Podcast appearances and mentions of Carl Hoffman

American road-trip aficionado Jim Hinckley recommends Old West ghost towns to visit before they fade away. Then Irish singer Cathie Ryan explains — and demonstrates — how Ireland remembers its heroes in song. And journalist Carl Hoffman lets us in on what he's concluded after researching the disappearance of banking scion Michael Rockefeller, who vanished in 1961 while on an art-buying expedition in the jungles of New Guinea. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

Home to about 30 Million people, this Southeast Asian Nation is on both the Malay Peninsula and the island of Boreno. It's on the island of Borneo where we get the fascinating story of Bruno Manser, one the world'd first environmental celebrities, ridiculed in the West as a "White Tarzan." Here's the book by Carl Hoffman, which tells the story of Bruno, that Clark mentions in this episode: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Wild-Men-Borneo-Treasure/dp/0062439022 In this episode, Clark talks about countries with religious symbolism in their flags. Here's an interesting link from PEW Research about 64 countries with religious symbolism in their flags: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/11/25/64-countries-have-religious-symbols-on-their-national-flags/ Info on Clark's online classes: Free classes available on Coral Academy! ● Parents can visit ⁠⁠https://www.coralacademydemo.com/⁠⁠ and select their preferred classes ● While filling in the learner details, they should click on 'Referred by teacher' and enter CLARK VANDEVENTER For more travel perspectives, follow Clark on social media! Clark on Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/clarkvand/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clark on TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@clarkvand?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc⁠⁠⁠⁠ You can also email Clark at clarkvand@gmail.com and check out all of his course offerings for tweens and teens on Outschool at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/clarkonoutschool⁠⁠

Home is where the heart is. This phrase that is scrawled across on wooden sign boards and hung in countless houses across the world may be cliche, but it's true. Bruno Manser may have been born in Switzerland, but his heart was in Borneo. A place where he fell in love with the jungle and the people in it. It was paradise, but it was in peril. The home Bruno found was in serious danger. A home he was willing to fight for the death to protect. We love our National Parks and we know you do too but when you're out there, remember to enjoy the view but watch your back. Please take a moment to rate and subscribe from wherever you're listening to NPAD! Become part of our Outsider family on Patreon to gain access to ad-free episodes, bonus content, and more. Follow our socials Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. To share a Trail Tale, suggest a story, access merch, and browse our book recommendations - head over to our website. Thank you so much to our partners, check them out! Mosh: Use our link and save 20% off plus FREE shipping on your first 6-count Trial Pack. Earth Breeze: Use our link to subscribe and save 40%. Microdose: Use code NPAD to get free shipping and 30% off your first order. BetterHelp: National Park After Dark is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month of online therapy by using our link. Sources: The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure by Carl Hoffman,  Wikipedia, Encyclopedia, Responsible Travel

Carl Hoffman (@lunaticcarl on Twitter, @carlhoffmanstories on IG) is the author of five books, inclucing Liar's Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies (Custom House). Social: @CNFPod Support: patreon.com/cnfpod Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com

“I didn't know where we were going, and I didn't know how long we were going to be gone. I brought no food, not even a bottle of water. When that boat left the dock, I felt so free. I threw off all these anxieties about control.” –Carl Hoffman In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Carl talk about the premise of The Lunatic Express, which took Carl around the world on a series of local buses, trains, planes, and ferries (2:30); how to overcome the common fears of traveling in this manner, and how tourism infrastructure isn't required for travel in places (9:30); how making yourself vulnerable to new places leaves you open to the people who live there (22:30); the role that simple conversation, smells, and open-ended activity plays in the lives of isolated communities (30:00); and Carl's advice for leaving yourself open to spontaneous travel experiences (40:00). Carl Hoffman (@lunaticcarl) is the author of four books, including The Lunatic Express, and Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest. Notable Links: People, Places & Things (play starring Kristen Bush) Meridian Hill Park (urban park in DC) Maggie Downs (travel writer) "Strange Bird" (Outside article about a pilot in the Congo) Moluccas (archipelago in Indonesia) Asmat (region in Papua) Sambal (Indonesian chili sauce) Buru (island in Indonesia) Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesian novelist) Suharto (Indonesian president from 1967-1998) Sons of the Waves, by Stephen Taylor (book about sailors) Sago (palm starch used for food) Cando (town in North Dakota) Mentawai Islands (archipelago in Indonesia) The Deviate theme music comes from the title track of Cedar Van Tassel's 2017 album Lumber. Note: We don't host a “comments” section, but we're happy to hear your questions and insights via email, at deviate@rolfpotts.com.

Op een ochtend in augustus 1961 vertrekt Michael Rockefeller, achterkleinzoon van de rijkste man ter wereld, samen met antropoloog René Wassink en twee lokale gidsen in een van twee kano's geknutselde catamaran vol camera's, geluidsapparatuur en tabak.⁠ De zee wordt ruw, de boot slaat om en de twee gidsen zwemmen naar de kant. Rockefeller en zijn begeleider, Wassink blijven achter op de boot. ⁠ .⁠ Na een dag besluit Rockefeller dat hij ook naar de kant gaat zwemmen. René Wassink probeert het hem uit zijn hoofd te praten, maar Rockefeller is ervan overtuigd dat hij makkelijk de kant kan halen. Hij neemt twee lege jerry cans mee als drijvers en zwemt weg. Daarna is niets meer van hem vernomen. ⁠ .⁠ De Nederlandse regering houdt het stug op een ongeluk, maar al snel beginnen er geruchten dat de jonge Amerikaan zou zijn gedood, geslacht en opgegeten door lokale kannibalen...⁠ Ik las voor deze aflevering, ondermeer, het boek De Harvard Peabody Expeditie van Jan Broekhuijse en daarnaast het boek Savage Harvest van Carl Hoffman. Allebei aanraders!  

On this edition of The Other Side of Midnight: Frank Morano is a yes-man. But not about the casino proposal for Manhattan! We remember Bobby Rydell, revisiting his music and past interviews, Carl Hoffman, a former contributing editor of Wired and National Geographic Traveler and the best-selling author of five books, including “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art” joins us for our Morano Mystery: What really happened to Michael Rockefeller? Dan Kovalik, human rights activist, labor rights lawyer and author of “The Plot to Scapegoat Russia” offers some more info on Russia-Ukraine war. Plus more distraction, debate, and discovery on The Other Side, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carl Hoffman, a former contributing editor of Wired and National Geographic Traveler and the best-selling author of five books, including “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art” joins us for our Morano Mystery: What really happened to Michael Rockefeller? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's it like to be around the President of the United States? Well, maybe that all depends on which side you're on! Last weekend Alan Gurvey and guest host, attorney Troy Slaten, took a fair and balanced look inside President Donald J. Trump's inner circle. During the first half-hour, President Trump's former personal secretary Madeleine Westerhout provided a fascinating look at what it was like being shoulder to shoulder with the President as she documented in her new book, "Off the Record: My Dream Job at the White House, How I Lost It, and What I Learned." Madeleine shared the highs and lows of what many would call a life-changing experience, and answered the burning question… ”Who is she voting for”?  Later in the show, Alan and Troy talked about the psychology behind the President's rallies with Carl Hoffman, who wrote the new book, "Liar's Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies." Don't miss Gurvey's Law on Sundays, at 5 p.m. on KABC-AM 790 TalkRadio and streaming live at kabc.com!

We Need Dr. Fauci More Than Ever as Trump Embraces Quackery | Trump, The Ill Strongmen on the White House Balcony | Inside the World of Q-Anon and Trump's Deadly Conspiracies backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

In her new book, Sisters in Hate, Seyward Darby turns our focus away from the image that often springs to mind when we think of white nationalism—that of angry, often armed white men. As she writes of the men who marched with burning torches in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, the “iconic images…show illuminated male faces—grimacing, grinning, threatening.”But in a video posted online from that night, Darby was struck by a woman who stepped from the crowd to confront a counter-protester—using a racial slur to accuse the person of being a race traitor by failing to join the marchers. “She seemed disgusted that someone would debase themselves instead of standing with their own kind.” That moment helped propel Darby to begin reporting deeply on the women leaders in America's hate groups—the women who, unlike many of the men, do their work quietly and away from the cameras. “The people who are most frightening are always the people who don't want to talk to the mainstream media.”In our conversation, we talk about how these women sell their own unique brand of hatred, wrapped tightly in homespun American values—and distributed via YouTube, social media and other channels. “They have always been savvy about communicating with each other and potential recruits outside the eyes of the mainstream media.”STORIES FROM THE LAST 7 DAYS:In Episode 3 of the podcast, I talked to Liar's Circus author Carl Hoffman, who spent months traveling across the country attending MAGA rallies in an effort to understand the people who stick with Donald Trump, no matter what. At Forbes:Fauci Tells CNN: President Trump ‘Asking For Trouble' With Florida RallyTrump: I'm Not Going to ‘Waste My Time' With Virtual DebateVice Presidential Debate Draws 50 Million Viewers This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit standupkid.substack.com

Author Jim Hinckley recommends Old West ghost towns you can still visit, before they fade away. Irish singer Cathie Ryan shares how Ireland remembers its heroes in the lyrics of traditional songs. And journalist Carl Hoffman tells us what he learned about the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, who vanished in 1961 while on an art-buying expedition in the jungles of New Guinea. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

"I'm a journalist, but if I ever was a campaign strategist I like to think I could actually win the president this election..."Robert Moore explains to Daniel Hewitt the key advice he would give Donald Trump to turn the race around, less than four weeks before election day, after seeing him miss another opportunity as he theatrically returned to the White House from hospital.After Robert's big Hollywood secret is revealed, West Wing insider Laura shares very telling memories of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that rocked the Clinton administration and explains what the Trump campaign could learn from it.And - with the president's quarantine stopping him from attending his signature MAGA rallies - Daniel speaks to Carl Hoffman, a National Geographic investigative journalist who went deep into the base of Trump's base. He shares what he discovered and why it poses a threat to the Democrats.

Carl Hoffman is a very brave man—and one hell of a reporter. In 2019, he set out on one of the most audacious reporting gigs ever: driving thousands of miles across the country attending President Trump's MAGA rallies. He had no Trump supporters among his friends, and really didn't know any of the president's die-hard supporters personally. Why did they stick with him through every scandal, every outrage, and lie after lie after lie?By embedding himself in the rallies—lining up outside huge arenas in the cold the night before the event to spend the night in a folding chair alongside the devoted rallygoers who fight for their spot at the very front of the line—he began to get a sense of who these people are, and why they idolize Trump. “They're not freaks, they're not foreign aliens, they are us, they are just like us in so many ways and they're funny and they made me laugh.”But, there is a dark side to the president's supporters, both in their vilification of journalists and in their unquestioning belief in the most extreme conspiracy theories.In our conversation, Hoffman talks about taking on this assignment—and about the people he blames for allowing the MAGA movement to take root in America. BIG UPDATE: The podcast is now available on Apple Podcasts! If you get podcasts via Apple, please subscribe—and if you like the conversation, please consider giving the show a review and a 5-star rating. Reviews and ratings are the most important metric in convincing Apple's algorithms to put @standupkid conversations in front of more people who might like it.STORIES FROM THE LAST WEEK:PODCAST: Episode 2: Jean Guerrero, “Hatemonger”Shep Smith on Leaving Fox News: ‘It Was Time For a Change'Trump Biden Debate Draws 22.8 Million Viewers On Broadcast NetworksHas Chris Wallace Watched The Debate Again? ‘Oh, God No'Chris Wallace Tells Fox News Viewers: ‘Wear The Damn Mask'CNN's Jake Tapper: Trump Has Become Symbol Of His Own FailuresChris Wallace Tests Negative For Covid-19 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit standupkid.substack.com

On this episode of What to Reid, Joy talks with Carl Hoffman about his fascinating new book: Liar's Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies. Hoffman takes you into the strange, strange world of MAGA rallies, where you'll meet teachers and nurses devoted to Q-Anon, seemingly everyday people who live and would, in this pandemic, die for Donald Trump. #WhatToReid Read the New York Journal of Books review here: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/liars-circus-strange Buy your copy here: https://amzn.to/3cZ8Glr

To those on the left, Donald Trump’s rallies are a Black Mass of American politics with the President summoning the nation’s darkest forces. To his supporters the rallies are a form of pilgrimage; joyous ceremonies that make them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Based on hundreds of hours of reporting, Carl Hoffman’s new book “Liar's Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies” aims to understand these strange and powerful happenings and the movement driving them. Join us for a trip through the heart of Trump country in this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI.

American journalist Carl Hoffman has spent three months on the road, travelling around America attending Donald Trump's MAGA rallies.Almost 200 hours immersed in the rallies, in lines outside the rallies and alongside the president's most loyal supporter base.He has now written about the experience in his new book, Liars Circus.Hoffman joined Francesca Rudkin to discuss what it was like attending the rallies and what he learnt about Trump supporters.LISTEN ABOVE

Carl Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest, which was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” a NY Times best seller, one of the Washington Post’s 50 notable books of 2014, a Kirkus best book of 2014 and the number one non-fiction book of 2014 on Amazon.com. The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes, was one of the Wall Street Journal’s ten best books of 2010. He is a former contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired magazines and his narrative pieces have also appeared in Smithsonian, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure and many other magazines. He has traveled on assignment to eighty countries and is the father of three young adults. He lives in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Matt Crawford speaks with author Carl Hoffman about his book Liar's Circus. Hoffman went on the road attending MAGA rallies and talking to Trump supporters all over the country. This is an in depth and personal read about what he learned, experienced and what he saw while he stood in line for more than 170 hours. All this was occurred during the pivotal impeachment trial and the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. This is an enlightening read that really does capture a pivotal disparity between political parties. Required reading, especially now.

Why Trump Loves Rallies in Which He Shares the Unhinged Belief Systems of His Cult-like Followers | Will Biden Call Trump Out on His Cynical Game of Creating Civil Strife in Order to Benefit From It? | The Author of a New Report "Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, And Far-right Militancy in Law Enforcement" backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

[Explicit Language] Carl is the New York Times best selling author of Liar's Circus, out September 1, an immensely insightful real-life story of a reporter's journey into Donald Trump's MAGA rallies. Carl attended dozens of Trump events across the country and got to know some of the Red Hat superfans who attended – so of course we'll talk with Carl about what makes these people such loyalists to a fascist tyrant, and we'll figure out whether they can come back from their brainwashing. Follow Carl on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and his own site.

Michael Rockefeller wanted to live the life of adventure & exploration, something far different from his well known wealthy family in New York. Michael would get the opportunity to join an expedition in the Asmat region of New Guinea, with the prospect of bringing back art from the headhunting & cannibalistic tribes of the Dani, to display at his fathers museum. In 1961, Michael would disappear without a trace, prompting a wide spread search, theories, & the high possibility he was eaten by cannibals. What really happened to Michael Rockefeller?[FOLLOW US and BONUS CONTENT]Join our Patreon, for just $5/month, get elbow deep! you will get access to our after show "After the Podcast is Afraid" plus more bonus episodes & content, just visit patreon.com/ordisstudios Visit Our Website: eventhepodcastisafraid.comFollow us on Twitter @PodcastAfraid Follow us on Instagram @PodcastAfraid Part of the Crawlspace Media Network [THIS EPISODE is SPONSORED BY]PODGO.CO is the easiest way for you to monetize your podcast, apply today to become a member & immediately be connected with advertisers that fit your audience P-O-D-G-O DOT C-O[FURTHER READING] "Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, & Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest" by Carl Hoffman [https://amzn.to/38JUZVu][MUSIC USED in this EPISODE] Music from https://filmmusic.io"In Your Arms" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Mister Exposition by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/4061-mister-expositionLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

[Correction: I've replaced the original audio file because I forgot to insert the Nimoy Fashion Alert!  I feel like mission control launching the Apollo mission and then turning to ask the astronauts how the flight was going - then doing a spit-take as I see they're not on the space ship. Sorry!] Jeb and Blake look into the mysterious (well, not THAT mysterious) disappearance of Michael Rockefeller who disappeared while researching the Asmat people of New Guinea.  (Watch the ISO episode on YouTube) Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by E. E. Evans-Pritchard Thinking with Things by Esther Pazstzory The ISO episode title card: The original photo the title card is based on:   Milt Machlin - the guy who goes looking for Rockefeller, former editor of Argosy men's adventure magazine.   Machlin on location looking for Rockefeller     Just saying... (Harcourt Fenton Mudd) Machlin investigated the theory that Rockefeller had been taken to the Trobriand Islands, a thousand miles from where the boat had capsized. The shots of the island reminded me of another fateful trip.   Interior and Exterior Nimoy Fashion:     The woodwork of the Asmat people is very impressive:     Carl Hoffman on the case for cannibalism.  Ostjanep chief Ajam of the Asmat region, who says that his tribe did not kill Rockefeller.  Asmat person chewing gum.   The writer of this episode, Alex Pomasanoff, also produced a NatGeo special called The Invisible World. 

- A study found that the average weight gained during pregnancy is 14 pounds — and that's by the babies' fathers. Five thousand male survey respondents said they were eating more as their partners' pregnancies progressed. Their reasons: eating out more frequently before the baby comes (42 percent), the increased availability of snacks around the house (41 percent), the desire to make their partner feel better about her own weight gain (25 percent), and being served larger portions — apparently by a hungry mom-to-be (20 percent). - The better your social and home life, the less likely you are to suffer from high blood pressure and heart disease. The latest in a string of studies finds a correlation between happy home life and the risk of heart disease. Married couples who felt they had friends and family for support during hard times were less likely than those who felt alone in the world to become overly stressed. Researchers say the study proves psychological factors can play as large a role in preventing heart disease as diet and exercise do. WACKY-BUT-TRUE: MOM AFRAID OF DENTISTS USED SUPERGLUE TO KEEP TEETH IN MOUTH _ A mom in Brazil terrified of dentists used superglue to stick her teeth back in her mouth for 10 years. Eventually, the toxic chemicals in the glue meant she lost most of the bone supporting her teeth in her upper jaw, and she was forced to spend her life savings on treatment. Dentists had to remove most of her teeth, insert titanium pins into her mouth in order to screw on false teeth and restore her smile. WACKY-BUT-TRUE: ANTS KEPT OLD WOMAN AWAKE BY RINGING BELL _ A 75-year-woman in Germany called police complaining that she couldn't sleep because her doorbell was always ringing. Officers sent to investigate the cause quickly tracked down the culprit: an ant nest next to the doorbell. The insects had built such a big home that the nest pressed the switching elements together, keeping the bell ringing. Officers silenced the doorbell by removing the nest with a knife. WACKY-BUT-TRUE: KAZAKH DRIVER FOUND TO BE WEARING ICE SKATES _ Police in Kazakhstan got a surprise when a driver they stopped for a routine check turned out to be wearing ice skates. The man admitted he had consumed quite a few drinks shortly before getting into his car. But why the ice skates? The man explained that he was on his way to have some fun at a nearby shopping mall, which has a skating rink. WACKY-BUT-TRUE: MAN FACES ASSAULT CHARGE FOR HITTING TRAFFIC WORKER WITH PICKLE _ In Vermont, a Massachusetts man is in trouble for throwing a pickle out a car window and hitting a traffic worker. Troopers say Christoph Herrmannsdoerfer was a passenger in a car when he threw a large pickle out the window. It hit Carl Hoffman, a state employee who was working by the road, and caused him pain. WACKY-BUT-TRUE: WANTED MAN WALKS RIGHT UP TO COPS _ A guy in Brazil upset that a friend had been arrested by police. So he walked into a station house to inquire about what was going on. This would not have been such a bad idea except for one thing: the guy was wanted by the cops on robbery charges and his wanted picture was posted right there in the station house for everyone to see. WACKY-BUT-TRUE: A tip for would-be gasoline thieves. When stealing gas in the dark, don't use a lighter to see how you're doing. Police in Germany say that's what a man did when he was siphoning gas from a dump truck at a business. The man was transferring the fuel from the truck to a gas can when he used a lighter to see how full the container had become. That sparked a fire that caused minor burns to his face and hands. The fire spread to a nearby forklift, which was destroyed. Entertainment News Question of the Podcast - What was the most expensive thing your spouse purchased without discussing it with you first? Did you let them keep it? The question of the podcast for listener participation for this Wednesday is a What is BEST incident of plain luck that...

“Super tasters” are people who experience more intense sensations than others. Dr. Linda Bartoshuk is a University of Florida researcher who figured out how to identify super tasters by using “cross-modality” testing. For example, subjects are asked to compare the sweetness of a soft drink to the intensity of various sounds. Linda attributes her interest in taste research to the experience of seeing her father and brother suffer from cancer, which prevented them from being able to taste or enjoy most foods. TRANSCRIPT: Intro: 0:01 Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965 my name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles: 0:37 Welcome to a bittersweet episode, also a sour and salty episode in which you will get a taste of a new method invented by a psychologist at the University of Florida. I’m Richard Miles. My guest today is Linda Bartoshuk, a researcher who discovered the concept of supertasters. Welcome to the show, Linda. Linda Bartoshuk: 0:52 Thank you. Richard Miles: 0:52 So Linda, I was going to offer you some Radio Cade coffee, but I’m suddenly afraid it will not measure up to your standards. So tell me, are people afraid when you come to their house for dinner? Do they order out all of a sudden? Is that a problem? Linda Bartoshuk: 1:05 No, I never stopped to think about that. People do want to know if I’m a super taster and I have to tell them no, I’m not only not. I’m at the opposite end of the distribution. Richard Miles: 1:15 So, so any listeners thinking of inviting Linda to dinner, you can relax and she won’t show you up. So Linda, we usually start out each show by asking the inventor, entrepreneur or researcher to explain what the what is of what we’re talking about. So why don’t you give an explanation of what is a supertaster and how did you find out that they even exist? Linda Bartoshuk: 1:35 Supertasters are people who experience more intense taste sensations than do others. That’s the simple original definition of them. Then of course, we started to learn a lot about these people and one of the first things we learned was that they have more taste buds. Not surprising, I suppose more taste buds. They experience more intense taste , but not only do they have more taste buds, because of the anatomy of the tongue and because they’re pain fibers in baskets around tastebuds , they also feel more pain in their mouth. And because the structures that hold the taste buds have touched fibers, they feel more touch. And one of the most important components of food is fat. And we perceive fat by touch. It’s viscous, thick, creamy, oily. These are all touch sensations. Richard Miles: 2:22 Do these people self identify? I mean, did you give surveys? How does somebody even know that they’re super tasted ? Like most people think the way I taste or look as normal? How do they know that they’re not normal? Linda Bartoshuk: 2:32 That’s an extremely good question because it gets to the heart of what was special about this work. How do we know if someone’s a supertaster for that matter? How do I know what you taste? If you and I try to compare a taste experience, we use ordinary language. Like I say, Hmm , this lemonade is very sweet to me. Is it very sweet to you? And it doesn’t matter what you say, we haven’t communicated a thing because you don’t know what I’m experiencing that I described as very sweet. So the first question is how can we compare sensations across people? Unless you’re a mind reader, it’s obvious. It’s impossible. So what did we do? Well, we came close. We didn’t solve the problem when it came close. Consider the following. If I can think of something that’s independent of taste and let’s start maybe with sound and I hear a sound as loud or soft and I can match that sound to a taste intensity. If the perception of loudness and the perception of taste are not related, then I can use perception of loudness as a standard and use it to compare taste . And that’s exactly what we do. Richard Miles: 3:38 Interesting. Okay, so you sort of triangulate your way into this in terms of finding these people who have these extremely intense reactions to taste . Linda Bartoshuk: 3:46 You came to my lab, I put up a set of earphones on you and I’d play you a pure tone and I’d allow you to adjust the loudness of that tone with a knob. And I’d give you something to taste and I’d say taste this. Think about how intense it is and match the intensity of the taste to the loudness of this tone. Now that’s called cross modality matching and a very, very interesting psychologist, SS Stevens at Harvard. In the 1950s and sixties designed this technique. Humans are extremely good at it. You may not think about it, but you can compare intensity across sensations, no matter what the modalities are. So we pick a modality not related to taste and we use it as a standard. So for example, if I study genetic variation in taste and we use a compound called prop, P. R. O. P., It’s very bitter if you’re a super taster. To me, I’m a non taster, I don’t taste it at all. Now that’s an extreme difference. But how would you measure lesser differences? Well, suppose I took an ordinary Pepsi. I want to know how you experienced the sweetness of Pepsi. I want you to set the sound loudness to the sweetness of a Pepsi. Now a supertaster will turn that knob up to 90 decibels, which is the loudest of train whistle. And somebody like me will turn that knob down to 80 decibels, which is the loudness of a telephone dial tone. Now we know a lot about sound. We know a lot about hearing. We know that 10 decibels is a factor of two. So we now can say that a supertaster you get it. Richard Miles: 5:20 Yea, you can quantify it. Linda Bartoshuk: 5:20 P epsi i s twice as sweet to the supertaster because to match it, they u se a sound that was twice as loud. Richard Miles: 5:26 So I’m surprised marketers haven’t caught on, this wouldn’t be great to say these are loud fries or soft asparagus. Right. Okay. So if you’re a super taster , you experienced these tastes much more intensely. Is that across the board? I mean, every time you put something in your mouth you just sort of like, Oh my God. Or is it nuanced? Even for a supertaster , Linda Bartoshuk: 5:43 It’s every time, a factor of two is average. So imagine there are some two supertasters out there to experiencing three, four times as intense taste . Now how do they know that it’s the world they live in? They think it’s ordinary, but it’s not same as the world I live in and the world I live in I think is ordinary. And what’s fascinating is to think about how many experiences out there like this. Richard Miles: 6:06 So just give me an idea of what rough percentage of the population is super tested? Linda Bartoshuk: 6:10 That’s an interesting question. In the United States, we probably have about 15% of the population are supertasters. Richard Miles: 6:17 Oh, that high. Wow . Linda Bartoshuk: 6:17 But more women than men. Richard Miles: 6:19 Interesting. Linda Bartoshuk: 6:19 And it varies by race. So as you start to go around the world and you get to non-Caucasian groups, they have more supertasters. So in fact male Caucasians are the least likely to be supertasters of anybody in the world. Richard Miles: 6:34 Interesting. Okay. So nobody has to buy me dinner. Right? So what do supertasters do with this superpower? Do you find more of them gravitating to being cooks ? Do they tend to congregate in certain professions or what would I do with this if I had it? Linda Bartoshuk: 6:49 You know, I was asked this question some years ago and I just sloughed it off and I said, nah, that couldn’t be any connection. What do you like? What you do is too complicated. Actually to my amazement, I’ve done tests in a lot of different professions and there is a connection. A wonderful group of professional cooks invited me to a conference some years ago and they let me test them. There were several hundred people there, there were too many supertasters in that room. And most of those cooks were Caucasian men. So here I am finding all these supertasters in this group and I don’t understand this. I truly do not know why cooks would tend to be supertasters. It’s gotta be more complicated than just tastes . If anything, you think that the cooks would be the non tasters who are less opinionated about hating strong taste . Cause supertasters can get very upset about some things. Richard Miles: 7:39 Because in addition to being able to enjoy something more they’d probably irritated by. Linda Bartoshuk: 7:42 Well enjoy it. It’s interesting you said that because we actually did something recently which shows a connection there that I wasn’t expecting. We are measuring, and remember I told you how exciting it was to find this cross modal match technique to find supertasters. We’re doing something similar with pleasure. So we can measure the pleasure of food in supertasters and others. And I can tell you that supertasters get more pleasure from the foods they like a lot. Richard Miles: 8:10 Interesting. So I joked earlier about marketers getting a hold of this, but there is a serious component here. Linda Bartoshuk: 8:15 Very serious . Richard Miles: 8:16 Is there, there’s gotta be, I’m assuming work being done. Maybe you’re doing it on synthetic version of the apparatus and allow supertasters to taste. Can that in some way be reduced to some sort of additive or a new GMO that would give you the same effect as if you were a supertaster ? Linda Bartoshuk: 8:31 I have no idea because most companies don’t share what they’re doing. They consider it proprietary and they’re not going to tell me what they’re doing. Even if they ask me for help, they’re not going to tell me what the results are. Richard Miles: 8:42 I see . Okay. But is it possible in theory to do this? Linda Bartoshuk: 8:46 I’m not sure. I once had a phone call from a fellow in California who owned a vineyard. I’d given a lecture in California and he wanted me to send him prop papers. These are little bitter circles of paper that have a compound on that is particularly good at picking out tasters. Supertasters non tasters. And I had demonstrated it at a lecture and apparently he was there and he wanted to test all his employees and I said, why do you want to do that? And he said, I’m going to fire any of them that aren’t supertasters. I said, I’m not sending you papers at all. And I said, that’s the wrong thing to do. What you need to do is think about how you’re going to use these different specialties. A supertaster is going to be fantastic at picking up an off flavor, but they’re going to pick up bitter that shouldn’t be there in your product. Those are the people you hire to be the specialist to go out and check. But you’re selling wine to , most people are not supertasters and you want to know how they feel about the wine you’re selling. Richard Miles: 9:40 Exactly. So I imagine back in the days of old, the supertaster would be the guy who tastes the food for the King right? Linda Bartoshuk: 9:46 Exactly. Richard Miles: 9:46 And he’s gonna know uh oh, something’s wrong with this, you know, send it back. Oh , that’s fascinating. So how did you sort of end up looking at taste it’s just somebody asks you a question, you got curious. Tell us the path from psychology to an expert on super tasting. Linda Bartoshuk: 10:00 The first time I heard a question like that I would have answered by saying, well, when I was an undergraduate, the chairman of my department of the psyche department had done his PhD on taste and when I was ready to go to graduate school, he sent me to his mentor, Carl Hoffman, Brown university and I did my PhD with him also. But the truth is I don’t think that was it at all. I think what really did this is my father got lung cancer when I was a junior in college and I remember what was the most disturbing to him was that his sister made him a canned beef. He was a farm boy and this was one of his favorite foods and he tried to eat it and it tasted metallic and it put him off and was one of the main things he talked about when he was ill and I didn’t think about that consciously. But it’s interesting that I ended up working on that problem, on taste, Phantoms , what produces them, how you can treat them. And I didn’t learn this in time to help my father, but many years later my brother developed colon cancer and he had a phantom also and I went to see him, evaluated him and I could tell him what caused it. I still couldn’t fix it. Now I’m working with a friend in Canada, Miriam Griskha, we can actually treat these phantoms. I think that experience with my dad really made this salient and made me want to work in this field. Richard Miles: 11:18 I hadn’t even thought about the medical aspect and I should have because I recall that my father-in-law, Dr. Cade , one of his inventions apart from Gatorade was a drink called go and it was a high protein milkshake and they were testing it on athletes, but some of the early consumers of that were cancer patients because they really liked the taste of it and it was the only thing that they would want to eat and keep down. And of course it was good for them because everything in milkshake. At the time, he was mostly focused on building up proteins like that and it just happened. It tastes good, but because it tastes good, it was their only. Linda Bartoshuk: 11:48 Right. Richard Miles: 11:48 Thing that they wanted to have, right. Linda, so you grew up in a small town in South Dakota and your original love I understand was astronomy correct? Linda Bartoshuk: 11:55 Yes. Richard Miles: 11:55 So tell me about some of your early influences. Uh, what was it like to grow up in South Dakota? I, what like five people that live there. Who were some of your early influences? You mentioned your father or did you have other teachers or friends or mentors? What was that like pre-professional before you became a psychologist, what was your life like? Linda Bartoshuk: 12:12 No, I remember my teachers as being absolutely wonderful, but it’s interesting. I can recount to you some anecdotes and it’s going to sound like I grew up an angry young woman. That is not true because those events didn’t make me angry at the time. They make me angry looking back on them. We had a career day in junior high and each one of us was supposed to write what we wanted to do on a three by five card. A school would get us somebody in that field and we’d interview them. So I wrote down, I wanted to be an astronomer and they had me interview a secretary and I should have begun to catch on then. And so I get the high school and I want to take physics and chemistry and trig and algebra. And my guidance counselor told me these were unrealistic choices for me and he wouldn’t approve my schedule. So I bargained with him and I agreed to take typing and bookkeeping in return for being allowed to take these other subjects. And I should tell you, I think there was one other girl in chemistry. And other than that, it was the only girl in those courses. I gotta tell you though, the typing came in handy. I’ve got to admit that. But the teachers who taught me those subjects, I think were delighted that a girl wanted to take these subjects and they treated me just like the rest of the people in the class. So I don’t have any bad memories of that at all. Richard Miles: 13:26 Did you enjoy chemistry? Did you find it difficult? Challenging? What was your reaction? Linda Bartoshuk: 13:30 It’s interesting. Richard Miles: 13:31 If it tends to be one of those classes to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you don’t like it, you’ll take the basics and you’re out right? Linda Bartoshuk: 13:36 I didn’t like it much, and yet I’m in the chemical senses and chemistry is really important. And what can I say about that? I don’t think maybe the teachers made us like it enough. I think they didn’t expect us to like it either. And that’s a mistake. And wow. If there’s one thing that kids should be helped to like it’s science and math because it’s gonna help you everywhere, right? It’s going to help you think. Richard Miles: 13:59 But then you chose to go into psychology. You went to high school in South Dakota, right? And then where did you go do your undergrad? Linda Bartoshuk: 14:04 Well, I was going to go to South Dakota school of mines and technology and that was my home state school. And my parents took me for a visit and I would have been one of three women in a class of a hundred freshmen. And I said, uh-uh , I do not want to do this. So I went to Carlton college and the thing that made it so wonderful is that my family couldn’t afford to let me stay there for four years, but they were willing to let me go and try it out. And I was walking through the reception line with the president of the university shaking the hand of every freshmen , Lawrence Gould, the great Explorer. It was very exciting and he whispered in my ear, you’ve just been awarded a merit scholarship. Ooh, wow. It paid for my school. I could stay at Karl for four years. So I was all set. They had an observatory. I was going to be an astronomer. I took the math and the science absolutely loved it. And I get to my junior year, and lo and behold, I find out that women aren’t allowed to use the big telescopes we’re considered, I guess, too fragile. Now I’m getting pissed off and my college roommate and I sat, went through the catalog and looked for any major I could switch to that would give me credit for all that math and science. Guess what? Psychology would give me credit for all that math and science. So I could spend the last two years at Carlton taking all the psych courses and catching up with that and graduate with an astronomy, math, and psych. But what happened in my first class, I took it from John Bear, wonderful teacher, and I encountered the study of the senses and I never looked back I just loved it. Wow. Richard Miles: 15:41 And so the rest is history. How did you end up at Florida? That’s a missing link. Linda Bartoshuk: 15:45 Florida. Oh boy. I might as well tell you the truth because I’ve written it. I was at Yale for 30 years and I was mad. Yale didn’t treat women well and they didn’t treat me well. I hate to think back on all of the things that happened there. Well let me give you an example. I had an appointment at the Pierce foundation, which is a research Institute affiliated with Yale. And when I got pregnant with my first child, the director, Dr. James Hardy , ex Admiral from the deep South, sorry to say, said to me, we’ll be really sorry to lose you. And I really didn’t know what he meant. And I said, I don’t understand. And he said, well of course you’re going to resign and take care of your child. And I said, no, I’m going to keep working. And he said, women like you are going to destroy Western civilization. And he made my life miserable after that. And eventually it was more than I could stand at . And I actually moved to Yale full time and left the Pierce foundation and went into a clinical department, department of surgery. Now in surgery, they do operations on people that cut the taste nerve. If they can’t help it, it’s in the way certain kind of operations in ear, nose and throat. And I could study those patients before and after. They had a nerve cut and it opened incredible vistas. Richard Miles: 17:00 Right. Linda Bartoshuk: 17:00 Why did I eventually leave Yale 20 years? I’m really getting tired of it all. I served on sexual harassment boards. I was on one committee after another. I worked very hard for these causes. My husband was a professor in physics. He’s a theoretical physicist and he loved Yale and I didn’t want to leave while he loved it, but when he retired he said, you know, I’ve had my way all this time. Let’s go where you want. Well, the university of Florida has a smell and taste center. It was set up by Barry Ache and I wanted to be a part of that. Richard Miles: 17:32 Great story. Linda, I’m sure you probably get asked to talk to students and other groups and they probably ask you or you dispense some advice. What would you share, say with an up and coming researcher or even a budding entrepreneur? Do you look back on anything and say, gosh, I wish I’d done a little more of that and a little bit less of that? Think of a 21 year old version of yourself, what would you tell yourself now that you didn’t know then. Linda Bartoshuk: 17:55 I would tell them to do what you love because when everything else settles out, the fact is you want to get up in the morning and go to work and do something you love every morning I go into work and I can’t wait to get there. And there is just nothing that can substitute for that. Richard Miles: 18:11 I agree. It’s probably the most common advice that we hear on the show. Linda Bartoshuk: 18:13 Take a lot of math too. Richard Miles: 18:17 Love what you do, but study up in the math. Yeah, I was going to mention earlier when my daughter graduated from college, very, very few people had double degrees in both math or science related field and humanities related field. Out of all the graduates, there’s either one or the other and occasionally you saw somebody like my daughter got a degree in math and in Spanish. It’s a very unusual combination and so I think it just sort of shows the breadth of your interests that you went from a love of astronomy to chemistry to psychology. So you must enjoy what you do. I imagine when you’re doing it. Linda Bartoshuk: 18:49 I do very much. Richard Miles: 18:50 Linda, thank you very much for coming on the Radio Cade. Hope to have you back at some point and find out about loud steaks or soft potatoes. Linda Bartoshuk: 18:58 Thank you. Richard Miles: 18:58 From Radio Cade, Richard Miles signing off. Outro: 19:01 Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates, inventor interviews podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

In 1961, Michael Rockefeller went on an adventure and was never heard from again.  Theories and speculation have been plentiful since then but one man went to check it out for himself and came back with horrifying answers.  What happened to Michael? What Really Happened to Michael Rockefeller. Carl Hoffman. Smithsonian Magazine. March 2014. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/What-Really-Happened-to-Michael-Rockefeller-180949813/ The Story of Michael Rockefeller and the Cannibals Behind his Disappearance. Gabe Paoletti. November 28th, 2017. https://allthatsinteresting.com/michael-rockefeller New Documentary Said to Confirm that one of the Rockefellers Was Eaten By Cannibals. Hunter Walker. December 23rd, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-rockefeller-eaten-by-cannibals-2014-12 The Mysterious Disappearance of Michael Rockefeller. Tim Sohn. February 9th, 2015. Outside Online. https://www.outsideonline.com/1929556/mysterious-disappearance-michael-rockefeller How a Young Rockefeller Died at the Hands of Cannibals. Susannah Cahalan. March 15th, 2014. The New York Post. https://nypost.com/2014/03/15/how-a-young-rockefeller-died-at-the-hands-of-cannibals/ Savage Harvest. Carl Hoffman.  

Journalist Carl Hoffman talks about Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri, two men who arrived in Borneo with very different dreams and aspirations. Hoffman served as a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired Magazine. He is the author of The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure (William Morrow, 2019). Two modern adventurers sought a treasure possessed by the legendary “Wild Men of Borneo.” One found riches. The other vanished forever into an endless jungle. Had he shed civilization—or lost his mind? Global headlines suspected murder. Lured by these mysteries, New York Times bestselling author Carl Hoffman journeyed to find the truth, discovering that nothing is as it seems in the world’s last Eden, where the lines between sinner and saint blur into one. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Carl Hoffman talks about Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri, two men who arrived in Borneo with very different dreams and aspirations. Hoffman served as a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired Magazine. He is the author of The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure (William Morrow, 2019). Two modern adventurers sought a treasure possessed by the legendary “Wild Men of Borneo.” One found riches. The other vanished forever into an endless jungle. Had he shed civilization—or lost his mind? Global headlines suspected murder. Lured by these mysteries, New York Times bestselling author Carl Hoffman journeyed to find the truth, discovering that nothing is as it seems in the world’s last Eden, where the lines between sinner and saint blur into one. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Carl Hoffman talks about Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri, two men who arrived in Borneo with very different dreams and aspirations. Hoffman served as a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler and Wired Magazine. He is the author of The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure (William Morrow, 2019). Two modern adventurers sought a treasure possessed by the legendary “Wild Men of Borneo.” One found riches. The other vanished forever into an endless jungle. Had he shed civilization—or lost his mind? Global headlines suspected murder. Lured by these mysteries, New York Times bestselling author Carl Hoffman journeyed to find the truth, discovering that nothing is as it seems in the world’s last Eden, where the lines between sinner and saint blur into one. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is Carl Hoffman, the CEO of Basis Technology, and a specialist in text analytics. Carl founded Basis Technology in 1995, and in 1999, the company shipped its first products for website internationalization, enabling Lycos and Google to become the first search engines capable of cataloging the web in both Asian and European languages. In 2003, the company shipped its first Arabic analyzer and began development of a comprehensive text analytics platform. Today, Basis Technology is recognized as the leading provider of components for information retrieval, entity extraction, and entity resolution in many languages. Carl has been directly involved with the company’s activities in support of U.S. national security missions and works closely with analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. Many of you work all day in the world of analytics: numbers, charts, metrics, data visualization, etc. But, today we’re going to talk about one of the other ingredients in designing good data products: text! As an amateur polyglot myself (I speak decent Portuguese, Spanish, and am attempting to learn Polish), I really enjoyed this discussion with Carl. If you are interested in languages, text analytics, search interfaces, entity resolution, and are curious to learn what any of this has to do with offline events such as the Boston Marathon Bombing, you’re going to enjoy my chat with Carl. We covered: How text analytics software is used by Border patrol agencies and its limitations. The role of humans in the loop, even with good text analytics in play What actually happened in the case of the Boston Marathon Bombing? Carl’s article“Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. The 2 lessons Carl has learned regarding working with native tongue source material. Why Carl encourages Unicode Compliance when working with text, why having a global perspective is important, and how Carl actually implements this at his company Carl’s parting words on why hybrid architectures are a core foundation to building better data products involving text analytics Resources and Links: Basis Technology Carl’s article: “Exact Match” isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. Carl Hoffman on LinkedIn Quotes from Today’s Episode “One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know. You know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they do…” — Brian O’Neill “Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you [Brian] point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language…” — Carl Hoffman “What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication…Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics.” — Carl Hoffman “It’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down [the right] people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling [entity resolution] wrong. It’s shocking in a way.” — Brian O’Neill “We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting as close to yes or no as we can.”– Carl Hoffman Episode Transcript Brian: Hey everyone, it’s Brian here and we have a special edition of Experiencing Data today. Today, we are going to be talking to Carl Hoffman who’s the CEO of Basis Technology. Carl is not necessarily a traditional what I would call Data Product Manager or someone working in the field of creating custom decision support tools. He is an expert in text analytics and specifically Basis Technology focuses on entity resolution and resolving entities across different languages. If your product, or service, or your software tool that you’re using is going to be dealing with inputs and outputs or search with multiple languages, I think your going to find my chat with Carl really informative. Without further ado here’s my chat Mr. Carl Hoffman. All right. Welcome back to Experiencing Data. Today, I’m happy to have Carl Hoffman on the line, the CEO of Basis Technology, based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. How’s it going, Carl? Carl: Great. Good to talk to you, Brian. Brian: Yeah, me too. I’m excited. This episode’s a little but different. Basis Tech primarily focuses on providing text analytics more as a service as opposed to a data product. There are obviously some user experience ramifications on the downstream side of companies, software, and services that are leveraging some of your technology. Can you tell people a little bit about the technology of Basis and what you guys do? Carl: There are many companies who are in the business of extracting actionable information from large amounts of dirty, unstructured data and we are one of them. But what makes us unique is our ability to extract what we believe is one of the most difficult forms of big data, which is text in many different languages from a wide range of sources. You mentioned text analytics as a service, which is a big part of our business, but we actually provide text analytics in almost every conceivable form. As a service, as an on-prem cloud offering, as a conventional enterprise software, and also as the data fuel to power your in-house text analytics. There’s another half of our business as well which is focused specifically on one of the most important sources of data, which is what we call digital forensics or cyber forensics. That’s the challenge of getting data off of digital media that maybe either still in use or dead. Brian: Talk to me about dead. Can you go unpack that a little bit? Carl: Yes. Dead basically means powered off or disabled. The primary application there is for corporate investigators or for law enforcement who are investigating captured devices or digital media. Brian: Got it. Just to help people understand some of the use cases that someone would be leveraging some of the capabilities of your platforms, especially the stuff around entity resolution, can you talk a little bit about like my understanding, for example, one use case for your software is obviously border crossings, where your information, your name is going to be looked up to make sure that you should be crossing whatever particular border that you’re at. Can you talk to us a little bit about what’s happening there and what’s going on behind the scenes with your software? Like what is that agent doing and what’s happening behind the scenes? What kind of value are you providing to the government at that instance? Carl: Border crossings or the software used by border control authorities is a very important application of our software. From a data representational challenge, it’s actually not that difficult because for the most part, border authorities work with linear databases of known individuals or partially known individuals and queries. Queries may be the form manually typed by an officer or maybe scan of a passport. The complexity comes in when a match must be scored, where a decision must be rendered as to whether a particular query or a particular passport scan matches any of the names present on a watch list. Those watch list can be in many different formats. They can come from many different sources. Our software excels at performing that match at very high accuracy, regardless of the nature of the query and regardless of the source of the underlying watch list. Brian: I assume those watch lists may vary in the level of detail around for example, aliases, spelling, which alphabet they were being printed in. Part of the value of what your services is doing is helping to say, “At the end of the day, entity number seven on the list is one human being who may have many ways of being represented with words on a page or a screen,” so the goal obviously is to make sure that you have the full story of that one individual. Am I correct that you may get that in various formats and different levels of detail? And part of what your system is doing is actually trying to match up that person or give it what you say a non-binary response but a match score or something that’s more of a gray response that says, “This person may also be this person.” Can you compact that a little bit for us? Carl: Your remarks are exactly correct. First, what you said about gray is very important. These decisions are rarely 100% yes or no. We live in a world which is constantly shades of gray and the challenge is getting us close to yes or no as we can. But the quality of the data in watch lists can vary pretty wildly, based on the prominence and the number of sources. The US border authorities must compile information from many different sources, from UN, from Treasury Department, from National Counterterrorism Center, from various states, and so on. The amount of detail and the degree of our certainty regarding that data can vary from name to name. Brian: We talked about this when we first were chatting about this episode. Am I correct when I think about one of the overall values you’re doing is obviously we’re offloading some of the labor of doing this kind of entity resolution or analysis onto software and then picking up the last mile with human, to say, “Hey, are these recommendations correct? Maybe I’ll go in and do some manual labor.” Is that how you see it, that we do some of the initial grunt work and you present an almost finished story, and then the human comes in and needs to really provide that final decision at the endpoint? Are we doing enough of the help with the software? At what point should we say, “That’s no longer a software job to give you a better score about this person. We think that really requires a human analysis at this point.” Is there a way to evaluate or is that what you think about like, “Hey, we don’t want to go past up that point. We want to stop here because the technology is not good enough or the data coming in will never be accurate enough and we don’t want to go past that point.” I don’t know if that makes sense. Carl: It does makes sense. I can’t speak for all countries but I can say that in the US, the decision to deny an individual entry or certainly the decision to apprehend an individual is always made by a human. We designed our software to assume a human in the loop for the most critical decisions. Our software is designed to maximize the value of the information that is presented to the human so that nothing is overlooked. Really, the two biggest threats to our national security are one, having very valuable information overlooked, which is exactly what happened in the case of the Boston Marathon bombing. We had a great deal of information about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, yet that information was overlooked because the search engines failed to surface it in response to queries by a number of officials. And secondly, detaining or apprehending innocent individuals, which hurts our security as much as allowing dangerous individuals to pass. Brian: This has been in the news somewhat but talk about the “glitch” and what happened in that Boston Marathon bombing in terms of maybe some of these tools and what might have happened or not what might have happened, but what you understand was going on there such that there was a gap in this information. Carl: I am always very suspicious when anyone uses the word ‘glitch’ with regard to any type of digital equipment because if that equipment is executing its algorithm as it has been programmed to do, then you will get identical results for identical inputs. In this case, the software that was in use at the time by US Customs and Border Protection was executing a very naive name-matching algorithm, which failed to match two different variant spellings of the name Tsarnaev. If you look at the two variations for any human, it would seem almost obvious that the two variations are related and are in fact connected to the same name that’s natively written in Cyrillic. What really happened was a failure on the part of the architects of that name mentioning system to innovate by employing the latest technology in name-matching, which is what my company provides. In the aftermath of that disaster, our software was integrated into the border control workflow, first with the goal of redacting false-positives, and then later with the secondary goal of identifying false negatives. We’ve been very successful on both of those challenges. Brian: What were the two variants? Are you talking about the fact that one was spelled in Cyrillic and one was spelled in a Latin alphabet? They didn’t bring back data point A and B because they look like separate individuals? What was it, a transliteration? Carl: They were two different transliterations of the name Tsarnaev. In one instance, the final letters in the names are spelled -naev and the second instance it’s spelled -nayev. The presence or absence of that letter y was the only difference between the two. That’s a relatively simple case but there are many similar stories for more complex names. For instance, the 2009 Christmas bomber who successfully boarded a Northwest Delta flight with a bomb in his underwear, again because of a failure to match two different transliterations of his name. But in his case, his name is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. There was much more opportunity for divergent transliterations. Brian: On this kind of topic, you wrote an interesting article called “Exact Match” Isn’t Just Stupid. It’s Deadly. You’ve talked a little bit about this particular example with the Boston Marathon bombing. You mentioned that they’re thinking globally about building a product out. Can you talk to us a little about what it means to think globally? Carl: Sure. Thinking globally is really a mindset and an architectural philosophy in which systems are built to accommodate multiple languages and cultures. This is an issue not just with the spelling of names but with support for multiple writing systems, different ways of rendering and formatting personal names, different ways of rendering, formatting, and parsing postal addresses, telephone numbers, dates, times, and so on. The format of a questionnaire in Japanese is quite different from the format of a questionnaire in English. If you will get any complex global software product, there’s a great deal of work that must be done to accommodate the needs of a worldwide user base. Brian: Sure and you’re a big fan of Unicode-compliant software, am I correct? Carl: Yes. Building Unicode compliance is equivalent to building a solid stable foundation for an office tower. It only gets you to the ground floor, but without it, the rest of the tower starts to lean like the one that’s happening in San Francisco right now. Brian: I haven’t heard about that. Carl: There’s a whole tower that’s tipping over. You should read it. It’s a great story. Brian: Foundation’s not so solid. Carl: Big lawsuit’s going on right now. Brian: Not the place you want to have a sagging tower either. Carl: Not the place but frankly, it’s really quite comparable because I’ve seen some large systems that will go unnamed, where there’s legacy technology and people are unaware perhaps why it’s so important to move from Python version 2 to Python version 3. One of the key differences is Unicode compliance. So if I hear about a large-scale enterprise system that’s based on Python version 2, I’m immediately suspicious that it’s going to be suitable for a global audience. Brian: I think about, from an experience standpoint, inputs, when you’re providing inputs into forms and understanding what people are typing in. If it’s a query form, obviously giving people back what they wanted and not necessarily what they typed in. We all take for granted things like this spelling correction, and not just the spelling correction, but in Google when you type in something, it sometimes give you something that’s beyond a spelling thing, “Did you mean X, Y, and Z?” I would think that being in the form about what people are typing into your form fields and mining your query logs, this is something I do sometimes with clients when they’re trying to learn something. I actually just read an article today about dell.com and the top query term on dell.com is ‘Google,’ which is a very interesting thing. I would be curious to know why people are typing that in. Is it really like people are actually trying to access Google or are they trying to get some information? But the point is to understand the input side and to try to return some kind of logical output. Whether it’s text analytics that’s providing that or it’s name-matching, it’s being aware of that and it’s sad when you have these gaps like what happened in this border crossing case where a name spelling is responsible for not flagging down these people. I mean, we put people on the moon and we get something like a name spelling wrong. It’s shocking in a way. I guess for those who are working in tech, we can understand how it might happen, but it’s scary that that’s still going on today. You’ve probably seen many other. Are you able to talk about it? Obviously, you have some in the intelligence field and probably government where you can’t talk about some of your clients, but are there other examples of learning that’s happened that, even if it’s not necessarily entity resolution where you’ve put dots together with some of your platform? Carl: I’ll say the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from nearly two decades of working on government applications involving multi-lingual data is the importance of retaining as much of the information in its native form as possible. For example, there is a very large division of the CIA which is focused on collecting open source intelligence in the form of newspapers, magazines, the digital equivalent of those, radio broadcast, TV broadcasts and so one. It’s a unit which used to be known as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, going back to Word War II time, and today it’s called the Open Source Enterprise. They have a very large collection apparatus and they produce some extremely high quality products which are summaries and translations from sources in other languages. In their workflow, previously they would collect information, say in Chinese or in Russian, and then do a translation or summary into English, but then would discard the original or the original would be hidden from their enterprise architecture for query purposes. I believe that is no longer the case, but retaining the pre-translation original, whether it’s open source, closed source, commercial, enterprise information, government-related information, is really very important. That’s one lesson. The other lesson is appreciating the limits of machine translation. We’re increasingly seeing machine translation integrated into all kinds of information systems, but there needs to be a very sober appreciation of what is and what is not achievable and scalable by employing machine translation in your architecture. Brian: Can you talk at all about the translation? We have so much power now with NLP and what’s possible with the technology today. As I understand it, when we talk about translation, we’re talking about documents and things that are in written word that are being translated from one language to another. But in terms of spoken word, and we’re communicating right now, I’m going to ask you two questions. What do you know about NLP and what do you know about NLP? The first one I had a little bit of attitude which assumes that you don’t know too much about it, and the second one, I was treating you as an expert. When this gets translated into text, it loses that context. Where are we with that ability to look at the context, the tone, the sentiment that’s behind that? I would imagine that’s partly why you’re talking about saving the original source. It might provide some context like, “What are the headlines were in the paper?” and, “Which paper wrote it?” and, “Is there a bias with that paper?” whatever, having some context of the full article that that report came from can provide additional context. Humans are probably better at doing some of that initial eyeball analysis or having some idea of historically where this article’s coming from such that they can put it in some context as opposed to just seeing the words in a native language on a computer screen. Can you talk a little bit about that or where we are with that? And am I incorrect that we’re not able to look at that sentiment? I don’t even know how that would translate necessarily unless you had a playing back of a recording of someone saying the words. You have translation on top of the sentiment. Now you’ve got two factors of difficulty right there and getting it accurate. Carl: My knowledge of voice and speech analysis is very naive. I do know there’s an area of huge investment and the technology is progressing very rapidly. I suspect that voice models are already being built that can distinguish between the two different intonations you used in asking that question and are able to match those against knowledge bases separately. What I can tell you is that context and nuance are equally important in both spoken and written human communication. My knowledge is stronger when it comes to its written form. Capturing all of the context means that you can do a much better job of the analytics. That’s why, say, when we’re analyzing a document, we’re looking not only the individual word but the sentence, the paragraph, where does the text appear? Is it in the body? Is it in a heading? Is it in a caption? Is it in a footnote? Or if we’re looking at, say, human-typed input—I think this is where your audience would care if you’re designing forms or search boxes—there’s a lot that can be determined in terms of how the input is typed. Again, especially when you’re thinking globally. We’re familiar with typing English and typing queries or completing forms with the letters A through Z and the numbers 0 through 9, but the fastest-growing new orthography today is emoticons and emoji offer a lot of very valuable information about the mindset of the author. Say that we look at Chinese or Japanese, which are basically written with thousand-year-old emoji, where an individual must type a sequence of keys in order to create each of the Kanji or Hanzu that appears. There’s a great deal of information we can capture. For instance, if I’m typing a form in Japanese, saying I’m filling out my last name, and then my last name is Tanaka. Well, I’m going to type phonetically some characters that represent Tanaka, either in Latin letters or one of the Japanese phonetic writing systems, then I’m going to pick from a menu or the system is going to automatically pick for me the Japanese characters that represent Tanaka. But any really capable input system is going to keep both whatever I typed phonetically and the Kanji that I selected because both of those have value and the association between the two is not always obvious. There are similar ways of capturing context and meaning in other writing systems. For instance, let’s say I’m typing Arabic not in Arabic script but I’m typing with Roman letters. How I translate from those Roman letters into the Arabic alphabet may vary, depending upon if I’m using Gulf Arabic, or Levantine Arabic, or Cairene Arabic, and say the IP address of the person doing the typing may factor into how I do that transformation and how I interpret those letters. There’s examples for many other writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. Brian: I meant to ask you. Do you speak any other languages or do you study any other languages? Carl: I studied Japanese for a few years in high school. That’s really what got me into using computers to facilitate language understanding. I just never had the ability to really quickly memorize all of the Japanese characters, the radical components, and the variant pronunciations. After spending countless hours combing through paper dictionaries, I got very interested in building electronic dictionaries. My interest in electronic dictionaries eventually led to search engines and to lexicons, algorithms powered by lexicons, and then ultimately to machine learning and deep learning. Brian: I’m curious. I assume you need to employ either a linguist or at least people that speak multiple languages. One concern with advanced analytics right now and especially anything with prediction, is bias. I speak a couple of different languages and I think one of the coolest things about learning another language is seeing the world through another context. Right now, I’m learning Polish and there’s the concept of case and it doesn’t just come down to learning the prefixes and suffixes that are added to words. Effectively, that’s what the output is but it’s even understanding the nuance of when you would use that and what you’re trying to convey, and then when you relay it back to your own language, we don’t even have an equivalent between this. We would never divide this verb into two different sentiments. So you start to learn what you don’t even know to think about. I guess what I’m asking here is how do you capture those things? Say, in our case where I assume you’re an American and I am to, so we have our English that we grew up with and our context for that. How do you avoid bias? Do you think about bias? How do you build these systems in terms of approaching it from a single language? Ultimately, this code is probably written in English, I assume. Not to say that the code would be written in a different language but just the approach when you’re thinking about all these systems that have to do with language, where does that come in having integrating other people that speaks other languages? Can you talk about that a little bit? Carl: Bias is incredibly important in any system that tries to respond to human behavior. We have our own innate cultural biases that we’re sometimes not even aware of. As you point out, it’s impossible to separate human language from the underlying culture and, in some cases, geography and the lifestyle of the people who speak that language. Yes, this is something that we think about. I disagree with your remark about code being written in English. The most important pieces of code today are the frameworks for implementing various machine learning and deep learning architectures. These architectures for the most part are language or domain-agnostic. The language bias tends to creep in as an artifact of the data that we collect. If I were to, say, harvest a million pages randomly on the internet, a very large percentage of those pages would be in English, out of proportion to the proportion of the population of the planet who speaks English, just because English is common language for commerce, science, and so on. The bias comes in from the data or it comes in from the mindset of the architect, who may do something as simple-minded as allocating only eight bits per character or deciding that Python version 2 is an acceptable development platform. Brian: Sure. I should say, I wasn’t so much speaking about the script, the code, as much as I was thinking more about the humans behind it, their background, and their language that they speak, or these kinds of choices that you’re talking about because they’re informed by that person’s perspective. But thank you for clarifying. Carl: I agree with that observation as well. You’re certainly right. Brian: Do you have a way? You’re experts in this area and you’re obviously heavily invested in this area. Are there things that you have to do to prevent that bias, in terms of like, “We know what we don’t know about it, or we know enough about it but we don’t know if about, so we have a checklist or we have something that we go through to make sure that we’re checking ourselves to avoid these things”? Or is it more in the data collection phase that you’re worried about more so than the code or whatever that’s actually going to be taking the data and generating the software value at the other end? Is it more on the collection side that you’re thinking about? How do you prevent it? How do you check yourself or tell a client or customer, “Here’s how we’ve tried to make sure that the quality of what we’re giving you is good. We did A, B, C, and D.” Maybe I’m making a bigger issue out of this than it is. I’m not sure. Carl: No, it is a big issue. The best way to minimize that cultural bias is by building global teams. That’s something that we’ve done from the very beginning days of our company. We have a company in which collectively the team speaks over 20 languages, originate from many different countries around the world, and we do business in native countries around the world. That’s just been an absolute necessity because we produce products that are proficient in 40 different human languages. If you’re a large enterprise, more than 500 people, and you’re targeting markets globally, then you need to build a global team. That applies to all the different parts of the organization, including the executive team. It’s rare that you will see individuals who are, say, American culture with no meaningful international experience being successful in any kind of global expansion. Brian: That’s pretty awesome that you have that many languages going in the staff that you have working at the company. That’s cool and I think it does provide a different perspective on it. We talk about it even in the design firm. Sometimes, early managers in the design will want to go hire a lot of people that look like they do. Not necessarily physically but in terms of skill set. One of the practices that I’ve always liked is actually getting people that aren’t like you, that don’t think like you, in order to intentionally tease out what you don’t know, you know that you’re not going to look at the problem the same way they are, and you don’t necessarily know what the output is, but you can learn that there’s other perspectives to have, so too many like-minded individuals doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better. I think that’s cool. Can you talk to me a little bit about one of the fun little nuggets that stuck in my head and I think you’ve attributed to somebody else, but was the word about getting insights from medium data. Can you talk to us about that? Carl: Sure. I should first start by crediting the individual who planted that idea in my head, which is Dr. Catherine Havasi of the MIT Media Lab, who’s also a cofounder of a company called Luminoso, which is a partner of ours. They do common sense understanding. The challenge with building truly capable text analytics from large amounts of unstructured text is obtaining sufficient volume. If you are a company on the scale of Facebook or Google, you have access to truly enormous amount of text. I can’t quantify it in petabytes or exabytes, but it is a scale that is much greater than the typical global enterprise or Fortune 2000 company, who themselves may have very massive data lakes. But still, those data lakes are probably three to five orders of magnitudes smaller than what Google or Facebook may have under their control. That intermediate-sized data, which is sloppily referred to as big data, we think of it as medium data. We think about the challenge of allowing companies with medium data assets to obtain big data quality results, or business intelligence that’s comparable to something that Google or Facebook might be able to obtain. We do that by building models that are hybrid, that combine knowledge graphs or semantic graphs, derived from very large open sources with the information that they can extract from their proprietary data lakes, and using the open sources and the models that we build as amplifiers for their own data. Brian: I believe when we were talking, you have mentioned a couple of companies that are building products on top of you. Difio, I think, was one, and Tamr, and Luminoso. So is that related to what these companies are doing? Carl: Yes, it absolutely is related. Luminoso, in particular, is using this process of synthesizing results from their customers, proprietary data with their own models. The Luminoso team grew out of the team at MIT that built something called Constant Net, which is a very large net of graph in multiple languages. But actually, Difio as well is also using this approach of federating both open and closed source repositories by integrating a large number of connectors into their architecture. They have access to web content. They have access to various social media fire hoses. They have access to proprietary data feeds from financial news providers. But then, they fuse that with internal sources of information that may come from sources like SharePoint, or Dropbox, or Google Drive, or OneDrive, your local file servers, and then give you a single view into all of this data. Brian: Awesome. I don’t want to keep you too long. This has been super informational for me, learning about your space that you’re in. Can you tell us any closing thoughts, advice for product managers, analytics practitioners? We talked a little about obviously thinking globally and some of those areas. Any other closing thoughts about delivering good experiences, leveraging text analytics, other things to watch out for? Any general thoughts? Carl: Sure. I’ll close with a few thoughts. One is repeating what I’ve said before about Unicode compliance. The fact that I again have to state that is somewhat depressing yet it’s still isn’t taken as an absolute requirement, which is today, and yet continues to be overlooked. Secondly, just thinking globally, anything that you’re building, you got to think about a global audience. I’ll share with you an anecdote. My company gives a lot of business to Eventbrite, who I would expect by now would have a fully globalized platform, but it turns out their utility for sending an email to everybody who signed-up for an event doesn’t work in Japanese. I found that out the hard way when I needed to send an email to everybody that was signed up for our conference in Tokyo. That was very disturbing and I’m not afraid to say that live on a podcast. They need to fix it. You really don’t want customers finding out about that during a time of high stress and high pressure, and there’s just no excuse for that. Then my third point with regard to natural language understanding. This is a really incredibly exciting time to be involved with natural language, with human language because the technology is changing so rapidly and the space of what is achievable is expanding so rapidly. My final point of advice is that hybrid architectures have been the best and continue to be the best. There’s a real temptation to say, “Just grow all of my text into a deep neural net and magic is going to happen.” That can be true if you have sufficiently large amounts of data, but most people don’t. Therefore, you’re going to get better results by using hybrids of algorithmic simpler machine learning architectures together with deep neural nets. Brian: That last tip, can you take that down one more notch? I assume you’re talking about a level of quality on the tail-end of the technology implementation, there’s going to be some higher quality output. Can you translate what a hybrid architecture means in terms of a better product at the other end? What would be an example of that? Carl: Sure. It’s hard to do without getting too technical, but I’ll try and I’ll try to use some examples in English. I think the traditional way of approaching deep nets has very much been take a very simple, potentially deep and recursive neural network architecture and just throw data at it, especially images or audio waveforms. I throw my images in and I want to classify which ones were taken outdoors and which ones were taken indoors with no traditional signal processing or image processing added before or after. In the image domain, my understanding is that, that kind of purist approach is delivered the best results and that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t have first-hand information about that. However, when it comes to human language in its written form, there’s a great deal of traditional processing of that text that boosts the effectiveness of the deep learning. That falls into a number of layers that I won’t go into, but to just give you one example, let’s talk about what we called Orthography. The English language is relatively simple and that the orthography is generally quite simple. We’ve got the letters A through Z, an uppercase and lowercase, and that’s about it. But if you look inside, say a PDF of English text, you’ll sometimes encounter things like ligatures, like a lowercase F followed by a lowercase I, or two lowercase Fs together, will be replaced with single glyph to make it look good in that particular typeface. If I think those glyphs and I just throw them in with all the rest of my text, that actually complicates the job of the deep learning. If I take that FI ligature and convert it back to separate F followed by I, or the FF ligature and convert it back to FF, my deep learning doesn’t have to figure out what those ligatures are about. Now that seems pretty obscure in English but in other writing systems, especially Arabic, for instance, in which there’s an enormous number of ligatures, or Korean or languages that have diacritical marks, processing those diacritical marks, those ligatures, those orthographic variations using conventional means will make your deep learning run much faster and give you better results with less data. That’s just one example but there’s a whole range or other text-processing steps using algorithms that have been developed over many years, that simply makes the deep learning work better and that results in what we call a hybrid architecture. Brian: So it sounds like taking, as opposed to throw it all in a pot and stir, there’s the, “Well, maybe I’m going to cut the carrots neatly into the right size and then throw them in the soup.” Carl: Exactly. Brian: You’re kind of helping the system do a better job at its work. Carl: That’s right and it’s really about thinking about your data and understanding something about it before you throw it into the big brain. Brian: Exactly. Cool. Where can people follow you? I’ll put a link up to the Basis in the show notes but are you on Twitter or LinkedIn somewhere? Where can people find you? Carl: LinkedIn tends to be my preferred social network. I just was never really good at summarizing complex thoughts into 140 characters, so that’s the best place to connect with me. Basically, we’ll tell you all about Basis Technology and rosette.com is our text analytics platform, which is free for anybody to explore, and to the best of my knowledge, it is the most capable text analytics platform with the largest number of languages that you will find anywhere on the public internet. Brian: All right, I will definitely put those up in the show notes. This has been fantastic, I’ve learned a ton, and thanks for coming on Experiencing Data. Carl: Great talking with you, Brian. Brian: All right. Cheers. Carl: Cheers.

Author Jim Hinckley joins us to recommend Old West ghost towns that you can still visit. Then Irish singer Cathie Ryan describes how Ireland remembers its heroes through the lyrics of traditional songs. And journalist Carl Hoffman shares his deeply researched take on the mysterious disappearance of banking scion Michael Rockefeller in the jungles of New Guinea. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

In this episode Matt Crawford interviews New York Time best selling author Carl Hoffman about his book The Last Wild Men of Borneo. In this unbelievable story two men from different sides of the world end up in the jungles of Bali searching for fulfillment. Two men on different paths that converge in a story that reads like a Hollywood Movie. Carl Hoffman writes a book that you do not want to put down and will mourn the end of.

Mar 13th - Carl Hoffman, Dan Mason

Mar 13th - Carl Hoffman, Dan Mason

Hear from Londoners about what's afoot in their city right now, and the don't-miss experiences for anyone looking to make the most of a visit to the British capital this year. Then author Carl Hoffman tells what he discovered about two modern-day adventurers who befriended an indigenous tribe in Borneo: One of them got rich selling tribal art — and the other disappeared. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

"The role of an artist is to open people's minds" - Carl Hoffman I caught up with this weeks guest at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival here in Bali to talk about adventure travel writing. Carl Hoffman is one of the greatest modern adventure travel authors. He is the author of Savage Harvest, The Lunatic Express, and Hunting Warbirds, as well as being a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler. Carl has traveled to more than 75 countries on assignment for Outside; Smithsonian; National Geographic Adventure; ESPN, the Magazine; Wired; Men’s Journal; Popular Mechanics and many other publications. Savage Harvest was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “editor’s pick.” Amazon.com named it the best non-fiction book of 2014. For the project, Carl learned to speak Indonesian and lived in a remote village amidst 10,000 square miles of road-less swamp with a tribe of former headhunters and cannibals on the southwest coast of New Guinea. In this episode shares come great stories about how he wrote Savage Harvest and how he approaches writing books and journalism. It was great to hear Carl's process of uncovering the story and understanding the situation. Another one of my favorite moments of the interview was the story of his bus ride across Afghanistan where the bus breaks down in the region of a dangerous warlord. So if you are curious about how you can become a travel writer, or are a fan of intriguing stories about far off places, this is the interview for you! Quotes: "I'm overcome constantly with ideas for stories" - Carl Hoffman "What draws us to tribal people in the first place?" - Carl Hoffman "When I'm reporting, I put aside my personal needs" - Carl Hoffman "Good journalism is trying to perceive the soul of a place" - Carl Hoffman "The way to be a good writer is by reading" - Carl Hoffman "Books resonate with you when you need them" - Carl Hoffman "The role of an artist is to open people's minds" - Carl Hoffman "Writing a book becomes an effort to understand" - Carl Hoffman "Try to write as simply as you can" - Carl Hoffman "Adventure is doing something unexpected" - Carl Hoffman "I have an antenna up at all times to find the end of my story" - Carl Hoffman What you will learn: -How to choose what stories to write about -What it takes to produce a NYT bestselling adventure travel book -How to be prepared as a journalist -The Evolution of being an Author as a career -How to get paid as a travel journalist -How to approach reading as a writer -How to navigate the farthest, most remote places on our planet -How to fit in in any culture -How to find the right people to be your journalistic sources Continue the Adventure (Resources from this episode): CarlHoffman.com Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II   Reading recommendations from Carl: Tony Horwitz Wilfred Thesiger Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft (Enriched Classics) Thanks Carl Hoffman! If you enjoyed this session of The Art of Adventure Podcast, let Carl know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out on Twitter: Click here to thank Carl on Twitter Support the Art of Adventure! This podcast is supported by listeners like you! Become a patron of the Art of Adventure on Patreon Subscribe to The Art of Adventure Podcast for free in iTunes or Stitcher. If you enjoyed the show, please help us by leaving a 5-star rating and review! You might also like these episodes: AOA 067 | Matt Prior | Adventure Academy AOA 074 | Colin Wright | The Future Of Publishing AOA 069 | Kimanzi Constable | How To Sell 100,

We talk with Carl Hoffman about his book, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art. We also learn about the checkered past of the cyclotron, or proton accelerator, and we have the latest installment of People Are Strange.  

Travel writer Carl Hoffman will be at Thurber House on March 31 to discuss his new book Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art.  We talked about how Hoffman followed up on his journalistic hunches … Continue reading → The post Carl Hoffman talks cannibals and what gifts to bring your children from your travels first appeared on Craft: Exploring Creativity.

Carl Hoffman explains what it was like to travel the world on the most notorious, over-crowded trains, planes, busses and ferries — the way most of the planet gets from one city to another. And listeners share their own travel discoveries and suggestions for seeing the world. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

Carl Hoffman describes his experiences traveling on the most notorious, over-crowded trains, planes, busses and ferries from India to the Andes and listeners share their own travel discoveries and suggestions for seeing the world. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.