was created in 2015. When I was a researcher at university in UPF, it all come with the research that I've done in my PhD about microwave imaging for medical applications. And when I was at UPF, we were trying to find an application. It's like a technology push innovation, my window. So we had to look for a new application. And we came up to a non-med need that is the colorectal cancer detection at an early stage. And, well, we developed this project to satisfy this non-med need. Basically, what we do in my window is to develop a small radar that can be integrated at the tip of a standard colonoscope. And this helps the doctors to detect the polyps that are the precursors of this cancer. So there's a direct link from your PhD research through to potential applications to patients. I wanted to be able to arrive to the society, to transfer this knowledge to the society, to help patients.  This was not possible at university. And so we had to create the startup and look for a lot of grants, investment, and have more flexibility to do all these things. Yeah, and I think these days it's a far more common route for researchers to go down, or even to start thinking about what is the potential application benefit or the word we use a lot in the UK, the impact of our research. But maybe 20 years ago, that wasn't really the case. But I think there's been a big change in that. So from a general point of view, I've spent a lot of time helping people in your position, trying to set up the spin-off company and thinking about the intellectual property rights, protection, thinking about the business plan, building the team of people that can launch the company. But what was your experience? How did it actually sort of happen? In fact, what you comment, in fact, I think that are the three most important things. And in our case, were crucial. First of all, it was to find a team because myself, as a researcher, I didn't have any experience on entrepreneurship. And I made the decision to look for an experiential to do all these things, because one of the things that you have to do when you start a startup is to negotiate, no? All the shareholders agreement and all these things. And you need a lot of experience and legal aspects and I was unable to do this and it's quite crucial to do this better because instead you can have problems, for example, with investors. They can limit the investors or something like that. So it's quite important to do so. And also the university helps a lot in the first stages to look for grants that you need to start your work and also in the business plan. The business plan is crucial, no? It has to be done in a correct way to convince the investors and I had a lot of support from the university to do so. So the team started with you and then you found a CEO from within the university or someone from outside in Barcelona in Catalonia? He was from outside, but I had the support from the university to meet some people that they already know from the ecosystem in Barcelona. So that was the second person. And the third person? The third person? Yeah, the third person is the endoscopist, is the medical professional that knows about the problem, no? Because one of the most important things before creating the startup is to talk a lot with people that know the problem and make a lot of interviews to know everything. And what's your role now? What's your job title or what do you do? I'm CTO. CTO, yeah. Can you say a bit about how you raised money? What was the story for raising money to support the company? In order to start this project, we had to look for money and the first grant that we get, it was a grant from Catalonia Government that it was for projects with potential to transfer to the society. With this grant, we filled the patent and we started with the market research and all of this and we saw that it was maybe it was the way and we decided to go for it for the technology transfer of this project and then we looked for another grant that there are some here. And with this, we could do the first prototype and the first validation with X-Vivo samples and once we had this and the business plan, we applied for another grant that it was in fact an investor. Yeah, yeah. Then this was when we get this grant, this was what triggered the creation of the company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a big difference, isn't there, between what a grant-giving organization is looking for compared to what a financial investor is looking for. And I mean, in my experience, that's something academics and scientists, you know, that's a big change for them, thinking about how to write a grant application compared to how to write a business plan to try to raise investment finance. So one of the frameworks that I talk about is you have the science and the scientists, which is what you had, and you need to find the money and the management and that's what you've done. So that's great, yeah. So we talk a lot about startups and, you know, spin-off, spin-outs, but then there's also the conversation about scale-up and certainly from the UK, there's been a lot of focus in the last 10, 15 years on startups. How do you get these things going? How do you set up the spin-out companies from universities? And scaling up a business, well, any business, you know, and I'm not an expert to talk on this, but scaling up a business that started from a university. It's a sort of continuation of this transition that we've been talking about from being a researcher, a scientist, thinking about the applications, having to learn about lots of different parts of the world, really. And I think for me it's a continuation of the team building and thinking about, as we scale this business, what sorts of expertise do we need? In a university, you're not going to be sitting there thinking about the sales and marketing activity or the financial function or whatever it might be, but as the company scales up, these are things you need to think about, obviously. But also I think for the founding scientists, it's quite an interesting journey to leave the university, join the company, staying with the company. How your role as a founder may evolve and what particular areas that may take quite often in the sort of general model of spin-out company formation. Generally, it's so much, it's about learning what a business is, learning to be a business, learning what the immediate priorities and the focus is and having the plan to deliver the business goals. So in a sort of general sense, it's not that different to being a scientist probably because you're thinking about the projects, writing the grant applications, pursuing the science, but it's just the focus and the objectives maybe more to the fore of what you're thinking about. For your business, the pathway is relatively well understood, isn't it? It's relatively well trodden. I mean, you need to do this, this, this and then if it works, great, you know what'll happen. In some other business areas, there isn't this sort of standardized pathway of like you say, the regulatory, the clinical trials, getting all of the support. And so I guess that provides you with your track for scaling up. But for many other businesses, there isn't and one of the things I've seen with quite a lot of startups is initially the breadth of the opportunity is huge. We've got this amazingly exciting technology. It could do this, it could do that, it could do a very wide range of things. So how do you focus? And that's one of the common challenges for a spin out is instead of trying to do everything from a technical point of view, thinking to satisfy the investors. For you, the pathway is relatively well understood. But even so, you have to understand how you're gonna get into the clinic at what stage is somebody gonna pay money to take your technology and replace something else. So use yours instead of something else or use yours in addition to something else and all of the challenges of that. Yeah, you have to do the things very easy for the people who is using this and communicate a lot what is the benefit of using your tool instead of what is in the hospital. And in our case, for example, our device is a complementary device, so the hospital will pay more to do the same thing. But we have to convince them that finally, there is savings because you are treating better and you are detecting more cancers. And finally, the savings will be in terms of treatment because you have to not treat cancer people. I know from my own personal experience, having been involved with UPF for five or six years now, that UPF as an institution provides a lot of support and really wants to encourage researchers to get involved in all sorts of knowledge exchange knowledge transfer and technology transfer. And I know you've said you've benefited from that. Maybe you can tell me sort of what was it like for you? Yeah, in fact, it was very, very helpful having the university behind because they help a lot in identifying the grant that you can apply. They help you in the proposal and they, for example, when we had to fill the pattern, they give you support with this. And this is the business shuttle unit? Yes, the business shuttle. And then when I was in the middle of the project, the UPF Benchers was created and it was very great because we were like the first project and they put a lot of effort with us. And in fact, they develop our business plan and it was great. Yeah, I think that the support is crucial because as researchers, we don't know how to do this. I mean, in one word, I think the word is impact. And this is certainly the dialogue in the UK for the last sort of 15 years. It's universities thinking about how they can generate a positive impact on society. And that's talked about in terms of benefits to society. And the impact can come from all sorts of different benefits that it might be economic. So we might be talking about business and economic impact, but crucially, we're also talking about social impact, cultural impact, policy impact. And so I think this is something that is relevant to every activity in the university. And technology transfer started really within the engineering, physical science, life science departments. But as the concept is broadened from technology transfer to knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange, sort of thinking far more broadly about how universities impact society and deliver benefits to it. And I think that's what universities want to do. I mean, that's where this is all coming from. It's thinking it's, we're not just sitting here in the university behind the closed doors, publicly funded institutions need to be able to demonstrate the benefit, the impact that they're having on society, is that sometimes, and this is what I say quite frequently, sometimes the commercial route is the best way to deliver benefits to society. And yours is an example of that because sometimes you've got some great ideas, some great prototypes, some great plans, but unless you can get private investment to come in and develop it, it's just not going to get through to market and work with people who know how to get things through to market. So sometimes within this broad concept of generating impact and benefits to society, sometimes the commercial route is the right one. And as we were saying, the motivation isn't the money, and that's a possible by-product from it. In the UK, the universities are independent charitable bodies. So they're not actually owned by the state, they're not state entities. So the people who work in them aren't government employees, they're not public sector employees. And I think there are two important points about that. One is to do with the sort of the culture, the way researchers think about the possibilities of doing things independently and getting involved in knowledge transfer. And the second is quite simply some of the rules and the bureaucracy and the regulations about who is allowed to do what. And I think a consequence of that is that maybe tech transfer got going earlier in the UK. But now what I've seen, and that happened because of the independence, because of the possibility to do it, the desire to do it, and the relative lack of sort of bureaucracy. Whereas now I think from what I see in Spain and Italy and elsewhere where they are public sector employees, public sector institutions, that change has happened and culturally now it's more acceptable, completely acceptable for public sector researchers here to decide to get involved in knowledge transfer. But I guess you've lived this experience, haven't you? And probably in the last few years it's been okay and it's been a lot easier to do than say 15 years ago. But I wonder if you recognize any of that in your experience. Yeah, in fact now I've seen changes. Maybe it's like eight years ago or something like that that I began to think about transferring my research into the society. And at that time maybe there was no so much experience as now. And personally I could felt a little bit what you are saying that maybe is not ethical, let's say to do so, no? Because people think that you are going to make money of your research. But now there are many, many, many startups that are coming from university. I agree that things are changing. In fact in Barcelona above all for these health projects is a very good place to be because you have a lot of first range hospitals, for example to do your validation. In case of pharma, for example, you have also very big pharma around. And also you have investors, local investors that could help in the first stages. And you have, for example, these grants or these training programs that there are quite good programs and above all focused, for example, in the health sector. And it's very helpful at the first stages. Yeah, I mean I've seen, I think in the last say 10 years but certainly the last six or seven years that I've been coming here quite a bit. I think the Barcelona sort of tech community has developed enormously. And I think it's a combination of what the universities have been doing but what the Generalitat, the local government's been doing to actively decide to support this. And there's a number, as you say, there's a number of agencies providing support. There are a number of ways that you can access money but it's about so much more than that. It's about the people. It's about the community of people and the networking. And you go down to the waterfront of Barcelona Tech City, you know, you've got this sort of physical manifestation of the buzz that's going on here.


I think having a richer and better, bigger ecology of public financial institutions is crucial for a number of reasons. Number one, they will provide the things that we need, rather than the things that the bankers need. But number two, the bankers have a big club that they hold over the heads of the rest of us. The club is, well, if you don't give us what we want, we're going to have a capital strike. We're not going to finance you, or we're going to move our headquarters that are abroad, or we're going to do something else. If we have a really rich group of public financial institutions, it'll be easier for us as a society to say, okay, good riddance, goodbye, you can move, we don't need you. So these public financial institutions also serve as a safety net for the rest of us. My name is Gerald Epstein, I'm a professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In my new book, Busting the Bankers Club, Finance for the Rest of Us, published by University of California Press, was originally funded by INEC. So it's great to be here with you all. We know the main requirements for a socially productive financial system. It's a regulation of all financial institutions. It's leverage requirements and policies to ensure that banks finance productive activities. But we don't have them because of what I call the Bankers Club. The Bankers Club is a group of allies of the banks, it's the banks themselves and a group of allies that support them and protect them. And the Bankers Club comes to their defense whenever society or the government tries to highly regulate finance and make them more socially useful. So the Bankers Club sustains the power of finance through a variety of mechanisms. One is by passing legislation that protects the bankers. This is legislation that deregulates finance such as the ending of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1998. The Glass-Steagall Act, as you might remember, was the law passed during the Great Depression by FDR and the new dealers that would separate commercial from investment banks and limit speculation that banks could take, put in federal deposit insurance. And this legislation, the banks didn't like. The banks didn't like it because it limited what they could do, it reduced the incomes that they could get. And so almost immediately after the Second World War, they started trying to get rid of this legislation and related types of legislation. So they spent millions of dollars, perhaps billions of dollars, in financing politicians that would help get rid of this legislation. Financing judges that would help get rid of this legislation. Financial regulators and lawyers who would try to get rid of it. And so finally, in the late 1990s, they really succeeded after having nipped away at it over the preceding decade. And under President Clinton, with Alan Greenspan as head of the Federal Reserve, and other neoliberal politicians, they finally passed legislation to almost completely deregulate the financial system. And so those are all various ways in which the bankers club, that is, the Federal Reserve lawyers, economists, I'll talk about a little bit later, were also involved, and regulators. All try to make it easier for the bankers to make money and to get bigger and more powerful. The bankers club is comprised of a number of primary groups. First of all, it's the bankers themselves and the politicians, the legislators that they pay off. They lobby them, they give them money to help them have a happy post-legislative life, the revolving door, and it gives them good jobs once they're done with being legislators. It involves the Federal Reserve, I call the Federal Reserve the chairman of the club. The Federal Reserve really protects the banks, it orchestrates subsidies for the banks, low interest rates when that will help the banks, high interest rates when there's inflation, and that will help the banks. And the Federal Reserve is really their main protector, both at the regulatory level, making sure that they have regulations that aren't too onerous, and at the monetary policy level, making sure that monetary policy increases asset prices when that's useful and stops inflation when that's useful. In addition to the Federal Reserve, we also have the lawyers who work for banks, lawyers who help fashion legislation that will make it easier for banks to expand into new types of businesses, will help the banks get first in the line when there's a bankruptcy, they get their money back first, and lawyers of course help craft legislation. Unfortunately, my own profession, the economists, some of them are also in the bankers club as well. This operates at a number of different levels, at one kind of general intellectual level, they develop research that tries to show that unregulated financial markets are best for society as a whole. They try to fashion research that shows that banks should be left to do what they want to do, and that's going to trickle down to the rest of us. I'm thinking of people like Eugene Fama, who got the Nobel Prize for his work on efficient markets and so forth. Of course what INET is doing is trying to counter this kind of research, this kind of ideology, and I think it's been very effective at doing that. Economists also operate in a more material, a more devious way. In research that I and my former graduate student Jessica Hagenbarth looked at, we looked at economists and top economists who were kind of on the take from the bankers, that is, they were on the boards of directors of bankers, they got consulting fees for bankers, and then when they appeared in public and supported banks and low regulation, they didn't reveal the fact that they were also getting money from the banks themselves. Another group that I think it's very important to look at is non-financial corporations. As Tom Ferguson has written in his really important work on the Depression, during the Depression there was a group of banks that really, excuse me, non-financial corporations that really didn't align themselves with the bankers club. They supported the New Deal regulations by Franklin Roosevelt. There was kind of a split at that time between some segments of finance and some segments of industry, but by the time we get to the 1990s and the 2000s, you can find almost no space between finance and industry. One is why, and I looked into that quite a lot, and one possibility is the idea of financialization, that non-financial corporations get more and more of their income from financial activities. And that's important, but I think the main reason is what I call the financialization of the CEOs, that is, the CEOs and top management of these corporations are fabulously wealthy and they need financiers to manage their funds and to get them to tax breaks and to help them get around tax laws and so forth. And so they don't want to interfere with what finance can do because they personally gain so much from what the financial industry does. So that's why they align themselves as part of the bankers club with finance. I begin the book talking about the Jekyll and Hyde of finance, and you'll probably recall the Robert Louis Stevenson story, Dr. Jekyll, an upstanding member of the community, had this other side, the Dr. Hyde side, who was a murderous villain, and they were both embedded in the same person. And the financial system is kind of like that. That is, we as a society need finance. We need finance to support mortgages for homes, for investing in plant and equipment, for coming up with innovations that will help everybody to invest in communities, small businesses, et cetera.  That is, it creates financial crises every 10 or 12 years, needs to get bailed out. It allocates most of its resources to speculation, to having a lot of leverage in the economy and creating crises. And it doesn't provide good services for most of the population. That is, small businesses are often rationed out or charged too much. For retirement, it doesn't offer good financial retirement for most people. So that's the Hyde part of finance. Now why is this? It's because finance essentially can create money out of thin air. And it can create money out of thin air and make enormous profits by engaging in all of these kinds of speculative activities. So unless the government regulates finance, makes it difficult or impossible for it to engage in these kinds of activities, it's going to make the most profit for the companies and for the CEOs by engaging in this kind of speculative and destructive activity. So when we have proper guardrails, when we have proper regulation, and we also have to have the government that's underwriting the Hyde's, the Jekyll side of finance, underwriting the good things, then we can have a financial system that operates for the rest of us. There's so much artificially created complexity and obscurity around finance, because as Dennis Keller heard, the head of Better Markets puts it, finance does very well in the dark. It is when there's a lot of complexity, first of all, the people on the other side of the trade, that is the people who are buying the financial products or are borrowing from the financial companies, they don't really understand completely what's involved with these investments, what the real costs are and so forth. And that allows financial markets to create products that are sold not like commodities where there's a clear understanding of what's in it and there's a common competitive price, but they're able to charge high prices for their commodities and get an extra profit from it, number one. Number two, this complexity makes it hard for, and obscurity makes it hard for these products to be regulated. So the regulators have trouble understanding what's in them and so they can't regulate. And the financiers themselves use this as an excuse for saying, well, we're the only ones who really understand it, let us regulate ourselves, you don't try to regulate it. Moreover, if people out in the community, they can't understand us, so they can't really try to rein us in and prevent us from doing this, so just leave it to us. So it serves purposes both at the micro level where it allows them to get more profit, at the regulatory level where it says, regulators, let us do it, and at the more social political level when they say, well, it's too complicated, it's too technical, nobody can understand it. And that's one of the things that I try to do in my book, is to make these kinds of issues understandable to everyday people, students and people in the street and people even in the government who want to understand better how these financial products work and oftentimes only work for the banks. The top of my book is Busting the Bankers Club, Finance for the rest of us. And if you look at it from one side, you say, well, finance is so powerful, it's got this huge club behind it, it has all this money at its disposal, so it's hopeless. But what I've found is that, no, in fact, there's this whole group of what I call clubbusters out there, economists, lawyers, some government people, politicians, and others who are really fighting and have been fighting for a long time to reform the financial system and make it work for the rest of us. So for example, starting at the top, the politicians, we have politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown and Jeff Merkley and many others who have really made regulating finance and making it work for the rest of us a top priority, and so that's crucial. And then we have lawyers and legal scholars like Jennifer Taube and Sola Omerova who was prevented from being the head of the OCC because they thought she would be too hard on the banks, and many other legal scholars who are trying to show what's wrong with finance and how we can regulate it better. Then you have economists and educational institutions, INED is one of them, economists like Jane Durista and others who are trying to puncture holes in this mythology of finance, helping everybody when it's deregulated and being too technical. And then we have activists who operate at a number of different levels. So for example, Dennis Kelleher in Better Markets or Lisa Donners and Americans for Financial Reform, and then at the grassroots, there are many activists out there. Many of them are pushing for regulations of various kinds, and importantly, they're pushing for publicly-oriented financial institutions, public banks and other kinds of financial institutions like that, which I think are really crucial for busting the bankers' club. Banks without bankers means publicly-oriented financial institutions. They may be wholly owned by the government or by a municipality or by a state. They might be a public-private partnership that has a social mission, and maximizing profit isn't the main focus. And they can be a hybrid, partly public, partly private, which actually most financial institutions are. And they often have particular missions, missions to finance affordable housing or missions to finance green energy or to finance a small business or housing or something like that. And we have, over the world, over the whole world, there are many public financial institutions. In the United States, we have a number of different kinds. You can think of credit unions and others, which I would call public financial institutions. But they're mostly very small, and they're not up to scale to really compete with the big financial institutions. I think having a richer and better, bigger ecology of public financial institutions is crucial for a number of reasons. Number one, they will provide the things that we need rather than the things that the bankers need. But number two, the bankers have a big club that they hold over the heads of the rest of us. So that's the kind of double entendre in the title of my book. The club is, well, if you don't give us what we want, we're going to have a capital strike. We're not going to finance you, or we're going to move our headquarters that are abroad, or we're going to do something else. If we have a really rich group of public financial institutions, it'll be easier for us as a society to say, okay, good riddance, goodbye, you can move, we don't need you. So these public financial institutions also serve as a safety net for the rest of us when the private financial institutions won't do what we really need. So what we need to make them more viable, to allow them to grow bigger, allow them to be a bigger part of our financial system, is we need the same kind of federal reserve and government support for these kinds of financial institutions as they give to the megabanks. One of the things that keeps the bankers club going is what I call the money spigot. The money spigot is the funds that go into paying lobbyists, paying economists, paying lawyers, and buying legislation. Now the money spigot comes from the profits of the big banks, but it also comes from the huge subsidies that our government gives to the big banks. First of all, the government bails them out when they get into trouble. The great financial crisis, the government, the federal reserve, and the Treasury spent over $20 trillion bailing out the big banks. They did it again during the COVID pandemic in March of 2020. We saw it more recently with Silicon Valley Bank and so forth. But they give almost no money subsidizing and supporting banks without bankers, these publicly oriented financial institutions. So what we need is, for example, the federal reserve to open up the discount window and the liquidity support for these kinds of banks. The federal reserve should create a financial regime that allows these kinds of banks to thrive. The government should stop bailing out the mega banks and help these banks become bigger and more important in our economy. That's what we need.


Is that too soft? No. Sounds good. We'll do like one different triangle or something. We'll deal with that later. Hello everyone and welcome, I'm James Milan and this is Talk of the Town. We are here today at the Thompson School to talk to one of the newer teachers here at school at the end of his first semester. We are in the music room with the music teacher. He is Philip Dario Fiorentini and I believe you go by Dario, is that right? Dario is fine. Great. Thanks for having us in and basically we just want to take this opportunity as we often do on Talk of the Town to introduce you to the community and the community to you as well and find out really kind of what your journey was to get here, how the experience has been so far and what you've got, what you plan on going forward. With that as a preface, let me start by asking you, is this your first job as a music teacher? You look young enough for that possibly to be so, but I don't know. You're very kind James, but now I've been teaching, this is my fifth year teaching now and I used to teach in Borica County just north of Boston. So the move to here was an effort to get closer to Boston where I do live and I can't say I'm very happy here. Great. And excuse me for failing to recognize you as a grizzled vet of five years now. So but this is your second job as a teacher, your first exposure to Arlington I assume. Did you know anything about Arlington before this job opening came up? So I grew up just west of here in Concord, Mass. So as a child actually there was the long slide playground that I used to love to go down that huge long slide built into the hill. So that's about the only exposure I guess I've had besides just driving through and passing through the downtown. So but it is a good step closer to Boston than Bill Ricca that's for sure. Have you, has music been part of your life for your whole life? Is this a more of a kind of recent calling? Tell us a little bit about that. So I guess music's been a huge part of my life kind of since I was a kid but in different ways. So way back from when I was five, six years old it was playing on the piano that my mother brought from Mexico. My grandmother was a concert pianist, passed away when I was five actually. But having the piano in the house just allowed me to like twinkle out little tunes and figure out little Mozart melodies just sort of by ear, not exactly perfectly. But having it there as a toy was exposing me to music at a very young age so that when I got into sort of middle school I could choose the instrument that I really wanted which was the drum. So like hitting things. That's perfect.  Yeah. So that happened and that came along with like this toy drum set that got me going with grooves and rhythms and that kind of exploration. And when I got to high school it was in the high school band that I met Aldentina was my band director in Concord Carlisle High School. And a person with some influence as it turns out over your professional trajectory it sounds like. Yeah and like the phenomenal music that we would make as a school band aside you know he was a very delightful person and really made a nice community in this huge school that was like very welcoming to basically everyone. So I think that was the main attraction for me to become a music educator. And you said to become a music educator I'm interested to know was there a time as you're growing up as a kid and you're playing the piano you're playing the drums etc. You know your grandmother was a concert pianist etc. Did you have aspirations as a performer? Do you still perhaps? Well performing is always fun. It depends on the context you know a formal piano recital is very different than like a like festive playing at the house when my mother has company over you know. So it kind of depends on the context but I can say it's always nice to share music but I think in the end it's always going to be an intrinsic value. I don't think I'll ever stop playing piano for myself. Right. So performance you know performance is playing music of course and what you're what I hear you saying is yeah within the context of conviviality and you know and doing it for yourself etc. It makes a lot of sense. Not necessarily did you ever aspire to be a professional musician for instance. Yeah it's just it's important to realize that when you're watching a performance you're seeing the sum of hundreds of hours and thousands of hours even for some musicians probably spent in solitude you know really perfecting that craft. So if you don't enjoy that solitude part of it then you're not going to be able to do the performance part. And clearly you have staked out your territory here in music education and that is far from solitude. In fact here we sit in your music room which is a good you know a very nice sized space and also just very cheerful and I can just imagine it being filled with lots and lots of very young students. Tell us a little bit about your days here how often are the students getting music in their week and how often are you teaching throughout the day. So students have class in music about once per week and that's for forty minutes each time they come to visit and as you can see from my room I keep it very open because in that forty minutes we'll do a lot and typically I'll start with movement so doing some stretches and then I do a lot of imaginative movement with younger grades especially but even in upper grades as well where students have to use their imaginations basically to move in meaningful ways. So something that's an example is we're going to move around the room and you are an elephant so it's going to be very very heavy movements but your volume level needs to be pianissimo which means extremely soft so they see all these interesting combinations of how do you move heavy with a soft touch so exercising the mind in that way is important. We also move on to a lot of singing singing is very important because it's direct expression of musical ideas in upper grades we'll put that expression on to instruments so such as drum, cellophones, metallophones, marimba, some students have played piano for me a little bit but as you can see that's a lot that we cover in that sort of amount of time each week. Right and obviously students are always coming in here with lots of energy I'm sure they get to move around in their classrooms as well but nothing like the release that they probably find in this particular space. Do you also find that working with elementary school students clearly what you're choosing to do is easier in some ways because they have less self-consciousness than older students might around say these movement exercises that you do etc. So that's definitely true where students that are younger sort of don't have that confidence filter that students tend to develop when they go into like middle school age but sort of trying to tear that down is something I do with my upper grades and you know it's really you know some students will love to do the performance aspect like we mentioned before like some students love to share their music and go and like spread it with the world whereas other students definitely prefer to do that sort of solitude thing and it's really about getting each student to form their own relationship with music in a successful way that will make them able to express their musicality. What's the hardest thing about working with this age population? Remembering their names. There's about 500 students here and I think I can probably call out about 250 to 300 of them right now. And you're about four months into this task or so of name memorization that's not bad that's that's pretty good seems to me are you actually seeing I assume so that you see all 500 students at one point or another in your week or over a course of time. Yeah so like I said it's each class will come visit for four minutes each week and then through the week I'll see all 500 students. So that does see I mean you put it you know facetiously just learning their names being difficult but that does sound like it would be hard to you know to to feel some of the same kind of connection you'd feel if you were seeing people over and over again and a smaller number of them. Do you do you find that you've you have or let me ask it this way what lessons have you already learned relatively early still in your teaching career about what goals are reasonable to expect of yourself and of your students through your music education that you're giving them. So it's just a lot of multitasking I guess you could say James. You know you need to understand not just like music level because everyone's at a different music level you know you don't start learning music when you come into my music class at five years old you start learning music from when you're still in the womb of your mother you know is a really when it starts so every child comes in at a vastly different level I've had five-year-olds that can sing perfectly in tune and five-year-olds who have never tried making a singing sound in their life. So you're differentiating musically pretty much from the get-go in kindergarten all the way up through fifth grade as well so that's just one aspect when you take into account students with special needs students with IEPs or 504 plans with behavioral plans students that have hard things going at home you need to take into account like what sort of activities and what sort of participatory things can you do in the class that will be beneficial to them you know when I choose songs to sing and activities to do it's not just about doing the song or activity I also tell a whole lot about the history of the music where it comes from what it's about why are we singing these songs you need to give the music purpose for it to resonate with children. As you you know are getting used to a new school and a new student population etc do you find that your interactions with the students are separate from everything that is happening in the rest of the school or are you being do you have ways to integrate yourself and what you're doing with your your colleagues and what's happening in the classroom you know outside of here. So the amount of collaborative time that I get with the colleagues here at the Thompson school is quite limited actually and that's just due to scheduling and you know there's a lot to do in the day and there's just not a lot of time for that. So in regards to making things applicable I would say like just the social emotional learning aspect of it that's just teaching students what it means to act in a society and how to behave as people you know just doing very fun team building games there's one called the telephone song where you get to call out someone's name and the whole class sings that person and then that person calls the next person and it's sort of a chain event right and so in the past I've had that going sort of towards the end of the music class so when the teacher comes in I'll call out the teacher's name and then it puts the teacher sort of integrated into our music class for that very brief you know one minute turnover time. Right clearly a small thing but it makes all the difference. Yeah lovely little connection there. Many of your colleagues I know have to worry about standards. Standards imposed by the state for them to reach X right in their classes. Do you are you do you have to also conform to those kinds of things and what are if so what are those standards like what how is it that the the state or the Department of Education is measuring the progress of your students. So yes we do have to worry about standards and I'm actually currently in the process of working with all the other elementary school teachers in Arlington for music education to develop a curriculum that's entirely based on satisfying those standards for Massachusetts and the way it looks like the what we get is a giant document that basically has it's divided into sort of three sections create perform respond and those sections are then elaborated on in terms of singing in terms of performing in terms of playing instruments and then by grade level as well so like what should a kindergarten or be creating musically what should a fourth grader be able to read musically what should a third grader etc. So we're currently sort of revamping the curriculum from second grade up and the way it has to happen is you do second grade in the following year you can carry that through into third grade and the following year it's into fourth grade so it's sort of a long process but you kind of have to do it like that so you have a baseline makes sense. So switching gears you had mentioned earlier that you were interested in moving as you moved from Bill Ricca here to Arlington that part of the attraction for you was that it was closer to the city. Why is that? Is that are you living in the city or where are you coming to Arlington from? I'm currently living in Quincy which is south of Boston so I did grow up near Boston so I do really like the city but I'm actually currently living in a boat so. Is that right? How did that happen? That was just a question between where did me and my roommate want to move and then we couldn't decide and then we needed something at the time we needed something between Bill Ricca and Rhode Island so we thought the coast had less traffic turns out we were wrong but one thing led to another and then we ended up buying a boat. Well I know we all know that housing is tough in Boston but you've got your own version of that obviously. Anything that you you know I'm sure that our audience would be their interests would be piqued to hear that you in fact live on a boat. Anything that you can share you know in the form of hey this is what I have to deal with all the time or here's an amusing thing that happens when you live on a boat something like that that you might share with us? Well my first year it was it was a stormy year in the winter so the in early March I believe there was a storm that flooded the seaport district three separate times on three different high tides and we basically couldn't go on our boat during that time so it was me and my roommate and our dog the big pit pole macho we had to basically live in the marina offices for two nights. So they right I guess you make do as you can and that was your emergency shelter for for that time.  Right absolutely but and and I assume that the boat itself is stationary and remains that way it's not or are you in fact able to take it out? We've taken it out about 25 to 30 times. Okay. Our favorite trip is to heading to Boston right around five o'clock and then so that when you're in the harbor it's the sunset and you can see sort of the beautiful Somerville sunset with the pink sky and then the lights turn on in Boston and it kind of falls into a night scene. Yeah that sounds it's unbeatable. That sounds like a real respite from whatever you know working with 500 kids throughout the week might you know might elicit in you that that seems like a good way to let it all go. Anything else that you do in in your own life that is you know something that is important to you not perhaps totally unrelated to working here at school but again that we always like to find out a little bit about the folks we're talking to that has nothing to do with what they're doing professionally. Sure well I I'm an aspiring adventure so hence the boat life hence you know I've taken trips to Utah and Colorado and Iceland to do backpacking and camping and I'm an avid mountain biker I do downhill mountain biking at the Highland mountain bike is my favorite one I have the sticker on my car I believe. I'm an avid skier so I'm getting ready for this season and hopefully we'll be spending lots of time up in Maine. Sounds sounds good and also maybe you might want to get out west for the skiing as well if and when you can. Yes. So last thing just to bring it right back to school again. Do you have concrete goals for yourself you know in this job and over the sense of this career that you've identified and that you are moving towards or is it is that kind of beside the point and really there's enough to worry about on a day-to-day week-to-week basis. No there are very concrete goals you know I kind of teach I have it in my mind to teach for a 30-year plan which me myself not being 30 years old can't say if I'm going to be interested in music when I'm 30 technically but I have a strong assumption I will be and the day that I can teach a kindergarten class for six years and then see them grow up to be 30 and still have music as a strong connection in their life as a strong backbone for them to be able to rely upon that's when I'll know that I've satisfied my goal. Right okay so I just want to make sure I understand what you're saying is now you you'll you get to teach kindergartners you'll have them for the six years that they're here when that first class that you've had for the six years they're here gets to be 30 years old or so so another 15 20 years after that that's that is you know you'll you'll feel that kind of okay I've accomplished something important. Yeah I don't need to I don't mean to dive too deep here but it's really like a cultural shift you know I talked to a lot of parents and I love to talk to parents actually and a lot of adults and colleagues and you know I can't tell you how many times I hear oh I used to play that but then this or oh I used to play guitar and then I don't know how to do it anymore I haven't played in years you know well like why it must have not been that meaningful to you then or that important so yeah well I have to say that that aspiration sounds like a pure teacher to me because from my own years of teaching I really recognize in it the fact that you of course enjoy the experience that you have with students who are right in front of you every day and every week but the idea the deeper sense that something that you're doing with and for them is going to have an impact over time in their lives is something that I think all teachers hold very dear and and good luck to you with that aspiration I have the sense even from our brief chat that that may very well be the case and that just as your band teacher in high school turned out to have a big effect on your own decisions about what you wanted to do professionally I wouldn't be surprised at all if you'll find that students come back to you years from now and have something similar to say I hope so for your sake thank you James I'm interested to it's interesting to think that for you as an adventurer or an inspiring adventurer as you said and also a musician by calling it by profession how do you balance those things do you find that you bring music around with you everywhere you go including hiking up the mountains how does that work well I think everyone does to a certain extent like music's everywhere in movies TV shows there might be music at the beginning of this interview or at the end but I do know that I've literally carried music in Utah when I hiked a you know 13,000 foot mountain I brought my ukulele with me and then promptly ran out of water so I thought I made a big mistake there you mean you're right the ukulele took up the space at the water with it yes so but then there's other yeah I was not full of water unfortunately but uh yeah I mean besides just you know listening to a lot of my favorite artists you know music it's sort of it draws moods so depending on the mood that I'm in you know I'll have classical music or hip hop music or country music or folk music that I listen to and you know as a music teacher I get tons of people that give me music listening suggestions so I'm happy to say I have a large arsenal of songs that I can choose from to set my mood right and just out of curiosity are there any genres musical genres in at you know at this point in your life that you would say you really don't appreciate I don't think I can fair enough you know I have found that when I was your age I did have like no way country music no way bluegrass music no way etc and as I've gotten older I just realized man there's good music in all of these genres and you just have to find the good stuff yeah well it's not I mean there's music that I don't like of course but there's no music that's not valid because if it's being made that means that someone likes it even if it's just the one person that makes it it's meaningful that one person that's all we need I only use the bottom typically since I'll pop up and hit a side but