(upbeat music) - Coming up next on "You Oughta Know."

Car enthusiasts start your engines.

We are heading back to the days when fast cars ruled the roads.

Plus local entrepreneurs turn to an innovative way to display and sell their products.

And destination Philadelphia.

See why luthiers are finding comradery here.

(upbeat music continues) Welcome to the show.

I'm Shirley Min.

Back to school means back to business for the kids and adults.

Navigating the social media landscape and its impact can be tricky for parents.

We'll get some tips on how to stay on top of it later.

But first, if your child plays a string instrument you'll need a luthier.

A luthier is a craftsperson who makes or repairs stringed instruments.

And as it turns out, there's a growing community of young luthiers in Philly.

- I'm John Thorell and I'm a luthier.

- Hi, I am Sarah Pick.

I'm a violin maker in Restore.

- I'm Christo Wood.

I'm a violin maker here in Philadelphia.

(instrumental violin music) - A luthier is someone who makes or repairs or maintains string instruments.

It's guitars, it's mandolins, it's ukuleles, it's banjos.

Their violent maker label is a real subtext of it.

(violin continues playing) - I mainly specialize in baroque instruments, so I deal with not only violin, viole, and cello, but I also deal with the instruments that were pre 1750.

- [Shirley] The numbers are fuzzy, but Sarah, John, and Christo are part of a dozen or so luthier's in Philadelphia and the community is growing as more skilled luthiers are drawn to Philadelphia for a variety of reasons.

- Philly's a big city and it's got a great musical heritage.

The arts scene here is valued and there's a great, I don't know, there's just, there's a lot of energy around music.

(violin playing) - So many people have started moving here and they all do something slightly different.

And so for me, it's really great having those differences around and we all get together and talk about things.

I think it's growing and I think it's really great.

(violin playing) - [Shirley] Christo recently moved from New York City.

- This is my workshop.

Yeah, it's a 13 by 13 room and it has almost everything I need.

- [Shirley] It might look cramped, but Christo has way more space here than in New York.

- These instruments are machines and their role is to amplify the sound of a vibrating string in such a way that they can fill a hall or they can project over an entire orchestra and for everything, for it to perform that feat, everything has to be working really well together.

There really is passion and love for these objects.

(cello playing) - [Shirley] Violin and guitar maker, John Thorell grew up playing the cello, but he found he didn't enjoy playing the instrument as much as he did making them.

- Violin making appeals to a different kind of personality, someone who wants to work with their hands or make or repair things as opposed to perform for people, which is definitely more my personality.

- [Shirley] John is also a Philly transplant.

- We all just enjoy Philly as a down, it's definitely more affordable.

When you play a stringed instrument that's a millimeter thick wood in some spots, it's a maintenance heavy thing, so you have to have a relationship with a luthier.

- [Shirley] Sarah has been making and restoring violins for 20 years now.

In that time, more women have joined the field.

So much so, that Sarah is part of a fast growing online community called Women in Lutherie.

She says the support network has almost 700 members worldwide and they connect over Zoom.

- It's allowing women to come together and swap stories very safely and not to feel like they're being judged.

And we also want to help support them when they start out on the bench, in the beginning of their career and stuff like that.

So it's been a really good platform for a lot of young women coming into the field.

(string instrumental playing) I didn't actually think I needed it until I utilized it and now I don't want to live without.

It's fantastic.

- For Sarah, John, and Christo, most of their work comes from word of mouth.

Their instruments, out in the world are all the advertising they need and they're putting Philly on the map.

The word is out.

The custom made right and left-handed guitars from Loudo Guitars are helping to reinvent one of the most popular instruments in rock and roll.

(instruments playing) - It was my junior year of high school.

One of my friend's fathers took me to the Martin Guitar Factory.

I realized that people actually built guitars.

Ever since then, it became a dream and now here we are today and I already had an ear from music being a musician.

I was 18 at the time when I decided to go to Luther School.

I had been tuning and repairing pianos for nine months and I found out I was really good at fixing things.

In the past 20 years, I was just working a job as a repair guy for another repair shop.

I started my own shop to spend a lot of hard work and just grinding.

My theories of guitar making are based off of a lot of the tradition of guitar building over the past hundred years, but it's an art that heavily involves science.

I pull out a piece of paper and I sketch out my design and from there I scan it into my computer and I recreate the design in 3D programming software.

And then once I'm happy with the design, I then convert it into a code that I can then run onto the CNC machine and make the process as efficient as possible so that I can get out a guitar to a musician on their budget.

When I start off building guitars we have a rough saw lumber and we process it and then we load the body blanks onto our CNC machine and we have the CNC machine hollow out most of the guitar and cut a lot of the features on it.

We use a channel bound fretboard on our higher end models, which means that we actually inlay the fretboards down into the necks.

And it's great to look at.

The main thing about our necks is the type of joint that we use.

We do use a glued in set neck.

It's a slip fit.

Without glue it will support the full weight of the instrument.

So you know that all of the tone from the instrument is going to transmit and resonate throughout the whole body.

The tops of the instruments, I do bend the wood, which is one of those crazy lutherie secrets.

Elliot comes in and he makes sure that I focus on my strong points instead of having to focus on everything.

He keeps me looking towards the future.

- I take on most of the management role.

Pete does all the design work and then from there, it's kind of my job to make sure that the processes work to do a lot of the prototyping, to make sure that the machines can handle what we're trying to make work.

(sparks blaring) - [Peter] We have CNC mound pickups that we create and that comes standard on most models.

Then we have the hand wound ones made by my mother.

- He called on me when the time came.

Somehow I was able to pull it off without breaking the wire and he says, you're it.

It's incredible.

He's been working at this since he was 18 years old.

- The market that I'm trying to go after in guitars is all musicians and most companies do not offer left-handed models, which I definitely plan on focusing on.

Instruments are not gender specific and I do feel that there are some instruments that should be designed for a woman rather than just painting a guitar pink and saying it's a female's guitar.

The Imperium, that guitar is incredibly special because for years I had been wondering what guitar I was going to build for the more virtuoso style player.

I started thinking about Zach Lopresti the way that he plays and he was playing a guitar that I newly re-fretted and then it just hit me.

That night I drew it up and I started working on it.

I decided to wait, relieve the body.

I changed the way that the fretboard is laid out.

It's more comfortable to play, it's easier to bend on.

I am beyond happy with that guitar.

(guitar playing) The real response comes from the musicians playing it and coming over and telling me how much they love it afterwards.

I feel like I'm up on stage a lot of times and it's wonderful.

In my heart, I'm a person that will not quit.

If I want to do something, I'm doing it.

The plans for Loudo in the future are that we one day become the largest manufacturer of American-made guitars.

That's my goal.

(guitar playing) - Philly is well known for its music scene and Play on Philly is laying the groundwork for the next generation of musicians.

- D, rest, rest.

(fingers snapping) Go.

(violins playing) Freeze.

- [Teacher 2] Ready?

210.

- 210.

- [Teacher 1] Hold your shoulder.

- [Teacher 2] 212.

- [Students] 213.

- This has been the biggest joy of my life.

(trumpets playing) As much as I have enjoyed playing trumpet playing all over the world, studying at a place like Curtis, nothing is better than watching these kids have an even better opportunity than I ever had.

(trumpets continue playing) My name is Stanford Thompson.

I'm the founder and executive director of Play on Philly.

(trumpets continue playing) The mission of Play on Philly is that music education is a very powerful tool to create transformative change within young people.

- What we do at Play on Philly, we've been able to ask ourselves some questions about what music does to help students build life skills, social emotional skills, and then this big pot of skills that we call executive functioning.

- [Students] 243, 244, 245, 246.

- The air traffic controller of our brain.

And so how does playing music every day day after day, week after week, year after year, affect our ability as a human being to persist on a task or to hold two things in our brains at once?

All these skills that we need to thrive and be successful in whatever it is that we do, you need this set of skills in order to do your day-to-day work and be successful.

- [Students] 255, 256, 257.

- We have five different music centers.

By the end of the year, we'll have served 400 students.

We partner with a school to bring afterschool program to the schools and the students that the school specifically serves.

Three of them K to 8 schools, one of them is a high school program that's actually open and porous and we can welcome in students from all over the city.

And just two years ago we started a pre-K program and these students are learning their instrument eight hours a week during the school year.

- [Teacher 2] Last hundred.

- [Students] 301, 302, 303, 304.

- Those students in the pre-K to first grade range have never picked up an instrument before.

And so what we do is we foster rhythm steady beat, oral skills.

And so the whole idea is that once a student has gone through that part of our program, they have that really good internal pulse and that sense of rhythm and sense of pitch.

- 380, 381, 382.

- [Students] 380, 381, 382.

- Students start string instruments when they're in about first or second grade.

If you enter our program in third, fourth, fifth grade, you're playing a wind brass percussion instrument.

Something that's sort of unique about Play on Philly is that almost immediately they start playing in an ensemble.

We know that in order to get into music school conservatory you have to start studying privately and you have to be practicing independently.

And for those students we have something called the Marian Anderson Young Artist Program which is our private lessons program.

(trumpets playing) - The unique part of Play on Philly is having a program that removes all barriers to access.

Our kids can leave their last class of the day, go down to the auditorium, and within 5 or 10 minutes you know, have an instrument in their hand and begin playing.

- [Teacher 2] 399.

400.

(teacher and students cheer) Wow.

- Social media is here to stay and here with me to talk about it is psychologist, Dr. Roger Harrison from Nemours Children's Health.

Dr. Harrison has counseled tweens and teens and spoken to their parents about this very issue.

Dr. Harrison, thank you so much for being here.

- It is my pleasure to be here for this conversation, - And selfishly, I'm so excited because my son who's turning 11 very soon is being promised a phone at 12.

So I need help.

So navigating the social media landscape.

- [Dr. Harrison] Yeah.

- But first you know, we keep hearing about the negative impact that social media has on mental health among particularly kids in that 10 to 17 age range.

This aside from social media, is already a problem.

Correct?

- Yes.

I think we are in the midst of a youth mental health crisis.

Recently the Surgeon General put out a mental health advisory showing that even prior to the pandemic we were seeing significant increases in anxiety and depression and even in suicidal attempts that require medical attention for young people.

Social media is not the cause of the mental health crisis, but it certainly has a role to play.

- Okay.

So with that in mind, you know, we keep hearing about this analogy or I have heard this analogy that compares social media to driving a car.

You know, when you're getting your license you start off having a permit, you're taught about all of the risks of driving a car.

And so in the same vein, social media is like that.

Except the kids are not really being trained or prepared in any sort of way.

And so we have some tips that I wanna go over that you provided and one was you know, let's provide some guidance on internet safety.

I mean, that being what?

We're not sending out information about where we live or too much personal information about ourselves.

- Right.

Absolutely.

And just like a car, having a car has many benefits if you're a young person.

It gives you access to your friends, you get to the mall.

Social media use has many benefits for young people.

But I do want to encourage parents to practice basic internet safety tips, which is don't share personal information, not my location.

Turn that off.

I might be talking to someone who says, "I too am a fellow teen" and we don't know who we're talking to oftentimes and so don't share where I live.

Don't share school with people who I don't know online and certainly do not make plans to connect with people who are strangers, who we don't know.

And I want parents to be having these conversations about safety tips particularly with the younger, the tween set.

- Right, right.

What do you think about parents checking phones?

Because you know, you might wanna look, not only if your child is sending out anything inappropriate but also what if they're being cyber bullied?

I mean, what do you think about kind of checking the phone?

- This is a tough one.

I think if a parent has not had that conversation with a child and did not at the outset, set an expectation, that this is a privilege and part of the privilege of you having a device is that I'm gonna check it.

It's gonna be really hard to all of a sudden say to my 14, 15, 16 year old, "I wanna check your phone and look at your DMs and your messages."

- [Shirley] Yeah.

- So I want parents who wants to do that and I'm not generally encouraging that, but parents who wanna do that, I'm gonna encourage them for your tweens, set that expectation first.

For your older teens it might be a breach of trust and it might actually create a lot of strain and stress in that parent-child relationship.

And so we navigate it differently and explain why I want to see this information now.

- And we wanna make sure that the phones are not affecting their sleep, particularly checking social media apps.

'Cause I think teens are checking you know, till two in the morning sometimes.

- Absolutely.

There is so much information, data that we have on how crucial sleep is for developing brains at this stage of life and some of those relationships between social media use and mental health impact, we're not sure if it's because I'm up at night and not getting the sleep that I need.

And so if a child is up until two, three o'clock, four o'clock, it's gonna have impacts on my attention, on anxiety, on my ability to focus and think and reason and get through my schoolwork and sleepiness through the day.

And so definitely wanna make sure that social media use is not interfering with me getting the sleep that I need for my developing brain.

- You think parents should take away the phones at night?

- Ha!

These are great questions.

(Shirley laughing) For a, if we're talking about a ten, eleven, ten, nine year old, they probably should not have devices in their rooms at night because they might not have the brain development, that maturity to resist the impulse and that FOMO reflex, I don't wanna miss out is gonna be so strong.

And so for that early teen I discourage parents from having them keep devices in their room.

They should charge it in a common location outside of their bedroom.

- Okay.

And two more points that I'm just gonna go through really quickly, 'cause we're about outta time.

Make sure the kids have both virtual and in real life connections and interactions.

- Absolutely.

- And then also parents need to model behavior that they wanna see in their kids.

- Yeah, so parents wanna teach important lessons like don't spend all your time in your social media and then kids look around and what am I doing?

- [Shirley] Yeah.

- I'm on my phone watching TV with my tablet beside me.

And so as a parent if I'm not modeling that kind of behavior then I'm probably not gonna have my child set their own restrictions on their device and media use.

- I'm not guilty of that at all, Dr. Harrison.

- [Dr. Harrison] Me either.

(Shirley laughing) - Well thank you so much for being here.

Very helpful information.

- It's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

- Another way social media influences us is with current trends like innovative ways for entrepreneurs to sell their products.

One popular trend has made its way to West Philly with Container Village.

(upbeat instrumental music) - West Philadelphia Container Village represents the lowest rung of business success.

So if you move from your basement or your car, your trunk, this is the next logical place to go, Container Village.

To be able to provide a rung in the ladder to success for entrepreneurs who did not have a location.

(upbeat instrumental music) The buses used to turn around here and then leave out to their routes.

So this was abandoned by city public property and it was overgrown with grass and weed.

It was turned over at least to us and we began to make improvements.

We began to see a vision of what it could be.

We got this black topped and we bought containers overseas, shipping containers that were then converted to the stores that you see.

The village encompasses a great many things, all your five senses.

Something to touch, something to see, something to hear, and something to taste.

In addition, we have what are called pop-up shops.

So you might not have enough merchandise to fill a whole container, but you might have a trunk load of jeans or sneakers that you've acquired and you want to do on a Saturday, a pop-up shop to sell it.

(upbeat instrumental music) We have partnerships with the African American Chamber of Commerce.

We have partnerships with Kwaku at LA 21, and they provide technical assistance and entrepreneurial training to the merchants you see here - Our involvement at Container Village comes from support from the city and the Commerce department to actually train and provide technical assistance for the businesses.

So every person here has been through our 12 week entrepreneurship training and receive expertise in coaching and also technical assistance.

And we talk about marketing, finance, digital, literacy, and really ways by which you can actually grow your business.

And the hope is that this becomes like the start and eventually they grow from here into storefront.

- At the end of that course that they took, they came to us and they did a Shark Tank presentation and they talked about their origins, they talked about their struggles, they talked about their goals and ambitions.

All of them were courageous.

Their willing to gamble on themselves and use their time, talent, and treasury to invest in themselves and their business.

(upbeat music) We're growing in the diversity of the type of product we hope to have, as well as bikes sold, artisans that do glass blowing.

A ye old village where there's all kinds of activities going on, that's what we hope to do seasonally.

What we hope at the West Philadelphia Container Village that people realize good things come from West Philly, but there should be one in North Philly, there should be one in South Philly, Germantown, Northeast.

So that this kind of success can be spread so that beginning small businesses have a platform to go global and be successful.

(upbeat instrumental music continues) - The race of gentlemen is more than a gathering of men with souped up muscle cars.

The ladies show they too have a need for speed.

(upbeat music) - Drag is short for the racing gentlemen, right?

So I was reading a really cool book about the old days and the incarnations of cars and motorcycles and the relationships between people that were inventing these pieces and how they needed to then get them to market if they proved to actually work.

They were using the beach as proving grounds.

You know, the possibility of an engine catching on fire.

You had the ability to pull it into the ocean.

I happened to be at the beach a couple weeks later where I came up with the idea of like, wow, what if I tried to do this again?

(car engines roaring) - This is our 800 mile adventure.

- [Camera Person] Where'd you come from?

- Michigan.

- [Mel] They're all early American produced vehicles.

The bodies are 1934 and earlier, but the parts can go up to 1953.

It's all manual transmissions.

Motorcycles are all hand shift or jockey shift.

- [Camera Person] What's that?

- Look at the radiator.

- [Camera Person] Yes sir.

- Detroit, man!

- So it's like our own moving art exhibit for living history.

(upbeat music) We have wives and sisters and daughters racing cars and so it's one big happy family.

- The thrill is so amazing and the people you meet from every different state, they're all beautiful, they're all good racers.

They have unique pieces.

That's Hot Tamale.

She's a 1939 flathead and she was a 74 inch cubic kick, but now we turned her into an 80 cubic.

So now I race with the big boys.

She does pretty well, but I've yet to get the checker flag.

(upbeat music) - This is a 1950 service car, Harley Davidson.

And it's actually our pit vehicle because my husband races so I wanted to be back in it.

So I got this service car and we fixed it all up and here we are.

These old machines have just been you know, running for 50 years to longer and they're just amazing and it's cool.

Everybody loves each other.

(Vicki laughing) It's crazy.

Like I've never met such a wonderful group of people really.

- For motorcycles anyway, they have to be 1947 or earlier and have to be produced in America and they have to be period correct.

You're allowed some modifications on it, but they have to be period correct modifications.

(upbeat music continues) - The vintage Swap Meet is just a place where you know, our enthusiast buddies help others to find the parts that you need to build a race car or a race motorcycle.

(upbeat music) The Trog is such an experience.

You know, there's this electricity that you can't explain.

(upbeat music) - We hope you enjoyed the show and we will see you here next week.

Have a good night everyone.

Bye.

(upbeat music)