Don’t Be an A**hole (with Marie Estrada)

in a minute. I remember back when the pandemic was getting started and I was taking my regular freedom walks, these walks that got me out of my house, winding through my neighborhood. Johnny's became my favorite, like neighborhood dive bar. I'm at mad locals there but a shot. I could feel that like cheers vibe in there where you could become a regular, everybody can know your name, and that just don't exist. And I was struck by a big chain in the landscape that friends they're back. When you

could to that. Businesses were closed the east along absolutely shuttered and abandoned storefronts. Here on the north Side, it felt like a ghost town. And I lived near enough to a major thoroughfare York Boulevard, which I am used to having this hustle, this bustle of this color in this life, and that was gone. My favorite bar, Johnny's, closed, and I understood why so many of them had to be.

It was a public health safety measure. But over a year later, a lot of those businesses they couldn't hold out any longer. In fact, I just learned that somewhere around fifteen thousand businesses in l A County alone have permanently shut since the beginning of the pandemic, well the fallout tonight, a new study finds at seven million small businesses across the country may not survive the economic crunch caused by the pandemic. People are afraid to come, Some

people don't care about cutting their hair anymore. Sales are down or wapping. The worst part is not knowing what to expect tomorrow. How much worse is it gonna get? And we all know the other side of that story. We were ordering so much stuff online. I'm talking toilet paper, sweatpants, weighted blankets, and ring lights. Oh my goodness, if you were able to successfully order a ring light off the internet in the first few months of the pandemic. You

were super blessed. And while we were doing all that ordering, we were patting the pockets of rich corporations and leaving behind small local businesses to fend for themselves. Last week we learned how a giant company like Amazon gathers up all this power and the effect that that has in our democracy. But Amazon is not the entire story. Yes, it's true businesses couldn't hold on and they're gone, But

others they're still kicking. They're fighting to stay alive. Because when COVID hit communities showed up, they citizens, they participated, they supported those local businesses. Here we go calls what's up? Man? So why is this blue? Then? Is this a blue pat? Oh? And how loving doing that? You should call this the smurf larte? Have you got silver like Ramen a k a Ramen of York. They're still hanging in there. And then Rosy Bunny Bean, which is such an attractive looking

pet food shop. I thought it was a people food shopped. And then we've got just the saving grace as Teca and they look like they've adapted so well. Forgot Mario's Liquor. Mario did a major upgrade and he's looking like he's doing great, so I hope that's true. But very new signed Pristine Mario, trying to keep up with the time.

How are you doing there? In fact, what inspired this episode was my wife reading an email, an email that featured Maya Komarov, who started this business called shop in n y C now during the height of COVID in New York City. Shopping NYC created this online network of local businesses offering same day delivery, competing directly with Amazon. They even had this super catchy campaign, get this Brooklyn

not Bezos. Oh I love that. And Shopping NYC is actually how I met my guests today because while people like Maya were showing up for her local community, those local businesses, well, they showed up right back, helping their neighbors survive these unprecedented times. Marie Estrada is the co founder and co owner of Moto Spirits Rice Whiskey Distillery in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, beyond making delicious libations in the spring of twent each want to

get the height of COVID. Marie was there for New York when New York needed her most. M m HM so him, Marie, nice to meet you. Hi. Oh, it's nice to meet you too. Well, thank you for taking some time to speak with us. Can you, just, for our purposes introduce yourself and your business. My name's Marie. Actually my full name is Marie eleanor Augustine Estrata. Thank my parents for that. Um. I was actually born in

the Philippines. So I'm an immigrant naturalized and uh came here to New York, went to Columbia University, studied English and anthropology. Then then now I'm making whiskey at Moto Spirits right across the street from a police precinct. Actually, and are they frequent visitors? They are in a nice way, you know. They come by once in a while and they're just like, oh, you know, I think we need your air compressor, help us with your tires, that are you know, And I'm like, yeah, yeah, come on in,

you know. And so yeah, okay, So it sounds like you should be on the payroll of NYP, But that's like a different conversation. You're the auto body shop and distillery. Um. And then what's what's your role in Moto I'm co founder and so my my business partner, he guy um Yar Denny. He and I run Moto Spirits together, and a actually called Moto Spirits because we ride motorcycles. Don't listen to that mom, and everything we make is inspired

by motorcycle trips through different countries. Well, okay, tell me something about yourself that that might surprise people that's not in your official bio. Well, I have my pilot's license. I've been flying since I was fourteen, and I flew sailplanes with my stepfather and then I got my regular pilot's license back in two thousand seven. So I think some people are surprised that I do that. Um, they don't often see someone who looks like me flying cessna's,

owning a distillery, flying planes, breaking all kinds of moles. Marie, I'm proud of that. Actually, you know you should be. You should be. Do you remember the moment you decided to open a distillery? So I have to bring in my my business partner, and he and I live in the same apartment building in Williamsburg. We would have these amazing rooftop party barbecues and all kinds of things, and whenever there came a project, he would come to me.

Because I have certain skill sets that I wouldn't say, Well, no, they are on the other end of the spectrum as a guy. And so you sound like Liam Neeson. You have a particular set of skills. What kind of skills are talking? Well, I actually, you know, I don't smoke like a chimney. I know all this stuff. So I have a palette. He likes to kind of bust doors down.

I like to still bust doors down, but you know, then clean them up and make them organized and actually execute things that are ideas that that's how we operate together. And so when he first went on the first motorcycle trip to Vietnam, he came back and he said, oh my god, Marie or he calls me, we we I have this thing. It's amazing. And so he had me taste these plastic bottles filled with clear things. My first reaction was, oh my god, this is terrible. It was

just does not taste good at all. And I have no reservations about saying my opinion about the way things taste. And he said okay. And I said, I think you're colored by your experience there in Vietnam, because he had described falling in love with the people just discovering these people making moonshine basically even though it was called rice wine, and he said, I want to find this, and his impatience was like, I can't find it. And so this was the two of us then realizing that, you know,

we we can find it, but not really um. And so that's kind of how it started. Some explosions a little bit and home experimenting. I'm sorry, explosions tell me from so inside. Uh, what happened was we were trying to experiment with how to actually make this drink ourselves so that it was palatable. And all of this is

I guess the history of what happens. You know with legitimate distillers, they tend to do things under the radar first, and then they do things legitimately and avoid those kinds of pressure cooker explosions things like that and the ruining of someone's girlfriends, you know, Jimmy Choose and sneakers and things like that. When that happens. This is a very adventurous start. What are you making in your distillery? What are you distilling? We're making two things, but the whiskey

we're making made from one rice. And it turns out that officially, the designation is a whiskey if you're using a hundred percent grain and then aging them in barrel, and then we produced also what's called jabuka, and jabuka means apple in Croatian. The wet year, did you found motor spirits? So whenever someone asks me the question, I have to answer legally. We started in two thousand sixteen. Yeah, but but you destroyed Jimmy choose and a pressure cooker

well before. Yes. Um. One of the things about what we were doing, and we went into this very practically, was that we don't know what we're doing. The thing I think with both a guy and me is that we're not We're not the most normal of distillers. My stereotypical view as a you know, bearded white man with sometimes glasses or not. But I am not that, and a guy is not. At What does it mean for for you to not be seen as normal? I wouldn't

say I'm proud of it. It's not like I walk around saying I'm you know what, I have said this before. I'm a little brown person who's from the Philippines and I make whiskey, you know, um, But I am without actually saying it, and I don't mind representing something that's um limited. I'm limited in this world. After the break, COVID hits New York City and Marie has to figure out how to keep her business, her community, and herself alive. Yea, can you tell me, um what was it like when

COVID for came to your community? You know, as a business owner, when COVID first hit, I think it was even March twelve, you know, I put it on my calendar or something like that. When it became officially a pandemic. It took a little while for it to register that

it was an actual pandemic. Today, Governor Cuomo announcing starting tomorrow at five pm, a ban on any gatherings of five people or more tonight in a studying policy reversal, New York City, joining California and urging the general public to where non medical face coverings to stop the virus. The Trump administration has declared New York a major disaster. The state accounts for nearly half of the nation's reported cases of COVID nineteen. We are literally scouring the globe

looking for medical supplies. We're becoming crushed under a tidal wave of unfathomable numbers. I even got covid um and I lost all sense of smell and taste for a month. And I was telling my business partner too at the time. I said, you know, I just I don't know what's wrong with me. And this was before we recognize that one of the main symptoms of getting COVID was losing your sense of smell and taste. And I said this, sim I said, I don't know what's wrong with me.

And then when all of this information started coming, he said, oh, my gosh, you had COVID, and so it wasn't you know, So we did coronavirus, driving a consumer scramble for hand sanitizers. This is Attorney's General in several states cracking down on price gougers. Last week, a twelve ounce bottle of hand sanitizer was selling on Amazon for fifty dollars. Comparing ounce for ounce, that's about two times more than the price of gasoline. When COVID hit, what we started researching and

hearing about was that you could make sanitizer. Right, we have the equipment and the ability to produce alcohol in the same way that's produced in sanitizer. And then what happened was one of my workers. She had a friend who was working alongside New York City makes Ppe, and so they said, can you make sanitizer and we will help deliver the bottles of sanitizer if you just keep

producing it. So we actually pivoted our business. We started using our mixtures of experimental concord grapes and rice and jabuka tails and redistilling them and produced our first sanitizer. So the large part of our business and my day to day was literally, Okay, I have to batch cocktails, put them in containers, how do I put a label on sanitizer? And is this legal? Okay, We're We're just going to do it because no one has sanitizer right now and we can make it. And it wasn't a

money making strategy or anything. It was all of these hospitals and we were just seeing this lack of anything and that that's what our two thousand twenty was like, I mean, that's what we're doing, bottled cocktails and sanitizer and making sure not to swap those labels right exactly exactly What was it like to change your production so quickly? It wasn't too too much of a change. Actually, because

I think that's how we're lucky. We're not a huge production and so any changes we make tend to start with experiments. It was ideal, in fact, because we could just produce it in a way that no one else could, and we we made videos actually, so we even taught

people how to make their own sanitizer. We told people that they could even go to their liquor store as quickly as possible and get some you know, X y Z, some ever clear whatever it was that they could get their hands on and use that, and then we showed them how using certain ingredients based on whose recommendations. And some people were like, oh my god, I did it.

You know, I said, don't drink it. So as a business owner yourself, how do you justify all of these activities which we're not prioritizing any kind of bottom line? It sounds like it was a human reaction. I think I thought to myself, Wow, I'm in a rarefied position right now. I never thought I never woke up in the morning thinking, oh mom, I'm making hand sanitizer. You know, it was never a cool thing. But you think about all these people who potentially are dying, and you don't

know what's going on. You just you sit there and you say to yourself, Okay, the world is in a pandemic. Everything that's happening now has no code written or or anything like that, and so anything that we do now to even make a small difference will be a big difference probably. But at the same time, there is a practical side. I don't want to paint us as you know, oh there are you know, these ridiculously generous people. I

think we are. But at the same time, we were thinking practically and we said, well, if we can't sell our booze right now, at some point we'll be able to somehow balance out the fact that we can't sell anything else by somehow maybe just keeping ourselves afloat, and maybe this will happen. We were giving away sanitizer and we were also getting donations from people, so we said, okay, if you guys donate to us and we can keep producing, and then we can keep giving our sanitizer to folks.

And that's what happened. A lot of people were incredibly generous and they said, wow, we love what you're doing. And here, you know, and if if we couldn't fulfill a particular order. Then we were passing it on to someone else, and so there's a sense of it just has to happen and someone would take it on. What did you call your hand sanitizer? We call it don't be an Asshole, And it's because that's actually written on

our label and it's always used protection. So we thought it was kind of a joke, you know that people once they could always use protection don't be an asshole. So that's our sanitizer. Did it change or highlight your own connection and your business is connection to your actual local community? Quite a few people who I think it. I started realizing that people did love us in a way,

which is something I didn't really recognize. Everyone was reaching back out to us the relationships that we had initially fostered with random things like motorcycles and dogs, and they just came, you know, everyone just said, Okay, well we're

gonna do this. Or bartenders came and we did this bartending event once, this competition, and they reached out and they said, hey, how about if we do um, you know, a special cocktail thing for you online and then we can you know, give that money to a certain organization. And so that's that's how we've been doing things. Now, how how would you define community? I think for me,

community is a healthy dependence on each other. I'm really lucky because I have a strong sense of family and I'm my sisters are my best friends, and my family has always been very close. But beyond that, I start thinking about all the things that I have to do or want to do, and I start reaching out to the people who are not necessarily always aligned with who I am, but who can we can help each other, and it's that sort of bond that means you're part

of a community. I don't when I think of community, I never think negatively, which is maybe um naive of me. But I don't see it as a crowd, right, that's the opposite for me. It's like there's power in crowds, but it's a louder thing, whereas a community is you're in it. The businesses who I support, they often are my friends. One of my friends owns this really amazing spot and he's Pakistani and it's called b K Johnny. But what happened with him after COVID was and he

went he was hospitalized. He brought in program of feeding under served people and so now since June, he's I think, going to hit ten thou free meals. So this to me, I started thinking about this and every time I ordered food, it's often there because I know exactly what he's doing. So that that's what the community is. I think for me, Well, we come back how Marie balances values with necessity when it comes to that company that shall not be named. Okay,

I'm gonna name it is Amazon. That's that's the company. H When I think of Amazon, I don't think of community. I think of it definitely is a huge conglomerate as a business, and that's the difference. I think. But when I'm in this business and I have to get something delivered in a certain amount of time, unfortunately for me, I end up often having to get something from Amazon because I need it in a certain amount of time

with as little hassle as possible. Why do you why do you say, unfortunately you have to order from Amazon. You're trying to avoid ordering through Amazon? What is what is that about? I wish it were a different world where Amazon wasn't almost overtaking so much. There's an intention with small businesses, that's why they're called mom and pop shops. You know, it's like, oh, there's a sense of community, whereas I don't think Amazon has a sense of community

except for a bottom line. Like, Okay, we will attach ourselves to an initiative. We will start promoting certain businesses like black owned businesses, Asian businesses, all kinds of things. But it's not the intention is not because they necessarily care, but they want to profit off of these communities. It

gives me a terrible taste in my mouth. And I know they employ a lot of people, and look, I I know this, and even some of the people I had brought in for certain events and things had on the side been working at Amazon because they needed to make money. But goodness, couldn't we have alternatives? Yeah? From a from a customer perspective, When I'm a customer of so many businesses and I have felt that hesitation, that distaste in my mom, I guess I'll go to Amazon.

What do you think a small business can offer a customer that a larger resource business like Amazon can't. This is something if you do want someone to do something for you that you want to help them with, or you bounce ideas off of and that's what happens often when I am working with motorcycle businesses, other food businesses in the area who are in Brooklyn, any chefs or you know, any anyone like that. Then we create events,

we do things together. Even a hairstylist, we this event called moto Oasis because you know, we wanted to serve our community and have people outside safely, get back massages and haircuts, you know, and eat really yummy Filipino food. I mean, who was so you can't do that with Amazon. Yeah, there's a word that's occurring to me, which is relationships. I don't I don't know that I feel like I

have a relationship with Amazon. I have a have a series of transactions exactly very efficient transactions, but I don't know them right. So, in the context of everything we've talked about, in particular the community connection that a business can have with other businesses and with the public, is there anything you encourage a listener to do. I think one of the things that I always remind myself to do to kind of slow things down, um, not rush entirely,

and to be okay with making those mistakes. I don't think I would have my business if we didn't have all those problems and those mistakes, and if we slow things down, um, forgive ourselves a little bit for these mistakes, and think about also doing things outside of our comfort zone so that we can actually allow ourselves to make those mistakes. I think all of those come together for me, and that's what I would recommend, slowing things down, making

some mistakes, for giving yourself. Wow, that was now what I expected at Although it can be like shop small business Saturdays, But no, you went to the deep end of the pool. No. I mean I wouldn't have my business if it wasn't for all the mistakes we made, you know, And I just I think people are so scared to fail, and you're not learning if you don't fail honestly and in the context of the value you've been a part of, contributed to, and benefited from in

your community as a business. Is there any advice you have to us citizen consumers out here ways you'd like to see us showing up more or better? Oh for sure. So I think something that would be really amazing to take a look at it what you're actually purchasing and how much time and money you're spending on your online purchases,

Whether it's Amazon or not. Your online purchases and the purchases and the things you're doing with your money that are local and or brick and mortar, and if you actually did you know, an Excel shoot or whatever it is that you want to do and said to yourself, Okay, wow, I think I could spend significantly more on the local business and also the physical business. Maybe once you know, things open up a little bit more. If I can do that, then I think it would make a difference. Actually,

So that's what I would would recommend. I love that that's a good it's a good home work assignment. And it makes me wish that a platform like Mint or quick Books or you know, one of these online finance things could let you like you could probably flag it in there and see it over time. But it plants a good question in my head. Marie, thank you so much for the time you can I order your stuff to be shipped? Is that possible? Is they way to

get it to California? Unfortunately, so when I'm when I'm able to travel back to New York, I'm coming to Bushwick and I'm coming to try your products, rice whiskey in particular. All Right, thank you again so much, thank you, thank you. Marie just gave an excellent call to action, which is to really track how much of your spending is happening in your local community and then try to increase that percentage. In that spirit, we're just gonna pass the mike to Marie to shout out some of her

local businesses that you should absolutely support. Brooklyn, this is for you. There's b K Johnny means sweetheart in Pakistani love Nelly also known as the Drunk Bakers, and they make the most delicious and panadas bolero elevated street food Vietnamese. I mean, I could go on. There's Engines for Change, and then there's Motor Velly, and then there's motor Girl, and then there's I got it. It takes a village, and you're gonna member of the village. I would, I would,

and my mom I have to thank her. I wouldn't be here. Next week we speak with Bruce Patterson, technology director of Amman Idaho. Don't let the small town a seventeen thousand fool you. They've managed to invest in a model of municipal broadband that any city would dream of. For you know what time it is? Time for actions. Here to guide you through them is our producer Ali. We want to know how you relate to local business.

What locally owned businesses do you rely on? Do you know the owners, what do you most appreciate about it? What would you miss if it was gone? Try following some of your favorite local businesses on social media, many of Instagram accounts where you can reach out directly. We often hear that it's good to support local independent businesses, but why exactly. The Institute for Local Self Reliance actually answers that question in the article why care about independent

locally owned businesses? It's in the title. If you want to do a deeper dive, go to bookshop dot org, Backslash Shop backslash, how to Citizen to check out more titles on this topic. Lastly, we want you to shop local, and we want you to buy direct. If you live in New York City, check out shop in dot NYC, a new online service for residents to shop from small

businesses in their area, not Amazon. Shopping NYC has plans to expand, so keep an eye out for one near you, or reach out to them if you want to start a marketplace in your region. Meanwhile, the shop app by Shopify can help you spot local businesses selling directly online. As always, when in doubt, order directly from the business that is providing the good or service you're buying. You get the same great product and they get more of

the revenue. If you're tak any of these actions, please brag about yourself online using the hashtag how to Citizen and send us general feedback or ideas for the show to comments at how to citizen dot com. Speaking of that domain name, we have one and we're using it. Visit how to citizen dot com to sign up for our newsletter or learn about upcoming events or even more stuff than that. And if you like the show, spread the word, tell somebody. If you don't, definitely just keep

it to yourself. Appreciate you. How does Citizen with barrettune Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and dust Light Productions. Our executive producers are Me barrattun Day, Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Yuson. Our producers are Stephanie Cone and Ali Kilts. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is our apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eaping. This episode was produced and sound

designed by Ali Kilts. Special thanks to Joel Smith from I Heart Radio.