While working on the next season of Against the Rules coming later this spring, Michael Lewis has had some conversations that we didn’t want to hold. Conversations with people who are helping others through the Covid-19 crisis. We’ll hear from a software developer focused on helping the 40 million Americans on food assistance manage their benefits, as well as a teacher on the frontlines of the crisis in New York State. To help those in need, go to givedirectly.org/covid-19.
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Pushkin. Hi, It's Michael Lewis here. I'm nearly finished with the next season of Against the Rules. It's like last season in some ways, I'm talking with people about inequality in American society and what it's doing to our idea of fairness. But this time we'll be telling the story through the lens of coaching and coaches, the edge that coaches can give people, and who doesn't get that edge in our society. As we all know, things are not normal right now. That's why we're bringing you this extra bonus episode. I guess I should first say I'm still alive and so far disease free. But I've been doing a lot of interviews lately with people who've dedicated their careers to helping other people. This is an especially good time to be talking to people like this, So you're going to get to hear a couple of their conversations right now. Once with someone you already met before in last seasons Against the Rules, the teacher Katie Highland. She happens to live in the containment zone that it's now New Rochelle, New York, so she's been on lockdown more than most of us in the United States first, though, here's a guy whose work is also really relevant right now. His name is Jimmy Chen, and he left behind a fancy career in Silicon Valley to build an app, which he's called fresh Ebt. It helps people on food stamps. Well, it's actually formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. They're about forty million Americans who access this program. They get funds once a month on a card that looks more like a gift card than an ATM card, and most of the state programs don't have an easy way to let people know how much is left on their card. They don't even know their balances, so it's hard to budget and make smart decisions. That's a problem at any time, but it's a huge problem right now with so much food and secure in our economy. And Jimmy's got a solution. Hi, this is Jimmy. Hey Jimmy, thanks for joining me. Hi, Michael, So, are there peculiar anxieties that you're sort of seeing in response as virus in the population that you serve? Well, you know, we've seen a lot of people concerned about not being able to purchase more toilet paper, and I think that's a thing that you know, people are often cracking jokes about in the general population, why are you stocking up on toilet paper right now? But when we talk to our users about that specific situation, they actually have a very real need there. For a lot of our users, they can't afford to purchase things like toilet paper in bulk, and so they are purchasing toilet paper every time they go grocery shopping or on a very frequent cadence. And so if the grocery store is sold out of toilet paper, that's a real problem because they don't have a backup supply that they can use, and so a lot of people are really worried about that. So it's interesting because no one has explained to me why that shelf and no other shelf in the grocery stores that maybe the disinfectant shelf is empty. Yeah. I mean, I don't know which way the flywheels started on this particular one, but I know that for low income folks who maybe haven't had the resources to go out and stock up on toilet paper, it is a different level of scary. Okay, so let me back up a minute. Let's just start a little bit about you and what you do like what your company is sure. So I'm the founder and CEO of Propel. We're a technology company that aims to help people who are low income the United States to navigate safety net programs like the food Stamp program and to improve their overall financial health. We build a free smartphone app called the fresh Ebt app that helps somebody who gets food stamp benefits or snap benefits on an EBT card to see how much they have left in benefits, but also to connect to a variety of different social services to save money and to find different ways that they can earn more cash. Are you already seeing an uptick in users in response to what's going on in the economy right now? We are. We're seeing about thirty percent more usage each day than we normally do, and to be clear, those are for people who are already using fresh Ebt. So we have also seen a lot of stats about how enrollment in the food Stamp program has gone up dramatically over the past week, but the way that the food Stamp program is actually structured that those enrollments don't become actual cases usually for about a month, and so we would see that a month later as people enroll in the program. So you're already saying it up. But what do you imagine is going to happen over the next few months. Well, I think there are a couple of different populations that are worth thinking about here. The first are the people that are already getting food stamps now. So you know, there are forty million Americans prior to COVID and all of this crazy pandemic stuff. There are forty million Americans that we're already struggling to make ends meet in a normal economy. These are the folks that are already using the food stamp program. The majority of them are working and have children and just trying to pay the bills. So those are the people who use fresh EBT now, and they're facing a very specific set of challenges as this is kind of the financial shock that is really putting them behind. There's a separate set of Americans that we can also talk about, the people that are probably one or two tiers of income higher than that and maybe have a little bit of safetiscussion but not a ton, and as a result of the economic shock here, they're the ones who are newly applying for the program. So I think those two groups are going to have different types of outcomes but face some of the same challenges. But how big is that kind of food stamp adjacent population. Well, there's that popular stat that forty percent of Americans can afford a four hundred dollars shock. Right now, these are all of the Americans that are living paycheck to paycheck, and it's not necessarily the case that those folks are all very low income. You know, you can be making seventy or eighty or ninety thousand dollars a year and still be in that population of not being able to afford a four hundred dollars shock. As we've spoken to our user base about what past week has been like, we have heard from people that eighty eight percent of people who get food stamp benefits and we're working have had their hours cut or lost their jobs entirely. And of those eighty eight percent, the average amount in job earnings that has been lost is five hundred dollars. So when we talk about this four hundred dollars shock that was going to send people over the cliff, that shock has happened, right, So it makes what you do even more important. Yeah, that's right, I think you know, broader than Propel. You know, the reason I started Propel was this notion that we have a safety net here in the United States, that people who go through financial hardship have a variety of resources provided by the public sector and the private sector, and that those resources are aimed to help people in financial need to get back on their feet, and so more broadly, I think, you know, this whole COVID nineteen mess is a real test of our safety net in the United States of not just programs like food stamps, or programs like Medicaid and unemployment and so on that also have to pick up the slack and are seeing tons of more traffic these days as people are looking to these safety net programs to help them to get through this really unusual time. How long did you start the company. I started the company about five and a half years ago. How did this happen? Well, I grew up in a loving and supportive family that also experienced a financial shock and had trouble putting food on the table. I think, like most American families, we were sort of on the edge financially, and then when my dad lost his job when I was about ten, you know, we had a few years of just really tough financial times. I was fortunate to go to college on a full scholarship on financial need and then spent a few years working in different software companies in Silicon Valley after I graduated from college. And one of the things that just really struck me after spending years working in Silicon Valley and these tech companies is just how people solve the problems that they understand. And that's by and large the reason why so many products that come out of Silicon Valley are solving the problems of twenty to thirty year old men. Yes, who live in cities and have gone to college. And are you know there's a demographic bias to the software that we create due to the problems that tech entrepreneurs understand. Yeah, it's funny to think of Silicon Valley as a geek problem solution factory. Exactly, exactly. There are forty million people on food stamps. You went out with some of them in New York City. I'm just curious, when you're out kind of watching the way the program works, what kind of insights do you glean? What kind of things do you learn about people who are living with very low income well, actually I went to a food stamp office in Brooklyn to apply for food stamps myself, and there were a number of things that were surprising to me about that that I learned from that particular trip. But the first one is that just I walked into the food stamp office and here in this office, this is back in twenty fourteen, there were maybe a couple hundred people who were waiting in line, and most people waiting in line were passing the time the same way that most people do when they have an hour to wait, which is they pull out a smartphone. So here are lines of hundreds of people all waiting in line to see a human case worker and fill out a paper form. That is the same for everyone passing the time with a smartphone in their hands that has the ability to solve a lot of those bureaucratic challenges for them. And so this was sort of raised the initial question. It seemed like the problem was not hardware that actually most low income Americans these days have accessed to smartphones that can access the Internet. The problem was software that those phones didn't seem to have the software that was built for them that would actually address their needs and was actually built for the SNAP program, and to me, a large part of that was because there was a blindness in Silicon Valley to the problems that people in food stamps have. So walk me to the point where you decide how to address the problem in the way you've addressed the problem. So I was spending time. You know, this is after we had already chosen to start Propel. My co founder and I were spending time in grocery stores in Philadelphia trying to learn more about what it was like to go grocery shopping with an EPT card and what was different about it. And there is a woman we spoke to those Well, the first thing that I do is I called a phone number on the back of the card, and we said, okay, can you call the phone number for us? She pulled out her phone. She had the phone number for the EBT card saved on speed dial, and then when the automated voice started talking, she immediately, without having to look at her card, typed in her EBT card number purely for memory. And when we asked her how she was able to do that, she said, well, I have to call this phone number every time I go grocery shopping, and so I've memorized my card number. We later found out that this is probably the most commonly called phone number in the United States, the one to call it to check your balance on your EBT card. So, if you were like, in this period we're about to go through are going through, if you were advising the various bureaucracies that interface with people who are landing in the social safety net, like, what would you tell them? What would you suggest? Well, I would first paint the picture of what the past couple of weeks have been like for the forty million Americans who get foodstamp benefits, and what we've really heard from people over the past few days. In particulars, it's clear that people are facing impossible choices. I mentioned that eighty eight percent of people who get food stamp benefits and are working have lost some amount of wages, either because their hours have been cut or because they've been laid off entirely. And so people are dealing with a fairly unprecedented kind of a financial challenge where they can't make ends meet based on their earned income. You know, the other side of that challenge is that at the same time, a lot of those families have children and those kids were previously getting a free or reduced priced school lunch, and those kids are now at home, and you have to feed those kids in extra meal each day. And so these are some of the challenges that are really compounding. We've started to hear from our users that you know, they've had to pick between food for their kids or gas, or taking time to go find a job, or people that are missing work because of the hours at their employer and not having childcare for their kids because their kids are home from school. We heard a story pretty recently from someone who is thinking about, you know, her money is super tight this month, and so does she spend our money buying a dinner for herself or buying formula for her child? It shows formula for her child. I think the whole pandemic has been anxiety inducing for everyone, regardless of your income and regardless of your resource level. But for people that were already struggling financially, I think it's just compounded and been a really really challenging situation to go navigate. So the food stamp program actually deposits each person's benefits on a monthly cycle, and that is intentionally staggered throughout the month, So not everyone gets their food stamps on the first of the month. Oftentimes people will get their benefits on the fifteenth or the twentieth, depending, you know, usually on some fairly random thing like what's the last letter of your first name or last digit of your social so you're lined up like school students alphabetically. That's right, that's right. We've heard from a variety of people who get food stamp benefits about how scary it's been over the past week as they've watched their neighbors and their friends go out on these shopping trips to try to stock up to purchase canned goods and whatever else they need, while these folks who are still waiting for their benefits to arrive don't have the purchasing power to make that same shopping trip. And people are concerned about, well, when I get my benefits in on the twenty second of the month or something, are the stores going to have anything left? They want to stockpile this like everybody else. But if your name starts with sly last name starts with a W, you're screwed, right, You've got to wait until it's yeah, so we'll have a bunch of listeners, how would you advise them to help if they want to help? Well, you know, we actually just announced a partnership. So Give Directly is a nonprofit that does cash transfers. They Give Directly team is experienced in doing international cash transfers, primarily to people in need throughout the world. They have done a variety of programs in the United States as well, usually in crisis situations. And so we've actually just announced a partnership with them to help our users to get cash. And so through the Give Directly partnership, we are trying to identify people who use the fresh ebt app and are currently validated as getting food stamp benefits. We're focused on people who are really dealing with the hardest struggles because of the pandemic and looking to help them to get a cash infusion. So, if I want to give money to give Directly so that people who are don't have money have some money to spend, how do I do it? What do I do? Go to their website directly So the Give Directly team is fantastic. Their website is at GiveDirectly dot org, give e d I, r ect ly dot org, slash, covid, dash nineteen. Jimmy, thank you so much for taking the time. It's like a total joy to interview you, and I'm really glad you figured out how to do what you're doing. Thank you so much for having me on today. Next up, Life in the Containment Zone. I've been checking in from time to time with Katie Highland, the teacher we met in season one. She was basically being abused by her student loan servicer. You'll get to hear some new stuff about her and how her life has changed when we get to season two. But right now, Katie Highland has something to teach us all because she lives in the New York suburb of New Rochelle. It was one of the first coronavirus containment zones in the United States. Who would have fuck, Katie Highland that before we ever met in person, we would both be quarantined. And it's just you can't even make it up. You can't make it up. It's the most amazing thing in New Rochelle is a containment zone. What does that even? What does that mean? Like? What effect did it have on your daily life? My kids teachers, my personal my children's teachers have just been phenomenal in you know, getting ready for this remote learning. None of us were trained, you know, properly on how to do this. We've all just figured it out in the last couple of weeks and put it into put it into play. Are you doing it through Zoom? So I'm not gonna do zoom because my school in particular, we're not going to do sort of the live feed with students We're gonna do. I'm gonna do something called screen Castify, which is basically going to capture, like record all of my movements on my computer screen. So I'm going to basically teach my class like I do every day. They're just gonna hear my voice instead of seeing me. So I'm gonna go through all my slides with them and have activities. And we've already been using Google classrooms. So it's not going to be a huge change for my students, but I'm gonna miss them to hear that we might not go back to school at all this year. That was a really tough pill to swallow, not to see my eighth not for them for them to not have a graduation, you know, to miss all those sorts of things, and to not have like a proper goodbye. There's so many emotions. You know, you want to keep yourself safe, you want to do the right thing for your profession. You miss your students, but you want to be with your family and stay home. So it's all very conflicting things that are happening. I'm curious what happened in New Roshop. How did they discover it was a hot zone. There was one gentleman, a lawyer from New Rochelle, who was the first person to test positive. And he actually, from the reports that I heard, was really severe, was put in a medically induced coma. He rode the Metro North to work every day. He was a member at a temple. And then other people from that temple started to test positive for the virus. And that was a couple of weeks back. So that's really how it originated, like in Westchester. And then I just heard reports that he had woken up from his coma and told his wife, I love you. So I think everyone was really encouraged to hear that. All right, Katie Hyland, go and save New Rochelle. We'll do all right. Bye bye, all right bye. So that's all I got right now. I will say this that this one thing I've noticed about what's going on. We're supposed to be in social isolation here in the San Francisco area, and you're still allowed to wander around the streets, and so now everybody's wandering around the streets. And I've had more social interaction, though at a distance, with my neighbors in the last twenty four hours than I had the previous six months. So maybe we're all going to get to know each other again. Anyway, I hope you're all staying safe and well and sane, and thank you for listening to our podcast. We'll be back soon.