Running to the Noise, Episode 30 (Part 1)

Carmen Twillie Ambar: I'm Carmen Twillie Ambar, president of Oberlin College and Conservatory. Welcome to Running to the Noise, where I speak with all sorts of folks who are tackling our toughest problems and working to spark positive change around the world. Because here at Oberlin, we don't shy away from the challenging situations that threaten to divide us; we run towards them.

One of my favorite parts of hosting Running to the Noise has been working alongside our incredible student producers, Travis O’Daniel and Eloise Rich. Behind every episode, they helped research our guests, shape our conversations, ask the thoughtful questions that led to so many memorable moments. Quite simply, this podcast wouldn't have been the same without them.

This past May, Travis graduated with a degree in communication studies, and Eloise earned degrees in comparative literature, cinema and media, and French. Like so many Oberlin students, they somehow found time for much more than classes, working at the Oberlin Review in multiple positions, but Travis also as a managing editor, and Eloise as layout editor while pursuing countless other interests.

Travis became a familiar face on campus through performances ranging from the Rocky Horror Show to his own drag cabaret, where he blended his love of Broadway musicals with stories from his own life. Eloise served first as treasurer and then president of the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, better known as OSCA, a role that's practically a full-time job.

And now they are Oberlin alumni themselves, ready for whatever comes next. But we couldn't let them go just yet. We invited them back to catch up on what they've been doing since graduation and to help introduce a series of short conversations they recorded with our Season 3 guests, including Radio Diaries founder Joe Richman, AI pioneer Tom Dietterich, Lawfare co-founder Benjamin Wittes, singer Tamara Jade, comedian E.J. Marcus, model Seyquan Mack, attorney Ali Najmi, and our commencement speaker, Cecilia Conrad, CEO of the philanthropic nonprofit Lever for Change.

Travis and Eloise, welcome back. It's so great to see you, and thank you for everything you've brought to Running to the Noise. This feels very familiar.

Eloise Rich: I know.

Travis: It's like we're still on campus.

Carmen: That's right.

Eloise: I sort of always knew that there was going to be one more conversation.

Carmen: Yeah. Yeah. It had to be. It had to be. So first off, let's just talk a little bit about what's happened since graduation. Like, how has the entry back into, I don't know if you would call it the real world, but certainly not the Oberlin world?

How has re-entry been into the world that's not in Oberlin, Ohio? Eloise, you wanna go first?

Eloise: I actually had a little bit of a, a prolonged end to my Oberlin career. I had to finish up being president of the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, and that ended on the last day of June. So July 1st, my first day of freedom.

After graduation I spent a couple of days on campus cleaning up the co-ops, all of that business, moving out, and I drove back down to North Carolina. Now I'm moving to DC.

Carmen: Wow. And so do we know what's up in DC, or we're managing things around? What are we thinking about?

Eloise: I have some leads. The journalist in me...

That's sort of a natural thing to say, it seems. Yeah. I've decided that's a great starter city, a great transition city for me. There's a fabulous Oberlin network there.

Carmen: Yeah. I was gonna say, that is rich for the taking, so to speak.

Eloise: Yes. And we've talked to some actually great guests on Running to the Noise that I've actually reconnected with.

I also was touring apartments, and I had a great coffee chat with Ben Wittes, one of the co-founders of Lawfare.

Carmen: Excellent. And Travis, what's your... As my mom would say, what's your story, morning glory?

Travis: Much like Eloise said, networking is the name of the game right now. So I've just been doing a lot of that, using it as an excuse to travel a little bit.

Okay. So I went to New York recently and met with some of my publishing connections.

Carmen: Oh, that's right. Yes. I remember some of those that were forged right here on Running to the Noise.

Travis: Yes, Rumaan Alam. Uh, but it's just been a lot of job hunting and reaching out to people, and, uh, I'm moving to New York in September.

Carmen: I was gonna say, two Obies are on the move, but also to places where there are lots of Obies. I hope you all are discovering (it's certainly been my experience here) that Obies pick up the phone for you. They are really willing to help, and they're really willing to talk to you and give you some perspective, so you get the feeling that you're just adding a new advocate to your team of people who also wanna see you be successful and see you find the right sort of landing spot.

So I'm excited about that. So you all keep us posted, and let me know what I can do, 'cause I'm happy to try to make those connections for you. So I guess just to ask you a few questions, since now you're guests on the pod. What the heck? I feel like it's like the way you have with, at least I have with the triplets.

You know, you're nurturing and supporting them, and da, da, da, and now all of a sudden, like, they're in the game with you in a totally different way, and it's like, who would have thought in those early days that you all would be guests on the pod? But I'm wondering, these past two seasons that you worked on this podcast, what was the most challenging part of the experience for you?

I kinda know what it is for me, but what was it for you all?

Travis: The hardest part... We have so many guests that are from different fields, and some of them are very technical fields. And so I feel like the hardest part for me was learning how to become familiar enough with all of these different fields quickly to write good questions and to know what you're talking about when it comes to these conversations. And so I feel like that's one thing that I got really good at, was trying to learn as much as I could as fast as possible for some of these...

Carmen: Yeah. That is a great skill set. It's almost like you gotta become a mini expert in a short period of time over some topic that you may have no familiarity with.

And gosh, what a great skill to be able to take into your next role, and particularly in the role of kind of media, right? You may have a beat, or you may have an area that's of interest to you, but you also could be writing about anything. And so being able to really get up to speed quickly, know how to research, know how to cut through and get to the key things you need to know, yeah, huge skill set development.

So what about you, Eloise? What was the most challenging part for you?

Eloise: I would say that was certainly a challenging part, but that was probably my favorite part, and that's what has always really drawn me to journalism because I have to become, as you put it, a mini expert, but also to just put in the work to do the hard research and the hard things and get into all of the little details.

But I think the actual hardest part for me was the editing. By that, I sort of mean just the production, figuring out what to cut, figuring out any of the reordering. I think we got into a pretty good rhythm over the last two seasons in the conversations themselves, and that's a testament, I think, to your development as a host, honestly, more than anything.

But it was so hard to figure out what to cut.

Carmen: Oh, I can totally imagine that. I appreciate it as we were going through it sometimes around the difficulty of editing and figuring out what the most important pieces were. But I wouldn't dare go listen to my first one now because I feel like by the time we're in season three, that I was able to not edit in my head, but remember where I left off an idea and to close it back up, or to enter something that I knew was important, but we never really dealt with it, so you just would have better pieces to work with.

So hopefully I got better as you guys got better at editing it.

Eloise: There was always so much rich content, 'cause you never know who your audience is going to be when you're putting these episodes out.

Carmen: Yeah.

Eloise: And just the guesswork that goes into that was very difficult sometimes.

Carmen: I'm so excited to have Tom Dietterich here today, but I will make sure that Travis and Eloise get a chance to ask you a couple of questions before we let you go. So Travis and Eloise?

Eloise: There have been a lot of conversations going on in the media lately regarding policy and law about AI. Do you think that lawmakers and policymakers are asking the right questions about AI?

Are they missing anything?

Tom Dietterich: They're not spending enough time thinking about two issues. One is privacy, and the other is, I would say, fake humans. AI systems, as they're envisioned, uh, unfolding, need to know a huge amount about you personally in order to help you. If you're having an AI system manage your email, it needs to be able to read all of your email.

And if it's gonna manage your calendar, it needs access to your calendar. If it's going to make purchases on your behalf, it needs to have your credit card. This is extremely dangerous from a cybersecurity point of view, but it's also a huge privacy risk, and I personally am not gonna use these tools until I know I can run them on my own laptop locally with tight security.

Because the amount of data breaches that happen all the time is astonishing. We need privacy there as part of, of having a functioning democratic society. Kind of related thing actually is this issue of biometrics and identity, and that brings to the final problem, which is the AI technology that has been developed with great help from my, my expertise, or my field, has been basically a technology of mimicry.

So it imitates people. Now we can imitate your voice; we can imitate your appearance and your emotion. This is incredibly dangerous. I mean, we've already seen it with the deepfakes and things like this. It's also for use for phishing and other kinds of attacks, misinformation and disinformation campaigns.

I think we will soon reach the point where all digitally mediated communication is not trusted because we won't know if you're talking to me or are you talking to a simulation of me that someone has whipped up. So that requires some kind of way that I can certify and authenticate that I am who I am.

And I'm very opposed to the routine use of face recognition because you can't get a new face. Uh, the same with any kind of biometrics. There are technical solutions. That's a dangerous word to use, "solution." But there are technical approaches, let's say that, in combination with the right institutions and laws, might allow us to solve some of these problems, or address them at least.

Travis: I think that I can speak for a lot of graduating fourth years when I say that there's a lot of stress about career paths that we're going into, especially those of us with more liberal arts educations. And one thing that I specifically have been very concerned about as I've started applying for post-grad jobs is the use of AI in the hiring process.

So I was wondering if you had any ideas how I can make my resume or my cover letter stand out to these automated systems that are used to sort through those?

Tom: The use of these automated systems has been a topic of concern for many years, so I worry a, a huge amount about the degree to which these automated screening systems are fair.

I think we need some kind of auditing capabilities for fairness auditing, correctness auditing. One of my former students is involved in a startup company now that's trying to figure out what it would mean to audit these systems. How can we do that? It's not, uh, even clear technically how to do it, but I think we should be insisting on third-party audits for those systems.

But unfortunately, I can't give you any direct advice. I mean, you have to let your humanity shine through, and, uh, I don't know. Don't use em dashes?

Travis: Ugh, the journalist in me hates to hear that. I love em dashes. And in that same vein of those of us who are about to graduate that have degrees in a field like the liberal arts, is there any kind of interdisciplinary educational or career path that we can go into without having this AI educational system that we came up in?

Tom: My guess is that as AI systems take over a lot of the sort of routine repeatable intellectual and emotional work, it's going to be the human-to-human skills that are going to be the most valuable, and so that's hopefully where your skills lie. But how do you find your way into such a position doing that?

I think it's the usual, trying to get an internship, maybe starting by volunteering, which is, of course, easy for those of us who have money, but I was broke when I graduated. Um, you have to rely a lot on your network. We're having an arms race in cover letters and resumes because, of course, people are applying to thousands of jobs simultaneously using AI techniques.

So that whole system is breaking. You need to find some way around and run around that. I don't know if Oberlin is doing anything to try to strengthen networking at all.

Carmen: Well, I, I was just gonna say, Tom, the students know this. Our career development office has a way for Oberlin students to connect with the Oberlin network and alums who, uh, wanna provide internships, provide opportunities, just provide counsel.

And I, I have to say that now I'm, I'm starting my ninth year here at Oberlin, and, uh, there's nothing more powerful than the Oberlin network.

I'm wondering what you all learned about storytelling, and I think that plays into the editing piece of it too. But as I think about these pods, the thing that I had so much fun doing, and I still have so much fun doing, is, you know, there's always these little magical things that happen that you just didn't expect, or you just didn't expect to be having these conversations in this particular way.

It's like, "Oh my God, I didn't know that conversation was gonna go that way."

Eloise: I have so many memories of sitting in any of the rooms around your office and looking to Travis and being like, "No way. That was an amazing story." Sometimes that you told, sometimes the, the guest told. I think maybe more than storytelling, I feel like I learned how to write better questions to come up with these stories, and also the follow-ups that are always going to be necessary. And we would have to predict where these questions could go, and then write the follow-ups from there.

And for me, that was probably the most valuable aspect I learned about storytelling. And also just how you provoke someone who has had a very successful career to tell their story from Oberlin to present.

How do you get someone to reflect on all of that? And you're creating the puzzle, but you're also watching it be made in front of you when you're doing the recording.

Carmen: What about you, Travis? Storytelling and what you learned, or these kind of surprising moments when it happens?

Travis: The best story is never the one that you go in looking for.

Carmen: I totally agree.

Travis: There's always something; it could be even just a short mention of something that comes up, and it's like, "That was so interesting, like, tell me more about that." And that's how we've gotten so many great moments on the show. I like to think about when we had Ali Najmi on, and we, while researching, found a mention of him from his time at Oberlin in the Oberlin Review where he talked about loving Jay-Z and all that stuff.

And that, like, we got a ton of great content about his time at Oberlin from that, which was so fun.

Carmen: So you guys have a couple of questions for Ali, so we'll let you go.

Eloise: You've touched in this episode on the youth vote and why that was so critical in Mamdani's campaign. But I'm curious just generally, you know, why is this so important? Why is this such a critical thing we're hearing in the media? And with that, how do we as the youth vote get engaged?

Ali Najmi: The mayor won his election because of the huge youth turnout, and also the early vote. We have early voting in New York, and I saw the results of who was showing up by the second day of early voting, and I knew we won the election. It was like the turnout from the young people under 30 was, like, bananas.

The thing is, we wouldn't have somebody like Zohran Mamdani being the mayor if it wasn't for voters 30 and under. Young people have the opportunity to drive change and to shake things up, and it's a different way of thinking. If we had this level of youth turnout nationally, we could change the country.

So this is a model for political transformation. It begins with young people.

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Awesome. Who has the next question? Is it you, Travis?

Travis: Mine is a bit more lighthearted than that one. As I said, I'm the managing editor of The Review, and I was perusing through our archives, and I found a 2006 Obie on the Street profile of you.

Travis: Let me just, let me just show you. This is it. Can you even see it?

Ali: Oh, wow. Yeah. I have a lot more hair.

Travis: Well, in that profile, um, you say that you spend more than 50% of your time at Oberlin, quote, "listening to Jay-Z and planning the next step of your hustle." I was wondering, uh, what the current soundtrack to your hustle is, or your life more generally.

Ali: Well, that's funny. You know, Das Racist and Heems is a big connector of Zohran and I. In fact, Heems is somebody I grew up with who endorsed me in my council race, who Zohran is a super fan of, and is the subject of that Village Voice article. Yeah.

Carmen: Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Ali: And so a lot of even, like, songs from Das Racist are part of a lot of the sort of like, the music I choose on my Instagram posts that are related to the, the Mamdani movement.

Right now, what am I listening to? I'm still listening to my old-school stuff, actually, and I'm a big hip-hop head, New York hip-hop head. And so there was this guy who played at the inauguration, Babbulicious, who's a Punjabi guy. Now I'm, I'm learning a lot more from, uh, the young people in the campaign, so I'm trying to keep up.

Travis: Great. I love that.

Carmen: She's gonna love it.

Travis: Thank you.

Carmen: Did you guys have one more question?

Eloise: Yeah. Well, similarly lighthearted. Okay. But so Travis and I spent this summer actually living in New York together, and I lived there when I was younger until I was about 10 or so. So I have to know: your favorite way to get around, maybe your favorite restaurant, just some of those key points.

Carmen: This is for all the students who are gonna be heading to New York, uh, either for summer internships or for their permanent jobs. We need Ali to give us best way to get around, and best... Do you want him to do Queens restaurant or just any restaurant? What his best restaurant is?

Eloise: I say Queens restaurant.

Carmen: Okay. Okay.

Ali: Yeah, definitely. Well, you gotta get to Jackson Heights, and you gotta go to Kabab King for some good South Asian food at a really good price. If you're ever on Houston Street, there's another good spot, vegetarian spots. It's like a taxi driver spot called Punjabi Deli. It's all vegetarian.

Carmen: Okay.

Ali: Uh, you know, the getting around is tough in New York. The mayor likes to take the bus, but I'm not really on the bus. I'll be honest with you.

Carmen: So you a subway person or what? What, Ali? What, what? How are you getting around?

Ali: Ugh. Oh my God. This is the part where there's a lot of daylight between me and, and the mayor and his movement.

But I have a car.

Carmen: Okay.

Ali: And I spend a lot of money on parking. I live in a part of Queens that actually doesn't have a subway.

I know that's not the maybe the answer you're looking for, but I think if you're a young person in the city, the way to get around is getting on the subway. Best, cheapest ticket in town.

It's great service. You know, perhaps by the time you come here, the mayor would've made the buses free, and you can't beat that deal. Free bus is what we're about.

Eloise: Fingers crossed on that one.

Carmen: Awesome. Yeah. Well, we want the mayor's success, but the free buses is the thing you want him working on.

Carmen: If I think about all the awesome things I get a chance to do here at Oberlin, doing this pod has been one of the most fun things for me. And in part because I'm oftentimes on the other side of it where someone's asking me questions or whatever, so it's nice to be on the side of asking questions, I think, first of all.

But more importantly, I think it's been just the opportunity to have these kind of wide-ranging conversations, oftentimes with someone I didn't know. I've come to appreciate why people listen to podcasts in a way that I don't think I appreciated as much as a listener, as a person who helps create them. Because there were so many times when people were telling the story that I was riveted by it, by what they were describing in the moment.

And I remember thinking oftentimes, "This is why you listen to podcasts," right? This is why. 'Cause you're just in your car, wherever it is, you're listening to these things, and you're like, "What did they just say?"

Travis: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: Whatever that is that they just said. Part of what I hope I've gotten better at is when those moments happen, letting the space show up so the person can tell the compelling story and you don't interrupt them too much.

But also that you ask the types of questions that, if you're the listener, you wanna know.

Travis: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: That next question that opens the door up even more. So yeah, I have to say I've had total fun doing it. Yeah. I guess a couple other questions. You both worked at The Review as part of your time at Oberlin, and for the audience that doesn't know, that's our student-driven newspaper on campus that I think most people on campus would view it as a student newspaper of record as compared to the multiple print opportunities that we have on campus.

The Review both combines kind of hardcore journalism with opinion pieces and with a kind of around-the-square capturing sort of the, the campus. I'm wondering, how would you describe that experience of print journalism versus what it means to be in this different type of experience, which is video/kind of listening journalism that's just so different from what it means to be in print journalism, and quite frankly, what is taking over the media space, right? In terms of its competition with traditional media. Independent media is a thing for sure, and the way people consume their information about issues that they care about is very much in the podcast sphere. So I'm wondering how you compare those two things and what you think this type of format means for the future of journalism.

Eloise: Print journalism was my first love, I would say. I remember in high school, I brought back the print edition of my high school newspaper following the pandemic. It was that toss-up. Are we gonna go fully online, or are we gonna keep printing? And I was like, "We're gonna keep printing it." And from the beginning of my time at Oberlin, I've been working at The Review.

I've held several different positions there, and I've always kept that love. But as my Oberlin career has progressed, as I got a degree in media studies, I think I've learned a lot that sometimes you can view the podcast sphere, the video sphere, as an oversaturated market. Yeah. I've heard a lot of that rhetoric going around, and I've definitely experienced that myself, for better or for worse.

But it really is valuable in its accessibility in particular, that you can listen in transit, that we're a culture that communicates verbally, and that is, I think, just such a strong way to consume information. But I also see a lot of some of the legacy media publications, for example, they're putting out these podcasts as, like, the point of entry that will then provoke you to read maybe some of that more technical written work. And the two need to exist with one another. But working for Running to the Noise has certainly helped develop my love for this media sphere as well.

Carmen: What about you, Travis? This kind of shift from what traditional media, print media used to be, to now this format?

Travis: Well, it's funny that you ask that, 'cause Eloise and I actually were wanting to start the Oberlin Review podcast for quite some time. We really tried to get that off the ground, but we were the two busiest people on Oberlin's campus and it never worked out quite that way. Like what Eloise was saying, it is just so much more accessible, and I feel like podcasts are so great at creating community.

People love to have such shared experiences listening to podcasts. It's such a social form. It feels a lot more social. So we were hoping to foster that with the Oberlin Review, and again, maybe funnel in more readers. I feel like Oberlin is a very interesting place where there is a lot of readership in our print media still.

And I don't know if that says something about the Oberlin students and the kinds of things that they're into and looking for, but Oberlin was such an interesting spot because we were never worried about that transition necessarily. We had a very steady readership, which was so interesting.

Eloise: We have produced such a robust network of audio journalists.

Carmen: Yes, that's right.

Eloise: It's crazy how many folks there are who are just on the frontier of that medium.

Carmen: Well, some people would describe some of our Obies as kind of the founders of the podcast space, right? So it's certainly true that we can, as an institution, take the credit of being a part of the place where people began these types of things.

I guess I wanted to just ask a couple more questions. One of them is really whether there was a guest or a conversation, and you've mentioned one of them, Travis, but maybe one particular one that's really stayed with you that's like, ah, man, you know, when you think about this podcast and you think about that guest as one of the ones that really stayed with you?

Eloise: Well, we were talking about this before recording, and I think we were both having trouble picking just one.

Carmen: Yeah.

Eloise: I think I can look at it in two ways. There are sort of two categories. One is the content that the episode produced.

Carmen: Yeah.

Eloise: The other is what we were talking about with the research and then the surprise, particularly in sectors that I maybe didn't previously have interest. I will say all three of mine are sort of journalist Obies. So for me, that would be Ben Wittes, Sonia Shah, and Joe Richman.

Carmen: Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. I like those episodes. The reason why Ben stays with me, I think in part because I'm a lawyer. But I think he was so revelatory about his views of the Supreme Court, the shift that he suggested that they've made from what we have traditionally understood as kind of this, at least the framing of an objective evaluator of the law.

And his focus on what has shifted, particularly in this administration, I found not only chilling, a little bit like, "Oh my goodness, here's where we are," but also so important to our discussion and conversation about what's happening with this administration.

Benjamin Wittes: And where are you both from?

Eloise: I'm from New York and North Carolina.

Travis: And I'm from Kentucky.

Benjamin: Well, good to meet you both.

Travis: The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, it felt like such a turning point, not just for reproductive rights, but for how the Supreme Court handles precedent, previous decisions. How did this moment strike you, and what fallout are we still expecting from that?

Benjamin: First of all, as somebody who believes in reproductive freedoms, it, it struck me much the way I think it struck many other men who are sympathetic to reproductive rights, which is to say, it's not the same gut punch that it is to women because there's a, just a difference between something that affects you very directly and something that doesn't.

But Roe v. Wade is three years younger than I am, and it is something that I am very aware that every woman of my generation and every woman of our daughter's generation, so it's two full generations of people who are now adults, grew up with this as an understanding of their fundamental rights, and there's a certain amount of anger that the Supreme Court toys so blithely with people's rights.

On the other hand, this is a major commitment of a lot of conservative jurisprudence, and it has been for a very long time. I grew up with a very deep awareness that this was a contested opinion from the moment it was written, and the precedent that was being overturned was not one that had been universally accepted ever.

And by the way, that the judicial logic of it was not unimpeachable either. I would say I had very mixed feelings, but mixed leaning toward anger and negativity. The results of it have been, I think, surprising to a lot of people insofar as the number of abortions in the United States has gone up.

Travis: Up, yeah.

Benjamin: Um, and so I do think there's a real "be careful what you wish for" quality to something like this, and I wonder very much whether the people who put a huge amount of political eggs in this basket are gonna come to regret it at some point.

Eloise: Yeah. I have a, I guess, quick follow-up about that, honestly, which is, for both of us, we voted in our first presidential election in 2024.

We've only really been voting members of society for three years now. And my question is, during such a volatile and divisive time in our government, a time where I think that there's some concern, honestly, with how checks and balances are upheld in the country, is there any advice that you can give us?

I know you said that voting is a necessary but insufficient account of civic obligation, so what can be done beyond that? And I know you touched on it some in the episode, but...

Benjamin: Yeah, I mean, there's, there's so many things, and it often depends on what happens to be in your heart. My chief other engagement is through journalism and scholarship, and I write a column three times a week.

I do multiple podcasts per week. We try to track all of the litigation involving the administration, and we try to summarize it every week. So that's my chief mode of engagement. But there are others. There's protesting. There's a bunch of other stuff, and I think for some people, the best engagements are not political at all.

They are human-to-human engagements with people who need help. They're representing clients. A lot of the lawyers that I work with, they're not gonna get out in the streets and do anything. But they are going to represent the people who get out in the streets and do stuff. And by the way, not clear to me which is more important, because those of us who do that stuff do need to know what we are and aren't going to get in trouble for.

And there's also the people who staff homeless shelters, right? A lot of them wouldn't describe themselves as engaged in politics. So we live in a society in which nobody knows what's gonna work. So you plant 1,000 trees and most of them don't bloom, but some of them bloom, right? And those trees are, in this metaphor, people's ideas about what they can do that would be helpful, and some of them are very political in character, and some of them are really not political in character.

My advice is your instincts are worth your listening to.

Travis: I love that. And on the topic of things that you can do, that leads me into our last kind of question. I was hoping that, first of all, you could talk a little bit more about your Eras Tour that you went on. Um, what that was like. And the big question that I've had, I know that you have a love of dog shirts.

Benjamin: Oh, gosh. Well, let me, let me take the dog shirt question first 'cause it's simpler. The dogs have no meaning at all, and they are not my dogs. The dog shirts and my dogs are unconnected. Okay. Dog shirts started because during the pandemic, I was doing a daily live stream, a version of which I still do every morning, with my friend Kate Klonick.

One day, I had one of these shirts, and I had just been to the gym or worked out, and I was a mess, and I just came on the show anyway, and I was wearing the dog shirt, and all anybody was talking about in the chat was the dog shirt. They loved the dog shirt. They hated the dog shirt. My guest on the show said, "Ben, your shirt is nipply and weird."

And, um, and, and I just thought, "All right. Anything that's getting this number of people to talk and to ventilate opinions about things is great." So I ordered, like, 20 of them of different breeds and declared that I would never wear another, uh, anything other than a dog shirt. And then the pandemic ended, and I had to go back to work.

And so I faced this question. I, I think 45-year-old me was, like, would've been put on a suit or whatever. Right. But again, getting to this part that I just was past the point in my life when I gave a crap, I faced the question, "Am I the sort of person who stops wearing dog shirts because it's not what the Brookings Institution expects of me?"

And I decided that the answer to that question was no. And so I started wearing dog shirts to work. And the funny thing is, the other day, I hosted a panel at the Society for the Rule of Law, which had three federal judges on it. I was like, "All right. Do I put on a suit for..." It's not one federal judge. It's not two federal judges.

It's three. It's three federal judges. Three of them. Do I put on a suit? So I said, "All right, I'm gonna put on a suit." So I put on a suit, walk into the room, immediately start fielding complaints 'cause I'm not wearing a dog shirt. And in fact, the organizer of the conference said to me, "Ben, I thought you had more fortitude than that."

And so now I, now I, you know, I mean, it's just never happening again that I'm not wearing a dog shirt to something.

Carmen: I love it. I love it.

Benjamin: So the Eras Tour was, for those members of the audience who may not be aware of my Eras Tour, uh, was me and a small laser that went to a number of European capitals to project on Russian embassies there.

It was super fun. Um, one of the things about projecting on Russian embassies is that you become a little bit of a folk hero to Ukrainian communities around the world. And so in every city, there would be some gathering of either pro-Ukraine locals or people who were kind of aware of the work and valued it, and sometimes they would involve Ukrainian, uh, refugee communities.

And so in addition to everything else, it was extremely moving. In a lot of European capitals, the embassies are kind of on high-traffic local streets, and so you get people who are walking by who, you know, are themselves, particularly in, like, Estonia, where there's a lot of Ukrainian refugees. Right?

And people just walk by in downtown Tallinn and see you projecting a Ukrainian flag on the Russian embassy, and people would burst into tears. So there was something really moving about it just because of a proximity of that community. Like, we have a lot of Ukrainians in Washington, but they're not gonna be just wandering by the Russian Embassy.

Right. The city's much bigger. And by the way, they mostly don't live in the city, and they generally stay away from a Russian embassy, right?

Travis: Yeah, that's right.

Benjamin: And they also... I announce when I'm doing it, so they're there if they wanna be there. They're not gonna be caught by surprise by it.

In Berlin, one guy who was not Ukrainian (he was German) asked me, "How long are you gonna be here? My wife needs to see this." And, you know, his wife is Ukrainian. And I said, "I'll be here for a few minutes." And he ran home and kind of dragged his wife out to the embassy, and she was extremely emotional about it.

And I always present these as a kind of lighthearted trolling exercises, but they're not actually aimed at the Russians when I do them. They're aimed at signaling to Ukrainians around the world that we care about them, and we haven't forgotten them despite what our president may be saying. And taking it on the road was a very fun way to do that with different groups of people who are not necessarily tuned into my social media or not necessarily reading The New York Times when we might do a story about it. But when you stumble upon it when you're walking down the street, that's a different thing.

Travis: Yeah.

Carmen: Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Excellent. Thanks, Eloise and Travis. Yeah.

Benjamin: Thank you, guys. Thank you. It's been such a joy talking to you.

Travis: That's it for part one of our student-led season three wrap-up.

We've got more questions and conversations to share in part two. Be sure to follow Running to the Noise for season four coming soon.

Carmen: Thanks for listening to Running to the Noise, a podcast produced by Oberlin College and Conservatory. Our music is composed by professor of jazz guitar Bobby Ferrazza and performed by the Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble, a student group created through the support of the legendary jazz musician.

If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that subscribe button, leave us a review and share this episode online so Obies and other folks can find us too. I'm Carmen Twillie Ambar, and I will be back soon with more great conversations from thought leaders on and off our campus.