Promising

Promising

Transcript for Promising (full episode)

It's 90.1 KZSU.

When I was 11, I wanted every kind of pet.

But my family was allergic to all of them.

So I promised to find a hypoallergenic dog.

I promised I'd take care of it.

And I thought that I would have to prove to them that I meant it.

I would read books about poodles.

They said, we'll see.

Because when we're kids, we try to trade promises for everything.

More time with the TV, ice cream, et cetera.

And these kinds of promises are so normal.

We keep flexing our promising muscle.

Because we know from an early age that promises have a magic power.

A promise is like a kind of currency.

And when I was a kid, that currency wasn't worth very much.

I got the poodle, but it took five years.

And we got the dog because my parents were ready to, not because I'd made the promise.

As I got older, my relationship to promising got more complicated.

The promises I make and the promises I keep say a lot about who I am.

And as I got older, I made promises I didn't even know how to keep.

I remember a promise I made to my mom the summer before coming to Stanford.

I made a promise not to forget where I come from.

I'm from a land where big purple mountains rise up in every direction.

This is Tucson, Arizona.

It's a hot, dusty place driving distance from the border.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Tucson is a popular diner, Bobo's.

Bobo's is a greasy spoon with a $1.89 breakfast special.

The summer before Stanford, I worked at Bobo's as a bus girl in Cashier.

I cleared plates and refilled Tabasco bottles.

My mom liked that I would work at Bobo's before leaving for Stanford.

She liked that it was a service job, that I would meet all kinds of different normal Tucson people.

When I finally got to Stanford, my mom put a Bobo's menu on a bulletin board in my freshman dorm room.

I think she was trying to tell me something.

Something about continuing to be someone who wiped tables and mopped floors, continuing to be someone who can appreciate burnt diner coffee.

At Stanford, there are a lot of formal dinners.

We're talking three different forks, service from people wearing tuxedos, and there's nothing wrong with formal dinners.

But they're just so not burnt diner coffee, not diverse Tucson, not who I am, and sometimes I am able to fulfill the promise.

Like when I talk about these dinners with my mom, I let her know how lucky I feel, and they seem extravagant and special again.

And I feel whole, like I'm being the person I'm supposed to be.

But often I feel like I'm not fulfilling the promise.

I don't even think about the people in tuxedos who serve me food and clean up after me.

Instead, I'm thinking about the history paper I'm writing about Mississippi.

When I'm able to catch myself, it's because I'm remembering the promise.

And I feel like my mom has seen me being ungrateful.

I feel ashamed.

And that shame makes me recommit to the original promise.

That I will remember where I come from.

Even when I break the promise, the promise still has power.

I break the promise by taking a fancy dinner for granted.

But realizing what I've done makes me care about the promise even more than before I broke it.

After breaking the promise, I recommit to being someone who appreciates soup with perfectly shaved parmesan on top.

This is the magic power of promising.

A promise has an effect even when broken.

Even though I broke this promise to my mom, for example, I keep making promises.

Small ones, big ones, words in the air.

And yet still, still, I keep making them.

And not in an empty way.

It's a kind of compulsive ritual.

A way of declaring intentions even in the face of utter doubt.

A promise often has no concrete outcome.

A promise is more like a ritual we do to control uncertainty.

This is KZSU Stanford 90.1 FM.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Each week we choose a common human experience, like recovery or obsession, and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

Today our show is called Promising.

I'm Nina Foushee.

The Latin for promise is to put forth or send forward.

But promises are like Moses being sent down the river in his little basket.

We send them down river not fully knowing what will happen to them.

I think my mom knew that Stanford and the rest of the world would change me.

It's not like she actually wanted me to stay the same person I was when I was in high school.

But then did the promise itself matter?

At base, our constant acts of promising seem to be a general hedge against what we can't possibly know or prepare for.

We use promises as a way to reassure or brace ourselves and each other constantly.

Today on State of the Human we're exploring all kinds of promises to figure out what's behind the power of a promise.

In our first story, at the age of 13, Stanford Jr.

Will Hamilton made a promise to Pierre Vallotte-Kahn.

He's the formal spiritual leader of Suvism.

In our second story, Stanford Senior Liz Matus makes a promise to herself after a cold winter walk across her hometown of Cedar Rapids.

In our third story, Stanford philosophy professor Jorah Dannenberg reveals a promise he made to care for an enormous dog named Ella, a mastiff who likes to eat shoes and couches.

In our fourth story, Stanford sophomore Hadley Reid tells us about a time when wedding vows were only the beginning of another promise.

And in our final story, Matt Rothe, a fellow at Stanford's Design Institute, shares two broken promises.

One's an unspoken societal promise, and the other is the promise of technology.

You'll hear one man's story about the broken promise of the tractor.

God, sex, chaos, marriage and tractors.

It's all in the next hour.

Stay with us, we think you'll like it.

The age of 13 was a turbulent time for Will Hamilton.

He was about to go off to boarding school.

His parents had recently split.

He had a coming of age ceremony, which for some reason is actually pretty common for 13-year-olds of many religions like Judaism and Christianity.

Will's parents practiced Sufism.

Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes having a personal relationship with God.

This is the story of the promise Will made when he was inducted into the Sufi order and what it means to him now nearly 10 years later.

My name is Will Hamilton and I'm a junior at Stanford.

I knew that I was about to meet, personally for the first time, the current leader of the Sufi order.

It was called Pir-Valad Khan.

And I was waiting in one of these rooms with this green carpet, white walls, and I was just imagining, trying to imagine what it was going to be like, and I can't remember exactly what happened, but I know I ended up either on one knee or sort of both knees, just sort of in front of my father and Pir-Valad Khan.

He had the qualities of an eagle, and he did actually have a very big, sort of crooked nose that reminds one of a bald eagle's beak.

This was Pir-Valad speaking.

He was telling me about how important a promise is, and if you say that you promise something, then that means that you have to stick to it, otherwise there's no point in making it.

And so he asked me whether I would have promised to aspire to the ideals of God, and try to be noble and pure and true in my life.

I rather meekly sort of mumbled, I promise.

And that wasn't enough.

So he looked me in the eyes and said, No, you must say it with conviction.

So I looked him back in the eyes and I said more strongly, I promise.

And he sort of nodded his head gravely.

And he put his hand on my shoulder and said, I remember being very proud that I had this title.

I remember going home and just in my, in the hallway, I think saying to my mom, like, Mom, I'm now a knight of God.

And she sort of smiled and was like, Oh, that's fantastic.

I don't regret saying the promise.

And I say this defensively perhaps with the knowledge that I have broken that promise many times in my life.

It surprises me that I made a promise such as that.

And that the concept of a promise was explained to me very directly in being immutable.

And certainly I think about that quite a lot really now.

In fact, almost every time before I make a promise the memory brings itself back up to me.

I mean, even the idea of a promise, like the idea is that you can at any point in your life be certain concretely that you won't change your mind or even just change, you know.

The idea that that just wasn't even in my head at that time is really fascinating to me.

My views have changed so much since I was 13.

I think the powerful promise like that was suddenly defining for several years my life.

What's perhaps more important from my memory of that promise is the less that I promised to aspire to the ideals of God and more that I promised to understand what a promise was.

That story featured Will Hamilton.

Will is a junior at Stanford.

Will thought of his promise as an initiation, and even though he broke the promise, the promise itself helped keep Sufism in his life.

Sometimes we make promises to ourselves without even saying them out loud.

Often this comes with a dramatic event, a failure, a very cold day.

Liz Matus told this story at the Haas Center for Public Service in March.

A warning for listeners.

This story mentions sexual activity among middle school students.

Woo, yeah!

This isn't a story that comes with that much fanfare or even that much victory.

It's a story that I think about a lot, and it's sort of one of those moments in my life that guides a lot of some parts of what I do now.

And I'll tell you all about how.

So I'm from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is a pretty suburban feeling town, small city, of like 150,000 people in Iowa.

And that sort of is the very specific setting in which this story takes place, and.

Yeah, I'm taking some tips.

The time of the story is, I'm in seventh grade.

And we little seventh grade Liz, little nerd kid in middle school, was the person who a lot of my friends came to with her problems, and expected me to sort them out.

It was the winter, and it was a particularly gnarly winter.

And I remember it was winter because it was Valentine's Day, February 14th, when my friend decided to skip school to lose her virginity.

We all knew this was happening, because she told us all about it beforehand, and there was this big planning process, and this whole story that she had built up about why it was a good idea, and why Valentine's Day was the right time to do it, and all of these things.

And then afterwards, she felt really, really bad, and really wished she hadn't, and so she came to me, and she said, this was a mistake, I'm really scared, I don't know what to do, I can't talk to my parents, I can't talk to your parents, I can't talk to the school, I can't talk to anybody, it's on you.

It's on you, Liz, to, I was Elizabeth at the time, it's on you, Elizabeth, to fix this one, and I said, well, I don't, I'm 12.

It was really scary, and I didn't talk to my parents, I didn't talk to her parents, I didn't talk to the school because I wanted to honor her wishes, and I knew it was really important to treat her with the respect that she wanted me to and the way that she wanted me to do that.

So I went about figuring out what kinds of things I could do, and I heard about Planned Parenthood, sort of knew that it was an entity that was like, sit there to solve things like this, so I was like, how do we get to that?

How do we get those resources into our lives?

I was 12 and my brother was 17, and I talked to his best friend, because one time I saw in her purse the little birth control thing, so I thought that she might know some things about sex and be able to help me out.

And I said, Maggie, I need you to do me a favor.

I need you to call Planned Parenthood and make me an appointment.

And she said, well, why?

I was like, well, my best friend lost her virginity on Valentine's Day, and she doesn't know what to do about it, and I really don't know what to do about it, and probably they might know something to do about it.

So I'm like, can you just do that?

And so she called them for me, and she made me an appointment.

I don't know why I didn't call.

It seems somehow outside of my realm of things that I could do.

That was a thing that grownups did, make appointments.

And so she made me an appointment, and then the next step was getting there, because also, I don't drive, I'm 12.

The realm of things that I thought were in my basket of tools were very limited.

And I remember the gnarliest part of the winter, because I was one of those middle school kids who was too cool to dress appropriately for the weather.

So I came to school wearing a wind jacket type of thing, one of those two layers of nylon and maybe little slipper shoes that didn't have socks underneath them.

And my middle school, Benjamin Franklin Middle School, was on 20th Street.

And I figured out from the phone book that Planned Parenthood was down First Avenue about 20 blocks on 38th Street.

And so that seemed, I knew where it was, I kind of knew where we were.

I knew my hometown enough to think it might be feasible to get there on foot.

And that was my only real option because how else were we going to do it?

So after school on a Friday afternoon, a couple weeks after Valentine's Day, I was out in school and my wind jacket and my little slippers, and we took off to walk to Planned Parenthood.

And the first avenue is the business highway in my hometown, so there's like sandwich shops and like, I don't know, car auto places and stuff like that.

It's not like a particularly pleasant walk.

We walked the 22 blocks there and it got really, really cold.

That's why I remember it really distinctly because it was so freaking cold, and I didn't know what to do and all I wanted to do was cry and go home and talk to my mom and not have this be my problem anymore because I didn't do this to myself.

It was just dressed upon me.

But we walked there and we got there eventually.

We got to the place and a little 12-year-old, this little other 12-year-old walked up to the little counter and it was a really small building, and this little window kiosk and we walked up and we said, excuse me, we have an appointment.

My friend here lost her virginity and doesn't know what to do, and she's really scared that she's going to get HPV, and we don't really know that much about HPV and how it works, but she read somewhere that if you have sex before you're 15, you have a higher chance of getting HPV, and we don't want her to get cervical cancer.

I knew some facts about sex.

I didn't know that many, but I knew that one.

And they turned us away because we didn't have insurance papers.

And so then we walked back to my middle school and called my dad for a ride home, and I was out of ideas for things to do.

And in a lot of ways, I felt like I had totally betrayed my friend's trust because she wanted me to help her be not scared, and I had done all that I could do in my power to help her not be scared, and it didn't work.

The reason I'm telling this story is because people feel really scared and really embarrassed about sex, especially when they're children and teenagers and probably also in college and maybe for the rest of their lives.

And I think that talking about it really helps.

And since then, I've become a peer counselor at the Sexual Health Peer Resource Center in Vaiden, and even outside of that, I've just made a point of having a really open dialogue about sex in my life because if I can do it and if I can eat that embarrassment and talk about sex in front of people, I know that it helps them.

And so that's why it's my story.

No fanfare, no victory in this one, but it's just a true story about my life and a really cold day that I remember super well.

Liz Matus is a senior at Stanford.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Today we're talking about promising.

We're looking at what's behind the power of a promise.

In our next story, philosopher Jorah Dannenberg tells us about how promises help us stay the same person from day to day, even when the universe is doing everything it can to change us.

So I'm Jorah Dannenberg, and I'm Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department.

So I made a promise a few years ago to a friend of mine that if anything should ever happen to her, I would take care of her dog.

This is this fantastic dog.

She's wonderful.

She's also a pretty formidable dog.

She's a big, mastiff mix, and she's serious, and she'll get in fights with other dogs sometimes, and she eats all sorts of things other than dog food.

I mean, this is not a small promise to be taken lightly to take care of a Vella.

What does that translate into?

It's not exactly that it translates into anything, so to speak, behavioral.

I mean, am I gonna choose an apartment with a yard just in case I have to take the dog?

No, of course not.

The point of the promise is in a way to provide my friend with a certain kind of assurance or peace of mind of knowing that if anything awful did happen to her, that her dog would be well cared for and well looked after.

And sort of my responsibility as the person who made the promise is to make sure that I'm in a position to be able to do that should it ever come to that.

What we want from people who make us promises is a certain kind of security and peace of mind and trustworthiness.

And I think we can't get that from one another unless each of us has a certain kind of internal ability to kind of continue to be the people who made the promises and over the course of a life, a lot of the more important things about a person are subject to change.

And often in ways that sort of seem as though they're kind of the inevitable product of forces outside of us who we find ourselves with, what job we end up in, where we live.

Part of the point of making the promise seems as though it's a kind of self-preservation, a kind of continuing to be who you are or who you want to be into the future, when you recognize that if you aren't actively trying to do that, that you might very well not be, that you might lose some of the things that matter to you through, you know, kind of happenstance or the pushing and pulling around of you by the world.

Jorah Dannenberg is a professor of philosophy at Stanford University.

In our last story, we heard about making promises to others to hold on to specific parts of ourselves.

Because when we make a promise, it's kind of like an electric fence.

We decide who we want to be.

We're saying, I won't go past this boundary.

I won't let myself change.

So promises keep us accountable to ourselves.

In our fourth story, we're looking at a two person, real electric fence kind of promise, marriage.

Marrying someone means actually vowing to be together till death do you part with.

People, all people change.

What happens when the person you married becomes a completely different person?

Hadley Reid brings us the story.

Here's Hadley.

Holly and Don had been writing letters for about a year and a half, when one day.

He wrote to me and said, you know, thanks for your most recent letter.

It was great because I got it on my birthday, November 22nd, and I thought, oh my God, that's my birthday.

And I knew instantly that I was going to marry him.

Holly and Don are my mom and dad.

Both my brother and I call them Holly and Don.

We've done it since before I can remember.

We got married in the woods behind my parents' house.

We felt we were getting married, but we'd been living together for two years.

And there was the time when it was kind of like, well, it's just a piece of paper.

But in reality, I think that the vows are really meaningful and it is something that you're promising.

There was real weight in the very words of this promise.

I mean, it's essentially saying that you're going to stay loyal and true no matter what happens.

Holly and Don had been married for 16 years when they settled in North Carolina and had me and my brother Otis.

When I was 18 months old and Otis was five and a half, we had this winter where there was just an amazing amount of snow.

It piled up everywhere and people were cross country skiing through the neighborhood and handing out hot chocolate like candy on Halloween.

But by the end of the week, the snow had started to melt and we went on a hike up in the woods behind my house.

We started out fine and we went across the creek that runs through our neighborhood.

We started to climb up this icy bluff, but when we got to the top, Don just lost his footing and he slipped and he fell off of this bluff.

When he lost his footing, there was nothing for him to hold on to, nothing to break his fall and he slid out of control and he was screaming the whole way down.

It was horrifying to watch.

It was like seeing something in slow motion that you could do nothing to prevent.

And when he hit the bottom, he was motionless and we yelled to him and he didn't answer.

And it was like a very surreal and lonely moment to be up at the top of this icy bluff with two young kids and Don hurt or possibly dead at the foot.

Holly tried, but she couldn't get to Don.

It was too icy, so she ran, carrying Otis and I back to the closest house, hoping that Don wouldn't wake up alone and disoriented in the snow.

I called 911 and the emergency crew came and we ran back to where I'd left Don.

The whole way back, I just remembered my feet were pounding in the snow and my heart was pounding.

And just the whole way, I would just say, please let him live, please let him live, please let him live and it was just every step I took.

When they finally got to Don, he was conscious, but he wasn't, he wasn't Don.

When they got to the hospital, Don didn't really know who he was or where he was and he looked and acted like a caged wounded animal.

They had to tie him to the bed because he would rip out the tubes and cords that were monitoring him.

He had a severe traumatic brain injury.

The doctors would tell me that, you know, it was probably just a question of what level of deficit he was going to have, not if he was going to have a deficit and that he'd likely have pretty significant personality changes.

Don had to be sedated into a medically induced coma and even when he woke up, a few days later, things still looked grim.

The nurse would hand him a comb and he kind of hold it in both hands in front of him and stare at it.

Maybe look at it a minute and a half or two minutes and then all of a sudden he would like jerk it through his hair, like he'd figured it out.

He was having to sort of relearn and re-figure out what to do with things.

Holly began to realize that Don might not be, might never be, the same person she'd married.

You say when you marry someone that it's in sickness and health and basically you promise to take care of that person no matter what happens, but I was facing potentially having somebody who would not be the person I married, would not be funny or smart or able to be a father to my children and I mean, your life like flashes before your eyes.

I think the way I dealt with it was partly just by really focusing on everything I could do to help him.

In 10 days after Don had been in the hospital, something did change.

When I walked in, he introduced me like in this formal way, like, oh, let me introduce you to my wife, Holly Russell.

And I mean, these were the first words he'd said in 10 days.

And all of a sudden he was talking, like it wasn't just stumbling.

I mean, he was speaking fluently.

But meanwhile, he also was like wearing diapers.

I mean, he didn't have any like control.

So it wasn't like everything was better.

But eventually the other things did start coming back.

So Don was in rehab up in Boston for a couple of months.

He was still not completely himself, but he was pretty good.

And then he got better and better and eventually was just completely back to normal.

But even though Don did thankfully make a full recovery, during our whole conversation, Holly kept saying that she didn't know what would have happened if he hadn't.

And her doubt was infectious.

I really faced that situation for a month and a half where I knew he would be breathing and eating and surviving, but I didn't know whether he would be himself.

What does it mean, then, to have promised in sickness and in health?

Does that mean that you should then spend the rest of your life and your children's lives caring for someone who can't give you what you need?

I don't know.

I mean, I think the marriage vows would say yes.

I don't know if I could have done that.

I'd like to think I could have, but I honestly don't know.

Now, I was wondering about these what ifs and if they even mattered.

I mean, after all, Don had completely recovered, but somehow it still felt scary to hear Holly saying, I honestly don't know.

It felt like a little tear in our family fabric.

In fact, the only person who didn't seem troubled by this conversation was Don when Holly asked him.

Does that make you feel like I don't love you?

That's my dad, Don Reid.

From what I've heard about it, she was extraordinary.

Because I was sort of out of it for much of this, or even when I was back conscious, I wasn't really conscious of everything that was being done for me.

But would you have felt differently?

I mean, if something happened to me where I was not the person that you married, what would you do?

I'll go look after you.

So, you know that you would do that.

I think, yes, I think so, but...

Yeah, I think that I would, but I don't have any problem with the sense that I could have been in a situation where, you know, the point is not, I think the point of promise is not to make one of the promiseors unhappy, not to make one of the promiseors less, yeah, less, less happy.

Don wants Holly to forget about the semantics of the vow that she keeps running up against, because for him, the promise isn't about the words.

The vow isn't this straight jacket on the relationship.

Instead, the vows are like a shell that protected and shaped the relationship as it grew, until this subtler promise to keep each other happy was strong enough to hatch out.

That story featured Don Reid and Holly Russell.

They both graduated from Stanford.

They live in Chapel Hill.

We just heard a story about a promise that was a foundation, but not a straight jacket.

We heard about how promises can help keep us together, even when something huge changes, and our old lives run the risk of becoming unrecognizable.

This week on our show, we're looking at promising.

We're asking, what is the power of a promise?

In our final story, promises are made not between people, but between man and machine.

Matt Rothe, a Stanford School of Business student, shares his battle to overcome two broken promises.

Eric Olson brings us this story.

Matt Rothe cares more about how we grow our food than anyone I've ever met.

He grew up on a conventional corn farm in Colorado and always dreamt of one day becoming a farmer himself.

You know, I've always wanted to be a farmer.

But he's not a farmer.

So my name is Matt Rothe, and I teach design thinking at Stanford University.

Matt is a lecturer at Stanford in the heart of Silicon Valley, far, far away from the Colorado family farm.

I teach with Matt and I was, of course, curious to know, why is he not farming, what's stopping him?

And his response turned out to be a surprising story about modern agriculture.

It all began back in the farm in Colorado where Matt grew up.

Where up.

So I was raised in Fort Morgan, Colorado, on a very large family farm.

Matt loved helping his dad on the farm.

And when he was 12, he got his first job.

I was pretty excited about it, because my job was to drive this big tractor through a cornfield.

And I just remember being so excited to be driving this huge machine.

I got on, my dad showed me how to run the thing, what to do, and we made several passes up and down the field.

And these fields are like, each field is 160 acres, so it's pretty big.

It's pretty big.

Like 5,000 sager fields of corn.

It's a lot of corn.

I mean, it's corn as far as you can see in any direction.

Like how many hours did it take you to cover that?

Oh, forever.

You know, you're driving this big piece of machinery and all you're doing is staring at corn at three miles an hour and it all looks the same.

And you're just doing this for hour upon hour upon hour.

I mean, literally driving a tractor for 12 hours a day.

And so you can imagine like for 12 hours at three miles an hour, driving this tractor in 100 degree heat with the dust and the bugs and thunderstorms.

So what I thought was gonna be this really like cool thing driving this tractor and making money ended up being a pretty miserable experience for the most part.

But you wanted to be a farmer afterwards.

I did, yeah.

And so the saving grace of driving a tractor for 12 hours a day at three miles an hour is that you always see the end of the field.

You always know where you're going to.

And you're always, despite the fact that you're going three miles an hour, you're always making a little progress towards it, right?

And there's such a sense of satisfaction when you get to the end of that final row and you turn around and the whole thing is done.

I mean, there's just like, I don't know, it's so fulfilling to do that.

Matt ended up working on his dad's farm every summer, all through high school.

During his college years, he considered a couple of other options, but by the time he was a senior in college, he had made up his mind.

And so I spent a lot of time in my senior year kind of thinking about what I wanted to do when I graduated, and it just became more and more clear to me that I liked working on the farm.

I like fixing things.

I like planting things in the ground and taking care of them.

I like taking care of the land.

I like seeing it and feeling ownership of it.

And so all of that for me just kind of got bound up into this desire to want to go home and farm.

So I called up my dad in April probably.

And anyway, I remember standing in the kitchen talking to my dad on the phone, explaining that I really wanted to come farm with him.

And basically what he said was that the way farming is going, like there would be no way for you to own it.

Nobody will give you, will lend you money to run this operation.

One, no bank will.

I don't have enough money, this is my dad speaking.

I don't have enough money to lend you really to do this.

And I'm not in a position really to give any of it to you because I need to retire.

So, what was your reaction to your dad's response?

I think it was hard for both of us because I think I can't imagine being a father to my son and telling him or that he couldn't come back and run the business, the family business.

It's been in the family for 12 generations.

And it was equally hard for me because it was like I had spent all this time toiling over what I thought that I wanted to do and here it was not available to me.

And I remember just kind of feeling like helpless, you know, like...

Now what?

You know, like...

Now what?

Summer comes around, Matt graduates and he leaves college lost.

Lost and heartbroken.

I didn't know what I wanted to do and so I decided with a couple friends to move to Bozeman, Montana, where we ski bummed for a year and delivered pizza, which I guess was my first professional experience beyond the farm and the food system.

In the years that followed, Matt would find himself drawn back to just that, the food system.

After a move to California, Matt eventually landed a job with Nyman Ranch, a national network of family farms that raise livestock in a humane way.

And so we ended up doing some really cool stuff at Nyman Ranch.

I think the pork program that we built and that still exists today is probably one of the shining examples of how we can develop a sustainable agriculture at scale.

After six years, Matt left Nyman Ranch to attend business school at Stanford.

He wanted to explore if the practices he had helped develop at Nyman Ranch could be applied to more aspects of the food system.

But things didn't quite go as expected.

So I spent the summer in between my two years at business school at home.

I got to see my parents as a result of that quite a lot, which was really great because we didn't anticipate or foresee what was going to happen, which was that late that fall, early winter.

My dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, you know, when you start looking into it, you quickly discover that it's a year-long death sentence for 98% of people that get it.

Matt now shifted his focus from school and devoted all his free time to helping his parents back in Colorado.

Man, I flew to Colorado like 19 times in, you know, nine months or something.

And that was both to spend time with my dad because we knew that time was limited, but also to help him kind of manage his affairs with the farm to sort of understand his business.

I started taking a look at all of all of the spreadsheets, like all of the profit and loss statements balance sheet to really sort of get a sense for like, how does this business run?

Like, what is it worth?

You know, what are the challenges and things weren't looking so good.

The Roth family farm was up to its ears in debt.

He had a mortgage at 10% interest.

This is at a time when people are giving away home loans to strangers on the street practically.

So the farm is close to bankruptcy and Matt is asking himself, why is this happening?

And what are we doing wrong?

The one warm summer day in 2007, Matt's dad told him a story that finally helped Matt answer these questions.

My dad, in all this time that we ended up spending together in that last year, told me this story about how the tractor ruined farming.

And I just remember it just being amazed by this story.

It made sense of the situation of our farm.

I mean, it explained almost perfectly why our agriculture was so f***ed up.

So we were sitting at the kitchen table, and he was pretty sick at this point.

He was in his bathrobe.

He was probably eating an egg, for whatever reason.

He went through this period, as you do when you have cancer and you're on different drugs, you can only eat certain things.

Scrambled eggs happened to be one of those things.

And so he said something like, you know, your grandfather used to like to tell the story about how the tractor ruined farming.

And basically, the way that my grandfather tells a story, he used to tell the story, is that it used to be that we had horses.

I mean, they did all of our work.

The cycle of the day was that you'd get up in the morning and feed the horses and then you'd feed yourself.

And then you'd go out to the barn and saddle all the horses and you'd get them all connected.

And you'd go out and you'd work in the field with the horses until noon.

And then you'd come back, horses and water, a little food, you would eat.

And then you'd take the horses back out in the afternoon and you'd work either until they couldn't work anymore or until you couldn't work anymore.

And at the end of the day, you'd put the horses back in the stable.

And then everybody would go to sleep and get up the next morning and do it again.

Then one day, they invented the tractor.

And this tractor was going to be the savior for farming.

This is going to make farming easier.

It's gonna make it more profitable.

We're all gonna get rich if we buy a tractor.

Because you think about it, you went from a horse, which is one horsepower, to a tractor, which is scores of horses powered.

It was just a giant leap forward in terms of technology on the farm, basically.

It turns out that there were some things about the tractor that we didn't think about.

And one was that it cost a fair amount of money.

And we don't have a lot of money as a farm.

And so we had to borrow some money to buy this tractor.

Well then we realized that tractor actually breaks down a fair amount and it requires fuel.

There's also this cost of like just running this thing, fixing it, which we didn't really anticipate.

And so we had to go to the bank and get an operating loan just to run the tractor.

Well then we realized that this tractor is so productive that yeah, I mean, our days are shorter, but it's only because we're limited by how many acres we can farm and because we don't have enough acres, we can't actually pay off the tractor.

And so we have to go buy more land now, just so this tractor has something to do basically.

And so, again, we're poor farmers, we don't have a lot of equity, so we have to now take out another loan.

And that's all okay, you know, but what's happening is that everybody is getting a tractor.

All the neighbors now have tractors, and everybody is quote unquote more productive.

Everybody's buying more land, everybody's producing more food.

But the result of all of that is that prices are declining, right, because there's more corn in the market now, the prices declined.

And so the reality is that we're not really any better off financially, because prices have come down as a result of our productivity.

We've got all this debt now that we have to service.

At least with the horse, like we had the promise of only working a $12 day because that's all the horse could work.

And now we're working all day, every day, just to service this tractor.

It breaks down, it's smelly, it's loud.

And at the end of the day, we're not any better off than we were before we had the damn tractor.

And so when my dad was telling me that story at the kitchen table, it was like this amazing moment for me.

It started to take on this sort of metaphorical significance to me.

And what occurred to me as my dad was telling me this, I thought about it, you know, for quite a while afterwards, is that my grandfather's story of the tractor is basically an allegory for every technology that's been developed since.

And that includes artificial pesticides, fertilizers, genetic modified organisms.

It includes the specialization of farming equipment and technology.

It's all the same story.

A couple of months after the day when Matt first heard the story about how the tractor ruined farming, his father passed away.

At this point, the family farm was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Matt was desperate to keep the family business alive.

But he realized that his dad had been right this whole time.

Matt didn't have the resources to turn things around, and no one would lend him the money either.

Ultimately, Matt and his mother ended up selling the farm.

So, there was this combination of events that kind of happened in that year, and the one was just this experience of like, kind of helping my dad manage the farm and then selling it, and just sort of seeing firsthand, like, how fucked up our agriculture is.

There was this element of particularly when we had to sell the farm, of feeling like helpless in a way.

My dad was documented generation number 12 of family farmers in our family, and there wasn't gonna be another one.

Having this revelation and this really painful moment of seeing the farm sort of disappear for good in our family, I decided that I was gonna try to do something about it.

And that's where we are today.

Currently, Matt is working on two big problems.

The first one is to limit the tractors and other technologies' negative impact on the environment, particularly on the soil.

Most of our technologies, they result in the loss of soil fertility and literally in the loss of soil.

Soil is running off of our properties.

And so the ability of our soils to produce food is declining.

So how is it then possible that we're producing more and more food every year?

Other technologies that we've developed, namely artificial fertilizers and pesticides, are masking the decline in the productive capacity of our soils.

It appears that our agriculture is becoming super productive.

I mean, we're producing more calories now than we ever have.

But the reality is that the underlying asset, right, the thing that is most important to us, the soil, is actually declining.

And it gets worse.

Now, why this is important is that the things like fertilizer, pesticides in particular, they're all derived from petroleum or require a lot of energy in their production.

That's to say that they're limited resources, right?

So you could imagine a future where those resources become scarce and incredibly unaffordable.

And we're in a situation where we've significantly reduced the productive capacity of our soil as being a really terrible set of circumstances.

The introduction of the tractor set in motion a shift in American agriculture, from small and diversified farming to massive and hyper-efficient monocultures.

Growing a huge amount of one type of food, like the endless corn fields on Matt's family farm in Colorado, makes a lot of sense economically.

It is very efficient and allows the farmer to automate a lot of tasks.

But when the corn isn't growing, the soil is left unprotected, allowing rain and wind to wash it away.

So the first problem is that most of the technologies used in modern agriculture have a detrimental effect on the soil's fertility.

The second problem, and this is a big one, is that we're stuck with them.

Farming at this scale requires new technologies, like advanced tractors or irrigation systems, expensive ones, that most farmers have to borrow money to buy.

So just like Matt's dad, they are forced into debt to keep up.

You know, farmers borrow money to buy these technologies, and then they exist in an environment where they're dealing with three things that are outside of their control, things like the weather, pests, and the market.

And so you have just the existential reality of farming aligned against you basically.

And when you combine that with a balance sheet full of debt, it just increases the risk of bankruptcy, right?

And when one farmer goes bankrupt, another one steps in to take over.

And if history tells us anything, she will go bankrupt, too.

This feedback loop is the reason why so much of American farmlands are enormous monocultures.

The upsides to this, efficiency and an abundance of cheap food.

And the downside, the ultimate destruction of productive soil.

But there is a way to break this vicious cycle.

One way is to make farmers more resilient to changes in their environment by diversifying their production.

Just like a smart investor on Wall Street spreads risk by investing in several different companies and markets, farmers can mitigate risk by growing and rotating several different crops on their land.

Diversified farming also has the added benefit of building soil fertility, as crops and livestock are used to mimic natural ecosystems.

So, why is this not happening?

Cost, the reality is these small diversified farms are paying the full social environmental costs of their production.

If we were to transition our farm overnight to a hundred small diversified farms, the costs of that food would be extraordinary.

It's not just that monoculture farms can push down their operating costs thanks to efficiency and scale.

The crops they grow, most commonly wheat, soy and corn are heavily subsidized by the government.

Taken together, there are not many economic incentives to diversify.

Matt and the Feed Collaborative are looking at ways to change this.

One approach they're taking is to increase the demand for food grown in a sustainable way, and to help diversified farms become more competitive by linking them directly to consumers.

Consumers of food need to share in the risk of the production of food.

A model was developed about 100 years ago called Community Supported Agriculture, but the idea of that was that consumers of food actually invested in the farm that produced the food for them.

The main limitation of this model, however, is that it is very inefficient for a farmer to deal with a large number of small customers.

Therefore, Matt is assigning ways for large institutional food service providers, like a corporate dining service, to form long-term direct relationships with small farmers.

This way, they'll equally share the risk of bad weather, pests and poor market conditions.

That is, I think, a big part of the solution to disrupt the cycle of bankruptcy in our agriculture.

So, Smad continues to work on scaling these solutions.

He keeps moving towards his ultimate goal, to one day go back and farm.

And of course, I was curious to know, would that be with or without the tractor?

Yeah, so we'll have a tractor.

We'll have a tractor.

The tractor that we're gonna use in a way that minimizes the destruction to our soils.

I think the bigger thing about the tractor is that the tractor will be a slave to us and not the other way around.

That story featured Matt Rothe.

Matt Rothe teaches design thinking at Stanford University.

As a fellow at Stanford's Design Institute, Matt recently launched the Feed Collaborative.

They bring together students, faculty, and pioneers in our local food system to tackle its biggest challenges.

Today's program was produced by Christy Hartman, Hadley Reid, Eric Olson, Jonah Willingans, and me, Nina Foushee.

Special thanks to Will Hamilton, Holly Russell, Don Reid, Hadley Reid, Liz Matus, STI fellow Matt Rothe, and Professor of Philosophy Jorah Dannenberg.

For their production help, thanks also to Rachel Hamburg, Natasha Ruck, Charlie Mintz, Will Rogers, Miles S and Josh Hoyt.

Special thanks to all the musicians who created music and shared it with the Creative Commons license so we could use it today on our show.

Chris Zabriskie, Kevin Macleod, A Smile for Timbuktu, The Kyoto Connection, Antony Rajulov, Blair Moon, Mountain Range, Arizona Kazuhiro, Marty Erlich, Kai Engel, the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project and Puddington Bear.

And for their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford Continuing Education, the Program in Oral Communication and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Stanford Storytelling Project's live events, grants and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Nina Foushee.

We would like to dedicate this show to all the fathers featured in today's stories, and to all fathers everywhere.

All right, talk to you later.

Give Donna a hug from me.

I will.