How Might We Design Sustainable Innovation Ecosystems Centered Around Inclusion & Equity? with Randal Meraki
How might we design sustainable innovation ecosystems centered around inclusion & equity? This week’s episode of Public Hearing dives into the complexity of economics and empathy. Josh and our guest, Randal Meraki, talk about innovation and possible pathways for realizing a more equitable and inclusive future. Randal is the CEO and Co-Owner of The WorcShop, a 54,000 square foot makerspace & business incubator focused on manufacturing and industrial arts.
Listen to Public Hearing wherever you get your podcasts and on WICN 90.5FM, Worcester’s NPR affiliate station. And, while we celebrate women all year round, our guests for the month of March are all women who live, influence, and/or impact the City of Worcester, MA. Learn more about our show at PublicHearing.co
Transcript for this episode
Joshua Croke (00:19):
Hello, Worcester and the world. This is your host Joshua Croke. This is the Public Hearing podcast and radio show. It is about cities, communities and designing equitable and just futures. We're talking with members of the Worcester community and the central mass community, residents, artists, public servants, small business owners, local activists, politicians, and more about inclusive, sustainable and prosperous growth. Today, we're talking with Randal Meraki, CEO and co-owner of The WorcShop, a 52,000 square foot maker-space and business incubator focused on manufacturing and industrial arts. Today, we're asking the question, how might we design sustainable innovation ecosystems centered around inclusion and equity. This is the Public Hearing podcast and radio show. Public Hearing is available wherever you listen to podcasts and on WICN 90.5 FM on Wednesdays at 6:00 PM. Worcester's only NPR affiliate station. Randal, thank you so much for coming on the show. We always start the show, asking our guests to share some background about themselves, including parts of their social location, which are social characteristics of one's identity that have been deemed to be important by society to bring additional context to our conversation today. Some of those may include social class, gender, race, and ethnicity, educational, or professional background, and more; anything that you feel comfortable bringing into this space. And I'd like to welcome you and allow you to introduce yourself to our listeners. And thanks for being on Public Hearing today.
Randal Meraki (01:48):
Thank you so much, Josh. It's a pleasure to be here and I feel honored. My name is Randal Meraki. I'm 42 years old. I've lived an extraordinarily full life, I think, I’ve traveled all over the world and I've lived all over the country and, I've had a couple of careers under my belt and I'm currently an entrepreneur in the innovation industry. And yeah. So, how much do you want to know about my background, I guess is the real question
Joshua Croke (02:24):
Whatever you are comfortable sharing. I always love to get to know folx more on the show, as well as to show our listeners about the, you know, the broad diversity of background and experience people bring into our communities that, you know, fuel what they're doing and why.
Randal Meraki (02:39):
Okay, great. So I was born in Southbridge, Massachusetts and then moved between Southbridge, Massachusetts, and various places in Texas. All growing up, I went to 13 different schools before I graduated high school. And so I've bounced around quite a bit. And then right after high school, I joined the Navy and I operated nuclear reactors on submarines for eight or nine years. And then while I was in the Navy I was stationed in Pearl Harbor and did basically the most dishonorable thing that I could imagine doing. I ended up sleeping with an underage girl at a party in Hawaii. Next morning I turned myself in and ended up being sentenced to eight years and convicted of rape of a minor under the age of 16, she was 15, I was 27 and quite a bit of alcohol was involved.
Randal Meraki (03:44):
So that set me on a completely different path than the one I was on as a decorated sailor in the Navy. I'd had a very successful career in the Navy at the time and leading a life of privilege that I just kind of took for granted both in male privilege and white male privilege, but then also, like I was part of the Nuclear Navy, so I was in the elite. And so, you know, I was making good money, living in Hawaii, had, you know, life by the balls as they say. And then, like I said, I took an entire left turn. So then I spent five and a half years in prison, five years in the brig and six months in federal. And I went to a very intensive multi-year treatment program while I was in the brig and it started reprogramming a lot of the misassumptions that I had grown up with assumptions and certain thinking errors that led me down the path to committing the crime that I committed.
Randal Meraki (04:51):
You know, just thinking errors, like age is just a number, complete and utter misconceptions of what consent was, how, you know, how intoxication can affect consent. You know, I had to deprogram from, you know, toxic masculinity and rape culture, conservatism that I grown up with and started really drawing the more correct than healthy conclusions on how to handle relationships, what to do with my own sexuality. I started exploring my own sexuality as far as like, you know, trying to remove some of the stigmas that were kind of programmed into me when I was a kid; homophobia, things like that, and kind of you know, reassessing with with a more practical eye, what are my true attractions? What are my true, you know personality? Who is Randal? So I got out of prison in December of 2011, and I had served enough time that I still was eligible for the Montgomery GI Bill.
Randal Meraki (06:06):
So I went to Worcester State College for three three semesters, a year and a half. Actually, I have more than enough credits for a bachelor's degree. I just haven't gotten them all in one spot to get a bachelor's degree from any particular organization. So I've got a fair amount of education under my belt, and I've got a keen interest in economics, both micro and macro and then sustainable technology and society. So I started my metal fabrication shop, Eternity Ironworks in 2012 with my friend, Josh Swalec and that's still running to this day. Josh started his own, or restarted Ferromorphics Blacksmithing a couple of years ago. And then I started The WorcShop in 2016 with my now deceased partner, Steve Cornie, and my life partner, Angela Maraki. And so my path has kind of led me down to an attitude of empowerment for everybody that I can reach or impact and a business like guidelines toward sustainability, being able to engage in a practice forever. And that's caused me to have some, you know, put some serious thought behind what sustainability actually means both in a technological sense, but in a society sense as well. And then how to structure a society and a business around sustainability. So, yeah, I've got a pretty rich background and none of it is traditional. I didn't go the high school, college, get a job route. So I took, I took the long path.
Joshua Croke (07:56):
I appreciate that. And it's a powerful story as well as really value your honesty of the full history really, and kind of bringing that into this space. I think a lot of these conversations that we have around, you know, calling out things like white supremacy and rape culture, and really being able to have conversations about not only how do we eliminate those things from playing out in negative ways in people's lives and how that affects folx, but also what are the pathways for, you know, learning and growth and opportunity for people who were kind of within those identity groups or you know involved in some of that activity and really being able to claim that, grow and move past and not just move past it, but also become an advocate for the importance of storytelling and how one can, you know, manage and move past, you know, those things into the, to the work that that you're doing now.
Joshua Croke (08:54):
So I really value your insight and your honesty there. So when, when we're thinking about, and I want to talk about kind of The WorcShop like getting the elevator pitch for listeners who might not be familiar, and I appreciate you talking about sustainability is the ability to do something forever. And in our conversations that we've had over the years, I think that's always been kind of a focus of thinking about what does innovation actually look like. And, you know, speaking from my own background and experience innovation to me for the longest time was, oh, you know, flashy technology and, you know, the, I always draw this comparison to, because I'm a big scifi nerd, I talk about like the Star Trek verse, like the Battlestar Galactica aesthetic, right? Like Star Trek everything's polished and shiny and perfect and Battlestar Galactica is like “we built this stuff,” right? Like you can tell that this is a collection of years of labor and work and probably more realistic to our future ability to colonize space, we'll see. That's a conversation for maybe a different day, but talk to me about The WorcShop and your vision and kind of the action that's been going on in your world.
Randal Meraki (10:09):
Yeah, so thank you. And thank you very much for this opportunity. The WorcShop provides opportunities for entrepreneurs to come in and start a business and then fail, cheap enough to start another business. You were talking about innovation. Innovation is expensive and it involves repetitive failure. And if you can find a way to make the failure cheap, then you can innovate more and it's a numbers game. It's just like sales, you innovate, you know, try out a hundred ideas, 10 of them have some legs and one or two of them actually hit the market and become a product that can be sold for profit. All the rest of them end up being learning opportunities for the entrepreneur. And if those learning opportunities are made cheap enough, then the entrepreneur will continue to learn and continue to innovate.
Randal Meraki (11:07):
So our core values are innovation, inspiration and empowerment. The WorcShop is a, as you said, a 54,000 square foot facility on almost 10 acres of land, that is the largest manufacturing business incubator and makerspace on the east coast. And we provide workforce retraining curriculums as well, both on the business end of things, for entrepreneurs, including leadership classes and the technicalities of business such as your accounting and your marketing and things like that, as well as vocational classes such as blacksmithing and machining, welding and other types of fabrication courses. So we have very extensive facilities and it's membership-based. You come in, you get a membership, a monthly membership, that gives you access to the shops. You can get tools, certifications that allow you to use all the tools and the equipment in the shops. And then we have commercial and industrial space for subleases for people to start their own projects or set up their own little shop away from home to pursue their hobbies and passions. So, yeah, that's The WorcShop.
Joshua Croke (12:16):
I want to jump to a piece that you mentioned, which I think is really important for listeners to hear around making innovation cheap enough to fail and try again, because that I think is so critical and important because within that, sits the privilege of being able to just create or just do, right. You know, there are so many societal layers of marginalization and oppression that have historically and continue to limit people's ability to just explore and create and do for fear of sustainability of oneself right, in life and family. So I really appreciate you talking about that in that way, because I think it's an important frame and I just wanted to note the layer of privilege that is associated with innovation and as you and I are talking about innovation, a lot of my work is based in social innovation, thinking about systems change. And a lot of people don't want to pay for systems change because the people who can pay for it benefit from the systems. Right? Exactly. So how do we think about creating pathways for folx from marginalized and oppressed groups to really engage in this work?
Randal Meraki (13:31):
So I've come to the conclusion that throughout history, there are three broad categories of wealth generation, right? The means of production, real estate, and the means of distribution and in those three that's how everything else gets derived from that, right? So if you own land, you're already got a leg up land by itself as valuable. And then the natural resources that is on the land can be valuable. And the extraction of those natural resources can be valuable. And that's where, you know, the feudal nobility came from and the landed gentry and all of that, the means of distribution, as you can see with Bezos, and the way you get goods and services from the supplier to the consumer is the next part of how wealth can be generated on a fundamental level.
Randal Meraki (14:25):
And then the means of production, actually taking a raw material of some sort and turning it into a finished product that line of production is the next big way to generate wealth. So what The WorcShop does is tries to bring the means of production and make it available to everybody. So with modern technology of CNC plasma cutters, 3d printers, CNC mills and then even older technology of the manual machines and then the various industries of the wood shop and the glass shop in the metal shop and all of that, if all of those tools and equipment are more readily available to the everyday person, you're going to have more people building those prototypes and figuring things out because they can so far, you know, if you live in a three decker in the middle of Worcester, where's your shop?
Randal Meraki (15:17):
And so if you don't have a job that allows you access to the shop, and very few people do, if you work at any of the fast food restaurants or in retail, you simply have no access to a wood shop or no access to a metal shop, regardless of whether or not you would have a talent for it. Or you have a passion for it, or you have an invention in your head that you could utilize those equipments to bring to fruition. Until The WorcShop and makerspaces came around, it was just extraordinarily difficult for an everyday person to have access to the means of production. And I think that's to our detriment as a society, because innovation has to, one of the things that I believe with all of my being is that the main differentiator between humans and all other animals is our creativity.
Randal Meraki (16:11):
And I think that's what we're here for is to create and explore our shared reality and then to pass that knowledge down. So creativity happens when you have an inspiration and then the means with which to bring that inspiration to reality. And so I'm trying to connect and make that opportunity available to as many people as possible. This is also an answer to like, what do you do when, you know, you can't get a job? What do you do when, you know, it provides for the gig opportunity, you know what I mean? So, and as well as traditional startups. So yeah, I understand what you mean, and this is kind of how I'm building my little corner of the community to bring those resources to the community.
Joshua Croke (17:04):
Yeah. And that's really powerful. And I'm thinking, you know, when you talk about production and how disconnected so many folx are from the things that they own and how they're made and materials, and, you know, the science behind how the world works. I think we're seeing that it's impact play out in kind of some of the, you know, the consciousness factor of society as well of like, you know, and we recently spoke to Dr. Mattie Castiel who's the Commissioner of Health and Human Services in Worcester. And this is a quick tangent, but talking about the challenge of getting certain folx to really look at the science and production behind things like the vaccine and looking at how do we really get to this level of social consciousness, where we trust scientists and we trust builders and like, what are the mechanisms in which we need to to move forward so that people are more aware of, you know, how things are made, if I'm to make it kind of the most simplistic. And so that kind of came forward to me when you talk about production and, you know, like, I, myself am not the most connected to where all of my things can come from, right. Or how they were all made or how they all function and how they all work. So I think this is also just a powerful, incredible educational opportunity for those who might be interested in the tinkering side of this work as well.
Randal Meraki (18:37):
Oh, yeah, for sure. And one of the things that I have come to realize, and I didn't understand fully when I first started The WorcShop, having a big building full of tools and equipment is cool. Having the community that grows around that is even cooler, because you say that you don't necessarily have you know, a deep insight, you know, you're not necessarily a craftsman and that's perfectly fine. There are people here in your same situation that are part of The WorcShop community that provides skill sets that the craftsmen need. So when I build something great, how do I market it? Right? How do I record the digital media, put it on YouTube, edit it, you know, voiceover it, like, I don't know any of those skill sets, but there are people here in The WorcShop that do, and The WorcShop community has become such a diverse set of experts.
Randal Meraki (19:33):
There are so many experts here in each of the various fields that it's so much more inspiring when you know that you can take a thing and that just because you don't have the skill sets to do all of it, you can find the people with the skillsets right next to you, that'll help you with that project and make that project succeed. And so, the synergy of community has become actually even more important and valuable, I think, than the tools and equipment. And I think as that grows, that's how we reconnect normal everyday people to what is creating their society on a technological level. You know, introducing them to places like The WorcShop. And The WorcShop is not the only one, there are many other makerspaces throughout Massachusetts and throughout New England. Worcester has another one called Technocopia
Randal Meraki (20:24):
that's been doing the same thing with us since about 2015, 2016. And so they are great folx. So these kinds of makerspaces, these kinds of community centers that where the communities like core is creativity and making things I think is going to alleviate a lot of the disconnect as you call it between consumers and the consumer objects or products that they're actually buying. None of our technologies should be magic to us. You know what I mean? You should have some kind of inkling on how the, you know, your touch screen on your phone works or how we're being able to talk over the internet right now in this podcast and technology is advancing rather rapidly. And we need as many people cognizant of that technological shift, as we can get, we can't be leaving people behind because of their social status.
Randal Meraki (21:23):
Right. They can't afford a new iPhone, so they never figure out how to use the new iPhone. So then they can no longer engage in civil discourse because they don't have the social media platforms because they were left behind. And so how many opportunities and advantages, you know, are they not gaining because they don't have access to that base technology, right? Because they just can't afford it or, you know, what have you. So I think places like The WorcShop are going to be key and moving forward as a society, going from an extractive resource economy, which is the fossil fuels economy that we're based on now to a sustainable economy as a whole, right, the sustainable economy, the economy is simply how we're deciding what resource allocation looks like. Right?
Randal Meraki (22:18):
You get all the natural resources, land, water, air, all of the minerals and wood and livestock and everything. How does that get to the people, get turned into finished goods? And how does that get to the people we use capitalism and a fossil fuels based energy production system. And it's not sustainable, it's viral. So moving to a social network with a capitalistic, like icing on the cake, and then a sustainable power generation economy is the only way for our society itself to be sustainable in my mind. And that's gonna require institutions like The WorcShop I think, to accomplish. Otherwise, I think we're just gonna cook ourselves right off the planet, to be honest with you. And I think it might happen within our lifetime. It's getting scary out there, so.
Joshua Croke (23:11):
It sure is and, you know, you mentioned kind of the capitalism and we mentioned earlier kind of systems and structures of power and at any pivotal moment of change, either by human desire and want, or by like physical requirement, you know, because the planet, you know, is being affected almost irreversibly by the impacts of climate change. And we're contributing to that in many ways. And I know that there are our listeners who might be on the other side of this argument. So I'm also interested in, you know, hearing multiple vantage points and views of this issue. But for the sake of this conversation, I'm going to, you know, express my firm viewpoint on the reality of climate change. And the fact that it's been influenced by fossil fuels and human non-sustainable production industries.
Randal Meraki (24:10):
Yeah, so I was on a mission in 2003 to the North Pole on my submarine, the USS Honolulu, and part of the mission was to launch hundreds of these probes into the Bering Sea through the Bering Strait and into the Bering Sea, into the Arctic. And we were measuring salinity and temperature amongst other things. And, you know, this was the fifth or sixth mission like this that the Navy had done over the decades. And the data is there. I have long since stopped discussing climate change with climate change deniers. This is not something that you can deny, it's like denying gravity, right? Like the numbers are in, it's a thing it's human caused, Right? Now, we’ve got to deal with it and let's get to that base level of understanding, because if you're not there yet, then you're literally part of the problem. And you're never going to be part of the solution. Like, the data is there. If you're not going to believe it, then we don't have anything more to discuss.
Joshua Croke (25:17):
Yeah I was working on a project a couple years ago, just briefly with a space science organization that was looking at building, founded by a former NASA director, we're working on projects kind of in line with NASA and some other organizations and folx within that space. And one of, as we were looking at doing a fundraiser and like working on this marketing strategy for this mission that the organization was developing, we started coming across Flat-earthers, constantly pushing against some of our work. And I could not believe that in 2019, 2018, 2019, and this is still a growing movement of people who believe the Earth is flat. And I actually am like, do people really believe the Earth is flat? Or is it cool to be part of a group that you wear t-shirts with like a saucer Earth, you know, floating in space? Like, is it a t-shirt sale opportunity? I really don't understand it.
Randal Meraki (26:15):
On the backs of turtles, right?
Joshua Croke (26:17)
Exactly
Randal Meraki (26:19)
So one of the things that also kinda drew the conclusion of is like, how do you reconcile sustainability with scarcity? You know what I mean? And that was something that I don't know that people really have made the connection, and they really should because capitalism, as it is now, as we practice it in the United States according to the economics books that I read in college, the base fundamental of capitalism, the assumptions is that supply is going to be scarce and demand is going to be infinite, right? So the demand will always exceed supply. And, then the free market systems and the invisible hand, and not everything should end up being the highest quality at the most efficient, at the cheapest price to the consumer by market forces. That's, capitalism in a nutshell, right?
Randal Meraki (27:11):
Sustainability means you can do it forever. How can you reconcile that with something that if there's not enough for everybody, does that make sense? That doesn't really, you can't do that forever by definition. There's not enough for everybody. So it can't be forever. You know what I mean? Right. There's always going to be somebody that's gonna lose out. Well, in fact, technology has pushed us post scarcity in a lot of key places, right? There are more empty houses in the United States than there are homeless. So how does the free market system, how does capitalism allocate resources when its fundamental assumptions are broken? When they are wrong, right, we have more food than we have hungry. We have exorbitant food waste. And a lot of what ends up happening is things get legislated to provide shortstops, price floors, and price ceilings, and to account for externalities. And to provide for false scarcity on products and services, so that capitalism can continue to theoretically, efficiently allocate these resources, according to the needs and the wants of the consumers. And as we see just looking around it's quite obviously flawed.
Joshua Croke (28:28):
Right, Well, and that is also a conversation about priority and, you know, who's in positions to make decisions around what is prioritized, your point of like food waste, right? Food waste, there's so much of it. And a lot of it isn’t actually not even waste, it's surplus that becomes waste because of distribution issues. And so you're going back to the distribution conversation as well. And I've mentioned this a few times on the show. Recently we were talking with Grace Sliwoski over at the REC, the Regional Environmental Council, about a woman who founded this company called Goodr Co. where she's using technology to redesign food distribution in the city of Atlanta. And they've now become a national company where they're taking food at the airport. That was, you know, everyone identifies how much food they might need based on the demand of that day, or, you know, looking at the past week or month or year, et cetera.
Joshua Croke (29:27):
And they have 80 meals left over at the end of the day that often they just end up throwing out because regulation doesn't allow them to resale it, you know, the following day. So they need to get rid of it. And so instead of turning that food surplus into waste Goodr Co. will come in and use their process. And you know, their company model to redistribute that food to communities in need by developing meals and like distributing them across the city of Atlanta. And it's like, my question is like, why is that model not more prioritized by local organizations and governments and, you know, people who are in positions of power to allocate funding and dollars and to bring it kind of local to the central mass context. I often question the priority of our municipal budget. You know, looking at the dollars that we spend, you can talk about certain priorities behind a podium, but looking at the dollars that we spend is really what is shown to be the priorities for this community. And that is not always being used to address the issues that we're talking about now.
Randal Meraki (30:36):
So, okay, I'd like to go on a little bit of a tangent, if you don't mind, because you brought up the dollars, and I think a lot of our societal flaws, cancers, our deep seated societal problems, stem from an unsustainable currency. And I think what we're going to find out is that in order to have a genuine sustainable society, you've got to think about sustainability, again, redefining it as being able to do it forever. Abolishing homelessness, destitute desperation is a must cause it can't happen forever. History has repeatedly shown that when the desperate get desperate enough, they revolt and we have a change in a society, that's usually very bloody trying to find something that works better because what was there didn't work for everybody. And that's usually predicated or preceded by a very high inequality gap.
Randal Meraki (31:45):
And that inequality gap always ends up with the “have’s” having so much and the “have-nots” having so little that they're desperate because they have nothing left to lose moving forward as a society, the inequality gap due to technology has to be able to grow to virtually infinity. And the reason why I say that is because the first person to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit and mine it, is going to be the first multi-trillionaire. And that inequality gap is going to forever grow. And the only way for the “have- nots” to not eat the rich, is for the “have-nots” to actually have enough. Right? You have to make sure you have a baseline social network that everybody has housing, has food, has clean water, clean air, data access, so they can engage in society, power, and frankly, healthcare. Now out of all of those healthcare is the only one that's genuinely scarce because it comes with human training.
Randal Meraki (32:50):
And so that's something that the government would have to subsidize, but everything else technology has made it such that automation can make it virtually free. So you have to switch your currency over to a sustainably produced kilowatt hour dollar. It has to be tied to actual sustainable power generation because it's an interpretation of labor, right? So if we want to look at gross domestic product in the United States, and how wealthy is this country, what you should be able to do is figure out how much sustainable power the country is producing. And that is it’s wealth. That's however many trillions of dollars equals however many terawatts of power. Everybody gets a house, put the solar panels on the house, the house produces a little bit more power than it consumes. That's your universal basic income. That's how you take care of everybody.
Randal Meraki (33:45):
And there's no taxes involved. Taxation is a very archaic form of resource distribution. Taxes are silly, It's old school. In the 21st century, what we need to be doing is nationalizing all of the power generation plants, all the fossil fuel power generation plants, converting them to nuclear, and then providing those as your benchmark for sustainable kilowatt hour dollars. And then there's the federal budget. There's no more taxing anybody because it is inherent in the energy production that is owned by the federal government. It's a common heritage for everybody. That's how everybody gets all of their basic needs met. Then, you're doing this massive shift from fossil fuel industry to sustainable industry. The tree of technology that the fossil fuel industry has grown over the last hundred years and all of the branches and leaves of technology that has grown around cheap fossil fuel energy, needs to be replicated for sustainable energy.
Randal Meraki (34:46):
You need to find the equivalent technologies, your gas powered weed wacker now has to be electric power, but with the same performance as a gas powered, fast charging times, things like that. There's so there's so much innovation that needs to happen on the technology end of things, but for society to be able to actually advance into the post scarcity mentality and a paradigm shift, you need to have a social network that's just required, pure unrestrained capitalism, where if you don't work for a living, you don't have a right to live and you simply die in a gutter on the street is ludicrous and completely unnecessary. You know what I mean? So it's not even that everybody's poor. And then the poorest are dying. This is not the case. It's that there is abundance and our resource allocation system is set up such that some people just don't have a chance to enjoy any of it and they die. And this is not the America that I joined the Navy to serve. It's the America that I've learned is what it is, and that's what, you know, The WorcShop and all of the organizations that I'm working with is trying to change.
Joshua Croke (35:59):
That's also, it's a conversation that is getting more visibility now, but also I think there's a lot of fear surrounding the conversation of things like robots, taking people's jobs, right? You know, automation looking at that because people see it as job loss. Meaning, I don't get money, meaning I can't feed my family, meaning I can't afford my home. And instead of looking at how do we leverage automation to really make our resource allocation more equitable within our community? And that takes not only the physical production and distribution and figuring all that stuff out, which you just talked about way more eloquently than I could at this current moment, but also like, what is the the moral ethical conversation that needs to be had so that people trust and believe that a society can work in a way that is more about the collective, as opposed to the individualism, which we see so often play out in the country?
Randal Meraki (37:04):
So, I think it's not an either or, and I think that's where we're seeing so much resistance. I think people look at socialism as this bad word that you're going to work really hard and that somebody else is going to be lazy. And they're going to have the same standard of living as you. And that's not what I'm proposing. What I'm proposing is a baseline for everybody, whether you work or not. If you want to spend five years in your living room, playing guitar, spend five years in the living room, playing guitar, you'll get good at guitar, and then you'll come and increase the culture of the rest of community. That'd be great! If you want the luxuries, if you want things that are in fact scarce, finished goods and products that other people are making, then you got to find a way to work. What I want to see happen though, is the automation to take the place of what is now slavery, right? Anything that's done in our prisons can be done by robots. Anything that's done on a repetitive basis can be done by robots, remove humans from that equation, right? Provide the humans with the universal basic income so that the jobs that people get are the jobs that are creative jobs, that you can't automate. You can't automate creativity. If we do and Artificial Intelligence becomes a thing, I think we're kind of screwed anyways, to be honest.
Randal Meraki (38:30):
Right? So I think we’d lose the factor as the creative being in the future advanced society and that, and that's your job. Come to a place like The WorcShop and you have an opportunity to explore all kinds of industries to find out what you want to do. And then here's the argument that really irks me about people arguing against universal basic income. If you don't have to work for a living, people aren't going to work. “I'm a millionaire. I could sell all my stuff and just not work.” And just, why would I do that? I want to make a difference
Joshua Croke (39:06):
Yes people factor out purpose in this conversation.
Randal Meraki (39:13):
Of course you're not going to work at that specific, soul sucking, shitty job. Absolutely. You're going to do what you want to do, but you're certainly going to, and I would even pause at that most people after some period of rest, will go forth on their personal projects with a passion and an initiative that would not have been seen working for anybody else. Where groups and collectives of people are going to, you know, pursue shared projects and create just amazing things because they can, and they have the opportunity to, and if it fails, they still have a place to live. They still have something to eat. You know what I mean? They're not destitute and out on the streets. It boggles my mind, that in today's day in age, that a bank can forclose on a house and kick a family out, and then the house stays empty.
Randal Meraki (40:05):
What was the point of that? How would the dollar bill in its unsustainable form be a dehumanizing currency? And our capitalism in its unrestrained form is a dehumanizing economy. We need to add the humanity back into this, and we need to add sustainability back into this. And I think those two go hand in hand. Without humanity, you're never going to get a sustainable society. At some point, those that are without are going to overcome those with; history has seen it since the dawn of humans. And I want to break that cycle for one, and for two, I just want to elevate the standard of living of humans. If you're human, congratulations, you won the statistic, you know, lottery, and now you get to live in dignity because you're a human, you know what I mean? And then if you're a motivated human, you can live in luxury and decadence because there are opportunities for you to increase your standard of living along those routes. But the people that are at the bottom won't resent the people at the top anymore because the people at the top are not decadent at the expense of the people at the bottom. And that's what's got to change.
Joshua Croke (41:17):
Yes. And, you know, for listeners, we're talking a lot about some of, you know, the economy and physical, you know, industry and things like that. But at the core of this, there's such a strong element of empathy in which I feel that this would be allowed to manifest, right? There's a level of empathy, humility, acknowledgement of the collective, you know, the effort outside of oneself that is so imperative in moving some of this work forward. Right. And I just wanted to bring voice because I work in a lot of the “soft skills spaces,” right. I'm using air quotes for listeners, the “soft skills spaces” of how do we achieve empathy and cultural humility and understanding, and really think about the connectedness and trust that's necessary for these, you know, systems and strategies to work. Yeah, so that's just what came to my mind there as well.
Randal Meraki (42:23):
You want to know one of the other benefits of a sustainable currency would be in the society that I'd love to see a shift to, is that crime would go down to the floor. Crime would drop, drop, drop, drop. And the reason is because most crime is an outcome of scarcity. Most crimes stem from the lack of something or another and usually a basic lack. And it becomes an issue, you know, then it becomes sometimes a way of life and you have, you know, career criminals and that goes away when you no longer have a fear of losing the roof over your head, that goes away when you no longer have the fear, you know, of not having something to eat the next day at least a goodly portion of it. So yeah.
Joshua Croke (43:13):
That actually brings forward something. So I'm doing some work relative to youth justice and like the juvenile legal system and working on eliminating the school to prison pipeline. And one of the guys that is on this co-chair committee that I'm facilitating right now is involved with a public school system. He, after being incarcerated, got his criminal justice degree and started teaching criminal justice. And, you know, so he's seen, and he talks about the school to prison pipeline of his ability. He was able to take advantage of and connect to some of the resources that are being provided in certain programs that other folx may not have access to. And so really thinking about and talking, there's like a whole context of the importance and value of education there, but he said something the other day that I thought was like really powerful.
Joshua Croke (44:08):
And he was like, you know, the school to prison pipeline, these, you know, trauma to prison pipeline, all of these various pipelines that we have created structurally and systemically that lead to harm or death, or often a lack of ability to really look at what does reintegration into society look like when we just set up a system to throw people away, you know, keep them out of the eye sight of, you know, people who are not, you know, incarcerated. And then let's just throw them back into the world and hope that they land on their feet. Right? And, you know, he was talking about war and the violence that we see when addressing like youth violence and the people who are dying because of structural and systemic oppression. And he was like, “do you want to solve climate change? We already killed that person.” And it was really powerful to me because, do I believe that we're not going to, we don't have the capacity to solve it because of, you know, someone who was killed? No, but the story there is powerful, like the person who could have cured cancer, we killed already. And I thought that that was a really powerful way to talk about this.
Randal Meraki (45:22):
That’s interesting because I use a similar analogy where, you know, the person that makes a month-long battery is currently cutting hair at Rob Roy's. You know what I mean? And the only reason why they don't invent it for us is because they don't have access to something like The WorcShop. So I understand that analogy very well. I hope that's not the case. I hope that if we put enough brains toward the problem and enough will, political or societal will, toward the problem that we can in fact, overcome climate change. It is such an existential threat that I think part of the problem is the scope of it gets people daunted to where it's like, what can I do? You know what I mean? Or it's like, well, I recycle, you know, that's all I can really do.
Randal Meraki (46:16):
And it is what it is and we're, or even worse, it's all in God's hands. And people just absolve themselves of responsibility. The way our financial system is set up and is so intertwined. And so corruptly intertwined with the political system, I honestly fear that any change big enough would require like a military coup or would require a genuine revolution again. And that kind of realization scares me because I want to get this thing done without bloodshed. I want the societal shift to a post scarcity society without having to kill a lot of people. And I don't know if those in power will actually allow that to happen. They're the same people that are building the bombs and the guns. You know what I mean, war and death is their stock and trade. And that too is something that is not really, like, people don't like to connect those dots, right?
Randal Meraki (47:25):
People don't like to acknowledge some of the realities of our life. I'll give you an example. The dollar bill says, this is a legal tender for all debts, public and private, and is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Something along those lines, right? When it says it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, what it actually means is it's backed by the might of the United States military to enforce its value on a global scale. That’s the only thing it really means. When we talk about the national debt, debt for who for one, and the only reason why our dollar bill hasn't hyperinflated to worthlessness is because we have nukes, you know, and if people devalue our dollar on the government scale too much we will threaten with nuclear. I mean, that's how the full faith and credit of the United States where that's our credit is our weapons.
Randal Meraki (48:26):
And I would like to see our credit being the sustainable power that we produce. I would like to see our credit being the humanitarian aid we can lend to other countries because we have adopted a post scarcity mentality, and we’ve truly thrown our resources into gears, such that we have an abundance to share with other countries. Imagine this, imagine if we have 11 super carriers, right? No other country has more than one. We have 11. Imagine if we took four of them, two for the Atlantic and two for the Pacific, and we turned them into disaster relief ships, hospital ships, nuclear powered hospital ships with 90 aircrafts, you know, full hospital suite, thousands and thousands of beds, enough power to run a city that's been decimated by a hurricane. And imagine if we just sailed them around the country, like we sail the current carrier battle groups around the country, providing humanitarian aid. How much goodwill would we engender from all the other countries that we were helping out? You know what I mean, versus dropping bombs on them. And now we get a 9/11, or now we're always under threat of another 9/11. And so you and I have to get our rights taken away with the Patriot Act. And we have the TSA now, and we have, you know what I mean? Our lives as United States citizens are becoming curtailed more and more and more because of the foreign policy of our politicians of war. Right. Well, I didn't sign up for that. I didn't vote for that, you know?
Joshua Croke (50:06):
Absolutely. And I just go back to, I have a lot of conservative folx in my family. And so I jumped back to some conversations about, “well, how are we going to be safe? Cause people are going to just keep building weapons and we need to have better weapons.” You know, it's such a defeatist and a violent mentality, right?
Randal Meraki (50:27):
It is a race to the bottom. How quickly and efficiently, can we kill the most people? Why are we spending our money on this? And how quickly and efficiently we can elevate people out of poverty? And we can elevate the standard of living across the globe? Listen, if we took all of our nuclear arsenal, the 25,000 nuclear, thermonuclear weapons, we had, we could build enough nuclear power plants to operate for the next 50 years, clean and green. While we actually make a shift to sustainable energy production using the sun, using tide power, geothermal; all the various ways that are replenishable and sustainable, that will last forever. And we would still have enough nukes leftover to wipe out everybody on the face of the planet. You only need like 2000 of them for that. You know what I mean? And then we can start pointing them at the sky in case we do get that asteroid, dinosaur killer. And we can actually use our warlike technologies for the protection of Earth. And that I think would be a legitimate reason to keep some nucleus around. Other than that, like what?
Joshua Croke (51:35):
That seems so unfathomable to so many people. You know, I had a conversation with someone the other day who was like, you know, I don't understand why we need to go to space and like, why we need to go to Mars. Like I just don't get it. Like we have too many problems here on Earth. And, my positioning is so, I've been telling a lot of people, and we got to wrap up soon unfortunately, but I've been telling so many people I'm reading this book right now by Octavia Butler called Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. And she's an Afrofuturist who wrote about early 2020s, America, and how climate has decimated the political structures and people are living in poverty. And there's so many challenges. And the voice of this woman who says are the only potential that we have, in my opinion, to really unify as a humanity, as a human species is to take root among the stars is to look at a vision so grand yet achievable that we would figure out how to make our shit work here, right?
Joshua Croke (52:46):
Because of such an aspirational vision. That's one that unites people together.
Randal Meraki (52:52):
The Moonshot. Yeah, exactly. I agree that more resources need to be spent on cleaning up the last century of fossil fuel based global economy. That should be priority one. Priority two should be seating space. And here's two reasons. One, because if we want a sustainable global economy by definition, it can't be an extractive global economy. By definition, we can't be reliant on extracting natural resources from Earth or they’re natural resources, all your asteroids, right? That's where you get extra water. That's where you get all your minerals and metals to do all of your advanced projects. You don't mine them out of the Earth. You go capture them from asteroids. And that's the only way to prevent having all of our eggs just squished when the next asteroid hits. We have to be a multi-planetary species, but in my mind, we need to be able to do it by preserving the Earth. You know what I mean, taking that technology to the stars.
Joshua Croke (54:00):
Absolutely! Well, Randal, it is always so great to talk to you in the last like two seconds that we have, how can people find The WorcShop? How can they get involved? What's next?
Randal Meraki (54:10):
Great. Yeah. So The WorcShop is www.theworcshop.com that's T H E W O R C for Worcester, S H O P .com. Or you can reach us via Gmail at theworcshop@gmail.com again, T H E W O R C S H O P@ Gmail.Com. Scheduled tours, we're going to be opened up and in full operation here in a few months, we got to get some fire safety upgrades on the new building. We’ve got a new fire alarm system. And we are also a for-profit company and are looking for investors and partners. So reach out to us at theworcshop@gmail.com or visit our website at www.theworcshop.com.
Joshua Croke (54:53):
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Randal, always great to talk to you.
Randal Meraki (54:56):
Thank you so much, Josh. It was lovely talking to you. Have a good day.
Joshua Croke (54:58)
You too.
Joshua Croke (55:07):
Thank you for listening to Public Hearing, our podcast and radio show that airs Wednesdays at 6:00 PM on WICN 90.5 FM Worcester's only NPR affiliate station. Thank you to Randal Meraki for joining us today. My name is Joshua Croke and this has been the Public Hearing podcast. Public Hearing is created and produced by Action! By Design a community engagement and social change innovation and equity centered design and creative storytelling studio. Learn more at actionbydesign.co. Our audio producer is Giuliano D'Orazio. Thank you to Eric Gratton, Molly Gammon and Shaun Chung, who also support the production of Public Hearing. If you have any thoughts on what we could add to the show, voices, stories, please let us know at publichearing.co and as always, thanks for listening.
