 The question is just, you know, to describe for us the genesis of the process or the project and maybe even back up a little bit because I can't remember if Frank told me or I read it in one of the reviews out there about the project but that he had met up with another photographer in pursuing this idea. It wasn't the best match and then found Mary Beth. It was the perfect match and this spoke to a project that had really been in development for some time, at least in Fred's head, and that it wasn't the product of serenity. It was something that was really sort of fought through in advance. So I was wondering if you could tell us like how it began and sort of evolved finally to even to just get us to the beginning of the project. Absolutely. Mary Beth, do you want me to jump on this one? Great, I'll start there. So first off, hi, and I'll speak both to the people who are in the room and to the machine that represents the people who aren't. It's really nice to be here. Thank you, Heather, for having us. I have taught in CMS 20 years ago. I taught in this program. I also taught at Sloan School of Management. This is homeworld for me and I'm absolutely thrilled to be back. Then a lot of friends around the table and I'm grateful. So thank you. And I want to say this is very much a joint Mary Beth and Fred project and really we really cooked it up together. I had been bothered for a long time by something I'd seen in Silicon Valley mythology. So some of you will know I'm a historian of Silicon Valley, very much focused on myths that drive the valley and where they come from. And one of the deepest myths is that technologists build systems that make people transparent. And through these systems, you can just see everyone. And everyone's there. We can just quote, connect everyone and load that word. But what was becoming clear to me, though, was that the systems of connection that we were building did nothing to reveal the actual world on the ground in which we live. So I live in Mountain View about two miles from Google's headquarters. I have a family. I raised a daughter there. I have a boy who lives for a period of time as well. And I know a very different kind of place. And so I wanted very much to see the valley. Now, seeing is really hard. And that's really Mary Beth's domain. So I was very, very lucky. A friend pointed me to a couple of different photographers. I actually had one out who will go unnamed precisely because they lack all of the qualities that make Mary Beth and her work so special. Just plug your ears for a sec. OK. So Mary Beth will talk about her process. But I think that what Mary Beth has done in her other work, and she'll talk about her other work, is see people in places where those places have, for a variety of historical reasons, conspired to render those folks less visible. And Mary Beth has a technique for seeing, for working with her subjects, for making them visible in the classical idiom of portraiture, of a kind, hugely reserved for honoring those folks who are already honored in society. And to do that work in Silicon Valley seemed especially important. Now, it turned out that when we began doing that work, publishers told us that Silicon Valley, that story was a bit intimidating. So I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to be able to invite Mary Beth out. I would kind of have to trust me and come. Take it from here. Well, yes. Thank you so much for having us. So good to be at the table and in the virtual world. I'm not exactly sure where we should, where I should look. Should I not think about that? Should I just look at the humans here? Okay. So thank you so much for having us. Yeah, I got this call from out of the blue to go to Stanford and to, to think about working in Silicon Valley. And my kids were pretty little. It was 2017. And I thought, Silicon Valley, what do I know about? So what could I offer Silicon Valley? What am I going to do in Silicon Valley? And my little son said, Mom, can you just do what you always do? Just walk around and talk to people. And I thought, I suppose I could do that there. And I too was feeling really hemmed in by this myth, mythology. I mean, Silicon Valley, was I going to go knock on Mark Zuckerberg's door? I mean, whose doors were, what was I going to be knocking on? So it took a minute to get used to the idea of going there and doing this work. But then it was just really about who is this community of human beings as an ecosystem? And how does this economy here? How do these, how do these corporations affect what life on the ground is like? And so that really just became my MO. It worked great. And could you, could you, so Mary Beth and I at this point, it's, it's, I know you're so far away. We are, we are so far away. We've been working together really closely for a long time. Yeah. It'll just be, we've found a little bit about where you come from and the work that you've done before, because that's so important to how you were able to see the valley. Well, I'd love to see something about that. And then I also want to say a little bit more about this invitation from Fred. So I, my roots are in journalism, but I have in the last 10 years done these long-term in depth projects in communities. So first in my hometown of Brockton mass, which is right down the road. And I thought so much about being from Brockton. And how growing up as the granddaughter of immigrants, I feel so connected to immigrants and newcomers and those layers of those, those layers of social change that happened with economies shifting. And those, that's, that's who I feel the most connected to. And that's where my work really started was in trying to say, you know, growing up in Brockton, which was a rich and beautiful and incredible experience with the most amazing people. That's not what the public perception is of a place like that. And that's not what you read about in the globe. And yet the pride and the, the layers of love that I have for that place are so, are so deep. So my photography became a way to push against what wasn't being seen going all the way back to my, you know, my kind of earliest memories. Fred's invitation was a really interesting one because it was about someone who really did understand the place from a certain level. Fred. So Fred comes in as the perfect collaborator because what photographers are often doing is photographing life on the street, but not really understanding what they're seeing and the meaning of, of what they're seeing. So the best was that Fred had this real love for photography and real appreciation for it, but knew what the value was all about. So we had these, we got into this work mode where I was going out and talking to people and figuring out what life was like and then bring it back to him and his wife, Annie. And we would sort of wrestle with the meaning of what I was seeing. And so together we birthed this work that we think really gets at that, but I, it would have been hard for either of us to do it alone. I think both of us were also becoming professionally from worlds where there's a tradition that either a writer drives a project that is then illustrated by a photographer or photographer drives a project and then a writer writes some stuff around it. And, you know, one of the things that's been nice about working with you and it's very different than trying to work with this other photographer before, was that we were just fully collaborative all the way. Mary Beth taught me something new every single week. And you were very patient with me as I mailed you academic books. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that was really powerful. You know, we worked really, so, so. I did want to ask though, but the question you said, you know, your daughter's advice, I think what's it or just do what you always do, walk around and talk to people. How did that fly in Silicon Valley, walking down the street just me like, excuse me, I'm a photographer. I'd like to talk to you, you know, how did you make the connections? You know why it was amazing because everyone living there is aware of the myth and aware of the discrepancy between the mythology on the outside and what their life is like. So there wasn't a person who I said, go ahead. We are here and they're concerned. Yeah. Yeah. Concern and just, just conscious. It's like a, it's like a, it's like living inside Disney world except you're not. Yeah. Yeah. Except you're invisible. You're not Mickey out there. You're behind the curtain making it all happen for Mickey and your, your life is just not part of that story. I have another analogy that I want to bring in right here. So, so my first intellectual affection was the early American Puritans. I was really in love with Puritan of the 1620s back in the day. Somebody's got to do it. Anyways, I often used to wonder what would it be like if I could actually wander around in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620 and make pictures and what would that be like? And I realized this time it's been in our conversation for a long, long time. Time, time. It's still if you look at how the city is on the hill over our time. It's held up as a kind of sparkling target for people around the world. This is how we ought to be. This is how we ought to live. But in fact, much like the original Plymouth, Massachusetts, it's a place where some people are depicted and understand themselves as saints and other people are depicted and understand themselves as less than human. And capturing that distinction was something that I think we really worked out together. I don't think they understand themselves. Fair point. Yeah, sorry. But they know that they're not part of the main story. That's right. Even though they're working to make it half. It's the main stories to put it on their waiver. Yeah. Okay. So you said the publisher said like, that's not Silicon Valley. No idea what you're talking about. It was crazy. So I'd like to hear more about that story. Just like shopping the book and the ups and downs of that. Yeah. And the conversations you had. And then I'd also like to know like, is there some sense in which this sparkling target that's about that that is tarnishing that people are now, maybe just because there seems to have a burden in Congress all the time. They're like, oh, there's some kind of trouble here that we don't play the grass fun. Is that miss starting to, if not fall apart, but like adjust and change with two part question. I hope so. I'll start it. And then yeah. So, so, um, I didn't thought the book would be an easy sell. I love photography. I have a large collection of photography books. At the time I had an agent. I have a strong publishing record. I read newspapers and magazines. I thought this is not going to be a problem. The agent didn't think it was going to be a problem. And so she started taking the project around. We boarded in the book. It looks pretty much like it looks now. You know, available with a discount. Just saying. Um, but so the book was, was a really, I thought of quite a beautiful project. She couldn't sell it. And everywhere she went, they would say, sometimes they would say, if target books don't sell that mother, mother, mother. But the thing that we heard much more frequently was that's not Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is. And then it would be, you know, Zuckerberg, Tesla, Elon Musk, white men, et cetera. And while we're working on the book, actually, tell you a little bit about National Geographic and your experience with them. Well, and yes, and we also, it wasn't just that we were showing it to money people who wanted something saleable. I mean, we showed it to a very internationally prominent sociologist. Don't forget. That's right. This isn't, this isn't Silicon Valley. Yeah. We will go on there. And so, um, the National Geographic at the time was publishing an issue just about Silicon Valley and they, um, you know, I think Fred was shaking his head. He was more irate about it. I was very irate. They were into the whole, all the stuff, all of the tech development and the startups and the wacky ideas. Did you know that engineers are polyamorous? Did you know that they form cuddle puddles? And these pictures, these pictures of these young, beautiful, all white, beautiful people, men and women both piled up in like white clothes. It was like me and Rajesh. It was just wild. And so those were the bulk of the images back to you. There were some images that were more working class people who were trying to take it work. There were some, but I, you know, I was in journalism for a long time and I been friendly with someone who was an editor there and she wrote to me and said, um, we heard you have pictures of people in trees. And they published one of my pictures because whoever the photographer was that they had invited out didn't, didn't get into that level of life. And so the homelessness and the working for, and these are, you know, the working homeless, um, was something that we were so focused on that we couldn't imagine that a national jury geographic photographer could spend a significant amount of time in Silicon Valley and not get at that. And that's the power of the myth. This is the 1620 problem in Silicon Valley. You know, you go there and you immediately see the saints you've been told to look for. And then that's very powerful. But you, but you do in the process of doing that, you unsee all the people around you. The unseeing was something that I'd experienced just by living there, you know, going out to dinner and, you know, seeing the way that people treat people, but, but you came in with a different view. And definitely we really struggled to do and you see it in the book is really capture people at every level of the social stratum there. You try to try very hard to do the August Sunder thing at least a little bit and try to capture everyone. So there are people there who are, you know, founders of companies and have fancy houses with pools and there are folks like the woman who runs the taco truck on the cover. And it's the, it's the valley as it is. We sent it to, we sent it to a magazine in California that said, well, this is an interesting view. I mean, we really got so much rejection. And then what happened was it got so much rejection. And we said, okay, Fred had a publisher in France. And the Europeans could really see what you, what the mechanism was for seeing. And they published it. And then after we got it published in France, we took it back to an editor. Yeah. Yeah. He was going to do it in a sense of Chicago. And the point that you're making, Heather, is exactly right that something changed in America in the last few years. Yes, for sure. The European saw it well before we did it as they see many things in Silicon Valley before we do. But they, you know, something changed in America, tech class shit, also black lives matter in a way that suddenly it seemed like, oh yeah, gosh, there are people of color in Silicon Valley. That seemed like a thing that editors could suddenly see. They really couldn't see that early. It was really fascinating. Like, no. And so those cultural changes made it possible for editors to see it. And then the book, when the book actually came out, thrilled to see on Amazon with all its wonderful metrics, best seller of photography. No, like, that was, that was so satisfying. Right. And so that didn't last forever. It lasted long enough to give me a thrill. Me too. It was the extra person in New York Times. Yeah, that was a good thing. That was a thrill also. Oh, I want to take one note on that and give New York Times a high five. New York Times not known for taking the point of view of the work as a general thing, especially in the business section. And the thing, and this really goes back to the quality of very best images. Those images, we have 15 images in a two page spread in the business section, targeted at executives on the same day that Elon Musk posted SNL. Yeah, that's right. And I say, I give the, I give the times props for that. And so one of the things I'm proudest of in the project is thanks to your images, we were able to at least bring 15 images of the working class to the, to the leading, other than the Wall Street Journal, leading business section on the planet for executives. They had to see them at least for those 10 minutes. And then maybe two or three images of, there was a wealthy widow, they're not wealthy by the standards of that area, just wealthy, you know, my skin, you know, and I can just maybe hold in a dog. Yeah. And then there's that couple that has two children, but they can't afford to furnish their home, they can't do rooms and they, you know, they're sitting in the first vessel with space, you know, and then everyone else is in a taco truck, the person in the trailer. Yeah. Would it be helpful if we showed some images to folks? I would love if you could show some images. And then I had a question about those images, like the ones that I've looked at, there is, I don't want to use the word repetitive in a Jordan's way, but I see a framing of the people looking directly in a, yeah, in a computational way, just like I am very witness, and I have to get a sense of why that. Okay. One, as opposed to say, seeing the top person, you know, the person in action, that one might expect. This is a great question. And we've talked a lot about this, but I think, I've heard the question. Yeah. There was one point I wanted to throw up before we go to pictures though, which is one of the reasons that really, one of the things that really animated us. I think that's one of the things that I wanted to say is, I think it's important to think about, you know, social and politically is that we see the country moving in the direction of so, the economy of the country as a whole. And then communities as a whole are moving this direction. So Silicon Valley into being the sort of big game. If you want to go with this mode of capitalism that we're in, this is where we're going to end up. Okay, great. Thank you, Andrew. And I hope you answered this question. I have my answers are a little different, which I think is also interesting. And how do I get rid of this little bar, Andrew? Just grab it and slide it away. I don't have a cursor anymore. I think sorry, I think I need help. The cursor's gone. Just start first thing. Yeah. Where did it go? I can see it. It's going right over the. Yeah, sure. Well, we'll move it first. How about that? Yeah. There we go. Okay, got it. Okay, thank you. I am screen sharing. Okay, great. So is that thing too annoying for words? Should I just leave it there? It's great. Okay, so this is Teresa. This is the cover of the book. Her daughter texted me today. Teresa was working in a taco truck. I'll tell I'll just tell a little bit about how I met each person and then please, if anybody has a question, jump in or if I'm talking too long, jump in. I will talk about the aesthetic choices in the politics of those because they have some politics. And I, you know, yes, ma'am, why did you choose that photo for the cover? That's a good question. Show the French cover. We sure I can. We. I can show her the French cover really easily. We. This was the French cover. I was actually working with an editor at the National Geographic, teaching a workshop when we were trying to figure out the cover for the French book. And it was between these two. And he, this is a picture from Apple headquarters. So it was this grand opening of the new Apple headquarters that big spaceship thing. We were in this gorgeous marble space where all it's all been written about the marble and the aesthetics and there was this woman who was just going back and forth cleaning the glass, cleaning the glass. And so this shadow of her just felt like what we're trying to talk about is the inner things of the valley. The book came out it did well in France, but the designer was a woman named Lucinda Hitchcock who's at RISD and a dear friend of mine was like I don't know about this page book anymore. She had done this and she thinks, and there's the portraits are so much about this eye contact that we decided when we did this book to do eye contact and this might be kind of interesting. I don't know. We were trying to choose between. Warren, who is a venture capitalist and had done very well and had his business and his contribution to the narrative of the story was sort of about his feelings about where companies were going wrong ethically and how to grow big without going off the rails. What other pictures do we think about Fred, I think those are the two big those are two finalists. And so this picture was like this feels like what one might expect from the valley so they're all this is these are his employees they bought this house is his house on the left. He was able to buy another property this is a half a block from the famous garage where he was pepper pepper started in Palo Alto. They're all barefoot they're on their laptops and we thought that this actually we needed this picture because we needed to show that we weren't avoiding this person, but that we were. We were including this person from a different angle and a different in a different perspective. These are his employees. Right, but that's what these, but privately bought this house and so they're. That's a defining feature of elite work in Silicon Valley, especially the ability to connect your family. So I spent a lot of time inside Facebook and not met up at Facebook and they say bring your whole self to work. You know, and they celebrate on the walls or posters for, you know, celebrate LGBTQ and trends and all, you know, the posters to look as well to the famous farm worker, the organizer on their wall, even though they would never permit a union in the shop. And so I would say that the creation of the foe community is a management strategy across the valley and see it play here. So this is where he lives and then they bought this house, but I mean he's a really lovely guy. He's a great, you know, he's a great guy but he's able to create this work environment. Okay, so Teresa. I met her after a long day of shooting I stopped in. I stopped in Palo Alto there was a food truck and there was music, and I stopped to like dinner and relax. And when I, this is the sort of the art part of it is where my gut gets engaged and where my eye gets engaged and where I just have this instinct to go, oh my God, oh God, I gotta go back to my camera bag. You know, like something so amazing about her light. And so, you know, I see some Spanish and so back to my head. Hello, and I explain my name Mary with me and I'm doing a project. Can I come in and make a portrait of you. So she turns and asked her boss. So the boss is okay so now I'm climbing up into the food truck. And in the back so this is in the back of the truck super tight and I only had three frames, but she had to get back to work, you know, so I took three frames. And I mean I know why I love this picture is that her she is so present and direct and aware and with me and, you know, her presence is so solid. And I, you know, aesthetically I love the gloves I love this and her neck I love the way that she's framed in the black doorway and then all the other stuff is all around her. And we just really felt like this is the person who people aren't seeing when they're talking about that. I couldn't a lot of people, but it was something so she's not confrontational but she's definitely like saying, to me she's like, are you seeing me or not, you know, am I part of the record or not. I want to build on this because we thought about it a lot. The a couple of different pieces we were, by the time the French book had gone through a process. We were still wrestling with this deep you know what we're still good value acting. And what part of the decision between those two was do we try to make the book. We try to get past that by saying yes you see it's still Silicon Valley, or do we confront it by saying no this is actually the Silicon Valley, Mary Beth push very hard for this image and I think that was the right call. So in a variety of ways, first off, the class range in Silicon Valley is very different than anybody talks about the much wider range. The second ethnicity, I mean this is this is a woman of color in a world that is the in which all of the saints are depicted as white men. And so that's really important this is a woman who does labor with her hands, which is again something that is not emphasized in the valley, and all of that is super visible in the image. The other piece that's been very important to me and gets to the aesthetic of Mary Beth's work is that she's not just treated with a kind of respect and I will say that this is one of the very rare parts in the book where you did not get to know the person for a long time before you shop right. So you actually went in and shot right off the back. And went back as after. Right. One of the things that I love about the picture is that that idiom that that could have been painted, you know, in the 16th century in Italy, the way that her body is held, you know, that's a different that's a posture and a portraiture and a look and a respect for the image that echos down through art history to a very traditional but also very powerful place. And so the invocation of that place however suddenly, especially in this context seem important. What do you think? I really like I mean like my research is about the very, very important person in the city. So I struggle, you know, like just choosing my photo so I was just wondering. Should we look at some more pictures? What should we do? So this is Cristobal so to answer your question about the direct gaze, you know, I worked for decades, feeling like a documentary photographer and in which my role was to organize myself around the action. So that I could so that I could catch a moment felt like an authentic moment of what was happening. And then I became interested in portraiture in 2015 I started working on direct portraiture and just really enjoying this, this relationship and this moment of the direct gaze and and then when you stop someone on the street, the artistic challenge and you stop someone on the street and say can I make a portrait of you. And they say yes, and you're both kind of like well what do we do now. You know, and so how to solve that problem how to solve it through the narrative how to solve it through the relationship, how to solve the aesthetics of what's happening in that in that moment in that moment in time. So I just kind of got into I hadn't really explored that direct thing before. And it felt like the right way for these people to be speaking visually for our for our book. So this is Cristobal so Cristobal is a security will show you a few pictures. He's a security guard at Facebook. And I met him when they were workers were trying to form a union. I met him through some social through some organizing label organizing people. And when I met him we met at a restaurant we had this huge long interview. And when he brought me back to his house, I realized we've been at the front of the house in Melo Park. And then he brought me around to the back and I realized that he was leaving this shit. So, you know, in this idea of, you know, and he's a full time boy through a contract or a contractor. Through a contractor he brought into the contract to take care of whatever's been sorry to live in the valley even though it's a full time employee. So that to me was really important to find someone who was working at one of the big companies, but couldn't afford to live there. I just want to emphasize that's that's in every way a representative relationship, not an unusual person. You know what Mary Beth found in the security guard will be true of the kitchen staff, the preschool teachers on down the line. Well, how does the economy. I mean, how far can these cobbled together, sort of, exactly, go because if people you were wealthy, you know, want to have this lifestyle. They, and they want to say that children, they need someone to teach their children. Exactly. No one is going to drive eight or nine hours, you know, a day to teach their children, they can do better. So, so how does it become sustainable, not to mention just like they need someone to take the garbage out, they need someone to pick it up in the curb, you know, let me let me answer that question. Yeah, but into by breaking apart the word sustainable to two categories, persistent and sustainable. The first question I think is how and why has this persisted for so long. People do drive several hours each way. And, you know, the, the, the, and I think the answer to wise is twofold, at least one is the economic differential is so extreme. So across the mountains from Palo Alto is the second poorest county in America. The only one that's for one in Mississippi that's poor. You put that kind of poverty within driving distance of a place where in 2018 there were 74 billionaires in a two county region. Okay, so just that difference is so enormous. And in terms of keeping that persistent. I think you keep the difference up. It's perverse. In fact, as long as you keep some people extraordinarily rich and other people extraordinarily poor, it's like it's like creating a sucking vacuum. Those people need whatever money they can get. There was someone behind them exactly. So that's self perpetuating. The other piece of that that's really important is ideology. As long as we keep as journalists and reporters and media people telling stories about heroic creative disembodied mostly young mostly white mostly male workers, having genius ideas, sprouting from their minds, you know, shooting off from the ground and you know, rockets. You know, as long as we're doing that, then we're not going to break down what we're trying to do here say no we need to build media and do business for society as a whole, not just for for leaders. That's why we make sustainable. That question I think is a very even important one and I think that the first thing that we need to do is actually accept that business and technology are not there to make a profit. Profit is there to make a society to make it better. This is actually something that was widely understood in mid century American business we don't tend to think of this now. In my archival life I spent a long time reading the first two years of the Ford Foundation reports, which are places where corporate leaders in 1951 to get together and try to figure out how to do corporate work for America. And the ethos then is one of believe it or not, we in Christ are really doing what's good for the country. That's our job as businessmen we need to do that we need to not let salaries get out of hand with a settlement of unions. There's a sense that we are all in this together. And now it's a post-world war two moment. We need to reconstruct the notion that we are all in this together. How we do that is a long and complicated and hard story, part of it I think involves government regulation, part of it I think involves telling different kinds of stories. Our tiny piece of it is trying to say here's the we that's in it because that we is not in the story. Please. I'm just going to say about it. I think the definition of what's good for the country is ill in the century is still a racist and misogynist. Very fair. Very fair. I think these days, they're doing keeping people out and down, you know, so that may be true that this is also a time without question. Yeah, without without question. No, I think that's I think it's an incredibly important point. I see it as a more mixed time than we remember. I wouldn't deny segregation for a second, but I would also know in the places where there's the greatest depression sitting in an army. There are efforts to desegregate and to integrate and to begin to build a different America, even in the places where the oppression is taking place. I try to hold on to that. But we can go longer on this. What can I say? Yeah. I have to do also with what what in 1950s they were thinking about as a profit margin and what kind of profit margin needed to be. And even that we're talking about to that that's really gone off the deep end now with the thing Fred. I do think so. Yeah, I read it a little bit differently. I'm also I also really want to just say that I heard in the comment for me and my people really to hear that. I don't know what to do. It is sinking and thinking to hear that. Yeah, I think the profit margins are become grotesque. I actually actually we've kind of kind of gotten into a strange kind of mythological spiral. So one of the deepest stories in America comes from that founding moment. British Kurds come and they say, look, God has decided who's going to have predestination. God has decided who's going to heaven. We can't know that it, but chances are that if God loves you enough to send you to heaven, he's going to get you rich here on earth. And so gradually wealth in 17th century America becomes an emblem of potential salvation. That idea permeates America's side, permeates it across the race lines. I mean, there's a great flow of dollar. I don't know how deep we go into that kind of theology, but you know, it's it's it's across America. It's very powerful. Silicon Valley stands as an emblem of that idea that in fact God has decided that some people are saved and others are not. As long as you buy into the idea that wealth is some form of salvation, the spiritual and the commercial are aligned in that deep way. It's very hard to make cases for other things, other ways of being. That's triply true in the post-war war two era as the institutions of sociability begin to crumble in a variety of ways. Churches are declining, other places are declining. And it gets much harder to build a kind of society, kind of do things together, way across different lines that we just really need. And so that theology, commercial theology is everywhere. That would be my riff on it, but I don't know. I wonder if we can see some more pictures. We're looking at a few more pictures. Okay. All right. Yeah, let me run through. Okay. So here's a Melda who I, you know, when I was there for the time I was there for six weeks in 2017, I read the Airbnb. And I saw this woman coming out of a house to women with mops and buckets. And I went and spoke to them again in Spanish. And I just said, you know, I'm married with my own photographer. I'm working on a project about life in Silicon Valley. You want to tell me. And Melda said, yes. And she wrote down her number and I called her. And we met she. And again, she said, meet me at this gas station. She was in Redwood city. Meet me at this gas station. And I met her at the gas station and she got my car and she took me down this little street. And again, we didn't go into the house. We went into the trailer in the driveway where there were no, there's no rainwater. And we ended up going into the house where there were three generations of a family living. But I mean, so this became so common that I wasn't looking for desperation. But it became so common that every time I entered a space looking for a working person, but this was the living situation. So we, we spent a lot of time together when I was there. And we made this portrait in her trailer. This is Ravi and the Tommy. So we wanted to talk about the different, different, you know, engineers coming from all over the world to Silicon Valley. We don't, you know, who maybe are not part of the dominant narrative. And, you know, they belong to this community of immigrants from India that's been growing there since the 1980s. And one, and, and, you know, and they talked about they want to have a family. They're both pharmaceutical engineers. They went to, from India to the United States, many, many stops before they got to Silicon Valley. When they got there, they thought, we're not going to be able to lose a family here in this, you know, apartment for $3,000 a month. So in fact, yeah, 40% of the citizens of Silicon Valley were born in another country. And fewer than 50% speak English as their first language in the home, which is just a sort of interesting thing. It's sort of, it is sort of an island. And you have a sense of the percentage of undocumented people because when I asked the question about sustainability, I mean, sustainable for food. Does the system function in function, however it does, in part because there are undocumented people that if the situation becomes untenable for them, they either keep going, or they will even be replaced by more undocumented people. Yes. Is that a key part of the dynamic? I mean, I do not have stats on undocumented people. The poverty is robust. I mean, 14% of women, pregnant women do not have what would constitute sufficient food. 14% think about the pregnant women not having enough food. I can go down the line that this is not helpful. I do think the person, your point of very best point about persistent, the persistent availability of impoverished workers is right on point. So I was trying, but I did start to make these kinds of, Fred started calling them the interstitial pictures. Why use one syllable? I started to just sort of grasp at these scenes that were kind of, that I was seeing every day as I was driving up on the highway. And that was this funny kind of Judeo-Christian pushback from the community against what the new kind of sacred temples had become. And I just, uh-oh, what's happening? Oh, no, you're still, I'm still. It makes it look like you're not on Zoom. It's a different screen. Yeah, it's a different screen. No, this isn't it. Oh, I see. Now you're back. Zoom in. Zoom in, crashed. Yeah, looks like Fred, you're still on. I'm still on, but I don't have pictures to show. Fred, maybe you can make it while we're, yeah. It's interesting because you were basically telling the bigger story, but he tells the story really differently. Right. Like the actual meaning for the question, the subjection falls out. That's the iron cage. So I'm interested in your twists on it. Right. So I think that the, yeah, for Weber, the meaning of the search, the religious, We're just doing, we're just doing that. And I think that's fair. I think that's totally fair in this case. I do think that Silicon Valley is a much more religious place than anyone thinks. It's really actually interesting and settled by Catholics actually. Yeah. And it's still quite Catholic. But it's actually religiously quite diverse. I live on a street that's near a very main drag and the main drag was designed when the area was built to have a line of churches. And they're pretty cool, which is also clear. There's also a very strong, very conservative, evangelical, California evangelical style. Right. So, so I do think that's, I do think that's there, but you're absolutely right. I think that the fantasy of glittering, heavenly wealth permeates the valley. And you almost can't separate the glitter and the, the heavenliness from its religious roots. If you know the religious roots, you don't know that it's just like getting rich. Yeah, and the potential. Yeah, go for it. You can always make it. Yeah. Right. Fail fast, fail often. It only works if you have deep pockets. Oops. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. So this, you know, these things that keep, that keeps showing up, this is the Facebook bus. This is one of these unmarked blackout windowed buses that the companies send around to get their employees so that employees. So we started talking a lot, Fred and I started talking a lot about community health and what does community health mean. So when not only are you buying into, if you're, if you're wealthy, can you buy into this by yourself a bubble, but the employees are floating in these worlds that are not interacting. You're not a public bus employee. You're not standing at the bus stop with everybody else on market street in San Francisco. The bus is coming for you and you can get your haircut and you can get your teeth clean, all kinds of things happen on the campuses. The bus is coming to a public bus stop. Yeah. Because the company has made an arrangement with the state so that special, special buses can stop there and what is essentially a public resource. And this pattern of taking private advantage of public resources permeates the Valley and much of American life. So, you know, chat, Fred talks a lot about my upbringing and Brockton math, but I mean, it's, it's my feeling in my bones is we are enriched by being close proximity with one another all the time, whether it's in the market in schools at the bus stop, and what these companies are doing is taking the Valley and really stratifying it. And so people are not interacting. So they don't even are they're not even seeing the people who are working to support the companies that they're working for. So this is Richard, one of my all time favorite people. I had learned through some research that the AFL CIO was trying to organize at Tesla. And that the meetings were happening at a site of near ago and I got myself to do one of those meetings and was able to, you know, be present and I was introduced by the person who was doing the presentation which is about workplace safety and trying to tell the workers, you know, you've got rights, and how to identify abuses and how to speak up. And so I'm sitting at the table and I'm like, oh my God, Richard, you know, I just like have that. That's when my heart and everything is just like, Oh, God, I will be let me photograph him. And I talked to him recently and he said, remember how you were hoping that I would like that story. So I sat at this home meeting, please let this guy say yes to me. And so I was introduced to him. And so basically he had worked GM had all the same plan that Tesla took over, and he had lived his life as an American auto worker and he was making six figures when that plant shut down. And then Tesla comes in and he ends up on the floor making something like $18 an hour, 40 something $40,000 a year. And his and he ended up being he's in the news, you can look him up because he ended up being he started organizing he started working with the AFS, AFL CIO, and started to talk to workers about their rights and he was saying, I saw guys sleeping in their vans working 18 hours shifts blowing out their shoulders, sleeping in the van taking a shower in the locker room and come back and do it again he started to organize he gets fired. So Elon Musk was found in contempt, I mean, it was found to be an illegal firing that that violated the law about organizing being legal. So Elon appealed it something like three times, he was ordered to pay him back paying rain status job and as of now Richard is still not working. And what he said to me on the phone was, my back pay is like a penny to Tesla. He's not getting keeps appealing to send the message in Richard's view, not to organize to to. The image reveals an economic pattern that is permeating America right now and I think this is part of the work right companies like Tesla and others and that run those buses are trying to kind of build an economic world in which both thinking workers live up and cut off from anyone who works their bodies. And in universities, it's just told to us as the triumph of post industrialism, the triumph network society, the triumph of the space flows and the Manuel Castells idiom. And in point of fact, what happens is that while they're constructing this illusion of kind of the cloud floating simply and naturally above the world, they're pushing down super hard on workers. And in a very embodied, very driven, very directed way that takes full advantage of poverty, racial difference, all the social social schisms that actually are American. And it's, it's, it's really, really nasty and surfacing that surfacing the bodies of people seem really important to us. We talked a lot about that we talked a lot about getting bodies back in the mix. Is there not in the conversation. Well, man, that's all that's all I have. You know what, you know what I mean when that's what that's all I have is the conversations and the interactions with the actual people. You know, I'm not doing research. So, and that's all I bring. You know, it wasn't like I had a choice. Brenda live in a trailer outside Stanford's campus. And this is someone who had a drywalling business that he lost in 2008 and was in the crash and then was trying to keep things going and they were living in people sheds and then the authorities would come and they would get torn down and go to another friend's house and go to another friend's house so they took their savings and they bought this trailer and they live and so when you go to Stanford, you know that palm drive that incredible will perpendicular to that palm drive and all of the beautiful landscape is an entire world of trailers, which most of which house working people. I learned that there was a woman who worked in the Stanford bookstore who lived in one of those but I was never able to find her and that was something. But I did meet Abraham and Brenda and what happens with Stanford is that when there's an important football game like the homecoming game they order all the trailers to clear out. And so Abraham and Brenda you know go over to have a day or do something beautiful with the day, but can you imagine so this image control. Right Fred, I mean it's almost so amazing that I am thinking, is this real, even as I'm saying it to you now but they tolerated, because they have to consistent function, except when there's an image crisis. Well, we know that they do. I don't know if I can say that for sure but I know that on day of an important game. They are, they have been ordered to leave. So there's actually a real issue about this right now I live in Mountain View, and in Mountain View, the city has outlawed trailers on all city sponsored roads, all city roads. They're now they spent a million dollars putting up signs saying you know no trade, no parking of vehicles longer than X dimension here. This is Victor, this is mountain view. This is mountain Victor lives in one of these trailers here. So those are all gone now by right so far. Not done yet. Okay, that's fine. So, there are two exceptions to this rule in Mountain View and in Palo Alto. And that is for state owned roads. You can still park a trailer and stay still. So there's El Camino Real which runs from a full length of an insular, and that is a state owned road. And that's where all of these ones outside of Stanford are parked. They're all on El Camino Real. The other exception is by city, there are still a couple designated spots where people are fighting to stay and this road near Ring Store Park is one of them. And one of the reasons they're allowed to stay there is because it's the nice neighborhood. Right. So now you'll be thrilled to know that Mountain View is now creating an advertising campaign, Mountain View, an inclusive community. And this is absolutely nothing about class focuses exclusively on ethnic diversity, which allows them to focus exclusively on international tech workers. It's actually fascinating. It's completely fascinating. So this remains kind of invisibilized. And this is very much under threat. I mean these make these will go away as soon as the law suits work their way through the system. So what we kind of want to bring up is this, the threat does a lot of work on invisibility of pollution and how toxic. What are the numbers? Yeah, so pause for a second. Silicon Valley is actually the most polluted region in America that we don't talk about this. The Santa Clara County, one of the two counties that make up the valley has the single highest density of Superfund sites in America, worse than Love Canal. Superfund sites are sites left behind, polluted sites left behind by corporations where the corporation goes bankrupt, whereas otherwise unable to clean it up, the responsibility falls to the government. Those sites are ranked in the order of desperate need for repair. Superfund sites are the most desperately in need of repairs. This is like Love Canal. One of the first things you do when you buy a house in Silicon Valley is you get a Superfund site map online to make sure that you aren't near a pollution plume. And you really try to figure that out. We have houses in Mountain Dew, and we're going to talk about this in a second, that are built five feet off the ground. And they're advertised as having, you have one right there yet. This is Sunnyvale, the same thing. Yeah. So these houses are advertised in the Mountain Dew case as having above ground basements. This is a benefit to you. You don't have to go below the ground to store your stuff. Why? Well, they're built on top of things called TCE plumes. TCE is industrial solvent that flows through the ground and it off gasses. And it's toxic in a certain density as it rises up. And apparently the toxicity falls below the government mandated toxicity level for humans to live with it at three feet off the ground. So your basement is five feet. And this is, but this is a really expensive neighborhood. Yeah, that's true. I mean, the house is a little teeny bum below is a million, two million dollars. This is what it looks like with the remediation. Mark, whose mother worked in technology in the 70s and 80s before the regulation in place now were there. And she was working fusing, you know, when you go to the grocery store and you'd be the laser, she was fusing the glass to create that laser. And she was working with lead. She was working with molten lead and she had a miscarriage. And then she had had Mark who had severe disabilities and then she was driving around the valley and heard an ad for a law office on the car radio that said, were you working in technology during these years for a baby that needs these that needs this description. She was able to take it through the courts, but this is not uncommon for kids to be born with birth defects. Yes. Yeah, why don't we open up to Q&A and should I stop screen sharing. I'll leave it. I don't know. Just the option of like going back to images would be great. I'm happy either way, but we definitely like to answer questions. Yeah. Yeah. So I've been asking questions, but I'm just going to start with one of your. One of your key charts for thinking is through is mythology thinking about myths of perfect places. But as I was looking through the book of reading, I was thinking more about the possibility to opiate and I started getting started following right into Margaret Atwood which happens to me often and thinking about the kind of systems that she describes. And I thought of this line that is in handmade sailing also in the series, better never means better for everyone and always worse for some. And that's her, the way she conceptualized. She has a word used used opiate, which uses utopia and dystopia. It's not the most elegant word, but her point is that any utopia is dystopia. Because there's always someone who thinks that the system is amazing. It works really well for someone and it's a perfect world. Handmade sailing will be a dystopia to most readers, but there are characters in there. People can be, you know, capital punishment kicks in when people have an abortion or a form of abortion. This is a perfect world, which of course we're seeing. Right. So I'm just wondering to Royson, the concept of utopia, who used to be a failed utopia comes into play. And also in her world, it's very in perfectional worlds. There's intentionality. People are building structures that make everything better for them that they know makes it worse for others, but that's okay. Their better is the best, the most important better. And so there's an intentionality and say, where do we let the check trailers part? You know, what's the zoning issue here? How do we, you know, how do we make sure they're worse or you know, they're worse, but they want the peace? I wouldn't have believed in the intentionality argument until my wife and I went to a city council meeting about the trailers. It started at 6pm and there were all these women, all the working class families there, many Mexican Americans, some of them didn't speak English. All of them had kids, tons of kids, families, all their protests, the imminent pushing away of the trailer. And the meeting went on and celebrated the softball team and the high school and the new lawn on the track field. The time goes on. The parents start leaving together with the kids to bed. Finally, 11.30pm, we take up the issue of trailers and almost all the families are gone. And it was just incredibly clear at that moment to me that actually our city council worked very clearly for the tech firms and developers. I had not fully grok that. Now I will confess, right, so I, this is my very confession. I, one of the reasons I wanted to do this, one of the reasons I focused so much on mythology and my academic work is, you know, I'm disappointed. I fell in love as a 23 year old with the fantasy of a community of saints living in a brand new land. I fell in love with that fantasy. I think it's a fantasy that animates early America for, you know, rich white men. And I was in that category for sure of people who for whom this was built to work. And I was excruciatingly pained by the fact that it wasn't working. Not only for people who didn't look like me, but for everybody including. And I think that the thing that we have it now, the thing that gets me going in Silicon Valley is that this place is being offered as a utopia. The stories that we tell about what America ought to become. But it is precisely at this time in the deepest possible way. And it works for ever narrow slices of people. And there are absolute people that when you're talking about how like that people say this is the perfect world for me and I'm building it better for me. I know those absolutely. And for those people, these are not fully people on the screen. Right. And, and so as a sort of disappointed former member of that world. I want to figure out how to make the world better in a different way. That's my motivation pains me to know that. I think that's what I'm at. Can I ask a question? Yeah, sure. I guess I wonder, like, do you mean in order to emphasize in the sense of just to me that's what strikes me as the problem like, you know, we're expecting empathy through, like, even the most richest of billionaires. Stuck in the bubbles should be able to see people as people without feeling the pain. Yeah, it's great. I was like, I don't need to feel sometimes in fact, I shouldn't have to pretend empathy. Right, sure. Which is the problem before the act. Right, sure. So, so I have lots of thoughts on this. My first book was a book about traumatized combat events, who were able to do what they did in combat in Vietnam, because they have been trained not to see the end of this human beings. And I thought a long, long time ago, I think there are systems and incentives that reward folks for not seeing other folks. It's very hard to bring through that. So I'll give you an example from Facebook. Facebook surrounds the workers on the on the main floor with pictures of people of color of all kinds of all diverse orientations, everything more swear to others. And you might think you're a Facebook worker that you are acting as you do your Facebook work acting epithetically with these this array of imagine doubles. But in point of fact, you are mining your world, such as so that it can be mapped and monetized. And so, but are you going to bring regular folks from that space? I don't know. What do you call it? What capitalist regime? Well, that's the deal. I mean, doesn't that seem I always say Fred will shouldn't billionaires just give up some of the money and invest it back in the community like it doesn't seem that hard. All the money is being siphoned off sequestered off at the top. And then somebody like Jeff Bezos gets props for sending money to wherever he sends it. But I mean, so we're ending here on Constance, who's a teacher of Facebook, and she was driving three hours in. No, sorry. She's a teacher in Memo Park in Memo Park at a private school. And she was driving three hours into town to work or two hours in and two hours back and she had these little girls and they get home and they starving and she wouldn't be able to cook for them. She wasn't able to take a class. So Facebook builds teacher housing. And I think they dedicated something like a billion dollars to this pilot program for teacher housing, which is right near the campus. Now there are other issues because there are people in the neighborhood who feel that Facebook has really pushed out. It's in a predominantly black community. And so, you know, the picture of Geraldine and the church, you know, so there are other issues that way, but they build this housing and Constance is able now to live there. She can afford it. The rent is set at a percentage of her salary. She takes her 10 minutes to get to work and 10 minutes back. And she can quantify the ways in which her life has improved because of the time spent with her kids and being able to take a class. So it seems like more of this could work if the companies took that money and invested it back in the communities and felt what Freddie, we're talking about about the Fourth Army. You know, this note and exactly as you're saying, just ethically speaking, should a corporation that relies on the bodies that inhabit this community be responsible to the community health overall? And why? Or are we just going to the bottom line? I want to tie together. Very good. Very much one line on this. I want to tie together your question with Heather's comment. One of the things that people do to build utopias for themselves that exclude others is they create visual origins. They create ways of literally seeing one another. They structure those bones of seeing. I've written about this in other contexts, most of those combat comments, about how the veterans I studied were literally taught to see Vietnamese people in a very particular way to allow them to assault them. And it's very deliberate, very explicit, very much part of training and period. And one of the things that I think we've collectively our generation has seen is a marketing push from Silicon Valley led primarily by Apple, but other parts as well, to structure how we see our devices, how we see the tech world, how we do and do not see the workers that go into it. So, for example, when I was brought my first Apple Mac by the Stanford people, Stanford IT guys takes my hand, which is not something I'm doing in this world, but it takes my hand and he says, this is a new Mac. He rubs my hand. His, his touch life should be central centered on the back is the product of a regime of the structuring of our sensations such that he's, I know, you get a little will is right. Yeah, right. Yeah. This is a true story that we do not see all of the people who build that all the people who take it down the villages in which these things are burned to separate the elements of the soul China. None of that, what we see is the visual construction of sleekness smoothness. That's what we're trying to capture in that person. You know, so we don't see the shadows, shadows, people shadows on this very sleep world was too subtle. We needed something and said no, you know, very dear friend of mine. Oh, sorry. Well, I just want to say a dear friend of mine who's young photographer in Atlanta, she's from Montgomery, Alabama, young black woman is being approached by, I won't say which corporation right now to come and do advertising work for them, because she's got this young black millennial vibe going in her pictures, and that's what she cares about. She photographs the South she photographs our community, and they're trying to mine that aesthetic for their ad campaign. And I want her because she I want her to have that income, but I'm like, I don't care, they're using your five to pretend there's something and is it that's quite questionably, not what they are. I'm wondering if you guys want to sit in the chair and factory work in the sense that, for example, I see that, you know, it's what I need to bring the teachers near the schools. And most I need to delete the salary of factory workers. Like, my, my, my guess would be the factory factory work. There's a lot of that next time we try to unpack that. So I think that actually all workers are seen as unavailable to the valley. Actually, I think it's, and it's generally depicted as a question of time. We're coming for you. It's just a matter of time. And so I really do think that I'm going to have been a jurist for large grants for projects, some of which are about learning. And once I'm scared of you the most are projects that are about using AI to model and argue, you present yours, improve the lives of autistic children, deeply disturbing stuff. So I think that's everybody's thought of it. I think that what goes on in the valley is this, this story about some people are so special that we have to pay them a lot. And some people are so ordinary that we don't. And the specialness is constructed through a series, for example, enjoying Google where your specialist is through taking a very serious series of tests to find out whether you're a moving or you're doing right. Do the tests, the tests definitely solicit certain kinds of practices and footage of kinds of knowledge fair enough. But they also demand certain kinds of performance by favorite example that is with startups venture capitalists routinely seek out to talk about this. They don't seek out ideas that's good starting point to seek out people. They want people who are going to be the kind of people who will persevere and help their companies pivot as products fit what state when so the company ideas pivot, but the people step. What do those people look like? We're going to go to school. When I first talked to friends of Google is about 10 years ago, so what do you do? Oh, we have five schools. MIT Carnegie Mellon Stanford. So what we've got to do to get to the place where we can cut salaries, we've got to imagine that all of these pieces of work are in essence about helping people have better lives. It's all work. And it's no special to write AI code. Then it is to make a beautiful lunch to teach a beautiful class. And the only way you get away with paying a teacher 50,000 and a coder half a million is by pretending that her work is less complex, less important. And that's not me. And that's that's not a logical project. There's a visual component that we're trying to challenge. Go for it. So, I guess my question is that attractive top talent is not unique just to capitalists. It's also the American dream in the sense of like, we want the ideal immigrant. The immigrant is an international student who goes to MIT, but not the worker in, you know, and then you can see it through Harvard and MIT cursing through the means during what happened during the pandemic and who was being protected. Right. So I guess I'm trying to see if there are other institutions you can link this to that are outside. In the Institute of Technology, you know, I see top top itself is whole series of firms from different countries that are doing this is kind of a global thing. But the piece I want to distinguish is the distinction between the search for a particular skill search for particular kinds of people. So Canada has a very rigorous application process I've been exploring it right now for, you know, I've discovered that in fact they'll take older professors. Margaret Atwood. Well, you teach in Newfoundland. I am just anyone here. So they have a point system. It's all about skills. And they're very thoughtful about how they do that. I would say that in our country, we're very sloppy about how we do any of that, because we're looking for a certain kind of person. Pedigree. Not just pedigree, but also this kind of entrepreneurial person who fits within the unspoken foundational mythology of the nation. This is the kind of person who's going to innovate. Bring us new things. They are special. They are pre-selective. And they're pre-selection. They're pre-coordination. They're predestination. And they're already that kind of person in their home country. We need them here because this is the place that we destined to come. So I think there's a kind of really robust mythology in play there that's not about skills. We have a lot of difficulty having conversations about different skills and different kinds of workers we want in the country because we're so boxed in by this unspoken mythology. Let me say one thing about unspoken. I do a lot of work right now in the 70s and 80s on religious approaches to media technology in that period. We here at MIT may not think this was it. But Calvinism is very much alive in the United States. In the early 80s, one survey showed that 33% of Americans believed in the rapture. Take that in for the rapture. God is going to come down. Pick us up. Those who have been selected, take them to heaven and leave the rest behind. 3 out of 10 Americans believe this. So again, we may imagine that we're working in a world of ethical rationality. Certainly those of us who teach at Harvard or wherever to say rational choice is how people work. No, it's not. And we live in a world suffused with religion suffused with pathology far more than we know or address. We need to do that. Thank you. Yes. I just want to say that, you know, that, that just for the evaluation of different kinds of economics, which is very much what happens here in the community, right? Where school of humanities and social science people at the end of the life lesson, the new college of computing is the chemical and, you know, just the dip. So like we're doing the work we do is, you know, all the time and actually ace one. Clear matter of is there isn't even anybody from the humanities or arts on the search campaign for the president. So that is. So I will just say briefly that we have many of the same challenges at Stanford. And some of us inside the organization are fighting like crazy changes. And we see what happens. And I think for Mary Beth and just actually everything else something that something email, saying that, you know, one question to raise about the project is, you know, why we need to see the value of their eyes, but implicitly to question about the power still photography is invisible and a power that images or databases, as you put it, makes it hard to focus on. And I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about the power still. Now you might say, Well, they're for time, he's the best. You know, right, but as opposed to making films about this kind of material or as against property databases or what makes photography a smart tool to use for thinking through and exposing injustice. I mean, I'm not so sure it is always smart tool. And I think that photographers have hidden behind a notion of I'm going to make the better, the world a better place by exposing this injustice. Since the beginning of photography, but really photography can often make things worse by reinforcing the photographers own subjectivity certain stereotypes I mean photography has been a real agent of denigration since its inception of communities of people of color. I mean, I'm going to photograph this in a certain way, and then this work sort of justifies my own subjugation of the world. So, I mean that's out there, and that in this moment, especially in the hands of a white photographer, I think, is really important to be aware of and to push against. I mean, Fred and I have wonderful disagreements, big fights about about all this, but I mean so so I mean photography is my, the medium that I love, because I love the encounter, I love this moment of making something aesthetic. I love there being this object that stays still that can be returned to over time. And again, the installation work that I do is about these huge images being in a space that people do pass by over time, and have noted to me that the image stays the same that they change in relation to the image as they're thinking it through and imagining what are my own preconceptions about this person and when I learn about the person, how does that shift and how do I come to become fond of this image and not want it to leave the cityscape. I think I think a lot about. But but you know the fact that I love to make photography is enough justification because of the damage that I think photography has done in the world. And so one scholar that I think a lot about is Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, who teaches at Harvard who edited the vision and justice issue of aperture in 2017 and, you know, it's just a rockstar convening thinkers and artists and writers around these issues. And she really believes in the power of the aesthetic encounter to move a person beyond the limits of what they're seeing now. And so if you stand in front of a work of art, you know, I don't know if you've ever had the experience of standing in front of Mark Rothko and bursting into tears, I have, you know, there's something about standing in front of an image or or experiencing something that's beautiful formally that can open you up in a way that's not exactly intellectual and it's not exactly literal, but that's that's something. So I'm not claiming that these pictures are Rothkoesque, but that I try to get a viewer to a place that's elevated from the daily because in the day we're passing each other, and we're passing each other, and the light is bad. And the pole is sticking out of your head and bars and I'm hungry and I can't and I'm stuck on what you know. And so there's something about isolating this idea of a human being and presenting that in the most beautiful container I can create to try to to try to inspire a contemplative act on the part of. So it's right. Historical work, what I try to do is build literally like bowls into which people who don't have the time and the resources that I do to pick up the past can look and see the places that they come from. And that's really what I'm trying to do in the work and I get it wrong all the time. Maybe I thought I were a little different about this I was a journalist for a long time here in Boston 10 years and you know I know that I get it wrong every time. I get that that's like given, but I'm trying. I try a little more every time. And I'm okay with that I'm okay with the fact that I will not see the whole thing I will see it from my perspective my respect is a sort of a condition I just accept that I reserve the right to look at people who are different than me. I tell stories about them but try to listen respectfully while I do that, and I reserve the right to be told I'm wrong. You know that's that's all good. I'll say another thing just, which is, which is something that's a little peculiar about images, I love with it. First, good for photographs, what we're going to tour calls immutable mobiles. They are. A million times in the great work. Yeah. So they're not they're they're they're mobile things that don't change. They reward looking at again and again and again. So that's one power. Another power though this is where Mary Beth and I perhaps did for I think photographs have a power to be both and I think photographs taken for all purposes can often reveal things that we don't expect. And vice versa, both persons of photos taken for us as even everyone reasons can hurt people enormously. My favorite work in this regards by Joshua Gampson, he's a scholar of gay men and media. And he showed very persuasively that the gay men were all brought up with television talk shows in the early 70s to be made fun of, especially a feminine gay man. The way they were brought up shows made fun of audiences reacted very different solid in fact as human beings, and make fun of sense. We're actually game is to public participation for gay men and the spirits creates. And I thought that's a very powerful argument. It's a very interesting argument. And he makes it pretty persuasively over two books. So I think that we live in a world where our challenge is to see both. The thing about the, I mean I love film, you know I wouldn't, you know, those seven up films and all of that incredible work. I mean I like to think that this is a tiny contribution but right now we're going to talk about this in the next 24 hours but I'm in the conversation with Stanford archives and library about acquiring this work to be there for students 100 years from now to be able to say, What was it like for worker in the age of Zuckerberg. And so that really pleases me that long after I'm gone there's a document that is in the form of a still image and these narratives that will that will exist. Not yet. We're going to talk about that so. They want to acquire photos as objects. That's what we need to talk about, whether it's objects or as digital, right because that's a whole mother conversation also about whether we can hang banner images in the library for students to do their work. And so we're going to go into play about Silicon Valley as you might imagine a celebration of heroic inventors of a fair child, so many, so many dollars. And so we're the only person of color in the entire display right now is the Humber book. I haven't looked at the book so this maybe it's coming around. So this may have been absolutely the scope of the remit of what you're doing, but I love the idea of the training of the mythos by thinking about bodies and materiality. The thing I'm also struck by thinking about is any of us have visited enough campuses. And certainly come on MIT students like that. Also sort of a sense of historical points. As a knowledge worker. You know, it's one place I visited, these kind of quasi umbrellas, the fluorescent lights, where the sleeping bag shows the typical life. So I'm just curious if you thought about, I mean, of course, a lot of people do have a lot of fun, but no equivalence. But there is something materially embodied. I wonder if that if that was ever. I would love to photograph in there, but good luck. So this is this was actually a real problem for us. We were aware of that. And I've often thought that undergraduate life at MIT is perfect training for that. Part of what the undergraduate life at MIT is designed to do is to brutalize young folks so that they take those conditions. But you know, you know, what's the hackathon, but you know, and then I just spend with my friends. But we were not so I've gotten into tech firms, but only because I have friends who work there and I've gone on a personal basis and then turned it into work. We were totally unable to get very better there on any kind of formal photographing basis. I made a portrait of a woman at Google. And it was, yeah, you're right. It was like not great in there. And went and she and she retracted it because her higher ups found out that she let me in. And I don't think you love the value chain in their perception inside the firm. The companies become very aware of reputation issues. And, you know, various work is, is, I think, slated to be in our new computer science building. I'm very excited about it. But we are unable to hang banners on the wall. I think it's 40 by 40 for banners and has done that in every other project. We're unable to do that in Stanford because the buildings are trademarked. The buildings themselves are trademarked and it would be a brand violence. Just saying. So, but that's, but that's exactly the visual regime work I was talking about early. You know, we're doing work to make sure that those are not people but a brand violence. Like that's interesting. Well, I think we just hit with 628. Thank you. Did I answer your question? Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us right there. This is what compared to media studies is for.