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Below is the full transcript the full length video.
Setting the stage
We started right after the Fukushima disaster and it brought a lot of amazing people together. And here we are 13 years later, still going strong on citizen science.
JANE
I’m Jane McConnell, and welcome to Imaginize World. Today, we need to focus on the future for new generations. What kind of world do we want them to live in, and how can we help them build it? Greetings. Today I’m with Pieter Franken, co-founder of Safecast. Safecast is considered by many to be the most successful citizen science project in the world. It was created in 2011, a few days after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. We’re going to talk about citizen science, what it brings to the world, the challenges it faces. We’re going to talk in particular about Safecast and how it operates, why it’s successful, and how it can be an example for people who really want to make a difference in the world. Let’s go. Hello, Pieter. It’s really great to see you here.
PIETER
Jane, likewise. It’s great to see you.
JANE
We’ve communicated a bit, and this is the first time we’ve had, can we call this a face-to-face conversation?
PIETER
You can, right. Though quite remote.
JANE
In a remote face-to-face conversation. Now I’m based in the southwest of France and I know you’re in Japan. What part of Japan are you in?
PIETER
I’m in Tokyo and I’m in a ward called Shibuya, which is more or less dead center Tokyo.
JANE
I’m going to ask you a question I ask all of my guests, which sort of catches some people off-guard. And that question is, if you had to describe yourself in one sentence, what would you say? For example, if I were to say, “Okay, yesterday I was talking to Pieter Franken and he’s a,” how would you want me to finish the sentence?
PIETER
Right. He’s a passionate builder.
JANE
Wow, great.
PIETER
Done.
JANE
A passionate builder. It’s very concise and very, how would I say, enthusiastic.
PIETER
I like building things. I like the process of creation and I’m very passionate about it in general. Most people say I’m passionate about it, so I guess they probably are right. Most of my travels and journeys throughout my life have been around building things in many cases against the odds or missions impossible and so forth, which then require you to have a lot of passion because why are you doing this, right? Well, you’re doing this because you’re on a mission, so to speak.
JANE
You live permanently in Japan, I believe?
PIETER
Yes. I’ve been here for well over 30 years. I came here as a student for serendipity in life. I wasn’t necessarily at that time set on going to Japan. It was kind of a random thing, but as I came to Japan, I was very impressed with it as a young engineer and from one came the other and I ended up getting a job here. I was a researcher here. And then through that I built my career in the financial industry here over the years.
Pieter Franken’s background as a passionate builder and what citizen science is
I understand you’re a financial expert and you work with a lot of different organizations in that capacity, and you are a co-founder and director of Safecast, which is actually the primary subject of our conversation today, citizen science. And I learned, Pieter, that Safecast is considered one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world. I saw that repeated in different places.
PIETER
Well, there’s a lot of challenges in doing projects like that and people have been calling us that way largely because I think we have had a lot of passion by doing it again, but also a lot of tenacity and keeping something up like that isn’t easy. And I think we have somewhat been able to sustain ourselves now for almost 14 years. In 2011, we started and it definitely was a journey where we started, but we had no idea where it would end. But we knew we were going to do this. We knew this was the right thing to do and it brought a lot of amazing people to together. And here we are 13 years later, still going strong on citizen science and basically environmental measurement as we call it now. But at that time we started right after the Fukushima disaster here in Japan.
JANE
I’m wondering if you could, for people who listen to this later, could you define very briefly what citizen science is?
PIETER
Yes, it’s kind of a loaded term. Different people have given different explanations. The way I look at it is a combination of ordinary people like ourselves participating in a project that typically tends to collect information around them. So it’s easy to participate in that. And typically, that data collection is needed at scale and that makes it very suitable for citizens to get together because it’s very difficult for researchers or governments to collect millions of millions of data points on their own. So one element is that data collection. The other thing is as you bringing the data together, you can also tap into a massive resource of people. Again, the same citizens that can go and figure out what it means. So citizen is a little bit of a simplistic term, but everybody is a citizen. You can be engaging at different levels, but we have people that drive around and collect data.
We have people that are studying the results of the data, people write reports and so forth. So it’s a broader activity. And in that, whereas some people say, “Yeah, but citizen science is really not citizen Science. Science with a big S.” But that can change as well. We have successfully published scientific papers with a lot of recognition around that, and it is really a function of the community that somehow evolves over time that is able to do that. So I don’t think there’s a single recipe for it, but citizen science really brings people together, typically driven by a common need for a certain amount of data and transparency and then combine that with the same people or other people in the same group, trying to understand what that data actually means.
And from there, other things can happen, but in my mind it’s beyond citizen science. You can drive impact or you can change policies or whatever, but I think that as far as we are concerned, is not what we will do. We will set the stage for data to be trusted and available, and then from there other people can take better informed decisions.
Safecast started immediately after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
Could you talk a little bit about how Safecast started, why it started and what it wanted to achieve?
PIETER
Yeah, so Safecast started rather abruptly in March of 2011 when the big earthquake happened in Japan, which was followed by the massive tsunami, which was the most damaging part of the earthquake, was actually the tsunami. The force of the water cannot be described. I’ve seen the destruction myself and it just is unbelievable. And that force also affected the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. And basically, the plant got flooded and as a result it wasn’t able to cool the nuclear cores and the plant kind of exploded and threw out the tremendous amount of nuclear material into the atmosphere. And that then fell down onto the ground across a part of Japan, of course near Fukushima. But it kind of went up all the way to Tokyo at that time and that’s what happened. So that was kind of the event. Myself as a person, I was here in Tokyo when the earthquake happened.
Even though I was 500 kilometers away from the epicenter, I’ll never forget, it was the most intense earthquake I actually experienced myself in Japan over the years and we were not even close to it. My in-laws were actually or are still living near the center of the tsunami. And obviously we wanted to go and see if we could help our family and so forth. That became much harder to do than we thought it would be. Besides the logistical issues of actually getting there, we also now were faced with a nuclear threat and it was like an invisible wall between us here in Tokyo and our family there. And it was a moment within the first 24 hours, it was like I felt very helpless and said, “I need to do something about this”. Now, I wasn’t alone. There were other people around me, people, friends or people in the network that also were worried about what’s happening with this thing, what do we do? And the lack of information was almost complete.
There was not much information from the government, whatever was there later on we found out was rather optimistic, let me put it like that. And the information we wanted wasn’t there. So we then got the group of people together globally at that time it was, I think it was a chat room and everybody was kind of, “What do we do?” First idea was to create a website where we thought we could collect data from various institutions in Japan and make them available in a more readable format. That didn’t go anywhere because the data simply didn’t exist so that was that.
JANE
There was no data to be collected.
PIETER
The data we found was all from Tokyo but not from the disaster are. There’s a lot of research institutes here and we have a little Geiger counter to study atmospheric radiation, but not anything that has to do with a nuclear disaster of this scale. We then thought that crowdsourcing at that time was kind of a new thing. People were working on it. So we said, “Let’s do crowdsourcing. Let’s buy a bunch of Geiger counters and distribute them to people across Japan and have them collect data.” That idea was great, but there was one snag. In the first 24 hours, all the Geiger counters had sold out and we were stuck with nothing almost. So we had collected the money though to buy those Geiger counters. So we had a small budget and we started to innovate and think through what we could do. Long story short, we ended up building our own equipment and we developed a Geiger counter system that allowed us to drive around optimizing the use of the scarce Geiger counters at the time and start collect data pretty much kind of four or five weeks after the accident happened.
JANE
Wow. So I saw that you had created something that could be attached to a vehicle and therefore people could drive around and measure the data, as you just said. Was it dangerous for those people?
PIETER
It’s a good question. I was one of those people that if you start something and you’re not in the front row, then you’re not part of the thing, so that’s [inaudible 00:10 :22] building, you’re going to eat your cake first. So I was one of the four people that collectively drove up to Fukushima, but at the time a lot of people were living there and were there. So I was like, that’s one thing. And the other thing is there was no data. Some saw on TV and we said, “Well, this is a calculated risk.” We had spoken with other people and we had figured that this would be like flying from the US to Japan where you also get exposed to radiation or getting an X-ray. And so that’s what we did. However, we decided that the people on the car were no children, no women or people that had specific conditions.
So it was just a group of younger guys, actually. And we went into the area rather randomly. We had an address of somebody that some of our team members had contact with and he wanted us to find that person and measure their environment, which we did. It was the city of Koriyama, which was about 80 kilometers away from the power plant itself. And we found out that the radiation levels were way, way higher than we had seen on TV. But also what we learned was very quickly is that it wasn’t a uniform phenomena, it’s very blotchy. So you could walk from one side of the street to the other side and have very different readings. So we realized that this wasn’t far from an easy thing to start measuring. And that initial experience then led us to say if we want to measure this, we actually have to measure every single street because it is not predictable as people think it is.
And that’s what we ended up doing as well. So the first trip I’ll never forget, we drove, we had built our system in seven days. It’s kind of funny. On the seventh day we drove to Fukushima and the sixth day we tested it here in Tokyo. And actually, funny enough, if you build something it tends to not work on the first trial. It did work on the first trial. And so we had our first data view and then we were a whole lot wiser because once you have data, then you start to say, “What does that mean?” And we didn’t have any data that indicated what really was happening, but that time we had, that we said, “Wow, there’s a lot more happening here than we had anticipated.” And that kind of set us on this journey of 13 years later we’re still doing that.
JANE
So I understand from your story and from what I’ve read that governments not just in Japan, but in general, governments and institutions are not necessarily capable of or motivated to collect that kind of data and to share it openly with the public. Would you agree with that?
PIETER
Yeah. Yes, I think so. I think there’s multiple maybe factors into why they couldn’t do that. Part of the challenge was that government did have a predictive system that should have predicted where what went, but it was damaged during the earthquake. At least that’s what we were told. And so it was never used and the data was not there. They also didn’t have a quick survey system that could allow them to fly or do something like we ended up doing to quickly get an idea of the scale of the event. And I think there were scientists that were able to measure, let’s say, one location really well, but if we have measured hundreds of million locations, they were not designed for that. And they were, I would say, very academic approach to this. And I think the other thing is this has to do with nobody thought it would ever happen.
Safecast collected data beyond what normal scientists and governments could do
People are so confident that the safety and the quality and everything they had built would never cause this to happen. And I think that also once you have that, then your guards go down because if you say, “Well, we should be able to measure this at scale,” then people say, “Yeah, that will not happen. Why do we need it then?” And you saw that kind of reasoning has been used in the past, not only in Japan but with things like where I’m from Holland, so we have the dikes. How high do you build the dike? Is function of how high the water goes, but also a function of how much money and land you have to build a dike. And in Japan, the same thing with there’s actually a dike around the nuclear power plant that is very tall, made of concrete that protects the plant from flooding.
But once it is compromised, then all bets are off. So I think that is why people never really went there because they said, “Well, we strongly believe that will never happen.” And so they had not built the systems. Initially when we started, a lot of kind of thought that we were a bunch of amateurs and so forth. They were wrong. We had a lot of actually experts on our team and so forth, but we had a very different way of thinking about it. The idea of crowdsourcing and using a lot of people to drive around had never been done before. And we were pioneering with that. Later on we realized that there’s actually a good scientific foundation the way we were measuring and also there was a good scientific foundation, how we were able to triangulate if measurements were okay or not okay, which is kind of a technical issue, but Geiger counters or scintillators, it depends on what type you use and they need some kind of calibration to make sure that they’re accurately measuring.
But if you measure with a group of people, the group itself calibrates itself. And that kind of simplistic realization had not really happened up to that moment. So we pioneered a lot of things, but we came up with things that were later on, we worked with universities and scientists to prove that how we measured was valid and actually very cost-effective as well. If a government had to do this with its own resources, it would be very expensive. And then you need to keep these resources ready for something that hopefully would never happen or it would be very rare to happen. So I think that citizens can come together and team up to do things that otherwise governments or organizations are not designed to do. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
I think it’s more important you realize that. You say, “Hey, we can’t do that, but why don’t we use people collectively? We’re all part of this society, collectively we can do something that otherwise would not be possible.” And that’s really I think the crux of citizen science. It really is interesting there, where the scale is beyond what normal scientists or governments can do in terms of data collection.
Avoiding bias and building trust in data through decentralization, openness and transparency
One of the criticisms I came across in my research was not of Safecast specifically, but in general that citizen science projects often had an underlying bias, that they were created or developed in order to prove something. And I think in your case, you could have been accused of being anti-nuclear and that that’s what you were trying to prove.
PIETER
Entirely right. And to be clear, anything that has to do with nuclear is super polarized and biased. There’s a strong anti-nuclear movement and there’s a strong pro-nuclear movement and these groups have been like water and oil over the years to the point where they don’t even want to be in the same room and so on and so on. So when we started this, our goal had nothing to do with nuclear is good or bad. Our goal was to find out what happened and use that data to be more informed and do something that is rational. In the beginning of the accident, the government moved people around, not based on measurement, but based on an assessment. A lot of people are moved for no good reason. And now moving sounds innocent, but moving changes people livelihood. And actually, a lot of people committed suicide because they lost their livelihood because it’s nothing to do with the radiation directly.
I call it secondary fallout, but there’s a lot of effects if you do that at scale. It’s easy to move somebody out, it’s hard to move a village back. And that’s what we learned. So once the village is empty, who goes in first? The barber, the bakery or the police? You need to move everything at the same time. And it sounds simple, but it actually isn’t. So on the bias side, et cetera, we were very clear from day one knowing that nuclear had a very strong polarized thing around it. We said we are pro-data. We’re not pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. We are interested in measuring this as best as we can with no bias into the thing. And the way we prevented bias from creeping in is that anybody can participate in the project. You don’t have to be a pro or anti-nuclear person or share what your views are on that at all.
And more importantly, we don’t direct people where to measure. So if you’re an anti-nuclear action group, there are quite a few of they will select something to measure where they suspect that there will be radiation to be measured to show that it is not good. That’s fine, but has an inherent bias. Thing in there, in the governments, they do the opposite of that. They may measure areas that they know are less effective. We saw that in Japan as well. So we stayed out of that because everybody was basically measuring the neighborhoods and there was no bias in that. And also people, as they intersected and measured the same street, again, there was automatic validation building. So if you would have the intent of faking the data or whatever you wanted to do, that would actually very easy to be detected. And so that allowed us to create kind of a bias-free network of measurements, which is actually quite unique because that was kind of the end of the thing.
That was actually what gave us the power. And once you have that, then people can build trust in that data set because if it’s biased, the trust is gone and people will say, “No, but you only measured areas with high radiation,” and blah blah, blah, and vice versa. “You’re greenwashing here and you’re measuring only what is happy and fine.” We didn’t do that. We absolutely left it to our participants to decide where they’re going, zero moderation whatsoever. And that allowed the data set to be very reliable and trusted. And I think that is kind of an element in citizen science that depending on what you do is very important to make sure that the way you organize it doesn’t allow bias to drive the end result. And also allows people from different opinions and convictions to come together. And I’m not going to talk about things nuclear or whatever, but the context changes all the time around us.
If you look at the context of the Fukushima disaster and today’s context, we have a very different context. Climate change over the last 10 years has become a major impact to a lot of things that are happening to us. But in that, our views around nuclear have shifted, right? And where more people think nuclear among all things is maybe not the worst thing right now for us to get the climate under control and so forth. So what I learned is that the change, the context happens as it evolves, but how do you build something that sustains itself even though the opinions and ideas change? And that’s really, if you have that, then I think you’re onto something because it is valuable for many, many years. That is independent from where the public opinion is going, and it will always be somewhere. But at the end of today, and that’s my belief, my passionate belief is as a society, we need to build our fabric around data that is actually correct.
How do we unbias events that are happening
And so then based on that, we can do the right thing, in other words. And unfortunately, so when we started this, there were two things that were part of our context. One was I mentioned climate change, which has a lot of bias, and the other one was fake data, fake news, which is something that now we see we’re talking about those things as well. How do we unbias events that are happening? If you go to BBC, then I’ll show you 20 different pictures of a rocket hitting a market to figure out where the thing came from. And that allows you to build a fair validation of whatever the either side is claiming that what happened. And that’s super interesting. If we go back when we started, we started with that. How do we check for ourselves that we’re doing something that can be validated? And so that validation is something we see now more and more challenges to data that we don’t know if it is real or not.
And so that I think is something with Safecast we want to keep on focusing on and also inspire other people. Our focus is around environmental data. Besides radiation, we also measure quality, but you can apply some of these principles to a lot of other things. I meet a lot of people and I try to inspire people to use some of these principles to build trust around things that currently are not very trusted.
JANE
Safecast is a model that people can use as a way of making a difference. A lot of people think they agree with something or don’t agree with something, but what can they do about it? And I think what you’ve done with Safecast, you have enabled people to be free of that and to actually do something.
PIETER
Yes. And I think that’s sometime a big frustration we have as individuals, is that we feel like we’re not part of it. Can we play a role in this? And so forth. Of course, part of democracies you can vote and all these things so that you can participate in those things. But yeah, I think for people like ourselves, etc., at some point in time, what can you do? And that answer will be different for each individual. It depends on your capacity, your capabilities, time in your life and all these things like that. But I think it is important to interact with your environment and say as much as they are doing something, hello there, you’re part of that. And you can make a difference and you can drive change and all these things are there. It does require some things. But with the internet today, we’re meeting here, we have never met before, but it looks like we’re always next to each other. We’re not actually next to each other.
But with the internet, what we did is this, you can bring a lot of things together these days that otherwise were very hard to do. So that’s great. Now, when you bring things together, you make sure that it doesn’t fall apart. So you look for ways to focus and do things within a certain space and not fall for, as you were saying, not fall for the trap to bias the thing. Unless that is your agenda, that’s fine too. But if you want to build something that is trusted, et cetera, you have to make sure bias doesn’t trickle in. And so in our organization or our volunteers, there are people with different opinions about the climate, the air pollution, the nuclear power, energy and so forth. But all have agreed that the foundation of discussion is data that we can rely on. So that is I think the essence.
Structure and decision-making in Safecast: volunteer-driven, decentralized
How is Safecast organized from an organizational structure viewpoint? And follow up to that question is how are decisions made?
PIETER
So that’s a very good question. And the thing is, it has been very much a volunteer-driven organization where people are coming in and out and contribute in that. People can take more leadership and say, “I’m going to build this piece, I’m going to work on this piece.” We do have a little bit of a, we are an organization where we are incorporated as a nonprofit and so forth. So we do have a little bit of structure there because when people donate money to us, et cetera, we need to properly manage that. But we’re largely volunteer-driven where we don’t have staff that are full-time paid. People come together. Currently, we use something like Slack where everybody gets together and decisions tend to be taken in a rather kind of collaborative fashion around things. And we encourage people to come in. There is no, how do you say, you can’t do this or you can’t do that. Of course it has to stay within a certain scope.
What is the scope we’re working on? If you want to do something really different, that’s great, but Safecast is not the place to do it. And also, we have a few guiding principles that we set at the beginning, specifically around bias and being the way we work together to make sure that we don’t get into discussions that are not in the best interest of what we want to do. But beyond that, it is pretty decentralized, I would say, in its nature. All of the people that contribute data to Safecast are completely autonomous. As I said, we don’t tell them what to do. Many of them we don’t know, they get a device and start measuring, contributing. And so that is fully decentralized and that’s super exciting because it runs on its own and it propagates. And that is very good because there is no need for us to go and push people to do something.
They pull in, so to speak, and they start contributing spontaneously. And so that has been super interesting to see. Initially it was like how do we get people to volunteer? And it was like a snowball effect for people to come in. But it is also kind of an informal organization. Overall, what we do is, I call it decentralized data. Citizen science, that kind of describes things better, but we basically build decentralized data that can be verified and trusted. And in order to do that, you need a structure, but you don’t need to have a lot of hierarchical things around it to actually let it happen. You need guiding principles. There’s things around it. We have a small core team where we make sure that things stay within a certain operating range, but other than that, we’re not very traditionally organized, so to speak.
JANE
Interesting model. I think that some traditional organizations are moving towards greater decentralization, which is a whole topic on its own. I’ve worked with a lot of organizations, primarily large ones, and I see what happens with some of these efforts to decentralize. It’s not an obvious thing. Now your case, it’s different because you began with a group of highly motivated individuals.
PIETER
Yes, exactly. And I think that does have an impact. And I think also what’s the challenge of when you do things, is to see what’s around you. What are the building blocks, what are the resources, what is the contact? And leverage that to your advantage. Other problems may ultimately get solved in a different way. This is not something that can solve everything in life, but for certain areas this is a very useful way of doing things and so forth. So I think that decentralized organizations is a different topic altogether.
JANE
It sure is. Yes.
PIETER
And there’s a lot of challenges there. The thing, when you work on these things, what you learn is that what is the essence of this and what do you touch and what do you not touch? Because in order for it to be decentralized, you can easily centralize something out of it and then it doesn’t have the properties. But at the same time, something is entirely decentralized and it goes off the cliff, how do you control that? So what are the mechanisms to stay on the track? Right? There’s a lot of people working on that. I’m fascinated by it as well. I don’t have all the answers for it at the moment, but I do think it’s interesting to see how as humans, how do we interact? How can we do things that otherwise are near impossible to achieve?
Students need to explore their passions
That brings me to my next question about education. What do you think can be done or should be done in schools and universities, at all levels of education? It seems to me that most systems go for the traditional, you learn, you memorize, you pass the test, you get a diploma, get a job, but that’s not the way of the future. How do you see changes in education?
PIETER
That’s a one-hour answer question.
JANE
Okay, well, condense it to five minutes.
PIETER
I’ll try to share some of my personal experience and views around it. I do work with a lot of students and young people. And Safecast, we do workshops, we work with universities. I’m also affiliated with some university here and so forth. So I think the traditional way of learning, which was by remote learning, has kind of had its time. But there are elements to which I think people just need to have gone through. And if not, it’s just a suffering of learning. It kind of sounds funny, but there is some value in having to struggle through something that is difficult to understand and then mastering it. I think there’s a value there. And I’m not saying that we should just jettison everything and go for an experience-only based model. But I think the hybrid, I think, is where the opportunities are.
A lot of things that people learn at school have limited use. It may sound funny, but mathematics, there’s a lot of applied mathematics. You can do things with it, but if you learn mathematics, there’s not a lot of jobs. You can become a mathematics teacher and things, but otherwise it’s kind of an applied thing. And how many people are using that? At the end of the day, almost nobody. If you look at it, so how many people today solved an equation in their work? Almost nobody, right? So I’m not saying it’s not important, let me be clear, but what I’m trying to say is that there’s a lot of time spent on having our kids learn things that at the end of the day are not going to play an important thing in their life. So I think we need to reconsider that and say, “Okay, there needs to be a foundation of things that you have to have understood.”
As I said, some struggle of learning is actually good because you’ll learn tenacity. You said, “Oh my god, this is so difficult. Why do I need this?” Or whatever. It is actually useful. But at the same time, I think a lot of practical experiences are applied. How do we apply things around this? How do we build things, for example, are typically not taught at school, right? Kids use Lego blocks to build things. Why don’t we do that at a little bit more at school in a more structured manner? Because building is an important skill. Doing a project, how to get people together and so forth. And these kind of skills I think are very, very useful. And actually, a lot of people do use them on a day-to-day basis. When you get a job, you may have to do a project or you’re part of a company and they’re building something.
And what I also have seen is by having working with school kids and university students is once they go through this building experience, it’s sometimes life changing. I had kids that decided to go and study something because of that building experience. So, “This is so exciting. I can do this. What is this? I want to learn more.” So I think that type of, how do you say, incentivizing is not the right word, but creating an impulse. Okay, you create these impulses where people say, “Wow, that’s out there. This excites me.” And one of the challenges for parents is always when your kids go to university, what are they going to study? Some parents already figured that out for their kids, but in reality, you want your kid to find some passion somewhere to say, “That’s what I want to do. I get excited about this.”
Because passion is big. It helps a lot. If you’re passionate about something, things go faster than if you do something you’re impassioned about. But I think if schools, etc., would offer many more of these kind of real world experiences, learn how to build, etc., it also will help kids to say, “Hey, that’s exciting. I want to do more in that space,” and so forth. So I think that’s kind of my 2 cents on education. I know this is a very complex topic. There’s a lot of opinions on it. We did focus on education a lot because there’s a lot of things that people can learn from the project but also can be inspired with. And we worked with primary school kids, teaching them how to build some really simple thing, but also learn a little bit about science and so forth, and making it something that fits into a more realistic environment rather than an abstract kind of space where we learn about gravity and solving, formulas and things.
But a lot of people say, “Well, what is it good for?” Of course it’s good for something, but then you’ll realize that way later in life and that kind of motivation is lost there. So I think applied science and STEM or doing things where you do, and it doesn’t have to be science alone. A lot of people always talk about science, but there’s a lot of other things. It could be music, it could be solving social problems or whatever it is, but get your hands dirty, I think is really important for students to test their own kind of passion and interest.
JANE
You’re coming back to your answer to my first question of being a passionate builder.
PIETER
People ask me this question about what should I do when I go to university? I say, figure out what your passion is. It’s very useful and helpful. And the thing that there is a dilemma with it as well. I want to warn this, like if it were so easy, Pieter. The challenge is that in my own life, I only found out more about myself as I was progressing. I always liked building things and so forth, but it took a lot of time to see, but that’s actually really what I like. I’m a builder, that’s my thing. And so it’s really difficult if you’re young to figure out what it is. But I do think that if you give kids unique experiences, they can explore that space for themselves a whole lot better.
And there’s a lot of lost opportunities, I think, if you really don’t know what you want to study and you just pick something, it’s kind of a waste. So sometimes you can argue randomly doing things is also good. That also happens, serendipity is there. But in general, I think schools can do things to stimulate that kind of exploratory new kind of experience where things you have learned in the classroom can now be put into context.
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Is there any particular moment in your long career up to now that’s one of your favorite moments? A moment where you felt really happy or really proud or had an emotional reaction, a strong emotional reaction?
PIETER
Oh, that’s very difficult because I never thought about it, and I think there’s multiple moments. I think the moment of having built something. You build it. It’s there. That’s great. So because typically there’s a lot of reasons why it won’t happen. It’s challenging. There is challenges all the way and mastering the challenges, making it happen, working with people because you can’t do anything on your own and so forth. And then for example, I worked a lot in technology when a system goes live or a service goes live, or in case of Safecast, we’re achieving a certain level of measurements or some milestone, it’s great because you know that it mattered. You know that you were able to do something and create something that is being valued. And I think those are great moments in life when those happen. So across my career I built many things, but that kind of [inaudible 00:38 :19], it goes live, it’s running, and then customers come and they start using it and then it starts growing. It’s great to see that, no doubt about it.
JANE
Do you feel optimistic or do you feel pessimistic or somewhere in between about the future, say 10, 15 years from now?
PIETER
I’m optimistic, but I’m also, nothing is given, right? So I’m optimistic because that’s my nature. I do think there’s a lot of challenges always ahead of us. I think specifically now with climate change, I think is a huge challenge in human mankind. Sometimes very frustrating because the scale at which this happens is beyond anybody’s comprehension and it makes you feel a little bit helpless. But I’m optimistic because I think humans are amazing animals, so to speak. We have amazing capabilities to do things together. We’re social animals in my mind, and that is our strength. So if we’re faced with challenges, we will find a way to get over it. Unfortunately, there’s all kinds. Life is full of challenges, different opinions, different this and that, whatever. But I think our ability to solve problems and go after it and ultimately put humanity on top of our agenda, I think that drives my optimism.
My pessimism is driven by a lot of what I see as sad events where people are putting themselves in front of anything or their tribe in front of anything. I think that’s worrisome. And those things do worry me a lot. And I think I hope that human mankind can be a little bit more wiser in that sense. Having said that, that’s the challenge. But I think in general, I’m optimistic. I’m also a technologist. I think technology can solve a lot of challenges. It can also create a lot of mess, but I think with the number of people we have on the planet and all these things happening, it’ll be impossible to keep the thing floating without using a lot of technology to basically give everybody a meaningful existence here, which is far from the case, as we all know. So there’s a lot of things to do, but I always say a lot of challenges, a lot of opportunity, and that requires passionate builders. So that’s the way I look at it.
JANE
Do you have any final thing that you’d like to say, Pieter? Any sort of final idea, message, thought that you’d like to share?
PIETER
After this conversation, I think what I learned with Safecast and other things I’ve done in my life is that you can do way more than you think as an individual. And you can change things. Actually, you can have an impact, you can do something. And I think that may not be everybody’s destiny. I do think it has, there’s a lot of challenges in it, but it should encourage everybody to say, “I can do something in my community or in my work or whatever. But I can drive something.” And keep an optimistic, passionate view of life, I think is highly recommended.
Where there is a lot of challenge, there’s also a lot of opportunity to do things. I work with a lot of people that don’t have a lot, but I’m always amazed with the passion and the energy people have irrespective of the situation they’re in. I think that encourages me to just do more and see what can I do. And as I said, for everybody individually, I think it’s something different. But do ask the question to yourself once in a while. What can I do beyond what I’m doing right now as just something I can do? And then from there, maybe you’ll find your passion. And I think that’s the ultimate goal.
JANE
It’s been great talking with you, Pieter. Thank you so much for your time and for all the ideas and thoughts that you shared with us.
PIETER
And Jane, thank you for having me.
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