- We're shining a spotlight on three events recorded live this spring at our annual KQED Fest block party.

This broadcast features highlights from Snap Judgment Unplugged with Glynn Washington, Ideas That Shape Us with Manoush Zomorodi, and on voice identity and hip hop with musician Ruby Ibarra.

- And I'm laying in the middle of the snow next to my brother.

Both of us got our pajamas on.

And my mama says, "Y'all got to go to school."

School?

Hello, hello.

Even better.

Okay.

So when I was a kid, my parents moved us to the middle of nowhere and to this dilapidated, falling down, sideways, would blow over in a strong storm, single wide mobile home.

Middle of nowhere, Michigan.

And that's cool.

They were doing the best they could, doing the best they could, but, but I still had to go to school.

It was going to be tough anyway.

Only black family from miles away.

It was going to be tough.

We made it easy for them.

School bus pulls up, right?

School bus pulls up, get on the bus.

First day, they got songs.

Negro who Negro, what's the matter with your house though, Negro?

I hope it don't snow.

Or the other line was, where does the rain go?

And every single day, every single day.

And I come home in a ball and my mom's just like, "What's the matter?

What's the matter?"

And I can't tell my mom.

I know she's doing the best she can.

I can't tell her.

Nothing matter.

Nothing's matter.

She can tell anyway.

She feels it.

But that's the way it is.

And then that summer, I don't know how they do it.

They stretch the credit, save the pennies.

Moms comes to us one day and said, "Hey, it's moving day.

Moving day?

Where are we going?"

They don't tell us nothing.

We're kids.

Just get in the car.

Get in the car and pull up to our 88 acres of prime Michigan swampland.

But there on the hill gleaming in the noon day sun, is a brand new double wide trailer.

What?

What?

Double wide, a double wide trailer still wrapped in the plastic.

You got to be kidding me.

This is moving up.

Y'all Bay Area don't know nothing.

This is moving on up.

This is moving on up to the big time, right?

And I know, I know we can't ask for nothing.

No shoes, no presents for years.

I don't care.

We are moving up.

Right?

So then, then school starts up again, school bus pulls up.

This time, what?

Get on the school bus.

Everybody get.

They want to say, but huh?

Huh?

What you got to say?

That's right.

Double wide tricks.

They understand.

Joe behind out the way.

Call me Glynn, double wide Washington.

Sitting down, chilling, double wide.

So that's how it goes.

Every day we got the shag carpeting, we got the wood paneling, we got the toilets that work.

We got heat that comes on, fantastic.

In Michigan too, because of when we say winter is coming, this is not a fantasy novel.

You put the hay bales around the place, keep it for insulation, right?

Everything's cool.

So winter comes.

I don't care.

I'm in my double wide.

I'm drinking hot chocolate, watching the snowfall outside.

I don't care.

Watch a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Right?

One day I get up in the morning to go to school, go to the bathroom to wash my face and the water doesn't come on.

"Huh?

What's going on?"

Little brother comes in.

He's like, "Don't worry.

Don't worry.

Dad's gone to work already, but mom, she's on the case."

"What you mean on the case?

"Well, she got the torch.

"The what?

The pipe froze.

She's underneath the house.

Unthawing the pipes."

Okay.

All right.

And I don't want to say anything.

I don't want to say nothing about it, but I feel like I got to say something.

That's the older brother.

Hey hey, hey.

You smell smoke?

Welcome to Snap Judgment.

Unplugged for the first time ever.

This is fantastic.

I want to thank KQED for having me.

I want to thank all the Snappers and all the Spooksters being here right now.

Y'all are the best people in the world.

I appreciate you being here.

This is the first time we're doing this with no net, no music, no nothing.

I just get to tell you stories and I got to tell you again, I want to thank KQED.

Ryan Davis is running around here.

I think you might have heard from Michael Isip earlier from the whole Snap family.

We thank you for supporting this show and back in the story.

- Welcome everyone.

Thank you so much for being here.

You're in for a total treat.

I had the honor of interviewing this woman next to me, Manoush Zomorodi on Forum on, was it Wednesday of last week?

And it was such a good conversation.

I was telling her I get to also interview her on Monday at the Commonwealth Club.

And if I'm not convinced to do her protocol after reading her book and interviewing her three times, well then shame on me.

Again, like I said, this is Manoush Zomorodi.

She's the award-winning host of the TED Radio Hour.

You have probably heard her and also the author of her new book, Body Electric.

We'll hear all about the protocol I was just talking about.

I am Leslie McClurg.

I am a health reporter here at KQED and occasionally get to host Forum.

So thank you all for being here and - Welcome.

Leslie, you're an amazing host of Forum, by the way.

We had so much fun the other day.

I don't know if you got to listen, but I felt like when we met in person, I was like, "I am so sorry that you are stuck with me for three events.

I feel like we're married for a little while."

I'm in.

And then I'll go on back to the East Coast, right?

Where is the honeymoon?

- No, we're on the honeymoon.

We just get the good ride and then I'll send her back to do the hard work.

Yeah, exactly.

So we're going to talk about sitting and screens.

That's kind of the heart of your book.

How and why did you decide to write about specifically sitting?

I imagine you were really feeling the pain of it.

- I mean, weren't we all feeling the pain?

Okay, so I want you to.

I know we try not to talk about it, but cast your mind back to the pandemic, right?

And there's that moment where you're like, "Wow, everything is online.

I can look at my phone to talk to my family.

I can do work on this other screen.

I'll relax with this bigger screen, Netflix at night, and then maybe I'll do all three at once."

And that felt kind of, for those of us who were lucky to be healthy and in a safe place, that felt kind of amazing to me.

I was like, "Look at us.

We just switched on over and things keep going."

And then there was that feeling where you'd closed maybe one of your screens and all you had the energy to do was go over to the other screen.

And my shoulders felt like they were up by my ears.

I couldn't focus anymore.

My eyes hurt.

I felt so tired and I just could not understand why I felt so exhausted when literally I had not moved for six, seven, eight hours straight.

And unfortunately, when the world opened back up again, that feeling did not go away.

And it made me more determined though to understand biologically what goes on in our bodies when we sit and interact with screens for hours and hours.

Because to me, it felt incredibly physical.

We'd heard so much about the mental health effects of being online too much or social media, but this felt different to me.

- And so is the problem those four screens that are in front of you or is the problem that we're in this position all day?

- Well, as with science, it's nuanced, right?

That's the thing.

And so I wanted to find out, and I was actually listening to Morning Edition, as you do, and I heard this report by Alison Aubrey about research that had come out by a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, a guy named Keith Diaz, who had found that the sort of easiest way to mitigate the effects of sitting for a long time was to take a five-minute movement break every half hour.

And we're not talking like burpees or sprinting or anything crazy.

Walking two miles per hour for five minutes had outsized effects.

It slashed people's blood sugar, it slashed their blood pressure.

He had sort of found the magic formula.

So I called him up and I was like, "Why?

What does this do?"

And he explained to me that when we sit, we essentially put our bodies into a position, if you think of like a garden hose, right?

We're kinked at our torso and we're kinked at our knees.

And if you kink a garden hose, what happens?

The blood backs up and it causes pressure.

So that's the same sort of thing that's happening to our bodies for a long time.

The other thing is that when we sit, we don't stimulate our muscles and muscles need to be stimulated in order to suck in the blood sugar and the oxygen and push both up to the brain.

Of course, the brain is the thing that we're using when we're sitting and looking at screens all the time.

We're switching, switching, switching, using glucose, glucose, glucose, burning through glucose, burning through oxygen, leaving behind some CO2, build up the CO2.

That's when you get that foggy, can't concentrate feeling, can't pay attention to anything feeling.

So the system is actually, when it works, which is when it's being used as we are biologically supposed to be moving around, then we don't even think about it, but take it away and we start to feel very exhausted, tired, like we can't concentrate.

And I'd love to add one more thing, which there's a relatively new area of research into something called interoception.

So interoception is the body's way of telling you what you need.

That could be you need a snack, you need to take off your sweater, it's getting hot in here.

Or it could be, you need to get off your screen.

You're exhausted, you're tired, you're anxious.

And there's new research in defining that our interoception, we don't pay attention to it, right?

We're so busy scrolling.

We're so enthralled with what's going on on our screen that we ignore the signals that we need in order to give our bodies what we need.

- You have a passage you've chosen.

There's so much good research in this book and there's so many examples.

If you're not convinced by the end, you will be convinced by the end of reading this book, but will you go ahead and tell us about the bus drivers?

- Oh yeah.

I love this story.

So I'm going to give it to you, but this is so good.

It's not a Glynn Washington kind of story if you were here a minute ago, but it's equally nerdy and good.

Okay, so this is like the 1950s.

I'm taking you back to post-war London, all right?

At first glance.

Oh, picture.

Yeah, let's set the scene.

Picture red double decker buses going around everywhere.

The city's coming back into action.

Everybody's using public transport and.

Okay, you have that in your mind.

Here we go.

At first glance, bus drivers and conductors seem to live similar lives.

They were all men, mostly from the same working class neighborhoods with similar diets and access to healthcare, but their jobs could not have been more different.

Drivers spent 90% of their shifts sitting behind the wheel.

Conductors, meanwhile, were in constant motion, climbing the narrow stairs between desks, punching tickets, helping passengers on and off.

When the researchers.

These are researchers of the UK's Medical Research Council.

When the researchers analyzed health and sick leave records for 31,000 men aged 35 to 64, the difference was startling.

Drivers were far likelier to suffer from heart attacks than conductors.

The protective factor, maybe it was as simple as those stairs, the countless times conductors hauled themselves up and down each day.

Encouraged by the results, the scientists broadened their scope to thousands of other civil servants, including postal workers.

At the post office, some employees delivered mail on foot or by bicycle while others spent their days at desks.

Again, the pattern held.

When the findings were published in 1953, they were groundbreaking.

Dr.

Jeremy Morris, the epidemiologist leading the work, was eventually credited with establishing the first scientific link between physical activity and heart health.

It sounds obvious now, but at the time his conclusion was a revelation.

Movement wasn't just a nice to have, it could be a matter of life and death.

I love that passage because we're all like, duh, right now?

But at that time, nobody knew, nobody thought of anything.

And so I'm thinking, where are we right now?

What passage will they be reading from a book in 50, 60, 70 years where they're like, "Can you believe people had no idea that AI..." Or whatever it might be?

I just think that's so interesting.

I think we're in a moment where we are not talking about the things that we're leaving behind because we are so tied to our devices.

- May we be moving towards more movement.

You can catch up with Manoush.

I think you're going to go down to the lobby right now.

Books are for sale and she will sign a copy and I highly recommend.

Thank you all so much for joining us.

- Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you, - Leslie.

- My name is Nastia Voynovskaya and I am an editor and reporter from the KQED Arts and Culture team.

And it's thanks to the support of all of you that we get to tell the stories of the brilliant artists shaping the Bay Area.

And the person we're going to hear from today is a voice we need right now.

She raps in three languages about her immigrant experience and the power of Filipino women.

She's the winner of the 2025 Tiny Desk Contest.

And she's also the co-founder of independent Bay Area record label Bolo Music Group.

Put your hands together for Ruby Ibarra.

- Hi, Ruby.

Hi everybody.

Happy Saturday.

- Ruby, I wanted to start our conversation with your latest single Bakunawa, and this is a track where your lyrics are really inspired by Filipino folklore and the story of this moon-eating dragon.

Can you tell us a bit about that story and what you were trying to say with that metaphor?

- Thank you for opening that up with my most recent song, which still means a whole lot to me.

It's taken me to places all over the world over the past year because of that song.

And where it originated from was my growing interest in mythology in general.

I think it was the middle of 2021.

I was spending a lot of time at home and trying to kind of dive more beyond Philippine history, but also reading more into Philippine literature.

And I came across, you know, a lot of these mythological stories and the Bakunawa was one of them.

And to your point, it being a moon eating dragon, this mythological creature.

And I think what really drew me to the Bakunawa in particular was that it just seemed like this powerful beast and it was a powerful being but was banished because of its power, because of what it could do because of its capacity and the possibilities.

And I think I understood that as kind of a metaphor for oftentimes how marginalized people are made to feel.

And I equated that too with a lot of my experiences growing up.

To me, one of the superpowers I feel like I've always had growing up was the fact that I was bilingual, that I could speak Tagalog, I could speak what I. A few Filipino languages.

And I. But, but yet, you know, growing up in public school or, or even out in public spaces, there would be moments where I would be told to, you know, not, not say it out loud or to speak English instead.

And I think it's moments like that that I was like, wait a minute.

A lot of my experiences growing up, my personal experiences felt a lot like it was tied to the story of, of this Bakunawa.

And so I wanted to flip the, this story of this creature who's vanished and to kind of instead look at it in a way where, you know, this instead is, is a powerful creature that is told to not showcase itself, it's told to kind of shrink itself and to combat that narrative and to show people that, you know, it's okay for us to tap into that Bakunawa or that, that power that we feel within ourselves that we're often told to hide.

And I think I was also in a very reflective state at the time.

I, I was pregnant with my, my daughter who's now.

Actually today, she's, she turned 18 months.

So it's been 18 months since I wrote that song and, you know, back.

Or more than 18 months, but when I was writing that song, I was in a, a real mode of reflection of, you know, what, what kind of music do I want to make from this point out?

What, what kind of stories do I want to make sure that is, it's embedded in the lyrics?

Because I knew that one day my daughter would be listening, you know, to the music that I release.

And so, you know, this story was, for me, a very perfect starting point because it, it was also not only a metaphor for me, but I, I felt like it was a message that I want to share with my daughter now and as she gets older of, you know, to find that inner power that she has within herself and not be afraid to express it, not be afraid to showcase it and, and to embrace it.

- And I think you really embody that inner power when you performed Bakunawa at the Tiny Desk.

And we have a clip of that, so can we roll the clip?.

Yeah, I love that performance.

Everyone definitely go watch the whole thing on YouTube if you haven't seen it yet.

But yeah, as we saw in that video when you got this big moment to perform at Tiny Desk, you brought your whole community with you.

And can you tell us more about the amazing Panai musicians in your band?

- Yeah, I was.

During the.

While that clip was playing, I had turned to Nastya.

I was like, "Look at my drummer.

She has a stink face on."

And they're, they're such incredible musicians.

Everyone that you saw on that screen are all folks that I've built community with over the last decade that I've, I've been doing music more professionally.

And the featured vocalists that are on that song, namely June Millington and Wida, are two incredible artists.

Wida being a singer-songwriter from here in San Francisco, born and raised.

And June Millington, for the folks who don't know, she is a legendary rock star.

She's a guitarist and vocalist from this group from the 1970s, all women band called Fanny.

And I had the, the privilege to connect with her over the last, the course of last six years.

And she is just such an inspiration to me because one, you know, the fact that she's a woman who is still rocking it out to this day.

I think.

I believe she just turned 79 years old this year and she is definitely a warrior.

And so when I was writing the lyrics to Bakunawa, I. Outside of my rap verse, I, I also had written the, the, the singing verses and the chorus as well, like pretty much within an evening.

It was one of the, the fastest songs I've ever written in my entire career.

And when I was writing June's part, for example, she was already the vocalist that came to mind for me.

And those lyrics that you hear her sing on that song, it's specifically tailored and written for her, knowing her experience as, as being a woman in rock music, as, as being a Filipina who grew up as a first generation here in the States during the 1960s.

And also just being this, again, a fierce warrior, you know, part of the.

One of the many ways that I, you know, I respect and I admire her so much is she's also a cancer survivor.

And knowing that is, it's deeply you know, touching for me too because my mom as well is a, is a cancer survivor.

And so when I see women like June or my mother, I'm like, "These are such strong, powerful women."

And so again, I, when I was you know, composing Bakunawa, not just the lyrics, but also the vocalists the melodies and the people who were involved, I wanted it all to be very intentional and I felt like June was, to me, the ultimate representation of what the Bakunawa is and what it means.

- Thanks for these amazing insights, Ruby.

I know we're almost out of time, but before we go, can you tell us a bit about what you're working on next and anything that you want your audience to look out for this summer?

- I'm working on a lot of stuff that I can't talk about yet, but they're all very exciting projects.

I, I will say, I will just say fall 2026 there's a lot of stuff that's going to be happening and.

But more more in the near future, come check us out 5:00 PM outside on the main stage.

I'll be performing with my band, but thank you all for coming out today to our, to our talk.

- And thank you, Ruby.

Please, another round of applause for Ruby Ibarra.

Hey, thank you.

We'll see everyone outside at five for Ruby's set.