A new What If Instead? conversation with Lucas Rockett Gutterman on doing in order to change our understanding of the world.
Guest: Lucas Rockett Gutterman, Designed to Last campaign director, PIRG
At PIRG: https://pirg.org/people/lucas-gutterman/
Hosts:
Alejandro Juárez Crawford
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford
Miriam Plavin-Masterman
On ITSPmagazine 👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
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Episode Introduction
We often think we understand the world better than others thanks to all the articles we read online, but Lucas Rockett Gutterman believes that true understanding comes not from consumption, but from doing—especially when you do it alongside others. Tune in to hear how doing might change your perspective on the world.
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Resources
"Why Google announced Chromebooks will last for 10 years": https://pirg.org/articles/why-google-announced-chromebooks-will-last-for-10-years/
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Episode Sponsors
Are you interested in sponsoring an ITSPmagazine Channel?
👉 https://www.itspmagazine.com/sponsor-the-itspmagazine-podcast-network
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For more podcast stories from What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman, visit: https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/alejandro-juarez-crawford and https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/miriam-plavin-masterman
Changing My Understanding Of The World By Just Doing It | A Conversation With Lucas Rockett Gutterman | What If Instead? Podcast with Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Miriam Plavin-Masterman
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (00:00)
My niece is applying to colleges this year. It's got me thinking about the college essay idea that you're supposed to define what your life's about and all the important things you're gonna do a 17 -year -old is quite know that such questions of my life were, I hated those questions.
And even when I didn't know enough to hate them, how would I know the answers?
until I tried some things. It's only more recently that I'm more comfortable answering those questions because things have acquired a shape of their own. Now, Lucas, I know that you sometimes need to open up rooms of young
and that sometimes asking them to define themselves in less serious and weighty ways can be effective. I'm curious, really? Does it open them up and is it just the relief that nobody's asking them their college essay question?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (00:58)
Yeah, no one wants to be asked their college essay question. And then also people are sick of introducing themselves with their major in their year for the 3 ,000th time in college. So that's a balance. We want to use fun intro questions lighten the tension in the room, but also that actually tell you something about the person. So on the one hand, we have more serious ones, like maybe, I don't know.
your first political experience or something that's kind of interesting but also really fun ones like which sandwich would you be if you could be any what was your first screen name or something like that like that actually just gets people talking and fighting and sort of arguing and like they've already become a group because they have to
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:32)
Hmm. Hmm.
first of all, does everyone have a sandwich they love? mean,
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (01:42)
No, they definitely don't, which is part of the fun of the question. They actually sort of have to discuss it and the game is just how do you answer a question that doesn't actually have an answer.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (01:46)
Ha ha.
That game could get interesting internationally too.
is such a powerful thing for not just culturally but elementally, So what kinds of answers do you get that open people up and why do those questions, like how do they become a group if you're answering these questions? I'm so curious.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (02:11)
Yeah, I mean, I think, well, for the kind of normal questions, like first political experience or something like that, you you hear really interesting stories of just how diverse people's experience politics is. People have really different definitions, right? They might talk about how they went to a voting booth with their parents. They might talk about seeing something on TV. They might say, well, like, my first political experience is coming to this meeting right And then for the silly there really is no
answer, right? So what sort of sandwich is it? Is it sandwich you like? Is it the sandwich that has the qualities that you would most, don't know, represent or something? And kind of become a group because there's better and worse breakfast sandwiches, not one that you are. Yeah, sorry, I know. But they're all good answers as long as people have an answer. But it's not clear how to answer the question, right? So they actually have to
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (02:49)
What do mean there's no answer? Like there are better and worse breakfasts.
sandwich relativism is, I don't know.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (02:57)
You
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (03:05)
people are sort of going back and forth and they're asking people questions and someone sort of dares to be the first person to actually say what their answer is and that sort of then maybe inspires other people who have a reaction to it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (03:15)
So you know we gotta know, right? I mean, what if instead is all about enabling lots of people to ask, you know, what if instead of this, I had that, but, or I could make that possible, but about you? What's your first screen name? And give us the absolute data -driven answer to this breakfast question, Lucas. This is really serious now.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (03:39)
Yeah, yeah, this is very serious. My first screen name on AIM was Toucan because I liked Toucans and I grew up in New I'm kind of worried now some Googles that like what they're going to find, but hopefully everything is
Mim Plavin-Masterman (03:52)
You
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (03:53)
Yeah,
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (03:54)
There's obviously a best answer to the breakfast sandwich question, which is a bacon, egg and cheese. But I am sort of saying that also is like the New York City
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (04:01)
that's definitely a culturally specific one. So what about you, masterman?
Mim Plavin-Masterman (04:01)
Okay.
I kind of think my first screen name was like, Mimsy two 50. My dad calls me Mimsy and he has since I was like tiny. and he'll sign it like, you know, his led, like whatever. So yeah, so it's like dear Mimsy, you know, whatever. So I think it was Mimsy two 50. Cause that was the street address for my parents' house where I grew up. breakfast sandwich. I feel like you guys are going to hate this
but I have to go plain bagel, butter, lots of lox, half a bagel, all the lox, and butter, not cream cheese.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (04:38)
Who would hate that answer?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (04:38)
Wait, toasted or not
Mim Plavin-Masterman (04:40)
It's probably toasted. But like my sister still makes fun of me. She's like plain bagels. I'm like, yes, I want a plain bagel because if you can't do plain, miss me with the whatever that other stuff is. yeah. Yeah. So you hit this. Yeah. It's like, can you make a good vanilla ice cream? You can hide a lot of stuff in chocolate, but can you make a good vanilla? Can you make a good plain bagel? Thanks.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (04:42)
Toasted with butter.
So the other stuff is compensatory, right?
Well, that's our show folks.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (05:06)
Hahaha
Mim Plavin-Masterman (05:07)
This is great. Lucas, a pleasure to have you on. No. Okay, Crawford, you're not missing. You're not skipping out of this. What's your username, avatar, whatever, and then sandwich.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (05:18)
I'm not a plain bagel man.
Not a plain, big old kind of man, right?
my favorite breakfast in the world is if there are leftover enchiladas or pizza from Sal's and Carmine's.
and they're left over and I walk to the fridge and I eat them.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (05:44)
pizza that is a crime
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (05:47)
I think it's...
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (05:47)
colpisa is delicious.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (05:50)
It's so beautiful because these are foods, first of all, that almost never have leftovers because they're perfect foods, right? My great -grandmothers and grandmothers and mothers and brothers, like their recipe for enchiladas. I remember Christmas parties when I was a boy and I decided to be vegetarian when I was three years old and no one else in my family was and I was very, very young.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (05:52)
Yeah.
good point.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (06:15)
probably most annoying kid you can imagine. I was quite militant. I got a lot of militancy about that stuff out of my system early. But my grandmother, when everyone else is having turkey or something like that, would make me a plate. And I made the mistake one Christmas and she was one of eight. So it was like all these people singing Chicano songs. And I walked out with enchiladas and silence in all eyes on my plate. Where did you get that?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (06:20)
Hmm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (06:45)
Right? Of course, then I had to share. was really awful Christmas.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (06:45)
You
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (06:51)
So that's my answer. I mean, there's other ones. I love blueberry pancakes. The way my grandfather on the other side made them, there were never enough of them. I think there's a theme in my answer that there's a scarcity issue here, right? leftovers are such a rare thing. Those pancakes, he made them small. He made them slowly, placing each blueberry.
brother and I were the largest human beings to have ever been in a family by far. We were these eating machines and those pancakes would be made one at a time at the dining table. And I have so much weird how much I wanted my next pancake for the 10 minutes till I got it. The blueberry pancakes, have recently made for guests.
My mother -in -law from Turkey loves my blueberry pancakes and she's just this consummate chef, but I'm very proud that I can bring that to the mix.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (07:51)
It doesn't sound like scarcity, it sounds like you had just the right Right? There just wasn't left at first.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (07:57)
Well, there's a thing, right, where you, there was something that you didn't have enough of at a certain age, right? I remember watching the cartoon versions of Marvel Comics heroes and wishing there were live action films about Wolverine or something like that. And now, and we're losing a huge portion of our, I am the re -ratings for this podcast, I can go down when I say this, but now I'm just like, no.
not another Marvel movie. But at the time, I dreamt of them. So I think why are those Marvel movies always get like an 8 .0, 8 plus collective rating, right? It's because I think people at a certain time wished there were superhero movies that there weren't and then got to make them. This is a private theory. So you're right. It's not scarce anymore, but it was at a pivotal moment, right? Like there were moments when I would be
You know, work in kitchen at a camp in Maine and all I would get to eat because this was a very meat based place was rolls. Mim, I'm sorry, because playing your plain bagel theory is beautiful, but white bread by itself with nothing but American cheese and maybe a plastic thing that you have to tear and get all of your fingers with mayonnaise, ketchup or mustard. This is
something I hate with all of my being because I had existed these cookouts on just that.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (09:25)
You're going to conflate a plain bagel with white bread. We're going to have some words after this podcast. That's all I'm going to say.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (09:31)
Fair point, fair
Mim Plavin-Masterman (09:32)
Okay, so before we get to the intro, just to talk about who is our guest for today, right?
Gutterman. And he joins us from Brooklyn, New York, represent Brooklyn. He works for Public Interest Research Group, aka PIRG. You'll hear me talk about PIRG a lot on this episode. And he leads PIRG's Design to Last campaign, which we love. It's fighting against obsolescence, fighting against e -waste, winning policy changes from these big manufacturers, trying to extend
how long people can use their consumer products, holding manufacturers accountable for basically making us upgrade or trying to make us throw stuff out. And he got his start working as a PIRG student volunteer and an organizing director. And in doing so, he helped register thousands of voters and win zero waste campaigns to stop plastic pollution. And he likes a good breakfast sandwich, which we appreciate. So welcome, Lucas. Thank you for joining us today.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (10:27)
Yeah, excited to be here.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (10:28)
I'm Alejandro Crawford and my co -host is Mim, aka we're on a mission to make experiments of your own feel as normal as watching videos on your phone. Welcome to What If Instead, the podcast.
So Lucas, let's dive we already have a scene set. You're in a room of college students. You're trading screen names. They already have the advantage that yours is dumber than whatever theirs are gonna be. here you are, why are you opening up these rooms? Fill us in, what are you doing there? And I'd be so curious if you could tell whether some things that you thought were bad that happened to you.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (10:50)
Hmm.
Mm
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (11:06)
could have actually opened up what you're doing today.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (11:09)
Yeah, so taking a step back even before I was in the room with college students, was, you know, choosing to be a college student. And as a high school student, I had a very clear vision of my life was gonna be like and what I was gonna study and where I was gonna go to school. You know, I wasn't quite like a 10 -year plan kind of guy or whatever, but I did have some sense of what I wanted to do. know, I really wanted to be a...
programmer and like maybe work at a startup and like sort of live this early 2000s, know, Silicon experience that I was sort of online. And...
there was a sort fortunate misfortune which happened, which is that I just didn't actually get to do what I wanted to do. I ended up going to UMass Amherst. I still studied computer science, but it wasn't the sort of vision that I fortune.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (11:59)
tell us your state of mind at that point if you don't mind. Because I once people see a person doing amazing things like you, it's easy for them to be like, yeah, but that was just a bump along the way. But at the time, it probably didn't feel like it, right?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (12:10)
No, it really felt quite devastating as like a 17 year old. I mean, I think the college, I have a lot of empathy for high school students who are going through the college selection process because it's really brutal. I mean, the idea that, again, like that 17 year olds are sort of defining themselves in this way that's gonna have a big effect on the rest of their life. And they're sort of having to almost sell themselves or they're trying to compete against their friends and people they haven't
it can be really just emotionally tough. So for me, it was really hard. I just was sort rejections or wait lists from all the places that I sort of had imagined and that I had been really excited about. And, you know, I had even sort of already thought like, here are the classes I'm going to take and here's the clubs I'm going to join on these other campuses. And then those fantasies were sort of just swept away, right, because I just didn't get So it was it was very hard. And actually, I even distinctly remember going to visit the and sort of
really feeling just upset or like this wasn't the right place for me or, you know, sort of already thinking, okay, here's how I'm going to transfer somewhere else or something like And then of course, what ended up happening was that it really was the best thing that ever happened to I mean, it is sort of the life you know, that's happened in that. Basically on the second day that I was on campus, someone asked me if I was registered to vote and I...
I said I already was, but they asked me if I wanted to volunteer. And that's how I got involved with my local per chapter, helping register folks to vote within that first week on campus.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (13:39)
Lucas, I want to pick up and we're going to hear this story. We need to hear the rest of it. adjective you used, life defining. Because when you talked about those campuses where you envisioned yourself. There was a life definition there, and I would argue
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (13:47)
Mm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (13:56)
rising costs of higher education, which in the United States is much more expensive than in many other parts of the world, I think all other parts of the world not academics driving those rising costs, right? It's all the stuff that I think of as the scene setting of your And so you are meant to feel when you visit certain schools, you're meant to imagine yourself in that
and it's curbside appeal. And you know, you have these beautiful sewn buildings on a classic quad, right? And inside it's, you know, pasteboard walls and stuff, right? But at least when you're on that quad, you feel, or that green, you feel like you're in that movie. and I would argue that the emotional story that we tell ourselves is, really powerful.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (14:20)
Yeah, it's curbside appeal, right? I mean, that's literally what they're
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (14:48)
rooted in this idea that we're gonna get to define our lives, right, by sniffing that air and feeling that excitement and, you know, that learning and that thing that we've become a part of. And so we're sold on
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (14:53)
Mm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (15:00)
And yet,
you have not getting the life definition that you told yourself a story about and getting -defining outcome.
from something completely different. And as you go forward, I want you to dive into this if you don't mind, I think you are actually shifting the paradigm of life definition from that we're told it's almost like the dominant myth, right? So the dominant myth is that I define my life by getting in,
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (15:15)
you
Right.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (15:34)
Right? I talk about all this stuff, I get approval, I get entry given to me, and then I'm in that movie. And you're describing something that works completely differently and I actually think has importance well beyond just, you know, where you end up going to school, but that the actual things that open up life -defining outcomes are much more like the one you're describing. So thank you for indulging me just to like put that frame on it, which I was kind of figuring out as I spoke.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (16:02)
Okay.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (16:04)
Can you pick up on that and continue the story? Because I think you're onto something really relevant to people.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (16:09)
Yeah, I think people have different that I've saw with my friends and my peers, right, in college, and that some colleges really are sort of more like walled gardens and other places are more like open source, you know, maybe projects where everyone's sort of contributing in a different way. And so, you know, I have a lot of friends that went to schools that look really good on the tin, right? It says all the things you're supposed to say and it looks impressive on their resume.
You know, just, mean, there's nothing wrong with that, right? Obviously it sort of has opened doors for them and affected the rest of their life. But their experience them itself was actually quite different than mine. They didn't have the space build or make or the campus life itself all of that sort of been decided for them
And then actually, I even think that very hardworking, promising young people who do get exception to those institutions sort of don't get the opportunity to actually learn how make autonomous decisions on their own and build their own And they graduate even from these very selective, unfair, unequal, hard to get into institutions. They actually graduate with not having a whole set of skills that people who
Mim Plavin-Masterman (17:10)
Hmm.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (17:22)
maybe went to places that were more open and precipitatory actually got to experience.
You follow the rule. mean, your job there is to do what you're told for the most part and not to make something of your own.
I'm at campus that I wasn't really that excited about. I'm sort of asked to volunteer. And yeah, that was sort of the opportunity where I was able to be part a organization that students themselves were actually building, right? We chose what events we were gonna run and how we were gonna friend them and what the goals were.
had a student board of directors that actually approved the budget and made decisions about what campaigns we Again, my friend at the time was going to a school that was more prestigious opened a lot of doors for her in terms of her resume. But I very distinctly remember having a conversation with her where I was like, I actually can't talk to you then. Or I have to get on this board call that we're running. She was like, board call? What are you talking about? You're 18. You've been on campus for two weeks.
I'm like, I'm why I'm imagining you running around with like a briefcase, like hopsting on a conference call. Like, what are you talking about? But I have a board meeting. can't, you know, but because we really got to make real decisions. And that was very exciting. And that really, you know, the organization itself, obviously I'm still working with the same group and have been able to accomplish things that I'm really proud of and make a difference. But really it changed me, right? Just having the skills to not only sort of
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (18:22)
Hahaha.
I'm sorry, Mom, I have a board meeting. If you don't mind doing the dishes for me.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (18:52)
speak to the public and get out behind my computer screen and talk to strangers and all the things that I sort of was surprised to find myself doing as a college student, but also just to believe that, you know, people can just do things. They can build stuff and it can be successful and they can have an impact. And I'm not sure I would have learned that in this sort of other version of my life where I had gotten, you know, what I
Mim Plavin-Masterman (19:14)
So there's this, there's like, I don't know, ancient curse, right? In many religions, like may you get the thing you ask for, right? May your dream come true. So in some ways it sounds like you kind of sidestep that, right? The careful what you wish for
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (19:22)
Okay.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (19:28)
wanted to go back to your, your, your story about the campaign. So we'll, we'll get to the campaign that you're directing now, but I wanted to have you sort of talk about some of the campaigns that you did while you were in school that encouraged you to stay on this then helped you get to where you are today. Because even as an 18 year old, it sounds like you were heavily involved in a lot of campaigns. So can you talk us through one or two of them?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (19:52)
Sure, And you know, I think one of the things that was really challenging for me as an 18 year old was that the issues that I was most excited about were not necessarily available to always make a difference on right away. What's so exciting about that kind of trajectory is feel like I've been able to kind of wed those two parts, right? So when I was 18 and, you really cared about internet.
privacy issues and all these sort of techie issues. It wasn't totally clear how to actually make a difference on those to me. But this, what seemed like a detour at a time, but now actually feels really like it was a sort of pathway working to the Design to Last campaign, was just being able to work on the things that other people cared about that was near me that was available. So whether it was registering folks to vote and just seeing how much of an impact we were able to make with old school paper voter registration forms and clipboards.
standing outside of the cafeteria, know, the dining hall, people waiting for dinner, knocking on people's doors in the dorms, and then actually being at the polling place on election day, which was sort of the big moment for me when it really clicked, which is that it was just this line of students wrapped around the block, all who were going to vote for the first time, just like I had early that morning. And I left to go get a sandwich at like the cafe somewhere around lunch, and I came back and the election board was like frustrated with me. She was like, no, no, no, you can't leave.
Like we don't know all these students. They don't know what precinct their dorm building is. And by that point, I had memorized it because I was just going online and helping And she was like, you can't leave. All these kids showed up. We weren't expecting. It's great. But we weren't expecting this. so anyway, that was sort of the moment that clicked for me. If you had asked me when I started, is voter registration my top issue in the whole world? I probably would have said no. I would have said, well, you know.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (21:25)
I love it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (21:41)
Mm -hmm.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (21:43)
just registered with Ode and can't people just figure out on their own and why is this something that we really have to worry But it was through doing the work and actually being part of the campaign and seeing all of the ways in my peers were different than me and had different challenges and had different reasons why they hadn't registered or just didn't know how and felt intimidated and being overcome those barriers.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (21:47)
Right.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (22:08)
That actually just changed my understanding of the world through doing it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (22:12)
I wanna connect three things, four things you've said. So the first is this tension between you follow the rules, And students themselves are actually building something. You follow the rules was what you brought out is kind
not only how you get into the traditional elite paths to success, but also what you are taught to in those environments, what you're enabled to do versus students themselves are actually building something. So that's a tension that you started us with. And then though, I think it gets really interesting when it's a water students build and what were you going to build and you.
talked about the issues you're most excited about, not being the ones you can make a difference on right away, then you said this thing, which is just really beautiful, in its sort of simple is that you...
weren't expecting what happened. Right? Your words were, we weren't, I wasn't expecting this. And then this is the part I love, you said, but it was through doing this, through doing the then you said you found the obstacles, the ways the peers were different from you and what was blocking them. And to me, if I've paraphrased and quoted you, well, this is a
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (23:13)
Mm.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (23:35)
very powerful idea. It's not what I expect. It's not just that it's not the rules. It's that it's not what I expected to be working on, but it is the thing that through doing it, I find obstacles others are facing that I didn't even...
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (23:52)
Yeah, and I think that the takeaway for me when I look back at my experiences is praxis, right? That I learned by doing something rather than by reading articles online and thinking that I knew so much more than other people. It changed me to actually do things with other people and then kind of encounter what their relationship with this problem actually was rather than just what I they should think about it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (24:06)
Good.
I mean, let's talk about learning by doing and what it takes to open up meaningful opportunities to do that. It's one of those things that everyone says it, right? Like, it's like being in favor of entrepreneurship. Well, everyone loves entrepreneurship, right? But we make it harder and harder to be an entrepreneur. Well, same with learning by doing, right? Learning by doing, learning by doing. And it's really hard to find opportunity, say, in a traditional university. And if you've tried to, as I've worked very hard to make opportunities to...
learned by doing available, you're fighting the system to make those opportunities available. Now, tell us about your What does it mean to bring in those chances, not just for the most entrepreneurial or the most active, but for more people who can get the surprises that you've just
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (25:05)
Yeah, I really like the way that you frame that around most people rather than the people, the most entrepreneurial people, right? Because there is maybe some set of people who just don't really need any support and they'll just, that's their constitution. That's just the way they are. But for most people, that's not true, myself included, right? And so as an was always this balance that you're trying to manage between providing just enough structure and support
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (25:13)
you
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (25:34)
for people to feel confident, to try something that's outside of their comfort zone, and letting them really be in charge in deciding what to do. And I think people have their tendency, because part of what I was doing was also training the students to be organizers of each other. There's this whole other level of organizing. And so you'd see that students sort of had a tendency. Some people want to do everything themselves.
and they would develop the whole plan and they'd sort of come through with everything. You know, I think we sort of all can tell just by looking at that, like, yeah, that's sort of, you know, not really gonna build other people to be leaders and you sort of are deciding everything. And also you're not gonna be able to accomplish as much because you're sort of being this martyr and you decide to do everything yourself and that's not really gonna work, right? Ma 'am, maybe you're laughing because...
Mim Plavin-Masterman (26:25)
The martyr thing is kind of it's like don't worry I'll put everybody on my back and I'll take care of all of it You're just like, okay
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (26:32)
Right. Yeah, you're not actually doing a favor to other people by doing that.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (26:33)
Yeah, I it's an incredibly
Mim Plavin-Masterman (26:36)
No.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (26:37)
No, and very few things actually get built, things that matter, by someone with that mentality, right? You have people who have been standing on other people's shoulders who tell a story because most journalists, I mean this even happened to me, where there's a whole team and they want to tell a story about me, right? Which is wrong and you resist it but you realize they want a story with a clear protagonist.
we have high levels of entrepreneurialism is that we've traditionally been friendly to immigrants. Because if you make a journey against all odds, either a journey over land from the South, water from the East or the West, or out of slavery, right? If you make a journey like that, then you are enterprising, right? And so,
the single stupidest thing we can do is to deselect for those people because they're not all doctors and lawyers or something. It is the people who were children of peasants, right, who build, right, and who were children of slaves and So that's one thing, but that's only part of the story. As you guys just brought out, the most enterprising person, we don't want a world where it's just
The daredevil, you made it very funny, you know, that is always jumping off the cliff. You need with them somebody who's constantly asking, yeah, is this the right cliff to jump off? Or who's asking like, well actually let's go down and inspect whether there are any rocks right beneath the water right there. Like that's how things get
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (28:17)
yes, you sort of need to provide the space for the most enterprising people to take something on and do it. You can't be a micromanager, you can't define everything. And also, there does need to be some support and some structure. And so the other tendency I would see, very well -meaning, people who are trying to sort of empower everyone and trying to make sure that everyone can have their part.
But at the very first meeting of the new campaign that this person is launching, they look at the room of 10, 15 students who are interested in the issue and they say, well, really, this is your campaign. What do you want to do? And everyone looks around and they say, I don't know. I just got here. I just showed up five minutes ago. What do you mean it's my campaign? What do I want to do? That doesn't work either.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (29:03)
We open this up though, like what, so let's talk about this. Like what are these structures that allow people to participate effectively? And we could look at this, it'd be interesting. Like you can think of it in terms of long form improv, right? Where Upright Citizens Brigade or your favorite improv group has very specific ways of allowing one person to start doing something funky on stage and other people to join them, right? That's not something where they just are doing whatever comes to their mind. It's a
practice, to discipline, right? Same thing, whether it's innovators, entrepreneurs, political organizers, can you talk a little bit about the kinds of structures in your experience that are effective for creating those participatory effects, those collaborations where it's not just the person who's ready to run out with their idea, but it's all the other people that bring distinctive advantages and mindset?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (29:56)
Yeah, I think two things come to mind. So one you know, and I'll speak within the framework of political organizing, because that's what I know, but I think that this is applicable elsewhere, too. The first is the organizational structure, right, which is that we've all probably been part of a group.
It's just so slow and so frustrating because every single thing needs to be decided upon by everyone else. And there's sort of different levels of engagement and so annoying, right? And just to be part of like a bogged down, really slow, inefficient bureaucracy. So you need a structure where you're sort of pushing responsibility and credit outwards, right? We think of like the snowflake model. And so the campaign.
organizer, you know, maybe is 18 and this is their first semester involved, but they've, you know, stepped up and they've said they want to be the campaign organizer. It's their campaign. They get to decide what to do. Of course, they're taking the opinions of everyone involved and, you know, you can't force people to volunteer. So if people don't like the decision you made, they'll just leave, right? They're there of their own accord. But ultimately, it's their decision and they should just decide what they want to do. Okay. And then the organization itself might have a chapter chair or president.
who decides what to do. And again, they should be elected and they should be doing the most work and they should be on the ground. But also maybe not every single decision needs to have full complete consensus, especially from someone who maybe just showed up and is new compared with someone who's been there for four or five or six years. So someone who has more experience really maybe should have more decision -making power as long as they have more responsibility to put in the work. So we think about it that way, which is that the...
person in charge of the organization is not micromanaging the person who's running the table on Tuesday to register voters. That's ridiculous. But also the person who's running the table is not actually telling the whole organization what to do. And there's different realms and roles that decide how people have control and decision -making power. And that's really clear. I also was part of a bunch of other organizations, especially this is in school 2012 to 2016. there's a lot of.
know, leaderlessness and flat organizing and again, totally from a good standpoint, but it almost never worked, right? Because that just results in sort of no one having any responsibility and not really having any decision making power. The second thing is how we organize the campaigns themselves. So we want to have what we say is a breadth and depth of activities or tactics for people to be involved in.
So what can people do for one hour because their friend told them, hey, this is cool. Come with me to my fan plastics bags club. OK, that person is not going to read a 20 page document or become an expert or maybe even go to a meeting of the group. They just want to show up for an hour and volunteer. That's great. There needs to be something that that person can do. And then there also needs to be a variety of things to do. So some people.
really don't want to talk to strangers, okay, that's fine. Can they do something that's creative and can they make the big prop of the plastic bag monster of all the plastic bags you've collected that we're going to use at the press conference. Someone wants to talk to reporters because they're a journalism major, great. That person can do the media outreach or the press conference. And so that's the breadth. And then there needs to be a depth too. So, you know, I was involved with my chapter for four years. By the fourth year,
Going to the same training that you've been to for four years before, or running the same event you've run for four years, that's not really that interesting. It's not challenging anymore. It's not exciting. What can you have people who have the most experience to do where they're still feeling challenged, either because it's maybe harder, right? Or because they're just actually helping train and build up other people. So now this person is in charge of running all of the tables for the whole year. Okay, so they have to make the schedule of all the tables.
They have to find the people who are going to run each individual table and train them. They have to make sure all of the people who are the tabling coordinators have recruited the people to show up to their thing. And so now you have one person who, you know, is still bottom line responsible for everything, but their job is not to be a martyr and do everything themselves, but actually to recruit and train other people to be successful. And so I think of this in my nerdy way as sort of the fractal model of organizing, right? Where the way the organization looks nationally,
statewide, on campus, for one campaign, for one tactic, has the same structure. And people have real responsibility, but just the size of that responsibility differs depending on the commitment that they want to make. And that all of that is good. It's great that people just want to show up for one hour and they don't care about the thing as much as you do. That has to be welcomed and accepted. And that's how you find the next person who's maybe going to be the leader of the group in three years.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (34:49)
I think Mim is about to take this in a direction, but I just want to comment that nerd is a high compliment on what if instead. So you're a nerdy way. It's what you're nerd out on that matters most.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (35:00)
here's where I'm going to try to frame it succinctly. So one the things that interesting to me as you're talking is this consistency of, of culture, consistency ways of interacting with people at your level and levels above and levels below, even with a relatively transient population, which a student organizing network is like by its nature.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (35:21)
Mm.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (35:23)
As I like studying culture, cultures of innovation, cultures of growth, and there must be something that's happening to enable the cultures to stay so stable, even as the personnel is changing so much. So since you've actually taken it from the student position to where you are now, what's happening in the culture? I mean, this is a compliment. This is a great thing. Like what's happening in the culture to help these things continue and transmit with very different people from year to year
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (35:51)
It's a good question and it is the biggest challenge of student activism and organizing of course is that people graduate every year. Your most experienced, best organizers leave. I think frankly, the people that are annoyed by student organizing know that and they're like, okay, let's just wait out the clock and then these people will graduate and it will sort of go away.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (36:00)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (36:18)
Let's make a committee to study this and maybe we'll put them on the committee and they'll be sidelined and then four years later.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (36:22)
Right. then there'll be a report at some point, maybe. Right. Yeah.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (36:25)
Yeah, there'll be a report and you know, then everyone will forget. So, you know, I think part of it is just that we really have always put an emphasis on the organization. And actually, we very explicitly say that the organization is more important than just one campaign, which can be kind of a difficult thing for people to accept. mean, it certainly was for me when I was a new student, they're like, it's sort of...
it feels like maybe there's something that's not quite right or you're not quite putting the right weight on things because aren't we really here to make a difference and save the world and protect the environment? And how could that be less important than the organization? having an organization with a legacy that's so long and sort of having the stories of all the ways in which the organization has tried to be, know, challenges the organization has faced or the attacks on the organization or so on.
Really actually saying, well, some groups are going to have a method where it's not really a group and it's not about the organization, it's about the campaign, the issue, and those people will come together and they'll come together for this particular issue and then they'll disperse. And that's totally fine and that's one way to do it. And then some groups need to be the one that they're for 50 years. And they're a little bit more cautious and they work on issues where they think that it's not going to affect the health of the organization of the long -term.
And that allows it to be a platform that can exist to train and empower people for many decades, maybe some of whom who leave, who then start other organizations like the one I talked about first. I think it's, again, it's not actually the case that one is inherently better than the other, but the culture of our organization is that we're building a long -term organization and that organization sort of acts as the vessel that contains power for people.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (38:01)
Mm
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (38:21)
And that means that the organization is more important than just any one campaign and other organizations or people might choose to work for a different group. And that's sort of a totally valid, but just different strategy.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (38:31)
So to pick up on that, this idea of some of these longer, longer campaigns, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Design to Last campaign been very involved in it, but it's, from what I can tell it, there was a lot of conversation and then all of a sudden a lot of and then more conversation and then more action. And so I was hoping you could talk us through kind of how Perg decided this is what they want to work on.
and then how the campaign began to take shape and how that all worked out.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (39:00)
Yeah, so personally, what's really exciting about this campaign is it is sort of the culmination of this whole trajectory in my just personal professional life that we've been talking about, really wedding that interest in technology and that computer science background and that tech nerd background with all the organizing work that I sort of found myself getting involved with as a college student and then worked professionally in for years. so.
We launched the campaign two years ago, Design to Last. It's focused on the obsolescence of technology, really pushing back against the disposability treadmill that has us replacing our phones and our laptops and even our appliances at ever increasing rates. We're looking at technology that is designed to die because it's just actually built to be disposable, like disposable vapes with screens that let you connect to your phone. And if people have seen these online, they're totally outrageous. You you can...
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (39:53)
Where do I get those? sounds... no, no, excuse me, go on.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (39:55)
Okay, that's not going in the show notes. Okay, we're gonna cut that.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (39:56)
I'll send you the link. I'll send you the link. You can check out my affiliate link. Right, right, right. So you can, know, disposable vapes. Disposable vapes with screens on them that you can use to, you know, send WhatsApp messages. That's totally outrageous. Or even, you know, Apple AirPods that have batteries that can't be replaced, meaning that they sort of have this ticking time bomb that eventually they'll just have to be thrown out.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (39:59)
This episode is sponsored by disposable vape now .com.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (40:23)
to products that are just not designed to be repaired, to software that actually expires and actually prevents us from adding new features or extending the lifespan of our product.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (40:32)
sounds like something out of Idiocracy, that old Mike Judge movie, right? Where it's just like, what? Like vapes that, and then you're, but the fact is this is throughout our economy. This has been normalized. just, go ahead, please continue. I didn't mean to break your flow.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (40:47)
Yeah, it's totally normalized. And the point of the campaign is to really push back on this new status quo that we've been sold and win a world where things are designed to last.
and then just to your point about the status quo, mean, it's really in some ways we think that tech is different and special for some reason. No one tells me that I can't fix my car, right? And we don't expect when my car's tire blows out or I need winter tires to throw at the car and buy a new one. We say, well, you sort of have the car and I own it and I can fix it and I can add replacements and add new parts. And it's my thing. And actually, I think it should last.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (41:09)
Yeah.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (41:29)
10, 15, 20 years. I'm gonna give it to the next person in my family. Why don't we think of our folks that way?
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (41:34)
Honestly, self -repairing your car is very much harder than it was several
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (41:40)
because of the technology that's been added, right? So cars are increasingly computerized. We have software in your Tesla that says you can't use certain third party parts. That's part of this whole issue as well, which is that we're using software rather than empowering people to have more creative control and build new things and make the world a better and more interesting place to actually restrict and tie down and prevent people from using their products and then to really prevent people from extending the lifespan of their
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (41:42)
Right?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (42:09)
which is really terrible for the environment. So that's the kind of big picture of the campaign. The way we're doing that is one, just by...
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (42:15)
Wait, wait, before you tell us how you're doing it, I think you've done something really interesting, which is the idea that somehow we see tech as an exception.
I want to hear the steps you're about to outline, I didn't want to get past that before trying to make sense of it.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (42:24)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a good question. Why? I don't think we are falling for it. I think that people are very frustrated that they have to replace their phones and their appliances so frequently. But the technology has enabled a business model where things are thrown out rather than fixed or where they are replaced rather than used. And I think people are intimidated by the
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (42:47)
But let's look at that frustration.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (42:54)
technology. And so the industry can sort of wave their hands and say, this is much too complicated for you. You know, we have to be secure. We have to make sure that we are getting the updates and, know, you probably don't even know what a firmware is. not going to explain this. You know, so there's sort of this, this way of, of using the technology as a smoke screen to hide the effect on consumers. When in fact, whether something happens online or whether it's software or whether it's a tech product or not, that should not affect, it certainly doesn't affect the law.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (43:12)
Right.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (43:23)
in terms of what manufacturers are required to provide to consumers. And it shouldn't affect the way that we think about our products. So it's the job of the manufacturers to use this technology to develop a product that is sustainable and open and fair for consumers. It's not our job to be exploited because they can't figure out how to do it.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (43:44)
Let's unpack how frustrated we there are certainly times when we reflect, why do I have, I kept replacing the inner parts of a 2007 iMac until about a year
And finally, there was an operating system that it just couldn't, even though I had to replace all the inner parts to make it happen, take it apart. And it was a beautiful machine. The screen was just so perfect. was just a classic.
That having been said, I fully admit
that when AT &T a week ago somehow found me and snuck some message into my internet experience that said that I could turn in my last year Samsung flip phone for the new one with the AI I don't want for free, that even though I know intellectually I'd get another two -year contract and you know that I know I'm being exploited, I have to admit there's this part of me that was excited about getting the new one.
I just want to be honest with ourselves about, like, if we're going to take that frustration and make it visceral, make it actionable, I think we have to be honest about the ways in which
There's part of us that loves this and is seduced by it. Even if that's just like the part of us that's a mouse collecting baubles.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (45:08)
Or the kid with the Christmas present. mean, it's a way of being like, ooh, a present. Ooh, a thing comes in a box. It's very exciting. And so, no, the shiny new thing. We're a little bit like magpies in that way. We all want the shiny new thing.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (45:14)
Yeah, say
Yeah, yeah, you can know what's wrong with Amazon Prime, right? And what it addicts us to. I went through tons of effort to order a book for a friend who is a local economy expert that would be at his local bookstore that he could bike to recently, But I also, when a package comes that I've clicked on Amazon in front of my door, it is a present feeling, right?
But I just want to contend with that. How do we contend with that, Lucas? Do you have
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (45:50)
Yeah, well, I will say in terms of the Hanukkah thing, if there was anything like my family, you know, they probably just got like socks and books for seven out of eight days. So it is maybe not totally as much of a fun present experience, which maybe is kind of the point, right? It's like, it's, it's, it's okay.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (46:03)
My presents were homemade. This kid got legit toys every, on Christmas and every day of Hanukkah. I was so jealous.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (46:11)
My parents were more like Lucas's parents, like one really cool gift. And then there was like, here's a pair of socks and the book. Yeah, pretty much. I feel like they shopped at the same store. Yeah.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (46:11)
too much.
Yeah, here's some gelt. Yeah, right, the grocery store. And then I just couldn't let your iMac comment go because this is my demo.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (46:26)
HO!
For those of you not on the YouTube, please explain what we're seeing.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (46:31)
Great. So I have my, this is my first laptop. This is a orange iBook with the clamshell in the handle. What my boss refers to as my legally blonde laptop. It's my legally blonde. So this is, so, I mean, the reason why I have this, besides the fact that it's just kind of cool and nostalgic, right? Is that it really was designed differently. And kind of part of my point is that manufacturers are making decisions.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (46:43)
It is really good.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (46:44)
screen.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (47:00)
to prevent us from having abilities that we even used to have. So yes, it's true that we have gotten addicted to replacing things that don't need to be replaced. And there is a cultural shift and there's also some responsibility that we have as consumers to make sure that we're not replacing things all the
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (47:06)
Right, right.
Right?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (47:20)
you know, I think we have some responsibility as consumers for being seduced by, you know, getting new toys all the time that we don't need. But we also don't even have the ability to keep using things rather than replacing them. And so the reason why I have this with my demo is because, you know, we used to carry extra batteries. Remember, you could just throw an extra battery in your backpack or in your pocket for your phone. And I, as a, you know, child, could replace this battery that easily.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (47:31)
Right. Right.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (47:48)
Even in the front, so you just need a quarter or your fingernail to take off the battery cover on this, right? And then even on the front, it might be kind of hard to show with one hand, but you know, if folks remember to, you used to be able to just add in new cards. So I remember installing my, yeah, yeah, you just push two buttons on the keyboard and pull it off. And I very distinctly remember installing my, I think they called it.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (47:51)
Wow.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (48:02)
So Lucas is live demoing the modularity here. Please go on. I just want everyone who can't see this, who's listening to now, go ahead.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (48:17)
my airport card or something. It's like the Wi -Fi card, right? And you could install more RAM and more storage. And so we we lost that. Yeah, right? Right. Right.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (48:19)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (48:23)
And that keyboard turns into a parachute, just to note for everyone. So like if you're falling off anything, you can just like press the escape key and it's
Mim Plavin-Masterman (48:27)
Yep.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (48:33)
And so we used to have this, right? We actually used to have tech that in some ways was really designed to last, that we could fix ourselves, that we could upgrade, that was modular. And we don't have that anymore, right? We have AirPods that have batteries that are glued in and the only way you can remove them is by taking a Dremel and tearing it apart and throwing it out. So the first step is that manufacturers need to actually change their designs. And we need that paradigm shift.
among all of us for our responsibility for not buying new when we could fix or reuse.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (49:04)
Right.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (49:05)
Right. So, so as I'm hearing you say this, to me, there's a huge social justice equity piece of this. We all have such privilege that we can buy the new thing if we want to. Many people don't. Right. So this idea of like the Chromebook in particular, like for a lot of those kids, that's the computer in
the house and there's something that's just so fundamentally upsetting to think that that's the way that they learn. then now that they can't because some company that makes the software was like, now you don't, you can't update it anymore. Go, school district with money. don't so I'm just going to digress for one second, but I promise there's a point with COVID all these schools had to go do like cleaning supplies and paper towels. And it's like, with what
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (49:28)
Hmm.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (49:51)
And it's this, to me, it's a similar thing here of like, how are they supposed to give these kids a good So anyway, thank you for coming to my mini TED talk. Back to our regularly scheduled program.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (50:02)
Yeah, well, let's talk about Chromebooks. And then you sort of bring up the other part, which is that it's also about the second life after the first user, right? So the Chrome, not only did the schools in the US have to, you know, throw out their laptop that should still work and I talk a little bit, you know, give some background on the Chromebook issue and what was happening there. But also, you know, I also remember from a kid as a kid that my elementary school would do a big sale of all the computers that they were.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (50:10)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (50:10)
Mm -hmm.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (50:31)
when they were doing a refresh, right? And you could buy a laptop really cheap. Okay, but if the software expires, you can't do that. And you can't send them to other countries and...
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (50:37)
Yeah, what are yard sales gonna be like? Here's all the shit I threw out, right? Like, because you can't use it anymore.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (50:41)
right, here's all the plastic junk that doesn't work anymore. And so not only are you preventing people from still using their stuff in that first life, but you're cutting out the entire secondary market and the entire secondary life of the product. And it becomes economically invaluable and value, know, valueless as well, right? Because if a Chromebook that has expired software, who wants to buy that? I mean, you can't refurbish it. It's useless, it's a paperweight. And so no one's incentivized to actually
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (51:04)
Right.
Great.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (51:10)
we sell or recycle.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (51:13)
Now, you've brought up something really important in terms of the economic incentives and options that we There's, I like to call it the only game in town. When something's the only game in get screwed, Mim and I are writing a book that's very much about this and actually relates it to something I want to ask you about before we get out of time, which is the reason we continue to double down on
fossil fuels at a time when we can't afford to use any more, to take any more out of the ground. And I think it's closely related to what you're saying, actually. When there's a system that by design, is unresponsive, by design, you don't get to do the cool things you were just doing with it, and you have to throw it out and replace it and get the
Normally you'd say, well, that's not that great and there should be an alternative. But the problem is that many of the large tech firms are building that
what I want to get at is whether it's the only game in town, right, and you have to play it, or the alternatives take so much effort that
who's really gonna do it. I wonder, I've worked with multiple teams of entrepreneurs trying to create repair networks, trying to make second life possible, trying to serve the alternative. And in many ways, it's like they're just battling these huge waves coming at them because of these, market power.
that has taken away alternatives and made it too hard to do that. Can you speak to any of that? Are you dealing with those dynamics in what you're working on? And then I do wanna just get your thoughts on the relationship between this and climate before we go.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (53:05)
Yeah, I think that what's coming up is the Chromebook story, right? Which is that you have these laptops that were very popular in schools, especially during COVID, as my mom was talking about. Schools had to spend millions of dollars to buy these laptops, sometimes with government funds. Sometimes schools were running bake sales to make sure that every kid could get a laptop. And that was for a whole set of students, the only laptop that they had in their family in the way that they could do their homework and so on.
and then what we discovered was that these laptops have software support that ends, has an expiration date. Once that software has expired because of the way Chromebooks are built, you have no alternative, right? So there are some, you know, excellent enthusiasts and hackers who can demonstrate how to install Linux or Chromium or install some alternative operating systems on the Chromebook. But that's not really something that most
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (53:53)
Right.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (54:05)
people can do. And even if you have an IT department that has the expertise and excited to do that at a resource school, OK, well, you do that for 30 ,000 Chromebooks across the whole LA school district. There's way more than that. Right.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (54:15)
Right, right.
Yeah, so except for the exception where you have special skills or all of the resource in the world to go to great lengths. I want to repeat four words you said. You have no
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (54:30)
That's exactly right. And so that's why when we found this problem and we saw the huge amount of waste and we saw the way that schools were sort of being pushed to replace these laptops that should still work just because the software support expired. You you could imagine someone whose idea of the campaign is we're just going to go and we're going to train all of the IT departments how to install alternative operating systems. For all the reasons you just said, that's not really the...
best solution. That's not really the best campaign strategy, right? And so in some ways it seems harder, but in other ways it was really the only alternative was to actually just go to Google and say, listen, you just can't keep doing this. This is not fair to schools. It's not fair to students. This is not fair to the environment. Of course, they're going to say, this is required. This is just the way that the technology works. There's no other way we could do it. But
We just knew that wasn't true by understanding the way that Chromebooks worked. And because Google actually had extended support during COVID to their credit to help schools. And because they could extend support then, we knew that they could really choose to extend support later.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (55:40)
You used this phrase earlier about something else about good intentions, but it doesn't work. Here again, I'm not too impressed. mean, it's nice. You do a program, you donate some things to schools. But if alongside that, you've been consolidating market dominance and eliminating What I care about isn't the one nice thing that you out of the goodness of your heart, deign to do. What I'm interested in
is an economy that's competitive enough that you constantly have to be on your game because there is room for real competition. Soon as we don't have that, then we're just asking for handouts. All of us were hoping that Google respond.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (56:22)
I guess the reason why I think and put that way is as an organizer, it's really important that we understand what the motivations of everyone involved actually are. And so it's not the case that Google is making some decision just because they're malicious. It's because it really does cost them money to figure out how to have these laptops last longer. And I'm sort of, I think it's the wrong choice, obviously, if we ran a whole campaign and we pushed against doing them.
you have to understand what is actually preventing, in this case, Google from doing the right thing. It's the case that they really did have to invest a whole set of money to test all of these different models with the new version of their software and make it works. And yeah, great. OK, so they have to invest that money. Yet, as we just said, they are the market leader. Google has no shortage of money. And that this was really a business decision, not a technical decision.
And given it was a business decision, we showed that they really, we sort of couldn't tolerate this model that forced schools and consumers to throw out laptops that should still work and imagined, you know, what if otherwise, and actually was able to get Google to change their mind by organizing the public and sort of showing that this was just a decision that they made and was not some inevitable and unfixable truth.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (57:44)
So what I love about this is that you took, in effect, a lot of their business model involves externalizing costs onto consumers in schools. And then you guys were like, okay, here's all the money that you've now thrown onto the consumers in schools, not cool, right? Like you've actually, came in in effect with a tally and said, yeah, you made all this revenue, but here's all the costs that you or the costs that you cost and do better. And I just think that's really powerful.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (58:09)
Right. agree.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (58:10)
Yeah, and it's with our tax, I mean, you know, it's with taxpayer dollars because they're schools.
Mim Plavin-Masterman (58:14)
Yeah.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (58:15)
that's why I think the takeaway here is not we've been using the Chromebook as an example, but this is all over the tech economy. And the point is that if we allow companies to win by becoming the only game in town and making our economy uncompetitive for upstarts and innovators, then of course, if I were a shareholder, I would say press your advantage of those companies. That means we've set up a where
You win not by but by being in good with the refs and allowing yourselves to have baked -in advantages, right? Essentially, we set up what we call a rent -seeking economy. Now, I want to close by framing a question, and we may not have time to explore it in this conversation in the way that I know we would like to, but you
time sequences and you talked about how often you would be in an organization when you were a student and you'd say, it's about the campaign. And then you said, we're really focused on the long I remember stupid things when I was a student that I thought were the end of the world. But with the
It really is an end of the world situation and we really don't have any time. So the question, maybe we can just frame it and not try to answer it, all three of us, is how do we deal with the value of long -term solutions when we're now facing a crisis where long -term ain't gonna cut it?
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (59:50)
I guess I don't think of long -term solutions as being the same thing as having no urgency. We can be urgent and implementing solutions right now that have long -term thinking, right? So, you know, there's that proverb, right, that we sometimes like to quote, the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, the second, or, you know, a thousand years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is So you got to do something now, right? And we'll have a big -term effect,
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (1:00:05)
Mm -hmm.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (1:00:18)
You can't wait, but you also can't just use something that's gonna only work for a year or two.
Alejandro Juárez Crawford (1:00:20)
as.
Let's close on that. I've never heard that proverb before, but started us off by saying that it's what you weren't expecting. And it was by doing the work that you discovered the obstacles and the problems that mattered. And let's close with this idea of course we wished we'd trees in the...
late 70s or 80s when Carl Sagan was talking to the US Congress about the greenhouse effect and we could have done it gradually. But plant a whole lot of trees. The second best time is Lucas Rocket Gutterman. you so much.
for being here with us on What If Instead. It's a real pleasure and you've made us think.
Lucas Rockett Gutterman, PIRG (1:01:12)
Thanks.