an important question here is, is the technology actually working the way it's supposed to? And the problem is that in enabling a high scale, high volume network with no friction, it's made us more vulnerable. I wanna come back to that question though. I also, 250 for idea, I mean, I feel like I could be using this technology to better effect in my, like, you're a great guest, but I'm just thinking like, what kinds of guests could we have? That's right. At those, at we could afford those rates. We've invested most of it in the microphone. But before we go to the next question, I do just wanna let our audience know we've now got over 300 people, which is fantastic. You can send us questions. Use the Q and A in your Zoom panel. You can tweet hashtag night live. You can use Facebook live. We've got people who are watching the questions. They'll be sending them to me and we'll make sure to get some of your questions answered as well. So, Jeff, let's, you know, we've been talking big picture. Now let's talk about COVID. You know, what is the InfoDevick that we're hearing so much about in relation to COVID-19? What is it, where is it coming from? Well, to link to the last thing that we were talking about, I don't think InfoDevick is anything new in COVID. I mean, we've seen this kind of situation with other crisis events, but of course the volume of chatter online and just everywhere in the world is much higher for COVID. So the amount of misinformation that's being created is a big enough deal that an international organization like the World Health Organization says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. As damaging as the virus itself can be, the misinformation around this can also be quite damaging. And so we need to really invest a lot of effort into countering this, working with the tech world, working with the researchers, working with governments because it's to the point where it's affecting people's health behavior. I mean, there are examples of the person that drank fish tank because they thought hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment. And so people are changing their behavior based on things they're getting and it's also affecting public policy. So I mean, it's, I don't wanna equate the misinformation, viruses or infections I guess to overuse the metaphor, but it is something that can be just almost as damaging as the biological virus itself. So let's break it down a little bit. What are some of the most common categories of misinformation that you're seeing in relation to COVID and how do they appear? Most of us probably aren't running into this. Too many of us are clearly. So what is it, what might I see on Facebook or in Twitter? What are some of the common things that are coming up? Well, first of all, I want to note this. I think most of the rumors that start and the ones that we track from their origin all the way to cascades on Twitter and Facebook are generally honest to goodness ideas that people might have that they wanna share with their friends, with their family, their people's, their health's at stake. And so they care a lot about it. But there are those kinds of conspiracies like 5G weakening your immune system and sort of the root of all this coronavirus to COVID-19 being a bio weapon engineered in various different labs to, just to the many elixirs that have been promised as fixes to this. I think what we see most often when we track this at the population level, at the level of 500 million tweets, we see common patterns in prescriptive advice on what to do, on the origins of the virus. I think the ones that are probably the most damaging are the ones that sort of claim that they are the new, it's the new treatment for COVID. Those are the ones that scare me the most. So what are you doing about it? How are you, I like, I hope many, and we sent them all to it, read the Wired article and thought, I know that guy, but can one person really start to rein in this spread of misinformation? What is it, what do we need to do now? We can talk about what we need to do in the future, but what do we need to do right now to limit what I hear you saying as the potential for actual fatalities as a result, maybe not the main cause, but a indirect cause of fatality being people getting incorrect information that leads to bad choices. For sure, and there's no way that myself or my colleagues can do all that. I mean, my colleague, Carl Berksram, has been really on the front line because he spent 10 years of his life studying infectious diseases, and now he's spent the last five, 10 years also thinking about misinformation. So I look to my colleagues as people that truly are on the front lines, but what can we do, everyone on this call, all 323 people on the call right now? I think the best thing that we can do is be good information consumers ourselves to do a little bit of sourcing, to be that fact checker, to be that journalist, to talk to our librarians and our teachers. I mean, the best thing that we can do in our center, I see the center that we have, and it's a big team effort. There's so many people I wish I had time to talk about all the great things that they're doing, but I think that the things that we can do is provide resources for those that are truly on the front lines. For those, whether it's the medical officials talking about the virus itself and about what to do to teachers, librarians, journalists, I think it's putting, we can throw laws and we can even throw some automation and technology at it, but I just think that the best thing that we can do is just be a little bit more careful at this time. Also, I mean, it sounds so simplistic, but it's trying to slow down a little bit and we're in this fast lane now and science is being pulled into the fast lane too, and science is not comfortable in the social media fast line because it makes a lot of mistakes and in turn can affect- But regular people never make mistakes in the social media fast lane. I appreciate you drawing that distinction. I got, let me push back on you though. I'm looking out in a general sense, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we need to be smart, reasonable information consumers and that maybe requires some new skills in the 21st century. In a general sense, I think I come from the school that says a really effective regulatory regime has good laws, good private actor participation and good behavior. Autosafety is a good example of this. You've got speed limits and some basic rules about safety. You've got auto manufacturers making safety equipment available and then you and I need to put our seatbelt in and we need to get trained and we need to commit to following the rules. So in a general sense, I'm specific, but I kind of wanna play devil's advocate because earlier you pointed out such a critical source of misinformation here are well intentioned people who are asking questions that turn into assertions and they're asking questions that turn into assertions in platforms, on technology platforms that as you sort of jokingly pointed out we're basically pitched on the idea that they take an enormous amount of friction out of communication, that they allow an idea to spread to a lot of people really quickly to build communities of affinity around people who are like-minded who might have the same vulnerabilities, the same fears, the same aspirations. I think it's interesting that treatments is a huge category of misinformation. That's a hopeful category of misinformation. You're trying to get better. You're trying to protect yourself and your family. So are we, is the lesson here we need to become more social media literate or is the lesson here that there is a limit to what individual media literacy is gonna do in a time of crisis? Now, I think it's a good pushback because sometimes I am a little pollyannish about what media literacy can do. It's still the thing I'm putting so much of my effort towards, but there may be a limit to what media literacy can do because we're all vulnerable. As something that we talk about in the center, people are vulnerable from K1 to K99. And that may just be a limit of human cognition. That may be a limit now that we've sort of set up that there's just the only thing that we maybe can do is change some infrastructure. Maybe we can change some norms. I know about seatbelts. I mean, you use seatbelts as an example. I think, you know, there was a time, I remember when I was a kid, we didn't wear seatbelts. I was sitting in the back trunk in a Volkswagen bug when you could actually sit in the trunk where, and you didn't wear a seatbelt, but pretty soon it became almost embarrassing. If you sat in someone's car and you didn't put your seatbelt on. And so maybe we can get to the point where it's embarrassing, like to create almost, I don't wanna go so far as to say it's shame, but really to make it so it's socially awkward to sort of brag about sending something that you didn't bet or whatever. I mean, even thinking like we have these national groups that get together and talk about things that just can't be done in wars. Well, maybe we shouldn't be having, maybe we should talk about, you know, purposely disinforming entire societies should be something maybe not to the level of biological warfare, but getting up there. Well, I think that's interesting idea. So that you're here now, I think, I hear you referring to some of the signs we're seeing that state actors, if not originating some of this content are amplifying it. And am I correct in hearing you saying that we should think about that as potentially being conduct that violates international norms? Yes, I would love to see that. And I know that some will say, well, we can't even have time to get the international leaders to talk about things that like nuclear proliferation and biological warfare. How are we gonna get them to talk about this? But I think it is up there in terms of the damage that can be done to people and just societies. So, you know, in my perfect world, I would say when things calm down, let's have a discussion with leaders around disinformation, purposeful intent, you know, misinformation that's intended to deceive just to just make people be confused and have no trust in any other system except their own brain. Now, I wanna ask you another regulatory question that is at this nexus, but it's a more direct regulator. We're getting a lot of questions about, you know, whether the big platforms are doing better than in the past at directing people toward quality information. And I wanna actually, I think this is a really important question I wanna talk about, but I wanna put a bit of a spin on it, which is directing toward what? And I think this raises the question of we're not, we don't enter COVID-19, we may enter the COVID-19 crisis totally unprepared for what a truly global pandemic looks like in an interconnected society, but we don't enter the COVID-19 pandemic bereft of institutions. You know, we've got institutions that we've taken generations to build in fields like public health, in journalism, in fields to inform people, in basic government and services. And so one question I think I'm struggling with is, so many of these companies have struggled with this question of editorial influence. And so I think one version of this question is, are they doing a better job of directing people to good information? And does that actually mean directing people toward institutions that properly have authority over information? That's one question. But the second question is, what counts as an effective information institution in this era? And there's a really good example of this that I know that you've thought about, which is that there's a tech executive who wrote an article in Medium called The Hammer and the Dance that I think now has something like 40 million medium views. And there's a lot of debate about this. You know, some people have said, he's done a really good job of curating information from authoritative sources and making it accessible. I know I was one of the people who received the article and it was an eye-opener for me at an era when we were just getting our minds around this. And then other people have said, well, wait a minute, a really smart guy with an MBA is not an information intermediary in a public health crisis. And we should be, that's not the kind of democratization of information we want. We've built institutions. We should be directing people to what the local public health authority is saying, to what the governor is saying, to what the CDC is saying. That's not, that is sensible editorial judgment in a world in which we've built institutions. How do you think of that regulatory question? Where should these companies be directing people and are they doing a better job than they have in the past? Oh, it's a perfect question because we've been looking into this just over the last several weeks with my colleague Franzy and her student, Christine. This question of whether tech companies are doing enough right now and what they're doing and whether it's being effective is something I'm super interested in. I mean, a lot of people are concerned that one of the sort of victims of all of COVID-19 will be privacy and various other things that we care about as well. But one of the things that we've seen consistently across the platforms, and they may be even doing it in concert, possibly, is they provide these banners and they say, if you're searching for coronavirus, boom, here are, go to the World Health Organization, go to the CDC. This is brand new. And I do think it's a good step in the right directions in pushing individuals to these institutions, not requiring them. It just says, hey, by the way, if you're searching for this, here are some good pieces of information. Now, before COVID-19, none of these big tech companies were really doing it. There was actually a couple, I think Pinterest, interestingly, was doing some interesting work in this space, but the idea that you will start directing them to institutions is relatively new. Whether it stays after COVID is interesting, but we looked at this, we did an initial survey, which is it's going into peer review actually next week, and we've written a medium post about this, where we looked at the banners and wanted to know whether this actually even changed behavior. Long story short, mixed results. Some people actually do find it useful and not offensive. Some people say it didn't do anything for me. So there's a lot more work to be done. So that's interesting all by itself. Are some people offended? Are some people offended by that? Yes, yes, yes. I mean, you can look at the quality, the sort of some of the responses, and some say, you know, I can figure this out myself. I don't need that. So I'm going to change my behavior. I don't need the platforms doing this for me. How do you think about that? I mean, because again, it's so easy to talk about other people. Like I think I'm a reasonably educated person. The Thomas Pueyo article was really influential for me. I didn't know, I did take the extra step after slogging through it of saying, I've never heard of this person. And that probably is not a step everyone takes, but I read the article. I'm sure I quoted the conventional wisdom out of it. What do we make of, where's the paternalism line? What do we make of people who say, I could figure this out on my own? Were those people saying the same thing when they were reading a newspaper article 20 years ago? Is there something different about our sense of independence about information on technology versus sources we used to think of as authoritative? That's an interesting question you're bringing up. I didn't really thought about it in that way that over time, you know, in this new information environment in which we live, are there more attitudes of independence? Cause we're all, we're sifting through more, we're actually the filterers of information more than maybe we had the opportunity 20, 30 years ago because, you know, it's our friends that are filtering its algorithms to some degree, and it's us that's doing a lot of the filtering. And so we've been in this new position and does it make us more confident, less confident? It's an interesting thing. But let me give you a specific example of where this is playing out in public health locally. So I had some roommates, you know, in college that ended up becoming dentists. And so like, for whatever reason, I sort of, I'm tangentially involved in conversation. Compared to them, you're leading the most exciting life possible. It's all right. That's true. No offense to dentists. I love my dentist. I see my dentist every six months without fail. Right. But so right before we went into these major lockdowns, the dentists, at least in the state of Washington were one of the last groups to have to be shut down. And they were passing around in some of their email conversations. This post that was about how bad the spread could possibly be. And this post had received like the medium post you mentioned, I think probably millions of views. So I looked into it and it turns out it wasn't an epidemiologist. It wasn't a public health official. It was a marketer in Silicon Valley that knew something about data and so it could do some work with modeling. But we're seeing a lot of this, what we call sort of armchair epidemiology. And this armchair epidemiology, oh, I'm seeing some background here. Is that, you're getting that, Sam? Yeah, I'm getting a little background noise. That's a ghost in the machine. Okay, well, we'll keep talking and hopefully it'll go away. So anyway, the idea behind this is that, there are a lot of people that are now adjacent experts even though they're not truly epidemiologists. And so we're looking into that at a large scale. So Amispero and Kate Starberg, myself, we're looking at the role that these sort of less institutional, our individuals that weren't in the sort of traditional institutions for doing this kind of work, the role that they're playing in pushing conversations. So let me, some really interesting questions are coming through. I've got a few more minutes left that I, one is a question that just does not get asked enough which is, are there any populations that are either being acutely targeted by misinformation and disinformation and or that are uniquely vulnerable? And actually, I think one of the important insights of the last few years is we've sort of gotten beyond the kind of outrage and anxiety of some of the misinformation, state sponsored misinformation we saw in 2016 is a much more nuanced view of the way that African-American and Black communities were in particular targeted through some of those techniques. Are there any signs that COVID, that in the COVID infodemic of sort of similarly segmented vulnerabilities? It's a really good question. I don't consider myself an expert on that particular area, but I have colleagues. Like, again, I keep referring to my colleagues because they do some of this work. Like Kate Starberg, some really interesting work on the Black Lives Movement, for example, online. There's the Blue Lives Movement that was moving and the Black Lives Movement that was going online. And one of the things that she found is that many of these foreign adversaries, these foreign adversary accounts that were labeled by Twitter and released to the research community, she found them almost equally in both groups. And so whether it's happening on the COVID side, I think it remains to be seen, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was the case. I mean, one area in which we are seeing this is around maybe some of the anti-vaccination groups that are online. So we just hired a postdoc and it's gonna be joining us. Coco from University of Austin, she just finished her PhD, she'll be joining us. She's spent a lot of time working in these communities of anti-vaccination and we've had some, you know, just tangential conversations on email and various other forms. And I think there's a likelihood that there are groups there that are being targeted, but I think it's a great question. I hope others are investigating it. And like I said, it wouldn't surprise me if it's the case. And what about a few, we're getting some requests for maybe a few top resources for folks who do wanna know where they can turn to see who's tracking misinformation, to get high quality curriculum on media literacy. I hear you may have developed some materials on this, but can you give folks maybe three resources to consider and we'll send them out folks after the show. Absolutely. So first of all, I would say the Knight Foundation network that you're forming, then you have formed, Sam, from all the centers and the nine different, and other projects across the country doing this. They're either really digging deep and they're the leaders on misinformation research or the media literacy. We have some real experts in Washington. Mike Caulfield is someone that I would turn to if you're, let's say a teacher or a librarian looking for media literacy resources. We of course in our center, the Center for Informed Public at the University of Washington, we're gonna be putting up a page, hopefully within the next couple of weeks, probably more like a month if I say a couple of weeks, but we're gonna be putting a bunch of resources up. You can also contact me personally. And if there's a specific question you have about media literacy or anything in this space, at least I can turn you to the, probably the expert or maybe the world expert because this network is smaller than you think right now. And I'd be happy to direct any of those people with those questions. And yeah, you're doing a misinformation day for librarians, educators and others virtually, right? Can you just quickly give people what's the day where to go to sign up? Yeah, so the idea is something we started a year or so ago where we bring hundreds of high school students from rural and urban areas to campus. We spend an entire day and make it fun of course with cookies and treats and things for teaching, getting students to focus on media literacy, data reasoning, misinformation in general. And what we do is we bring the high school teachers and librarians also, we can't do that now. So we're doing it virtually. On May 26th, we're gonna do a little session for librarians and teachers that they can take to their students. And then when we go back to the in-person world, next year we're gonna do one with, hopefully 500 to 1,000 on our campus and many other campuses that are gonna join us. Where do people sign up for that? So they can go to our website at cip.uw.edu and you'll find contact information there. It's again, cip.uw.edu and you'll find a resource. You can also just contact me directly and I can set you up and you can join us if you want in that conversation. We're also gonna do this on campus. So if you wanna do it on your campus or on your area, we'll help you. We'll give you all the template materials for you to run as well. The Russian Cyber Intelligence Agency has misinformation every day, actually. You got it, you need a new brand. So last question, last question before we let you go and let some other folks go. This is not the first misinformation campaign. It's not the first digital misinformation campaign or crisis. It's not really a campaign. It's a series of campaigns, crisis. What's the next infodemic? Oh, that's such a good question, Sam. I would say the elections are a big one. I mean, the census was one we were worried about until COVID came along and it's certainly still a worry, but I don't know if it's at the same scale. I think we're gonna see very soon plans that have been probably put in place or they've been designed for several years now to attack to some degree our elections. And this is not a partisan issue. When we look online, we actually, we see it in both areas or in both sides of the political spectrum, but this is not just our elections either. Actually, we've been tracking some of these things internationally and we find that deep fakes all of a sudden arise two days before the election. And so these, Brazil was an example of this, the Sampaolo mayoral candidacy. So there's this kind of stuff, I think it's elections and it would be definitely a big one. And anytime that we have one of these global events, I think, I mean, it's certainly gonna, this will not be the last one. I think this is endemic. I think we're making the reality. I mean, you and I have talked about this by colleague, Paul Chung, and I've talked about this. This is, if our resilience paradigm for the future doesn't include information resilience, I think we've missed the reality because the genie's obviously not going back in the bottom, we don't want it to. We're having this conversation today because this technology is incredible, accessible and brings people together from across the world. You're coming from what seems to be a very authentic international beach, Cal and that would only be made possible by the internet. So we're gonna let people go first. I wanna tell them about other places they can see you because you are everywhere. So first of all, for night owls, tonight at 7 p.m. Pacific, Jevin will be on a special panel on climate change misinformation, if you wanna learn more about that Chinese hoax. And I looked it up, the easiest place to sign up for this is on Twitter at climatetap, climate TAP, and you can register for tickets. The center that Jevin leads, the University of Washington Center for an informed public will be doing a series of webinars in town halls on misinformation. You go to cip.uw.edu to see the lineup. And August 4th, Jevin is out with a new book called, I'm not gonna say the full title because again, this is an FCC-approved webinar. It's called Calling BS, the Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. You can pre-order it now on Amazon. It was $13 on Kindle a week ago, but post-COVID it's $10,000 to buy it back. I wanted to know they're investigating that. We are also not done talking about the infodemic here at Night Foundation. Next week, Thursday, 1 p.m. April 30th, we'll have Joan Donovan from Harvard, one of the most incisive voices on this problem. On May 7th, we'll have Safia Noble from UCLA, a wonderful opportunity to go deeper on this question of how different communities are affected differently, and particularly marginalized communities by the infodemic. Then we'll have Renee Doresta from Stanford on May 14th, and one of the leading experts on the way state actors are driving misinformation around COVID-19. So many of the topics that we touched on today, we're gonna be talking about more deeply. The recording of this episode is going to be available tomorrow. You just have to go to kf.org slash vision. You can email us at vision at kf.org. We would love your thoughts, your complaints. We'd love to see what you think is misinformation, and what can be learned about it. Send us tweets, examples, articles, pictures, videos. You can also visit us on Instagram at vision.kf. Lastly, please stay on for 30 seconds and take a quick online poll. It's just two questions. We really want your feedback. Before you take the poll, think about the part of this you enjoyed the most, and then tell us what you thought of the show. And other than that, really, Jevon, thank you so much for joining us and everyone out there. Please stay safe and please be well. Thanks so much, Sam. And thanks for all your efforts more generally on this problem. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Jevon. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.


All right, so hopefully you've enjoyed the session so far. That big panel with Bain and BlackRock is going to be followed now by some folks that you expect to see at SoCAP. You may be expect to see a lot of places where you're looking at social change. Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the Gates Foundation have all been doing amazing work for years. And they've all redoubled their efforts around impact investing and understanding the power of using these markets for change. They're also re-understanding their role, and they're here to tell you a little bit more about that. So I'm welcoming Greg Ratliff from the Gates Foundation, Deborah Schwartz from the MacArthur Foundation, and Christine Looney from the Ford Foundation. Well, good morning, everyone. I'm Greg Ratliff with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and I'm here with Deborah Schwartz from the MacArthur Foundation, Christine Looney with the Ford Foundation. And we want to talk to you about impact investing and the history we've had. And this has been a great conference for me because I ran the impact investment portfolio at MacArthur in the 90s and have been working in higher education for the last 10 years, so I'm sort of coming back in. And it's interesting to see a lot of things change, a lot of issues like exits stay the same. And I thought we might start off with some reflections from Christine about the current state of the field, where we are. You've just done, I know, a landscape analysis. So maybe tell us what you've learned. Sure. Well, first of all, it's great to be here and I'm excited to see so many people in the room. I think Ford started this market scan, but probably before I talk about that, it might be good to give some history and context for our involvement in the market, which started really in the late 60s when we started making PRIs, worked with the IRS to allow private foundations to make them. And since then, we've had almost 50 years of investment experience, which in and of itself has given us a lot of lessons and practical experiences in the field. I think as importantly, when I think and being on a panel with Deborah, especially has been such a partner to Ford in all of our work over the years, it's important to kind of reflect on what some of our most important or most meaningful investments have taken to kind of get to the stage they're at today. And if I reflect on markets like the community development finance market in the United States or the microfinance market overseas, Ford and MacArthur and others were early, early stage investors in these organizations. And it wasn't just the investment capital though that made this field grow to where it was today. It was a combination of investments plus grants, a lot of support to things like trade associations and ratings agencies and measurement tools and just even capacity building for these institutions. And so if you look at the self helps for one example who started small and it's now almost a billion dollar organization, two billion dollar organization. I think it's important to kind of look at to see kind of what it took to get them there. We found ourselves about a year and a half ago under with a new president, Darren Walker and we were looking at the growth of this space and looking at the role that we had in it and we'd been investing at that point really to support our own programs. We'd been doing some grants, but once again to really support our own programmatic initiatives and we were kind of reflecting on the amazing growth that was taking on in the impact investing market, the number of new investors and kind of step back and said, what role should philanthropy be playing in this and is there a role for Ford within this? And so we engaged monitor Deloitte to really help us do a scan of the market to really just kind of level that where we thought the market was at. And I think for those of you who are practitioners in this space, what we found won't be alarming to you. It was, one thing that came out was that there was a lot of hype in the market, that this was the solution for all solutions and that everyone can make tons of money and deliver the impact. I think there was a level of huge investor appetite, but maybe a lot more work needs to be done in terms of investor preparedness. On the demand side, we saw just a huge growth in the sophistication of the types of products and organizations and funds that were emerging, but a continued need for more organization to help investors not only find them or them to find investors for general marketing and communications of those products. And then in the middle, some very nascent and emerging market infrastructure but that needed to be developed further to help connect those two. And I think Deborah will really speak to that. And so that was kind of the first stage of almost our level setting of the market. And the second was really a dive into, well, Ford could enter this, but in and of itself, we could do little. So what would it look like if we took a collaborative approach to this work? And so I'd say the next phase of this for us has really been speaking with so many of you to see where there are opportunities for collaboration and to develop kind of partners for us as we kind of start this initiative. No, that's great. Deborah, do you have anything further to add in terms of the state of the field? Thanks. And I would just build off what Christine says that. I think Ford and MacArthur and Packard and many others have been at this for a long time, but I think that was for a set of challenges and enterprises that don't look like the full scope of the social sector today. We have a much wider spectrum of everything from pure nonprofits that are looking to build what the Heron Foundation calls philanthropic equity to hybrid models. And we've worked a lot in the affordable housing space with joint ventures and LLCs. There's all of those kinds of things to public private partnerships, special purpose vehicles. So what's really wonderful is there's this incredible spectrum in the social sector. And now there's also this incredible spectrum of investors. Everything from the mainstream investors we just heard from, the Black Rocks and Bain and others, Morgan Stanley, Goldman, and it's a long list, a whole emerging class of specialty advisors and also mainstream advisors who are building mission into their practice, high net worth individuals, and then retail investors, and you heard from Calvert, which has been in that retail end of the spectrum, as well as an incredible array of foundations. And the Mission Investors Exchange, which Christine and I were part of when it first began 12 some odd years ago, has 250 foundations, the Global Impact Investors Network, Global Confluence Philanthropy, US CIF. So there is an incredible, wonderful, vibrant community, but to Christine's point, the next challenge is really how do we, as foundations, that have significant capital to put to work? And we have 300 million dedicated 100% to impact. We also have a 30-year track record, so not quite as long, but we've deployed about a half a billion dollars, and we've learned a lot, as Christine said. And so I think the next generation of our work is how to bring those assets, our risk tolerance, our capacity to do dogged problem solving, and how to take all of that, as well as the kind of ingenuity that it's taken to really build up individual sectors and individual enterprises, and how do we help build a marketplace that really, in a fluid and meaningful way, connects the flow of capital, making it easier for those who are trying to raise the capital to get it on the terms that really work, capital that's suitable, not just capital, the capital that's suitable, how do we make it easier and more suitable for investors of all kinds to play together? And I think, I'll just leave it with saying, the G8 Task Force report last year, the Global Task Force talked about this next generation being about risk, return, and impact. I would say that the work that our foundations and others have done for the last 30 to 50 years has been all about creatively applying tools of various kinds to meld risk, return, and impact. Our next generation of work needs to really be about ease, suitability, liquidity, because we've got to get to a much more efficient ecosystem so entrepreneurs don't end up struggling so hard and so long to cobble together the resources they need for the invention and innovation work for the growth in scale and for their long-term success. It's just too hard and too slow. No, that's really great. So you guys talk a lot about the proliferation of actors and players in the space, the kinds of transactions that are being done. I mean, it's a really dynamic time and I'm curious, you mentioned risk, what are the challenges in that new space? You've got all these new people coming in, they're trying to figure out how to work together. What are the issues you're most concerned about as you move forward? Maybe I'll start. So I think for me, there are a couple. I think one is with new entrants and new energy, people may be starting to almost recreate the wheel when others have been kind of working on things for quite a long time and it's out there but we just haven't done a good enough job marketing. Some of this and some people are sharing the models. The second, it's come up quite a bit but is this kind of fear of greenwashing that we have new investors coming in who are almost selling their products with impact as a selling point but maybe it's not as front and center to what they actually really wanna do and so is this market an in jeopardy of that? And maybe the third is maybe around just overall complexity. It's complexity of language and the perpetuation of that, how many different ways we're kind of all describing what we're doing, I think it makes it pretty confusing for new entrants coming in the space and then the second is this complexity of product development. We've worked on many transactions together where we're one of up to 20 investors all with very boutique interests in transactions and it's costly and time consuming and I'm not even sure at the end of the day we're all even extremely satisfied with where we got so we need to really simplify not only the language but the products we're putting out there to make it easier for capital to flow more effectively. I mean when we think about the global kind of risks within the marketplace, I agree, I think there's a very healthy discussion at this venue and others about this issue of quote unquote impact or goodwashing. I would put it a little differently. I think that we have to be honest that not all kinds of capital are gonna be right for certain kinds of problems and that when you're looking at certain kinds of enterprises really honing in on deep challenging social environmental issues, enterprises that may be very untested, very innovative, unusual markets. The truth is we need to be very actively making the capital work for them and that's what I would call deep impact. It's not just enough to have money and motivation. You actually have to be prepared to look at how to blend the public, the private, the philanthropic capital and make the solution work. Those kinds of investments I've often said are not just made, they're not just lying around. They're made, not found. The problem I see is that as large flows of capital come into the space, if we don't build some products to Christine's point that make the connection, I think it's unreasonable to expect that the large deployment of capital is gonna be able to do that artisanal finance. And so I think we'll get a lot of shallow impact which will be okay, it'll be good, it'll be better than it is today but it may leave out the ability to really continue scaling things that are incredibly valuable to solving some of the biggest problems in our world and so our challenge is how to go to deep impact and not just shallow impact and I think that's one, the other is sort of the shadow of subprime and also some things that happened in the microcredit world. I think when investors' expectations are inflated or hyped and you get a lot of money rushing in, you get very smart people who say, there's money for me to make if I wrap myself in the impact mantle. And so there is a job for foundations, I think, but for all of us to be good stewards of mission and that's never gonna be cut and dried. No, those are great, great comments, thank you guys. So let's get to the good stuff. So you mentioned, Deborah, you're 300 million compared to the 75 trillion of the mainstream investors, right? And so increasingly foundations are a smaller part of the capital in the impact investment space. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how you see your role shifting and how it needs to shift and then maybe transition into, based on your sense of the landscape, what are the specific things you're planning to do going forward? What kinds of projects?  How are you gonna collaborate? Well, again, I wanna echo what Christine said. I think that we're just like forward very mindful and we started about two years ago looking at this exact question around the same time that Christine and Darren and Frank and Zav, other colleagues at Ford were looking at this because we're mindful of this incredible opportunity, right? More capital than ever, wanting to find ways to be meaningful. And we've learned how to knit together the deals that unlock impact on a transaction by transaction by transaction basis and that's powerful, right? I mean, we have 15 years of working on one issue alone, rental housing in the United States and our $200 million investment in that field building up a set of enterprises and intermediaries has unlocked $15 billion in new capital and hundreds of thousands of lives and homes have been transformed and that's great. But we can't be the only source of that $200 million. Ford can't be the only source of the capital it's provided to microcredit. So one of the first steps is the collaboration and Darren Walker convened a set of presidents from foundations that make impact investments earlier this year and that's an ongoing conversation and I think that's an important part of the future for all of us is that the institutions themselves that have the most flexibility, that have the greatest ability to take risk and innovate that we work together to create a real community of support that fosters innovation and a next generation of marketplace capacity. So a couple of specific examples would be the new products that Jen just announced. So in addition to Raisis, a fund called Age Strong, another one that she announced with President Obama around investment in India, MacArthur was able to provide a modest amount of grant support but it helped them do the legal and technical work involved in a new structure. Another is Impact US, or Impact Us, excuse me Liz, and both Ford and MacArthur have provided seed capital to build a new online marketplace and Liz will be talking, she's somewhere in the room I think at 12.15 today, she'll be talking about that. Another to the point that Christine made is documenting what we already know about creative solutions and Bruce Campbell will be talking about the innovative term sheet project which Ford and Heron and Peton and Sorenson and Blue Haven have all funded because we can provide a library, a playbook, and people both entrepreneurs and investors will not be stuck having to figure this all out from scratch. So those are just some examples. I have one more but why don't we shift over to Christine? Yeah, so I think to your first point in terms of the role of philanthropy, this was a question that came out in our market scan and I think resoundingly, whoever we interviewed kind of voiced that there is a big role for philanthropy to play in this growing market and I think for foundations it's kind of looking at all the resources we have available to contribute and they're beyond, I mean grants are an important piece the investment capital and our ability to be flexible with that and as catalytic as possible in terms of supporting growth in the market will be really important. There are also things like convening power, there are things like the leadership that these foundation presidents can bring to the conversation both in terms of really bringing home this notion of impact and being a standard for good practice in the market. So I think there are many, many opportunities in terms of philanthropy's ability to engage. For Ford going forward, I think for us we're looking at something that will be almost a three part strategy that will include a grant component as part of a new impact investing initiative that will be very market facing. I mean, I think to Debra's point we're going to try to support as many things as we can that will be catalytic to the market and better connect the investors and the demand side. We will be engaging quite a bit in terms of supporting public policy and I think we've had an important win with the recent treasury guidance. There's a lot of positive moments from around ERISA but bringing I think alongside these movements in public policy, the really necessary communications and education that will really make these policies not just move forward but actually effective and so that we can implement them and actually have more capital flow to the issues we care about. And the third will be within our own investment fund strategy and there, I think for Ford, we're really looking at how we can engage in markets and make markets more effective versus looking at particular transactions and individual investments. So the more effective we can be at that in being a real catalyst and being flexible, I think the better and more of a contribution we'll be able to make to the market. Deborah? Yeah, so Echo and Christine, I think we're gonna be putting grant dollars to work to help share innovations that exist, new ones that are coming into being and be a resource in that way to help again foster kind of a community of collaboration and product innovation and market building. I think it is important to recognize that matchmaking in this world is important, right? And there's some really exciting platforms emerging but matchmaking itself, the matching, is not gonna be sufficient that if we really want to connect the supply and the demand sides of this marketplace, we actually need to do true market making and that means putting our capital at risk and finding others who are willing to put capital at risk in a completely different way. So I'll give you an example of a product innovation because I think we are not going to get to a liquid, suitable set of products that really allow large flows of capital to come into the deep end of the pool if we don't actually make that happen. So for example, this summer we completed a transaction where the foundation instead of just providing risk mitigation, we've done that for many, many years where we will provide just enough first loss or guarantee protection to help an investor say, okay, it's a little bit unusual or I'm a little bit uncomfortable but now I'm okay or to basically get the risk return equation to work. In this transaction we did something called a liquidity facility and for those of you who don't come out of investment banking, that is not, a liquidity facility is not a glass of wine, it is not a room in your house or the kitchen sink, a liquidity facility is a way of standing behind an investment and saying when you investor are ready to exit, we over here the market maker will buy you out and we will buy you out and take the risk that nobody will ever want that security and then hopefully what we will actually do is be able to then be the bridge to the next investor and the reason we did this was a large social enterprise that it hit what we all know as the valley of death. We had helped launch it together with Ford two years before it had scaled up to a certain point but the equity that it had wasn't sufficient to get to the next level of growth and it needed to get to that next level to start to really tap in to more mainstream investors. So here's this classic gap and what we were able to do is to bring two financial institutions to the table who really didn't wanna do equity, that was not their thing and they really didn't like the idea that this was an investment that had a 10 year horizon and actually no real mechanism for exit. This was not a fund and the equity does not have a life on it. It's indefinite life. So we provided a 25% promise that a quarter of that equity would be something we would be willing at MacArthur to buy at a later date and it worked. So that's just an example of what we mean by trying to actually inject liquidity to this next stage of the market and we have other projects underway and we really look forward to conversations because we think there are ways to engineer new models. So I'm wondering if you guys to the degree you're willing to name names could say a little more about the kinds of financial institutions and partners you think you need to sort of realize this vision because listening to you, I'm gonna play a little devil's advocate. I hear you meeting with each other, foundations and foundations talking and to pull this off, that can't be the case and so how do you include more mainstream financial actors in the dialogue and the structuring and design? Well, I'll just tell you, I mean we have five or six big projects underway we're talking to investment banks, to family offices, to RIAs, and that's one of the things that's so exciting for us is that the real explosion of interest and impact investing means that we have a much wider array of potential partners but at the end of the day there are a set of players and big foundations are among them who bring important kinds of resources into the mix so we are I think necessary but not gonna be sufficient and to use Christine's word we need to catalyze this community of market building it'll not be any one of us cannot do this we need talent and expertise, traditional capital markets, tools and expertise all of that's gonna be required. Yeah, I mean I would completely agree I think just partnering with foundations would have been the easier play but as you said we're such a small percentage of this market and so like Debra, I mean we're in our conversations they've expanded much well beyond philanthropy we've really been attempting to be strategic in terms of where are the big pots of capital and what will it really take over time to unlock that and so having conversations with like CIO investor roundtables and people like that who donor advice funds and government importantly as a huge kind of catalyst beyond philanthropy in this market and so I think it's gonna take all many, many different types of institutions to kind of make this as effective as we like it to be so we're open to those partnerships. That's great, well we are out of time so we'll have to come back next year to hear how it all goes but please join me in thanking our panelists. Thank you.