805conversations

Dr. George Ayoub is an author, scientist, and educator, experienced in medical research and higher education. He has taught over 10,000 students at colleges and universities and is appreciated for his ability to make things clear for all audiences. He enjoys word plays, gardening, and teaching. His research has identified natural foods that protect our bodies from disease and improved the health of people. His most recent book, All the Worlds a Stage is a concise guide to the workings of your body, with clear explanations of how to improve your odds for a healthy and productive life. It includes an overview of human biology, including cell function, organ system physiology and development. The book explains common chronic diseases and how to adjust diet and exercise to improve your odds of a healthy life. Our conversation covered George's broad interests, from teaching, researching, and why he chose Physics as a major and in Grad School he majored in Neuroscience. He was drawn to these two subjects because they were core to his worldview that the two most core subjects were Physics and Philosophy. So he minored in Philosophy. These cover the bigger ideas of how things work (Physics) and who we are (Philosophy). This conversation is so packed, it's hard to isolate the best bits for the show notes. This show is best experienced by listening - keep a notepad around to take notes.

Alex Cicconi-Kasper, CEO of +Charge, is the winner of the recent Startup Weekend, held in February, at UCSB. He's a second-year College of Creative Studies student and Physicist. He and his team have developed a single-use cell phone charger. In this episode, Alex goes into detail about how they worked as a team over the 56 hours of the weekend to come up with a concept, test market the idea, get feedback and secure a team to mock up the idea, which led to them winning the weekend. 805Conversations is supportive of the efforts of the various Startup Weekends in the region and offers a podcast interview to help these young companies get some early publicity and gives the new leadership a chance to hone their presentation skills for the media. You can read more about the product in detail at the UCSB Center for Creative Studies website: https://ccs.ucsb.edu/news/2018/reliable-charge

Siobhan Holden is a student at Santa Barbara High School and brought cookies to her class one day, and everyone fell in love with them. Sometimes that's all it takes to get that entrepreneurial energy flowing. It turns out that high school kids don't have enough money to afford organic, handmade cookies, so she turned to a broader market and debuted at last year's Summer Solstice Festival. That was a great launchpad, and since then the cookies and the cookie business has grown exponentially. Along the journey to growing the business, she's learning about marketing, distribution, bulk baking, customer relations, and finding ways to build the business. She says that the reason they don't use preservatives in their cookies is that you wouldn't expect your mom or grandmother to use them in theirs. We agree.

Jennifer Berger is a native Southern Californian and a third generation Realtor. Following the footsteps of her Grandfather, and Mother, Jen began real estate in 1998 while attending UC Santa Barbara. She graduated in 2000 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Spanish and soon after attained her Real Estate License. Jen began her career in a boutique real estate firm in Santa Barbara and after five years joined an established real estate firm to accommodate her expanding clientele and connect with clients on a local and international level. Jenn joined the prestigious and elite agents at Compass at the end of 2016. Our conversation took us into areas I'd never considered when thinking about real estate, like how to deal with death and divorce. She says that there are two reasons to be in the business, the money and the people. Knowing from working directly with her as a volunteer at TEDxSantaBarbara, for her, it's the people. She also busted some myths I had about weekend realtors that think it's easy to get a licesne and make a million dollars and only have to sell a couple of homes a year. Not true. If you want to be a realtor, she suggests: 1. Be ready to invest all of your time 2. Be a jack of all trades 3. You've got to have heart Coming from a 3rd generation realtor, that makes a lot of sense. We appreciate Jen's spirit and her sincere desire to build lifelong relationships with clients.

Edgar Terry, President, and CFO of Terry Berries comes from a long line of farmers. He has a lifelong interest in finance and teaching. In this episode, Edgar explains the Food System in a way that helps us understand the process of commercial farming in a way that helps us appreciate the complexities of the business. Terry Berries have been a fixture in Ventura County for the past 16 years. They are centrally located at 1701 Telephone Road. They've operated a fruit stand this entire time and don't wholesale the berries. If you want some of the best tasting, picked-fresh-daily strawberries, you'll need to go during the season (February through Mid-June). In addition to the berries, Edgar grows large crops under contract, peppers, celery and other vegetables for large food producers. As a chef, I was fascinated to learn how this all worked, and how he manages the entire process. Edgar explained that they operate on single-digit margins, meaning it only takes a minor mishap, maybe too much heat, to erase the profit. Luckily for the family, he has a love of numbers and suggests that there's no substitute for sound finance. He loves this aspect of the business so much; he's been teaching it for 32 years in California Lutheran University's Degree for Professionals Evening Program and the Master of Business Administration Program. He also somehow finds time to sit on eight boards of directors, including being the President and CFO of Terry Farms. He's a busy guy. We also talked about the challenges and surprises of commercial farming, and some of the innovative aspects that are being implemented to help him and other food producers meet the demands of an ever more discerning population.

Emily Barany has a great story to tell about how ThomasFireHelp.org started. It was the day after the Thomas Fire had burned through the night and was barreling towards downtown Ventura. She helped a friend evacuate and in the morning started looking for ways to help those affected by the raging fires. She contacted a friend Chris Collier, and together they came up with a plan to connect resources within a few days. Listen as she tells the story of rallying private pilots in the area to create an ad-hoc fleet of planes to transport key personnel and those in need of medical treatment during the worst days, primarily when the 101 freeway was closed. ThomasFireHelp was born out of the immediate and desperate needs of people in the Ventura and Santa Barbara communities facing disasters of unprecedented scale and destruction. No one knew where to go or what to do, and everyone wanted to help. That was their simple beginning - they became the 'Craigslist' of recovery, building a “scrappy” web-based platform connecting those in need with those who had resources to give. Emily has a background of helping local organizations. Her company, Visionality, works with non-profits to align their vision with their strategy and focus on the business side of the operation. This episode takes a deep dive into the motivation that has now resulted in the creation of a Disaster Resource and Recovery Platform. Emily admits that she knows nothing about software development, or disaster recovery, which leads to her quote above, "Everything starts with I don't know." She's been on a steep learning curve since early December 2017 when the Thomas Fire started. She continues to develop the platform, knowing that the recovery efforts may easily take ten years until we're back to a new normal. Emily is a graduate of California Lutheran University, one of the sponsors of our podcast and represents her alma mater very nicely.

Seth Streeter is a community organizer and CEO of Mission Wealth. Over the past two years, he has led the creation of a significant new effort in Santa Barbara called Sustainable Future. His Advisory Council of 24 civic leaders reads like a local Who's Who. Collaboratively they have found ways to amplify what's happening in the environmental movement in various silos and bring the efforts together under one umbrella. The site that they've created has an underlying strategy of employing game mechanics to make participation in various activities engaging and fun. At the recent Earth Day, they set up a Scavenger Hunt that took players in and out of over 200 organizations at Alameda Park. Part of the success of the project is how they are connecting non-profits to business to schools, the public and private sector and faith-based communities. It's a significant mandate. Seth's concerned about scope creep and has a clear focus on the challenges that such a sweeping initiative has. I enjoyed hearing Seth talk about Environmental Stewardship and feels that is an important message to communicate. We applaud everyone's commitment to this project and hope that it inspires you as well. Take a look a the site and sign up to discover new ways to be inspired.

Robin Elander is the Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Celebration. Recently she sat down with Mark and Patrick to talk about the upcoming 3-day festival and the workshop that runs for two months leading up to the big weekend. This year's celebration is June 22-24 in downtown Santa Barbara, ending up at Alameda Park for a well-attended parade after-party. We talked with Robin about the challenges of running such a creative endeavor and what it was like behind the scenes. Summer Solstice Parade began in 1974, as a birthday celebration for a popular artist and mime named Michael Gonzales. In subsequent years, their parade joined forces with a Summer Solstice Music Festival coordinated by Michael Felcher, sponsored by The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, staged at the Sunken Gardens to celebrate the longest day of the year. The Parade and Festival is the largest arts event in Santa Barbara County, drawing crowds of over 100,000 spectators from around the world. From these humble beginnings arose a celebration of life which, is like no other. This year's theme is Heroes and we're looking forward to seeing how the various floats and groups bring the theme to life. Robin says that Solstice has surprised her in how transitory the overall effort is and how people who've never thought of themselves as creative, come out of the workshops feeling a bigger, bolder version of themselves. Robin has been coordinating events since she was 16 in Jamestown, New York. She grew up in a beauty salon, much like the one we see in the movie Steel Magnolias. She says that the core of a community is their events, with the most visible of those being parades. Robin is involved in a lot of artistic ventures in Santa Barbara and works with the Office of Arts and Culture, the Community Arts Workshop and other organizations. She wears many hats as the founder of Global Good Impact and works tirelessly on behalf of many creative projects in Santa Barbara. She's currently working with a team to produce the Santa Barbara Timeline Mosaic. This project looks amazing.

Sabith Khan is an Assistant Professor at the School of Management at California Lutheran University. He's passionately interested in what drives us to give our hard-earned money to good causes and how this affects civil society, religion, and politics. Charity and philanthropy are becoming increasingly crucial as fields of study, given the growing importance of non-state actors such as civil society groups and nonprofit organizations in our society. The introduction of Automation, Artificial Intelligence and new forms of production are sure to upend the existing models of production, in what scholars and thinkers are calling the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ This is bound to have a profound impact on our societies, around the world. Sabith's research agenda is to examine these changes in the realm of nonprofit organizations, technologies, governance systems and help chart a path towards managing these rapid changes. He is particularly drawn towards examining the old as well as the new: religious, cultural and governmental systems as much as technological systems that seem to be emerging fast and dominating our consciousness. Our conversation covered; • His academic background, • What drew him into studying Public Policy and Administration, • Why he loves teaching, • Statistics about charitable giving that are eye-opening, • What about conflict countries? • What are remittances and why are they such a large part of the economy?

Narelle Wickham is a forensic mental health clinician, here visiting Santa Barbara for the summer from Canberra, Australia. This conversation opened up a window into why mental illness is such a driving factor in school violence and how educators can be taught to recognize early warning signs. Narelle became aware of the impact of mental illness and the judicial system while working in the court system in Australia and saw the challenges of mental health vs. criminal justice. She said that when you focus on solving the mental illness issue, there's an extremely high success rate. Narelle suggests that mental illness is primarily a young person disease, concentrated mainly on 12-25-year-olds. She has a method for training teachers called SOLD; S = Smile, O = Observe, L = Listen and D = Discuss. We talked about gun violence in Australia, where there's never been a school shooting, to here in the US, when there was a shooting while we were recording this episode. Another focus for her is Internet Addiction. We spoke at length about that issue. Narelle creates professional development workshops for teachers and school districts in Australia, and after having spent some time here, would love to start training here in the 805.