If you're just joining, my name is Cynthia Gordigua. I'm ProPublica's marketing director. Welcome to how to account how our journalism made a difference in 2020. So a lot of ink has been spilled about how we're living in a post-truth era and that journalism can no longer make an impact in the face of that. Without ProPublica, that's certainly not the case. Our work continues to affect real world change. And as you may know, that's one of our chief goals here. Today, we'll talk about some of the stories that spurred major impacts this year from reforming harmful policies and practices to righting wrongs in the criminal justice system. And to guide us through that, we'll hear from some of the editors of this work. With us today, we have Steven Engelberg, ProPublica Editor-in-Chief, Manny Garcia, Senior Editor of the ProPublica Texas Tribune Investigative Initiative, Louise Kiernan, ProPublica Illinois Editor-in-Chief, Charles Ornstein, Managing Editor Local, and Tracy Weber, Deputy Managing Editor. So I wanna just get into it with a set of stories about the justice system and the aftermath of those investigations. And I wanna start with Tracy and a series that actually published in 2018, which was called Blood Will Tell by Pamela Koloff. So this project looked at a forensic science call or forensic discipline called Bloodstain Pattern Analysis in which so-called experts report to study bloodstains of the crime scene to draw conclusions about the crime. So Pamela investigated the accuracy of this practice and how it sounds scientific, but in reality is quite shaky and circumstantial. But at the heart of the story was a man named Joe Bryan. Can you tell us a bit about Joe Bryan and what your story revealed about his case? Sure, most fun for editors talking about impact. And sometimes that takes a little bit longer to happen. Pam had been looking, if anyone knows Pam, she does a lot of the finest criminal justice reporting around, but she'd always been looking for a case that would allow her to get at something pernicious that happens in courts and prosecutors have a case that's kind of weak and shaky and they bring in a forensic expert, someone who purports to be a specialist in a sort of dubious forensic scientist and they throw out a bunch of jargon and they wow the jury and they sort of cast doubt on using a patina of science. So when Pam heard about the case of Joe Bryan, she thought she had her way into looking at Bloodstain Pattern Analysis. Joe Bryan was this well-loved high school principal in this town outside Waco called Clifton, Texas. He and his wife, Mickey, who was an elementary school teacher, were just well thought of throughout the town. You could always see them walking at night, hand in hand. They gave money to kids who couldn't afford school to field trips, well loved. And so when Mickey was murdered one night in their bedroom and Joe was 120 miles away at a teacher's conference, everyone thought Joe could never have done it. And no one believed he could have done it. But the local authorities came up with this case and they built a case, even though there was no physical evidence, no motive. And they had almost no sort of evidence to type their case. They went ahead with this case against Joe Bryan. And in court, the case was sort of shaky and it didn't seem like they had enough to make the case until they brought on this local cop. And the cop had taken a forensics course and blood spatter analysis, a week long course, and suddenly he was an expert. He had no science background, but they brought him on the stand and he convinced the jury that there was a scientific basis for Joe's guilt. Joe is convicted, he has sent away to prison and everyone in Clifton turned their back on him. So Pam comes along, she sees this case as the vehicle, but then Pam decided to do something extraordinary. If you look at most ProPublica stories, or many of them, they have kind of a dual track. They have a case they're looking at, but they also have a separate sort of track that's the point of the story. In this case, it was Joe's guilt or innocence, but it was also blood spatter forensics. So Pam came to me and said, I would like to become a blood spatter expert. So, and I would like to take the same course that the expert in Joe Bryant's case took. And so one of the glorious things about ProPublica is I could say, sure. So Pam paid $700 and drove to Oklahoma where she and 20 cops took a week long blood spatter workshop. And I can still remember her sending me pictures of her with a bloodied axe, swinging it all over and then measuring the blood spatter. But Pam proved a great point, and this was a crucial part of her story. She was now a blood spatter expert with the same training as someone, the guy who put Joe Bryant away for 30 years. And she could talk in the story, in the language of the forensics they used, and she could dispel the sort of magic that that forensics held in the story. And so it was a sort of a crucial way to not only unravel the case of Joe, but also unravel the forensics that underlay it. Okay, so after that first story published in May of 2018, a few things happened. First, the Texas Forensic Science Commission gets an independent expert to reexamine the analysis used to convict Brian or Joe, we'll call him Joe. It's his first name, Brian's last name is confusing. And then after that review, the commission found that the prosecution's bloodstain pattern testimony was, and I quote, not accurate or scientifically supported. And even the prosecution's own bloodstain pattern expert in that case came forward and said that his conclusions were wrong. So it seems like this is a clear pathway for the release of Joe Bryant. This was two years ago, but that's not what happened. He was in prison for more than 30 years. Even after the story came out, it took longer to get him out. So can you tell us what actually happened and also tell us about your experience of this long winding road to justice where it seems like the impact should have been immediate, but in reality took longer? So impact is a funny thing. And we talked about a lot at ProPublica. You have the clear impact would be Joe getting out. And then you have a bunch of stuff that we don't really appreciate that is pretty substantive impact. Charlie Ornstein was on this panel with me. When we first got to ProPublica, we wrote a project about the California nursing board failing to hold dangerous nurses to account. And the next day, then Governor Schwarzenegger fired most of the nursing board. That almost never happens. Most stories we do sort of trail out over time. Criminal justice stories typically take a really long time to show impact. But in the context of that, in the context of the slow moving criminal justice system, Joe's case had a bunch of surprising impact that turned out over time. First off, Pam's story had 12,000 people signed up for a newsletter to follow Pam's story. And when they had a hearing in Joe's case, hundreds, people drove hundreds of miles from out of state and it was standing renomally at his hearing. Lawyers from across the country were sending us letters saying, they were using Pam's story in court hearings to debunk the blood spatter forensics experts on the stand. They were citing it in court cases. It is being used by the Innocence Project to sort of help them, help attorneys, debunk the forensic experts on the stand. But also that case had laid dormant for 30 years. No one cared about Joe Bryan. Everyone who had once loved him had turned their back on him. Suddenly that case was the talk of Texas. There was a renewed interest in his case, but also in what they had allowed, how they had allowed this forensic science to infiltrate the justice system and the impact of that. So suddenly you have the Texas reconsidering who can be a blood spatter expert and what they should be able to testify in. Pam's ability to become an expert caused a lot of people to rethink what exactly that was around the country in a bunch of different forums. They teach it now in a lot of law schools. And I can't underestimate how unusual it was to have at a hearing the now retired local cop who took the stand and testified about this blood spatter forensics to come out of retirements, write and sign an affidavit that said he was wrong and that what he had testified to was not right. Val, that is really rare. We were focused on Joe's fate, of course. He had a health condition. He was uncertain how he was doing and then there was illness in the prisons and such. We think that a win and after a story like this is they're out, they're exonerated, they're cleared. That's a Hollywood ending that happens in some cases, but rarely. In this case, Joe's case went all the way up to Texas's highest criminal court and they're very conservative. They almost never favorably review these cases and they didn't in Joe's case. But it did convince the parole board who at seven times had turned Joe down. And after the stories and the renewed interest in it, they reconsidered in the interest of justice and he was granted parole on his eighth time. So for Joe, if you think about this, he got out and he is going to celebrate with his family Thanksgiving this week for the first time since the Reagan administration. And that's what we take home as a really great bit of impact. Thank you, Tracy, and great work. So next I wanna ask Louise about a story that ProPublica Illinois published this July by reporter Jody S. Cohen. But so I wanna take a step back because I know that as reporters or as journalists, people reach out to all of our editors with desperate stories on a daily basis. And the fact is you can't tell all of the stories even if they're very compelling. So Louise, I wanted to ask you how did we learn about a 15 year old girl in Michigan who we called Grace to protect her identity and what made your team decide to tell Grace's story? Well, this story, like many stories, started with a telephone call out of the blue. One day Jody Cohen, the reporter got a call and on the other end of the line was a woman whose first question to Jody was, is there a ProPublica Michigan? Well, at that moment, there wasn't a ProPublica Michigan. Now we're very excited that we're gonna be able to expand our work so that we can more regularly cover Michigan and other states in the Midwest. But at that moment in time, this spring, we were just ProPublica Illinois. But Jody being the intrepid reporter that she has listened to this woman's story anyway. And as it turned out, the woman who called us was Grace's mother and she wanted to share what had happened to her daughter, which is that Grace, who was 15, a sophomore in high school, had been placed on probation for earlier charges involving theft and assault. She had taken a cell phone from a kid at school, which was returned shortly thereafter. And she'd been involved in an altercation with her mother that prompted a neighbor to call police. So she had been placed on probation for these charges and had just been sent to a juvenile detention center for violating her probation by not doing her online schoolwork after her school had, like schools around the country transition to remote learning during the pandemic. So as Jody listened to this story and as she later related to the rest of us, I think she was struck by two points. One was in the midst of the pandemic when schools everywhere were scrambling to figure out how to manage remote learning. I think anyone who had direct experience with the challenges of what that entailed, particularly for children with special needs, which is the case with Grace, it was really hard. And the idea that you could be sent to detention for that, I think was very striking to us. And then secondly, I think the story really spoke to us because we were facing a cultural moment of racial reckoning sparked in part by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and others. And Grace's case spoke to the question of racial injustice in the juvenile justice system. Grace is black.  So all of those factors, I think spoke very immediately to us as they would, once we published this story to people all over the country and effect around the world. And so we just plunged in, even though it wasn't technically within our borders and we published the first story about Grace's case on July 14th. That story almost immediately went viral. It was covered by news outlets across the country and abroad, more than 300,000 people signed an online petition to demand her release. Everyone from Hillary Clinton to Janelle Monnet was asking that she be removed from detention. And then it just grew from there. So as you just described, after the story, there was this big national outcry. But despite all of that, the judge in the case still upheld the decision and she remained incarcerated until the Michigan Court of Appeals ultimately ordered for her release. But so between ProPublica's story and Grace's release, that was two and a half weeks. But the thing is, the story still didn't move the heart and mind of the judge. It moved all these other people. And in that process, Grace kind of became a celebrity. She, even as you were very careful to protect her identity and protect her privacy, there was still all this attention on her. So my question is, as an editor who helped shine a spotlight on her case, did you feel protective of Grace and all the new found attention she was getting and how did that attention change her life after she was released? When a story goes that viral, that quickly, it tends to take on a life of its own and it moves out of your control. For example, I saw people posting photos on social media of young women they claimed were Grace in juvenile detention, they were not Grace. I saw factual errors in other media coverage of the case and we tried to correct misinformation where we could but we really focused on continuing to do our factual and thorough reporting on the case. And of course throughout that we were very conscious of not creating harm for everyone involved in the case and most of all, for Grace, this 15 year old who was at the heart of it. Interestingly, Grace while she was in detention didn't know that much about what was happening outside. Her mother had limited the amount of information she told her about this viral campaign to free her because she didn't wanna erase her hopes. They were not allowed to watch television in the detention center, to watch news on television but they were allowed to listen to the radio and Grace had her radio tuned to NPR one night and heard a story about the case and realized that that was her. It was not until she was released on July 31st as you said, less than three weeks after the initial story ran and went home and her mother began to share with her hundreds of letters that people had written to them about the case and to share some of the social media with her about it. But they've been rightfully so very protective of her and her identity. They've had many, many offers to appear on television programs or through other media and turn those down.  But she is back at home with her mother. She is attending a new school where she's doing well. She actually had her first part-time job this fall where she was out canvassing voters for the election and she's doing well. Hey, thank you so much, Louise. So I wanna turn to Manny next. And by the way, Manny leads ProPublica's Texas reporting initiative with the Texas Tribune and he formed this team at the beginning of the pandemic. Most of them have never even met in person. They've never shared office space but they're still producing incredible journalism. So kudos to Manny for managing that under such extraordinary circumstances. So one of your stories in July, ProPublica and the Texas Tribune expose the practices of Opportune Inc. An installment lender that caters to Latino immigrants and reporters Ren Larson and Kia Collier found that Opportune was continuing to sue borrowers even after they lost their jobs because of the pandemic and therefore, you know, missed payments. So Manny, there were a number of lenders across Texas, across the country that were also doing this. They were suing borrowers during the pandemic. How did your team come to focus on Opportune in particular? Thank you first. Thanks for the shout out for Team Texas. So Kia and Ren had done a story earlier in the spring that looked at debt collectors who were putting folks at risk by garnishing their pandemic checks. So therefore a very important story based on that, Kia and Ren asked themselves a question. So which debt collectors are filing the most lawsuits in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic, which we know has left over three million Texans without jobs. So you'll enjoy this chess game and I'll walk through all or everyone on here if you follow the Queen's Gambit, you'll see some steps here in our game. So we asked a hard question, who's filing the most lawsuits? So the next steps is like, how do we get there? So it's twofold. Who are the people, the experts in the industry or the folks who are advocates for those who are suffering at the hands of these debt collectors? Who do we talk to? Second of all, what records do we need to try to determine who is the largest file or lawsuits? So then we had, it's the hurdle in the workaround. So it's critical thinking skills in a sense that the hurdle is like Texas has 800 justice of the peace courts. Think of it as small claims courts, even smaller, all of them are fiefdoms. So the record keeping is very chaotic and some courts replicate records and others, you're not. So then the decision is, how do we determine is there a sample size we can do to test our theory? So then it's keep it simple. We were fortunate because in the counties that are for Houston and Fort Worth, the records are public. So Ren was able to obtain with Key obtained the records and create like a sample size. And what that revealed was one of the largest debt filers, the filers of lawsuits in Texas was a small publicly traded company called Opportun. So now we have these two counties. Now the question is, can we scale from that sample size? So that's when we decided we're gonna look at the state's seven largest counties across the state where we have records available and then we build our database of records. I'm keeping it very simple, but you'll see how this goes up. So based on that, we were able to determine we have this larger universe. However, because doing that opportunity as a publicly traded company, we know where all of their retail locations and kiosks are located where they do business. What we had as a blind spot is, in many locations where they operate, we don't have quick access to their records. So again, that was a lot more time intensive of trying to secure records from say some of these smaller counties or municipalities and from these justices. So Ren ended up scraping five years worth of court data from seven of the largest counties in Texas. We end up with at the end is a record universe of 1.45 billion court records from 62 justices courts from January of 2015 through June 30th of 2020. And what we know as more than 50% of the population in Texas are within this universe, as well as 80% of opportunities retail locations. So we feel now we have a very, very good plan to go after this. So what we learned from this reporting is that opportunity from their own public statements, they prided themselves as being a very humane and affordable lender to the Latino community. Yet from Ren's work and Kia's work, they sued thousands of borrowers after they lost their jobs and mispayments. Second of all, the company had marketed a hardship program because of folks who had lost their positions jobs because of COVID. Our interviews showed that many of the folks who talked to us, they had never been told or heard of a hardship program. The third point is what was quickly, quickly appeared to us. And from our interviews, opportunity was filing lawsuits to intimidate borrowers to keep them refinancing their high interest loans. Okay. So one of our saying that pro-couple has no surprises. The subjects that you cover shouldn't be surprised about what's in the story when it comes out. So as part of the regular reporting process, Ren and Kia, or maybe it was someone else, it was you, Annie, submitted questions to the company. And before you could publish the story, opportunity announced that it was dropping the lawsuits and they also announced a cap on interest rates for new loans. So like it's, you had pre-impact before the story came out. And my guess is that opportunity thought that they were getting ahead of the story and taking the wind out of your sales by doing the right thing before you could publish and maybe they expected you to kill the story. But of course you proceeded. Explain why opportunity changing course and dropping these collection suits did not harm your story in any way and why it wasn't important to still publish it. Right. So in part of the interview process, I'll take you a step back really quickly. It's a small industry, everybody talks. So because there was so many lawsuits filed in Texas, it just stood out there. The publicist for opportune reached out to Kia and says, hey, we know you're looking at us. If there's anything we can do to help, let us know. So we promise to stay in touch. Then to your point in late July, the opportune CEO announces on a blog post, we're dropping all the lawsuits against our bars, capping the interest rates and we're gonna help anybody who fall behind and we're doing this because as a company and as our board of directors, it's the right thing to do. So of course we're sitting here. I talked to Charlie Rornstein and says, well, how do you think we proceed on this? And it was clearly an attempt to get ahead of our story but what it doesn't do, it didn't undercut our story. In fact, what it did, it confirmed our findings and merited more scrutiny because what they've done now is confirm what you're looking at. What we still needed to do was we needed to answer the why, why so many lawsuits and why were customers treated so differently when the company had a hardship program that they were promising. So what, again, our reporting determined, as I mentioned earlier, that they were filing these lawsuits to get people to either make a payment or refinance and there was the company that promised so much empathy was actually just hammering, hammering folks causally with phone calls. To your point at ProPublica, we believe in no surprises letter. Kia and Ren wrote a very long document of questions, very detailed questions to the company. As we normally do, we ran it by our general counsel, Jeremy Kutner, for review. And we sent it off to opportune and says, we'd like to give you a chance to respond. This is our deadline. Here's where it gets tricky in a sense. Opportune said through its publicist, we're going to offer you a statement but we're not going to comment further. So in essence, what you're getting is like, here's your statement. We're willing to talk to you on background. You can't quote us, but we're not going to help you out with any more clarity. So that leaves you depending really on your reporting so in your data analysis. On our side, we're fortunate that we have a very rigorous process for checks and balances. And at the end of the day, it's what I like to call in journalism and within ProPublica in the Texas Tribune, iron sharpens iron. So Ren's data work went through a Ryan Gortzowski-Jones, our data editor, and Chris Essay at the Texas Tribune who went back because we wanted to double check that our data was pristine, which it was. And also our stories go through a series of editors but the most important step to us because think about we have data is we need to put data to people. So almost everybody interviewed in the story, they only spoke Spanish. So Perla Treviso came in who's fluent and went out and did interviews with individuals who basically stood up our story and became the protagonist for the story. So where it ended was the company didn't respond. I called the P, I called the publicist at one point and said, hey, listen, are you sure you don't want to talk to us? He says, our statement is what you're going to go with. So we published our story was airtight, we had the receipts and the result was exactly what you want. The company dropped, has dropped every lawsuit in Texas against every individual. Thanks, Danny. So I'm gonna turn to Steve next. Most of the stories we've discussed so far involved like, I mean, I just got into like some really intense data work, deep research, in some cases, like Bud Wiltel took an entire year of reporting but sometimes for a public who dives right into the news to hold public officials accountable. And that was the case this year when reporters Robert Badirechi and Derek Willis investigated former Senate Intelligence Chairman, Richard Burr. In May, they reported that Burr, who was then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee sold off up to $1.7 million of stock after receiving early intelligence briefings on the health threats of COVID-19. But at the same time, Burr was reassuring the public that the government had things under control. So how did ProPublica find the story and why did you think it was important for us to expose it even if it was a quicker hit than the long form stories that ProPublica is traditionally known for? Hi, first of all, welcome to everybody. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, this was a fascinating little story. We had begun the year in the time before time Robert Badirechi is a very fine reporter on our staff and he was gonna look at this sort of interesting phrase, congressional ethics. Does it exist? And in the course of trying to figure that out had spent an enormous amount of time reading the forms filed annually by congressmen and senators. He's very familiar with the fact that some of these guys have a very kind of plain vanilla financial picture. Some of them have a complicated picture. Some of them own stocks, some of them own lots of companies, all kinds of complexity. And so he gets up one morning and he hears on NPR because a lot of times we journalists learn things from other journalists, not at all any shame in that at all. And NPR had reported that there was something, a club it was called the Tarheel Circle. And in that club, just sort of a strange idea, you pay $10,000 per member and these were generally investors from North Carolina, some other powerful people. And then the club would bring in insiders, company executives, members of Congress, whatever, to give sort of private briefings. And so this gentleman Burr, Senator Burr had from North Carolina, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee had come in and given a briefing in which he was quoted by NPR as saying, and this was in February when he gave the briefing. He said, well, there's one thing I can tell you about this. It's much more aggressive and transmission than anything we've seen. We're akin to the 1918 pandemic, he said. Companies might have to curtail travel, schools could close, military might have to compensate for overwhelmed hospital by being mobilized. Well, that all sounds actually, as it turns out, pretty accurate. Not what the president was saying at the time, but there you go. It was with the intelligence community was telling the Senate Intelligence Committee members. And so Robert had a question, just a single question in his mind, which was, gee, he's in essence telling these well-heeled people they probably might wanna change their stock alignments. Airplane companies not good. I wonder if this guy had sold any stock. And so he just pulled up the publicly available disclosure form. Why not? And to his and Derek Willis's surprise, it turned out that there were 33 separate transactions totaling somewhere between 600,000 and 1.7 million in which he had indeed sold most of his stocks. And he had done so again at a time when the public was being assured by the president and by others that this was really not so bad. We were gonna get through this unscathed that was more of a China problem. And so with that, we published a story and there was a lot of attention paid. And ultimately, Burr. Well, ultimately Senator Burr found himself in a lot of difficulties. I mean, the way it broke out at first, because in journalism, we all copy each other. So since we pulled Burr's files, other people started pulling other people's files. And there were several other people, members of Congress who had sold off their stocks suspiciously in about this timeframe. So they were sort of follow on stories about members of Congress selling things. And then we started looking into Senator Burr more because the disclosure reports contained all sorts of things, including if you buy or sell property. And it turned out that he had sold his house to a lobbyist at a price the lobbyist had set. So that made another little interesting story. And then the next thing we did, we know one day we wake up and the FBI is serving a search warrant at the good Senator's house, pulling all of his records. And then shortly after that, he was no longer chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Now he is still a member of the Senate as of today. So that investigation is ongoing. I haven't heard much about the FBI investigation of the senior Republican from North Carolina during the Bill Barr Justice Department administration, but I would not be shocked if after January 21st or so, we might hear some more about this. Okay, thank you, Steve. So I wanna stay on the topic of the federal response in the beginning stages of COVID. And I'm gonna get to Charlie in a minute, but going back to Tracy, I want to talk about a story that you edited in March and April of this year, Patricia Callahan and Sebastian Rotella investigated how a US subsidiary of Royal Phillips, which is a Dutch appliance and technology company had received millions in federal tax dollars years ago to deliver a low-cost ventilator for pandemics, but they never actually did it. And then despite that, they struck another deal with the US government for $646 million or $646.7 million, four times the price of what the ventilator should have been. So walk us through what happened there exactly and how you got this tip and what do you think it says about the early stages of the federal response or what it says about the federal response in the early stages of the pandemic? So sure, to set the scene with this, you gotta remember that in March and April, there was this, at least in New York, in the East Coast and a couple other spots in the city, this sort of desperation that people were flooding the hospitals. And at that time, everyone really thought putting the most, the serious patients on ventilators was this life-saving move. And there's this desperation for ventilators and why didn't we have any in this national stockpile that's supposed to be prepared for pandemics? And Steve, see, even when you're editor-in-chief, you still get tips. Steve got a tip from someone that he passed along to us that we should take a look at this deal that had been struck to put ventilators in the stockpile, what had happened to it, because it had never been fulfilled. So the reporters, which also included Tim Golden, they decided to go dive into this world that they knew nothing about of contracting for things in that, and what they discovered is what you oftentimes discovered, that the story, the tip that Steve had gotten was like a good interesting thing, that deal had died out, but there was another subsequent deal that was actually the really bad deal that we should take a look at. So the reporters dove in and found out that years ago under Obama, they had actually contracted with Phillips and said, hey, what we really need is a portable, low-cost, easy to use ventilator that we can make a bunch of them and put them in the stockpile. So they paid Phillips to design just such a ventilator, and they agreed on a price of $3,280 each, and they wanted 10,000 of them. So they paid the company to design and manufacture these. Then when the pandemic strikes, everyone's like, well, where are those ventilators? And it turns out they hadn't actually delivered those ventilators yet, but with some sleuthing by the reporters, they were able to discover, oh, but they were selling, Phillips was selling, and I almost virtually identical ventilator produced in Pennsylvania, shipping them all around the world, but they had not shipped the ones to the stockpile.   And then, so we published the story and then the Trump administration, and this was the sort of shocking thing, agrees nevertheless to a subsequent deal with Phillips in which it agrees to buy all these ventilators at the same ventilator and the same design at four times the originally agreed upon cost. So they spent, the contract with them was for the one, as you noted for 647 million, and at the time that was the largest coronavirus contract for anything. And so we had written that story and we put that story out there. There was a lot of outrage. And ultimately, they backed out of- Well, so it happened exactly as we all totally love it to happen, where members of Congress smartly jump on our good work and investigate this thing and find out that they, and they are able to get all kinds of documents in which that we could not get. And they actually published their investigation, they find evidence of fraud in the deal and they fraud, waste and abuse and that the Trump administration had paid up to $500 million too much for the ventilators and that Pete Navarro, who struck the deal had been gullible and agreed to pay $15,000 for each of the ventilators. And then the federal government backed out of the deal and before Phillips had delivered a third of the order and saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, it was a win, so. Thank you, Tracy. I know that was a lot to summarize. I know, but it was basically underneath it was like one of those rolling investigations where everything you want to happen is happening right as you go along and the impact is a win for everyone. So, that was a good one. So I wanna turn to Charlie next to talk about at least one of our local reporting stories this year because it's not just the federal government with this kind of influence over things. State government also requires scrutiny, of course. And Charlie, you had mentioned earlier like in a conversation just us that since the pandemic reporting on non COVID stories in local government has decreased dramatically. And for local reporters who wanna tell these other stories it's been a bit more challenging for them. I'd like to hear more about that through the lens of our work this year with the Maine Monitor and their series looking at how Maine is the only state in the country with no public defender system and instead legal services for the state's poorest defenders are left to private attorneys who are contracted by the state office that doesn't properly supervise them. So tell us about the challenges that the Maine Monitor reporters, Samantha Hogan and ProPublica data reporter, Abnel Phillip faced as they put this on in the age of COVID and what they were still able to uncover. Yeah, Cynthia, I mean, you're exactly right. The underlying problems that are going on in local and state government and not even government but just in regions across the country haven't just disappeared because COVID has arised but the ways of getting at them has really changed. Courthouses are closed, city councils aren't meeting in person, many communities you can't go into city hall. It's harder to get records. Some states have said that they're not even processing records or requests because of the COVID emergency. So if you're a local reporter trying to cover what's going on locally behind the scenes it's really hard to do that. That was the case in Maine. Folks who are history buffs may well remember a US Supreme Court case about 60 years ago Gideon versus Wainwright that established that every person accused of a crime had a constitutional right under the Sixth Amendment to the assistance of a lawyer. And states are required to provide one if you're too poor to hire your own. In many states that entailed setting up a public defender system where the state had an office that it funded with public defenders who took care of this. Maine, believe it or not, is the only state in the country that does not have a public defender system but instead pays for private lawyers who are contracted by the state to basically provide a defense to them. So we looked at the agency in Maine which is called the Maine Commission on Adigent Legal Services as part of our local reporting network. So Samantha Hogan is a reporter at the Maine Monitor and ProPublica is really proud of having a local reporting network where we are able to support local reporters who stay on staff of their local news organization to spend a year working on an important project for their community. And so Samantha had been writing about problems with indigent defense in Maine last year and felt that the problems ran even deeper than she had reported. And what she reported on this fall is that the state as part of the MCILS, this agency had hired attorneys who themselves had had disciplinary problems for professional misconduct that these people were being hired to defend the indigent in Maine. So just to give you an idea, the commission lawyers in Maine represented about 15% of the lawyers who were practicing attorneys in Maine but they were 26% of the lawyers who were disbarred, suspended or reprimanded in the past decade for professional misconduct. We found attorneys, one lawyer is a registered sex offender convicted of possessing child pornography. Another one was found to have exposed himself to a client. There were other folks that had other criminal backgrounds and then went right back to defending people who were accused of crimes and in many cases it ended badly for those people. So Samantha published this and very immediately this led to impact. The executive director of this commission announced that he would retire this year. The board of the commission recommended to Maine's governor that she double the budget for indigent defense in Maine. It's unclear if she'll actually do that but the commission board recognized immediately how serious these problems were. And I have no doubt that it's in no small part a function of the reporting that Samantha did and frankly, with all these reporters who are focusing on COVID right now and rightly so. I mean, I too am inspired by the work that Tracy talked about and that you heard Louise and Manny talk about but there's not enough reporting that's going on in other areas and we need to create, we need to ensure that that's happening. Those underlying problems are not going away and in fact, people who are doing bad things may see this as a perfect moment to keep doing those bad things. Thanks, Charlie. So I'm actually going to move to some of the questions from our viewers now. And we may go back to my questions if we don't have that many. But as a reminder to the audience if you'd like to ask a question just click the Q and A button at the bottom of your screen to type it in. So our first question comes from Brooke Baldwin. I'm not sure if it's like the CNN Brooke Baldwin or same name, but anyways, she says as journalists doing work that exposes people doing things it shouldn't be doing you yourselves can become targets or can you come targets? So to the degree that you're comfortable sharing how do you have to think about protecting your communication and other aspects of privacy do you continue to be able to do this work? So like how are some of the ways that we just keep our communication secure and how do you protect yourself and other and your subjects? Well, you really look there's a limit in the modern world to how much you can do but we certainly try to take the basic precautions. You know, every one of our reporters is adapting the use of things like signal where you can send messages through an encrypted app and make sure those messages disappear either immediately or within a day. So, you know, this is a way of, you know covering some of the more obvious things but the truth of the matter is, you know in the modern world, it is really hard to have dealings with people and not leave behind some kind of electronic breadcrumbs. And so, you know, depending on who we're dealing with or what we're doing, you know you certainly take a bunch of precautions particularly say in the national security arena but, you know, it's actually a challenging thing with, you know, the cell phone location data and all the rest of it, you know we, you know, invest money and time and securing our networks and professionals have sort of looked at what we do and made it better but at the end of the day I've no doubt that a very, very determined adversary could find a way to hack darn near anything. I'm curious if my colleagues have any other thoughts on that. So, we have a whole page sort of devoted to how you can contact us securely and give us information securely. COVID has been a real problem because a lot of times you might actually avoid any kind of phone or electronic altogether and meet someone in person. We are still doing that. We have reporters that have gone out and reported socially distant and can gather information in ways that won't leave that electronic trail. We are very good about using signal, using WhatsApp, using various ways in which the conversations can be protected and the identities of folks can be preserved and that people can get information to us in ways that are secure or as secure as we can possibly achieve. It is challenging and I feel like there's sort of a one-up game of keeping things private but we are really dedicated to it. Great, thank you. So, our next question kind of deals with this idea of being in the post-truth era. This is an anonymous question they ask. Given how widespread disinformation has become and how vilified credible investigative journalism has been by some in our society, how do we renew and reinforce people's trust in the fact-based reporting that you do? And are you finding that you're getting like a lot of pushback in the face of your facts? I mean, is this something that you're kind of grappling with and how have you grappled with it as journalists? I don't mind stepping in and answering that. I think one of the things that we try to do and that ProPublica is known for doing is bringing the receipts and Manny mentioned this but I think it's incredibly important that when you report that something is broken or you report that you found something, we try as best we can to share what we found with the public that often means sharing the documents, the data, case studies, snippets of decisions so that people can read for themselves. I think when Tracy and I worked together on investigations, we always felt that in addition to asking people to trust us, we should let them see for themselves and then come to their own conclusions and when you do that, the level of trust that people have in you only increases. If I can add to that, Charlie, I like to think that transparency is the foundation of trust and that the more that we are open about how we do the work that we do, the better able we are to grow trust. I think as a profession, we tend to assume that people know a lot more about how we do our work than they actually do and that making sure they understand the way that we go about it, that for example, an anonymous source is not anonymous to us. We know who that person is. There is a whole process through which news organization goes through to accept an anonymous source and there are dozens of other examples of the way that we approach our work thoughtfully and with accuracy and fairness in mind that we just need to be much more open about that with the public. Our next question comes from Darlene and it's kind of about the time that goes into this work. Anyone, can you give an example of how much time elapsed from the green lighting of a story to its actual publication? Like what's the longest time it's taken from a story being green lit to like when it finally comes out and do you have an example of a really fast time as well? Well, I'll jump in here and just say with respect to the questioner, one of the things I as an editor usually delete from any story draft that comes in and by now our staff is so accustomed this hardly ever arrives this way is that sentence that begins in an 11 month investigation pro-publica has learned. I don't think readers actually care deeply how many months we spent on it. And so that is sort of in a sense our problem. Stories can take days, they can take weeks, they can take months. And the demand of pro-publica is that we do hopefully original research to do stories that wouldn't otherwise be done. And that can take a little time or a lot of time. Perhaps Manny could talk a little bit about from the time he green lit, the first look at the border wall construction to the time we had a story and then how long it took till we got like even more stories. Yeah, so that's again, let me back up and just reiterate what everyone has said. The readers really want and these are not your critics. These are also the folks who support you. Think about us in our tomb whom much is given, much is expected. And so our supporters wanna know how we did these stories. In the border wall stories, this was Jeremy Schwartz who came to us from the Austin American statesman very sourced in. He got a call from one of his old sources and says, you gotta look at this border wall that was built here in South Texas. A lot of taxpayer money, private money from this organization called Rebuild the Wall went into it from good supporters. The thing is ready to topple over.  I sent it to Charlie and said, hey, listen, this sounds promising. Well, Jeremy's chasing this other lead. I'm just gonna have Perla make some calls because Jeremy and Perla worked on it. Perla makes some calls and it is indeed, indeed turned out to be a story. And so the timeframe, because to support our reporting had to be, we believe that this is shoddy construction using public money, but as well a large share of money from private donors who both just believe in this project. But how do we show that it is indeed falling apart? So the green light came from talking to enough experts in engineering, water flow, et cetera to say, yes, there is a big problem down there. So I would say that was maybe a couple of weeks and then to make sure we pitched it to Charlie. And then Charlie's point of view, okay, how do we best tell the story? And of course, one of the big home runs here happened to be actually with a Texas Tribune that Miguel got a drone pilot to fly over this thing and show just what a message is because you could write, but there's nothing more powerful than pictures. So I think that was probably a couple of weeks to talk to the experts to get a green light. But then over the course of the first story was maybe about, I think maybe Charlie may remember like about under the month, but what was incredible about it, the president of the United States on a Sunday has read that a storm passed and the wall started just clearly, it was not going to do well in the long run. The president sends out a tweet basically disavowing any knowledge of anything related to this thing, considering one of the key founders of the We Build a Wall group is Steve Bannon, who was one of his chief campaign strategists, who subsequently he and other We Build a Wall members were indicted in a case of looting the charity. They're allegedly charged with looting the charity. So you see the product that you see really is many steps in laying the groundwork for publication and that's that rigor that we apply. Okay, we have so many great questions and not a whole lot of time. This might be the last one. Can you talk about the benefits and challenges of reporting and doing investigative journalism as a nonprofit organization? I don't know if you have thoughts on this, like do you feel like there's particular challenges or benefits of being a nonprofit? Just to jump in very quickly there. I think the biggest benefit potentially, first of all, the work is done at the same kind of level that any other sort of top news organization is. I would say the biggest benefit is that we are built around the entire thing that this hour has been about, which is impact. So the biggest benefit that we have is that we can choose stories where we're potentially gonna have impact rather than having to get massive number of clicks or even stories so fascinating that anyone would give us $800 a year to subscribe. By the way, if anybody wants to do that, that's great. We have a donate page come on down but if you're not moved to give us $800 a year, we'll do it anyway and we'll do it for the impact which is what we've been talking about here. And I think for me as someone who grew up in for-profit news organizations, that is a completely different mindset. Okay, and I'm gonna take another question and before I take that last question, a note from our president actually, Casey earlier was talking about a page that gives you lots of information on how to securely share stories with us or information. And that page is pro-publica.org slash tips, T-I-P-S, okay. So our next question comes from Jenna. She says, there's a fine line between activism and journalism when the result is political or legal impact. How do editors delineate the two within pro-publica to make sure motivations are purely journalistic? Take it. Tracy, you were, do you want me to take it? Okay, I think that people who come to us may have a whole array of motivations to tell their stories just like in the real world. People are motivated by doing the right thing. People are motivated to stop what they see as wrong to their colleagues. People may have other motivations as well. What we have to make sure is that we screen all of that out to make sure that at its core what we're telling is truthful is accurate not only in the small letter accurate but in the capital A letter accurate in the sense that it is in the spirit and in the letter exactly what is taking place and that we aren't doing it to advance somebody's own motive but rather to advance the truth. Steve and I had a conversation a couple of years ago in which we talked about whether investigative journalists were inherently pessimistic or optimistic and we were doing this as we were awaiting a plane in the Idaho, Boise, Idaho airport and I was certain the plane was gonna be delayed and I said to Steve, well, journalist, investigative reporters were inherently pessimistic and he said, I beg to differ with you. He said, journalists are inherently optimistic in the sense that investigative reporters when we see a problem, we are optimistic that people who of goodwill when they see the same problem will try to fix it and it obviously left an impression with me because I'm repeating it now but I think he's exactly right and I think it sort of goes to the heart of this question which is that we at our core believe that if you show that something is wrong and we have validated it and determined that we're telling us factually and truthfully that people of goodwill will wanna fix it and I think that's what this is all about. Very well said, Charlie, thank you. That's actually our time for today and as a reminder to everyone today's event was recorded and will be uploaded to ProPublica's YouTube channel and if you haven't already, you can get more invitations to events like this by signing up for a big story newsletter at propublica.org slash newsletters. Thank you so much to our speakers and for everyone watching from all of us at ProPublica thank you for joining us. Have a great day and we'll see you next time.


Le Quang Liem and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave at 6 points, going into the penultimate round at the Gibraltar Masters. Liem joins us to talk about his game. Liem, you drew with Maxime. It seemed harmless for him from the very start. Are you satisfied with the result? Yeah, in general, I think we play a good game. I try to test him in the rune fan, which is his pet opening and it's not a very easy thing to do. I think I got something. The position was interesting and at some point it was a point up, so he had to play some accurate moves to hold the position and of course he was up to the task. So there was not much I can do and I was just trying to focus on the last two games. So the extra pawn didn't really offer any real chances? Yeah, I think the problem is it's really hard to defend that C3 pawn and his pieces are very active and they can compensate for the pawn and at the end I couldn't defend the pawn. So yeah, I draw his logical result. Now you're on 6 points, so a more aggressive approach probably in the last two rounds? Yeah, definitely I would have to choose my approach for the last two games, but also it depends on who I'm going to play, so we have to see the pairings tonight. Right, now you mentioned something very interesting about trying to test Maxime in a line which he plays often. So give us some insights at your level when you're preparing against a player like Maxime. How do you decide which approach to take for the opening? Yeah, so Maxime is a very interesting player. Most other players they play a variety of openings, but Maxime he plays only Crune Fan against Default and Nadoff against E4. So in a way it's easier to predict what he's going to play, but also it's extremely hard to out-prepare him because he knows this opening so well. So in this game I just try to do something a little less popular hoping that he would forget his preparation, but it didn't work that way. Yeah, so if I go really aggressive and try to go into a very complicated line, he may even out-prepare me there and he may know better than me. So there was a risk that I had to take and I decided to play for two results today and try to play it safe, but also give me some practical chances and if he defended well then okay, draw is fine and that's what happened. So the approach was safety first? Yeah, for today, yes. Alright, well we look forward to seeing you back in our studio. Good luck for the two games. Thank you very much. Thank you.


There was once a pottery teacher called Joe. One month, he decided to split his class into two groups. Group 1 had to make a pot every day for 30 days, making it 30 pots in total, and Group 2 had to work on a single pot for the whole 30 days. At the end of the month, Joe judged the quality of the pots. Without exception, every one of the top 10 pots came from Group 1, the guys that made one pot per day, and actually none came from the group that was focused on perfecting their single pot. Now, in any pursuit, goal, or craft, either it being video production, writing, drawing, coding, or music, quality comes in as a result of often huge quantities. And if you want to follow pop psychology rules like the 10,000 hours rule, where 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are needed if you want to achieve work-class status at basically anything, this doesn't necessarily need to be the case moving forward. There's no specific number tied to it, but the majority of work-class performers in any craft put in more hours than the rest of us. And probably when just starting out, there's going to be a gap for a few weeks and months, and you know, even years, and we're all going through this. We know that our craft isn't really that good yet, it's trying to be good, but you know, it isn't. But what is good, what is legit, what is organic, is the thing that made you start thinking about improving your craft in the first place, which is actually your taste and passion for that particular craft. And by paying attention to your taste for the actual craft, you'll probably notice that what you are creating is not good, that you are not there yet, that your progeny still needs some streaming. And most of us cannot manage to get past this stage and oftentimes quit, but how can you go past this? How can you go past this block? My idea that you will have something that you want to do and then you try to do it, and you'll fail, and you try again, and you'll fail, and you try again, and you'll fail, and you'll try again. So you keep pushing on a specific project, coming up with buggy and sketchy versions of it, you do it quickly, you do it dirty, speed matters. Now there's one thing I want to keep in mind, which is the battle between quality and quantity. Quality and quantity come in with various degrees of attention, focusing on understanding what you are trying to achieve, and also focusing on the work itself. There should be a guiding light, a North Star, and in the book Deep Work, Call Newport explains a small piece of Theodore Rossville's philosophy of work during his Harvard years. Now these fragments spent studying didn't usually add up to a large number of total hours, but he would get the most out of them by working only on schoolwork during those periods and doing so with a blistering intensity. So you want to keep attacking the same problem and coming up with different solutions to it while also thinking from first principles whenever you're trying to come up with a new version of the craft. Essentially the more you'll practice, the more you'll learn, and the more knowledgeable you would be. So let's say if you want to start writing, which is in my opinion the easiest thing you can do right now, having tremendous benefits overall, such as improving your cognition, your ability to think, process, and structure information while also facing your racing thoughts. You can actually improve your writing by doing it every single day for a few minutes. So do you want to learn how to write, to write one page about anything every single day? Do you want to learn how to cook? Start with something basic such as an omelet and try improving and mixing the recipe every single time you're making a new one. Do you want to learn how to play music? Play something small every single day. It is about combining that intense focus, not caring that much about making it perfect with the quality versus quantity phenomena, focusing on quantity first, so that you can start producing higher quality work later.


feel like a seal, which could be verbal behavior, hint. Verbal behavior, folks. It's behavior that is verbal. Why just a talking head? Because there couldn't be anything more appropriate for verbal behavior than a talking head. Skinner-defined verbal behavior is the behavior that is reinforced to the mediation of another person's behavior. So your words and your actions and have an effect on other people's behavior, often through words and actions, and maybe translate that into actual actions. So anyway, so verbal behavior is near and dear to every behavior, unless it's hard. It's not super confusing. It's just simply the application of all the other behavioral principles to all other nonverbal or non-language principles to the app, to language, applying them to, it's not challenging at all, I promise. Pick up a copy of verbal behavior for yourself and I guarantee you by the time you're done with it, you won't be confused at all. Anyway, thank you very much. Have a good day. Bye.


On Friday, August 19th, the residents of Hyman gathered to receive donations from four good community, a non-profit charity operating out of western Kentucky. Six volunteer workers loaded up their bus and made their first trip to Hyman following the flood disaster, bringing with them food, clothing, bed sheets, and other necessities for affected families to take. It's been awesome. You know, we love the people of eastern Kentucky. This is like I said, our fifth time out this far, and we're about five hours west of here in Henderson, Kentucky, and it's just been humbling. Every time we ask people that you can take a whole box, they're always like, well, we want to leave more for someone else, and just that humility. They care so deeply about their neighbor, and that's just humbling for us because we bring tons of resources where it's okay to take more than one because you lost everything, but everyone's mindset has been very positive, very uplifting, and it gives us the energy to keep coming back because it's, you know, five hours isn't a quick drive, but having the positivity has been awesome. So we specialize in getting resources. So we work with big retailers to get resources into the hands of people that don't have them. So we have socks, we have clothing, we got hand branded stuff like underwear and bras for women, we got furniture, could be from a desk, a table, and then we have resource bags and the clear bags which are full of cleaning supplies, some food, toothbrush, hygiene products. So it really is just, we always bring enough to help people kind of restart. It's enough to kind of get you going, and we also brought shoes on this trip, which is the first time we brought shoes. So it's been, it's been good. We've been, every time we come out, we think of better things to bring, and we get awesome feedback from everyone about what they're requesting, and we usually try to find it and bring it. My name is Aaron Crump, Chief Medical Officer at Pikeville Medical Center. The Heart and Vascular Institute, it's really an incredible program. Made incredible because of the providers, because of the technology, and because of the staff. We've truly become the leading provider of Heart and Vascular Services in Eastern Kentucky, and in fact, what we do compares to anywhere in the nation. Pikeville Medical Center, when it comes to your heart, place your care in our hands. Since the volunteers had never brought supplies to a flooded area before, their main concerns were safety and the amount of goods to transport. Regardless, the citizens of Hyman were more than happy their community was receiving help even after the flood waters receded. This is, this is bad. This is, you know, this is our first time being in a flood area. I said we went to the tornadoes and Bremen, Mayfield, and you know, they're all horrific and but the flooding like we've never experienced that over there in Western Kentucky. So it's been it's been hard to see whole houses ripped off their foundation. I think everyone kind of takes for granted the power of water and what it could really do to someone. So it's, it's been rough to see the destruction as you drive in, especially through just the counties that were all affected. So it's uh it's been a real sobering driving through this Eastern Kentucky area seeing everything. Yeah, so biggest concern is safety of our staff. You know, making sure we're going to an area that's safe and safe, stable for us to go into. And then it is the concern of do we have enough resources? We, we want to help everyone. We want you to come here and if your sister's not here, tell your sister come out here. This is for the people. This is all free. This is, it sounds crazy like what do you mean? You have brand new stuff. You're giving out for free. It's like, is this what we do? So, yeah, making sure we have enough and the right location. We always try to strategically place ourselves in locations where the people can get to us easily, especially with the flood. A lot of people lost their vehicles. A lot of people don't have great access to cars right now. So we do try to strategically place ourselves in like a hub and this has been awesome. Like this is a great turnout and I think we found the right spot for Heinemann, which has been just going to be an awesome day for us. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.


I've been clean for eight years after almost a decade of battling my drug addiction. Those of us in long-term recovery know that it's easier to get sober than it is to stay sober. When my life was an absolute mess, it was easy to realize that I needed to change, but many people come to find that the challenge is keeping that energy when life gets back to normal. After working at a drug and alcohol rehab center for years, I saw this pattern with many of my clients, and I teach them that this is something we need to do daily if we want our lives to get better. What many people don't realize is that this is the same thing we're seeing with influencers and the Black Lives Matter movement. While many of them were extremely vocal when hashtag BLM was trending and they thought they were making a difference with a black square on their Instagram feed, their energy is gone when we need it the most. During the George Floyd protests at the beginning of the summer, I saw a lot of people saying don't forget about BLM when it's no longer trending. Although a major part of me knew that they were right to say this, I wanted to be optimistic when it came to my fellow influencers on YouTube and other social media platforms. At the time of the protests, I saw many of them tweeting about it and posting pictures of them at protests. Some of them even made videos discussing their own privilege and how they were going to do better by the black community. As a half black man who hoped for the best, I'm extremely disappointed today by the silence of many influencers. Why today? Well, at the time of writing this script, it's September 23rd, 2020 and we just received an update about Breonna Taylor. Before the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, a young black woman who had her whole future ahead of her, was gunned down by the police in her own home. For months, we've been waiting for justice and today it was announced that the punishment was going to be minimal. A young woman is dead and one of the three cops was indicted. Now he was not indicted for the murder of Breonna Taylor, but for the fact that some of the many bullets he fired went into a neighboring apartment. Unfortunately, many influencers are now silent and haven't mentioned BLM since it was trending on social media. I feel that it's important to call this out due to the fact that influencers are in an extremely privileged position and many are benefiting from the prestige of appearing like they care when their actions say otherwise. In an effort to let some of these influencers save face, I won't be naming names, but if you look through your memory, you'll know who falls into this category. Also, I want to make it very clear that I am not the ideal either, but it's our responsibility to be self-aware so we can improve. Right now it's very clear that many influencers talk their talk, but they aren't walking in. As mentioned in another video, slacktivism is a major issue. Slacktivism is the practice of supporting a political or social cause by means such as social media or online petitions characterized as involving very little effort or commitment. In his hilarious book, Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander makes fun of slacktivism by saying, an interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world's problems can be solved through awareness, meaning the process of making other people aware of problems and then magically someone else like the government will fix it. But on a more serious note, this is something all of us should take seriously. Entrepreneurs are profiting off of the selling of an idea that they care about social issues while putting in little to no effort when it comes to making change happen. When you look at their actions under a microscope, you can see that they only discuss social issues when it benefits them. It's a cloud-inducing sleight of hand making their audience think they care about something and doing absolutely nothing about it. At a recent point, there was more outrage over the Netflix movie Cuties than there is about the lack of justice for Breonna Taylor from People on YouTube. Why? Because talking about Cuties gets influencers thousands of views. And Breonna Taylor doesn't. Child exploitation is a major issue. But if it did not get views, I doubt you'd see so many influencers talking about it. We don't need to be an economist to know that humans are driven by incentives and influencers have much greater incentives to discuss what will get them the most clicks, views, and likes. Now that BLM is not trending, they're no longer incentivized. This isn't just about Breonna Taylor either. It's about the entire BLM movement and seeing influencers not live up to the show they put on during the George Floyd protest. When the protests were going on, influencers loved hopping on their platforms to discuss their privilege to raise awareness about what's been happening to Black people for years. Although these YouTubers admitted to some of their privilege, they seem to not fully grasp the privilege that they have. Privilege is being able to release one video a week and make more money than half of the people in the United States. Aside from privilege, many of these influencers who make more money than you and your parents would not be successful had they not been born when they were. I've recently been binge reading books on problems with the idea of meritocracy and it's extremely eye-opening. Many of us refuse to admit how lucky we are and influencers are often the prime example of the myth of meritocracy that we have here in the United States. If you're interested in this subject, I highly recommend the new book, The Tyranny of Merit by moral and political philosopher Michael Sandell as well as Success and Luck by Robert H. Frank and Fair Shot by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. One privileged YouTuber sticks out in my mind the most, while none of us can ever prove how much someone cares about an issue, based on the lack of action I'm confident in my argument. This YouTuber, who I'm leaving nameless, has been very vocal about not only equality but social justice in general. They have been a huge Bernie Sanders supporter and are very vocal about it. After a brief look at this YouTuber's social media, you can see that they grew up in an upper or upper middle class family and to this day they travel the world on expensive vacations. When the George Floyd protest happened, this YouTuber didn't upload for a couple weeks. While they said they didn't upload due to wanting to let black voices speak on these issues, it's hard to believe that this is true since prior to the protest, their uploads were inconsistent. In fact, after they returned, they still have extremely inconsistent uploads. Although this YouTuber has cultivated an audience who believes that they care about black lives and making change, the fact is we have not seen it. In their return video, they discussed how they really wanted to promote more black creators and talk more about the issues that African Americans face. The creator apologized in advance because they had to do some sponsored content but they promised to get back to these serious issues afterwards. Since then, they haven't. Not only have they not discussed these matters further, but they said they planned on promoting more black creators. In a collaboration video featuring about six people, they featured one person of color. Recently, they did a solitary collaboration video with a black creator. And this was only after the creator passed one million subscribers. Like I said, this is not the only creator who is guilty of this. Plenty of influencers are. They're profiting and living an extremely privileged life off the illusion that they care about social issues. As consumers, if we like their content and support it, that's one thing. But as a community, we should not give these influencers extra points for their slacktivism. Not only are they silent about Breonna Taylor, but millions of people are unemployed during the pandemic, don't have health insurance, and are facing eviction. Meanwhile, influencers are profiting as they send fake social signals. I'm not encouraging anyone to stop supporting an influencer, but I believe we should all be a little bit more skeptical when we see influencers social signaling to be seen as an activist when it's just convenient for them. All right, everybody. Yeah, I don't have much to say. I just saw that nobody is calling out this behavior. And, you know, I've been really trying to pay attention to this stuff. The new cycle moves so quick, so, so, so quick, and we forget what was happening even a month, two months ago and things like that. And this is something that I've really tried to pay attention to. And I'm noticing it more and more.  And like I said, like, I know that I could do more. You could probably do more, too. We could all do more. But in the position that these influencers are in, the least they can do, the least they can do is hold up to their word and do the minimum, like not only talking about these issues, but promoting black creators. You know what I mean?  And like, none of them are. They come back and they say something and everybody says, Oh, you're such a good person and then they don't, they don't do anything about it. You know what I mean? But anyways, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know about this awesome thing going on on Twitter. It's called Defeat by Tweet and all the money goes towards black led organizations. But anyways, anyways, every time Trump tweets, money gets donated to these black led organizations, they've already raised like over two million dollars and it helps black people go out there and vote. It helps locally owned organizations. I'll link the website down below. But yeah, you can donate like pennies every time that Trump tweets and it'll help get them out of office in November. But anyways, we got to keep the energy like these, these issues that we're facing, they've been going on for decades and not even decades, centuries, you know, and we need to keep the same energy if we want change. Anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like it, give it a thumbs up. If you're new, subscribe, ring the notification bell and a huge thank you to everybody out there who supports the channel, whether it's on the Patreon or getting books from therewirestall.com or all the books that I recommend down in the description below. Those are affiliate links. I highly recommend those books that I mentioned in this video. All right. Anyways, I'll catch you guys next time.


All right, hey guys. So I wanted, I've been asked a lot of questions about this journal and I know we've at this point shown it briefly before and we've talked about it, but I haven't shown you how I actually do a page and what my process is, which I'm going to now. This is my color inspiration journal. And the last time I talked about it, I shared the pages that were in here that I'd found in some art and other magazines and then this is the one that started it. I was inspired by this image, the color and composition of this image to create sort of a color mood board, if you will, on inspiration dashboard of the original image that inspired it and then the colors of paint that I was able to grab from the image, this stamp here at the bottom, which is a mixture of all of these colors along with notations about where the image came from and the different paint brands and their colors that I used. Although this is done in acrylic, you could definitely use this as just a color inspiration landing point to find out or mix these colors in your watercolor palette, your gouache palette, whatever medium you're using. You could go find your olive green pen and still be inspired by the same page. And it is funny, I get asked about this all the time. So this is literally the leftover paint from doing the swatches and then I dip this piece of cardboard in it. This is actually my second piece because I wore out the first one and this is all that's left of the first one. So it's just a piece of cardboard packaging that I then dip in the paint and get well coated with the paint and then stamp. So I can see what the colors look like mixed together besides just swatches this way. So we are going to work on a page. It started out with these magazine images and then I realized in the last video where I talked about this that I had all these other inspiration notebooks I showed in another video. I'll try to figure out which video it is and link it in the description below in case you haven't seen it. Anyway, I talked in that video about maybe taking those notebooks apart because I really liked this format better and those notebooks were very old and past it. I did that except for the people one because the people one, I really, that notebook I'll keep adding to, it's a good reference book, personal reference book for me when I am doing something with the human form or faces in it. I collect images out of magazines and I paste them in the people book and that way I have a good reference for positions of head and facial features and body and hands and feet and all that sort of stuff. So the people one I kept, everything else got taken apart. I took the images that I loved from those books and I put them in here, starting here and I put them in groupings. I usually start out being inspired by one photo and sometimes like in the beginning it's still gonna just be one photo but sometimes it's gonna be a collection of photos that I think play well together and together give me interesting inspiration for composition and shape and movement as well as color. So these are the new ones that I've been doing and a lot of these images I've had a long time, if it says random magazine photos, it's because I've had it so long I don't remember where it came from. So I'm like this one I took, I don't remember exactly where I took but I took and so I love this one. And a lot of them are very much departures for me in color because I'm used to traditionally doing something that's more like this. So this color palette that would be a challenge for me but that's why I like doing this because I can flip to this with intention and okay just be inspired by these pages to create an interesting work of art. These images with these movements and the shapes and the textures and the images as well as the color palette inspired by these images. So that's what this is all about. So now we have this new page and I've got this new collection of images that I think I wanna see if we can work together on one page. So the first thing we're gonna do is grab some glue because that's important. Okay, which I didn't grab. So these are our collection of images. So they're all from, I think a house beautiful magazine that I picked up at the library and I found this one first and there was just something about the colors in this picture and the textures in this picture. Did I say picture? Picture. Colors in this picture and the textures in this picture that I was very attracted to. Then I found this one which goes, I don't know which way but it's like a piece of a photo like the corner of some architecture. And there was something about the colors and texture in that distressed stone or wood or whatever that is. And then I found this one is just gigantic bright pop of yellow. So I think that I wanna use all of these. So what I wanna do first is find out the important parts of this one for me to add to our book. I do also like the size of this because if I am traveling, say for instance, or teaching, this is a good size to take with me. Those other ones were a little big. So, but the space is limited. So I wanna find out which parts of the photo for me are important. I do think this dish not necessarily the hands but the dish is important. I usually don't think about it this much to be really honest with you. Grab some bigger scissors.  I don't usually bother getting the paper trimmer out at all, trim this one. This is just really, yes, the shapes are interesting and the fact that they're all yellow. Mostly it's just about the color. That doesn't mean I wanna lose the shape. So I think when I trim this one, I wanna keep some of the shapes by doing this because I think those shapes are inspiring. And I think I wanna do something like that. Now, if the little bits are interesting enough, I will save them to do collage work with or paperclip art or something like that, a tag. So I generally set them aside at least for a little bit but this, I like this. So my only question is, do I want these other? I don't really think I need them. Do I? I really like this bit. All right, so now we're gonna get to glue in. So you can use glue stick, you can use Elmer's glue, Taki glue, whatever you have, nothing fancy. Just glue your images down. In the old journals, they were taped in with scotch tape. So I mean, you could do that too. Scotch tape, washi tape. If you're gonna do washi tape or decorative tape, try to pick tapes from your collection that add to the color and inspiration of the images and the movement in the images, the texture in the images. Don't just add like hot pink washi tape to this. I don't think that will work very well. I love this yellow, which is so funny because I'm not normally that big a yellow or orange fan, but when you're painting, it is a must have color. When you're painting, you must have yellow and or orange. It just gives a nice pop. I do wish I knew which house beautiful magazine this is from and I might actually still have it in the garbage can, so I might need to go take a look to notate the month. I do try to write it down. In fact, one of the pages, there's a print of a piece of artwork from one of my teachers, Pauline Agnew. And it was part of a class I took with her and I took a piece of it and put it in here. I really am inspired by her work and the colors in that piece. Okay, so that's all well and good in there. We're gonna take these and put them over there. Let's find out what issue of that magazine that was.  Holy cow. So it was house beautiful November 2017. So then just make a note, right? And if it's a picture of a painting, like, let's see, this one, this was from Southwest Art Magazine May 2019, artist's name is Andrew Denman and it's called Stacked Bluebirds, I believe. So always make note, give credit where credit is due. All right, so we've got that now. We need to do our paint. So I was inspired by these collection of images to pull some certain colors. So I pulled a white, a buff, a gray. I pulled a fuchsia, a red, a yellow. And this one's called Coffee Latte. This one's called Light Cinnamon and this is a dark paint's gray. So we're gonna swatch all these on this adjacent page now. So what I do is pull a pallet over and start lightest to darkest and put out just a small drop of paint and then take the bottle and I'm gonna put it in front of me with the color name facing me. If you're gonna do this with watercolor paints, you probably want to, this is a Moleskine Cayet. I like this journal, I like the paper for this kind of thing. I like the weight of the paper. It's interesting for mixed media, but, but, but, but. If you're gonna do this kind of thing with it, you probably want to use, with watercolor, you probably want to use watercolor paper. It's a Coffee Latte color. Go with the yellow, which doesn't want to come out. There we go, and the red. Remember what I said, lightest to darkest, right? Is that fuchsia? Oh, sorry, yeah, fuchsia. I thought these two reds very much would be inspired by the flower petals here in the image and the color of the beets and the beets stems in the background. I'm pretty sure that's what those are. They're beets, which I'm not a big fan of in real life. I don't really like beets, but it makes an interesting image. And the paint's gray, which is a dark blue gray. More interesting than black. Okay, I'm gonna a small, flat brush and start with the white and paint some swatches. And I'm gonna take my small pad of Muji newsprint paper here and wipe my brush off in between colors on the pad. Hopefully as I'm putting the swatches on the paper, you can see by looking from the swatches to the images and see where I was inspired to pull that particular color. Look at that yellow. That is Dekowart Americana Cadmium Yellow, just FYI. Okay, now we are going to write our color, brand and name down. Now in the front of the book, I made some notations about what my different abbreviations for the brands mean, what brand that actually is, like when I write media, what is that? It's a Dina Wakeley media paint, okay? So you can make yourself a little key in the front if you use abbreviations like that. This doesn't have to be neat. It doesn't have to be, you know, typed or anything. Nobody's really gonna see this except you. This is for you. So just use your own handwriting. If it's messy, it's messy. If you spell something wrong, you spell something wrong. I think every time I write paints gray, I spell it a different way. So yeah, just FYI. I know I misspell it and my misspellings are not consistent. Belling is not my strong suit. It's G-R-E-Y. I keep spelling it G-R-A-Y. All right, then I'm not quite done yet. Where's our piece of cardboard? So I take my piece of cardboard and whatever paint is left over on the palette and I find a spot. Sometimes it's this side. Usually it's over here somewhere. Usually at the bottom, sometimes at the top. Push, push, push, push, push. There we go. So then I can take this and put this over here and then leftover paint. And now I have so many of these little pieces of paper. It's crazy, you know, but I have to send some to the design team or something. Maybe bundle some with some other stuff in Etsy to see if you guys want like a $5 hand-painted embellishment pack or something. But you see the interesting white paper that you can make. I do do a fair bit of pushing on the piece of cardboard, which is why they don't last forever, but I do have a bin full of these from moving last year and buying furniture, so. Okay, and then on the last one, what I do, because I really, really don't want to waste paint, is I do this and then rub and you get that. So then you just clean it off what's left here with a baby wipe, which I'm always sad to do because I always get something that's interesting. So when you are going through your magazines and your materials looking for collage items, if you see a picture you find interesting and maybe it's something that you know, I'll never use that in a collage, but wow, that's an interesting image. I love the colors of that. That's one that you should pull and cut out and save and put in a color inspiration journal. So that's all done and we're left with a few pieces of hand-painted collage pages, papers, sorry, and a new page in our collage inspiration journal. So I hope it gives you some ideas of what you can do to build your own personalized reference library, which is really what this is all about, something that will aid you in your creative endeavors and give you inspiration, especially when you get stuck and maybe you have all these reds and yellows and maybe some of the browns, but you're like stuck as to what else you can put with it. Maybe you didn't think of the gray and the buff and the pain's gray, or maybe you had everything but the yellow and then you're like, yellow, that's what I need, I need yellow. So this is just to give you some kind of an idea or inspiration for your artwork. I hope it helps. I know it helps me, I've already been using it and it's not even finished yet. So that's it for today. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe if you will. If you wanna follow me on social media and see what pages I come up with every day as I add to this journal or whenever, now it won't be every day now cause now I'm out of images, but when I add more images, if you'd like to see what I'm up to or see whatever other creative endeavors I come up to every day, you can follow me on social media and find all those links and the links on where you can support me and the free content here on YouTube and over in the art groups and Facebook by clicking on the link tree list of links in the description below. My happy mail address is down there, the link tree list of links is down there and a bunch of other stuff so check it out. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe and above all go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself cause you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.