March 25, 2020 • 19 mins
While working on the next season of Against the Rules coming later this spring, Michael Lewis has had some conversations that we didn’t want to hold. Conversations with people who are helping others through the Covid-19 crisis. We’ll hear from a software developer focused on helping the 40 million Americans on food assistance manage their benefits, as well as a teacher on the frontlines of the crisis in New York State. To help those in need, go to givedirectly.org/covid-19.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hi, It's Michael Lewis here. I'm nearly finished with
the next season of Against the Rules. It's like last
season in some ways, I'm talking with people about inequality
in American society and what it's doing to our idea
of fairness. But this time we'll be telling the story
(00:37):
through the lens of coaching and coaches, the edge that
coaches can give people, and who doesn't get that edge
in our society. As we all know, things are not
normal right now. That's why we're bringing you this extra
bonus episode. I guess I should first say I'm still
alive and so far disease free. But I've been doing
(00:58):
a lot of interviews lately with people who've dedicated their
careers to helping other people. This is an especially good
time to be talking to people like this, So you're
going to get to hear a couple of their conversations
right now. Once with someone you already met before in
last seasons Against the Rules, the teacher Katie Highland. She
happens to live in the containment zone that it's now
(01:19):
New Rochelle, New York, so she's been on lockdown more
than most of us in the United States first, though,
here's a guy whose work is also really relevant right now.
His name is Jimmy Chen, and he left behind a
fancy career in Silicon Valley to build an app, which
he's called fresh Ebt. It helps people on food stamps. Well,
(01:39):
it's actually formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
They're about forty million Americans who access this program. They
get funds once a month on a card that looks
more like a gift card than an ATM card, and
most of the state programs don't have an easy way
to let people know how much is left on their card.
They don't even know their balances, so it's hard to
(02:01):
budget and make smart decisions. That's a problem at any time,
but it's a huge problem right now with so much
food and secure in our economy. And Jimmy's got a solution. Hi,
this is Jimmy. Hey Jimmy, thanks for joining me. Hi, Michael, So,
are there peculiar anxieties that you're sort of seeing in
(02:21):
response as virus in the population that you serve? Well,
you know, we've seen a lot of people concerned about
not being able to purchase more toilet paper, and I
think that's a thing that you know, people are often
cracking jokes about in the general population, why are you
stocking up on toilet paper right now? But when we
talk to our users about that specific situation, they actually
(02:42):
have a very real need there. For a lot of
our users, they can't afford to purchase things like toilet
paper in bulk, and so they are purchasing toilet paper
every time they go grocery shopping or on a very
frequent cadence. And so if the grocery store is sold
out of toilet paper, that's a real problem because they
don't have a backup supply that they can use, and
so a lot of people are really worried about that.
(03:04):
So it's interesting because no one has explained to me
why that shelf and no other shelf in the grocery
stores that maybe the disinfectant shelf is empty. Yeah. I mean,
I don't know which way the flywheels started on this
particular one, but I know that for low income folks
who maybe haven't had the resources to go out and
stock up on toilet paper, it is a different level
(03:25):
of scary. Okay, so let me back up a minute.
Let's just start a little bit about you and what
you do like what your company is sure. So I'm
the founder and CEO of Propel. We're a technology company
that aims to help people who are low income the
United States to navigate safety net programs like the food
Stamp program and to improve their overall financial health. We
(03:46):
build a free smartphone app called the fresh Ebt app
that helps somebody who gets food stamp benefits or snap
benefits on an EBT card to see how much they
have left in benefits, but also to connect to a
variety of different social services to save money and to
find different ways that they can earn more cash. Are
you already seeing an uptick in users in response to
(04:10):
what's going on in the economy right now? We are.
We're seeing about thirty percent more usage each day than
we normally do, and to be clear, those are for
people who are already using fresh Ebt. So we have
also seen a lot of stats about how enrollment in
the food Stamp program has gone up dramatically over the
past week, but the way that the food Stamp program
(04:30):
is actually structured that those enrollments don't become actual cases
usually for about a month, and so we would see
that a month later as people enroll in the program.
So you're already saying it up. But what do you
imagine is going to happen over the next few months. Well,
I think there are a couple of different populations that
are worth thinking about here. The first are the people
(04:51):
that are already getting food stamps now. So you know,
there are forty million Americans prior to COVID and all
of this crazy pandemic stuff. There are forty million Americans
that we're already struggling to make ends meet in a
normal economy. These are the folks that are already using
the food stamp program. The majority of them are working
and have children and just trying to pay the bills.
(05:12):
So those are the people who use fresh EBT now,
and they're facing a very specific set of challenges as
this is kind of the financial shock that is really
putting them behind. There's a separate set of Americans that
we can also talk about, the people that are probably
one or two tiers of income higher than that and
maybe have a little bit of safetiscussion but not a ton,
and as a result of the economic shock here, they're
(05:35):
the ones who are newly applying for the program. So
I think those two groups are going to have different
types of outcomes but face some of the same challenges.
But how big is that kind of food stamp adjacent population. Well,
there's that popular stat that forty percent of Americans can
afford a four hundred dollars shock. Right now, these are
all of the Americans that are living paycheck to paycheck,
and it's not necessarily the case that those folks are
(05:57):
all very low income. You know, you can be making
seventy or eighty or ninety thousand dollars a year and
still be in that population of not being able to
afford a four hundred dollars shock. As we've spoken to
our user base about what past week has been like,
we have heard from people that eighty eight percent of
people who get food stamp benefits and we're working have
(06:18):
had their hours cut or lost their jobs entirely. And
of those eighty eight percent, the average amount in job
earnings that has been lost is five hundred dollars. So
when we talk about this four hundred dollars shock that
was going to send people over the cliff, that shock
has happened, right, So it makes what you do even
more important. Yeah, that's right, I think you know, broader
(06:39):
than Propel. You know, the reason I started Propel was
this notion that we have a safety net here in
the United States, that people who go through financial hardship
have a variety of resources provided by the public sector
and the private sector, and that those resources are aimed
to help people in financial need to get back on
their feet, and so more broadly, I think, you know,
this whole COVID nineteen mess is a real test of
(07:01):
our safety net in the United States of not just
programs like food stamps, or programs like Medicaid and unemployment
and so on that also have to pick up the
slack and are seeing tons of more traffic these days
as people are looking to these safety net programs to
help them to get through this really unusual time. How
long did you start the company. I started the company
about five and a half years ago. How did this happen? Well,
(07:23):
I grew up in a loving and supportive family that
also experienced a financial shock and had trouble putting food
on the table. I think, like most American families, we
were sort of on the edge financially, and then when
my dad lost his job when I was about ten,
you know, we had a few years of just really
tough financial times. I was fortunate to go to college
on a full scholarship on financial need and then spent
(07:45):
a few years working in different software companies in Silicon
Valley after I graduated from college. And one of the
things that just really struck me after spending years working
in Silicon Valley and these tech companies is just how
people solve the problems that they understand. And that's by
and large the reason why so many products that come
out of Silicon Valley are solving the problems of twenty
(08:06):
to thirty year old men. Yes, who live in cities
and have gone to college. And are you know there's
a demographic bias to the software that we create due
to the problems that tech entrepreneurs understand. Yeah, it's funny
to think of Silicon Valley as a geek problem solution factory. Exactly, exactly.
There are forty million people on food stamps. You went
out with some of them in New York City. I'm
(08:28):
just curious, when you're out kind of watching the way
the program works, what kind of insights do you glean?
What kind of things do you learn about people who
are living with very low income well, actually I went
to a food stamp office in Brooklyn to apply for
food stamps myself, and there were a number of things
that were surprising to me about that that I learned
(08:49):
from that particular trip. But the first one is that
just I walked into the food stamp office and here
in this office, this is back in twenty fourteen, there
were maybe a couple hundred people who were waiting in line,
and most people waiting in line were passing the time
the same way that most people do when they have
an hour to wait, which is they pull out a smartphone.
So here are lines of hundreds of people all waiting
(09:11):
in line to see a human case worker and fill
out a paper form. That is the same for everyone
passing the time with a smartphone in their hands that
has the ability to solve a lot of those bureaucratic
challenges for them. And so this was sort of raised
the initial question. It seemed like the problem was not
hardware that actually most low income Americans these days have
accessed to smartphones that can access the Internet. The problem
(09:32):
was software that those phones didn't seem to have the
software that was built for them that would actually address
their needs and was actually built for the SNAP program,
and to me, a large part of that was because
there was a blindness in Silicon Valley to the problems
that people in food stamps have. So walk me to
the point where you decide how to address the problem
in the way you've addressed the problem. So I was
(09:54):
spending time. You know, this is after we had already
chosen to start Propel. My co founder and I were
spending time in grocery stores in Philadelphia trying to learn
more about what it was like to go grocery shopping
with an EPT card and what was different about it.
And there is a woman we spoke to those Well,
the first thing that I do is I called a
phone number on the back of the card, and we said, okay,
can you call the phone number for us? She pulled
(10:15):
out her phone. She had the phone number for the
EBT card saved on speed dial, and then when the
automated voice started talking, she immediately, without having to look
at her card, typed in her EBT card number purely
for memory. And when we asked her how she was
able to do that, she said, well, I have to
call this phone number every time I go grocery shopping,
and so I've memorized my card number. We later found
(10:37):
out that this is probably the most commonly called phone
number in the United States, the one to call it
to check your balance on your EBT card. So, if
you were like, in this period we're about to go
through are going through, if you were advising the various
bureaucracies that interface with people who are landing in the
social safety net, like, what would you tell them? What
would you suggest? Well, I would first paint the picture
(11:00):
of what the past couple of weeks have been like
for the forty million Americans who get foodstamp benefits, and
what we've really heard from people over the past few days.
In particulars, it's clear that people are facing impossible choices.
I mentioned that eighty eight percent of people who get
food stamp benefits and are working have lost some amount
of wages, either because their hours have been cut or
(11:22):
because they've been laid off entirely. And so people are
dealing with a fairly unprecedented kind of a financial challenge
where they can't make ends meet based on their earned income.
You know, the other side of that challenge is that
at the same time, a lot of those families have
children and those kids were previously getting a free or
reduced priced school lunch, and those kids are now at home,
(11:44):
and you have to feed those kids in extra meal
each day. And so these are some of the challenges
that are really compounding. We've started to hear from our
users that you know, they've had to pick between food
for their kids or gas, or taking time to go
find a job, or people that are missing work because
of the hours at their employer and not having childcare
for their kids because their kids are home from school.
(12:05):
We heard a story pretty recently from someone who is
thinking about, you know, her money is super tight this month,
and so does she spend our money buying a dinner
for herself or buying formula for her child? It shows
formula for her child. I think the whole pandemic has
been anxiety inducing for everyone, regardless of your income and
regardless of your resource level. But for people that were
(12:27):
already struggling financially, I think it's just compounded and been
a really really challenging situation to go navigate. So the
food stamp program actually deposits each person's benefits on a
monthly cycle, and that is intentionally staggered throughout the month,
So not everyone gets their food stamps on the first
of the month. Oftentimes people will get their benefits on
the fifteenth or the twentieth, depending, you know, usually on
(12:48):
some fairly random thing like what's the last letter of
your first name or last digit of your social so
you're lined up like school students alphabetically. That's right, that's right.
We've heard from a variety of people who get food
stamp benefits about how scary it's been over the past
week as they've watched their neighbors and their friends go
out on these shopping trips to try to stock up
(13:10):
to purchase canned goods and whatever else they need, while
these folks who are still waiting for their benefits to
arrive don't have the purchasing power to make that same
shopping trip. And people are concerned about, well, when I
get my benefits in on the twenty second of the
month or something, are the stores going to have anything left?
They want to stockpile this like everybody else. But if
your name starts with sly last name starts with a W,
(13:32):
you're screwed, right, You've got to wait until it's yeah,
so we'll have a bunch of listeners, how would you
advise them to help if they want to help? Well,
you know, we actually just announced a partnership. So Give
Directly is a nonprofit that does cash transfers. They Give
Directly team is experienced in doing international cash transfers, primarily
(13:55):
to people in need throughout the world. They have done
a variety of programs in the United States as well,
usually in crisis situations. And so we've actually just announced
a partnership with them to help our users to get cash.
And so through the Give Directly partnership, we are trying
to identify people who use the fresh ebt app and
are currently validated as getting food stamp benefits. We're focused
(14:18):
on people who are really dealing with the hardest struggles
because of the pandemic and looking to help them to
get a cash infusion. So, if I want to give
money to give Directly so that people who are don't
have money have some money to spend, how do I
do it? What do I do? Go to their website
directly So the Give Directly team is fantastic. Their website
(14:40):
is at GiveDirectly dot org, give e d I, r
ect ly dot org, slash, covid, dash nineteen. Jimmy, thank
you so much for taking the time. It's like a
total joy to interview you, and I'm really glad you
figured out how to do what you're doing. Thank you
so much for having me on today. Next up, Life
(15:07):
in the Containment Zone. I've been checking in from time
to time with Katie Highland, the teacher we met in
season one. She was basically being abused by her student
(15:28):
loan servicer. You'll get to hear some new stuff about
her and how her life has changed when we get
to season two. But right now, Katie Highland has something
to teach us all because she lives in the New
York suburb of New Rochelle. It was one of the
first coronavirus containment zones in the United States. Who would
(15:49):
have fuck, Katie Highland that before we ever met in person,
we would both be quarantined. And it's just you can't
even make it up. You can't make it up. It's
the most amazing thing in New Rochelle is a containment zone.
What does that even? What does that mean? Like? What
effect did it have on your daily life? My kids teachers,
(16:11):
my personal my children's teachers have just been phenomenal in
you know, getting ready for this remote learning. None of
us were trained, you know, properly on how to do this.
We've all just figured it out in the last couple
of weeks and put it into put it into play.
Are you doing it through Zoom? So I'm not gonna
do zoom because my school in particular, we're not going
(16:34):
to do sort of the live feed with students We're
gonna do. I'm gonna do something called screen Castify, which
is basically going to capture, like record all of my
movements on my computer screen. So I'm going to basically
teach my class like I do every day. They're just
gonna hear my voice instead of seeing me. So I'm
gonna go through all my slides with them and have activities.
And we've already been using Google classrooms. So it's not
(16:57):
going to be a huge change for my students, but
I'm gonna miss them to hear that we might not
go back to school at all this year. That was
a really tough pill to swallow, not to see my
eighth not for them for them to not have a graduation,
you know, to miss all those sorts of things, and
to not have like a proper goodbye. There's so many emotions.
(17:18):
You know, you want to keep yourself safe, you want
to do the right thing for your profession. You miss
your students, but you want to be with your family
and stay home. So it's all very conflicting things that
are happening. I'm curious what happened in New Roshop. How
did they discover it was a hot zone. There was
one gentleman, a lawyer from New Rochelle, who was the
first person to test positive. And he actually, from the
(17:42):
reports that I heard, was really severe, was put in
a medically induced coma. He rode the Metro North to
work every day. He was a member at a temple.
And then other people from that temple started to test
positive for the virus. And that was a couple of
weeks back. So that's really how it originated, like in Westchester.
And then I just heard reports that he had woken
(18:04):
up from his coma and told his wife, I love you.
So I think everyone was really encouraged to hear that.
All right, Katie Hyland, go and save New Rochelle. We'll
do all right. Bye bye, all right bye. So that's
all I got right now. I will say this that
(18:25):
this one thing I've noticed about what's going on. We're
supposed to be in social isolation here in the San
Francisco area, and you're still allowed to wander around the streets,
and so now everybody's wandering around the streets. And I've
had more social interaction, though at a distance, with my
neighbors in the last twenty four hours than I had
the previous six months. So maybe we're all going to
get to know each other again. Anyway, I hope you're
(18:48):
all staying safe and well and sane, and thank you
for listening to our podcast. We'll be back soon.
Pushkin. Hi, It's Michael Lewis here. I'm nearly finished with
the next season of Against the Rules. It's like last
season in some ways, I'm talking with people about inequality
in American society and what it's doing to our idea
of fairness. But this time we'll be telling the story
(00:37):
through the lens of coaching and coaches, the edge that
coaches can give people, and who doesn't get that edge
in our society. As we all know, things are not
normal right now. That's why we're bringing you this extra
bonus episode. I guess I should first say I'm still
alive and so far disease free. But I've been doing
(00:58):
a lot of interviews lately with people who've dedicated their
careers to helping other people. This is an especially good
time to be talking to people like this, So you're
going to get to hear a couple of their conversations
right now. Once with someone you already met before in
last seasons Against the Rules, the teacher Katie Highland. She
happens to live in the containment zone that it's now
(01:19):
New Rochelle, New York, so she's been on lockdown more
than most of us in the United States first, though,
here's a guy whose work is also really relevant right now.
His name is Jimmy Chen, and he left behind a
fancy career in Silicon Valley to build an app, which
he's called fresh Ebt. It helps people on food stamps. Well,
(01:39):
it's actually formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
They're about forty million Americans who access this program. They
get funds once a month on a card that looks
more like a gift card than an ATM card, and
most of the state programs don't have an easy way
to let people know how much is left on their card.
They don't even know their balances, so it's hard to
(02:01):
budget and make smart decisions. That's a problem at any time,
but it's a huge problem right now with so much
food and secure in our economy. And Jimmy's got a solution. Hi,
this is Jimmy. Hey Jimmy, thanks for joining me. Hi, Michael, So,
are there peculiar anxieties that you're sort of seeing in
(02:21):
response as virus in the population that you serve? Well,
you know, we've seen a lot of people concerned about
not being able to purchase more toilet paper, and I
think that's a thing that you know, people are often
cracking jokes about in the general population, why are you
stocking up on toilet paper right now? But when we
talk to our users about that specific situation, they actually
(02:42):
have a very real need there. For a lot of
our users, they can't afford to purchase things like toilet
paper in bulk, and so they are purchasing toilet paper
every time they go grocery shopping or on a very
frequent cadence. And so if the grocery store is sold
out of toilet paper, that's a real problem because they
don't have a backup supply that they can use, and
so a lot of people are really worried about that.
(03:04):
So it's interesting because no one has explained to me
why that shelf and no other shelf in the grocery
stores that maybe the disinfectant shelf is empty. Yeah. I mean,
I don't know which way the flywheels started on this
particular one, but I know that for low income folks
who maybe haven't had the resources to go out and
stock up on toilet paper, it is a different level
(03:25):
of scary. Okay, so let me back up a minute.
Let's just start a little bit about you and what
you do like what your company is sure. So I'm
the founder and CEO of Propel. We're a technology company
that aims to help people who are low income the
United States to navigate safety net programs like the food
Stamp program and to improve their overall financial health. We
(03:46):
build a free smartphone app called the fresh Ebt app
that helps somebody who gets food stamp benefits or snap
benefits on an EBT card to see how much they
have left in benefits, but also to connect to a
variety of different social services to save money and to
find different ways that they can earn more cash. Are
you already seeing an uptick in users in response to
(04:10):
what's going on in the economy right now? We are.
We're seeing about thirty percent more usage each day than
we normally do, and to be clear, those are for
people who are already using fresh Ebt. So we have
also seen a lot of stats about how enrollment in
the food Stamp program has gone up dramatically over the
past week, but the way that the food Stamp program
(04:30):
is actually structured that those enrollments don't become actual cases
usually for about a month, and so we would see
that a month later as people enroll in the program.
So you're already saying it up. But what do you
imagine is going to happen over the next few months. Well,
I think there are a couple of different populations that
are worth thinking about here. The first are the people
(04:51):
that are already getting food stamps now. So you know,
there are forty million Americans prior to COVID and all
of this crazy pandemic stuff. There are forty million Americans
that we're already struggling to make ends meet in a
normal economy. These are the folks that are already using
the food stamp program. The majority of them are working
and have children and just trying to pay the bills.
(05:12):
So those are the people who use fresh EBT now,
and they're facing a very specific set of challenges as
this is kind of the financial shock that is really
putting them behind. There's a separate set of Americans that
we can also talk about, the people that are probably
one or two tiers of income higher than that and
maybe have a little bit of safetiscussion but not a ton,
and as a result of the economic shock here, they're
(05:35):
the ones who are newly applying for the program. So
I think those two groups are going to have different
types of outcomes but face some of the same challenges.
But how big is that kind of food stamp adjacent population. Well,
there's that popular stat that forty percent of Americans can
afford a four hundred dollars shock. Right now, these are
all of the Americans that are living paycheck to paycheck,
and it's not necessarily the case that those folks are
(05:57):
all very low income. You know, you can be making
seventy or eighty or ninety thousand dollars a year and
still be in that population of not being able to
afford a four hundred dollars shock. As we've spoken to
our user base about what past week has been like,
we have heard from people that eighty eight percent of
people who get food stamp benefits and we're working have
(06:18):
had their hours cut or lost their jobs entirely. And
of those eighty eight percent, the average amount in job
earnings that has been lost is five hundred dollars. So
when we talk about this four hundred dollars shock that
was going to send people over the cliff, that shock
has happened, right, So it makes what you do even
more important. Yeah, that's right, I think you know, broader
(06:39):
than Propel. You know, the reason I started Propel was
this notion that we have a safety net here in
the United States, that people who go through financial hardship
have a variety of resources provided by the public sector
and the private sector, and that those resources are aimed
to help people in financial need to get back on
their feet, and so more broadly, I think, you know,
this whole COVID nineteen mess is a real test of
(07:01):
our safety net in the United States of not just
programs like food stamps, or programs like Medicaid and unemployment
and so on that also have to pick up the
slack and are seeing tons of more traffic these days
as people are looking to these safety net programs to
help them to get through this really unusual time. How
long did you start the company. I started the company
about five and a half years ago. How did this happen? Well,
(07:23):
I grew up in a loving and supportive family that
also experienced a financial shock and had trouble putting food
on the table. I think, like most American families, we
were sort of on the edge financially, and then when
my dad lost his job when I was about ten,
you know, we had a few years of just really
tough financial times. I was fortunate to go to college
on a full scholarship on financial need and then spent
(07:45):
a few years working in different software companies in Silicon
Valley after I graduated from college. And one of the
things that just really struck me after spending years working
in Silicon Valley and these tech companies is just how
people solve the problems that they understand. And that's by
and large the reason why so many products that come
out of Silicon Valley are solving the problems of twenty
(08:06):
to thirty year old men. Yes, who live in cities
and have gone to college. And are you know there's
a demographic bias to the software that we create due
to the problems that tech entrepreneurs understand. Yeah, it's funny
to think of Silicon Valley as a geek problem solution factory. Exactly, exactly.
There are forty million people on food stamps. You went
out with some of them in New York City. I'm
(08:28):
just curious, when you're out kind of watching the way
the program works, what kind of insights do you glean?
What kind of things do you learn about people who
are living with very low income well, actually I went
to a food stamp office in Brooklyn to apply for
food stamps myself, and there were a number of things
that were surprising to me about that that I learned
(08:49):
from that particular trip. But the first one is that
just I walked into the food stamp office and here
in this office, this is back in twenty fourteen, there
were maybe a couple hundred people who were waiting in line,
and most people waiting in line were passing the time
the same way that most people do when they have
an hour to wait, which is they pull out a smartphone.
So here are lines of hundreds of people all waiting
(09:11):
in line to see a human case worker and fill
out a paper form. That is the same for everyone
passing the time with a smartphone in their hands that
has the ability to solve a lot of those bureaucratic
challenges for them. And so this was sort of raised
the initial question. It seemed like the problem was not
hardware that actually most low income Americans these days have
accessed to smartphones that can access the Internet. The problem
(09:32):
was software that those phones didn't seem to have the
software that was built for them that would actually address
their needs and was actually built for the SNAP program,
and to me, a large part of that was because
there was a blindness in Silicon Valley to the problems
that people in food stamps have. So walk me to
the point where you decide how to address the problem
in the way you've addressed the problem. So I was
(09:54):
spending time. You know, this is after we had already
chosen to start Propel. My co founder and I were
spending time in grocery stores in Philadelphia trying to learn
more about what it was like to go grocery shopping
with an EPT card and what was different about it.
And there is a woman we spoke to those Well,
the first thing that I do is I called a
phone number on the back of the card, and we said, okay,
can you call the phone number for us? She pulled
(10:15):
out her phone. She had the phone number for the
EBT card saved on speed dial, and then when the
automated voice started talking, she immediately, without having to look
at her card, typed in her EBT card number purely
for memory. And when we asked her how she was
able to do that, she said, well, I have to
call this phone number every time I go grocery shopping,
and so I've memorized my card number. We later found
(10:37):
out that this is probably the most commonly called phone
number in the United States, the one to call it
to check your balance on your EBT card. So, if
you were like, in this period we're about to go
through are going through, if you were advising the various
bureaucracies that interface with people who are landing in the
social safety net, like, what would you tell them? What
would you suggest? Well, I would first paint the picture
(11:00):
of what the past couple of weeks have been like
for the forty million Americans who get foodstamp benefits, and
what we've really heard from people over the past few days.
In particulars, it's clear that people are facing impossible choices.
I mentioned that eighty eight percent of people who get
food stamp benefits and are working have lost some amount
of wages, either because their hours have been cut or
(11:22):
because they've been laid off entirely. And so people are
dealing with a fairly unprecedented kind of a financial challenge
where they can't make ends meet based on their earned income.
You know, the other side of that challenge is that
at the same time, a lot of those families have
children and those kids were previously getting a free or
reduced priced school lunch, and those kids are now at home,
(11:44):
and you have to feed those kids in extra meal
each day. And so these are some of the challenges
that are really compounding. We've started to hear from our
users that you know, they've had to pick between food
for their kids or gas, or taking time to go
find a job, or people that are missing work because
of the hours at their employer and not having childcare
for their kids because their kids are home from school.
(12:05):
We heard a story pretty recently from someone who is
thinking about, you know, her money is super tight this month,
and so does she spend our money buying a dinner
for herself or buying formula for her child? It shows
formula for her child. I think the whole pandemic has
been anxiety inducing for everyone, regardless of your income and
regardless of your resource level. But for people that were
(12:27):
already struggling financially, I think it's just compounded and been
a really really challenging situation to go navigate. So the
food stamp program actually deposits each person's benefits on a
monthly cycle, and that is intentionally staggered throughout the month,
So not everyone gets their food stamps on the first
of the month. Oftentimes people will get their benefits on
the fifteenth or the twentieth, depending, you know, usually on
(12:48):
some fairly random thing like what's the last letter of
your first name or last digit of your social so
you're lined up like school students alphabetically. That's right, that's right.
We've heard from a variety of people who get food
stamp benefits about how scary it's been over the past
week as they've watched their neighbors and their friends go
out on these shopping trips to try to stock up
(13:10):
to purchase canned goods and whatever else they need, while
these folks who are still waiting for their benefits to
arrive don't have the purchasing power to make that same
shopping trip. And people are concerned about, well, when I
get my benefits in on the twenty second of the
month or something, are the stores going to have anything left?
They want to stockpile this like everybody else. But if
your name starts with sly last name starts with a W,
(13:32):
you're screwed, right, You've got to wait until it's yeah,
so we'll have a bunch of listeners, how would you
advise them to help if they want to help? Well,
you know, we actually just announced a partnership. So Give
Directly is a nonprofit that does cash transfers. They Give
Directly team is experienced in doing international cash transfers, primarily
(13:55):
to people in need throughout the world. They have done
a variety of programs in the United States as well,
usually in crisis situations. And so we've actually just announced
a partnership with them to help our users to get cash.
And so through the Give Directly partnership, we are trying
to identify people who use the fresh ebt app and
are currently validated as getting food stamp benefits. We're focused
(14:18):
on people who are really dealing with the hardest struggles
because of the pandemic and looking to help them to
get a cash infusion. So, if I want to give
money to give Directly so that people who are don't
have money have some money to spend, how do I
do it? What do I do? Go to their website
directly So the Give Directly team is fantastic. Their website
(14:40):
is at GiveDirectly dot org, give e d I, r
ect ly dot org, slash, covid, dash nineteen. Jimmy, thank
you so much for taking the time. It's like a
total joy to interview you, and I'm really glad you
figured out how to do what you're doing. Thank you
so much for having me on today. Next up, Life
(15:07):
in the Containment Zone. I've been checking in from time
to time with Katie Highland, the teacher we met in
season one. She was basically being abused by her student
(15:28):
loan servicer. You'll get to hear some new stuff about
her and how her life has changed when we get
to season two. But right now, Katie Highland has something
to teach us all because she lives in the New
York suburb of New Rochelle. It was one of the
first coronavirus containment zones in the United States. Who would
(15:49):
have fuck, Katie Highland that before we ever met in person,
we would both be quarantined. And it's just you can't
even make it up. You can't make it up. It's
the most amazing thing in New Rochelle is a containment zone.
What does that even? What does that mean? Like? What
effect did it have on your daily life? My kids teachers,
(16:11):
my personal my children's teachers have just been phenomenal in
you know, getting ready for this remote learning. None of
us were trained, you know, properly on how to do this.
We've all just figured it out in the last couple
of weeks and put it into put it into play.
Are you doing it through Zoom? So I'm not gonna
do zoom because my school in particular, we're not going
(16:34):
to do sort of the live feed with students We're
gonna do. I'm gonna do something called screen Castify, which
is basically going to capture, like record all of my
movements on my computer screen. So I'm going to basically
teach my class like I do every day. They're just
gonna hear my voice instead of seeing me. So I'm
gonna go through all my slides with them and have activities.
And we've already been using Google classrooms. So it's not
(16:57):
going to be a huge change for my students, but
I'm gonna miss them to hear that we might not
go back to school at all this year. That was
a really tough pill to swallow, not to see my
eighth not for them for them to not have a graduation,
you know, to miss all those sorts of things, and
to not have like a proper goodbye. There's so many emotions.
(17:18):
You know, you want to keep yourself safe, you want
to do the right thing for your profession. You miss
your students, but you want to be with your family
and stay home. So it's all very conflicting things that
are happening. I'm curious what happened in New Roshop. How
did they discover it was a hot zone. There was
one gentleman, a lawyer from New Rochelle, who was the
first person to test positive. And he actually, from the
(17:42):
reports that I heard, was really severe, was put in
a medically induced coma. He rode the Metro North to
work every day. He was a member at a temple.
And then other people from that temple started to test
positive for the virus. And that was a couple of
weeks back. So that's really how it originated, like in Westchester.
And then I just heard reports that he had woken
(18:04):
up from his coma and told his wife, I love you.
So I think everyone was really encouraged to hear that.
All right, Katie Hyland, go and save New Rochelle. We'll
do all right. Bye bye, all right bye. So that's
all I got right now. I will say this that
(18:25):
this one thing I've noticed about what's going on. We're
supposed to be in social isolation here in the San
Francisco area, and you're still allowed to wander around the streets,
and so now everybody's wandering around the streets. And I've
had more social interaction, though at a distance, with my
neighbors in the last twenty four hours than I had
the previous six months. So maybe we're all going to
get to know each other again. Anyway, I hope you're
(18:48):
all staying safe and well and sane, and thank you
for listening to our podcast. We'll be back soon.
Host
Michael Lewis
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