It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm a new summer OD.

And this week we have a little something extra for you to listen to.

It's a follow up to our most recent episode where we profile three people who are

bucking the system, making systemic change, which is really hard to do.

We dove into fixing the school system, law enforcement, even the pharmaceutical industry.

The speakers were pretty amazing.

And now I just want to add one more person for you to listen to. Public defender

Robin Steinberg. She's changing how Jail's work in the US, in particular the bail bond system.

Robin and her husband David Faga co-founded the bail project, which now operates in 18 states.

And it's kind of ingenious what they do. I got to interview Robin in 2019 at the Ted Women Conference.

Here we are on the Ted stage where Robin started off by explaining how she and David came up with

the idea a few years ago. So we had both spent decades in the trenches of the criminal legal

system as public defenders, fighting for each and every client the best we could,

defending people's humanity and their dignity and fighting for their freedom.

And no matter how good we were as lawyers, and I like to think we were really good,

and how forceful we fought on behalf of a client.

Sometimes it all came down to a few hundred dollars. And that was whether or not your client could pay

bail and fight her case from freedom or whether she was going to be locked in jail on Rikers Island.

And desperate would wind up pleading guilty whether she did it or not.

And that just enraged us. And sometimes you know the answers are simple in the right in front of you.

And so we thought well what if we just paid clients bail? And that's where the idea of creating a

revolving bill fund because bail comes back at the end of a case. If we could raise money and put

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