Battle Over Ballots; Racism Reality vs Perception; Pandemic’s Unexpected Impacts | The Nation Speaks

[Music] today on the nation speaks the growing corporate activism in reaction to georgia's new election law is facing pushback from conservatives and in america q a we get to hear what regular americans think about whether organized sports should weigh in on politics it's a theme we hear a lot about there's a racism crisis in america but how much of that racism is shaped by perception a brave researcher decided to find out just over a year ago work life for most of us was majorly disrupted so how's that been going we asked three very different professions then america q a asked people across the country the same question hello and welcome to the nation speaks i'm your host cindy drewcare a month ago georgia passed election reform laws explicitly to address the long list of problems that came to light during the last elections there were enough questions confusion and evidence of at least some voting irregularity to trigger three recounts georgia's new law was meant to resolve these problems before the next election but it's instead sparked a maelstrom of protest from democrats and corporate america the accusations are of racism and voter suppression atlanta-based corporate giants like coca-cola and delta airlines and dozens more companies and celebrities have spoken out against the law major league baseball took the dramatic step of pulling this year's all-star game out of atlanta in protest president joe biden has said the law is more racist than segregation and it's just not right this is jim crow on steroids what they're doing in in georgia and 40 other states representative burgess owens from utah who grew up himself in the jim crow south took particular offense to this accusation it is disgusting and offensive to compare the actual voter suppression and violence of that era that we grew up in with a state law that only asked that people show their id this is a type of fear monitoring i expect in the 1960s not today other republican politicians have gotten involved and are trying to apply counter pressure like our first guest we have with us now u.s senator marsha blackburn from tennessee senator thank you so much for taking the time with us today i'm delighted to join you thank you so now you co-sponsored legislation along with senators ted cruz josh hawley mike liamerko rubio to strip major league baseball of the antitrust exemption it's had for a hundred years and that's being done to punish the league after it decided to pull this year's all-star game and draft out of georgia to protest the state's new voting law now correct me if i'm wrong here but it doesn't seem that this is going to deliver an immediate catastrophic blow to the league but it's being done to send a message why did you choose to take this action well honestly i do think it would deliver a blow to the league because what it would do is open up the baseball leagues for more competition and for new entrants into the world of baseball and that would be a good thing now also pointing out to mlb that they have a responsibility they do have this anti-trust exemption they have been able to operate under this and for them to step in and say well we're going to start to pick winners and losers and if we don't like something that the government of an entity is doing then we'll just pick up these teams and move or it it is just so it's inappropriate and so this is a proper action uh there is a uh i i think people in georgia now are beginning to look at this and say hey wait a minute the people you're punishing are us and look at the small business owners there in dekalb county georgia that were planning on having this game as a way to help recover from the pandemic and they have been disenfranchised because there is an incorrect definition of this law they have it has been misrepresented by some companies and by some entities like mlb as to what it does it does not restrict voting it does not suppress voting what it does is to expand both the opportunities to register to vote to have ballot access and it makes certain that votes that are legally cast by georgians will be counted in those elections it's so the law is all about election integrity and it is being misrepresented how much do you think major league baseball's move was um an ideological objection and how much perhaps fear of you know atlanta becoming a playground for protests especially they're going to honor hank aaron how much do you think that factored into it i have no idea because i'm not in their corporate boardrooms and i'm not a part of the phone calls that mlb has conducted in order to arrive at their decision what i do know is that they have sent a message that they have chosen aside in a political debate and that side is clearly not with the elected representatives of of georgia and people are going hey wait a minute you know our voting laws are far less restricted than many other states so why are you picking on us and this is something that i i think mlb will see people say hey i'm not going to buy a ticket to a ball game or if they do show up what will different mlb teams do when people say i will not show you my id if you say showing an id is a racist act do not ask for my id to come here and watch a game and don't ask for it if i choose to buy a beer don't ask for an id if i board a flight don't ask for an id if i apply for government benefits or if i register a child for school or go to have lunch with my child at school don't ask for it when i go to the doctor's office and don't ask for it when i go to the liquor store or i buy cigarettes or i pick up a prescription so let me ask you this one of the things that baseball commissioner robert manfred said in a statement is that this move was the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport and the day before they made their move they signed an extended agreement with tencent which is a chinese a very large chinese tech company that has very close ties with the chinese communist regime which of course is as a horrible human rights record and 10 cents also put pressure on the nba when former houston rockets general manager daryl mori supported the protesters the pro-democracy protesters in hong kong so what sort of values what kind of statement do you think this is making i i think it's a statement that probably they wish they had not made because the chinese communist party does not wish the united states or the private sector and the united states well they are intent on global domination by the time we get to the midpoint of this century they are not seeking to be a member of the community of nations they want to dominate the community of nations the genocide they are carrying out against the uyghurs there in xinjiang province is something that they should be held to account for they are using the uyghurs as slave labor to produce goods for uh nba licensed merchandise mlb licensed merchandise they are using that slave labor to to manufacture merchandise for other companies like nike like apple and these companies should be standing with the united states of america on the values of freedom and free enterprise and free people and they should have the guts to look at the chinese communist party and say committing a genocide is wrong going after the hong kong freedom protesters breaking your word to hong kong going back on your word and then imprisoning these individuals that are freedom fighters putting the chinese communist party's police force on the streets of hong kong carrying out a human rights violations against the tibetans the mongolians these corporations should be able to stand up and say we're going to stand for freedom we're going to stand for free markets and free people and chinese communist party you need to be listening to us not us bowing or listening to you has there been any response at all from the baseball commissioner robert manfred not yet we're still waiting i guess they're in the timeout box um and let me ask you this do you think this pressure is having the impact of or perhaps intended to intimidate other states away from passing similar legislation no i'm delighted to know that so many states this year are reviewing how they participate in the voting process you know the constitution gives the right to set the time place and manner of elections to the states and because of that it is the state legislature's duty and responsibility and they work with the subdivisions which are the counties to make certain that voter rolls are cleaned up and this year many people are putting that emphasis on cleaning up these voter rolls and that is something people can do go to their county election commission when's the last time you purge the voter rolls and remove the names of people that are deceased you know you have to get those right that is the foundational part of having integrity in the election commission and states and counties are going through this process they're making certain that the roles are right so that if they do mail out ballots they're only going to people that live in that county or live in that state and they're standing up and pushing back on this horrendous hr1s1 which would federalize the electoral process would mandate that states do mail out ballot and allow ballot harvesting and require states to put all of these different databases they have like university students and business licenses things that include people that are not residents of the states but may work or come into the state for a short period of time for education it would require that all of those names go into your voter database it would also remove the ability of local counties to clean up their database it is a recipe for fraud and i'm delighted that so many states and state legislatures are taking their responsibilities seriously and are working to clean up these databases all right thank you so much for joining us today we appreciate your time thank you it's good to join you bye now bye-bye while republican politicians are using their tools legislation conservative groups are also getting involved our next guest is trying to hold corporate america accountable for its objections joining us now is scott shepard he's the deputy director of the free enterprise project which is part of the national center for public policy research and scott you recently submitted questions to shareholders meetings to two ceos to bank of america and coca-cola and they gave you some sort of answers these are both companies that have come out against georgia's voter reform laws what kind of tell me what happened what kind of answers did you get from these companies well at coke they sort of dodged our question which specifically asked if you're objecting to voter id how is it that you can uh demand in particularly bank of america's case demand id from borrowers and from in both cases from uh visitors and employees and and uh investors who want to vote their shares at shareholder meetings coke answered a a pre-written um staff written question about the voter law generally and while they had said that it was unacceptable and racist before they backed off and said well gosh we need to we need to all work together to make sure that that elections are fair and that everyone believes in them and i think that's right but that doesn't involve attacking george's or anybody else's attempts to make voting uh honest and clean and fair and then at bank of america they actually took our question and and uh brian moynihan who's the ceo of of bank of america hampden haud and started to claim that he hadn't said that voter id and the voting the voting law was was racist and unacceptable and then he he backed off of that and finally he said the right to vote is is court america um and that we want to make sure it's uh preserved and extended the fullest extent possible one of the things is there's lots of provisions in these laws and that's why last week after looking at some of the discussion you know i i asked that i got to the conclusion that maybe we need a bipartisan commission it might be um if it were truly bipartisan and represented everybody but what we could certainly expect is that there'd be a lot of hard leftists on that commission and then mitt romney or somebody else from the from the right-wing surrender crowd and it wouldn't be bipartisan at all what struck me from his answer is it sounded like it's possible he hadn't read the law himself before objecting to it is that your sense from from some of the corporations you've been working with yeah that's that's absolutely true they've gotten so used these these woke ceos have gotten so used to uh just jerking their knees and responding in in in lockstep with everything that they're told to from the hard far left uh that they they got ahead of their um ahead of of whoever reads these things for them and so they automatically said oh this is terrible this is racist and then found out that what they were being asked what the the the state of georgia had done was expand opportunities for voting but also expand assurances that the person who has the the ballot is is casting it and that there aren't boxes of ballots being pulled from under tables at 3am after there's a mysterious uh and convenient pipe bursting which happened in atlanta on election night in 2020 and uh and other protections and so they they got out on a stupid limb and they made stupid statements and now it looks like they'd still like to interfere with voting integrity but they've had to backpedal scott can you explain to us what exactly your organization is doing this is the heart of shareholder meeting annual shareholder meeting season and we're going to those meetings they're all still virtual but we're going and posing questions like we asked coke and the bank of america earlier in the week and we also went um this past week to levi strauss and in contrast to coke and bank of america chip berg who's the ceo of levi strauss didn't back off at all he doubled down saying that uh that the bill in georgia is racist that efforts in in texas and really nationwide there's an immense amount of support in every uh demographic category except looney leftists for voter integrity and voter ids um he said that that all of these efforts are steps backward and there he explicitly said that they're racist although he wouldn't explain what exactly he thought was racist because he's oh i don't think voter id is racist but he didn't specify which which uh specific provisions he thought were and i suspect this is also an uh an illustration of the ceo responding without knowing the details but we have to keep we at the fep and all of us from the center uh and the right and the sensible middle of this country have to keep the heat up to make these ceos explain very clearly they're calling us racists for wanting uh clean elections they're calling us uh retrograde and discriminatory well that's that's really inflammatory language especially with everything else that's going on these days if they want to call us racist they need to explain exactly what specific provisions in these laws are are racist and otherwise they need to apologize and get back to making blue jeans and and making soft drinks and flying us around the country and and playing baseball so it seems like the left has been fairly successful in actively engaging these companies and getting them to to sign on to these things there's you know 400 companies or something like that now that are trying to push for the equality act to be passed in washington so do you think is the right are the conservatives just not trying as hard are the messages not resonating are they not organized what do you think are the dynamics at work here well i think you've hit a hit hit an important nail right on the head which is that we on the right we've got families we've got jobs a lot of us have have uh faith lives uh we've got things to do and we think that the left shouting in zuccotti park to eat the rich and all of this nonsense we think it's nonsense we think they're acting like fools and so we haven't behaved that way at least since the the tea party era about a decade ago which was notable for the fact that we cleaned up after ourselves and zuccotti park looked like a looked like a war zone and then we stopped but we have to actively get involved again we have to take up the less tactics to stop the left's uh attempted strategic takeover of the entire civil life of the country and so we've got to we we we would love allies at the shareholder meetings if you own shares in these companies to to ask questions with us and when the world uh opens up if you go you can ask the ceos questions about their ridiculous positions face to face and if you don't own shares you can get in touch with customer relations and let these companies post on their facebook pages and on their twitter accounts and let them know exactly what you think about their absurd positions i that you can get a lot of mileage out of taking a road trip and protesting in front of the corporate uh buildings go to go to mlb games with with um with t-shirts that say one person one vote or voter id or baseball get out of of politics there's all sorts of ways to to make your feelings known and corporations really do pay attention and the louder we are and the more clear we make it that that we're just not going to accept this uh the more likely corporations are to get themselves back into the business of being in business and not in trying to destroy the american republic so let me ask you this why do you think so many businesses are so eager to align with the democrats when a lot of the policies are probably not going to be good for them they're going to you know increase corporate taxes to pay for the big spending bills why do you think that is well in in the case of big tech i think it's because a lot of highly educated but little experienced kids got very rich and very fast and don't know anything about how the world works and are themselves woke but in a lot of other cases it's exactly because the right doesn't um campaign doesn't engage isn't active the way the left is i think a lot of ceos and and people who are now ceos got really scared during the uh the occupy wall street era and started to uh surrender to the hard left to try to make sure that they were eaten last and so now you've got this this uh group of ceos who see an opportunity to increase their power and work uh their personal policy preferences uh into all of our lives through corporate control um but also uh whether they recognize it or not are likely to be surrendering themselves to political forces that will never respect corporations that always intend to destroy these corporations and they're offering themselves up on a silver platter and some of these companies are the ones you know getting looted or burned down yeah i mean this is a lesson that they're slow to learn but that they need to learn there is no buying off the hard left you know nike gives all of this money to to black lives matters into the very organizations that are burning down their stores and starbucks is the same and it's a long list of companies and they still get their stores burnt down eventually they need to learn either to stop supporting these uh these organizations or um the corporate uh owners the shareholders have to replace them with people with a lot more sense all right well thank you so much for joining us today scott we appreciate your perspective on your time thank you so much i'm so glad to be along with you coming up next why a researcher thinks racism in america isn't entirely what it seems but first here's america q a where we ask if you think professional sports should be getting involved in politics [Music] they just should be neutral oh i'm very upset with that we should let the money stay here in atlanta we were doing an awesome job we was walking with it so why should they change when people come to see games and things like that that's what they're paying to see they're not paying to hear your political views or your political stances i'm a volunteer as well i think it was horrible they should have left it where it was supposed to be yet we were already set to do this and we need to stick with sports and let the politicians stay where politics need to stay no i think i really think people should just keep that as their personal opinion because it just divides the country more than it needs to be they have every right to behave like every other company and other companies have that right too but i think that being part of an organization that's national and it goes from you know high school age kids all the way up into people who retire and i think that they all have to probably agree on standards i think they should uh just not like tell people to act on it i think in our country it's hard to stop anyone from having a political stance so i mean i think it really just comes down to how big their influence is but as voters and independent people we have to make those judgments ourself of what we're being influenced by well i think they're overpaid way overpaid to give them a political stance as a separate entity no i've always looked at athletes as artists i think that that's what they should stick to [Music] if they got a personal thing do it on their own time i don't think that their team as a whole should represent anything i feel they should have their own political views but they should also know that they're looked up to if you're privately owned you know you should always have your own opinions um i don't really think that that should affect your business per se um you know everyone's entitled to their own opinion it's one of the things that makes america so great actually no i think sports needs to just stay with sports i mean i think that's a lot of the problem now with everybody just politics everything has to be about politics i think major league sports teams are should be able to have a political stance because you know they are celebrities essentially that people look to i don't think sports should be in politics at all politics shouldn't be in sports it should be separate things for me i understand why they why certain teams are taking a stand to participate in certain things they're not because they're trying to be supportive yeah i mean fight for what you believe on well i think that they're it's regarded with us standing in the community and people pay attention to them and so i think it is appropriate people watch sports for the escape from reality and bringing all of that political garbage into sports is ruining it all for everybody they're entitled to their opinion and where they want to have their game played but it's all become political everything masks vaccines so we're in a strange time accusations of racism are everywhere these days but it's often taboo to question racism itself our next guest recently published a very interesting and controversial report called the social construction of racism in the united states it contains new surveys and past research and basically makes the case that the public doesn't have an accurate impression of how much racism exists in america today we're joined now by professor eric kaufman adjunct fellow at the manhattan institute and a professor of politics at london university professor welcome good to be here cindy so um you wrote a very interesting report that revealed a lot of things about perceptions of racism and the existence of racism itself in america could you just start by walking us through what you found to be most revealing in your research well really the the report very much makes the case that um perceptions of racism are in many cases driven by the media and bipartisanship rather than by reality and so just to give you sort of a top line statistic um perceptions of racism for example have been the perception that race relations are good in america we're at about 70 percent um running from about 2000 to 2013. since 2014 the the share of americans saying uh race relations are good has dropped down to 30 to 40 just in the last sort of five six years at the same time we know however that attitudes to interracial marriage for example and the actual number of interracial marriages has been going up and up so for example in 1990 over 50 percent of white americans opposed interracial marriage that's now under 10 we know that the number of um african-americans shot by police has declined 60 to 80 percent since the late 1960s so at the same time as reality of latitudes and behaviors has been getting less and less racist we're seeing the opposite perception in fact america is getting more and more racist i was interested in that divergence why that occurred and so we can see many many ways in which that occurs due to the media so for example if you track the use of the term racist or white supremacist or white privilege in the new york times in the washington post uh new online news sites that's exploded from about 2014-15 onwards with that huge increase which we can measure through word counts um or we could measure it in google trends and other places it's a well-documented phenomenon that there was a sort of conscious editorial decision to move in this direction and at the same time we see that opinion amongst particularly white liberal americans but to some extent all liberal americans shifts on questions around race and diversity dramatically two levels that we haven't seen in for many decades so this shift is in my view tied very much to media dynamics rather than to anything happening on the ground if it were tied to what's actually happening on the ground concern over over racism would actually be declining and the share of people saying race relations are good would be rising but it's the citizen journalism it's the vivid imagery imagery circulated on social media and on the internet that's what's really driving um people's perceptions of the size of the problem so that's very interesting so there's perceptions of the problem itself which i get so people are you know picking that up through media and social media what about the experiences of racism what are you seeing the reporting of that um yeah well i mean it's not just perceptions of racism as a national problem but even personal experiences are inflected by what's one's partisanship so for example we see a big difference between people who are republican and democrat african-americans for example who are um who say that white republicans are racist versus african-americans who say that they are not racist we've got a gap of 20 to 35 points uh between the one group and the other group on whether they've personally experienced various forms of racism and discrimination also exposure to social media 2016 pew survey data that i use showed that african americans on social media about 30 reported things such as people being afraid of you or um you know everyday racism whereas the share amongst those who were on social media was over 50 so 20 points higher just amongst those on social media compared to those who are not that really shouldn't be affecting your experience of people being afraid of you or acting like you're not smart that that really isn't something that you should be reporting much higher levels of just because you're on social media so i think this is sort of speaking to the impact of social media exposure on even personal perceptions of racism and that i found quite interesting in addition for example with partisanship you know black trump supporters compared to black biden supporters you see that black biden supporters uh 40 of them report monthly or more uh racist incidents uh experiences uh under the trump administration and only 20 out of the obama administration whereas black trump voters report report 30 uh under both so you know we'd have to imagine that perhaps people who are inflicting these um you know racism on african americans are able to pick out the the biden voters over the trump voters it just doesn't make any sense other than through this prism of uh partisanship uh and we see that sort of the way partisanship sort of amplifies people's uh interpretation of reality in the direction of finding more racism particularly through one uh statistic which is really i asked a question which is a very fact-based question do you think that the uh that young african-americans are more likely to be killed by a police bullet or in a car accident now we know from the statistics which are very good on this it's about 10 times more likely to be killed in a car accident than being shot by the police and yet what we see is eight in ten um african-american biden voters saying a young african-american is more likely to be shot by the police than die in a car accident and seven and ten whites who believe that white republicans are racist agree with that point so they're both getting the question wrong this is a fact a factual question their ideology is distorting their perception of reality i mean it's the ideology coupled with the kind of media diet coupled to some extent with the social media ties they have all of those things are framing reality for them in a way that simply creates a much perception of a much bigger problem nationally and also in term you know framing and interpreting everyday experiences or perhaps constructing experiences in a way that those of another partisanship aren't so yeah i found that question about the you know how young african-americans are more likely to die very interesting because because that one's fact-based you could you can measure it you can know that it's wrong right so one question i have is how much do you think there's a factor of personal definitions of racism and what a racist you know act or comment might be being different among groups well i think this is this is a big ideological split so do you think something like if someone says i don't notice race um you know some people you know there are people who would say well that's racist that's kind of a microaggression uh and what we see for example in the debt is african-americans who have a degree are much more likely to say something like i don't notice race or america is a colorblind society they're much more likely to call that racist and this is kind of a or or be offended by that story um and yeah so the definition of racism is flexible depending on your ideology and clearly progressives are wanting to expand the definition of racism to include a lot more things you know any disparity but any group disparity on something like education income health housing whatever will be automatically interpreted as racism by progre by many progressives whereas conservatives will say well we have to control for other factors such as socioeconomic background which is linked to other things including the income of a particular group when they entered the country as immigrants or perhaps the legacy of the past or perhaps it might have to do with the family or whatever so a much more sort of nuanced approach that would say there is racism it's not been eradicated but we have to actually control for other confounding factors and once we've done that in refuted counter arguments then we can talk about the remaining bit as racism but to actually just look at any bivariate disparity and call that racism he's an example of this expansion of the uh term uh racism and of course the implications of your work are pretty significant i mean we saw in the recent project veritas cnn video that i mean what we all know that uh if it bleeds it leads that media you know it's driven by that sort of uh coverage but i mean the implications are pretty big because people are on the streets protesting they're calling for defending the police and all of this could be a very mistaken perception about how bad the problem actually is yeah and and that is that has two consequences so for example when joe biden or barack obama are talking about this as a racist problem you know something like the george floyd uh uh killing uh you know this is actually in many ways um to frame it and racialize it in a way that it may simply be an issue of police brutality so instead of uniting people you're actually rubbing on uh some of the divisions one group feels they've been slighted unfairly and and people have been generalizing about say white people are police and saying they're all this way or they're all that way um and at the same time also we have to bear in mind in addition to the divisiveness of this rhetoric there is also the um the impact on african americans and just doesn't seem like many people want to talk about that impact uh you know there was a study uh that looked at cities that had blm uh protests for example had 10 percent a 10 increase or 10 higher murder rates than those that didn't have blm protests in the period 2014 to 2019 uh and that's a careful academic study and it came out in in walks as well um and so the the increase in deaths there is on the order of several thousand so we have several thousands deaths mainly african-american deaths and this is now before the kind of crime wave that we've seen since uh mid-2020 as a result of the uh the most recent wave so there's a huge cost to ramping up threat perceptions talking about defund the police leading to reduce reduced policing typically leads to more anarchy and violence and and there doesn't seem to be any accountability and responsibility being taken for that so that maybe actually we should be more restrained we should look at the complexity of policing in relation to communities and maybe actually it's not such a great idea to keep hammering on to this narrative rather than saying actually you know we have cases very similar to george floyd's like tony timpa who a white man who's had a very similar experience in 2016. very little interest in that little interest in the fact that you know when you control for police interactions that uh whites and blacks are like there's a similar propensity to be shot by the police that these are exceedingly rare events that the notion that somehow young african americans are at risk of randomly being shot by the police i mean this this completely fallacious um you know images seems to be propagated even by elites it doesn't seem like they're taking any responsibility uh for what what are really mistruths it's like saying that that you're likely to be blown up in a terrorist attack you know at any time i mean it's completely irresponsible yeah right well i hope more people get a chance to read your report because i think there's some really important findings in here although it might be resisted well thanks cindy thank you so much for joining us today thank you coming up next how has work life changed over the past year of living with the pandemic we find out from three people in very different professions but first here's america q a where we ask the same question to americans across the country [Music] well i work in the medical field so obviously more precaution it's been great to not face any traffic but it's been very difficult difficult emotionally for a lot of the staff to not be able to see one another and just to get into random conversations i'm looking for for a job which kind of makes it a little tough during covet times online school was definitely a big shift especially since the end of my sophomore year got cut off by covid it's definitely been much harder for me to learn because of online school like i haven't been able to pay attention as well because i'm sitting at home instead of like in class it's also different because i couldn't see my friends or anything so like definitely social life impacted my group of friends got a lot smaller we started using a wagon for transports instead of having prisoners in the back of a car with an officer we'd have to disinfect everything as soon as we were done with the transport they were trying to control the numbers in the jail so a lot of the the people we would normally arrest we were cutting breaks to or given court appearances to keep the jail numbers down actually i worked a lot more than i did the year before prior in uh 2020 once coveted started we for instance we did a downtown indianapolis hotel thousand rooms and there was only seven people in the hotel they shut it down but we were considered essential workers so we actually was able to finish the job about three days early there's nobody there at the start of covid we were doing maybe like 10 bucks a day like it was just it was terrible working in the mall and doing very little to no business but as of like maybe the last month or two it's everything it's been changing my work life changed over the past year for the greater uh number one i'm retired not too much i do have to wear a mask every day since i work from home it really i enjoy working from home so it's been better for me there's no work completely out of work in fact i'm going now right now to go play somewhere do a little rehearsal with the pianist because they let us come indoors and practice a little bit the whole year we've had nothing no students even my orchestra was sitting sitting around i don't know what they did to survive and in fact our tour was canceled we had a tour going to china with my orchestra worried about the world but personally we've done just great so good luck it's been an unusual year to say the least most of us have gotten used to zoom meetings and kids learning from home today we meet three people from three professions where it might not be obvious how they might be faring under pandemic work limitations joining us to tell us their experiences we have dr david prologo an interventional radiologist we have william pooh who's the founder of the william pew music academy and we have jen gavin an animal uh a dog trainer and animal behavior consultant welcome to all of you you all come from very different professions and i'm sure i've had very different experiences over the last year so dr prologo why don't we start with you what has been the impact of the last year on your work oh gosh uh cindy i think that the the immediate impact was the most dramatic for sure early on when this started as a hospital-based physician and and all the hospital-based healthcare workers our lives were really turned upside down almost overnight and we had to be here and we had to be protected in a in an environment where there was a new virus being transmitted everyone was scared protective equipment was uh was scarce and and then on top of that we we had to organize and continue to meet in the evenings and a lot of times we were away from our families because we were afraid of the transmission and and so our regular schedules and our regular days got up ended and uh and for months on end we just reported to duty i guess to uh to take care of as many people as we could for as long as we could without knowing what the next day would bring and so i think that immediate impact was uh was was so exhausting and so traumatic that uh that that's the first thing that comes to mind uh when you asked what changed or what impact did i experience during the last year so now well what actually why don't we move to you william why don't you give us your first reaction what changed for you in your industry um mostly as adopting uh technology in our industry music industry has been pretty much the same way since its inception about 300 years ago so the lesson is taught based on one on one and the student learning things directly from that teacher and the teacher have a hands-on approach to their students and um this this adapting of the virtual lesson online to us is a new uh challenge for our industry so what kind of music lessons are you doing online for all kinds of instruments or certain ones uh we're pretty much doing everything online and it goes from string instruments violin viola cello and that code piano and the wood wings brass and composition and even singing so uh we do all kinds of lessons online initially yes all right when i come back to you i want you to explain a little bit about how that works but jen why don't we jump to you so what's changed in your world we're we're busy i think our industry has seen record numbers of adoptions uh both from rescues and breeders and as part of that we're seeing a sharp uptick in the number of dangerous behaviors dog bites and aggression cases in our industry i'm currently working seven days a week and that's been a tough thing i think if you take a look at the journal pediatrics and some of the scholarly articles out there as soon as state home order started we saw a sharp uptick so that's very interesting dr prologo let me go back to you what what how are things now what has sort of permanently changed what went back to normal i think that the most striking thing that has permanently changed or semi permanently changed is telehealth we're able to see patients of course via skype as we're using now or zoom appointments or facetime or other telehealth modalities and that actually opens up a flexibility for us now we can see patients on a thursday or a monday when otherwise we couldn't because we only had inpatient appointments on wednesday and it also allows us to see patients a little bit easier who are traveling from out of state for specialty care and so the implementation of telehealth to our practice was i think an improvement in an expansion that followed from our covid adjustments is there anything you're not able to do with a telehealth visit that you would be able to do in person certainly we can't examine the patients and that's been a subject of much discussion for us how to manage someone's description or to see something that someone wants you to to examine it's a little more difficult that way but it forces us to open up our communication which is which is uh yet another improvement i think another advantage potentially and william maybe you can explain to us a little bit about how a remote piano lesson works or viola i mean of course you have to really see what the student is doing so how does that work yeah um actually um it works better on the older students than the younger ones and uh like you said uh it's it's being hands-on teacher you know adjust students posture and um it's a must and but we cannot do this online so it posed a challenge to the teacher that has to um explain things very concisely and also simple to understand and so the the way of communication has changed and i think it's more to a teacher to adapt a new style of teaching so how do you do it technologically wise i guess you need a couple of cameras what does it look like right we have a um range from simple uh just zoom call and which is i think the vast majority teacher are doing with zoom and um and with some uh exception of using very high end microphone which is cut the time lapse to the minimum but no matter how minimal still is time lapse you know that's nothing can come replace the live lessons and um so we have to limit our um like a plane together with our students it's impossible um and so we have to talk more and um it seems like more explanation use more words than a sound in some cases and do you feel like they're progressing as quickly or stunted through this i think most students are adapting very well and doing that a year of virtual lesson we actually being able to host an online competition and students will practice at home and submitting their video clips and then we have a panel of judges to give them scores and awards and that really motivated their practicing at home and a parent's student both raved about that competition oh that sounds that sounds great and so jen i guess at the beginning you were were you seeing dogs remotely or how did that work so i've always seen a few dogs remotely certainly the number i'm seeing virtually has increased in fact i typically am doing most of my behavior consults virtually for the first consult because there's a lot of history taking involved and when you do those remote calls and consultations is the dog there as well or just the human the dog is there as well so can you feel do you feel like you can get a good enough sense from looking at them on camera you know seeing a dog in the home has advantages and disadvantages uh oftentimes when i'm working with a dog they're not going to behave in the same way that they might at home when they come to school for dogs or even when if i were to do a house call when there's a speaker in the home and so it gives me a nice face line that i might not otherwise have and like i said i typically am doing my follow-ups in person with maths and social distancing so i kind of get the best of both worlds and it's really interesting and dr prologo what lessons have you learned um that you you know didn't expect or would never have come across otherwise i i think that we we learned that we really do count as a society on people like first responders uh firemen police the medics the hospital system we really do count on them being there and it isn't something that we think about on on a day-to-day basis until something like this happens and we we look to the hospitals and expect everyone to be there and we were here uh and and uh and we did the best that we could but i think it's a learning point that we we live in a place where we have access to health care and uh and maybe sometimes can take that for granted so a lesson that i can learn and we can potentially all learn is to sort of be grateful for this infrastructure that we have in this great nation that we live in oh that's beautiful and and i definitely thank you for your work as i'm sure most uh people do for our front line workers um and william how about you what lessons have you learned from this um we find out this actually happened not all bad to our industry and some some actually uh are kind of positive that pleasantly surprised to us for example now we'll be able to bring um top experts and um around the world and giving mass classes to our students in atlanta and so we had a master class uh invited a professor from uh beijing and china and uh from norway and from iceland and and so i find out it's it's rather easy now and which is before it not only costs a lot and it's also hard to schedule um now this become a plus for us but of course um the large ensemble for our students still is quite difficult um to start because the social um distance and uh and the appearances worry about too many people mingle together so that yet to be solved and i think uh moving on and as the pandemic gets better you know solve better and better and we'll be able to bring back these large ensemble programs to our students now that's so interesting um and jen how about you lessons learned yes you know i think that the this has really shown a light on a big need for some regulation and some education we are seeing clients being heartbroken and traumatized when they adopt a new dog even oftentimes a puppy who has behavior the dog training industry is completely unregulated so clients who are trying to don't know where to go to get accurate valid information finding themselves heartbroken or fighting mouthing and having extreme anxiety and do you think this extra aggression and biting is it because there's unusual home situations or just more people are you know adopting dogs that might not have otherwise thanks for asking that i think it's a combination of factors i think this was a long time coming i've seen a steady inclination to adopt out dogs that previously might not have been adopted out in rescues especially dogs fight histories i think we're seeing the culmination we have dogs who have previously been humans who are now being adopted out and i think we're seeing a lot of people trying to capitalize on the demand for dogs and puppies by breeding when they don't have a lot of knowledge about genetics about early neurological development and what it takes to raise a behaviorally sound and healthy puppy excellent and doctor prologue what are things like in the hospital now now that we know a lot more about the disease obviously the peak has passed what are things like now i think the focus really now is on those patients who got delayed who didn't have covet or coronavirus and that is the diabetic patient or the patient with cancer or the patient with long-standing heart disease another thing that i think is useful to consider is that during the pandemic as we rush to take care of all the new communicable patients coronavirus patients a lot of those patients got put on hold cancer care got put on hold i do a lot of pain management which got put on hold and we got backed up so as the pandemic started to come under some degree of control the first thing we had to do was decompress and open up for all of those folks and take care of their medical problems their issues their pain as quickly as we could and we're still playing catch-up in that regard well i'm glad you brought that up because that's something i've thought about a lot during this pandemic do you think people i mean i guess there was cancer diagnoses that probably didn't happen what do you think is sort of long-term impact of all of this so the long-term impact really i think will help us prioritize these conditions and realize that we've got to take care of them independently as well and have a plan for them independently and know that they are important and they count on us for management of their disease be it cancer or pain or other uh subspecialties even that i'm not mentioning now so we've got to have a plan to run those things in parallel should there be another emergency down the road very interesting and william um what do you think will be permanently changed in your industry because of this even if things go back to normal i mean i'm just thinking students could now shop around to you know music academy anywhere in the world um they could collaborate with people different places so what do you think has changed permanently yeah i think the um this technology brings the world smaller brings everything uh within reach of click on button and so like you said and um the audience can shop around for the concert they want to listen student can shop around for the teacher they want to study with but however and i think the most things change is and i hope people realize the value of music that has to do with bring everybody together in the time like a pandemic and there was a very moving story that in italy and um one of the neighbor and a young guy is playing piano and doing the uh quarantine and that somehow the neighbor um and which he never who he never met before and a response was in the piano and so apparently both of them play piano so they they communicating with each other daily through piano music for the for for like a three or four months and without seeing each other and but they kind of communicating through the music you know break the barrier of the wall and they find comfort in each other so those are music is in the time like pandemic it can do a lot of good things beautiful things to people that's a beautiful story i do remember the viral videos i think from italy where you know people were singing together from their balconies and uh you know it's one of those rare feel-good moments in the early early days of the pandemic um and gemma we'll wrap up with you how about you what uh what's changed permanently going forward do you think well i'm hoping that the change going forward that will be that we will spotlight dog bite prevention and that what will come of this which is really kind of tough spot we're in right now will be more educational all right well thank you all so much for joining us today we really appreciate it it's it's it's wonderful to hear all of these very very different experiences that's all for today's show thank you so much for watching the nation speaks join us every saturday 11 a.m to noon eastern and from all of us here have a great week you