>>Narrator: How do I know which path is best for me?

Is it possible to take on these challenges and obstacles?

Where do I even start?

What should I do with my life?

Sometimes, the only way to find out is to go see what's possible Since 2001, we've been sharing the stories of people who ventured out and explored different career paths and different possibilities for their futures.

This is one of those stories.

This is Roadtrip Nation.

>> Jackie: We're halfway through our road trip and I'm exhausted.

[LAUGH] But in a good way.

This has been such a great experience.

I'm pleasantly surprised how well our flow between the roadtrippers has been, and I think we understand each other pretty well.

>> Gabriel: The state line between Illinois and Indiana is splitting the RV currently, so like I'm in Indiana, Tomi is in Illinois right there.

>> Tomi: Hey.

>> Gabriel: That's pretty cool.

For the second half of the trip, we're going to head out east.

We'll see Ann Arbor and New York City along the way, ultimately finishing in Boston.

So I'm excited to see what it's like out there.

>> Tomi: Really excited to talk to more people that are in health equity and making a meaningful impact.

[MUSIC] >> Jackie: Today we're in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we're going to be speaking with Ji Hye Kim.

>> Jackie: She decided at a late age to open up a restaurant and that's something that I really wanna chat with her more about.

>> Ji Hye: Well, hello.

>> Jackie: Hi.

I actually reached out to you because I love you as a person, not that I know you.

>> Ji Hye: [LAUGH] >> Jackie: I think it's so amazing that you did your degree and then you decided that you loved cooking and you made it into your life.

And the way that you do it in such a health equity focus is amazing, and I'm so excited to talk to you.

>> Ji Hye: My goodness, I hope I live up to it.

[LAUGH] >> Jackie: Could you tell us more about yourself and how you got to where you are?

>> Ji Hye: Yeah, I was in Korea until I was 13 and then we moved to New Jersey.

And then I moved to Ann Arbor for college.

So I went to University of Michigan.

I studied political science and economics.

When I was here, we have Korean restaurants here, but it didn't taste like home-cooked meals that my mom made me, and I really, really missed that.

I think in retrospect, I was experiencing the disconnectedness from what I grew up in, and I felt very alone.

And it's, I think, that kind of sense of being disconnected from your own community.

So I think when I decided to go do something with Korean food or Asian food, I think I was inadvertently subconsciously seeking that out.

So I started just making dumplings and thinking about selling to local restaurants.

During that path, I ran a small food cart for four years.

Michigan's cold, so we run the food cart from April Fools Day to Halloween, and then the other half of the year, I would go work at different restaurants just to gain experience.

So I wanted to know all about it.

I started reading like evolution of Korean cuisine through the centuries.

And that helped a lot when I was creating the menu for this restaurant.

Because I felt that if I was making a little change to it that I was doing it with some sort of integrity.

Or at least honoring the existing flow of the story and I'm not just abruptly changing it without giving it any respect.

>> Jackie: I wanna say I admire your tenacity to envision the life that you want for yourself and to just go for it.

What kept you going, and what keeps you going?

>> Ji Hye: I think what helped was that when I was creating the restaurant, I thought maybe I can not change society.

And maybe I can not break down systematic injustice.

But at least I can make something different for the restaurant itself.

I've been the server and I've been the line cook and the dishwasher.

So when I became the owner, then I wanted to do things differently.

And sort of create a micro-ecosystem, at least within the four walls of this restaurant, to do something that I wanna see the bigger society do.

So what policies can I set that makes their lives a little easier?

So that looks like paid time off that accrues with the number of hours you work.

That looks like massage credit.

That looks like not requiring doctor's notes when you're sick and then you have to call off.

And it's actually really fulfilling when I have a system that I created that I feel like is working for the staff.

Having that in my head helps when everyday trials and tribulations wear you down.

So those are, to me, more meaningful when I make a decision than my desire to fold everything and run away, [LAUGH] or scrap everything and try something different.

>> Gabriel: So you mentioned earlier missing out on that community back home.

Do you perhaps have some specific examples where you had kind of like an aha moment and you're like, that is a community I was looking for?

>> Ji Hye: Yeah, I do actually.

>> Gabriel: [LAUGH] >> Ji Hye: So what we do here is we try to source locally.

We work with other non-profits in the area, so one of the non-profits that we work with is Growing Hope out of Ypsilanti.

It's an urban farm.

And I start connecting with the farmers, right?

So I didn't even think, actually, for a while, consciously that they're my community, cuz I was so obsessed with the Korean community I left behind.

And then one day, in similar setting like this, I was doing an interview.

And then the interviewer asked me, you must feel so proud to represent your culture, and how do you feel representing your community?

And then I sort of paused and I thought, you don't know who my community is.

Because I knew very well she was only referring to Korean or a Korean-American community.

But then I thought, I have expanded my idea of who my community is through doing this work.

I've always considered myself, until maybe a few years ago, that I was Korean, not even Korean American.

And now, I feel just as Korean and just as American and just as Korean American.

But that was the moment that I realized that my community and sense of community has expanded along with my sense of identity and my existence as a immigrant in United States.

And I felt suddenly comfortable.

I didn't feel that comfortable since I came to United States.

I felt very uncomfortable when I first got here.

I didn't speak the language.

The school system is different.

I don't look like the majority here.

So I realized until that moment I felt like I was living as an alien, even though I was a citizen.

And by doing that, I was delegating myself as a second-class citizen voluntarily.

The truth was that I had already created a new community, and it just only took me to realize it and also feel more at ease with this more complex, more diverse sense of self and sense of community.

>> Tomi: Thank you so much.

That was great.

>> Ji Hye: Can you guys do Korean hearts?

>> Jackie: Yeah.

They're going to look really nice.

>> Tomi: [LAUGH] Health equity is in everything.

It's just being equitable with your resources when you're in a position of leadership.

All of these intentional decisions that she has made to build her restaurant the way she's built it, it was really cool to see how these practices can be built into everyday life for different industries, at the very least.

You're so cool.

>> Ji Hye: [LAUGH] >> Tomi: This is great.

>> Ji Hye: I'll try to remember that on a hard day.

>> Jackie: She uses her love of cooking and she does it to better impact the community.

And it's really exciting overall that you can be making a larger impact towards health equity in different ways.

>> Ji Hye: What's the worst thing that can happen?

Just go for it [LAUGH].

Bye guys.

>> Gabriel: Bye.

[MUSIC] >> Jackie: We're in Chinatown in New York.

We're just gonna eat food [LAUGH].

Which one are you thinking, this one?

>> Tomi: I'm thinking number three, that looks really good.

>> Jackie: That looks kinda good.

So we got pineapple pork buns from Mei Lai Wah.

Ready, one, two, three.

That's good roast pork.

>> Tomi: Yep.

[MUSIC] >> Gabriel: These are the biggest and sweetest cherries I've ever had.

[MUSIC] >> Gabriel: Main character vibes.

>> Ebony: [LAUGH] [MUSIC] >> Jackie: [LAUGH] [MUSIC] >>Tomi: Tik-Tok angle >>Tomi: [LAUGH] >>Tomi: It's so terrible [MUSIC] >> Gabriel: Today we're in New Haven and we're going to speak with Toby Sheppard Bloch of Greenwave.

>> Toby: Welcome to Greenwave.

Greenwave is a nonprofit that supports and trains ocean farmers in the era of climate change.

Greenwave has a goal of training and supporting farmers to grow 10 million pounds of seaweed a year in the next five years.

So this is our lab, and what we're doing in here is we're domesticating kelp, right?

So kelp has this dual-stage life cycle, you can pause it at the gametophyte stage.

The cool thing about these gametophytes is that by manipulating environmental conditions, and by just keeping it in the salt water, refreshing the salt water every few months, adding some nutrients, they will continue to multiply and multiply and multiply, but not fertilize each other.

And then, by exposing them to white light in the nursery, then they will advance to that next life cycle.

So we started a year ago initiating these cultures.

And to give you a sense of how fast they grow, we've gone from about a gram of material to almost 100 grams.

>> Tomi: That's serious.

>> Toby: So those are bull kelp cultures, and that's an endangered species that we have been able to culture and create a seed bank of.

>> Gabriel: So in your professional career, especially one that is trying to not make the future look so bleak, how do you kind of contend with that on both the personal and professional level?

Because that kind of climate anxiety can be so demotivating.

Perhaps it can make you apathetic and just kind of uninterested.

>> Toby: 100%, so, on a personal level, it has definitely paralyzed me at different points in my life.

We're looking to reproduce 10,000 years of human knowledge and experience in like 10 or 20 years.

And no pressure, right?

If it doesn't work out, it'll just be the end of civilization, [LAUGH] so the stakes are relatively low.

So it's really important, and that can be a real challenge in the work context, right?

Because the pressure is almost limitless.

The world is on fire, and it's coming at us at 100 miles an hour.

And people that wanna try and leverage the old ways of doing things to fix these problems, the world is gonna pass them by.

They're not gonna be listened to when the world is floating away.

What's gonna matter is our relationships with our community, our connections to nature, our ability to give each other mutual aid.

>> Gabriel: I do think GreenWave will play an important part in the future.

I can definitely see myself working for a company like GreenWave.

I would even enjoy just the kelp farming itself.

>> Toby: Bye [MUSIC] >> Gabriel: Put on your seatbelts, guys.

[MUSIC] >> Tomi: We talked to Erica Walker, who is an assistant professor at Brown studying sound and noise.

So really excited to see how she blends that line between academia and public service.

I think she really speaks for a lot of people in ways that they are not typically being spoken for.

>> Gabriel: So your specialty is noise.

I grew up around eight siblings, so I'm familiar with the impact that noise can have on you.

So would you mind talking a little bit about noise pollution and the impact it has on our health?

>> Erica: So I think that I've always been predisposed to noise in the neighborhood that I lived in.

It was intersected by two major highways, a railroad, and an open sewer lagoon.

I remember we could predict when the train was coming because we could just kind of start to see [LAUGH] the dishes shake and be like, yeah, that's the train.

And this came like 24 hours a day.

So, I think that I've always kind of been primed to how our environment impacts us.

Especially when it comes to sound, and we see that it sets off like a stress response, a flight or fight response.

It's literally the same response you have when you're preparing to either run from a ferocious tiger or fight a ferocious tiger.

And you can imagine that constant stimulation of that response over a period of time can manifest to some pretty significant cardiovascular and mental health diseases.

So from fireworks to somebody, has urban chickens, you name it.

People reach out to me and then I support them using real time monitoring.

We do community surveying.

We do laboratory experiments.

We just do a bunch of different things.

And the idea is to crowdsource comments within this community-identified noise issue, give them objective data that they can use to take on to advocate for changes.

So I'm just sort of there to be the scientific front.

>> Tomi: I wanna ask about your vision for this field that I feel like you've kind of created.

I feel like most people don't really understand that these things have huge health implications at least on that biological level.

So I'm wondering what's your vision for this field?

What have you seen in the past couple of years?

What do you hope the next five or ten years look like?

>> Erica: First, I would like for us to get out of out of this misconception that noise is kind of like one of those suburban first world problems, that it's just one of those things that you just have so much time that you can just complain about this.

But when you look at how insidious noise exposures is, especially in communities that are extremely vulnerable, noise pollution didn't just happen.

I think that it's been intentionally baked into our urban planning, right?

We decide to dump everything that's loud in communities that are vulnerable, in communities that don't have the power to fight back.

So it's an intentional thing.

So I'm hoping that we can kind of get beyond it being like a tea and crumpet, pinky in the air kind of problem.

And it's a significant intentional environmental stressor that's negatively impacting people's lives.

That's the first thing.

And the second thing is, I hope that we can use metrics that better measure sound pollution in communities.

When we talk about sound, the first thing people usually just go to is how loud it is, right?

But this, it's such a complicated exposure.

So hoping that we can create a host of metrics that kind of take into the complex nature of what sound is.

>> Tomi: I feel like even what you are doing is, I mean, you said it yourself, it's pretty unique.

A lot of times, like academia is very get these papers out or stay kind of in your bubble or in the ivory tower.

But you don't see a lot of people going into the community and keeping up at least those connections and the reasons why they got into academia.

So I guess I'm wondering how you're able to kind of balance those two worlds, if it is a balance, or if there are ways that both of them kind of help each other in ways that you didn't expect when you were first coming into this.

>> Erica: Yeah, I have decided that there are ways that I'm gonna do research where it's gonna be academically inclined, but it's also gonna be very accessible and very community-driven, so I'm not gonna compromise on that.

And if I ever get to a point here where I have to compromise, then I have to walk away, because this is what I wanna do, because I know the power of this kind of work.

If we're public health, then the public should be our focus.

So I'm not gonna compromise on that.

But I do think that it offers the platform to be able to do both and I think that I can show that.

So case in point, I'm in my home state of Mississippi.

I don't know if you guys heard about the Jackson Water Crisis.

It was huge last summer.

When I went to Mississippi, people in the community were like, yeah, noise is not our priority, water is.

And I'm like, okay, let me see what I can do.

So having that flexibility, I was able to test water, have lots of community events, provide people in my community with tap water results, etc.

But then I was also able to publish in Nature.

I volunteered myself into the position of not compromising, right?

It gives you a freedom.

And the freedom is, I can be as creative as possible, and when you can be as creative as possible, you can do anything.

>> Tomi: It's really cool how she kind of takes a niche approach to these huge systemic issues and then she follows the through line all the way to the clear socio-historical cause.

It makes me feel good to know that people are actually doing this research.

We definitely need more Erica Walkers to cross those boundaries in the future.

[MUSIC] >> Jackie: All right, y'all, where are we?

>> Tomi: We're in Boston.

>> Jackie: Paddleboarding >> Tomi: But I can't swim and I don't have good balance.

>> Gabriel: You'll have a life jacket [MUSIC] >> Tomi: [LAUGH] Don't laugh at me >> [MUSIC] >> Tomi: Okay, so we're out paddle boarding, and I just finally stood up, and I'm happy I took this leap.

[LAUGH] Yay, it's so pretty out here.

>> Tomi: So, we're here in Boston about to do our last interview with my lab's principal investigator, Dr. Pardis Sabeti.

She does work in infectious disease, health equity, so really excited to have this conversation.

>> Pardis: We're here today at my lab at the Broad Institute where I have about 40 people that work with me.

And we're working on a space called computational genetics, but also experimental genetics and genomics.

And for the last while, we've been working on infectious disease a lot, where Tomi's been working in my lab.

And do other things too, I guess.

I'm in a rock band.

I do a lot of wellness stuff.

>> Tomi: That is so cool, honestly.

>> Pardis: [LAUGH] >> Gabriel: So you mentioned that you work in computational genetics.

Can you kind of describe what that is and what you're working towards, perhaps in plain language that a general audience could well understand?

>> Pardis: Sure, yeah, so computational genetics is basically taking the data that's in our genomes.

It's basically a code, and computational genetics is where you use computers to try to decipher that code and figure out what it's doing and what's going on there.

We're at this really interesting inflection point where we can generate data from, like every single person on this planet could have their genome sequenced.

And every time you get an infection, you could have that genome read out.

But not just that, but we can also then compare that to all your traits, all your diseases, all your background, or the infection, all the symptoms, all the responses to the drugs you give.

And we can decipher all of the data of all of the genomes on this planet.

And then we could use that to write totally new code to do even a better job of getting genes expressed in the brain.

And that's super powerful for what we can do for medicine and super scary for what we could do for when bad actors act.

And now we actually have generative AI that can actually design new viruses that have more lethal features than anything we've seen before.

>> Jackie: Since our theme of this road trip is health equity, I was wondering where you see your work and research going in the next five to ten years and the specificities of how that would be integrated in the equity space.

>> Pardis: So I've been working in infectious diseases for the last 20 years.

And about 15 years ago, I connected with somebody named Christian Happi, from Cameroon originally, but living in Nigeria.

And the two of us together kind of really hit it off and we launched a program together.

And in trying to launch this program where we were studying Lassa virus in rural Nigeria, we realized we had to do a lot to get our teams familiar with the African context, their teams familiar with a lot of the genomics.

So we really started sending our students back and forth and having an exchange that led us to eventually build a bigger and bigger program.

That turned into something called the African Center for Excellence in Genomics of Infectious Disease, it's called ACEGID.

And ACEGID has now trained well over 1,300 people in deep training programs in genomics, bioinformatics of infectious disease, from 42 different countries in Africa.

And to me, it's so cool, where we think about health equity and we're like, how do we help vulnerable populations?

But by considering them vulnerable in the context of society has been imposing upon them, but giving them agency and being like, let's see what they can do.

I had these three-hour meetings every Saturday with the leadership of Sierra Leone.

And I was just like, my gosh, you guys, I would always be like, you guys are so on it.

I think asking the right questions, posing the right problems, doing things in a way that are, it was so refreshing compared to my week time in the US response, which I found far more political and frustrating.

So to me, health equity is around taking all those external factors away and then seeing the people that you're working with as partners and I think you can do amazing things.

And I like that our way of trying to support the African continent is by making leaders and empowering those leaders to drive things forward.

>> Jackie: Yeah, knowing what you know now and everything that we've talked about, what final piece of advice would you give to all three of us?

>> Pardis: Always come back to your foundation.

This passion that you have for health equity.

If it's those things or whatever it is, just keep finding that, because a lot of stuff is gonna come at you, you're not gonna solve it all.

Just take a step each day in your own direction and your own purpose, and whatever will come, you will be your best self bringing yourself to the table for that.

[MUSIC] >> Jackie: It was really cool just meeting everyone, cuz I think I quickly realized that everyone was just like, just go do the thing.

And if it doesn't exist, just make it.

>> Gabriel: Everyone's just kinda like, what are you worried about?

It just happens.

>> Jackie: Yeah, they're literally just like, trust the process and just do it.

There's no necessarily right or wrong thing for you.

It's just like, am I enjoying or is it a good fit for me?

This road trip has kinda given me peace about the decisions that I made and I think it just helps reinstill that.

I would never put myself in a situation where I'm not making a good choice for myself.

So just really leaning into doing the thing instead of just hyperfixating on the research to do the thing.

>> Andre: Life has a funny way of coming back full circle.

So just be patient.

You get a chance to watch it all kinda unfold in a very beautiful way that's really more so designed for you and not necessarily for anybody else.

>> Gabriel: Obviously, I'm not gonna change the course of the world, but at least for myself and a close community, I can change our world.

And I mean, if everyone could change their own little world, then I guess the whole world could change.

>> Jorge: Now that you've been exposed to all the possibilities, you can go back and you find your community, and I'll say go back and trailblaze, motivate the next trailblazer.

>> Tomi: One big thing I thought about a lot more was the power of the collective.

People can absolutely do a lot more than you give them credit for.

When you find groups of people who are similarly focused on the change that you wanna make, you can really get a lot more done.

Gonna miss me.

>> Jackie: [LAUGH] Who are you?

>> Tomi: The disrespect after all this time.

>> Jackie: [LAUGH] >> Tomi: Let's cut the cameras.

I can't even deal with you all anymore.

>> Donna: Sometimes it's unbelievable the number of ideas, requests, and passion people have for their community, and how they wanna be involved.

passion people have for their community, and how they wanna be involved.

We have so much opportunity to succeed by working together.

We have so much ability to protect our environment for future generations.

And if we can each believe in ourselves that we have something to give others, I think we get back so much more in return.

[MUSIC] Wondering what to do with your life?

Well we've been there and we're here to help Our website has some awesome tools to help you find your path And you can check out all our documentaries, interviews and more Start exploring at roadtripnation.com