Matty Oates, Tall Ships Portland + Shipyard Brewing Company

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Matteo's island is the former Program Director for Tall Ships Portland and he currently works as Media Manager at Shipyard Brewing Co. He and his brother also host a podcast called Bach to Bach in which they discuss both classical music and beer. Thanks for coming in.

Matty Oates:

Thank you. Happy New Year.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Thank you. So did I pronounce this correctly? Bach to Bach. It's B A C H and then B O C K. Bach to Bach.

Matty Oates:

Yeah, it's seen a lot of variations over the years, Bach being Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer and then B O C K. Bach is a type of German beer, so we thought we were pretty clever when we came up with that name. So there was beer involved in creating that name as well, so it came out pretty well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How long have you been doing this podcast?

Matty Oates:

We just hit two years and we've gone through a little bit of a lull at the moment just because both of us lead fairly busy lives. So getting content out there has been a bit tough recently, but it's always a lot of fun. We've had a lot of great chances to interact with the local music community and both beer and classical music community around the country as well through phone interviews or visiting musicians. It's been great.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is this becoming more popular beer and classical music?

Matty Oates:

Well, from our very biased perspective, I'd like to think so, but we are seeing there's a great organization in town run by the PSO called Symphony and Spirits, takes young folks from 21 to 39 and rotates through different local watering holes before PSO Concerts. There's either a beer or a cocktail designed specifically for the program coming up. And for 25 bucks, it's a chance for young people to mingle, learn a little bit about the program before they all then just walk down to Merrill Auditorium and get to see an amazing performance. So all in all, the scene's coming up slowly, but it's coming up.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I remember interviewing Emily Isaacson, and she had. She had beer happening on beach blankets in the summertime and at the bowling alley. And she's really trying to bring this back into the more popular vernacular, I guess.

Matty Oates:

Yeah, well, you know, why not? We've created this mystique around classical music that you need to sit in a seat and be completely docile and quiet. And we love the idea that if you really appreciate a poet, just like a jazz musician, if solo finishes, it shouldn't be taboo to express that in some way, shape or form. And, you know, there used to be beer at concert halls. Why can't there be beer again? So we like. We think it's a good combo. It kind of breeds in moderation. It breeds a really good time, really good night out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you still play the violin?

Matty Oates:

Absolutely. I still teach a bit as well. Kevin and I both. My brother Kevin Oates, both started quite young. I saw Elmo playing on Sesame street with Isaac Prom and the great violinist when I was 3, and I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. So after pestering my parents weeks in, weeks out, I finally started taking around four years old, and now it's just a great release. It's like an old friend. But Kevin's taken it to a much more professional degree, whereas I kind of keep it on the back burner.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

He's working with the Maine Youth Rock Orchestra and also the main academy of modern music. Is that right?

Matty Oates:

He did in the past, but Kev's now out on his own as the Maine Youth Orchestra is its own nonprofit entering their. They've just passed their third year. They've just released a documentary as well about their tour that they took. It's so the Mayuth Rock Orchestra. For those who don't know, it's a chance for students 12 to 18 to take their classical instruments or their orchestral instruments and play with visiting rock bands. And not. They've played with. They've played with Spencer Albee. They've played with. What's his name? Sorry. They played with Guster this past year at Thompson's Point. Gregory Allen, Isaacoff. A lot of great names. So it's a chance for Kids to realize that their instruments aren't just to be relegated to the formal concert hall, but they can take it and they can use it in every way, shape and form in every genre of music out there. So it's a really wonderful non profit. People should check it out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So you're actually now doing the media for your brother?

Matty Oates:

Oh, no, he's.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

No, I was just kidding. Just putting that nice plug in. I was appreciation of that sibling love that you were giving him.

Matty Oates:

Oh, go. Yeah, no, absolutely. He's the reason I moved here to Maine. So I was out overseas for a very long time and I just saw him doing really amazing things here with Miro and I saw a chance to come back to the US and he was the reason. So Portland then, and hence Portland. And I've got to see him build this thing from nothing to a really successful nonprofit.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Where did you grow up?

Matty Oates:

Albany, New York. It's on the way to everywhere, but there's a lot of people from upstate New York that have come up to Portland. I don't know what that says about both places, but we grew up on a farm in Albany, New York and we used to come up to Ogunquit. Our grandparents had a cottage there since the 40s. So from the earliest stage we were just kind of running on Agunquit Beach. And then the early 90s when it was blew up and Route 1 became a parking lot. And so Kev went to school at USM Gorham and he came back then after, afterwards, and then I, you know, I followed suit. We've always kind of had this love affair with Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What were you doing in Europe?

Matty Oates:

I was racing classic yachts. We were based out of the south of France. And yeah, it was, it was kind of the greatest job of. Of all. It was this 1911 big boat classic called Mariquita. There was only four made back in the day. It's the equivalent of the America's Cupboats of today. And it was, it was based out of the south of France and we would spend the summers racing around the Mediterranean and hitting up all the Rivieras and the Balearics and. And then the winter we would just take care of this boat, which needed an amazing amount of work and then just traveling and exploring. It was fantastic.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I'm trying to remember my geography, but I don't think that Albany has a lot of ocean around it.

Matty Oates:

It does not have a lot of ocean. You are absolutely right. When I tell people I used to work on boats, that's actually the first thing they say is there's not a lot of oceanfront. My very first boat was the sloop Clearwater, which was started by Pete Seeger back in the late 60s. He had built this as a replica of a 17th century Dutch sloop to kind of bring focus back to the cleaning up of the Hudson. This was right around the time of the 1972 Clean Water act and that huge spurt of environmental legislation around that time. This was a rallying point for him to start cleaning up the river. And that was my very first boat. I had gone hitchhiking abroad for five months when I was 18 and I came back and I just took the first shot that I could find which happened to be on this boat. I'd never sailed before and that was the beginning of the end.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's unusual, isn't it? Don't most people get into sailing or boats because they've grown up with it?

Matty Oates:

Essentially, yeah. I was one of the few people that hadn't ever been on a boat before. Everyone else had grown up sailing Optis and J boats and especially around here in Maine, sailing is such a. Casco Bay is one of the greatest spots in the world to grow up sailing. And that was. I was a rarity in that case, but I just fell in love with it, right? I wasn't even on board the boat. I was still a quarter mile away and I could see the top of the mast from over this hill. And that was it. I was a goner.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what was it that I guess spoke to you about that scene, the top of the mast that was calling to you from afar?

Matty Oates:

Oh, I still don't know if I could put it into words, but it is, I think in the beginning there's the romance of it. There is what we all picture. Tall ship sailing to be or sailing of old to be. Wind through your hair, salt spray and all that jazz. And that is the hook. That's what got me in. But then everything else that came after it, the intense discipline, the need to care for the ship, care for your shipmates, an amazingly tight community, and honestly, the life skills that came out of it, I think it was probably the best education I could have ever hoped for. Just the learning, empathy, learning, not that I didn't have it before, but being able to realize small social dynamics within a team and really trying to take that on and come up with a great result each day and learn to keep a cool head when everything's falling apart around you, when stuff's breaking, when there's a storm at 4am and you are in the middle of the Atlantic. That kind of stuff that's a, you know, that's a forge that you don't find a lot of other places. And I think that's what kept me. Just this, this completely different universe.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You worked as the program director for Tall Ships Portland. Tell me about that.

Matty Oates:

I came to Portland, came off boats, came to Portland and again was gonna just take on any job that came my way. I was just happy to be around my brother again. And we were just kind of perusing jobs online one night and Kev goes, matty, have you seen this? And sure enough, here was a call for a program director for the local nonprofit 501 Tall Ships Portland. They were formed in 2015 to help put on the Tall Ships Festival that came through that year. And they were going to put on their take on their first full time employee. So I sat down with their board president, Alex Agnew, and we were meant to have a quick 30 minute coffee. It ended up as four hours. Talking about sailing as sailors do. We just kind of ramble, which I'm doing right now. And that was the beginning of the end. So we had two great summers of sailing programs. And the main mission, most people think it's a nonprofit that does events. The events help fuel the real mission, which is youth education at sea. The idea that getting teenagers out, high schoolers out is, is one of the best ways that they can. I don't even know the right word here. It's one of the best educations they can ever hope for. They learn how to sail, but the sailing's just almost a metaphor. It's just the best classroom. They learn the same things I got to learn. They learn true teamwork in the idea that this is not going to get from point A to point B unless everybody pitches in. Everyone's on ground zero. No one is the cool kid, no one's the nerd, no one's the jock. It is everyone's out of their element and they are given a challenge that they have to rise to meet, otherwise they don't get to where they're going. Thankfully, with the help of Falmouth assistant principal John Radke, he also accredited their summer one week program. So now kids who go out sailing with them also get a semester's worth of high school credit, which is a really great validation of that education as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you think that that's something that we're lacking in today's educational system? And not to diss teachers, because my mom is teacher I think that they work very hard and do a great job. But is there something about teamwork that maybe we could use a little bit of extra?

Matty Oates:

Yeah, I agree with you there. Both my parents are teachers as well. And it is an intensely difficult job to be a teacher, especially nowadays in an age where kids can pull up an answer to a question on their phone, usually faster than a teacher can even say it. But yet learning, utilizing different classrooms, especially a classroom where it forces people to put the phone down and turn their eyes up, that's a huge benefit that I think people still are hesitant to latch onto. And again, they do learn how to sail, but the actual lesson is so much more. It's just a great classroom. You can teach anything on it. You can teach physics when you're talking about friction coefficients and pulleys. You can talk about the Bernoulli principle. You know, what makes airplanes fly with the idea of a lift over a curved surface. When you're looking at sails, you can teach how to clean a toilet. You can do anything at all where you can teach trigonometry with astro navigation. Any subject you can possibly think of can be taught on board these boats. So it's an intensely useful tool.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I guess what I was wondering about was the way that it seems that we have gone. Is a very competitive direction with our kids. And I have three. So I've seen that this has evolved over time, that it seems often very individually focused, especially in the suburbs. We have a lot of. It's very important for people to get into the right schools. And in order to do that, they're kind of sometimes clawing over each other in order to be the best.

Matty Oates:

Sure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Which is kind of understandable. But in the end, you know, when you get out of your great education, you still need to be able to work with people. So I'm wondering if this is something that Tall Ships and other organizations like it can kind of fill a void with.

Matty Oates:

Absolutely. And Tall Ships is just one of so many great organizations that offer that here in Maine. Ripple effect is another. And you're absolutely right. The individual ambition is fantastic and it has driven so many wonderful things. But at the end of the day, not everyone can go it alone. And you do need to know how to work with a team and when to give and when to push and when to compromise and when to support and. And that sort of thing is. Yeah. Is taught through all these great experiential modes. And I. You know, that was probably. I was. I was an app. I was a jerk when I was growing up, I. I was so up myself and not, you know, not outwardly, but I was. So I was right about everything. And learning to just shut up and listen was a great lesson on board these things. And realizing that I don't have all the answers all the time, and it's okay to be wrong and it's okay to ask for help and it's okay to do these things. That was. And realizing, yeah, how I fit into the larger puzzle of a team was instrumental growing up.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think it's also something that I've seen with musicians who work for a long time with other musicians that. Especially when I. When I've watched Spencer, because he's our producer for the radio show, I've seen how he interacts with his team, and it really is. You really have to learn to read one another. You have to learn to give, you have to learn to take. And it. And it seems like that's something that actually comes over time. So it's not necessarily something that you can get out of even a semester working in a classroom together.

Matty Oates:

Right. It's true. It would be a piece of a much larger puzzle. And experience is the best educator, and I hate to quote it because I just saw it yesterday, but Star wars, when Yoda says failure is the best teacher, it takes messing up. It takes a lot of different classrooms, you know, to use a. To refer to a lot of different, you know, forms of education. But it. Yeah, it takes a long time to get there. But the semester, or even just a week on board a boat, it's so intensive. It's like, you know, immersion. Immersion learning where you're chucked into a completely foreign environment and your senses have to be firing all the time. And it does help. I've seen. I've seen some students make amazing transformations. Not everyone, and there's really no predicting who it's really going to resonate with. But there are some students who have come back as completely different people in a very short amount of time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So does it also help you to listen, to learn to listen to yourself versus. I mean, you talked about turning the phone off because sometimes when you're out on the ocean, you don't have access to the Internet and paying attention to the world around you, but also to pay attention to yourself and your intuitive response to things or even your learned response to things like the weather, I guess, or other people.

Matty Oates:

Yeah, trusting. Trusting one's gut is something I've learned. And you know, talking about messing up, I've learned the hard way. Times where I've had the gut feeling and ignored it, and then stuff's gone wrong. That education's been wonderful in the idea that now when I have that gut feeling, I react to it. And even now it may be wrong, but nine times out of 10, it's been the right thing. And like you say with weather, You'd rather have prepared for it and be wrong, then throw caution to the wind and then be wrong because things can go much, much worse.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you mind me asking about one of these times of, I guess, failure and not trusting your intuition? Because I think sometimes these are things that are good for us to hear about other people because we all assume we're the only ones.

Matty Oates:

True. A lot of it was just dealing with feeling like I should check, you know, if you. If we're sailing and I look at something, I look at a line, you know, where we've been sailing out to Bermuda for four days, and we're always checking to make sure that. That no lines are chafing or nothing's. Nothing's wrong. And to the, you know, the times where you see something and the. The gut reaction says that's going to chafe through. And whether you're tired and it's because it's been, you know, you know, you've been up for. You're working on two hours sleep, three hours sleep, and just kind of out of it, you go, it'll be fine till morning. And the next thing you know, it's two hours later and the line's parted and everyone's being called up to take in this sail that's now flopping about. Cause, you know, I didn't trust my gut on that. And times where we've broken broken masts and broken spars and, you know, days we went out sailing, we probably shouldn't have been out in weather that was too strong and this was racing, that voyaging. And just. Yeah. People getting hurt. People or gear breaking and just seeing where pride. Seeing where, for lack of a better term, machoism can just lead you down the wrong path and attempt to prove someone wrong or better somebody. And it just. It get. It gets you nowhere in the end. It really doesn't.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is this part of that learning that you're not always right that you were talking about with regard to yourself when you were younger?

Matty Oates:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Learning to, Learning to be wrong is. I think the best thing that we could possibly learn is just. And a lot of times realize, you know, on a boat, the hierarchy is very rigid and needs to be because the responsibility flows uphill. That person at the top of the hill needs to then have the ability to control all the variables. So, you know, a captain may need to be a bit of a tyrant, but it's because if anything goes wrong, they bear all the responsibility and there's no other way to it. So there's times learning to hold your tongue even if you don't believe things right. And the only time you really can speak up is if you believe people are in jeopardy, safety's in jeopardy. But yeah, learning to swallow pride, learning to just accept the fact that you may not agree, but you aren't wearing the captain pants. So that's. You just got to suck it up and go with it because you may not have all the answers.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And again, I wonder if there isn't something cultural or societal or educational that hasn't kind of started us all down the path of believing that we all have to be right and we have to be right the first time.

Matty Oates:

Yeah, it's true. I completely agree with you. We've gone down that path. But at the same time, it feels like a lot of us don't, then if we are wrong, don't have, we don't want to accept the responsibility that we were wrong. And that's the other thing. Just being able to raise your hand and say, my name is Mariot and I was wrong like that. That's. I feel that's a lesson that should be taught more. And yeah, no, it's, it's, yeah. Valuable life skills that I think, like you were saying before, in to strive to be more competitive and be more individualistic, we miss some of the most crucial. My mom's a preschool teacher and she has all these parents who are at age 4 and 5, they're wondering if their kids are ready for kindergarten and are they going to do well in the tests. And she's like, hold on, hold on. Can they share at playtime? Do they know how to take turns? Do they know these are the real skills that will get them through life? Colleges are not going to be looking at, at their preschool test scores. They don't care those. But if you can share with somebody, that's going to make you a good friend, a good partner, a good business partner.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's so important you decided that you were going to switch gears and go from the nonprofit world to work with Shipyard Brewing Company. But you've actually been able to continue to bridge that gap and you found that there are important ways that working in a for profit situation can help with the non profit situation.

Matty Oates:

Absolutely. I started working with Shipyard Brewing as program director of Tall Ships because Shipyard was a great supporter and sponsor of the, the nonprofit. So I got to work closely with the, the staff there through our events and, and, and then going. Starting to work with Shipyard in June of this year. It really opened my eyes to how much Shipyard and really the entire brewing community here in Maine gives back to the nearly 13,000 nonprofits that are in Maine alone. So there's a lot of people with strong missions and great hearts, but it's tough to run a non profit on your own and to see the astronomical rise the brewing industry and then how they give back. I had no idea. Shipyard gives back to the number of nonprofits that it does. And it adds such a feeling of community being able to be at these events and help support everything from Portland Trails and Spurwink and some of these organizations that do great and much needed work in Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, it's interesting having worked kind of in that, in between where I've had experience in the for profit and the nonprofit worlds, sometimes for profit gets a bad rap. Sometimes, you know, you're seen as like the evil organization that's money grubbing. But then when you realize that not only are they supporting nonprofits, but they're also supporting people's families and paying their health insurance and making it possible for people to have roofs over their heads, it's easier to be less judgmental, I guess.

Matty Oates:

Yeah, that's so true. And it kind of comes back to like the yin and the yang. We wouldn't be able to have one without the other. We couldn't have nonprofits if there were no for profits to support them. And, and having been through, not just through tall ships Portland, but also before I went out to France, all the boats I worked on were 501c3 nonprofits doing environmental education or historical education. So from the beginning, realizing how tight these budgets have to be and how important fundraising is and how important donors are and yeah, without those four profits, we would have great intentions with the nonprofit world, but no way to execute. So you're completely right. They're so integral.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And I think that's again, something that maybe when I was growing up and when I. All this stuff I'm saying to you, I've kind of experienced myself. So it's not as if I'm accusing other people of feeling a certain way about for profit organizations. I think when you go through, when I went through my academic training to become a doctor, there's this sort of sense that, that there's these ivory towers that we all can live within and then all the people down below who actually have to work for a living and scrub the toilets and do the for profit stuff, somehow there's something base about that because they're doing, they're working for money.

Matty Oates:

Right, right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And I think that's a transition that we all have to go through. This sense that, you know, there's this idealistic view of the world that you get to be part of when you're in the academic field, but then once you get out, there's this reality of life.

Matty Oates:

Yeah. There was a great article written, I think 2008, maybe 2009, published in the New York Times. It was in one of the Sunday inserts. I believe the title was A case be made for working with your hands. And it was a guy who had an English degree from University of Chicago. He'd done a lot of freelance writing. He'd done a lot of work at think tanks in D.C. and he left it all, he did a bit of freelance writing, but he left it all to open a motorcycle repair shop because he'd been tinkering. And he realized bit by bit that the thought process, the actual analysis that went through breaking open a motorbike was at the time for him far more real than the think tank stuff he was doing in dc. And that's not to put down that work and that which, which is integral. But he brought up that same idea of we pass the linemen working in a storm to repair a transformer and we say, oh my, what a tough job. But is there a little tinge of jealousy in there as well? Do we actually want to be the one performing this crucial task? And that's another thing that we did focus on a little bit with tall ships, with the idea of the maritime trades and how we have. We've turned away from promoting the trades. It's been this constant stream that everyone needs to go to a four year university and that's it. And that's why we've got electricians making six figures, because there's nobody out there. And it's, it's. The thinking is not only incredibly difficult, but with a very. If you get it wrong, it's a pretty abrupt end working with AC power. So you know, you got to make sure you're thinking clear and thinking ahead and thinking through everything that you do. And same thing with plumbing and engineering. And Maine has so many opportunities. There's a boatyard, Washburn and Doughty up the way that make these state of the art tractor tugs that we see plowing the waterways here. And they are having a tough time finding kids at 18 years old to sweep the floors of the workshop for 18 bucks an hour, which if you're 18 years old, is a great wage around here. And they will take you and they'll see what you're interested in, whether it's welding or whatever, and they'll put you in an apprenticeship and provide you with a great career in the state of Maine. And I feel like a lot of people don't even know these exist. So. Yeah, sorry, that was a bit of a tangent there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think it's an important thing for us to keep considering that we live within a community and different types of intelligence are valuable. You can have the type of intelligence that enables you to get a PhD and study something at the university. University. You can have the type of intelligence that enables you to keep the power on. You can have the type of intelligence that enables you to build a boat. And it's not that any of these are better or worse or more valuable or less valuable. They're all very valuable and they keep us all moving forward together.

Matty Oates:

Right?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I think this took. I'm okay with that tangent since I believe in it. So that's the bottom line we're talking and I'll let you go on that one. I've been speaking with Mattie Oates, who is the former program director for Tall Ships Portland, who currently works as media manager at Shipyard Brewing Company. He and his brother Kevin also host a podcast called Bach to Bach in which they discuss both classical music and beer. This has been a fun conversation. Thanks for coming in.

Matty Oates:

Thank you for having me.