Lynsey Addario

03/03/20 • 48 min

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Ep. 35 — A war photographer confronts her own mortality as she bears witness to the world’s worst wars / Lynsey Addario, Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist. Renowned photojournalist and war photographer Lynsey Addario and three fellow journalists were documenting the Arab Spring uprising in Libya in March 2011 when the unthinkable happened at a hostile checkpoint. The journalists had lingered too long to complete their reporting on the front lines and were cornered and taken hostage by Col. Muammar Gaddafi's troops. They were repeatedly beaten, tied up, blindfolded and constantly threatened with execution before being released nearly a week later. It was hard enough to recover from the trauma of her violent kidnapping, the second in her 15-year career as a award winning war photographer. A month later, Addario learned that two other journalist friends had been killed in Libya, leading to a profound existential crisis about the life-threatening career she had chosen. Addario's soul searching led to her best-selling memoir, "It's What I do," in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, recounts the incredible risks she has taken covering every major conflict and humanitarian crisis of her generation, played out against the backdrop of the post-9/11 War on Terror. A regular contributor to The NewYorkTimes, National Geographic, and Time, Addario has reported and photographed from some of the world’s most dangerous hotspots including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. Recently, Addario took on another difficult assignment documenting a very different kind of death that challenged her as a photojournalist in an entirely new way. I hope you enjoy this incredible story of courage, perseverance and sacrifice. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra: Renowned photo journalist and war photographer, Lynsey Addario and three fellow journalists were shooting the Arab spring uprising in Libya in March, 2011 when the unthinkable happened at a hostile checkpoint. Addario and her colleagues were released nearly a week later. It was hard enough to recover from the trauma of her violent kidnapping, but when a month later, Addario learned that two other journalists friends had been killed in Libya, her world fell apart. Chitra: Hello everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Good Story, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. My guest today is Lynsey Addario, the Pulitzer prize winning photo journalist, who for the past 15 years has covered every major conflict and humanitarian crisis of her generation. A regular contributor to the New York Times, National Geographic and Time magazine, Addario has reported and photographed from some of the most dangerous hotspots in the world, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia and Congo. Addario also is the author of the bestselling memoir, It's What I do, a powerful narrative about her coming of age as a photo journalist during the post 911 War on Terror. Lynsey, welcome to the podcast. Lynsey: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Chitra: Did you always want to be a photographer? Lynsey: No, actually I never wanted to be a photographer. For me, I started photographing as a hobby and it was something I did sort of as I was growing up, I taught myself, I bought books on how to photograph, but it was never really something I took seriously, I guess because I didn't have exposure to photojournalism. And so it wasn't until I graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in international relations and Italian that I moved abroad and I started really paying attention to photography as a form of journalism and storytelling. And that's really when I decided I wanted to become a photographer. Chitra: Your first camera was actually a gift from your dad. You were one of four sisters,

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Mara Hvistendahl

Ep. 34 — A Shanghai-based American journalist uncovers a Chinese spy caper that brings her full circle to her midwestern roots / Mara Hvistendahl, Author, The Scientist and the Spy. When journalist Mara Hvistendahl began looking into the FBI’s arrest of a lone Chinese man behaving suspiciously in an Iowa cornfield, she was blown away by what she uncovered. Hvistendahl’s two-year reporting journey led her into the heart of a massive FBI industrial espionage investigation into the theft of genetically modified corn seeds by Chinese agribusinesses, triggered by the arrest of that one individual, Robert Mo. What began as idle curiosity ended in a gripping book, The Scientist and The Spy, in which Hvistendahl documents the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government went to make its case against Mo and the implications for other U.S. based Chinese scientists and foreign scientists in general. And it is a microcosm of some of the issues confronting U.S. - China trade relations. Hvistendahl’ s tour de force also offers a disturbing picture of the consolidation of U.S. agriculture in the hands of a few corporate giants, leaving average farmers fighting for survival. And she examines in detail the ethnic discrimination underlying many of these types of criminal investigations and prosecutions.. The story, which Hvistendahl now believes she was meant to write, also had a deep personal twist, bringing her full circle back to her own midwestern roots. I hope you enjoy this saga of one reporter‘s long journey home. Tanscript Download the PDF Chitra: Minnesota native Mara Hvistendahl learned Mandarin because of her mom's history in China. Later as a reporter in Shanghai, Hvistendahl read about a Chinese man found behaving suspiciously in the middle of an Iowa corn field. That odd little story led Hvistendahl on a two year reporting journey that uncovered a massive FBI industrial espionage investigation into the theft of genetically modified corn seeds by Chinese agribusinesses. Hvistendahl's journey also had an unexpected personal twist. Chitra: Hello everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. Joining me now is Mara Hvistendahl, author of the book, The Scientist and the Spy. Mara, welcome to the podcast. Mara: Thank you so much for having me here. Chitra: You became a Mandarin speaker because of your mom's amazing story. What was that story? Mara: Sure. My mom was a missionary's daughter. She spent some of her high school years in Asia and then moved back to the Midwest and had kids, got married. After she divorced my father when I was four, she decided to spend a year applying to schools and studying Chinese again. The woman who became her Chinese tutor was also a single mom with a son around the same age as me and my brother. Mara: She's living in the dorm at a St. Olaf College in Southern Minnesota and nobody there knew that she had a child. Her name was Hung-yu, and so my mom thought, let's get her out of the dorm. Hung-yu and my mom ended up moving in together and co-parenting me and my brother and my Chinese brother for a number of years, for five or six years. We became quite close as a kind of blended family. Chitra: You took Mandarin in college and then you decided to move to Shanghai. Why did you move? Mara: I decided in college that I wanted to become a journalist. I took Mandarin, though, more just because of this personal interest and I'd always loved the language and the culture. Then I went to journalism school and I was in New York trying to freelance. I was working as a nanny and a waitress on the side and an editor said to me, "Do you speak some Chinese? You probably should just go to China and see if you can get your start there." Mara: I packed up one or two bags and just moved.

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Dave Chase

Ep. 36 — A succession of friends dying early propels a hospital revenue cycle consultant to rethink the foundation of American healthcare / Dave Chase, Creator, Co-Founder, and CEO of Health Rosetta. When Dave Chase turned 40, he was stunned to realize that nearly a dozen of his friends all around his own age had died due to health problems. One in particular hit him the hardest, a successful executive who got cancer. “And really, at every step of the way the system failed. I mean, she got the wrong diagnosis which led to the wrong treatment plan,” says Chase. “Ultimately, this devastated her physically, financially, mentally, and she ultimately passed, she left behind a 10 year old daughter, and she was a single mother. And I realized this was a complete system failure. And I'd been a part of that system. And that was one of those road to Damascus moments for me, realizing certainly I was trying to do the right thing. But the more I looked at the system I was in, the more I realized it was, in some cases doing more harm than good. And the effects were just dramatic the more I dug into it, basically.” A successful hospital revenue cycle consultant at the time, Chase knew that he had to rethink his career and reason for being. He began to think deeply about some of the most intractable problems in the American healthcare system: The high rates of misdiagnosis and over treatment; the direct link between the two-decade-long employee wage stagnation and the escalating cost of healthcare; the devastating opioid crisis, about which he's written a book, The Opioid Crisis Wakeup Call; and last but not least, how the average American is what Chase describes as just "one stubbed toe away" from medical bill-driven bankruptcy. Since his existential crisis, Chase has become one of the most innovative thinkers on healthcare reform. As the Creator, Co-Founder, and CEO of Health Rosetta, he's working with employers and unions to transform the healthcare system. In this insightful episode, Chase lays out a concise roadmap of all the factors that have led to the national crisis in healthcare during this ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: By the time Dave Chase turned 40, 10 of his friends all around his own age had died due to health problems. There was one in particular that hit him the hardest. A successful hospital revenue cycle consultant at the time, Chase knew that he had to rethink his career and reason for being. Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. Since that crisis, Chase has become one of the most innovative thinkers on healthcare reform. Joining me now is Dave Chase. He is the creator, Co-founder and CEO of Health Rosetta, which he describes as a "do it yourself health reform movement" to help transform the healthcare system.' Dave, welcome to the podcast. Dave Chase: Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to our chat. Chitra Ragavan: So how did you end up in healthcare in the first place? Dave Chase: Well, initially it was random, I was working with a consulting firm that's now Accenture. And as a new consultant straight out of school, they put you on a project and I was put into a hospital. And turns out, it was enjoyable, liked the team, liked the work and just kind of one thing led to another and have had much of my career in the healthcare industry. Chitra Ragavan: So what were you doing in healthcare when you turned 40, and you were starting to see that a lot of your friends had died? Dave Chase: By then I had moved on to the technology side. So I'd had a company that I had started. I mean, previously, I'd been at Microsoft and started their healthcare partnership ecosystem, that's about 28,000 partners that they have on the Microsoft platform, believe it or not, just in healthcare,