Ted Caplow, Life at the Intersection of Society and Technology

 

156. Ted Caplow

SPEAKERS

Will Bachman, Ted Caplow

 

Will Bachman  00:40

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report. I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Ted. Caplow, Ted, welcome to the show.

 

Ted Caplow  00:49

Thank you, will it’s, it’s a

 

Will Bachman  00:50

pleasure to be here. So Ted, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Ted Caplow  00:56

Thanks. My journey has been a little bit Serpentine, I think, since graduating from Harvard, I, you know, big picture. I graduated from Harvard with a degree in social science, and have had a career in engineering and entrepreneurship. So there, there were some terms along the way, and I think that the pattern of my life has largely been described as deviations From a direction I knew back in sixth grade that I was interested in science, and I remember we were assigned a two page paper about the solar system in sixth grade, and I wrote a 13 page paper, very proud of you know that all the planets, and you know lots of details about every planet, and you Know I was very close to my sixth grade math teacher, who saw something in me, I think, that other teachers hadn’t, and and, or at least pretended to. And he encouraged me. He gave me a calculator. And so I was, you know, from then on through high school, I was a nerd, and I always thought I’d do something in science. I really liked physics, and I got to Harvard. And when I got to Harvard, I tried to study physics, and I discovered that all the physics classes were at eight o’clock in the morning, and they met five days a week in the Science Center. And I would go to these classes half asleep and I wasn’t relating well to the other kids. The other kids were very directed and eager. I thought they were overeager, the professor would hand back the problem sets. He’d say, I’ve got your, you know, homeworks to return. And all these kids would jump up in this lecture hall and run down the aisle and form this kind of like, Scrum around the desk. And I was like, in the back row, like, blinking in shock. I was like, really? And, you know, I didn’t have the maturity to push through that, to be honest. And so I was too distracted by the fact that I could take an English seminar, you know, on Thursday afternoons for three hours at a professor’s house. You know, instead of going to the Science Center, you know, five days a week, at 8am I was enjoying life a lot, as I did throughout my time at Harvard, but I kind of fell off the path of science. Took up a few classes here and there. My father had been was still at that time, a professor of sociology, and I knew from him a lot of the intellectual background around social science. I found it interesting. I was very much kind of a jack of all trades. I think I was interested in humanities, so I fell into social science. I did a lot of theater at Harvard. A lot. It was something I loved that had started in high school and started right away at Harvard within a couple of weeks of arriving, that I was in a play. And so my time as an undergraduate was really, really pleasant, but not really rigorous. And when I got out of school, I thought I might go on in the theater, and I looked at conservatory programs. That was one. One stack on my desk was sort of all these theater programs. Another stack was urban plan. Planning, because I always thought I ought to get into something more back into something more technical. But I, you know, I didn’t have a science degree, I didn’t have any formal background, and I was like, well, you can sort of do urban planning starting from and you can be a social scientist, and, you know, Google an urban planner. Back in high school, I thought about being an architect at one point, but my dad took me to visit an architect friend, and they said, Well, how well can you draw? And I was like, I can’t draw very well, and this was just early enough technologically, when I was told, like, you can’t be an architect. Like, if you’re not an artist, you’re not going to be an architect. That seems preposterous today. And, you know, I now run an architecture firm, among other things, and I think I can sketch fine, but it’s not like that anymore. We have these things called computers. But back then, you know, CAD had not been foreseen. So I but urban planning anyway, that was one stack, because it was kind of that impulse. And then, and then I thought about joining the Peace Corps, and I went through half of that application process in my senior year. And, and this becomes sort of a formative story for me. I when you apply to the Peace Corps, at least back then they they assign you to a particular field, technical field, and then eventually they pick a place on the planet and all that. But before they pick a place on the planet that they would send you, they they sort of say, well, here’s you know what you could do there and and the only things that I was qualified to do was to either teach English or to keep bees, beekeeping. And this was because anybody who spoke and wrote English was qualified to teach English, and nobody was qualified for beekeeping. So they might as well teach me, you know, right? But I thought, you know, I was going to go and, you know, help wire solar panels, or fix tractors, or, you know, do something, grow crops, dig wells or something, yeah, do wells, right, build schools or something. Turns out, there were other young men and women all over the country who actually had those skills. And my social science degree, my Harvard education were good for beekeeping, so that was kind of what eye opening. And I decided not to do the Peace Corps, and I didn’t do any of the other things either. I went sailing because my father had a sabbatical that year, and he loves sailing, or loved sailing, and hatched this plan with myself and my older sister and one friend each, and my father and my stepmother, and the plan was to get a sailboat and a sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. And this we did. So I spent the last few months of college outfitting this sailboat down in Long Island, there’s a 47 foot sailboat, and shortly after graduation, like almost immediately, we we left, I think it was like the second week of June, and we got on this boat and we sailed away, and I lived on that boat for the next six Months, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. We stopped in the Azores for a couple weeks, continued over to Gibraltar and Spain, and then through the Mediterranean, and stopped a little bit in Sardinia, then down in Malta, which is just below Sicily. It’s incredible place. We’re in Malta for about a month because we had some mechanical problems, and we sailed across to Greece and traveled through Greece and the Greek islands, and ended up in Cyprus. And by then, it was getting a little bit cold, and we paused, and this was December of that year, and had a family meeting about whether we were going to continue around the world, which is like a five year, or go back to life. I. Um, my sister was two years older than me in between jobs. My my dad was my dad actually said, Hey, I have to go back, you know, to the university, but you guys can keep going. And we really almost did, but I felt, I think, a little bit guilty by then, I felt like I was kind of bailing out on adult life and that I should get back to to the real world. So I went back to New York at the end of 1992 and

 

Ted Caplow  10:41

my mom had an apartment in New York. She lived there part time, so I had a place to stay. And I had a few friends from Harvard, Harvard, Radcliffe dramatic club and the theater crowd, who were, you know, all of them were in New York, you know, trying to do their thing and and I kind of joined that reality for a few years, and I got a job through a family connection, through my aunt who knew this guy who was a old school off Broadway producer. And so I got a job on the production side of theater, and I worked for a theatrical producer. And we did a we had a old comedy called bo jest, and I, I had to go down at night and collect all the money from the box office, or count all the money in the box office. And then I had to call this guy every night and tell him exactly how much money we made, exactly how many tickets of each kind we we sold. And it was a really, really good kind of introduction to to working life. But it was not the magical experience that undergraduate theater was Surprise, surprise. And I did that for a while, and then I started my own little theatrical company where I was, again, kind of in a producing role, and teamed up with some folks that I met at Harvard, and we did, we did some weird interdisciplinary stuff, thinking it was very profound, where we combined theater and music and dance and kind of performance art pieces, and we did a few gigs around New York and some cabaret gigs on, I think it was 44th Street place called Don’t tell mama, which is like a piano bar and a couple others there.

 

Will Bachman  12:45

What are the names of some of the Harvard folks that you were with there?

 

Ted Caplow  12:51

Dave Edgar, who’s a class ahead of us. He’s a cellist, super, super talented, professional musician and and then Molly Bishop, who might be our class, or might be a class ahead, was directing. And I think most of the others, well, Christine Van Kipnis, who is in our class. And then I think most of the others were not Harvard, okay, and at this I should you know on the personal side, I through Christine, I met my first wife, so her younger sister, Pascal, thank goodness was my first wife. We got divorced about 10 years ago. I and she was a ballet dancer. So my whole life was theater New York, you know, kind of and trying to create something new. I that was kind of my first entrepreneurial venture. Was I eventually left this job for the Off Broadway producer where, where I learned a lot about a lot of things. I think about that time a lot, but I started my own company, and we started a little nonprofit, and we help a fundraiser, and we booked these gigs. It was great. It was very foolish from a business or financial standpoint. It’s not a you know, bunch of you know, bunch of young kids decide they’re gonna, like, create a new nonprofit theater company in New York. Is not a well, we should say it’s a tale as old as time, right? But that that lasted a few years and and then I started to feel that I should get back to a more technical field. I was really this whole period of my life, from the Peace Corps moment through the traveling and into the theater, I felt like I wasn’t doing my job, you know, doing my duty. And, you know, for me, that’s always been a very conflicted, conflicted kind of thing is, I envy the people who find that what they’re good at is the thing they love the most, and they figure that out at an early age. And you know, will you mentioned this earlier? Some people have a very linear path. You know, I always wanted to do this, and I did it, and it and it was great, and so I keep doing it. That is, that’s that’s not been my experience. You know, in my own life, for better, for worse, I always felt like, Oh, I’m good at science and in theory, that’s what I should be doing. And but I kept getting distracted by by these more humanistic things, or what I perceived as more humanistic things, and that, you know, that’s something that I hope that current generations will be more free of. I think in our generation, there, at least, I experienced in our generation a very kind of sharp dividing line between the hard science crowd or the engineering crowd and the humanities crowd. So, you know, I didn’t know, or if I knew, I didn’t know that I knew anyone in theater who was also in engineering. I’m sure they’re one or two or something, but, you know, it was kind of just like a totally different, yeah, I had friends whose roommates were engineers, and they worked all the time, and they their lives were just completely different. You know, they hung out in a science center cafe. And it’s something that I lamented a lot. I used to complain more about everything. And one of my complaints, my relatively few complaints, about Harvard, was, I was like, why are they segregating, you know, these kids so that they’re making it hard for me. You know, I either have to, you know, get up really early, and I’m a night owl, and I have to go to these classes and, you know, work really, really hard to have to take 20 half courses or something to be an engineer and only 13 to be a sociologist. I’m like, that’s not right. Like you’re, you’re boxing me out. Anyway. So I was, I was feeling like, I need to try that again, and I first tried to just dip my toe in the water. So I applied to a program at Princeton, at the Woodrow Wilson School that was a master’s program, but it was still on the policy side. It would have had some technical content, and I would have, you know, kind of gotten to do sustainable development stuff, which had always been an interest of mine since, since Harvard, actually, and traveling. And I thought, okay, I can go somewhere in the world, and they’ll train me, and I’ll be able to do something productive. I didn’t get in to the Woodrow Wilson School, but in the course of that application, I started talking to some folks at the engineering school, and they said, you know, why don’t you know? Why don’t you I probably prompted some of this, but anyway, I, my recollection is they said, Well, you know, why don’t you come do a PhD in engineering? And I was like, because I’m not qualified, you know, because I feel like, you know, I feel like I lost that chance earlier in life. But they said, no, no, we were we value your, you know, your different background. We have too many, you know, chocolate chip cookies here, and your oatmeal raisin cookie or what do you want to say, you know? But like they, you know, they wanted, at that time, an interdisciplinary student, and I had to take a lot of classes to bridge the gap, which I did before I applied. So I went to Columbia as a postgraduate, non degree student, which I didn’t know existed, but turned out to be one of the like, great bargains in education, where you can pretty much walk in off the street, or at least could then, and you could take Columbia classes as if you were an undergraduate, provided you just had a bachelor’s degree from somewhere. It wasn’t hard to do. Just filled out a one page application. So I did that. And I was a, essentially a 25 year old undergraduate at Columbia for a year at

 

Will Bachman  19:31

Columbia, taking all these engineering classes. Hopefully not in not an 8am hopefully,

 

Speaker 2  19:36

well, by then, I was like, hey, you know, I was, I was reconciled to it and and the surprise, I guess, for me, is that I did really, really well, and for the first time in my life, I was very focused and disciplined. It. In my in my academic life, and I’d always done fine as a student rises or B plus, you know, student sometimes a minus, but, but, you know, but it was always like a struggle. You know. I was a guy that, you know, was late to class, did his paper the last day. You know, I just kind of, but when I went to Columbia in this sort of very, very self generated, self motivated way. You know, I wasn’t in a program. I was just kind of making things happen one class at a time. I found that it was, it was impossible for me not to do all the work carefully. Because it was like, why am I here? You know, I put myself here.

 

Will Bachman  20:40

So now you were the kid who’s running down to get his exactly I was. I tried to be a little bit subtle about it, but

 

Ted Caplow  20:50

I was like, What do you mean? I got one question wrong on the homework. Like, you’re now the overeager kid. You have a little time and I go talk to the professor and like, No, I will say it’s, it’s really easy to do well as a 25 year old in that class full of like 21 year olds. So I had an advantage, but, but I did make friends with with a professor, and we stayed friends for many years, and that was all success. I did get into Princeton as a as a PhD student in engineering and and I, you know, went and took a lot of classes at Princeton, and I ended up, I ended up just doing a master’s there, really, for personal reasons. I was, at that time, I just gotten married, and my wife was working ballet dancer at New York City Ballet, so we couldn’t live in New Jersey, and so I was commuting. I had a little student apartment in Princeton, but I didn’t use it that often. I would, I would tend to, like, try to put my classes on certain days, and I would take New Jersey Transit. I have spent many, many hours in New Jersey Transit, but it was really like an hour and a half door to door, and it so two years was okay, but, but when I got to the end of the two years, or sort of almost to the end of the two years, I felt like I didn’t want to spend another three there to finish that PhD. And my advisor, who I, you know, have a great debt to, because I wouldn’t have ever, you know, gotten into that program without him, but he also, you know, turned out to be very, very intense, and the guys around them were very intense, and kind of, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a very collegial environment. It turned into a very, very solitary environment where, you know, these guys would sit in their office and work for hours and hours, and I’d sit in my office and work for hours and hours, and then they’d send me a memo, like, after a month, you know, maybe we can come up the stairs, we wouldn’t talk, I’d get, like, a written memo, you know, asking about my research, and then I would like write them a memo. And that was all a little bit hard to take, I guess. So I changed that into a master’s degree and and went off on another tangent for three years and, and this tangent was, was misery driven. So I that that experience had been so, you know, kind of unfun and hadn’t, hadn’t felt like it was coming from an emotional enough place for me, I worked on solar power. I like solar power. I wrote a 240 page master’s thesis. It’s a good piece of work. It’s fine. I made an extremely elaborate model, mostly using Excel macros, and I kind of invented a variation on a system that, you know, my advisors were very happy with and my committee was happy with, but I kind of felt like I spent a year, more than the year of my life writing a 250 page book that nobody ever read. And I was like, of course, they didn’t read like. I wouldn’t want to read it like. Why? Why would there are five guys that signed off on my committee, but I’m pretty sure none of them read more than the introduction the conclusion. And you know, why would they follow me through this labyrinth of this model I created. And so I thought, Okay, I need something more, more connected, again, to other people. So I and I done this big sailing trip that I mentioned. So I got a job for a yacht designer company called Sparkman Stevens in New York, which is kind of the granddaddy. Of old school yacht design firms had been around for 100 years and built all these beautiful wooden boats now. Now it’s more steel and aluminum fiberglass, but, but they were famous for all these old wooden boats. And I got a job as an engineer, because I’m like, Hey, I’ve got an engineering degree and and that was an interesting experience. And then kind of halfway along the way with that, I had a friend started a restaurant, and I started helping him with his restaurant, and I ended up running as a restaurant, and I spent about two and a half years in the restaurant business. And this, again, was an entrepreneurial effort that was very social, very human, tapped into that whole kind of side of my nature. Obviously, that was a pretty big detour. I wasn’t doing the cooking, but I was doing the kind of concepting. So in designing this space, the menu, it was a high end soup restaurant called Soma soup. It was on Broadway between 71st and 72nd in New York. And we we created the entire thing from scratch, and that was just around the time that Starbucks was taking off. And so we kind of thought of this as the Starbucks of soup, and Starbucks today kind of feels like a fast food restaurant somewhere, somewhere slightly north of McDonald’s, but, but back then in the coffee world, it was like, wow, this is a nice coffee shop, you know, like you could get a coffee in New York. And before that was like, you went into every corner daily or bodega and it was 60 cents, and they gave you, you know, they poured the drip coffee into a cup, and, you know, that was coffee. And then, you know, Starbucks was these nice stores, and you’d go and you’d spend, you know, crazy amounts of money, like two or $3 I think, and you’d wait, and I remember saying, Oh, they’re selling the weight. Like, what people want to do is they want to fetishize this drink, and they don’t want it right away. They want to stand there for 10 minutes and have somebody hand make it for them, and that that’s really what that brand is all about. I was like, it’s because I couldn’t believe it was the product. I’m like, Yeah, coffee, you know, always been kind of a coffee Philistine. So it’s, like, it’s, it’s the weight. So for soup, we thought, hey, we can do that too, like we can make soup, you know, a special product and and there were some other companies that started doing it at the same time, Hale and hardy soup. And were a couple other ones. And they those ones grew. And may some, you know, some form of those may still be around. We had ours for about two years. It was incredible learning experience. I really learned small business, what I hadn’t learned back in the in the theater. I really learned now. So you know, accounting, payroll, HR, everything, how to relate to a landlord, how to handle insurance, how to hire, how to fire, how to deal with knife fights in the kitchen. Oh, geez. How to deal with drunk Irish cooks. How to deal with, you know, really nice employees that you really liked. And then you got a noticing that there was a paternity suit, you know, and and you had to garnish the guy’s wages, and you call him in, be like, Listen, I’m sorry I got this letter. And he’d be like, I understand. And then next day, never saw him again, you know, because they have to move on to the next job. And, like, learned a lot about life for good or bad, good experience. And then I went back to after three years out of school, I went back and did an engineering PhD at Columbia. Finally, Oh, good. And again, found that once I got into that context, I was an incredibly hard worker in that I always surprised myself by like, how hard I worked academically for those graduate degrees in a way that I couldn’t, kind of put together as an undergraduate. I did quite well at Columbia with my PhD, I got a lot of fellowships, and I went through quite quickly, published a handful of papers, basically through a introductory chapter and a conclusion on either end, and that became my dissertation, and graduated, graduated PhD in engineering. In it was probably 2004 so 12 years after Harvard. And that’s, that’s kind of, you know, what it took for me to get educated. It’s it’s a long, long log and, and, you know, just That’s how long it took me. And then, you know, since then, it’s kind of chapter two, but

 

Ted Caplow  29:53

I’ve stayed

 

Ted Caplow  29:55

on a more technical side and continue to be an entrepreneur. And. But, but now, but I found that having an engineering degree and having a doctoral degree and having, you know, a lot of academic experience at three different institutions and real world career experience in really three more careers on top of that, you know, yacht design and restaurants and and the theater. You know, it’s given me a lot of ability to understand and function in different environments and and particularly environments, are kind of at the intersection of technology and society. And I the themes that kind of have stuck is that I, you know, I’ve always been interested in in human development, I think, which I now think of as like sustainable technology, or I thought, but, but if I go all the way back to college, when I took lots of classes and third world development, looked a lot at Africa, looked at the Middle East, looked at China, several classes about China and some about Africa, all in my kind of sociology degree was very like sustainable development focused. It was, it was not so domestic. It was very international. And that, you know, frustration of the Peace Corps that, like, I didn’t have any skills to contribute, was all kind of oriented around, you know, how do we, how do we live on this planet and in a better way? And you know, our lives have played out against the background of climate change concern, at least over the last 25 years.

 

Will Bachman  31:46

So tell us about your post PhD life. Dr Caplow, so

 

Ted Caplow  31:53

the first thing I did was try to run away from New York, because I never intended to spend too long in New York. I had already been there for about 12 years, so I this didn’t work. I didn’t escape yet, but, but my first plan was to start a laboratory of sorts in the Bahamas, where I was going to pursue research on sustainable technologies, law of renewable energy, and how that related to food production. So hydroponics. Hydroponics is cultivating vegetables in water, without soil, and it’s become a bit better known since the whole vertical farming thing took off. But it’s an ancient idea. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are thought to have been hydroponic and then it got revived during World War Two in the Pacific Theater, where they were the US military would would go into these sort of remote desert islands, if you will, atolls in the Pacific, and they would need to feed these troops Fresh, fresh produce. And so the military got interested in, well, how can I do that in a very efficient, high volume way? And they looked at hydroponics, and did some pilot work there, and then it was evolved bit by bit. But I got very interested in that technology, and I took a few classes, and I went out to Ohio and took a workshop for a few weeks, and visited some greenhouses, and I loved it, because it was kind of clean farming. And I knew I wasn’t a farmer. I grew up in rural Virginia, but I knew I wasn’t a farmer. I was a technology guy, and this was sort of high tech, and you could couple hydroponics with solar power and kind of create these standalone off grid food production facilities. And I thought had a lot of pedagogical value. And I also, you know, thought I could do research in that area, so I put together a plan to do those things in the Bahamas, and had a graduation party, or degree party after my PhD. And I remember some of my friends gave me like, a guidebook to the Bahamas. And like, like, this was actually what, at least, what I told everybody was going to do and and I’d been down there, and I a little bit already, and I went and spent a little bit more time. I was very inspired by something called the Island School on a Lutheran in the Bahamas. And I visited there a number of times over the years. And, you know, partly I didn’t go to the Bahamas, partly, because I think that what they were doing down there was already better than than anything I could really add to it, but, and, you know, I might, and my wife is still a dancer in New York, so this was she was reaching. Kind of the end of her career. We’re starting to think about children, but, but it wasn’t easy to get away. And long story short, I did that thing, but I did it on a barge in the Hudson River instead of in the Bahamas, and it’s called the Science Barge, and it was a hydroponic greenhouse. It still is. In fact, this project is ongoing, started in 2006 so it’s almost 20 years, and it’s a it’s a big steel box, giant steel shoe box called a deck barge. And and on that, we build a greenhouse and put a bunch of solar panels. We also had wind power and and a biofuels program, and we grow food in this greenhouse and recycle the the wastewater into something called a constructed wetland, and then and we added fish to the greenhouse. So we did aquaponics, which is when you grow fish next to hydroponics, and you use the fish waste to nourish the crops. You’re talking about a freshwater fish, in this case, like a carp or and you can do it with tilapia as well. And we had a little cycle where we would feed. Well, we’d compost food scraps, and then we grow worms in the compost, and we’d feed the worms to the fish, and then we take the fish poop and use it to nourish the plants. And then we would take the waste wastewater from the plants, would go through this constructed wetland, and then, you know, any of the crop or edible parts of the plants would go into the compost bin and would grow the worms. So we, you know, we had this, like kind of complete ecological cycle this, you know, it’s an education project. It, I had sort of thought this had pedagogical value. As I said all along, I was not prepared for a career in education, but when I went and talked to Hudson River Park trust, and of course, that conversation was like 15 conversations, because this wasn’t really that easy to do, but they said, Finally, yeah, you can, you can do your project in Hudson River Park, which meant I could do it at a pier sticking out into the Hudson River. I could dock my barge there. But they, they had two requirements. One of them is that we had to move every two months, and the other was that we had to be free and open to school children every day. And so this turned into very much an education project, and we developed those relationships with schools, and had the schools come and tour this project. We had a big opening. We got a ton of press for this thing. Still, the thing I’ve done that I’ve gotten the most media attention for, and I think it, I think it’s really just because the idea was so quirky and kind of symbolic, a bar just kind of a microcosm, and you take a little piece of the landscape, and you stick it in the city. So the juxtaposition of, you know, growing food, you know, on the Hudson River, right in Manhattan, was, was an intriguing thought, and that was the theme of the pedagogy, or my kind of standard introduction to visiting groups was, you know, think about where your food comes from. And you know, each each American has a food print, or you did back then of about three acres. I said, Well, you know, New York City is about 20 million people in the metro. So it’s like 60 million acres somewhere out there, pointing West. You know that that is dedicated just to feeding you. And think about all the inputs of water and fertilizer and all the waste streams, and you know the sunlight you need and the energy you need. You know where does that all come from? And by bringing a little piece of that into the city, it really unlocked a way to talk about sustainability and resources and and and connect people to not just nature, but also reality. For one of the better word, you know, and you live in a big city, you just kind of consume these resources that are piped into you.

 

Will Bachman  39:47

I just looked it up. It looks like it’s not just school groups. But am I correct that this thing is the Science Barge is currently up in Yonkers. It looks like and you can actually organize a group tour. For $250 i guess

 

Speaker 2  40:03

i Yes. So it is in Yonkers. I don’t run it anymore. So I ran that program for about three years, and then the moving every two months got to us. So we were we originally on Pier 84 I want to say. But we were direct. We were one peer away from the intrepid aircraft carrier. So either they were, they’re on 40 and I guess we were on 44 or something like that. And, and that was really neat, good photo ops. But then we had to move. So we were down at Chelsea Piers. We were over on the East River, and we ran this for like two seasons, because in the winter in New York, it was hard to and then I thought, we need a permanent home. So I kind of cast around and found this organization up in Yonkers called back then, was called groundwork Yonkers, and they had some support from New York Power Authority, I think, and so the barge went to Yonkers. And the great thing about that was it was a permanent birth. And the barge went to Yonkers, and I think 2009 or 10, I think it’s been there about 15 years and and they have kept it going. And, you know, had to upgrade a little bit here and there along the way, but, but basically it’s the same, same barge and but that wasn’t at all the end of the story. For me, the we had a lot of teachers come and a lot of schools come, and one group of parents and teachers from PS 333 in in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, got serious about trying to bring this program onto their school rooftop, which is something we, you know, kind of always, we talked a lot about, like, oh, you know, this is cultivating food in the city. And, you know, if you did this on every rooftop, it would be worth this and that and and, you know, and if you could do this on schools, that would be great. But, of course, it’s impossible to ever get permission. But with a champion on the inside, a group of parents that I started working with, we were able to build a greenhouse called the sunwork Center on the roof of PS, 333, and that was around 2010, and it continued from there. So we the same organization that built the barge, is a nonprofit I started called New York Sun works that is now very strong in in this area, in New York, we’re in over 300 schools. What?

 

Ted Caplow  42:44

Yeah, smokes, yeah. And, and

 

Ted Caplow  42:48

the the thing that really unlocked the expansion was we took the system that we’d done on this, like school roof greenhouse, which is a really, it’s a million and a half dollar project 15 years ago, and we scale it down to kind of a classroom scale, still using the hydroponics and and aquaponics and same, same kind of ideas, but in a much more modular unit. So it became a way to to take over an existing science lab and kind of turn it into a hydroponic science lab, and we developed a very extensive curriculum. So we have a curriculum that’s all the way K through 12, like a different set of lessons for each grade. I think we have two or 3000 pages of curriculum, hundreds of lessons, and started working with the Department of Education and the School Construction Authority on all of this, and it took a while, five or 10 years, but we became a vendor, essentially an approved vendor of equipment to schools and also of the curriculum. And, and it just grew, you know, one school to two to four to eight to, you know, and, and then we started getting support from elected officials, so we got some congressional money. And, and it’s just just grown up into a big thing, and I was, have been the chairman of the board of that for for most of that time, I was executive director, way back in the early days. I left New York in late 2009 and I moved to Miami, which is where I am today. And at that point i i became just a board chair, and it’s been led most this time by Manuela Zamora, who’s the current Executive Director of New York. Some works, and it’s something I’m. Extremely proud of and very happy with having been a part of, and our goal, particularly my goal, is to expand outside of New York, and that’s beginning to happen. We, we had our Not, not exactly. We were in New Jersey, a little bit. I think we might have been in Connecticut, in one school, but we started in Birmingham, Alabama, of all places, just a few months ago, opened six school greenhouses in Birmingham with some local partners. We’re expanding in upstate New York. And you know, we think this model has portability, really, anywhere across the country. And there’s been discussion about international work too, but we’re trying, trying to focus on one thing at a time, but it’s, it’s a it’s really an education tool. And we have talked about climate science more over the years than than initially. Initially, it was a lot about food and resources, and there are a lot of issues that kind of get packed into that. You know, we have food desert problems in New York City, so kind of depending on the context, you know, if it’s in the Bronx or parts of Brooklyn, you know, they were very keen to have anything related to food attached to a school, because they were like, there is no fresh food here. Kids don’t even know what a carrot or a cucumber looks like, or tomato, you know, fresh on the vine. And so for the kids to be able to go in and grow those things in their school is, you know, is really rewarding. And then, you know, it’s a window into the sciences. For me, the most important thing about New York Sun works is that it gets kids excited about hands on science, period. And it’s not they don’t even kind of know that it’s happening to them. You know, they’re playing in a greenhouse. You know, they’re feeding a worm to a fish, or they’re harvesting tomatoes that are measuring, you know, the size of their tomatoes, and comparing it to what nutrients they fed it. But they’re learning biology, they’re learning chemistry, they’re learning physics, they’re learning Earth Science, they’re even learning economics. We do an annual youth conference. It’s been at the Javits Center for the last few years, and and these kids come and and they give presentations on their research projects to kids from other schools that are also doing, you know, summers research projects. So that’s been, it’s been great. And I’ve been very blessed that I it’s kind of grown better without me, maybe, than it would have if I was too hands on. I’m just like the right amount of involvement. You know, I have to go to board meetings and Katie other events, and I give strategic direction, or I try to give strategic direction, they when they don’t always listen to me, which is probably wise, but, but it’s really grown on its own, which is, which is very satisfying. Out of that same kind of watershed Science Barge project also came a commercial company called Bright farms that was originally consultancy for the how you could put greenhouses on commercial buildings around the world. And really, before the real estate and financial disasters of 2007 2008 we were getting a lot of inquiries from like Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia and Europe, you know, where people had these very grand master plans, like in China, there was like, building entire cities, and they were like, Oh, we have to have food production. And we did a lot of design work, but very, very few paid commissions came out of that. And then every the economy kind of fell apart. And around that time, through a friend, I was introduced to a guy named Paul Lightfoot who came in and said, You know, I’m a business guy, and I want to, I want to try to make this into a viable business. Because we’d also had kind of developed this concept of putting a greenhouse on top of a grocery store and being like, Look, you got a big flat roof. Why don’t you grow vegetables up there and downstairs. And long story short, you know that we developed that company, the greenhouses are not on the roofs of grocery stores, but they’re but they’re local in the sense that they they’re not long distance shipping from most of the lettuce the United States comes from Southern California and Arizona right on the border there, where it’s like sunny all the time, and there’s a lot of food miles and freshness issues, a lot of food waste, a lot of problems with that. And so we, we started growing those things locally in greenhouses that initially were modest, and have. It’s gotten very large and bright forms. Has grown commercially. It’s now almost a nationwide brand. I can now finally get it in my supermarkets. Here in Miami, I can get it up and down the East Coast. They’re in 1000 retail locations. Probably there was, there’s another company called Gotham greens. These are all packaged salads brands now, Gotham greens also spun out of, out of, out of my office through a couple employees that I’d had on the Science Barge who, who also decided a little bit before Paul and I got started that they said, you know, this has been great TED, but we want to, we want to do this for real. And these young people spun off this company, Gotham greens, garage, Poirier and Jen Hilton and and has have also built a big, a big business. They’re partnered with whole foods, so that that was, that was cool on the commercial side, and I was on the board of that, and went through the whole kind of venture capital experience as a founder. It was, it’s not, not a completely rosy experience, but it was, it was a real learning experience for me and and I’m very proud of the company, but it it’s incredibly hard as a founder to maintain control of of your ideas and your company, and when you see these guys, you know, the Bill Gates, the Elon Musk, the Jonathan Wang, you know, like, when you see these guys running these tech companies and still owning, like, huge chunks of them and still, like, you know, in the driver’s seat, that’s incredible. Like that. That’s the exception to the rule, because even successful companies, you know, often succeed, you know, kind of down the road or by a sideways path and and it’s not always like the same, the same folks in the same positions who go the whole distance. And you know that that was kind of, and that’s, I’m not upset about that, because I had other things going on in my life. But long story short, I I got bought out several years ago on farms and then, and then the company, the company’s private. It was acquired by Cox, Cox enterprises. But there’s about, I don’t know exactly. It’s probably 202 100 $50 million who’s invested in that company over the years. It’s a pretty big,

 

Speaker 2  52:47

pretty big deal for them. And, you know, they’re just kind of, they’re, they’re, they’re a cool group, because they don’t mind owning an ag business. And an ag business just grows a little slower than a tech business, so they have the patience for that, which is good. But bright Farms is also something I’m proud of. I’m not, I’m still very involved with sun works. I’m not still very involved with bright farms, but, but all of that came out of came out of that crazy idea to put the Greenhouse on the barge, okay? And then, meanwhile, I went off to Florida, and I built a barge here, and it was great for couple years, but it got wrecked by a hurricane because we had those Yeah, I’m in New York and and around then, Which is 2018 let’s say about seven years ago, I decided that I needed a vacation from nonprofit. Essentially been a nonprofit almost, almost my entire working life, and certainly a lot of my entrepreneurial life. So we by that time, I was divorced and I wasn’t married yet, but, but I knew my my current wife and we decided to start a, essentially a sustainable design firm. So what I do today is, is architecture, development and construction of kind of cutting edge, sustainable, resilient homes. And we take things to an extreme, so to speak. It’s not, I mean, everybody is doing green homes these days, with lead, and, you know, really the success of the green building movement, but our approach is, is completely internally motivated. So we’re not, we’re not, we do lead and we do something go well, which is a healthy building standard, which has been great, but we’re not. You. Beginning by opening those manuals and saying, Well, what do I have to do? We it’s a convergent evolution thing where, you know, we have our philosophy about what’s wrong with the way we’re building and and our own ideas about how to fix it, which typically go way beyond what LEED wants you to do. And then we’re kind of like, well, hey, we might as well get this certification, because we’re doing all this stuff anyway. So our big obsessions are like sea level rise, durability, human health, fragile materials, toxins. We’re building without, without using drywall, which is the biggest kind of change. We had a personal experience of pipe exploding on Thanksgiving and soaking the area between the inside the wall in our townhouse, we didn’t tear it all apart. And, you know, I, like, had my hands, you know, full of this, like soggy drywall mush and gypsum everywhere, and fiberglass insulation and like, little puddles on the floor. And I’m like, This is ridiculous. I don’t want to live with all this stuff, like, why is all this stuff in my house? And so we start trying to design a house that didn’t have any of that. So we took away the drywall. We took away the wall, really, to and have cavity walls. Like, I don’t want to, I don’t want a hole inside my wall where, like, there’s leaks and mold and bugs, and I can’t ever see that until, like, it becomes a really big problem. I’m like, I don’t want that at all. So we use all, like, hard surfaces. We put plaster directly over the concrete. We use paneled walls where we can remove panels and see behind them all. Our plumbing is accessible. We don’t do air conditioning ducts because air conditioning ducts are terrifying. I could, I could go into any amount of detail on this stuff, and we’re trying to, I’m trying to, I’m writing a book about it and about our design approach. But it’s, it’s really the same theme I think I’ve had all along, of trying to find a better way to do things and and again, working where technology kind of interfaces with with people. I think I’m the opposite of that linear guy who’s knows what he’s doing and has known it all his life. I’m I’m trying to sometimes reconcile and understand what I’ve been doing. Because I, you know, I sort of, sort of make sense to me, but I don’t always know that it makes sense on the outside. And you you, yet you have to in context like this, you know, present yourself in a coherent way, right? And so I think for me, that’s about, about finding better ways to do things. It’s about technological innovation and and that’s what I done, and that’s what if, if I’m good at anything, it’s that’s, that’s what I’m good at making that happen, which is a has required a diverse skill set, right? So it’s like, you can have an idea but no way to make it happen, and you can be very good at business, but have no ideas. And I think I’ve kind of spent quite a long time developing the the skills to have an idea and make it happen.

 

Will Bachman  58:23

And who are the who are the customers of your design firm? Is it individual homeowners who want to build a home, or you build doing it for like, you know, developers who build 50 of these in a development like, where are your designs being built?

 

Speaker 2  58:39

Yeah, so right, right now we’re still at the one at a time phase. So we completed our first house about a year ago and sold it. These are spec house that we developed and then sold it on the open market. We have a house that’s halfway much bigger house that’s halfway through right now. That’s also a spec home. First house is, I mean, Miami is a crazy real estate market, right? So the little house was $2 million house. The house we’re working on now is a waterfront house, and it’s building north of, north of 12. Oh, yeah, it’s a valuable house. It’s really cool house. It’s elevated, so all our designs are elevated, like 10 or 12 feet above the grade, because we’re looking at at least 100 years. At least 100 years, a good house, I think should last 150 and we become very short sighted when we build. You know, people have a 30 year mortgage, and that’s what the bank cares about. Nobody cares about anything after that. But if, if we really think about what buildings mean culturally, like we value Long live buildings and Long live places, you know, whether it’s an Egyptian pyramid or whether it’s just. You know, I go down to Key West. See, you know, oldest houses in Key West are 200 years old. They’re built by ship captains, and that’s what makes that place special. You go to St Augustine, and the oldest house is 300 years old. And this is Florida, right? This is a young state, obviously, if you’re coming from New England, or, you know New York, you or you know, you’re very used to old, old buildings caring, meaning they’re sort of vessels by which culture is carried into the future and ideas, and plus, it’s more sustainable, right? So not having to knock stuff down, throw it out, rebuild it. So we really believe in longevity. And if you’re going to build for the long term, you have to elevate here in the southeast, not on very low land, or in South Florida, anyway. So, so elevation is a big signature. And then we think about all the other things you need to do. You know, how is the rebar going to hold up to 100 years? How’s the concrete going to hold up to 100 years? And and we make them very energy efficient, because you’re going to have a house around a long time, the energy that you use, the operational energy, is much more important than the embodied energy over long periods of time. So how efficient is a house to operate? We put solar panels on the houses. We take out all the drywall. We use very durable finishes inside. You can basically take a hose inside our house and spray everything and, you know, come back the next day and go on with your life, because all the finishes, everything’s kind of designed to be able to handle, handle it anyway. To answer your question that that’s, that’s also spec house. We have two more that are in permitting. Those are also spec houses. We have a we have one that with a client came to us. We have a commercial project, and then we have a low income housing project that we’re just getting started on, that we’re doing in partnership with a with a nonprofit. Ultimately, we want to take these ideas and and move them up and down the real estate value chain, if you will. So it’s not just high end luxury. You know, sustainability and resiliency should not be a luxury. But at the same time, with with any technology development, the first few prototypes, if you will, are expensive, and so things often come in at the at the high end, Tesla, same thing, right? The first Tesla was like the one sports car. Body was exotically priced. It was not for everybody. And you know that company is continually tried to, like mass market their products. Same thing for us. We Yeah, we’d love to work with with developers who are just large scale, right? So those kinds of partnerships are still evolving. I I got back from California last week where I give a talk at Green build about this, met some people, and, you know, one thing may may lead to another, but at this point, I’m really focused on the quality of like each individual product or design and That and the innovation in it, because I feel, with a very durable, long, lasting creation, I don’t have to do it 100 times, right? Like, it’d be nice, you know, I’d always like to scale but, but this isn’t a business that we’re like, primarily worried about scaling and replication. Yet we’re, we’re really focused on proof of not just one concept, but like lots of concepts. It’s kind of like a collection of ideas and practices that that I’m not going to say, been thinking about for 30 years, but it’s not, it’s not just like a one off quick thing, either. It’s kind of like houses are very complex, like, I’ve learned a lot about the science part is very complex too, but it’s like a set of parts. A house has to do all those things and be a home, you know, for someone so it has to be esthetically successful. It has to, has to be pleasant to live in, day in and day out. It’s got to have lots of light. It’s got to have the right temperatures and air. And so you got all these engineering systems. You know, when you think about it houses, it’s like a body, right? You’ve got the electricity coming in and the water coming in and and you’ve got air circulating around. So there’s, like, these fluids, and then you have these organ systems. You have a kitchen where food’s getting made. You know, you have, you have the living room that has to be comfortable, you you know, you have to have ways to get in and out got you have to interface with your car. And you have, you know, so we have electric charging, and you know, have to be ready for when the car becomes the battery which is going to there’s a lot. And then all the materiality, of course, like and sifting through the jungle of labeling around non toxic building materials and so on. So. So that some of this is new. I’ve been doing that six years or so, so it’s not brand new, but, you know, it wasn’t part of my for education. But the same time, I find that my background in engineering is is something that’s useful all the time. You know, I may not, I may not sit down and, you know, cover the page with calculations every day. I love it. On those days when I’m actually like, you know, get to do some real engineering, but, but every day it’s, it’s technical literacy is very important in this field. You know, if someone says, oh, this, you know, flooring product is, is non toxic, I’m like, Well, what does that mean? You know, what’s it made out of? Show me the, you know, show me the report. And let’s figure out what these things really are. And kind of creates a whole world unto itself too. Like, there’s, you know, lots, lots to learn about all these things. But what I like about this, compared to my other work, is the longevity aspect. You know, as I get older, I think, well, if I can build some things that are really innovative and special, then then they’ll out live me. I’m also doing some technology stuff on the side, off and on. It’s not just the buildings. There’s also a lot of technologies associated with the building. So I’m working on a patent for an air conditioner, and I have another another couple sort of IP projects like that in the works.

 

Will Bachman  1:06:32

So Ted, tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

 

Speaker 2  1:06:38

You told me this question was going question was coming. So I’ve had, I’ve had like an hour to think about it.

 

Speaker 2  1:06:49

So Harvard as a whole was a very positive experience. One, one example I think I point to, but it’s hard to say that it directly leads to what I do now is I had eel Wilson for evolutionary biology, probably freshman year or the next year, and

 

Speaker 3  1:07:16

I, I

 

Speaker 2  1:07:20

don’t think I appreciated the Time. I mean, none of you know we, none of us did right like, what an incredible talent and researcher he was in that field, and it’s always been gratifying to read some of his books, which I do now and then, all through life, on on human nature, is one that I think of a lot, which is a short little book where he kind of explains a bunch of things about why we are the way we are, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, and and to think that this guy was, like, grading my papers like he was, he was just the teacher, you know. I mean, it was a relatively large lecture, but, but still, it was the O Wilson, and that’s really cool. I took a, I took a poetry class with Sheamus Haney. That was a great experience. That was a great experience because I got into it by application. You know, again, I hear I was this supposed to be science kid who kind of wobbled around in humanities. And I was like, Well, I wrote a few weird poems. Let me just send these in. And got into that class with Seamus Haney and that, that was a great experience. Those, those two things stick out. I took, I don’t remember the names that professors, unfortunately, but I took a class on China, and I took another class on colonial Africa. And those were very eye opening, because particularly the the African class was taught by an African guy, and again, I don’t remember his name, but, but the perspective and the authenticity, I think, is what really stood out at the theme through all of those classes. I think that stuck with me is that the professors weren’t just teaching to be cliche, you know, they had lived these things. You know. They in Wilson’s case, you know, he had done the research he was teaching us about some cases, you know. And this other guy had, like, grown up in colonial Africa, and, you know, that education system, and then become a professor, and then, you know, come to Harvard to teach us about what it was really like, you know. And I think that that. Of experience was was powerful, and I did a lot of acting, and I also took some classes on Shakespeare from the actors at the American Repertory Theater. And again, you know, they were actors first and teachers second. And I think I have a lot of respect for professional teachers, don’t get me wrong. But I think where you have someone who is, you know, first and foremost, a practitioner of lived experience in a field, and then they go into the classroom to to convey that knowledge, you know, to another generation. I think that’s very powerful.

 

Will Bachman  1:10:36

Well, Ted, you’ve had a lot of journey in your journey, I got to say, where can listeners find your architecture firm, your sustainable design firm? Where would you point people online if they want to find out more

 

Speaker 2  1:10:51

about what you’re doing? Thanks. Yeah, I’m not hard to find. My firm is capital monzano.com my name is C, A, P, L, O, W, my wife and partner. Her name is Manzano, M, a N, Z, a n, o. You can find me on Wikipedia. You can find me on LinkedIn, and and I love, I love getting those are the best emails in the box. Right when they’re like, not junk, they look, you know, and you’re like, oh, there’s a real person who has a question or is interested. So happy to have people reach out. I apologize for the very long monolog. I kept wanting to stop and I kept realizing I hadn’t reached the present day yet. So my life has not been terribly linear, but, but it’s it’s been creative, and I’m very thankful for that.

 

Will Bachman  1:11:51

Ted, these are conversations are always the highlight of my week. And this one in particular was fascinating to hear about your journey from the the kid who you know, ended up moving out of science classes to the PhD in engineering and building these amazing companies and organizations. Thank you so much for joining today.

 

Ted Caplow  1:12:12

Well, thank you. It’s an honor and a pleasure, and you know, I look forward to continuing to watch this series grow. It’s great project. You.