Hi, I'm Mark Buckley, and this is Inside Ideas, my 1.5 media and innovators magazine podcast. And I think that's one of my great wishes.  You're going to look at the rest of the world differently. And it's very hard to have an us versus them perspective in life when you've actually spent time with the them. And that applies whether it's people of a different ethnicity, people of a different culture, people of a different geography, because what you realize when you travel so much around the world, as I'm sure you know, just, you know, parents care about raising their kids and giving them love and giving them opportunities.   And it comes from the Greek word sit-offs for food and top-offs for place. And I invented this word as a practical food-based alternative to utopia. That's why I went Greek. And the reason I did that was because utopia, I discovered when I was researching it for Hungry City, it's a joke word. It can either mean a good place or no place. So it comes from the Greek OU, which means good or EU, which means no. And I remember finding this really depressing because utopianism, if you like, is our greatest tradition of thinking in a joined up way about how we can live well, you know, how we can lead good lives. And to discover that this place is good but it doesn't exist, really, really upset me. And by then I've been kind of researching Hungry City, I guess for about seven years. So I've realized by that point that, oh, you know, actually everything is shaped by food. So maybe, you know, I can invent a word that means food place and then we can actually, we already live in it. So it does exist. It very much does exist.    So there's many Greek words for food, but it's the fundamental, the thing without which you can't live. So it actually really should be sitotopia.  So just make it sitotopia, which is what I did. But I like finding really eye-catching stories that are quite extreme. But in the analysis of them, we can all learn something, even if we're not living extreme lives or at the cutting edge of anything. So I'm drawn to really kind of big, incredible sounding stories that when you look at the meat of them, you realize that, you know, we can all learn something from them. So and I like the gray area in things. I don't like things where there is one answer. I like the mess of looking into things. And quite often, you start looking at something and you think you're going to arrive at one conclusion, and you realize that actually, that is, that is so the sort of the least interesting thing about it. So I like charting the journey of investigating something and seeing how you arrive at somewhere that you didn't necessarily think that you were going to arrive at. And I think we live in a world where everything is very polarizing, very binary, very black and white. You're either one of these people or another one of these people. And I've never, I wish I could fit into one of those camps. It would be really, life would be really easy if I was just, you know, that kind of person, you know, the vegetarian person or the right wing person or the feminist person or the environmentalist person. I've never been like that. I've always picked causes according to their individual merits and not how they fit in with my identity. And, you know, that's why I was I was a foreign correspondent for many years and I worked on this, this television program for nearly six years, making documentaries from around the world. Part of the reason why I did that is if you're a foreign correspondent, it means you don't have to specialize. You can be interested in science and politics. And, you know, you can be interested in stories about women or stories about technology or anything. It just has to be not in your own country. So that's where the human beings origin come from. And really, with the whole thing, our objective is that, and we mean it. Yeah. So what actually in the introduction of the human beast, I do say this, but we mean it is one of those times that we have we as a species, we have messed up the planet. We are in the history of life, 4.2 billion years. There's never been any other time when a single species messed up the planet. Yeah. And we did it. And then it seems that the speed at which the bias is collapsing is at least a thousand times faster, compared to the speed of the next fastest collapse. This is the sixth collapse of the bias, sixth extinction event. So like, imagine that a toddler is walking to towards you the end of a park. Yeah, that was the speed of the last extinction event of the planet. Now, instead of that, there's a jet fighter flying full speed at you. Yeah. So that's the crisis we are having in our hands. And there's no other way to solve this other than our species gets itself together and takes responsibility and does it. I think it is going to be another golden age. And I think to your point, it's the companies that really understand that the way we had done things in the past is not the way forward. It's really about understanding holistically, thinking holistically, it's about systems thinking systems design and understanding that the planet is more, it's not just about humans, you know, it's about the whole planet. And I think that's the opportunity. If you listen to this podcast and see the video, I think Mark and I, we touch upon some amazing journeys, if you will, from stories around the world, whether we are going to Uganda to New York, where we're happening in Europe, where we live both, we live both in the same city, we have similar thoughts, but I really learned a lot from your inspiring questions. And from, I wish the listeners have the time to spend to, you know, engage and see their potential and take a little bit more like mood shots and learn about butterflies and how a metamorphosis of our world can basically lift us all up. I feel myself as a global citizen, because I always feel that when you grow up from a nomadic community, you don't feel yourself that you belong to one space in very locked land. No, you feel that you belong to the open space, you belong to all the peoples and you live in harmony with even fishermen and farmers, you are a pastor or someone who's going to the office. So you feel that in this, the open spirit of growing up in a nomadic community. Let me tell you like a little history about me. Communicating with engaging with the public. But generally speaking, I just think that I'm a big believer in exploring creative ways to engage with the public. As a scientist, I fully recognize that science is necessary but insufficient to fully engage with the public. Scientists need to be working with creative people with artists, with the arts and with technology. I think we really need to bring together art, technology and science together. And it's only when you take the lessons of science and the best practices from research, package them in creative, engaging ways with artists, but then use technology to deploy them at scale that you can really shift the needle in meaningful ways. So General Magic, for your listeners who haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend the documentary because it's a great story about how both the future is unevenly distributed and also about how the future comes very, very slowly and then all of a sudden. And people, the example of General Magic is a good example of how, for instance, Apple was working on a vision that was very close to the iPhone as early as 1995 and that every few years it looked like it was just a couple years away. Many people created products. The company that I was a founder of OmniSky also created a product with this vision. And then 2007, all of a sudden, the future arrives, but it was incubating. It was bubbling. I've got some bread rising in the kitchen. It was doing that incubation that all technologies do and then suddenly burst out. Companion is my favorite word. It breaks down the etymological origin of companions. Com is the Latin for with and pan, of course, is the Latin for bread. A companion is somebody you share food with.  And we do that in both a very local and domestic level, sharing food with the people that we live with and love. But also on a national and international level, the exchange of food has been a fundament. Indeed, is the underlying thing that gives rise to civilization, the fact that you can have a farmer who produces enough food for more than just their own family is what gives rise to civilization? Because it means you can have some people doing things that are not just food production. I think that we're all holding two poles, right? Right now. And they're the very ends of those spectrum. One is in our field in particular, when we're thinking about what the opportunity is here, it is. There's a tremendous opportunity. There's a moment that we've all gotten still enough to see what's really happening in the world. And on the flip of that, there's this incredible amount of pain, right, and unknowing in death and in triage and the things that most people live their lives oblivious to. Right. So there's it's all on the table right now. And I feel like as a long-term organizer and advocate, usually you feel like you're holding up a wall. And right now it feels like the wall has disappeared and everybody's kind of just looking at us.  Regardless of climate change, helping people to understand how to stay in control of their emotional mind, not dismiss it, but stay in control of it and allow it to happen, but understand it and be in control of it and then let your rational thinking and your actions be guided by your intellect and your rational mind. That's kind of a big journey for me throughout my career really, but obviously it's really come to a fore in the last few years while I've been really thinking about it myself. And it's a fascinating field of research that a lot of people, psychologists in particular, delve into. And that is a challenge that if we can get that across to more people, and I think it'll help us with the communication process. I think the world needs a different slant. And I want to be part of that game. And that is a more human, a more, I'd say, collaborative and open and welcoming way of working together. And sort of acknowledging that body, mind and spirit need to be formed together, particularly in the world of work. So that sort of made me then step out of where I was and for me to then create what today is called soulworks, basically in the name itself, bringing together soul and works and having that harmonize in a far more, I think, impactful way if we bring these worlds together. I wrote a book about the future I want to imagine and want to contribute towards. And the reason for that was to clarify for myself, primarily, whether we can achieve this, this being 10 billion people living on the planet, in balance with the planet and equally wealthy on all five levels of mesoteric needs. And yes, I absolutely know that this is doable. I feel that Mark is honest, like I feel you're honest. And your honesty deserves my opening up a little bit more. So I'm going to just tell you a little bit about the juicero thesis, because most people, right? And I'm defining most is like 90%, not 51%. Most people never understood what happened to juicero, why I did it, and what happened. So I'm going to share with you succinctly. I'm born in Liechtenstein, country with 38,000 inhabitants. I think we have to rematch and to tell stories to influence change. Liechtenstein is a good starting point to do so, because here you can think big and nothing is impossible. That's why we have started to sell stories that we could imagine because everything you can imagine is real. And we thought it was a moment to do something that was reason why we started the nonprofit foundation, the system change foundation, with the World Systemic Forum and the Hoos. The Hoos is a house. We're happening up where we try to think different. We all know technology has to be part of the solution, but it is more than technology. We need as well behavior change and policy change. Systemic change needs creative ideas and willingness to reimagine. With our approach, with our World Systemic Forum and the Hoos, we have to reimagine. We bring together opinion leaders, position makers, creative minds, capital, what you need to reimagine. Imagination is the starting point of everything. We're living at extremely complicated times. There are all these vectors coming together. Climate change, social change, geopolitical change and COVID has just highlighted some of the intense weaknesses in many of our global systems. In order for us to build a better future, we all are going to need to come together in new ways and radically collaborate. My new company, BOMA, is a company that educates all stakeholders on how we can build a better future. So please join me. I live my life with the philosophy with the belief of three M's. OK. No matter the future will come, I will live my life with moderation, which means the wisdom of balancing between me, myself and other life. The second M is my food. OK. I, before I make any decision, I have to think through. I have to be conscious about the impact, about the karma. That's why in addition to my talk on the sufficiency economy, I always have a talk on the karma marketing because there's something that can either create positive footprint or positive footprint. Karma is a footprint, right? So I always smileful. I always think about if I do this, what's going to be the impact, not just the outcome, what's going to be the impact of my action. And the last one, whatever I do, I have to make sure that it's meaningful because if there is no use, if they cannot be beneficial to our life, it's just the action. Questioning and following the evidence is the pathway to the future. That is how we've gotten as far as we have as a species. And it's a good thing. And asking deep questions is valuable. And the other thing I would say is, you know, as I said earlier, the divisions between groups of people that seem really important are artificial and minute compared to what we share. And if we have the perspective of of the pale blue dot of zooming out, we can realize that we are all in it together. And we're so, so, so astonishingly similar that if anyone came from the outside, they would not be able to detect the differences that we seem to think are very important. It's a world that are two caves. In one cave, it's people living is conscious people living clean people who's worried and concerned about others, about nature, the vitamin they live in the other cave. It's people dirty. They don't care about others when they have to go to toilet. They even don't go out of the cave. So when everything is a mess, they decide to move to another cave. Now the moment, the current moment we are living, there are no more caves to move. So we have to change our mind and care the cave, the place, the environment where we live. So we must change the mind, the mentality. There is no more me and you. Now it's time for us.  But when we connect this intelligence on a global scale and we learn how to better connect our brains together and then it will be such an exponential growth of intelligence. I envision a time where we're going to have domes on the moon where people are going to be able to go and pick up their crops as a layover flight to then go to Mars. I truly see this as the future. Imagine Mars having biospheres made of something known as silica aerogel that was made by Harvard scientists and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists. And it's this cloudy material that was originally used to be the insulator for spacecraft. But it's not too far fetched to have it be domes on Mars to grow crops. And moxie, an instrument on the latest Mars rover, the Perseverance rover, is a material, is an instrument that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and it's going to be able to do that on Mars. So who knows, maybe within the next five to ten years, the robots that are already living on Mars will be able to start building these habitable locations for humans to be able to visit. There are no borders. It doesn't matter where CO2 emissions occur. It really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if one country is performing better than another. If one economy is performing better than another. This is a global problem, a global challenge. And the only way to solve this can be a global way. And creativity is a critical part of solving the mess that we found ourselves in right now. I have kind of a thesis that the business world stole the word creativity and repackaged it as innovation because it's more fundable. And yet as all these different music classes and arts classes are being cut, like we're going to like lose creativity. And if we lose creativity, there's no more new ideas. We're stuck with everything that's already in a textbook and there's no more progress. There's no more solving of the problems that we've found ourselves in, which requires creative thinking. What pirates did and where they think are good is that you can use a pirate ship as a kind of a microcosm of how we should exist together because you just like we're on a ship in the middle of the ocean. We've got to survive. We've got enemies all around us. No safe place to harbor because we're now enemies of the state and we have to exist together. We have to exist in some kind of harmony and how are we going to do that? And that's our urgency that they had is really useful to put yourself in that scenario. Perhaps we haven't felt the urgency until now and say, OK, what are the principles here and the things that emerge? Well, you know, we will have to be heard. We have to. We will have to have a and I guess one of the facts I love about how pirates made decisions was when they decided the articles in a pirate code, they had to be unanimous vote. There was not even if one person disagreed on one of the articles, it didn't go in because that was that slight one percent risk of mutiny was not worth it. So, you know, it was real real unanimous decision making completely different to the kind of government lawmaking that we have now where it's imposed upon people. If anything, then history has shown us that in any crisis, whether that's the financial crash in 2008 or the dot com crash, you know, 1999 2000 that companies that kept investing in culture and innovation and actually made big leads, you know, Google to name one company that famously rose and emerge from the dot com crash more resilient and stronger than before, because it kept investing in new products and Apple did as well. So I think there's something to be said from an economic from a business perspective, not to just completely go back to this reductionist view and be super pragmatically focused on the bottom line, but actually no, continue with a much broader view of business. But I think there's a real tension now and it's going to be a real struggle. So some of those fundamental market forces, they're going to be, I think, reinforced and they're going to see new support. And for a more humanist way of doing business in the spirit of, for example, the CEO roundtable statement that came out last year and many companies changing their mission statements and changing the way they operate. It's, I think they have to stick with their, stick with their path. So it's either a back to the basics or it's a real, it's a license to reinvent business from the ground up, which I hope is the path that will take. You've used the word actionable. And that's, that's a favorite word of mine. It's a favorite word in my, in my research group. I love doing science. I'm fascinated by science. I've been fascinated by science.  But I think scientists have a, an ethical responsibility to make sure that their science makes a difference in the world. And that's no, no where is that more true than environmental science? Scientists and policymakers that have to be clearer about the consequences of deforestation and the consequences of another epidemic. But simply scientists have to think more like businessmen and say, can we come up with solutions for this that people can invest in? So as the solution stops the bad thing happening, but does so in a way that generates job and income for people who compare to investors. And that requires more interactions between ecologists who they know, which won't be affected by the environmentalists and economists and perhaps also with sort of business people and entrepreneurs who sort of say, how can we develop economic models that are going to create huge incentives for doing sensible things rather than corrupting incentives for doing bad things? I believe that the part that governments have to play, right? The governments have to make sure that the pandemic doesn't spread exponentially in the country, which you can achieve by enforcing social distancing and mass wearing and doing enough testing. But of course, that's not very nice for economy, right? The real question on the side of economy and probably on the side of all of our social lives, because people have our social animals and we want to go out and meet them. I enjoyed seeing you on Zoom a lot, right? But I enjoyed speaking to you directly in the LD much more. So we want to get back to that. And I think that's a question that at least we're still working on. How can we use technology to maybe need less measures and still prevent exponential threat that spread? So we understood that in the end, we are going to build a food system of our own. So I mean, as we move forward, we're always being compared to the meat industry, but in the end, we're going to be an independent food system of our own and we're going to have our own footprint. And we, from the core of this company was how we take this and build a sustainable and resilient food system. So the way we look at sustainability, we build it under four pillars of sustainability. The first is, of course, environmental. This is a major aspect in sustainability. A lot of times, it's almost almost sometimes associated a almost completely only 10 environments, which I disagree to, but it is a very important aspect. And we have declared that we call our manufacturing facilities biopharmists. This is how we call them. So our biopharmists are going to be carbon neutral by 2025. And our successful supply chain is going to be carbon neutral by 2030. But we're not stopping on the carbon neutrality. It's a very important aspect. But we want to also, we're building strategies regarding our water, land use, waste, every second ability, circular production. I mean, so we have a very elaborated strategy regarding the environment. You know, when I was studying sustainability management Columbia, what I learned really quickly was that there was this idea when I entered that sustainability was kind of a destination. Oh, we've arrived. We're sustainable now. And it's just it's total bull. It's not, I mean, sustainability is a process, right? So it's like, oh, this city is sustainable now or this building is sustainable now. No, because you attempt something. You make a lead platinum building and then you observe and you learn and you increase the standard again to go further, right? You want to go from carbon neutral to carbon negative. You know, and so that journey is what people need to remember very often. I think in vertical firing, people have missed that. They just kind of see it as like, oh, we've arrived and this is it. It's constant improvement. And because it's improvement, that means that the method matters almost more than the kind of like final results. You have to have the method. And that's what I've tried to focus my practice on is, you know, what are the steps to ask the great questions that observe and focus your improvement on to get that process of sustainability constantly going? Really, it's about change about how do you affect change? And I think that in order to do that, I would recommend getting a really good understanding of how societies form and understand some sociology, understand something about economics and obviously philosophy as well. But that sounds pretty dry, I guess, if you know, to a gentlism, really. But it wasn't until I started looking at those things that I began to understand how this all works, how it fits together. Because I think that this, you know, you really, I think it really is important to understand what system we mean by a system and what we mean by structure and structural change and structural reform. And until I think until you get to grips with that, you end up going down lots of, you know, blood out. If we in Europe would do, as example, two things, make it criminal to throw food away like the French model. Perfect. Because then less than around 50% of what we could use goes into is a bit to rubbish because idle and current are not beautiful enough or we mismanage your logistics. So if we make it criminal to throw it away, there's no shortage of food supply. It's a question of management or appreciating currents which have small issues which you might have to cut off. So there's no shortage of food. Number one. Number two, if we as a society change the way how we look at children and the upbringing of children. So what we have right now is what I call the civil war at home. Yeah, we know like Luxembourg 90% of marriages end up in divorce. They have enough money to pay family lawyers. So we know that when we know romantic relationships are not always working a lifetime and that's OK. What we as a society do right now we then celebrate people who create a war at home. Yeah, so custody battles access to children, parents, alienation, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a reason why the guys we meet at the Cairo summits age from why they have one or two burnouts in the early 20s because they grew up in a civil war at home. Yeah. So if we stop that, if we have the food situation making it criminal second a society say, you know what, if you don't provide equal access to the child to both parents, then you are actually wrong. We don't want to know the rest. Yeah. If there is no if there is no security or safety issue, then children should have equal rights to be with both sides of the family. If we study that as a status quo, things will change in no time. I realize that there were solutions happening on the ground. They were new business models that were not only making a profit, but also positively contributing to the health of the planet and the well-being of people. And that's how sort of my commitment to to climate change started really through the realization that that the climate change challenge touches on most of the other global challenge that we're facing. So we need to secure the future of terror and humanity.  And the the the advantage of this concept would be that we can distinguish between that which is sustainable and that which is kind of the overall goal, the vision. Because if we use the same word, sustainable for the apple we buy and for the great vision for humanity, we risk that the great vision gets damaged if we realize the apple is not as sustainable as we thought. And this happens actually quite often that we think things are sustainable and then a few years, a few decades later, we realize, well, it might not have been the best idea. Take, for instance, bioenergy. 15 years ago, we thought that the energetic use of biomass is a good thing to do. Today, we have a totally different perception on that. And that is an illustration. If people now say, well, scientists said 15 years ago, this is sustainable. Now they say it's not sustainable. Well, then sustainability cannot work anyhow. And I think kind of an airbag against this solution is to have a concept that we agree on. We need to secure the future of Terran's humanity. We need futurinity. And if we do that, we can argue about the details. You have to live on your own and independent. If you are waiting for a vaccine, you don't know when and you don't know how effective that will come to your body.  Not waiting for a vaccine or a vaccine. If you have the best medicine, but you don't have food, that's the situation of you don't have a good food or you don't have good food body, then you cannot get the food thing from that best medicine. It won't work if you are not ready for them. To have a strong opinion on the future and have in mind that, you know, climate change is real. So it's not like that we have much of a chance that we can just experiment and like, let's see what 2035 brings us. No, I mean, this future has to be sustainable. It has to be, you know, the Cata generation. It has to be adopted by chance that and then have a very educated guess like, OK, this is what I want to grow up to. And then work backwards. And like if if that means my future as a company or as an individual, I can do that next year, next month, tomorrow to go at least the first step into that direction.   So if you want to be part of creating the world we want to see, just think about what you're doing and understand that that decision to buy the, you know, seventh generation unbelief toilet paper matters. And I think we need we, you and I, Mark and people like us need to work harder to get consumers to understand everyone as a consumer to understand that everything you do is important. Or start small and big, but take opportunities. And if there aren't any, make them. For example, I always wanted to go to the innovation summit. And usually there was no chance of me getting in, because I was just the giant. But if you take up that opportunity, you can go. If there's no opportunities, join a group that can make you get more opportunities and get them and make them. For example, I told them how to make posters for helping children during this morally struggling time. And with it, people benefited. If you don't have any opportunities, just make them. Nutrition is going to be the organizing principle for the food system. And prior to this, for the last, you know, sort of 100 years as the kind of the legacy system was being developed, it was all about calories and securing calories. I think now it really is securing, you know, sort of nutrition. Now that has profound, you know, implications on how you how you transition to that, you know, kind of system. You have to start thinking about things much differently. OK, what we really are is one global civilization connected through infrastructure and supply chains. And just because you didn't make your t-shirt that you're wearing right now, you know, you are part of the supply chain by which that cotton was farmed somewhere or water was used to treat it. It was electricity was used in a factory. Human labor went into it. And then it was shipped, you know, on some cargo vessel across the oceans to come back to you. So you are part of that footprint of that t-shirt. And the same goes for the manufacturing of, you know, any kind of mobile phone. You often hear the saying within luck, if I'm lucky, if I say I'm lucky, people that have been polite to me say, well, Simon, you know, you worked hard.  The harder you work, the luckier you get is an Instagram quote that is not true. And I see it thrown around all the time. And I know plenty of people that have worked themselves to the bone, end up mental health issues, physical issues, you know, working hard does not equal success. Many, many, many people have proved this yet. It's still the same thrown around as if that's going to all your problems working hard. I was more successful when I worked less hard. Really smart people think they know the answer and they never do. They always get it wrong. And they think that the people have the problem or just dump. They're not. So the issue is, what's the real problem? Right. And finding that is hard to do. So there's a number. You have to ask yourself a lot of questions. You have to walk down a lot of dead ends. So you have to give yourself a lot of room for the first letter in our little suit of them to create, which is to clarify. We need to be more creative and critical about how we're currently living and asking better questions of how do we change it? We need to be capturing people's minds and hearts in a whole different, you know, in so many different ways, whether it is through movies, whether it is through, you know, artworks, we need to be drawing in the science, the complexity of what the science is telling us, but then translating that into something that gets people at their heart to look at a beautiful artwork or a photograph of a forest and go, wow, like, that is worth saving. That is, you know, wondrous. That is magical. That is putting oxygen into the atmosphere and that is capturing carbon that we so mistakenly put up there, but we know how it's related now and we know what we can do about it.  Everyone else is already taken by a lot of coincidence. OK, no, it's true. They have to be yourself.  I think you have to be hopeful and that if you apply positive thinking to your life and the idea of living more sustainably, you'll find that there are now lots of ways of doing that, maybe more in developed countries as far as technology is concerned, but in developing countries often they already are doing that in the forest communities. Hindu is a good example of how she's living her life. So I think my attitude is always be positive, always believe that you can you can change things yourself. The children really are the future. So I really do believe in empowering the younger generation because they are the ones who are going to make a difference. I might I might already be too late to make a big impact, but the impact they will make that's crucial, especially at the stage that we are right now where we have, if you look at the statistics of how the climate is changing, the children are the future and they are the crucial crucial turning point within all of this. I've actually studied how big societal transformation happens and when in order to have big transitions the theory is the academic theory is that you need disruptions and disruptions at multiple levels. So you need the status quo to be disrupted, which is where we are right now I think because of the pandemic as well as some other factors. But our day to day normal right has been definitely disrupted and I think everyone can feel that then you need some macro level disruptions that could be the climate crisis, right? We're seeing more frequent and intense climate disruptions of all kinds and and implications of that. And then at the same time you need local level innovative niche experimentation, grassroots activism and I see that as well. So, you know, I am optimistic about a restructuring and a transformation of society. I know it may seem naive given what's going on. But I think there are enough of us who are committed and passionate and creative and innovative and we are networked and we can be increasingly networked with each other and support each other. We need to teach children now more than ever that they vote each and every day. They vote with their mouths. They vote with their forks. They vote with their wallets. They vote with their screen time. And it's very important to be judicious and understand that in all that we do. And that's the way we're going to reclaim the world for the better of all instead of for the better of a few. Think how you are connected to nature. How do you get your food? What are you eating? Are you eating beef? Are you eating meat? What kind? How often? Because that is all related to rainforests. We all know about that. It's related to how we grow food. And I think it is not waiting for politicians to change the rules. It is about us being aware that we should help to change the rules. And that is part of how often we use planes in the future. What we eat, where we go, how we treat nature in our gardens, how we eliminate nature for another area where we want to build housing or a urban or whatever is built. And we should be much more conscious and I'm not saying we should and we will be able to avoid everything. I'm not saying here in an aesthetic mission and that we should go back to nature in a way. It is about being more conscious about it. We are now in a time which I call half time and half times we have throughout our lives. We have it in politics. We have it as a company. We have it as people. Now, what is the future? Is what you, what you, what I do, what each one of us does that all these little, little, little mosaic stones will form in the future. And if we are strong enough, if we, if we tend to say, I'm too, too small, I cannot move anything, then nothing will happen.  But in our world, we can, we can do the best and we cannot change the systems. The future will be the big picture is that under the leadership of China, emerging economies will gain importance. We will have to adapt to a new competition. We will have to adapt to all the digitalization in our working world. We will, we will have to deal with unpleasant and pleasant consequences of these developments. But at the end, we are the creators of our world. We, we just. When I grew up, I was fascinated by snow.  But in the middle, you will find the ball, but it will grow really fast high because it only rolls in one direction. And it will become very good in rolling in one direction. But then when you use an analogy with your life and you roll always in one direction and you have changed or you took the wrong values, which you mostly do when you are young, then that wheel will fall and then you will need years to find that ball again to roll in all directions. And what I try to do is I always was curious and that ball always rolled in all directions.   And that's some life philosophy that I created for me 20 years or 25 years ago because I'm a huge addict on snow and mountain sports I lived in Switzerland for a while. But I think that is something that people forget because they all want to go and be a wheel and be fast and go and hyper focus. But then you're going to fall and the higher that wheel is the bigger you fall. It'll be if you have never fallen before. Soil is the stomach of the plant. The plants don't have an internalized stomach. They have an external stomach and they spend 30% of their photosynthetic energy exuding sugary sap into the root zone, which nourishes a symbiotic community of bacteria and fungi. Upon which their digestion depends. It's exactly the same in the human stomach. We we host a symbiotic community of bacteria upon which our digestion and our health depends. So when we look at the soil anew, we can imagine it as the collective stomach of all the plants on earth digesting and feeding. And what a beautiful kind of metaphor that is. And it just changes one's attitude towards the soil. I really think it's we have a bright future. And because with the format and our goal is to open all these like small, local, positive, amazing ecosystems around the world. I see like a map of the world and see like all these dots. And I just want everyone to be happy and not suffer because life can be so fun and beautiful and tasty. And I want everyone to explore that. You know, I draw a picture these days comparing the forces that work on a human organization forces that work on an aircraft, the lift of human energy, the weight of bureaucracy, the thrust of purpose in the drag of fear. If we're going to get an organization aircraft off the ground every day, we better create more human energy than bureaucracy and more purpose than fear. And that simple model has really resonated with a lot of people. But then I make it personal and I say, look, when that pilot points to the aircraft down the runway, gives it full throttle and it hits takeoff speed. They make this very simple little move on the yoke. They pull it back just a little bit, creating an angle between the nose of the aircraft and the earth. And that simple angle is all that it takes to get your organizational aircraft off the ground. And then mainly they use an aeronautical engineering is positive attitude. And this is available to all of us, literally the second you hear it, you get to choose your own attitude.  If you want to get the people around you off the ground, be that force that you want to see in the world. Be that positive force. It's your choice. For me, the biggest change that people can make, whether it's on a personal level in a company, in an organization, in a city, is to shift glasses, to change from, as I mentioned earlier, this compliance. We have to do this. We have to be less bad at it and put on the glasses of opportunity. What can this bring us? How can it enrich my life to start biking more instead of always taking my car to start eating plant based, et cetera. And you can do that on all levels.


As much as I love this slow process of applying makeup, and I really do, I find it so relaxing. Sometimes you just don't have the energy or the time and you just want something quick and simple and easy. So I want to show you how to create this very quick and easy look. It might be the quickest makeup look ever. And all you're going to need is an eyeshadow primer, your favorite bronzer, a fluffy brush, and a brown eyeliner or cream eyeshadow, or both. Now let's get started creating this look. So we're going to start by applying an eyeshadow primer all over the lid, and I would recommend using a tinted one because we don't want to add any extra steps of applying, say, highlighter underneath our brows. We want to make sure that the eyeshadow primer that we're using is slightly tinted just to disguise any natural discoloration on the lid, which will also help out other shadows pop. And because we're just using bronzer and one shadow or even liner, we want to make sure our lids are kind of brighter looking. So that's what your eyeshadow primer should do. And I would also recommend using a sponge to blend it out because it actually goes on much quicker if you do this because applying with your fingertips can take a little bit of time when you're trying to get onto all of the different angles. Applying with a sponge just covers the entire area and also makes sure that it's a very even layer. So highly recommend using an eyeshadow primer and using a sponge to blend it out.  And as we talked about in my previous video, I'm basically holding the brush like I would hold a pen. I'm also kicking it back into the well position, and I'm bringing my hand slightly lower so that we can work into the crease of the eye. So this is where the eye creases into the eye shape. If you want more information on how to hold your brushes, you can check out my previous video, but I will do one for how to hold your brushes when it comes to eye makeup brushes. So if you'd like to see that, definitely let me know in the comment section. And we don't want to be too precise with this because this is a very quick and easy look. So don't worry if you bring it down onto the lid, that's totally fine. Just try to leave a gap underneath the brows because we don't have time for applying a little bit of highlight there or sharpening up around our brows. That's what the primer already did. It already created that clean line. So just try to keep that clean line as you're applying your bronzer. But you should end up with something that looks like this. Now moving on, you're going to grab a brown liner. I would recommend using brown as a black and then a cream eyeshadow. So you can do either or or you can do both. I'll show you how to do both.  So I'm going to do the upper waterline. I'm not going to do the lower one because it will probably transfer anyway. It's a very creamy pencil.   Whatever makes you feel more comfortable and try looking in the opposite direction, it just makes it easier and it's not so tickly when you're not directly putting the liner in front of your eye line. And then all you want to do is to take your finger and very lightly start to smudge over the top of your closed eye. This will transfer it above and below the eye and create a soft smokiness. Then take a cream eyeshadow. I'm using one that has like a bronzy tone, very flattering on most eyes. And I'm just going to apply this with my fingertips, applying this right at the lash line and just smudging then around the eye. I do have a video on how to apply all of your makeup using just your fingertips. If you want to check that out, I'll link it in the description box and also on the screen here. Most importantly is just to make sure you're focusing it right at the lash line. Try not to go up too high. You can very lightly kind of smudge and bring it upwards, but focus every time you pick up a little bit more right at the lash line. You can also smudge this slightly underneath the eye with whatever is left over on your fingertips. To be honest though, if you only have a very limited time to actually apply eye makeup, I would recommend focusing more on your mascara and maybe your eyelashes if you're going to apply false eyelashes. They always just bring the entire look together and you look more glam and more done up, opens up the eyes, gives you kind of a more polished finished look. So if you don't have much time, focus on your mascara or your eyelash placement. And then there you go, a super quick and easy eye makeup look. I've done this in the car, even though applying lashes in the car is a little tricky. Not while I'm driving though, Wendy is driving, not me. But I will do this in the car because I don't have to have too many products with me. I can just grab a couple of different things, pop them on my eyes, do this in the car. It's quick, it's easy, and then I feel super glam and ready to go. Let me know if you would try this out or if you have any tips and tricks on how to get ready in a hurry. What's one product that you absolutely love that you just put it on and you're like, I feel good, I feel glam. I actually went out this weekend and I am a home body, okay? I don't go out. I went out with some of Davey's friends this weekend and I didn't have much time to get ready because my JHS was acting up so much that I was like lying in agony for so long. And then I was like, okay, I have 20 minutes, let's go. And it ended up being really nice. I don't usually get a chance to see other people and I'm usually at home by myself on weekends because Davey's working, but to have just 20 minutes to get ready, I was a bit panicky, but you know what, it was worth it just to do a quick make-up look, do my hair real quick, and head out the door. And then I ended up looking after someone's random dog, which is the highlight of my night. I had a really nice, lovely weekend with Davey and some friends and I hope that you all had a great weekend too. And if it wasn't great, there's another weekend on its way and I hope that the next weekend is much better for you and I hope that you've had a great start to the week. And if you need a hug, I am sending you it. I'm sending you lots of support. I'm going to tell you to keep going. You're doing the best you can and you should be proud of yourself. And as always, my friends, be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and I will see you in the next one.


Welcome to the School of Library and Information Science Career Colloquia Session. My name is Jill Cleese and I'm the SJSU Career Center lead is on to SLIS. Thank you for joining me tonight. We have the great pleasure to have three librarians from the San Jose Public Library with us to share their tips and pointers for making it through the application process and on to the interview. So let's get it started. Our first speaker is Sandra Stewart. So go ahead Sandra, take it away. Okay, hello everybody. I'm Sandra Stewart. I'm an Acting Division Manager at San Jose Public Library and I get to introduce our session. We're covering the application process, supplemental questions. We're going to have some interview tips, a little true or false session and then we'll open it up to questions from the group. San Jose Public Library is a large urban public library. We now have 23 library locations. We serve a population of nearly a million. Our main library is a joint public library along with San Jose State. So it's a joint university and public library. We have 6 million visitors per year, 11.5 million items were loaned last year. We have a lot of programming. We've had over 10,000 programs and we've been hiring recently. We've been doing a lot of hiring recently because we opened or rather reopened four branch libraries over the, during this year, 2013, we've hired probably about 150 people over different classifications equaling to about 70 full-time employee hours. Let's see what this next slide says. Oh yes, we're hiring. So that's the good news. The good news is that libraries, now that it looks like the financial crisis is perhaps subsiding, libraries which are, well, public libraries which are government agencies are starting to look at the possibility of our funding returning and us being able to build back up our staffs and that's the good news. The bad news for you as new graduates from library school is that you're competing with people who were laid off. So you're also competing with people who graduated from library school last year and the year before that while a lot of people were being laid off. So there's a lot of competition in the market. During our last recruitment process over 300 people, like 350 people applied for seven positions. Half of those didn't qualify because they didn't meet the minimum requirements that we had published and many of the remaining half of those people didn't answer the supplemental questions completely and so that's why we're here today to give you some tips on how to rise to the top when you're job hunting. So I'm going to go over the application. A lot of, well, I would say just about all of your applications are going to be online and a resume may not be enough. You may have to fill out a very clunky online application. You may have to sign up for an account with the government organization so that they can plug you into their personnel system and you may have to fill out everything that you already have on your resume onto these online applications and it feels clunky. You can cut and paste as long as it makes sense to do so. The other thing is, hold on, let me look at my notes, like job responsibilities responding to things like that on the online application. It doesn't hurt to also attach your resume and some of these online application processes give you the opportunity to do so, but you may also want to email that resume as an attachment to HR for that system. Make sure that your contact information is correct. HR isn't going to call you back to see if it was correct. You need to make sure that the information that you have there is spot on, especially your email address and your phone number. Don't hesitate to contact HR to make sure that your application was accepted. If you don't receive a confirmation via email, call to make sure they got it. I know for me, I recently did an application locally through my own system and the online application just was eating everything that I was entering into it and I had to resend this application at least three times and then I finally just put it all in an email and emailed it to HR. So it even happens to me. Confirm your references. When you're coming up with your reference list, contact the people that you're going to put on the list. Don't let it be a surprise for them.  So you really want to make sure that the people on your references list you've talked to recently and they've agreed to be a reference for you. That's really important. And, well, I said this before, remember to save. Save all of the information that you're doing. David, don't be this person, it can be very frustrating to put a lot of time and effort in crafting an answer to a supplemental question that has multiple parts and then it gets eaten. So, you know, I would recommend that you take all the supplemental questions, put it in a word box, do all of your composing and save often. Okay. So now we're moving on to Katie. She's taking on the next part. Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Katie Dupron, the division manager for San Jose Public Library. And over this past year, I've acted as the hiring manager for those 70 plus FTE positions that we hired. In accepting applications for the library, your application goes through an initial screening process. Sometimes that's through the library department, but more often than not, it's handled through our central HR department. If a library or a site indicates a minimum level of requirement for the position, like you must have an MLIS, then you must have that MLIS to apply for the position. For San Jose, we do require the MLIS at the point of application. Other library systems will say that it's okay if you have it within six months. So be sure of the requirements when you fill out the application because you could be screened out right from the very beginning if you don't answer the question correctly. Some employers indicate that obtaining that degree is okay. Again, just be sure before you submit the application. Supplemental questions on the application are there for a reason. The questions are not fluff and there are means for screening out a large candidate pool. As Sandra mentioned earlier, we had more than 350 applications for the seven positions that we had available. Of the 350, half of those were screened out based on the minimum requirement for the degree and for experience. Others just didn't complete the application or parts of it were missing and they didn't and the applicant didn't make sure that the application had been received completely and when an application is missing information, you're screened out of the process almost immediately. So it's important to follow up with HR if you're unsure. The questions in the supplemental questions should be answered honestly and thoroughly but not necessarily like you're answering a thesis question. There's no need for citations and footnotes and additional references. We just want clear, concise answers that fully answer the question that's being asked. There's a lot of information on the internet that indicates that your application should stand out and it should because it's done completely and correctly. Quirking this in humor is okay but don't take it so far that your application becomes a joke. Supplemental questions also give an applicant an opportunity to discover if it's a place that they would like to work. The questions will give you an indication of what's important to the library. Do they mention trends, technology or story times? Take that as a clue that these are important issues. Taylor your answers accordingly. For example, at San Jose we ask applicants if they have knowledge of our San Jose way service model, specifically do you have knowledge? And then we supply a URL for people to do further research. It may seem like a simple yes or no question but it isn't. This is your opportunity to find out about us and the way that we provide service. This is a form of that question, why do you want to work for us? If it's asked, the employer wants to know what about us appeals to you? How would you fit into our way of doing business and can you fit in with us? For our part we have a very specific service model. We want people to know this ahead of time. Think about it and tell us that they think they would fit into our way of providing services. If you're looking for a traditional service model for libraries, San Jose is not the library system that you would want to work for. But you won't know that unless you do further research. It also is helpful as you go on in, if you go on into the interview process to understand what the library system is and what they have to offer. Be sure that you're answering the questions. That seems pretty basic but sometimes the answer just doesn't fit with the question that was asked. And I can't stress this enough. Proofread, proofread, proofread. Librarians notice misspellings and mistakes in grammar. So be sure to have a friend, a colleague or an instructor read your response. Seek feedback. Excellent answers. Free of errors will move you forward. However, even the best of answers that contain the spellings, grammar errors, run-on sentences, et cetera, will be noticed and you will be moved to the bottom of the pile. Remember too that sometimes the answers to supplemental questions are not available to the interview panel. Don't worry about repeating yourself when you get to the interview. It may be the first time that people on the panel have heard your story. So if a question is asked that you think you may have covered already in the supplemental questions on the application, feel free to repeat yourself and tell the full story. It's important to get the information out. For San Jose, the information in the interview is the only thing that we can consider not the information that was contained in the supplemental questions on the application itself. All right. This is Angie Meriflore and I also work for San Jose Public. I'm also an alum of SLIS and I manage the centralized programming in a children's room here at our main library at King. And I have some experience doing some interview, I was on an interview panel to hire librarians here and I've also done some interviews too. I like to get this job. So I'm going to talk about once you do those supplemental fill out the application you actually get in for the interview. So probably the biggest thing is to really prepare for the interview before you even step in to the interview room, research the organization, look at their mission statement, look at their events, calendars, if you've noticed and like what Katie was saying, you can see in the supplemental questions what, for example, what San Jose is asking is what we feel is important. So we usually have a question about like programming and outreach. And so look on our website and see what kinds of programs and events that we have and get a kind of a feel of what we feel as our library priorities. If you know someone that works for San Jose Public, talk to them. You know, visit some branches if you're close by, you know, do all that investigation to kind of get the feel of the organization. Because then you're also really, you're trying to feel out whether you want to work for that organization as well. So this is like good research for you too. And I know that we had one person who was hired here as a librarian and she said that one thing she did was make a, kind of create her own list of questions that she thought people were, the interviewers were going to ask her and she videotaped herself or recorded herself. I don't think we use videotaped anymore. But recorded herself so she can see like what she looked like and how she responded to answers and watched them. So that's her technique and it really works for her because we have her on as a librarian now. You know, try and find like those kinds of studying techniques like you would for a class and apply those to your interview. And also it's okay to call HR and ask them who's going to be on your interview panel. I'm not sure if they'll exactly tell you the people but at that time because they just may not know at that time but it's not a bad question to ask. They're going to let you know who those people are the day of the interview anyway in case there's a conflict of interest. But if you find out like a youth services programming librarian is going to be interviewing you, you know, you think about those things and so make sure and kind of talk about youth services programming all of there because that's going to be their interest. So after you do all of that homework to prepare for the interview, make sure that you arrive ahead of time and make sure that you're dressed well for the interview. Unfortunately, we've had experiences when people weren't. So I think that tip that you always hear about dress for like the job one step ahead of you or something like that, I think that really does work. And it just shows that you're taking it seriously. I think interviewers really appreciate that. It is okay. I know a lot of people ask if it's okay to have like notes or a notebook to bring or like a portfolio or whatever and that's fine. I think having like a couple copies of your resume, your references, some smaller notes like something that won't be distracting is good. But if, you know, note necessarily have like your iPad or tablet or a laptop or binders of information mostly because it's going to be really distracting to the people interviewing you and to you, I mean, a lot of times you're not going to have hours to talk to these people. You really have to capture the intention and engage the interviewers for a really set amount of time. And so to pretty much waste it wrestling through papers or trying to open a file on a laptop that's not loading as fast as you'd want it to is really going to, it won't be really good during the interview and it won't really give a good message. So also have several stories in library line. We like people stories, you know, things about times that you've delivered really good customer service. And we had to deal with a difficult customer. And make sure that you have those stories solid. A lot of times, depending on the question that we ask, you could probably pull from those several stories as an example of customer service, an example of outreach, an example of a project that you had to lead. And we like those stories. It's those anecdotes really help out. You probably heard me say customer service a lot in the last couple of minutes. And that's really important, but something that we really emphasize at San Jose Public and I'm all libraries. It's all about customer services. We're a people career. So make sure, and if you've never worked in libraries before, that's okay. I'm sure there's some point where you've had to deal with some kind of customer service, or it's a job you had in college, or if you do volunteer work or if you help out at your church or something where you've had to work with people in some kind of aspect of customer service. And make sure to bring those stories in. And to be able to connect them to library services is even better. Yes, so we already went through having notes, keeping eye contact. And like Katie mentioned already, we won't necessarily, the people in the interview panel won't necessarily have read your supplemental questions. So it's okay to repeat. Just really pretend like they never even like read anything or seen you or anything and just come in saying everything. It's okay to repeat stuff like that. So the next thing we're going to do is some true and false. I don't know if I'll, whatever that slide. So we're just going to go through some true and false. You can raise your hand if you think the statement is true. We may have already given you the answer to this one, but that's okay. We'll go through it anyway. I think there's like a little hand icon at the top there that you can, there we go. Yeah, so you all hear that thing. So the first item we have here is that humans don't actually look at my application. How many of you guys think that's totally true according to the picture? People are saying yes. Okay, well, we'll just keep going. So that's, we're speaking on behalf of San Jose. Did you just say we have to? No, it doesn't come up. Okay, okay, good. Of course, again, we're speaking on behalf of San Jose Public Library. And with us that's completely false. We look at all of the applications. I do, humans. And so I know a lot of people have heard that applications still, they have like computer programs that will run through and pick out keywords. And if you don't have those keywords, your application gets tossed to the side. And that's not true. So I will say that if you don't meet the minimum requirements, your supplemental questions may not be looked at because those minimum requirements are going to be your first hurdle. But those supplemental questions do get read. And I have anecdotal proof by seeing Sandra and Katie here with stacks of applications in their office. I'm like, okay, I won't bother you till later. So that one is a false. All right, our next one. I've worked at this organization for years. I'm guaranteed an interview. How many of you think that's true? She'll pan. Oh, they're doing answer no. They're doing answer no. They're doing answer no. We're learning how they do this. I know, right? We'll let it go for a little bit because there's 95 people up here. 35 people said yes so far. They can hear us. I'm sure they're saying no. Well, they can see it too. That's true. Interesting. Yes, we can hear you guys as we're talking about it. We're dealing answer and you're using it. Very awesome. I can't tell. Okay, so. What's the half and half? According to San Jose public, this is completely false. That was a really big struggle for us internally. We had, like Sandra said, we hired 150 people of different classifications. And it was happening across the board where people that worked within the organization weren't even scoring that interview because they weren't taking the supplemental questions seriously and they weren't even making that for it. And then they're competing with people externally as well who really were taking these applications more seriously. So that doesn't necessarily guarantee you an interview to kind of combat that we ended up doing workshops kind of similar to what we're doing today for our staff and it ended up really helping out. But just please, if you're already working in the library some sort and you want to promote within or transfer whatever process that your organization has to go through, just like how we were mentioning before to come into your interview as if nobody read your supplemental, go into that application and the interview as if nobody knows you in that organization. Because also you never know who's on the panel or who's reading your supplemental. It could be somebody from the outside and they really don't know who you are. So just, and it may feel uncomfortable to talk about something that everybody in the room knows about, but just do it anyway, just to cover your bases. All right. And our last one. Oh, I already, I answered that one. It's okay to ask HR who is on the interview panel to see if you were listening. They were. They were. They were. They were. Okay. So yes, that is true. It is okay to do that. Again, you won't get dinged for it. They won't make a note that you've called or anything. It's good. You know, and actually if there's someone on the interview panel that you have a conflict of interest with, it's within your right to say that you would prefer not to have that person sit on the panel, and we have had to remove panelists because of objections from people that are interviewing. So it's always important to look at the complete packet that you're sent to let you know who the panel is and when your interview is.  I know that Katie and my LinkedIn kept peeing us right before we were going to be doing librarian interviews because people were researching us and they were looking us up online and checking us out. That's what that's for. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I think we're going to open it up to questions. Short and sweet. I like it. Somebody says asking a panelist to be removed seems a really high risk. Seems you show yourself as a problem. Well, not necessarily. It just could be that you know them personally. They could be a relative. They may not necessarily be someone that you've had a problem with, but just someone that could create a problem down the line because they knew you or knew of you. Rather than you're the problem. Yeah. Because you don't, from what I understand, you don't have to say why it's a conflict of interest. Do you? Or do you have to? No. You don't have to state I have a problem with this person because other, just that you see that there could be a problem. It can be a subjective process, although for the questions that we ask on the supplemental part of the application, we have key concepts that we want people to hit. And so we look for those. Our first question, and this is no secret because our supplemental questions are out there for everyone. Our first question is do you have knowledge of the San Jose Ways Service Model? And we provide the URL. Now, we have actually had people just answer that, no. And that's going to get you screened out immediately. Because we provide you the URL, we kind of expect that you're going to do a little bit of research to see what's happening within our library system. And so that should acquaint you with the San Jose Ways Service Model. And you go on to explain what it is that you read and understood. So we look for the key concepts of customers. First, redesigning spaces. And if you hit the concepts of that, then you move on. In that question. And then we ask a question about technology use in the library, and we look for key concepts around e-readers, social media, blogging, you know, the things that are kind of current and happening now. And if you hit four of those, three or four of those, then you've met the requirement, you know, the kind of the standard that we have. And when we have a lot of supplemental questions to go over, like we had like 150 that we looked at recently. What we'll do is we'll have a few people who are looking at them all, and we'll divvy up the questions. So I did the San Jose Way question for all 150. And Katie did another question for all 150. So there's actually consistency of who's looking at the question for each of the applicants. Thanks, ladies. That was helpful. So there are hands, there's plenty of hands up with questions and there's plenty of questions in the chat box. So I'm going to play a question in the chat box here. Okay. Hands up for questions. So if it's a check mark, sorry, I'm showing my novice nature here. If I see a check mark next to somebody's name, they have a question. Sandra, if there's a hand up and a one, they have a question. And you can basically say Jennifer takes the mic or Jenny takes the mic. The question is, are numbers one, two, whatever. So I would say it looks like Jennifer K has a question. So let's see if we're the same. Okay. I can see her. We don't see a Jennifer K. Oh, it's a top level list. Like that makes perfect sense. Okay. So I'm sorry. How do I give Jennifer the mic? Do I just click on the mic? Just click off the talk button and then she can pick it up. Just click off the talk button and then she can pick it up. Got it. Take it away, Jennifer. I don't think Jennifer has a microphone. She says she has no question. The next Jennifer can pick up the mic or Jenny or Evan or Beth, go for it and ask questions. Hi. This is Beth. Can everyone hear me? Yes. Okay. So I'm a year out from my master's degree. I'll get it in May. And so as you were saying, a lot of these library one positions, for example, at San Jose, you need to actually have the degree. I've seen other postings where you need to be three months out. Or three months from your degree or six months, for example. I like the area that I live in and so if and as you know, sometimes a library one position doesn't come up, you know, a lot. But I do see positions for like library assistant one or things like that. Are those positions something that I should be a take time to apply to or should I just be focusing on that library one? Type position in the public library? That's kind of a difficult thing to set out because we say you really like the location that you're living in and library in one positions don't come up that often and should you, you know, apply for an LA position in the meantime. There is some, you know, good things about doing that. You could get your foot in the door in a system that you would like to work at but when you do something like that, when you put yourself into a clerical position when you are getting close to getting your degree or you may already have it, you may be putting an obstacle in your way as well. I mean it's really a kind of a judgment call that you're going to have to make. I mean if you're a year out and there's an LA position that you could get now in a system where, you know, the librarian ones don't come up very often and you say upfront, you know, I'm interested in moving up in the organization that might work in your favor but you may not want to track yourself as a clerical staff member when you're going to be, you know, looking for professional positions a few months later. Next question. Kim or Evan or Alicia, take the mic please. Hi, this is Alicia. I actually have a question about after the interview process. What's really the protocol on sending either thank you emails or a thank you card to the members of the interview committee? We're actually of two minds here. I think for a couple of us it doesn't matter if we get a thank you, a follow-up thank you or a follow-up note and one of us kind of likes that idea. I think probably to be on the safe side an email to the panel members is probably in this day and age adequate to let them know that you appreciated the time that they took. Yeah, yeah, email. Evan, do you want to take the mic? Sure, I'll go. I saw a question that was related to the Public Library. I was wondering if there's any particular skills that, I mean I don't know if you're still hiring or not but there's any particular skills you're looking for in potential librarians that you're thinking of hiring. We're wrapping up our process right now in hiring librarians but we do anticipate over the next few months some shifting and possible openings. What we're looking for in San Jose is really all about people skills. We don't have a traditional library system here where you sit behind a desk and wait for people to come to you. We're really all about being out there on the floor, engaging customers where they're at and just being very, very customer focused. So if you have those skills, that's what we're looking for. Okay, Kim, do you want to take the mic? About that, I had a difficulty. I would like to know if in an interview being knowledgeable in certain softwares is pretty much an important factor in having a successful interview. Being skilled in certain software, you know, it depends on the position. We have a position that we're going to be filling in the next few months that's an electronic resources librarian and in that case we're going to be looking for somebody who's very tech savvy, who knows databases, who is comfortable using lots of different software. We recently hired a web librarian and we were looking for really specific software skills for that person. We were looking for somebody who could code and we found someone but the pool of applicants that we had was much smaller than the generalist librarian positions that we mainly hire. Paul, do you want to take the microphone? Yes, I had a question about a couple of people I think had this question. If you're in a specific state but you have a job that you see that you really like but you're out of state, you know, at FAM in California and I see something in Washington, DC, how would you go about attacking those jobs that aren't near you and what are the realistic chances of getting them? Well, I could speak to this because I did it about 12 years ago. I lived in St. Louis and my husband had gotten a job out here in California and I was doing a cross-country job search and actually the CLA job list was very useful to me and I was looking specifically in the Bay Area for positions and I actually did several phone interviews at that time and we're willing to do phone interviews as well. We've done several phone interviews recently so don't feel that you are not, because you are not physically close to where you're applying that you're just out of a pool.  Kristin, C, do you want to take the mic? Yeah, my question was actually very similar to Paul's pretty much. I'm interested in applying out of the state of California once I graduate and I just wanted some insight into how the process is any different. I think it's really, really important if you're looking at a library system that you're not familiar with to really do your research so that you show your interest to the people that are looking at either your application or considering you for an interview, I think it's harder when you're coming from out of state to convince people that you would really move for the job, but if you know a lot about their library system and can show that in either your questions or the phone interview or a face-to-face, you stand a better shot. Okay, Nathan, you're up. Hi, I was just curious about applying for like a library into position as your first job, especially if it just says you need like one year of experience in a library system or two years, is that unlikely to happen if you have not worked in a library or, for example, I've volunteered in my library for a year, but I still need to probably just apply for a library in one position so they can open. Yeah. You know, actually because most libraries, well, public libraries are city or county agencies. We're bound by some pretty strict rules and if you are coming into a library as a brand new librarian without the professional paid work, chances are you're going to start as a librarian one. If internally to be a librarian two, you have to have two years of experience as a librarian one, that's going to hold true for somebody coming from the outside as well. People do start here as librarian twos, but they come to us with a lot of experience elsewhere. Either as a school librarian or in a public library or perhaps an academic library, but generally speaking, because of our hiring rules, people with little to no experience start as a librarian ones. Okay, Susan, you're up. Hi, thank you. Nathan kind of touched on that and that's volunteering. You know, I have interviewed recently for a job in a public library within California and you know, found that I was able to move into the interview phase because of volunteering. So I just wanted to get a flavor from San Jose on how you view, I'll call it strategic volunteering for someone who's really stepping in, stepping up and wanting to contribute to a system with the hope of a future job. Okay, yeah, volunteering is very good and when we're looking at applicants, if we're looking at people who are pretty much in the same place, if somebody has experience, paid or unpaid, that's certainly going to speak well for them as opposed to someone who doesn't have experience in a library. But then again, experience working with people and lots of strong customer service experience is really important to us in San Jose because of our really strong customer service ethics that we have. Just recently, we have hired a couple of people that had been working at clerical levels in library systems and then because of budget cuts, their positions had been reduced and that they were still in library school and they had a very, very strong interest in continuing in the field. So they volunteered to provide youth services and creative programs and they were actually sent to CLA to present a program and then we hired that person here because of those skills that he developed elsewhere in the library system as a volunteer. And then another person that had paid internship during her school terms but then after was not able to be brought onto the library system again because of budget reductions but she had continued to volunteer at two different library systems. So we really consider strongly the volunteer experience if it's relevant to what you were applying for within our system. And really take advantage of the internship listings at SLIS because when you'll get credit for doing it towards your degree but also the SLIS internship, they have to abide by a certain structure. Like so it's like what you were saying about strategic volunteering. Like they have to make sure that you're going to be doing librarian work. So you can come and volunteer at a library but if they make you like wash books all day, that's not necessarily going to build your librarian skills. Having these internships through the SLIS program will give you a better kind of breath of what that, you know, of what being a librarian is. Okay. It looks like we've exhausted all the people who raised their hands during everything. Questions in the chat box that we have? Yeah. We've got, it looks like some people wrote in questions and some people asked your questions. So we'll have to kind of see if we've already answered it. One of them is asking what are some of the things that help an applicant stand out? Being really thorough in the answers that they provide, one or two sentences to complete a supplemental question isn't really enough to give us an idea of someone's knowledge of what we've asked them to respond to a question such as what's your experience with technology in the libraries to say I have experience providing, blogging on my current libraries website. That really isn't a good indication to us about what their skills or experience are. So I would say just being very thorough but not so thorough, again that you're making citations or footnotes or that it becomes irrelevant. So nice concise answers that give us the information that we're looking for. So here's another one. On the supplemental questions, actually Sandra, would you turn your mic off while I ask the question? Thanks. So on the supplemental questions, is it appropriate to draw from SLIS coursework and assignments if you're lacking in the job experience area? Yes. It's appropriate as long as you can turn it back to real life application and not just make it sound that you're repeating a classroom assignment. If you take something that could be relevant to what we're asking like providing a program and say, you know, this is what I did in my class and this is how I would turn it into an actual program within the public library. As long as you can make it kind of a real life situation, then I think it's fine to draw from SLIS classroom work. Thanks. That was good. Here's another one from Amy. What are some other questions that you focus on or ask in addition to the customer service skills? We ask about programming and any skills or experience we have in programming or providing story times, youth services. Outreach. Outreach. And outreach. Outreach for San Jose is a really big component of what librarians do, that willingness to go out into the community and make those connections and then bringing the library to the community but also draw the community back to the library. So that's a real important one for us. And technology. I'm sorry. Another skill that we really look for, especially here in San Jose, is the willingness to be flexible and to be innovative. As I said before, we don't provide traditional library service. We really are about looking forward and creating new experiences for our customers here. Yvonne, we'll get to your question in just a second. I want to finish up the question here in the chat box. This is an interesting one. This is from Kate. It says, are public library jobs constantly evolving due to technology and funding such that the jobs don't resemble the same jobs from five years previously? We would say yes. All of us would say yes. Yes. We have expectations of our staff that are very different than they were five years ago. We expect staff to write blog posts and we expect staff to be able to assist customers with eBooks. And the way that people do reference now is so different than the way we did reference even 10 years ago.  And now, like two bookshelves, maybe two bookshelves. And those books are very rarely used when people are answering reference questions, as all of you new library school students know. Go ahead, Yvonne. Go ahead and ask your question. OK. I was just wondering, do you still have a cataloger position in the public library? And how do you do the cataloging? You know, it used to be majority of the time the position was doing the copy, cataloging, or original cataloging, or something. You keep emphasize on the customer service, on the floor serving the patrons. But what about the cataloging? What do you do right now? We have a technical services department, but quite frankly, most of our work is outsourced or is done pre-processed from our vendors. The majority of our cataloging is done on languages other than English or those items that come to us from independent vendors. Copy cataloging is accomplished by library assistants and sometimes senior library clerks. And then we use our librarian staff to work on the languages other than English and even for people that are not proficient in those languages. Sometimes we borrow records from other sources and bring them in, and that doesn't necessarily require a professional librarian to do that. Our department is very small. Just a few people, most of the librarians in technical services participate in selection and acquisitions for the library and not necessarily cataloging the materials. All of the librarians in our technical services department, even though they do selecting, they also do customer service work. In this building, particularly, a lot of them work in the children's room and do children's reference for us. And we think that that's a good thing because we want the librarians who aren't doing customer service on a regular basis. Also, the librarians who are in the web team, they also pull hours in the children's room just to get them out on the floor and to give them a little grounding. And this is what we're doing. Here's our customers. And this is why they're here. Thank you. Hey, here's a really interesting question in chat. Jane typed this in. And I have received this question myself from students. So it says, so what happens when I offer to volunteer at the public library doing library-related tasks? And the librarian tells me I'm not allowed to do any library-related tasks because they are paid positions. She says, the only things I'm allowed to do as a volunteer are scrubbing the shelves, offer after-school homework help, or help with the ESL conversion program. I don't know, many thoughts. Yeah. In a union environment, there are some restrictions as to what people are allowed to do when they volunteer for libraries. And it's not necessarily the staff that make that call, but the restrictions placed on this because of our unions. Part of it's protecting jobs, and then also that we're making sure that people who are the professionals are doing the professional level work. However, some libraries, like San Jose, have engaged volunteers that are working at that higher level that can help with producing programs that do help not only with ESL conversation clubs, but they are one-on-one tutors in after-school programs and various other things that we have going on. I would say, don't give up. I'd just recognize that it's not, if they're telling you you can't, it's not because they're trying to keep you down, but because they're trying to maintain that status quo with the union environment. Thank you. That's actually really helpful because I never thought about the union aspect of it, but I've definitely had that question from students. There's one other question here in the chat. Let me find it again that I don't think we addressed yet. It says, this is from Gina. What things are you looking for when it comes to programming? Angie, that's my question. I think, like what Kay said, we're always looking for something innovative. One thing that I've really been trying to focus on is having more programming with intention built around it. In this community, you put out a craft program, and 1,000 kids are going to show up guaranteed because children in San Jose, as most places love crafts. And that's great. But finding what those community needs are and those assessments, like looking at trends in the community. If any of you guys know about Pew internet research, they're based out of Washington, DC, read up on that kind of stuff. So when you do have a programming question, they always have really good, insightful articles about what this country is trending towards as far as technology and internet use and all different kinds of topics. But I think we're always looking for how to attract the people who aren't regular library users as well. I know right now we have a group of new librarians, and their real big target is this kind of, this gap, I like to say, post-college, pre-family, like 20s and 30s where they kind of think, I don't have to go to the library anymore. I finished school. But there's tons of stuff here for them, and they're really trying to target that group, and then trying to develop programming that they would be attracted to, like doing stuff after hours or reaching out to them where they hang out and not keeping it necessarily within library walls. So we're really trying to look for those new avenues and tap into those new library users. Yeah, anything else? Thank you. We have, oh, here's another question. What's the best way to get that experience with eBooks and other technology as it pertains to the library? Oh, I would say do it. Go to your local library website and download an eBook. Just try. Download an eBook. It's not as easy as you'd think. Get proficient at using the different, there's so many different vendors, and all of them are a little different in how you have to work with them. You might have to sign up for an account, like, for example, Overdrive uses Adobe Digital Editions if you're using enough, but if you're using a Kindle, then you're going in a different direction. So I would say get a hold of some eReaders or your tablets or download the apps onto your smartphone, as most people have smartphones, as Pew tells us, and practice because it's not as easy as you think. It's very frustrating when you first do it and then you understand where the customer is coming from and why they're coming to you for help. So that's my recommendation. Thank you. We have one question here in chat that came up a little while ago and we didn't get to it. The question is, do you consider customer service experience outside of the library field just as valuable? Where'd it go? Hold on. Just as valuable in, wait, library field just as valuable as customer service experience inside the library. You know, yes, quite frankly, we've talked about this a lot. For San Jose, we're looking for a particular kind of attitude and attitude and behavior is something we cannot train. We can train people how to provide service in our San Jose wave model. We can train people how to do programming, but we can't train into people that customer service attitude that can do spirit of let me make this right for you. What can I do to help you? And so that's, if you've been a barista at Starbucks, you probably have those customer service skills that I would be really interested in having the degree only enhances your ability to work in the library. But you know, coming in with the attitude is really primary. Yeah. We had one last question and where did it go? Ah, I lost her. It was from Jennifer. Can you type your question in real fast again, Jennifer? Jennifer, can you type your question in again really fast? Let's see if I can find it. Here it is. Okay, you guys ready? This will be my first library job. What would make me stand out from someone who might have more experience than me?  Maybe you don't have the experience, but you could certainly fill it in. I don't have that experience, but if I had the opportunity, this is what I would do. And be prepared with those stories about how you would act if you got the job. It isn't always about what you've done, but what you would do if we brought you on. And now that I have this opportunity to say this, when you're in the interview, that opening statement that you make at the very beginning about why you're there and we always start with why are you here and why are you interested in this position and starting out with what makes you so excited about libraries and about library service is really important. You have three minutes to make your case and then we go on into the technical aspects of the interview. And then we almost always give you an opportunity at the end to add something further. Use that opportunity to drive home again how much you're excited about the job, about the opportunity, about the things that you could bring to the library. If you've fled some question in the middle or didn't give a really good response, you can make up for that in that closing statement about why you're the best person to be in our system. That was a perfect way to end this webinar. Thank you. That was great. I love that, that people have to come through with the enthusiasm and just rock it right there in the beginning and wrap it up again at the end. So that wraps it up for us.


really going to come to life. Whatever from what we've talked about sticks with you, whatever you are thinking is most immediately actionable with the work that you're doing, you're going to do that more successfully.


Hi, and welcome to the session. Let us discuss the following question. The question says, verify Roll's theorem for the following function. fx is equal to x minus 1 into x minus 2 whole square on closed interval 1, 2. Now, we begin with the solution. We have to verify Roll's theorem for fx equals to x minus 1 into x minus 2 whole square on closed interval 1, 2. Now, since polynomial function is continuous and differentiable everywhere, being a polynomial function is continuous on closed interval 1, 2, and differentiable on open interval 1, 2. Two conditions of Roll's theorem are satisfied. We'll verify the third condition. So let's first find out f of a. Now, here a is equal to 1. So we have f of 1, and f of 1 is equal to 1 minus 1 into 1 minus 2 whole square, and this is equal to 0. Now, we will find f of b, where b is equal to 2. So we have f of 2, and f of 2 is equal to 2 minus 1 into 2 minus 2 whole square, and this is equal to 0. Clearly, f is equal to f of two conditions. Roll's theorem are satisfied, conclusion of Roll's theorem. That means now we have to show interval 1, 2, such that is equal to 0. This is equal to into x minus 2 whole square is equal to 2 whole square is equal to c minus 2 minus 4 into c minus 2 is equal to 0. This implies into c minus 2 is equal to 0, interval 1, 2.