“People have known about protein interactions since the 50’s. But at the same time, these protein interactions—the ways in which we were able to target and think about them as molecular targets—have really evolved in the past decade or two,” Sawyer said.

In this faculty mini-lecture, he breaks down his research and explains how his work can make a difference.

“Protein interactions are involved in every living system and disease,” Sawyer said. “We can pick and choose what we study, and we’re trying to go after things that are important to people.”

Full transcript below

J.D. Lewis: The eureka moment was in an English class. We were talking about The Merchant of Venice and we were talking about Portia, and the teacher said, “So you have to consider Portia as being a girl in a boy’s body, acting like a boy.” I was like, oh, that’s me. And so that was essentially the point at which I realized this is what my gender is.

Patrick Verel: When President Obama’s Department of Education issued guidance in 2016, that schools should allow students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, it was hailed as groundbreaking by supporters of transgender rights. But when Donald Trump took office in 2017, it only took a month for his administration to reverse course. Fast forward to 2021. Joe Biden reinstituted the guidance, and efforts to lift up and support people who identify as non-binary continue. In June of that year, for instance, the state of New York began offering the option of an X gender to anyone who did not identify as male or female. The federal government followed suit in September, allowing people to choose it on their passports. For those of us who are old enough to remember when President Bill Clinton signed the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, it’s fascinating how much things have changed. Over the last few months, I’ve talked to Fordham folks who have had insights to share in the topic of gender, either because of their work, their personal experience, or both. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

When I first met J.D. Lewis, a professor of biology at the Calder Center in 2011, they had presented as male. At an event in 2019, Lewis presented as female. We recently sat down to talk about that journey.

Now, you told me that you realized something was different about you when you were four years old, right?

JL: Yes, that’s correct. And so two big events both occurred at the same time. I discovered my profession and I discovered my gender in one day. And it happened when my mom’s older sister was visiting us. And she is a professor, and so she was my motivation to become a professor. And at the same time, I realized, oh, I’m a girl. And at the time, I didn’t think much of it. I’m four years old, and I just figured this is something that happens to everyone. And as I got a little bit older, I start to realize that I didn’t just feel like a girl, but that I kind of fit somewhere in between. And again still assumed this is how everyone felt. And by the time I was starting middle school, I realized, oh, this is pretty unique. And I have to admit that, at the time, because I identified more as a girl, I was hoping that puberty would give me a different body than I have right now and that I would end up having a girl body to go along with my sense of being a girl gender.

And again, at the same time, we didn’t have the language to be able to explain that, and so it was really difficult for me to be able to convey to other people what I viewed as my gender. And it was difficult for other people to tell me what they viewed as. And so, kind of the Eureka moment was in an English class, we were talking about The Merchant of Venice and we were talking about Portia, and the teacher said, “So you have to consider Portia as being a girl in a boy’s body, acting like a boy.” I was like, oh, that’s me. And so that was essentially the point at which I realized, this is what my gender is. Yeah.

PV: So at the same time that you figured out what you wanted to do with your life, you figured out who you were as well. That’s a lot for being four.

JL: It was. And of course, just like my gender, my ideas of what I wanted to be professionally shifted over time. But ultimately, obviously, I ended up becoming a professor, and in fact, that was partly because of my gender identity. I wanted to pick a field where I would be able to be comfortable with the way I dressed, so I knew I couldn’t work in the business world, because I am not comfortable in a suit and tie. And I wanted to be able to work in a field that was less gender-biased, for lack of a better way of putting it, than most of the STEM disciplines. And botany, at the time, was a field that was more open and welcoming to people who were not male. And so that’s how I ended up, partly, as a botanist and how I ended up as a professor.

PV: Really. So that influenced your choice even within the sciences.

JL: Yes, very much so. And then one other part about that is I was really interested in plant reproductive biology because plants can be whatever they want. You can have male flowers, you can have female flowers. You can have plants that produce male flowers some years and plants that produce female flowers some years. You can have flowers that are both male and female. You can have flowers that are male and have other flowers that are male and female on the same plant. You can have plants that have female flowers and male flowers at the same time. I’m like, this is perfect. This is me.

PV: Wow. Okay. That’s amazing. So that’s, what an interesting… and obviously you’ve stuck with it. It’s worked well for you.

JL: It has.

PV: Yeah. What changed for you between 2011 and 2019?

JL: Good question. And I think two things really were what made me change, how I approached this. And one was we had a better sense of what terminology we could use to describe our experiences. And so the idea of gender fluidity, for example, that term became much more commonly used. People started to understand what it meant. And so people could start to use it to identify how they felt because other people would understand what it meant. So I think that was part of it. And another part of it was working with students who were concerned about representation. And I had a meeting with one of my grad students who was lamenting the lack of representation of certain groups. And I realized that I needed to do a better job of representing, that it wasn’t just enough for me to be supportive and to be effectively an ally. That because this is my experience, I needed to be my full self.

PV: Yeah. When was that?

JL: It was about six years ago now, around 2015.

PV: And how do you identify today?

JL: So as a biologist, I view gender from a non-binary standpoint. And obviously, I’m gender fluid, and so I fit within that category as well. But because when I was young, I didn’t identify with a specific gender, now I typically use the term either genderqueer or agender to identify myself.

PV: So I think there’s this assumption that if you feel, as you do, that you aren’t the gender that you are assigned at birth, that you would naturally gravitate towards transitioning, either with things like hormones or with surgery. You’re not interested in that, right?

JL: So I think for a lot of people who are trans in whatever way that they’re trans, transitioning is clearly a critical part of being who they are, right, being their full self. And gender affirmation surgery, clearly, is really important, and hormone therapy can be really important. I think for me because I don’t identify with a specific gender, it makes it difficult for me to decide what I would transition to. And because for me, the fluidity is, okay, so I’m feeling more like a girl today, or I’m feeling more like a boy today, that also makes it pretty difficult to decide what to transition to.

And then another aspect of it is that I’m already fairly androgynous in terms of my build, and so my face is fairly masculine and obviously my voice is fairly masculine. But if you look at the proportions and I’m trying to buy clothes, then women’s clothes actually fit me better than men’s clothes do. And so even before I was open and out, I mostly wore women’s running gear, for example, because women’s running gear just flat out fit me better.

PV: What’s it been like since you decided to be more open about your gender?

JL: So there’s been a lot of support, which has been really nice, and I feel for the most part very welcome. One of the interesting things for me was that, when I was younger, I would be teased a lot. And people assumed that my gender isn’t what was different, that it was my sexuality. And so I was called a fairy a lot when I was very young, and I was called a different F-word when I was older. And that was basically on a daily basis that I would get this. It was whenever I was out and people didn’t know me, I would get the F-word, and it’s like, oh, you think you’re so original. And what’s been interesting, since I started dressing more like how I feel about my gender, is most of those kinds of comments have stopped. I still get death threats, and riding on public transportation can be kind of challenging because you always get someone who’s looking at you like, you don’t fit in.

But for the most part, people have been really supportive, so it’s been really nice. And again, for me emotionally, it’s been much better. So I feel like I am being able to be my full self now, and I’m able to go about my day without worrying about how I look. And to be blunt, before I started dressing the way I dress now, every time I was out, I felt like, I look crazy. I look ridiculous. This is not who I am. Now I feel like whenever I go out, I’m like, I like how I look. I like that people see me this way. And so that’s been a big change as well.

PV: I’m sorry. I have to follow up on this. Death threats?

JL: Yeah. I get people riding on the train who, as they’re walking past, say things like, you’re an abomination, you should be killed, or you’re a Satan worshiper or whatever, right? And it’s kind of like with the F-word, it’s like, oh, you think you’re so original. So. And I actually have had people physically accost me. And so it goes beyond just words, but actually, physically accost me.

PV: And what about here at Fordham?

JL: So for the most part, people have been really supportive. It’s been really nice. It’s been a journey. And I say that because I realize for everyone around me, it’s been a journey as well, right? And so my transition, I try to do over a fairly… and when we’re talking about transition, of course, it’s not from a medical standpoint. It’s more as how I present or how I dress, it’s my hair length, it’s things like wearing makeup. And I realize that for a lot of people at Fordham who have known me for a long time, it is different. And so I realize that it’s been quite a journey for other people as well. And so I feel that my being able to be my full self is a testament to the fact that most of the people of Fordham are nurturing and encouraging about it and are supportive about it.

PV: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great to hear. That’s great to hear. I mean, it’s so disturbing to hear about these kinds of things. You talk about the public transit. There’s this idea that we hold ourselves to, in New York City, that we’re so enlightened, but you know that that’s not the case at all, in many settings with many people. So it’s disturbing to hear that, and I’m sorry to hear that. That can’t be easy, but at the same time, I can’t say I’m all that surprised.

JL: Yeah. And thank you. It is easier in New York, I feel, because New York is very much a you do your thing, I’ll do my thing kind of place, which I think is good in this kind of situation.

PV: That covers all the questions that I have formally written down.

JL: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

PV: There is one more though.

JL: Oh yeah, okay.

PV: That I’ve been thinking about, and that is to say your family. Is that something that you feel like you could talk about?

JL: Yeah. I’m willing to talk about that. My ex-wife and I are you get along… well, we co-parent our children pretty effectively. Our kids joke about us being essentially co-workers as parents because we both work together on it. And she’s asked how do I identify, because of course she sees me like this, just like everyone else does. And same answer, right. It’s just kind of like, I don’t really identify with a specific gender. And with my kids, a couple of my kids are queer, and they’re very comfortable with their queerness. And so I, in some ways I feel like that, again, it’s this idea of representation, that for me to be my full self is good for them, because it lets them know that there are people even in our family that are supportive.

PV: Talking with Professor Lewis gave me a great local perspective on the subject. So, for my next interview, I decided to expand beyond our borders. Sameena Azhar, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Social Service works with Khawaja sira, a group of third gender people who have lived in communities in Pakistan since the 16th century. Did I say that right?

Sameena Azhar: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

PV: I did. Khawaja sira.

SA: Khawaja sira.

PV: Just rolls right off your tongue. Yeah.

SA: Yeah, yeah. And the accent is for the a, on the A at the end, so Khawaja sira.

PV: Sira. Oh, okay.

SA: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

PV: So now, in my intro, I noted that in the United States, you can now pick a third gender on official documents. That’s old news in South Asia though. Why?

SA: Well, it’s not super old. In 2014, the Supreme Court of India allowed for the creation of a third gender. So rather than registering as an M or a male, or a F as a female, you can register as an E. So this third gender option. And similar policies have also been passed in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, not in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, but the rest of those South Asian countries passed similar policies. Additionally, in India, Hijra are considered a scheduled caste.

So the scheduling of castes and tribes in India is a process that dates back to colonialism, and there were certain groups of people or communities that were considered to be scheduled as caste or tribes. And these individuals in modern India get a sort of affirmative action-style status by the government. So there are social entitlements that are available to them that are akin to welfare or food stamps, allotted seats in the representative government at the local level, so they’re called panchayats, so they’re reserved seats for people that are from these communities. So they’re pretty progressive actions to try to include these folks who are fully socially within South Asian society. And it’s a community that has been really gripped by both a long history of being honored and exalted, and also a long history of being marginalized.

PV: Now, I just spent a lot of time talking about the Khawaja sira and getting that correct, but you just referenced another group in India.

SA: Yeah. So, I mean, we’re basically talking about more or less the similar identities of third gender and gender-nonconforming identities. In India, the nomenclature is most commonly called Hijra.

PV: Hijra.

SA: Right. There’s other names for it in India as well, like Kinnar, Khusra, Aravani. There’s many names for this. In Pakistan, the name is Khawaja siras.

PV: What does colonialism have to do with all of this?

SA: So prior to British colonization, under mogul or Raj, but control, there was much more state-sanctioned support for these communities. So folks who were hijra or Khawaja sira would often work as courtesans or advisors or handmaidens in the royal court. And with the coming of colonization, the identity of being a hijra became criminalized. So in 1871, the Criminal Tribes Act made hijra criminals. And then additionally, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which is borrowed from the British penal code, criminalizes what is called carnal intercourse against the order of nature. Right? So this essentially is interpreted to be homosexuality or more specifically sodomy.

PV: When you talk about these folks that embrace this way of being, are we talking about people who would typically be identified as male embracing femininity or vice versa?

SA: No, typically it is folks who’ve been assigned male sex at birth and identify as either women, or as men and women, or as a third gender person. It’s much less typical, I mean, pretty much, for the most part, doesn’t exist, to have somebody who was assigned female sex at birth, who may identify as a man and be called a hijra. So it is quite specific to what we would call in the West, trans women. But the third gender classification of E does encompass anyone, regardless of whatever sex was assigned at birth, to identify as E.

PV: And how does this all relate to what you do here at Fordham?

SA: So my research really began in south India. My family is from a city called Hyderabad. It’s where I did my dissertation research, so mainly looking at issues related to HIV and gender non-conformity stigma of people who are living with HIV, are HIV positive. And my work in Pakistan has been somewhat of an extension of that. I’m not focusing there on folks who are HIV positive. There’s also a much, much lower prevalence of HIV in that part of Pakistan, so my research there is focused on an area called Swat, which is in Khyber Pakhtunkhwaqua, and that is the northwest province that borders Afghanistan.

So it’s been a very interesting place to be doing research, first through the pandemic, but also through the huge influx of Afghan refugees that have come in the past several months. The focus of those interviews and surveys that we’ve been conducting in both India and Pakistan have been really around trying to figure out how to reduce these experiences of the stigma that people are encountering within their families, within their communities, within employment settings, within healthcare settings, knowing that these experiences contribute also to poor mental health, and most probably acutely to experience the violence or homicide against gender-nonconforming people.

So one of my participants, research participants in India had been murdered during our research, and it really just drives home that these are issues that impact people’s lives in very intimate and violent ways.

PV: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man, that’s brutal.

SA: Yeah, yeah. Truly was.

PV: Daniel Alexander Jones, a professor of theater who performs under the stage name Jomama Jones, first introduced me to the concept of gender fluidity when I met him in 2013. Now, Daniel, Jomama has been a vehicle for you to try to get people to see both themselves and others in a new light. Do you feel like you’re seeing some of the changes you were hoping for?

Daniel Alexander Jones: Oh, Patrick. That’s a good question. Yeah. I think were you to look at maybe 2010 and look forward at where we seemed to be heading as a nation, we’ve gone in a very different direction.

PV: Do you feel like there’s been a backlash?

DJ: There are people who believe their way of life is threatened by the changes that are happening, or even by, and this may be a more accurate way to say it, the naming of things that have always been there, but the taking up a space around those things, right? We know that those we call trans folk now have always been here, throughout history. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is culturally shaped in such a way that claiming sovereignty and truth and ownership of that identity is going to be a threat to someone for whom that identity’s invisibility is necessary for them to understand themselves, for them to feel their own sense of power, right? When you think about how that’s connected to the last five or six years of our national experience, it’s sobering.

PV: The last time we talked, you said that so much of the conversation about gender fluidity is about how we encounter someone who is different from ourselves, and what happens to us if we fully accept them. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

DJ: This was originally, Patrick, from my perspective as an artist, because I was thinking about, both in my work professionally and also in the classroom, what role curiosity plays. The idea of engaging something you don’t know and being heightened or quickened or energized by the unknown, as much as you are by the process of naming and pointing out the things that you do know. And for an artistic process, whether it be writing or acting or directing, whatever the thing is, vital work depends on that curiosity. And it is that destabilization and the reaching for language to articulate what you’re feeling, the comparison of this new feeling to things you have experienced before. And also, if you will, the surrender into the possibility that that new experience has. All of those things are so necessary.

And what I began to encounter in the classroom, and what I began to encounter professionally even more so, was this sense of, we’ve got to name it and know it. What the problem is rooted in is a kind of taxonomical approach to life. Meaning that, if we think about taxonomy, we think about this idea of naming, delineating, putting things into categories. I’m thinking very often of those butterfly cases. Like those, the people who go out and collect them, and they pin the butterfly, and they name the butterfly, and there’s a sense that it is that thing. But we know that butterflies in life move. What they came from you don’t get in that pinned creature. So there’s so much of the story that’s missing from that pinned moment in time.

And then too, we then begin to think about exemplars of a particular group. Like this is what this type of thing looks like. And the connected part of that is we then begin to assume that something that looks like that, that has the same shape or form or the same name, will have the same content. Why? Well, in part we know it’s because our brain wants to filter out the things that are familiar so that we can pay attention to the things that aren’t. But I think the artist has a responsibility to deliberately engage what we don’t know, to deliberately destabilize what we think we know. It is part of our social responsibility.

And I think one of the things that this question around gender fluidity rubs at is that, if we live in a culture that has defined gender according to these formal shapes, whether they be shapes of thought or shapes of material of the body, we then eliminate the content. And that subjective content is the truth for that individual. So what does it mean that we would center a process by which I can have my observations, but I can’t then overwrite my truth of what those observations mean onto you before I get to know who you are, before I hear from you. Because as is so often the case, especially with folk who are dealing with expressing their own gender fluidity, very often what’s on the inside doesn’t match, quote-unquote, what’s on the outside. And so if I come to you and I have determined your interior by your outside, then I have done a violence to you.

PV: Talk to me about your own journey. How has your act changed since you started?

DJ: I was born into and raised in a worldview that was so profoundly shaped in the macrocosmic way by the civil rights movement, like the freedom movement and the workers’ movement, the grassroots movements that created the community I grew up in. Also, the courage of my parents who had an interracial marriage at a time where that was really forbidden, and the power of my community, which was a black community, working-class in western Massachusetts, that also was the house for a kind of multiethnic enclave. All of that to say that the culture that was born from that mixture of people, and that particular time, was in many ways set in opposition to the world that I entered when I started to go to school, which was a hierarchical world where race had a hierarchy, gender had a hierarchy, class for sure had a hierarchy.

So I had very early on to learn that I knew things about life that many of the people that I was going to meet in this other world didn’t know. And I also had to understand from a very early age, and I’m talking about memories from kindergarten, first grade, second grade, that many of the stories that were in that new world about who I was, about who my parents were, about who the people I loved were, were false. And I had to have the inner resolve, even before I had language to articulate it, to say, that’s not true. They don’t know.

And it’s when I became aware of my sexuality, and I understood that I was gay. What I understood is, just like I talked about those two different worlds, I could also look and say, oh, this is what is posited as being a boy or a girl or a man or a woman or… I could look at what the rules were supposed to be. So again, I came into this all at a time when I was looking around and saying, oh, wow, everybody’s playing this game. Everybody’s adopting these roles. And this person that I’ve known my whole life is now suddenly a jock or a girly girl or whatever. And I’m like, oh, it’s so interesting to see the person I know, take on and perform an extreme version of gender, as a way to get power, as a way to find their security, as a way to name themselves and be part of this larger configuration of students in this public high school.

And I knew it wasn’t me. So if I don’t fit any of these things, then the pressure, which I think is what a lot of young people face, is how do you conform? How do you figure out how to get access to or move in that system? Or the real danger, how are you taking that in, like do you try to fight your way back into the thing? And maybe the blessing and the curse that I had was like I told you, I had an experience and a bodily experience of something else.

One of the things that’s interesting, I’ve been teaching at this Jesuit university, and I hear a lot about the teachings of Christ. And I think one of the primary ideas is that you greet strangers as holy presences, that who you don’t know may be an angel. It’s your responsibility to take care of your fellow human being. Care means presence. Are you willing to be present with another human being? And I’m shocked always by how many people are unwilling to do that. I shouldn’t be shocked, but I remain shocked.

PV: Talking to Daniel shed light on how the culture is changing, but of course, culture can’t thrive if it’s not given the space to do so, which is the realm of law. For that, I turn to Elizabeth Cooper, a professor of law and the faculty director of the Feerick Center for Social Justice at Fordham Law School. Now you were involved in the passage of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act or GENDA, a 2019 New York law that was originally part of a previous law that was passed in 2002.

Elizabeth Cooper: I have had the real pleasure of being a member of and an advocate for the LGBTQ communities for many decades. And I remember very clearly when we were trying to get the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, otherwise known as SONDA, passed through the state legislature. And there were a number of advocates that were trying to get the bill passed in its original form. And that would’ve prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, which is being lesbian, gay, bisexual, as well as on gender expression or identity. And those phrases typically refer to people who are transgender or gender non-conforming. The advocates were told that they could get SONDA passed, but only if they took out the protections for gender expression.

And the advocates agreed to do that with the notion of, we’ll come back next year, get the gender expression non-discrimination provisions passed. Well, it just so happened that SONDA was passed in 2002, became effective in early 2003, but it was not until 2019 that the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act actually was enacted. The law is so powerful, because it prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression in employment, in housing, in places of public accommodation, in education, in countless areas, basically adding gender expression and identity to the long list of identities that cannot be the basis for discrimination in New York State.

PV:  When it comes to the push and the pull of these laws, you’ve said that Jim Crow laws can be a helpful reference point. Can you explain why?

EC: If you think about Jim Crow laws or Title VII, which prohibits discrimination in employment, or the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on basis of disability, you have lots of prohibitions on discrimination based on an individual’s identity, their core identity, who they are. Historically, I think the Supreme Court often thought of these as immutable characteristics. Not all of them are so immutable, but they are basically aspects of identity that go to one’s core. They also have absolutely no impact on how well one can perform one’s job. So if you have a person who is an excellent lawyer, for example, it should not matter whether they are transgender or cisgender, meaning that their physiology and their gender identity aligns, cisgender. And so, why should we permit discrimination based on gender identity? It makes absolutely no sense. This has nothing to do, like race, like sex, like religion, with how one can do one’s job.

I think that thinking about this historical context is also helpful when we start to think about the ways in which some people argue that religion or biblical values mean that one should be able to discriminate against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, and so on. It’s important to look historically to the kinds of arguments that were raised against Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination based on race. For example, people argued that it would be wrong to have black people and white people in the same bathroom, that it went against the Bible, that there were risks of violence. There were people who argued that separation of the races was mandated by the Bible. And in this context, I think that we are getting to the point where we understand that gender identity or expression or sexual orientation, this is not a matter of choice or going against God or going against the Bible. This is just a matter of who we happen to be.

PV: It seems like people either are willfully ignoring history or just don’t know about it.

EC: I think most people don’t know about it. I think that the point is just to look at people for the value of, for example, employment, the job that they can do. Why would you ever want to tell someone who’s gender non-conforming that they can’t walk into a movie theater? Or why would it be okay or should it be okay for a doctor to say to a transgender person, I don’t want to treat you?

PV: You’ve been involved in this advocacy for 25 years with groups such as the law school’s LGTBQ student group. How have things changed within the movement itself in that time?

EC: I confess that I am just dumbfounded by the changes that have happened in my lifetime. And when I say dumbfounded, I mean in the best way possible. When I first started teaching at Fordham, I was concerned about coming out. I remember that the LGBT law student group sometimes met off-campus, so its members would not have to worry about being seen walking into a room where people knew that the gay group was meeting.

The attitude today towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender identity more generally, is just striking. I see law students and undergrads. I have a niece who’s 18 years old. I see her and her peers having a comfort with people who are different from themselves. And they don’t look at it as something that should require segregation. They look at it as something to learn about, and they want to embrace the richness of diversity in their lives. So you have straight people, like my niece, joining the high school Gay-Straight Alliance. You have kids coming out as teenagers in high school, sometimes middle school. You have people claiming their gender identity or presenting themselves in gender non-conforming or genderqueer ways much earlier on.

There is a real, tangible move away from understanding gender as a binary. There is a much greater acceptance, understanding and acceptance, that gender, like race, is very socially constructed. It’s not that men don’t typically have more testosterone and women typically have more estrogen, or we have different body parts, but that, in the way we present ourselves, some of our rules are arbitrary. Why should only women wear nail polish? Why should only women wear dresses? Why should only men wear ties and Oxford shoes, right? It has nothing to do with who you are and your core values as a human being. If anything, how much more wonderful this world is when people can be their full selves and live their full lives, whether it is with their families of origin, or in the workplace, or walking down the street in the middle of New York City or the middle of any other small town, anywhere in this country.

So now, what? To help us use the lessons of the recent past to move forward in the future, we sat down with Kirk Bingaman, a professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

Listen below

Full transcript below:

Kirk Bingaman: On the one hand, it seems like everyone lives happily ever after, we’re back to normal. But with this missing year, I think there’s going to be like, reentry time with some hiccups.

Patrick Verel: As summer arrives and the trend lines for vaccinations and COVID deaths in the United States head in opposite directions, it feels like freedom is finally within reach. But let’s face it. The pandemic has taken its toll. We’re not the same people we were 15 months ago. So now what? To help us use the lessons of the recent past to move forward in the future, we sat down with Kirk Bingaman, a professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

When you think about this summer, what besides joy do you expect to be a prevailing feeling?

KB: We’re social beings, right? We humans are social beings. But we couldn’t be fully social beings the past year or so with the spread of COVID. We did the best we could under the circumstances, but it’s had an impact on all of us, on our psyche, whatever our age, even my own psyche. I wonder, working at home, thanks be to God, I can continue to do what I love to do, but it’s not been the same. So yes, it’s summer, there is joy, there is hope. But it’s a different kind of summer. There’s a mix. With the joy and hope, there’s anxiety, there’s still anxiety. There’s still this cautionary note. And there’s confusion. When will we be on the other side of this? Are we on the other side?

PV: Yeah. Have you heard this term that has been going around? Some people have been calling it the Hot Vax Summer.

KB: I’m not sure.

PV: Yeah, the Hot Vax Summer. And it’s all like, “Wait, really? Are we going to… Oh.” I mean, it’s obviously meant to be this kind of thing. Like, “We’ve been cooped up for so long. Everybody’s just going to cut loose and go wild.” And I just keep thinking, “Ah, I don’t know. Maybe…”

KB: You’re illustrating that’s where we are, in that tension.

PV: Adults and children have had to deal with a lot of mental health challenges during the pandemic, and the end is in sight now. But I would think that those challenges won’t just go away. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KB: The challenges don’t go away, I think for all of us, but particularly those of a young age, who the past year has been a significant developmental time for them. I work with parents who have young children, who were in, whatever, the first grade, the second grade, and then all of a sudden they had to go home. “Go home, we don’t know when you’re going to come back.” “Well, when do I see my friends? When do I see my teacher?” “Don’t know. Don’t know.” So the challenges don’t go away, because that leaves an imprint on the psyche, and we just have to be aware of that. Young children in the formative years are educated in other ways, particularly in the school system, not just the three Rs, reading, math and all of that, but socializing and increasing their social intelligence, their emotional intelligence. So there wasn’t the in-person education, couldn’t take my children to play dates.

So what’s now important, it seems to me, is going to be the reentry back into summer activities and, ultimately, back into in-person schooling in just a couple of months. On the one hand, it seems like everyone lives happily ever after. We’re back to normal. But with this missing year, I think there’s going to be like reentry time with some hiccups. It’s going to be normal for children to have, with the joy and the excitement, a variety of feelings. Some apprehension maybe. They are, after all, leaving the nest, the sheltering at home and back out into the world again. And it’s not just children, it’s adults. I just talked to a neighbor, who, beginning of the week, who’s going back into the city to resume in-person work, but doesn’t feel comfortable getting on the train, let alone the subway, driving in, just that reentry back into the real world.

PV: Your job is to train the folks that help us make sense of crazy things in life, like pandemics. But, of course, they’ve just lived through this, too. What kind of self-care do you tell your students that they should be engaged in right now?

KB: Whatever your education, your level of knowledge, or income, your credentials, we’re in it together, and we have to take really good care of ourselves if we ever hope to be providing effective care for others, which presupposes self-awareness. So I’m self-aware of when I’m feeling depleted, when I’m feeling anxious, when I’m feeling irritable, when I’m ruminating about, “When do we get to the other side,” or catastrophizing. And not only am I aware of that, but I know what to do about that, or where to turn in terms of my own self-care practices. It could be spiritual practices, meditation, contemplative prayer, calming the anxious brain, as I’ve done research on already, physical activity, exercise, and just getting out and into the natural world. A change of pace helps me reorient. It’s restorative. Be about our own therapy, meaningful relationships, whether that’s friends, family, faith community, people that we can be really real and open and honest with. So these are the things that we recommend for those in our care, that we have to be doing for ourselves.

PV: Yeah. I like that idea, that being self-aware. I feel like that’s something that I’ve been, myself, trying to do more of, to actually take note. And, as I think the phrase is, make a mental note of the things that are going on and say, “Oh, wait. I know what’s going on here.”

KB: The popular term these days is mindful.

PV: Mindfulness, right, right.

KB: I’m mindful of what I’m just experiencing right now, whether it be a thought or a feeling.

PV: Three years ago, you wrote a book called Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now. And it was about how technology was affecting our brains in ways that made spirituality and human connection more difficult. Has the pandemic changed any of your thoughts on any of this?

KB: It hasn’t changed my thinking. It’s only reinforced it, or brought it into sharper focus. While we’ve been sheltering at home, us human beings, digital technology, AI, it hasn’t been. The past year, we’ve had a change of pace. It has not. It has kept evolving full speed ahead. So the human brain was already on overload. That’s what I talk about in the book. Before, to begin with, and certainly before the pandemic, trying to keep up with the tsunami of digital information, trying to parse through all the information that comes our way, more and more, each and every day, information about the pandemic, how it’s impacting our health and wellbeing.

PV: When I think about this past year, the word that keeps coming to mind is exhaustion. What would you do and not do to recharge your batteries, so to speak?

KB: I think it’s important to be patient with one another, even kind and empathic and compassionate with those near and dear friends, family colleagues, and with ourselves. In my own faith tradition, there are Gospel stories of Jesus being into preaching and teaching and with people big time. And then the stories end with, “And then he went away for a while.” And I used to think about that like, “Oh, okay. That’s a rhetorical device for whoever the Gospel writer is.” But no, I think there’s more to it. He went away for a while, like you’re saying, to recharge the battery, to calm the mind for what was coming the next day. So that’s from my own Christian tradition, but there are other traditions. A couple of years ago, trekking in the Himalayas in Tibetan communities, I would hear them, villagers quote the Buddha, an expression attributed to the Buddha, who has also said as much, “Learn to calm the mind. Learn to control the mind, or it will control you.”

The Ever Given was freed after six days, but Lawrence Brennan, a retired U.S. Navy Captain who served aboard the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and now teaches admiralty and international maritime law at Fordham Law, said the snafu illustrates just how dependent we are on a system we often take for granted—one that has real vulnerabilities worth considering.

Listen below:

Full transcript below:

Lawrence Brennan: Look in your room, look in my room, look in the classroom, look everywhere, look in your closet. Everything that we buy today is most likely partially the result of global trade.

Patrick Verel: The other day, I did something absolutely unremarkable. Thinking about the warm summer months ahead, I shelled out $25 for a 10-foot long inflatable pool that had traveled some 7,000 miles to the store from its factory in China. I was able to do this thanks to a $20 trillion sector of the worldwide economy that became jarringly public on March 23rd when the Ever Given, a ship the length of the Empire State Building, ran aground in the Suez Canal, causing a traffic jam of epic proportions in one of the busiest shipping routes on the planet. The Ever Given was free after six days, but Lawrence Brennan, a retired US Navy Captain who served aboard the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, and now teaches admiralty and international maritime law at Fordham Law, said the snafu illustrates just how dependent we are on a system we often take for granted, one that has real vulnerabilities worth considering. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

So now the image of a seemingly tiny excavator trying to dig out the enormous bow of the Ever Given inspired some really clever memes on the internet. But in fact, there are some serious consequences to stacking 20,000 containers the size of tractor-trailers onto one boat. You said that this was an episode, that it was a little bit like the Hindenburg without the loss of life. Why that comparison?

LB Patrick, I’ve learned in 40 some years of doing this that somewhere between technology and liability, there’s an ascending risk. The larger the ship we build, the different types of propulsion we build, the more likely it is that there will be larger and less easy to handle casualties. So when we have a ship with 20,000 containers grounded and literally blocking all traffic north and south of the Suez Canal, that’s a billion or a trillion-dollar problem.

PV: The Hindenburg was a specific reference that you brought up in the sense of a shift in the way things might be done going forward.

LB: Absolutely. The Hindenburg is famous or notorious for the end of international air transportation, passenger transportation, until the end of World War II. At that time, people who were traveling between continents couldn’t just go to the airport and take an airplane. The ability of planes to fly that far wasn’t possible. The Germans built dirigibles before World War I, but they had one fatal flaw, as Hindenburg proved, hydrogen gas which was highly explosive. And that’s precisely what happened at the Naval Air Station Lakehurst in 1936 or 1937, when a fair number of the people on board were killed. Literally, the German international airline that ran Hindenburg ended transportation by dirigible.

PV: Do you think there might be a reckoning here for the idea, the wisdom of having ships this big plying these routes in areas where they could get stuck like this one did?

LB: Well, absolutely. This is like the trouble you have if a child who I should not have blamed, I should blame myself, stuck a large pencil in a narrow cup and it got wedged at top and bottom. And you put your fingers down and barely reach and you try to move it and neither side will move. You don’t want to break it in two. That’s the type of trouble the salvors had. And the fortuity here was that there was a proper full moon, a quarterly full moon that gave a magnificent tide and they were able to get the extra water off the ship to increase or decrease the draft a little and the tugs were there and they were able to move both ends off. But the people who run canals such as the Suez Canal particularly but also Panama Canal and others, need to consider what the limits of transportation are.

The length of this ship, Ever Given is limited by the statute or the regulation imposed by Suez Canal Authority. It has to be under 400 meters long. This ship was about a meter less than the maximum length. The international community also has to invest in assets to be able to respond when the fortuitous event or the intentional event occurs. You have to have assets, and we’ve seen that in the United States within the last two years with a car carrier that capsized in Brunswick, Georgia, and they’re still trying to cut up the ship and remove the wreck. And that was hundreds of millions of dollars of loss of cars and a ship.

PV: How important has the shipping industry become in our lives over the years?

LB: Look in your room, look in my room, look in the classroom, look everywhere, look in your closet. Everything that we buy today is most likely partially the result of global trade. There are very few things I can drive down to the Costco and say is a domestic product. If I want Qingdao beer, I’m having beer imported from a province in China. If I want Barry’s Tea, I’m having tea and ported from Ireland. If I want to be a fashionista like my older daughter who is a fashion lawyer, I need to buy things in Paris or London or wherever. And we’re talking about trillions of dollars of trade.

PV: It’s funny, I’m just thinking about the headlines that came out after that ship got stuck, and there was all this focus on the traffic jam. I remember reading that there were animals stuck on ships behind it, and there was some organization that was very concerned about whether or not they were all going to be fed or whether they would starve. And I remember just thinking, wait, what? Really? Even animals are traveling around through the Suez Canal on ships.

LB: Yeah. Animals travel, particularly to Muslim countries, because the lamb that are shipped are religiously acceptable. These are large ships with hundreds or thousands of lamb under deck and above deck. That’s how food travels. I’ve spent years becoming a quasi expert in the travel of soybean from the US Gulf Coast or Brazil to China and Japan. A shipload of soybean is $30 million depending on the exchange rate and the market rate, but that’s a common amount, and they can easily be damaged by delays in transit and by humidity or rain or improper ventilation. And pretty much things that we rely on for food, as well as clothing, as well as automobiles, petroleum, rocks, and things to manufacture, they all are imported today.

PV: Can you tell me a little bit about why the industry is still so important to New York City?

LB: New York has been, since the start of this nation and particularly during World War I and World War II, the major port of arrival and departure, both of US armies to Europe in 11917, 1918, and from 1941, the occupation of Iceland through the end of World War II in 1945. It was the manufacturing hub of heavy industry war material. Monitor, which won the Civil War at sea, was built in Brooklyn, but the economics of the port of New York, whether you’re importing oil for the industrial northeast, exporting grain, paper stuff, whatever you’re importing on a container ship, a bulk ship is important. But behind that is the economics of the international banking system, the international insurance system and the domestic insurance and banking system. Every piece of goods being shipped by sea is properly financed. It’s subject to a negotiable bill of lading and almost all are insured.

PV: I live in Brooklyn, and every summer my family goes over to Governor’s Island at least once, and I always get a kick out of looking back over towards Red Hook and seeing all those shipping containers. Do you know the connection between the shipping cranes and Star Wars?

LB: No.

PV: So the legend has it that if you watch, you know the movie Empire Strikes Back?

LB: Generally.

PV: George Lucas based the four-legged walkers on the cranes that he saw living in the Bay Area. So now every time I see a shipping crane, I think of Empire Strikes Back.

LB: They’re magnificent things. None of them are built in the United States. You have to see how they’re transported. They’re transported on really small, low ships as deck cargo. It’s the same type of ship that would lift a 10,000 ton US Navy destroyer.

PV: Talk to me about your classes. What’s unique about this sort of law and what do students typically use it for?

LB: It’s unique in that it is international law, and that I have to teach different US federal procedure jurisdiction in US federal courts and in state courts, and I have to teach some practices that are specifically maritime. I also teach evidence and procedure. Probably the best part of the class is that every year I learn more from my students than I teach them. They’re all different personalities with differing backgrounds. I get a few people who have been in the Navy, and I get some international students in the LLM program. We try to write a project at the end of the year. They have a choice. They can take an exam or they can write a final paper of 20 to 25 pages, and they can write any topic they can convince me is in some way attached to admiralty and international maritime law. And that’s not hard. If you can show me there’s some water linked to it and convince me, I am happy to do that.

I’ve had a fair number of students whose articles have been published, particularly in Fordham International Law Journal, and those who are cited. And I have a number of students who have gone on to practice admiralty, either part or full time.

PV: What was one of the most interesting papers one of your students wrote?

LB: A couple of piracy papers were excellent. There’s a recurring interest today in piracy because it’s the anniversary of the freeing of the officers on Maersk, Alabama that was seized and it became a famous movie. So, piracy cases are interesting. They present tremendous risk. In a sense, more difficult to predict than what we see with Marine casualties. You can go to the actuaries and you’ll see the statistics, and there will be a finite number in a range every year of fires on ships, of collisions, of strandings. Technology should reduce those, but when you get something like Ever Given, where it’s just off the charts and beyond what the insurers have prepared for, and the amount at risk is so large, that’s the game-changer.

And yet in spite of all of the uncertainty, entrepreneurs are still founding new companies. The Fordham Foundry, a business incubator based at the Gabelli School of Business, has continued to stage contests for burgeoning ideas. Its most recent one, the Ram’s Den, took place on February 6, and a second one, a pitch challenge geared toward less developed business plans, will take place March 27.

So what is life like for a small business owner these days? We sat down with Brandon Adamson, a Gabelli MBA graduate whose company BeautiMaps won the 2019 pitch challenge, and Ozzy Usman, a current EMBA student who won second place in this year’s Ram’s Den with his small business lending company Equeduct.

Listen below

Full transcription:
Ozzie Usman: A lot of startup building company building is a social thing and what I mean by that is you have to be able to plug into all these different things that you need to do, but you need to find the best people you can in those areas to really help you because there’s no one person sitting in some basement or even in a garage coding the future.

Patrick Verel: To say these are challenging economic times is an understatement. As COVID-19 vaccines are rapidly being distributed, the promise of a revived economy seems closer than ever. Not so fast though. As experts warn that life in the United States will probably not fully return to normal until the fall and yet, in spite of all the uncertainty, entrepreneurs are still founding new companies. The Fordham Foundry, a business incubator based at the Gabelli School of Business has continued to stage contests for burgeoning ideas. Its most recent one, the Ram’s Den took place on February 6th and a second one, a pitch challenge geared towards less developed business plans will take place March 27th.

So what is life like for a small business owner these days? We sat down with Brandon Adamson, a Gabelli MBA graduate whose company BeautiMaps won the 2019 pitch challenge, and Ozzie Usman, a current EMBA student who won second place in this year’s Ram’s Den with his small business lending company, Equeduct. I’m Patrick Verel and this is Fordham news.

Hi, guys. Welcome to the first-ever Zoom-enabled Fordham news conversation. So this is about business. So I’d love to hear the elevator pitches for your companies. Brandon, you’re up first. Ready? Go.

Brandon Adamson: Sure. Thank you. So my name is Brandon Adamson, as you mentioned. A recent Fordham MBA grad from the Gabelli School of Business and I am the founder and CEO of BeautiMaps Technologies LLC. So BeautiMaps is the prime and global freelancing platform specifically tailored to the beauty and makeup industry. We empower independent professionals and clients to receive and provide beauty and wellness services. Essentially my goal is to connect makeup artists who are certified or not certified with new clients and right now that’s scattered use between YouTube, Style Seat, Instagram. We’re looking to have that on one platform.

PV: Okay. Ozzie, go.

OU: Patrick thanks for having us on. So Equeduct is a company that we started about two years ago. It was started by myself and three other founders. We specialize in providing small business loans specifically to high-risk and startup businesses. What we did was we took a look at that specific segment and determined what are some of their key pain points and build a solution around how do we get funds directly to them as quickly as possible by using automation for risk management, as well as making sure that we can also ACH and wire funds to them immediately versus them being in a holding pattern for an extended period of times. So overall, what we’re trying to do is essentially provide funding for businesses that are struggling.

PV: So now, Brandon, you won the pitch challenge in 2019 for your idea and obviously, so you’ve been working with BeautiMaps since then. How has that been going?

BA: So I would say it’s been going great by way of how much I’m able to learn throughout this process. Obviously the pandemic has put a strain on the industry I’m targeting by way of makeup. Right now, people are not outside as much. Events, such as weddings and these huge events that require people to get dressed up or dolled up aren’t really happening. So there has been a slow down per se. However, what that has allowed is me somewhat extra time to be able to build the infrastructure for our company a little bit better. So what that looks like for me is making sure my MVP or my minimum viable product for an app is as sound as possible, even as a version zero iteration. That means making sure that marketing and advertisement I’m building up that anticipation to the idea that once people are able to go outside, there is this platform that can rely on it to connect them with makeup artists or institutions to provide those services.

PV: So did you make major adjustments about a year ago when all this started to fall apart?

BA: Absolutely. So BeautiMaps’s main target or main goal is to provide a mobile platform to connect makeup artists with their current clients and new clients. So it’s a way of discovery as well as continuing your book of business.

One of the long-term visions or long-term goals for the company was to also have a multi-vendor marketplace. Think of Etsy, but for makeup. So instead of doing that three to five years down the line, we somewhat fast track that and now on the Beauty Maps website, we actually do have a multi-vendor marketplace where I’ve partnered with a lot of other small businesses that sell cosmetic products, such as makeup or eyelashes or eyeliner that are now currently being featured on my website. So the app itself isn’t there yet. I’m not actually connecting to makeup artist just yet, but we’re still able to generate some revenue and at least some traction around the word or the name BeautiMapsv so that once we’re able to roll it out, people have somewhat of a familiarity with it.

PV: Ozzie, you were further along obviously with your business when you entered the Ram’s Den this year, because that’s just the nature of the Ram’s Den competition. Talk to me a little bit about what you’ve been doing.

OU: I think I’ll echo what Brandon said. It’s been very challenging. We started the business, we built out our MVP, we secured funding. So we did some basic blocking and tackling things. By the time we had entered into the new year 2019, there was word on the street for lack of a better phrase of COVID starting and then obviously it hit. The second it hit, things just slowed down initially. We ourselves were trying to figure out what our next position will be, things of that nature but very soon after we started getting in a ton of requests. As far as the way that we’ve structured it, we were actually doing Google advertising, Facebook advertising, things like that, predating COVID. Now what ended up happening with just spending just a few dollars, we’d get like hundreds, and in certain cases, thousands of users requesting loans.

So we had an overwhelming demand that started and what that meant was there was a lot of technology that was underlying our MVP that we didn’t build. So for instance, our automated risk management wasn’t built out. So we had to manually go in and do all the background checks, do all of the looking at their cash flow, things of that nature.

So what I’ll say is I think it made it very clear to us very quickly when the pandemic started and as it followed that we’re going to be critical in helping people survive. So we weren’t just a business that was helping them stay afloat. It turned into if we’re not providing loans and we can’t act fast enough, people will lose jobs. People will have to have hard conversations with their families. So then it went from being just a startup to being almost a bit of a calling for us.

So we’ve been focused heavily on being able to just get the requests, do the analysis of if it’s a risk we’re willing to take and getting them the funds as quickly as possible. So, that’s been sort of our key focus and the challenge now is its sort of flipped over where we’ve gone through the funding that we had originally acquired and as founders we’ve started putting our own funding in and so we have essentially self-funding so we can still continue providing these loans. Obviously we have a lot more skin in the game. At the same time, we’re actually going out, working with other institutions, showing them where we are, our progress so we can get additional funding for more institutional investors.

PV: Is there anything else that the pandemic has made you re-evaluate things?

BA: The pandemic has positioned to me to try to make this company as recession proof as possible. So in my position, fast tracking the timeline on that marketplace where even if people aren’t putting on makeup or women or whoever may not be putting on makeup, they still might put on lashes. They’re still doing their makeup, maybe not professionally, but just to go to dinner or brunch with their mask, if they still want to look somewhat presentable or cute.

OU: I’m sure Brandon’s going through it. We’re going through it as well. It’s how do we stay resilient in a time where we have to work a lot more than we’d anticipated. We all have our day jobs, but we’re now trying to build this company. So it’s been challenging but I think overall I say to all my partners, it’s kind of like our first fight as a couple and we just have to get through it and how we get through it will speak more to us than when we’re just being a happy go lucky couples.

PV: One of the things that you guys have in common is you both worked with the Fordham Foundry. Are there any lessons that you learned from working there that you’re able to use now?

BA: One thing specifically I learned that was important was in this realm, especially as it relates to me building out an app, certain developers have told me the app, for the features I’m looking for, it’s going to run me at least 170K and I’m not sure about you guys, but I don’t have 170K laying around and a lot of people don’t have 170K laying around, but how do I get my vision out without the capital? I can always raise the capital. We can do some rounds with some funding, etc. However, in this realm in today’s day and age, you can fake it until you make it, like literally. So take advantage of prototypes, pay for what it would actually look like and how it would actually operate so that when you show it to investors and show it to even possible clients, they can see it, also get excited about it and realize this is something they want to be a part of.

OU: I’ve been a serial entrepreneur for about eight years now and one of the things that you learn really quickly that they don’t show you in the movies is a lot of startup building, company building is a social thing and what I mean by that is you have to be able to plug into all these different things that you need to do, but you need to find the best people you can in those areas to really help you because there’s no one person sitting in some basement or even in a garage coding the future that person may have built something that can sort of give them direction but ultimately what it boils down to is being able to plug into the right people and that is the key between succeeding or not. It’s one of the main keys I believe. So the Foundry from that perspective has been phenomenal.

You, one, get to touch base with a lot of people who are subject matter experts in that particular field. In addition, if they’re not, they know where to send you or they know who to talk to. So the Foundry, I think in that respect has been instrumental, especially for first time startups. I mean, Brandan, I’m not sure how many companies you’ve built out, but my first one, I flushed $500,000 of my own money down the toilet and I had nothing to show for except a really great app. It could probably land a Rover on Mars, but what it couldn’t do was get the client in there to buy the product.

PV: What’s the biggest challenge you face right now. Brandon, you want to go for that first again? I feel like we have a thing here where it’s a counter-clockwise thing in live view here.

BA: Sure, sure. No problem. So the biggest challenge I face right now, I would say is building out a solid team. You can always find someone who loves it just as much as you and maybe they’ll get some equity in the company and they’ll do the coding or there’ll be your CTO, things of that nature. However, just so I’m clear. I’m not someone who thinks one person should be doing all the work. There’s some CEOs out here and founders, they want to be in the books. Good to great. They want to be known as the guy who took the company from zero to 100. I’m perfectly fine with delegating but part of that is either you need to find somebody who, or people who are just as interested and invested or you need to pay them.

So I think when you don’t have the funds or the capital to necessarily hire people, you’re really focusing on trying to build out a team of people who can see the vision and agree with the vision and will grind through it with you. So I think right now my biggest challenge and I actually just reached out to Al and notated from the Foundry about an intern because the Foundry also provides interns. So I’m definitely going take advantage of that for the next round. Just because having someone who can perhaps maybe strictly focused on business development or strictly focused on marketing versus me trying to have eight legs doing it or eight different arms doing it is just a better approach.

PV: And what about on a personal level? You have a day job too, and you have a life outside of work, I assume.

BA: I do have a day job as well that’s fairly demanding. I work in finance and I also have a two year old as of last Sunday. His name is Bryson. So yeah, full on employee, full on daddy mode, full on entrepreneur. But it’s one of those things where it’s the making of a good story regardless of how it turns out. So my son can also see that I can go to work and still chase my own vision and my own dreams, et cetera. So challenges, yes, but also learning moments by way of a lot of characters being built at this time, which I can imagine Ozzie, in your past entrepreneurship ventures, whether they worked or didn’t work, I’m sure a lot has molded you or changed you to a point where you’re able to attack things differently now. So that’s the one thing I’ve also learned. If this were to never work out, I know how to start a company lightning speed now. I know how to get things going super fast. I know how to do these particular things that for a lot of people is the biggest obstacle.

PV: What about you, Ozzie? Obviously we’ve heard about some of the challenges on the business front. What would you say is the biggest that you face both there and also on a personal front?

OU: I would say on a personal front, an ongoing challenge of mine has been time management, priority management and what I mean by that is I currently run about five different companies that are spread across providing microloans like Equeduct to others that do credit card processing and so on and so forth. So the challenge that I have is where am I going to spend my time is probably the hardest thing and every morning I have a little ritual I go through to determine what’s the highest priority thing that I need to solve for the day. What’s the most pernicious problem that we’re having, that I need to put my brainpower into as a founder and as a CEO of a company. If my attention goes into something that is not relevant and that does not push the company vision forward, then we’re just spinning wheels and dirt.

Beyond that, I think at a company level, our biggest challenge right now is we just need to go faster. I don’t know how else to say it, but I’ve partnered with folks who come from corporate America and there is a bit of a shackle that you wear when you come from corporate America, which is fast is not necessarily good and what I mean by that is they’re used to being very risk averse and taking very measured steps in determining what the return is and a startup is very much not like that. It’s not about taking measures step. This is about running as quickly as you can before either your juice, which is your funds run out, or you find something that works.

Brandon, I’d be curious. Obviously, I’m guessing this is your first company that you’re building up. So if you could change one thing about yourself, forget about the company. It is what it is. One weakness that you think is slowing you down, stopping you from actually building this thing out. What do you think it would be?

BA: Oh, easy answer. It would be my inclination or lack thereof to attack the social media route. So in the beauty industry, seeing is a big part of it. Being active on social media, et cetera. So for my Beauty Maps page, I have a marketing company that’s ran by a friend who’s handling the posting, et cetera, but a lot of that and a lot of things around businesses today, they want to see you, the personal person behind the business. In this case, it’s a little bit different because I’m a 6’2 African-American man and I don’t know much about makeup but knowing that’s a key, especially in this day and age to be noticed is you have to push out content, right? You have to be seen, you have to be known and I particularly don’t enjoy that. I live a private lifestyle. I enjoy that. So if there’s one thing I could change, it would be my ability to be okay with that.

OU: I shy away from publicity also as much as I possibly can, but you’re the main cheerleader for your company. Like now, I was on a flight down to Miami. I talk about my companies to anyone and everyone that’s willing to listen. I was literally trying to sell loans to people on the flight who were sitting next to me. They’re like, just put your mask on and shut up. I’m like, are you sure your business doesn’t need to tell, let’s talk about how your cash flow is and so on support. The trick really becomes is your weaknesses are your company’s weaknesses, quite frankly and it’s true when they say from being in a business perspective, as an MBA student, they always say, find people that offset your weaknesses. It is especially true in a startup because nothing happens in that area unless you have that weakness accounted for.

PV: Brandon, did you want to ask Ozzie anything?

BA: Sure, absolutely. So you mentioned that you ran through half a ticket on your first business. You can feel free to divulge the details if you want but I was just curious, what did you approach differently? I know you mentioned the prototyping, but in this case, you can’t really prototype. You’re either servicing alone or you’re not. So I’m just curious in this case, how did you approach this business idea differently than you did your first one to try to avoid those pitfalls?

OU: So I’ll give you a great example. I think prototyping is shorthand for get it out there as quickly as possible, right? And we can call it whatever we want to, but prototyping really means get it out as quickly as possible, start getting feedback. So with respect to my first business, it was in exotic car peer-to-peer car rental company. So essentially if you owned a Ferrari or Lamborghini, you can put it on a platform and someone will rent it from you and you monetize it. It’s a depreciating asset and we take a certain percentage of the profit, right? We built out the entire, we built out all the partnerships. We built out everything supply side. We had like over a hundred cars on our platform in five different states and we did all these things. What we didn’t do was we didn’t bring customers to the platform. So we spent all this money building up this supply base and this ability to connect the demand side with the supply side but we never focused in on the demand side. Ultimately, what ended up happening was when it was time to shift gears and start focusing on the demand side, which we thought was going to be not the hardest part, turned out to be very hard and on top of that, we ran out of money.

PV: Imagine in your mind now that we can kind of see our way out of this pandemic and we’re going to enter into back to normal, whatever that new normal is. But if you go to a bar and somebody you talk to asks you, why do you like starting companies? What do you tell them?

BA: I would have to say the freedom of knowing that this idea or this business is a representation of my perseverance and execution. At work, you work 40 hours a week. Maybe you’re actually productive for 25 of those 40 hours, but you’ll still get paid for the 40. At a startup, you’ll get paid for what you do. So if you’re only productive 25, you’re only getting paid for 25.

OU: I’m a child of a small business owner and my dad is great at so many things, but I witnessed firsthand discussions at the dinner table about tightening our belt or not having enough money for vacation, or at times, if I only had some more money, I could have grown the business differently or things of that nature. So for me, building Equeduct was in direct response to those conversations that I had with my dad and my family had. It’s to say to people that, listen, it is tough being a business owner and for me specifically, it’s a number of people. So for every one business that goes under, 10 people directly are impacted and by the transitive property, it’s a total of about 40 to 50 people are impacted by one business going down. So that’s a lot of people that are hurt. That’s a lot of people that don’t have money. That’s a lot of people that may not even have the ability to send their kids to school and so on and so forth. So, for me, it’s really straightforward. It’s how do I build something that can provide or contribute to their lives at that level?

Closer to home, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is hoping his embrace of universal basic income, or UBI, will help him become the next Mayor of New York City. The idea behind UBI is that the government sends every adult a set amount of money regularly which ensures that when they enter the job market they do so not from a level of destitution but from a basic level or security.

Attitudes about wealth distribution, it seems, are changing. Thomas Massaro, S.J., a professor of moral theology, has given all of this quite a bit of thought. He’s a frequent contributor to catholicethics.com and the author of Mercy in Action: The Social Teachings of Pope Francis (Rowan & Littlefield, 2018)

Listen below:

Full transcript below:

Thomas Massaro: I would describe the pandemic as a crisis, a public health crisis, that it is, but it’s also an opportunity, an opportunity for the American public to maybe see a wider perspective that we’re all in this together, rich or poor, no matter what region you’re from, what demographic group you’re from.

Patrick Verel: On January 21st, 900,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims, adding to the 16 million who were claiming benefits at the beginning of the month, a sign that the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much a threat to the economy. A second round of stimulus checks was issued by the federal government in December and President Joe Biden has included a third round of checks in his proposed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

Closer to home, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is hoping his embrace of universal basic income, or UBI, will help him become the next Mayor of New York City. The idea behind UBI is that government sends every adult a set amount of money regularly which ensures that when they enter the job market they do so not from a level of destitution but from a basic secure level.

Attitudes about wealth distribution, it seems, are changing. Thomas Massaro, a Jesuit priest and a professor of moral theology, has given all of this quite a bit of thought. He’s a frequent contributor to catholicethics.com and the author of the 2018 book, Mercy In Action: The Social Teachings of Pope Francis. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

What is universal basic income? How does it actually mean?

TM: Well, great question, Patrick, and I think the place to start is looking back at just a little bit of history of the ideas, the current ideas for universal basic income, I’ll call it UBI for short, actually, can be traced back to proposals way back in time, at least a century or two ago, where various groups have proposed ideas for keeping people’s income at least above a basic poverty level. In fact, if you look back over the 20th century, pretty much every generation has at least toyed with the idea of keeping people’s income up, establishing a floor under their income, at least in the affluent nations. People want to have a certain level of equality in society, and I really think there’s an upper limit to how much economic inequality is palatable and sustainable.

So think back to the industrial revolution roughly 200 years ago, since then we have witnessed quite a bit of poverty and material suffering, and in response to that, there have been a number of utopian movements that have tried to alleviate the worst of that poverty. Some of this utopian literature and practice overlapped with socialism, even as far as going as far as Marxism. But ultimately, that has never really taken root, at least not in North America. What has sometimes appealed to a lot of people is how to transform our capitalist economy into a place where there’s less inequality, and sometimes people turn to the levers of government. I’m thinking of fiscal policy, transfer payments, welfare systems that redistribute enough income through taxing and spending to benefit the poor and keep at least a modest floor of income under all people.

PV: How has this all played out in debates within this country?

TM: In the United States, the 20th century has been almost like a laboratory for experiments. If you know your 20th century U.S. history, you may recall the progressive era, the ’10s, and ’20s during which there were a lot of proposals for ambitious welfare programs that would help the poor. Then, again, there was another great advance in the 1930s under the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to introduce ideas like the social security system. Actually, most people don’t know that even more recently, I’m thinking of the 1970s, an unlikely President, remember Richard Nixon, proposed the idea of a basic income program to replace the old welfare system. It was called Aid To Families with Dependent Children in an attempt to get rid of all of those waste and fraud and inefficiencies of the welfare system.

That idea even had the support of a very unlikely economist, the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who proposed what he called the negative income tax, it’s like a refundable income tax refund, giving it to people of very modest means. And it never really got off the ground, but it did suggest that the idea of universal basic income has been bubbling up just below the surface as a potential program.

PV: Back in September, you published an essay where you connected universal basic income to the teachings of Pope Francis. How do the two go together?

TM: Notice that everything I’ve said up to this point only is premised on secular and humanitarian arguments and motivations. I said that nobody wants to live in a society that’s so sharply split between the very rich and the very poor, and that’s why we have some social programs, although we still actually do tolerate quite a bit of widespread suffering. So those are minimalistic justifications for generosity in public policies. From a theological point of view, I would emphasize what I consider to be more robust religious motivations to alleviate suffering. What would God want us to do in the face of widespread poverty? I’m pretty confident that I could identify Jesus Christ as someone who would support the general ethical obligation to assist the poor in extremely generous ways. Just think back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, that’s chapter 10 of Luke’s Gospel, or Matthew 25, the Parable of the Final judgment, where Jesus is closely interweaving love of God and love of neighbor. If you’re going to be a religious person devoted to God, you’ve got to do something to assist your neighbors as well.

Pope Francis has been a consistent advocate for greater social concern for all types of marginalized people, refugees, people who are trafficked, people who are adversely affected by climate change, exploited workers, anybody who suffering from poverty or inequality. I have to say, there’s no specific program, policy, or formula that Francis has been advocating that would guide legislators or presidents or prime ministers in any specific country. Catholic social teaching is actually quite dedicated to avoiding the specifics of policy detail and staying with general principles, embracing values and priorities, and Pope Francis is walking in this well-trodden path. And especially during this pandemic though, he has publicized the need to address the deep needs of people.

Last Easter time, he gave an address, it was April of 2020, where he dropped this Spanish phrase. It’s an ambiguous phrase. It’s, “salario universal,” literally a universal salary. So immediately when people heard this, they started writing articles and asking hard questions of Vatican officials. Was he embracing a universal basic income in some form or other? Or was he just talking about maybe a standard minimum wage for people who are already employed, whether in the formal sector or the informal sector? So there’s a lot of ambiguity about it, but there were some very well-educated voices who were saying that Pope Francis has joined the Yang Gang, calling for universal basic income. To this day, I don’t know exactly how Pope Francis meant this, but clearly he was referring to a need, and it’s a constant Catholic teaching, that we use the gifts of God’s creation, not for just the benefit of a few, but for the benefit of all in society.

PV: So I’m going to play devil’s advocate here for a moment. I have to ask you this, what are the weaknesses to this argument that everybody should get a universal basic income?

TM: Really good question, and it has to do with the wellsprings of our political culture, grounded in the Protestant work ethic, and the American high regard for encouraging work. And, of course, these are values that are very much agreed within the Catholic tradition. Really all religions, nobody wants to discourage work. But at the same time, a structural viewpoint of the economy, recognizing how the contemporary economy really excludes many people from real work opportunities, a living wage. This is a really important argument that balances the scales again and reminds us that there is a need to address those who really, through the labor market, just don’t have a realistic way of making a good living in a dignified manner of life.

PV: The spring semester is upon us this week, and I know you’re going to be teaching a class. Talk to me a little bit about these classes. Does this topic ever come up in any of the ones that you teach?

TM: Yeah. In fact, the largest class I’m about to start teaching is called Catholic Social Teaching. I teach it most semesters and I just love bringing those topics, bringing those concerns, and values into dialogue with my students. So they’re old ideas that come from papal encyclicals published generations ago with long fancy Latin names. But what I really love doing is getting my students to see them not just as dusty museum pieces and I’m their tour guide through this museum. But really, getting them to engage thoughts that have been cropping up every generation since the Industrial Revolution, thoughts about justice, about the fairness of the economy, and the policy question of how do we deal as a government, as a secular society, how do we deal with the problem of persistent poverty of millions of people who have no chance of making it in a modern, very competitive economy? So I just love talking with my students, mostly Fordham undergrads about these topics, and sometimes I play devil’s advocate as well.

PV: The fact that Florida went Republican and voted for a $15 minimum wage in November would seem to show that raising the floor for people’s incomes actually has a bipartisan appeal to it? Do you think that’s because of the moral dimension associated with it or do you think there are other reasons as well?

TM: Well, I think that’s really significant because, as you know, Florida, a Southern state, is not usually considered a pro-labor state or electorate. So the fact that there’s an upsurge of support for a higher minimum wage in many parts of the country and across the demographics of all political stripes, suggests to me that perhaps conditions are proper, correct, auspicious for people across the spectrum to consider measures that will help all people, especially low-income workers to live a decent life. If so, that really closely overlaps the content of Catholic social teaching. The main opponent here, the main barrier to overcome a hurdle that we have to jump is that cultural element of we’re averse to seeing anybody get something for nothing, whether that’s a benefit or a tax giveaway program of any sort.

And I think the way that we can maybe overcome this is to keep in mind the goal of having work-related benefits, and most of our social security system is like that, but also an open space for some benefits that are not work-related, and especially if they’re tied, as the universal basic income is, to people who just can’t make it in the labor market through no fault of their own. I really do think Americans care about their neighbors, no matter what part of the country they’re from, whether their demographics are different, and they’re looking for common sense and reasonable opportunities to pass laws, to support legislation that will benefit all people, regardless of how labor markets treat them.

PV: Do you think that attitudes in this country will change as a result of the pandemic towards issues like universal basic income?

TM: I would describe the pandemic as a crisis, a public health crisis, that it is, but it’s also an opportunity, an opportunity for the American public to maybe see a wider perspective that we’re all in this together, rich or poor, no matter what region you’re from, what demographic group you’re from. And it could just be the occasion, as World War Two was the occasion, for wartime solidarity for post-war Britain. It could be the occasion when the United States finally recognizes that we’re in this boat together and we have enough solidarity to actually make some sacrifices that include higher taxes to support income support measures like universal basic income.