University of California, Santa Cruz

They know better.

Are you pitching me on becoming a data brokering executives? Because I only minored in data brokering at UC Santa Cruz.

I majored in hand whittling magic wands.

I wish I had a magic wand right now.

remember that.

UC Santa Cruz was like pretty high on the list.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not given to you.

I took that chance and moved to Santa Cruz, came in there.

As you probably know from your familiarity with Santa Cruz, not the most hospitable places to UC Santa Cruz banana slug students who are coming there for school.

at the time at the time Santa Cruz was probably one of talking about localism was one of the most localized spots even amongst themselves in the world yeah you did if you were on the east side you know you didn't go to the west side you'd surfed in mid-time you're kind of caught in the middle you're like you know and so you know I went there and was like yeah okay this seems gnarly I had an in though I in my my surf shop in uh in New Jersey and gotta give them a shout out, body language, this guy, Keddie Kuyanga, he was a real character.

I'm really glad you love the crackers.

Originally, what happened was I was in college going to UC Santa Cruz, studying design of all things, and was just looking for a way to kind of make some extra money on the side as college students do.

And so what happened was I ended up finding...

this local juice company in Santa Cruz called Central Coast Juicery.

It's pretty easy to justify, hey, if this thing could make that model 2x faster or some class of models 2x faster, just go do that together.

In my lab, we do a lot of UCSC.

We do a lot of crazier out there things that may or may not come to fruition.

So we did some research on the fundamentals of looped models.

Well, it's an interesting concept in that the people that are gathered can be gathered for mischief or productivity.

But when people are gathered for productivity, you get a very – or you got – uh, a, a very organic, um, raw, uh, opportunity to explore concepts that you wouldn't necessarily ordinarily hear from anything in a quote-unquote regular university, certainly not UC Santa Cruz.

The people that were gathered were usually gathered of similar mind, if not like mind.

And the opportunity to Talk about what was possible and what was possible with your community was kind of centered in those conversations.

But my guest...

Professor Dr. Josh Brzezinski, researcher at Stanford University in Religious Studies at McGill University in Transcultural Psychiatry and a teaching faculty at UC Santa Cruz.

So Dr. Josh, welcome to The Line of Fire.

Thanks for joining us today.

The observatory brought back a scientist who had worked at Keck as an astronomer before pivoting to oceanography.

Dr. Xavier Prochaska, or Dr. X, is a distinguished professor of astrophysics and oceanography at UC Santa Cruz.

He delivered a public lecture at Coyulu Theater on his work at the intersection of astronomy and oceanography.

So when people ask these days what I am, used to be astronomer, now it's oceanographer, or maybe it's just scientist.

What can we do at Keck? This is a bit of a complicated side by a complicated human.

No, he's a very, he's a great human.

Phil Hines, who's one of my colleagues at UC Santa Cruz, who's a big part of the effort to put an adaptive secondary mirror on the Keck telescope.

And it shocked me, he's an engineer, he's got a lot of engineering skills, he's a scientist as well.

Feats owns Kenny's Strawberry Farm, a relatively small operation focused mainly on pick-your-own production.

He contacted Joji Muramoto, a UC Cooperative Extension organic agriculture specialist based at UC Santa Cruz, after learning about Muramoto's ASD research.

The project also brings in Ana Maria Pastrana, the Cooperative Extension Plant Pathology Advisor serving Imperial, Riverside, and San Diego counties.

Together, they are examining a technique intended to suppress certain disease-causing organisms in soil, not promising a fix for the farm's declining yields.