Run Your Nonprofit Like a Scientist

Every leader in every org in the social impact space has its fair share of failures. But for some reason, in this space, we don't talk about failure a lot. We tend to brush over it or paper over it or diminish it or reframe it. And I think that's a huge mistake. 

Today we are joined by Michelle Moog-Koussa. She is the executive director of the Moog Foundation, a foundation that exists to carry forward the legacy of musician and synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog. And they're doing something that I think is very interesting. They are embracing failure and the scientific method through the lens of music creation and synthesizers to teach young children and the community at large how to become better people, essentially. Michelle's built the Moog Foundation from $15,000 and a stack of a bunch of Bob's early crossed-out notebooks into a 20-year institution that has tens of thousands of students that they've served, a world-class museum, an archive — and people have told her along the way to quit, and she never did.

In our conversation, we get into why the social impact sector has a cultural problem with failure, what the scientific method actually demands of leaders, and what Bob Moog's approach to experimentation can teach us about building organizations that learn instead of organizations that get stuck in planning.

Episode Highlights:

[00:00:00] Why the social impact sector refuses to talk about failure

[00:02:00] From theremins to a synthesizer that changed music: who Bob Moog was

[00:04:00] How 60,000 CaringBridge messages gave birth to a foundation

[00:07:00] The three pillars: Dr. Bob's SoundSchool, the Archives, and the Moogseum

[00:12:00] Stepping into a legacy with $15,000 and a steep learning curve

[00:15:00] The sine wave of a career: surviving 2008, COVID, and Hurricane Helene

[00:17:00] "You're swinging a miniature bat" — and the reframe that changed everything

[00:23:00] Running a nonprofit like a scientist: hypothesis, test, iterate

[00:25:30] The sector embraces the scientific method — except the failure step

[00:27:00] "Mistakes are the portals to discovery"

[00:31:30] Why fear of failure keeps organizations frozen in planning

[00:34:00] Music as a force for community, not isolation

Notable Quotes:

[00:25:30]: "The sector at large does not accept failure with grace." Eric Ressler 

[00:27:15]: "Mistakes are the portals to discovery." Michelle Moog-Koussa 

[00:18:05]: "I don't have a miniature bat. My bat is so big, I just needed more people to help me swing it." Michelle Moog-Koussa 

[00:30:55]: "I don't mind that we make mistakes. We're human. What I do mind is if we don't learn from them." Michelle Moog-Koussa 

[00:32:50]: "The best idea in the world has zero impact until you actually take it into the world to test it." Eric Ressler 

[00:31:30]: "If it doesn't work, that just means you're one step closer to getting it to work." Michelle Moog-Koussa 

Resources & Links:

• The Bob Moog Foundation — Michelle's foundation; donations, the membership program, the volunteer portal, the online store, and newsletter signup all live here
• The Moogseum — the foundation's museum in downtown Asheville, North Carolina
• Dr. Bob's SoundSchool — the foundation's 10-week second-grade sound-science education program (nearly 40,000 students served)
• CaringBridge — the platform where Bob's page drew 60,000+ visitors and nearly 4,000 testimonials from 67 countries
• The Orange Peel — the Asheville music venue where Dr. Bob's SoundSchool students perform their end-of-program concert
• Spectrasonics Bob Moog Tribute Library — a $100 sound bank of 1,300 sounds; all proceeds benefit the foundation
• UJAM Vox Humana — a charity plugin benefiting the Bob Moog Foundation
• Native Instruments Modular Icons — a sound library that benefits the Bob Moog Foundation

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:01:30]: Michelle Moog-Koussa, thank you so much for joining us on Designing Tomorrow today.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:01:30]: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Eric Ressler [00:01:35]: So for our listeners who are not familiar with the Moog Foundation and Bob Moog, who is a musical icon and possibly even legend, could you start by giving us a little bit of background about Bob and his life, how he lived his life, and how that led ultimately to the foundation being formed?

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:01:55]: Of course. It's my favorite thing to talk about. So Bob Moog invented the Moog synthesizer in 1964, and that synthesizer, being the first one that was truly accessible to musicians, went on to revolutionize the face of music. And although that was nearly 70 years ago now, the Moog synthesizer continues to be quite prominent in music of every genre. He started off as a doctorate student in engineering physics and was making theremins on the side, something he had been doing since he was 14 years old. And for anyone in the audience who may not know what a theremin is, a theremin is an early electronic musical instrument, one of the earliest, invented in 1920 by a Russian physicist named Leon Theremin. And when Bob was just a kid, he and his electrical engineer father would make electrical hobby projects together. And Bob at that time fell in love with the theremin and made one.

He made his first one for a science fair when he was 15. And by the time he was 19, he was proficient enough that he was writing articles on how to build them, and then went into business selling assembled theremins and theremin parts. And that eventually led him to the musician who asked him to make a new instrument to make new sounds. That gentleman's name was Herb Deutsch, and they worked together. And the result was the breadboard prototypes of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog synthesizer went through many iterations and still continues to go through many, many iterations. And Bob went in and out of the company as it was owned by different people. But in the last 25 years of his life, he was working steadily on developing alternative interfaces for synthesizers, developing theremins, and of course developing more synthesizers. And then he did pass away in 2005, actually August 21st of 2005.

And that is when the foundation was born and morphed very nicely into why we were even created. And I will say that Bob was a very humble person. He did not like to think of himself as superior to anybody else. And I don't think he would've ever envisioned the foundation in his name because of that. But what happened when he was quite sick — he had a brain tumor at the end of his life — is that we started a page on CaringBridge for him. And for those of you who are not familiar, CaringBridge is essentially a place where either critically ill or terminally ill people can set up a webpage and communicate with people on their own time, at their own pace, and people can leave messages for them. So it's a way to communicate without being intrusive to someone who's quite ill.

And we set up a page there thinking it would just be for maybe 40 people who would be interested in how he was doing. And instead, 60,000 people logged onto that page in the first seven weeks, and then 20,000 people logged on the day he passed away. But even more powerful than those numbers back then in 2005 was the fact that almost 4,000 people left testimonials in the guestbook section. Where in most pages it would be, "We're thinking of you, we're praying for you. We learned if you eat blueberries it will help your tumor," that kind of thing — well, in this particular page for Bob Moog, it was one testimonial after another about how Bob Moog had either changed or totally transformed people's lives. It was super powerful, with people saying things like, "Because of Bob, I'm a musician. Bob Moog gave me my creative voice. Because of Bob, I'm an engineer." And it just went on and on like that.

And I will say it was quite a daunting moment for my family and myself because, hearkening back to that humility, my father didn't talk about his work that much. And when he did, it was never in any grandiose terms. And I don't think that any of us knew what he had done. We didn't talk about his work, but we definitely knew the basics, but I don't think any of us realized the true impact. Those testimonials came from 67 different countries, and we knew that there was something incredibly special there that we wanted to harness and carry forward. The chance to inspire people all over the world just doesn't come along every day. And here we had a vehicle to do that by continuing his legacy. And that's where the Bob Moog Foundation was born.

And not surprisingly, our mission is to inspire people of all ages through the intersection of science, music, technology, and innovation. So it's essentially a mirror image of what Bob himself did for over 50 years. The way that we achieve that mission, we have three main projects. One of them is called Dr. Bob's SoundSchool. It's a program that we've run for about 12 years through which we teach little kids — second graders, to be exact — about the science of sound through music and technology. It's a 10-week curriculum that we deliver to entire school districts, and we train the teachers, and the teachers then teach the students. We've educated almost 40,000 little kids in that time, and we've been really heartened because the program is 10 weeks long, but it's highly experiential and multisensory. So our goal is that kids are hearing, touching, and seeing sound with every lesson.

We're really trying to meet the kids where they are in their learning journey and provide the kind of curriculum where the kids will really retain the information. And we have done some assessments and we have found just that — that our curriculum compared to a standard curriculum, there's much more knowledge retention, which is what we're looking for. So that's one program. The other program is the Bob Moog Foundation Archives, which is a vast collection of over 15,000 pieces of archival material that we protect and preserve and share with researchers and journalists and museums. And those two projects, the archive and the education, feed right into our third project, which is the Moogseum in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, which is an outward-facing facility that brings Bob's legacy alive to inspire people of all ages, and to do so in a way that's really accessible.

We wanted to make sure it wasn't just a synth geek fest. It's really meant for anybody who wants to be inspired by someone who was deeply dedicated and committed to their field and was able to make these huge changes, because we believe as an organization that anybody can affect the world around them, and we want to encourage them to do that.

Eric Ressler [00:09:55]: Just a lovely, in my opinion, origin story for a foundation in the space of social impact, where the current approach to foundations being formed seems to be typically that some individual is highly successful commercially, makes a boatload of money, and starts a foundation as, in the best interpretation, a give-back, but often also a tax advantage. And what strikes me about your foundation and Bob Moog's legacy and his history is that Bob strikes me as someone who just genuinely loved music and loved technology and loved the intersection of those two things, which speaks to me very directly. And then the foundation was started because of the impact that he had on so many people. It's really a grassroots foundation, and you all have had the opportunity to take all of the positive impact and the community support and channel that into not only continuing Bob's legacy, but also building on it and expanding it — taking a lot of the values and the virtues of who Bob was as a person, and even through your leadership and through the staff and the community, built on that and evolved it and expanded on it too.

So I'd love to hear your take, your experience, on what that's like stepping into a legacy. And I think we mentioned when we were talking earlier about how sometimes people like Bob get reduced down to the key talking points, and almost their humanity gets flattened in a way that is not true to how complex they were as people. So I'd love if you could just share what that journey's been like for you stepping into the role that you have.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:11:45]: It has been a remarkable journey that I am honored every day to be navigating. I'd like to say that Bob Moog forged this big golden path and I get to just walk on it every day. It's quite extraordinary, and we knew that from the beginning, as I mentioned. That doesn't mean that we were equipped necessarily to take on this project, but we knew that it needed to be done. And quite honestly, when the opportunity came up, my brother was initially guiding the process. It wasn't anything like it is now. It was more just a name and a couple of ideas. But then he decided he needed to cycle off and offered it to the rest of the family. And I was amazed I was the only one who stepped forward. And I said to him, "I know I have a big learning curve, but this opportunity cannot be passed up." So we started with almost no money.

I think we started with $15,000, that's all we had. And then it was a very steep learning curve of learning what is involved in a nonprofit. We didn't even have our projects defined, certainly as they are now, much less figuring out some kind of fundraising network.

And it is important to point out that Bob had his ups and downs with his career. He would say that he wasn't really a businessman, that wasn't his forte. He was much more focused on musicians and musical interfaces. And as a result, I don't think the words "rich" and "Bob Moog" would ever go together in the way that most people would think about it. So as you note, this was an effort that was born out of sheer commitment and recognition that the humanity of all of this was so powerful that we had an opportunity to do something very special. This is not the glorification of Bob Moog. It certainly is not a tax shelter or anything like that that you noted. It's really all about that ability to inspire people all over the world.

Eric Ressler [00:14:20]: What have you learned that either has surprised you most or inspired you most as you've stepped into this role and this journey and worked through the early stages of building up a foundation all the way to where you are today, where you have a defined theory of change and programs and a very clearly, and I would say well-articulated, definition of your role in the ecosystem and the purpose? That's a journey to get there. I'd be curious to hear, what have you learned on this journey about either the power of music or the way that you can have the biggest impact that maybe was surprising or unexpected for you?

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:15:00]: I would say that if you're talking about one of the things that I learned the most, I would have to say that this journey has been quite challenging in many different ways. Of course, we went through the 2008 dot-com bubble and things were difficult for us then, and we've been through COVID, and we've been through Hurricane Helene, and there are other complexities that have come up that have been extremely challenging. And then of course there's the fundraising part of it — just trying to make it, trying to grow it, trying to figure out who you are. And there have been several times where I've wanted to quit, where people around me have encouraged me to quit. And the one thing that I have always come back to is Bob never quit. And things weren't always easy for him either. I like to say that his career was like a sine wave. It was up and down and up and down, and the ups were really high — and most people know about those ups — and the downs were really low, and a lot of people don't know about those at all, as you say, because I think the knowledge base focuses on the high accomplishments.

That to me has been so critically instructive: that you don't give up. And it's one thing that I share with people, for example, when I'm doing tours at the Moogseum. I like to say that, yeah, Bob Moog was obviously very smart, he was very educated, but I think also as defining for his career and his impact was the fact that he embraced commitment and dedication as strongly as he leaned on his education and his intellect. And that's something that we can all muster when needed, but that has been a guiding force for me and helped me and the organization get to where we are. And I have found it both deeply instructive and deeply inspiring, because it's not easy. I remember someone saying to me, "You should give up. You're trying to hit a home run with a miniature bat." And he meant that from a business perspective — that we're trying to do a lot with hardly any money.

And this person encouraged me to quit, and I told him I couldn't. And he said, "Why?" And I said, "Because this foundation has so much potential. I can taste it. We're just not there yet, but I can't just give up on it." After he left, I thought about what he had said. I do want to consider what people say. And even though I didn't agree with him, he was being honest, he was being earnest, and I did appreciate that. But then it came to me that I don't have a miniature bat. My bat is so big, I just needed more people to help me swing it.

Eric Ressler [00:18:15]: Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode — I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose-built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy. But we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring our ideas to life through campaigns, creative, and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters, and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

I think something that a lot of executive directors and founders — what you shared with me in your journey — it rings true to my experience even running Cosmic over the last 16 years. And the sine wave, for listeners who maybe didn't get it: a sine wave is a really fundamental element of synthesizer design and music in general, so applauding your pun there. But that also does feel like my experience, and I think the experience that I hear a lot of our partners who are often executive directors or founders share. And I do think that it's a really tricky balance in our space, in the social impact space, because there is a lot of burnout. There are a lot of conditions and cultural norms in the system at large that I don't think is structurally right for the scale and the scope of the missions that a lot of folks are working towards.

And so I do think we should be changing that. We should not accept that this is just going to be hard and that's just how it is, fully. And at the same time, there is a balance there where we shouldn't expect it to be easy either. If this were easy, these problems would've been solved. Our missions would already have come true decades ago, millennia ago in some cases. And so I think that sine wave balance is one that is tough. And I think for me, one thing that I've always known in running Cosmic, and that I see when I talk to a lot of founders like yourself, is that there is this greater purpose or potential that I think folks like us see that outside advisors maybe don't always understand as deeply if they haven't ever been in that position themselves. And I'm not saying there aren't times where spinning things down isn't the right call.

Sometimes there is a breaking point and a boundary that gets passed enough times, and it's like, you know what? We had a good run. We've made some good impact, and it's time to close shop. And that's okay too. I don't want listeners to come away with the reaction that, well, that's just how it is and there's never a time where we should be shutting things down. But there is a spirit of perseverance, of resilience, of just sort of grit at some level that I think is fundamental to running a shop like this too.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:21:30]: Yep, I would totally agree with that. And I tell people that all the time. There are certain equations in business that help make things work. And when you don't have as much of something, you're going to need more of something else. And for us, it's like, okay, so you don't have a ton of money — how are you going to compensate for that? And that is just bearing down and getting the work done. And there were times, especially in the first five and 10 years, when I would work the 60, 70, 80, and occasional hundred-hour work week. I don't recommend that last one, by the way, for anybody. I think it's really important to embrace that, recognize what your situation is, and make the equation work, whatever that means. For someone who's much better funded, it could be a different kind of equation. But for us, it was that grit, as you say, that was an absolute necessary element and continues to be.

Eric Ressler [00:22:30]: I think the other thing that maybe we should touch on a little bit — in channeling Bob, but also in hearing how you're talking about how you've run the foundation — is an almost scientific, experimental philosophy. When you're inventing new instruments or reimagining them, there must be that kind of experimental intuition in terms of a guiding principle around how to approach it, right? Having a hypothesis, testing it, getting user feedback, iterating, scrapping things altogether, accepting that sometimes you're going to fail and that's just part of the process. So there's that scientific, experimental, entrepreneurial mindset that, in my opinion, is how we should be thinking about running these social impact organizations, whether you're a nonprofit or a foundation or a funder. This is the way, in my opinion, that we should be thinking about this. And I'd love to hear if that resonates with you, and if so, how you've thought about running experiments, iterating, and what some of those aha moments have been in your trajectory.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:23:45]: That's a great point. And I would say that hearkens right back to the heart of Bob Moog's career and studies and interest. And that is essentially the scientific method, which is something we actually teach in Dr. Bob's SoundSchool. And the scientific method is: you write down your idea, you test your idea, and you write down the results. And we have a lot of Bob's schematic notebooks, and we share pages from these with the kids in Dr. Bob's SoundSchool, particularly the pages where the whole results section is in the middle of the page and he crosses it out and just says "didn't work."

Eric Ressler [00:24:20]: Didn't work.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:24:25]: Didn't work. And the next page he's trying again. So I find that whole approach really fundamental to growing an organization or a business. Some people may have these one-hit wonders right off the bat, but I think that that is probably the exception. And a lot of organizations are much more iterative, where it is a continuum of trying to figure out what's working, where you're getting your highest ROI, focusing on those things while being open to new ideas and constantly incorporating those ideas as much as is applicable for your business.

Eric Ressler [00:25:15]: I think it's so true. And to talk about the scientific method — one thing I've noticed observing the space deeply through my lens, working with a number of different orgs, is that the sector at large does not accept failure with grace. And what I mean by that is that there's an expectation and a norm and a culture in philanthropy and in social impact that failure is bad. And so what I think we see a lot of times is a lot of orgs are embracing the scientific method when it comes to writing down ideas, developing a hypothesis, testing those things, and listening. But I think where we stop is the most important part of that entire process, which is embracing failure, publishing the results of failure for the sector at large, and not seeing failure as something that's bad, but an inevitable, constructive part of the process of learning.

And I hope that we can change that in the sector. And I think it's going to take all sides to do it. I think the dynamic and the power dynamic is that nonprofits who are funded either by major philanthropies or by donors, they don't want to admit failure because it feels like they're letting their supporters down. And I think we need to change the narrative around that — around failure is part of the process. It's a good part of the process. It's actually the most helpful part of the process, because if we can't admit when we fail and we gloss over that or we just don't talk about it, then we're not really doing this work earnestly. And I'd just be curious to hear, as you teach kids about this process, do we need to reeducate the social impact sector at large around the failure step in the scientific method?

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:27:05]: I think so. I think that failure or challenges should absolutely be embraced. And I'm reminded of probably my single most favorite saying, just because I have to say it to myself so much, which is: mistakes are the portals to discovery. And in this case, you could say mistakes or failures are challenges — they are our teaching tools. So we need to heed them as much as our successes. And I would agree that being able to share them and show their value is incredibly important. So many people tend to get mired down in them, and I think that just stymies progress.

Eric Ressler [00:27:50]: I've even noticed sometimes, and even with myself — this can be a problem that I'm working on — that if you aren't careful, you can't actually learn from those failures if you don't honestly and fully accept them as failures. If you gloss over them and try and reframe them as not a failure — and that's a slippery slope, because if all you do is focus on the negatives and the failures and you don't view them constructively and effectively, they can just bring down your mood, your energy, your inspiration. So there's a balance with this, as with many things in life. But at the same time, this culture around failure I think leads to us not learning and not iterating and not becoming the best version of ourselves and our organizations, if we don't take a moment to fully embrace, recognize, and accept: this experiment failed.

And here's maybe why. Here's a new set of hypotheses around why that experiment may have failed and what we might do differently next time. But what I see sometimes is people reframe or reposition or gloss over these failures as, well, we gave it our best, and, oh, look at all the good things that happened during that failure — and sort of diminish and paper over the failure. And then you don't fully, truly learn from it because you don't accept it as a failure, and you don't go through that next step of, well, what might we do differently next time? So I'd be curious to hear how you've dealt with that in your own journey, and how you saw that happen in the scientific method that Bob took, and how your students are now taking it in the classroom setting that you have as one of your programs.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:29:35]: Well, I would say at the very beginning, it was harder to surmount the challenges without just kind of beating yourself up about them. But I think as a leader, you recognize, okay, you know what? I've only got so much energy. So am I going to put my energy towards being mad, being upset, being self-defeating? Or am I going to take that energy and turn it around and try to forge a more positive path forward for whatever it is? And for me, that's what it really came down to — that I knew I had to be very careful with how I dispensed my energy. And if I was just going to walk around being sad, that wasn't going to get us anywhere. And that's the goal. The goal is to move forward.

And so I have obviously had lots of challenges and failures. And what I started doing was immediately taking the opportunity to have a feedback session after an event that didn't work out, or whatever it was — a grant application that wasn't successful — to turn around, gather a group of people together, and then brainstorm what went wrong. And I like to say to my team, I don't mind that we make mistakes. We're human. What I do mind is if we don't learn from them. So that's my approach: to learn from those mistakes. And of course, again, this is what Bob did. This is what the scientific method is based on. And it's one thing we really impress on the students of Dr. Bob's SoundSchool, which is, first of all, no idea is too stupid to write down. All your ideas are valuable. Write them down and then test them out and see what happens and write down the results. And you know what? If it doesn't work, that just means you're one step closer to getting it to work. As an example, here's Bob's work showing you that's exactly what he did over and over and over, decades.

Eric Ressler [00:31:40]: I really love that. I really love that. And the other thing I'm reflecting on that I also see — there's the not-accepting-failure mistake that we can make trying to follow this scientific method. But then there's also another version of that that I see, which is almost a fear of — I think it's related to that first thing — a fear of imperfection or a fear of failure keeps people in that write-down stage: the three-year strategic plan that takes 12 months to put together that then doesn't get tested until the plan is fully dialed. And so we stay in this planning-strategy mode for so long, when the scientific method, and even to a degree a design-thinking methodology, would be more around how quickly can we get these ideas into the market or into a prototype form and get them tested?

Because that's where the real learning happens. And there's a balance there too. You don't want to just go with a half-baked idea that doesn't have any intention behind it or any thought behind it, but I see other orgs stay frozen in that overintellectualizing, overplanning, overthinking stage. And I can fall trapped to this myself. And what I've learned is that the best idea in the world has zero impact until you actually take it into the world to test it and to iterate on it and to see if your idea is solid or not. And I think sometimes that can be another form of a defense mechanism, another form of fear of failure — if you don't ever actually test your ideas, you can't fail. And so you stay safe because you don't take them into the market. So I really love, and I think about this scientific method as a way to think about how to run social impact organizations from various vantage points.

And I think it's really cool that you all are channeling that through Bob and through music. And I'd actually like to spend a little bit of time, as we work towards wrapping this up, talking about music — the power of music for personal happiness, the power of music for community-level happiness, and then also the power of music for social justice and social change. And so I'd love to hear how you think about that, and also how you see music impacting people, especially young people, in the work that you all are doing.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:34:00]: Well, let's start with what music meant to Bob, because that's kind of where we're rooted in. And I will say that he was devoted to the transcendental nature of music as a force — not only for self-expression and self-enjoyment, but particularly as a force that brings people together in community. To the extent that in the late '90s he was interviewed and someone asked him what he felt about or saw in the future of electronic music, and what he honed in on is that he was highly concerned that technology had developed to an extent that people could both make and listen to music in isolation, and that if that continued, a great cultural resource would be lost in enjoying music as community. Now, thankfully, live music is alive and well, and we do come together in community hundreds of thousands of times a day around the world around music. So that is the dedication that we are rooted in as well, and what an important force this is for all of us. And part of it is self-expression. You cannot minimize how important that is for people.

We definitely like to feed that, and so did Bob. People would ask him if he was a musician and he would say, "No, I'm a tool maker. I make tools for musicians." And the musicians were really his beacon. And I think that the reason he felt so strongly about them is he was obviously a very creative guy, but he was also an engineer, and his way of thinking was very linear. Whereas when he connected with these musicians, their mindset is this broad, open expanse, and it's just a trajectory of exploration for them. And he loved that, and he wanted to provide the tools for that exploration. And I feel like that's what he felt that he provided — not only providing the tools for sonic exploration, but those tools as vehicles to connect with a larger audience. We don't talk as much about this in Dr. Bob's SoundSchool because we are talking to second graders, so we don't talk about more of this maybe philosophical foundation that we have, but we definitely encourage them to embrace all kinds of music, to embrace all kinds of sound, to think about sound that's around them, to think about music, where it comes from and how it's made. And then every year of Dr. Bob's SoundSchool, all the kids get together and they put on a concert about what they've learned.

Eric Ressler [00:37:15]: Very cool.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:37:15]: So they actually get to come full circle and provide a musical experience for their parents and teachers, which they are often very thrilled to be able to do, because they do that at the Orange Peel, which is like the hallmark music venue in Asheville, and they feel like rock stars. They get up there and they can feel the power. They've got 500 people they're singing to, and they can feel the power of what they're doing. So it brings it all very full circle through those moments.

Eric Ressler [00:37:50]: In many ways, I'm reflecting on how learning music, or being introduced to music-making through a synthesizer, is such an awesome and profound musical introduction. Because although a synthesizer — and there's all kinds of different synthesizers, of course — it can feel overwhelming without proper facilitation or guidance, in many ways it's the most fundamental, basic, almost molecular building block of music-making, which is just a sound wave or a sine wave. And then it gets manipulated and adjusted. I think one of the things that many people don't realize about synthesizers is that they're reductive in nature. It starts with a pure sound wave, and as you're shaping that sound, you're reducing things, you're not adding things, with the exception of maybe some effects like delays or reverbs. But it's almost like chiseling a block of granite instead of starting from building blocks and building on top of them.

And so it's a really interesting, experimental, in my opinion, accessible, and equitable introduction to music, because it takes away the structured "here's the scales, here's the modes." And all of that fundamental music knowledge is great too, but this to me feels like a great way to introduce music as an imaginative, discoverable, experimental modality instead of a structured modality — which, if you really want to get serious about making music and pursuing music, you need that part too. Or maybe you don't need it, but it can be quite helpful as a tool. But that just strikes me as a really interesting and unique way. So I have a first grader who will be a second grader next year, and hopefully she'll have the opportunity to go through some of your programming. Maybe we'll connect after the show and figure out a way to make that happen and bring it to her school and to her teachers.

Michelle, before we wrap up, I do want to give you a chance to just plug or promote anything that would be helpful to our listeners who are interested in learning more about the Moog Foundation or your work. Where can people find you online, and what opportunities do people have to get more deeply involved if they're interested in pursuing that?

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:40:00]: Oh, thanks for that opportunity. So people can find more about us at moogfoundation.org and moogseum.org. Ways that they can get more involved — the first one won't be a surprise. Donating to the Bob Moog Foundation is always really powerful. A nonprofit without funding is like a car without fuel. It's really that simple. So every donation helps empower our work and is crucially important to everything we do. But there are other ways to support. We have a membership program with all kinds of cool perks that people can participate in, also found on our website. Visiting the Moogseum when you're in Asheville, North Carolina, or in Western North Carolina, or telling your friends and family about the Moogseum, is another powerful way. We also have an online store with all kinds of cool merch, and of course every sale goes to support our projects. And there's a volunteer portal through the website, and that also has been very powerful for us.

We found some really great volunteers. And I would say two things, one in closing. One is that in-kind donations are also very powerful. If you have any old electronic musical instruments or documentation that can be part of the archive, that's a great way to support us. We run fundraising raffles four times a year where we raffle off either vintage synthesizers or Eurorack synthesizers. And that's a really fun way to support us, and those raffles are crucially important for us, so keep your eye out for them. You can sign up for our newsletter through the site and you'll get notifications of the raffles. Of course, we're on Facebook and Instagram, you can find out more there as well. I encourage people to do that. That'll just give you a really good idea of what we're focusing on day-to-day, week to week. And also for those of you who are into synthesis, Spectrasonics has a product called the Bob Moog Tribute Library that they developed that solely benefits the Bob Moog Foundation. It's a sound bank of 1,300 sounds made by all these amazing sound designers, and it's $100, and every bit of it gets donated to us. A company called UJAM also has something like that called Vox Humana. And there are some other companies as well. You can find out more about other companies that support us, including Native Instruments — it has Modular Icons that benefits the Bob Moog Foundation. So if you look on our website under "ways to support us," you'll find all of those options as well.

Eric Ressler [00:42:55]: Awesome. Michelle, thank you so much for your time today. This was really inspiring for me and hopefully for our listeners as well. And thank you so much for joining me.

Michelle Moog-Koussa [00:43:05]: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciated it.