Making Better Episode 18: Brian Dunning

Science writer Brian Dunning is the host and producer of the Skeptoid podcast and the author of seven books on scientific skepticism.

Skeptoid is one of the longest running and consistently most popular independent podcasts, having surpassed 100 million downloads in January 2017.

Dunning is the writer and presenter of the documentary films Here Be Dragons and Principles of Curiosity. He has appeared on numerous radio shows and television documentaries, and also hosts the science video series inFact with Brian Dunning

A computer scientist by trade, Brian uses new media to showcase the rewards of science and critical thinking. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and lives in central Oregon.

As always, this episode of Making Better is fully transcribed, and you can

Making Better Episode 17: Lisa Willis

Dr. Lisa Willis holds a PHD in immunology, is the present assistant professor of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. She focuses on helping women achieve their goals in STEM fields: Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics, and she describes something that she calls “the glass obstacle course” which is a lot more complicated than a glass ceiling, and she provides a number of good examples as to the things a woman needs to navigate in academia. Read her full bio here, follow Dr. Willis on Twitter, and as always, read a full transcript of episode 17.

Episode 17: Lisa Willis Transcript


Chris: Hi, I’m Chris Hofstader.

Francis: Hi, I’m Francis DiDonato.

Chris: And this is Episode 17 of Making Better Podcast, featuring Professor Lisa Willis from the University of Alberta.

Francis: It’s a pleasure for me to have Lisa Willis on, because, like myself, she also has a PhD in Immunology.


Francis: It’s really important that academia opens up to demographics that it seems to have really hindered, historically.

Chris: Ok, with that, let’s get on with the episode.

Chris: Dr. Lisa Willis, welcome to Making Better!

Lisa: Thank you for having me.

Francis: Yes, thank you very much for coming on, very excited to have you today.

Chris: We first became aware of you on the CBC podcast, “Quirks and Quarks.” How did you come to become a spokesperson for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, also known as STEM?

Lisa: Well, I am a female, in STEM, and I have come up—did my undergrad degree at UVIC, my graduate degree at the University of Guelph, and then my post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto; and so I have lived this Canadian experience of being a woman in STEM. I always saw things happen, and I wasn’t really sure why they were happening, or what they meant. So, for example, when I was a student one of the faculty members told some very sexist jokes in class, in front of 300 immunology students—and that kind of bothered me, but it was the status quo, nobody wanted to say anything about it. And then when I was a PhD student, I saw a lot of things happen that really should not have happened, and that bothered me too, and there’s always this sort of idea that women are somehow not as good at science, or not quite as deserving of awards. And I always had questions, you know, why is it that the longer I am in science, the harder it is to get ahead, the more obstacles I seem to face—is it me? Or is there something else going on? And one of the issues is that the places that I was working and doing my schooling were predominantly men, so when I did my PhD at Guelph, my department had only 12% female faculty members, even though the student population was almost 50%. So that’s an issue, I wasn’t seeing role models, I wasn’t seeing people that I could talk to about these experiences. And eventually, I just got fed up with having these questions and these doubts about whether I belonged in science, and I happened to see someone give a talk—Dr Imogene Coe from Ryerson University—give a talk on women in science, and she talked about how there were systemic biases, and there was research about this. That just lit a fire under me, so I went to the literature—I’m a scientist, all of my information, all what I deal with on a daily basis, is literature and what other people have found with nice studies. So I went to the literature, and spent probably about two weeks searching through every single paper I could find, not just on women in science, but also on racialized people in science, on people with disabilities, on LGBTQ individuals, indigenous peoples, and what I found was shocking to me. I had always thought, growing up, that sexism wasn’t a thing anymore, and now there was really, really good data that shows that simply having a woman’s name at the top of a CV, even if the CV is identical to the man’s, just having that name be female means that the people, professors, reading that CV or that resume, think that woman is less competent and less hireable. And that’s just not OK to me. So I saw the data, it really transformed how I thought about my place in science but I also recognized that there was a gap in the education about equity, diversity and inclusion, about women in science. Most of the training was focused on telling people that there was an issue, but from an anecdotal point of view: people tell lots of stories about issues, they try to appeal to the morality, that it’s morally wrong to discriminate against women, and what I saw was that with researchers, that wasn’t coming through, the message was not making it through to researchers because they’re used to being analytical. If you spent 30 years training your brain to think a certain way about the world, to be analytical and to question everything, well then the information about EDI has to be presented to you in that way, so that you can understand it. And no one was doing that, and so that’s when I started Inclusive STEM: it’s talks and workshops, seminars, that are designed to teach scientists, at every level, about equity, diversity and inclusion using what the data says.

Chris: I was Vice President of Engineering at a company here in Florida that makes software and hardware for people with vision impairment. When I took that job, I had a team of just eight people in software engineering, and all of them were white men, a couple of them were blind. When I left that company six years later, I had fifty people on my staff and twenty-three were women, which I did have to go well out of my way to try to come up with gender equity on the team, because 90% of my applicants were men. But when you were discussing on Quirks and Quarks the notion of the “glass obstacle course,” a lot of those were issues I was aware of and went out of my way to try to avoid. So if you could speak to some of those particular issues that women face…

Lisa: Yeah. So, the thing is, this is a cultural problem. This is not something that white men are doing to women, this is something that every single one of us does, it’s a cultural bias that men are better. We see it in our TV, in our movies, in our books, in our casual conversation. What happens, because we have this systemic belief that men are better than women, every single one of us perpetuates that at every single interaction in every single day. So there is not one glaring place where women are discriminated against, it happens everywhere. So in university, women are graded more harshly on their assignments than men are. They are less likely to get scholarships and fellowships and grant money, they are less likely to be invited to speak at meetings, they are less likely to get awards, and the problem is that speaking at meetings and getting funding and getting awards: these are our scientific currency. And if you are slightly less likely to get an invitation to speak at a meeting, or a grant, then you’re also less likely to get that award, which means you’re also less likely to get invited to speak at a meeting. It actually snowballs, a lot of tiny things that snowball into this giant issue, the longer you’re in them, the worse the issue gets.

Francis: Where do you think this comes from? In my own personal life, I can’t imagine why other men would in any way look at women differently in science, more favorably or not favorably. Why do you think this even happens?

Lisa: I think it stems from a history of a power imbalance between men and women. So if you look at the majority of people in power in Canada and the US, those are Europeans that came over, right? Europeans with power who came over, and if you look at a lot of the European power structures, if you just look at the UK, women had very little power. They had to have a dowry so that their fathers could pay men to marry them, essentially. They had no choice, they were considered property. In other places around the world, women are still considered property. So I think that this comes from an historical culture that now we’re trying to change, because we recognize that it shortchanges people. We are losing out on human capital, we are losing out when people cannot come to work and perform their best. We are losing out when we say that we don’t want to hear someone’s opinion simply because they’re a woman, or they’re a person of color.

Francis: You mentioned Inclusive STEM—is that the same as I-STEM?

Lisa: No. Inclusive STEM is my own little title for my program of talks and workshops. I go all over Canada talking to scientists. I’ve given lots of talks in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC. I haven’t been out to the Maritimes yet, but I would love to. I also haven’t been up north yet, but again, I would love to. And I really try to tailor my talk to the audience that I am talking to. One of the really important things when you’re talking to anyone, when you’re trying to change someone’s mind about something, is making sure that you’re not shouting something from the mountaintop while they’re down in the valley below, because that shouting goes right over their heads, it doesn’t work to change their minds. And so I’m trying to meet people where they are, to get them to change their minds, really change their actions, about women, racialized people, people with disability and indigenous people, and LGBTQ as well. I tailor it to who I’m talking to, I have seminars that I give to high school students, everyone from high school students all the way to faculty at universities who make decisions and write grants. And I talk about the scientific benefit of working with diverse teams, I talk about the numbers in Canada and how, for women, the percentage of women in STEM fields hasn’t changed in 20 years—most people find that shocking. We might think that we’re getting better, but the numbers don’t actually support that. I talk about the data demonstrating bias in STEM, in the last 10 years. The amount of data that has been generated that demonstrates bias in very clear ways is just extraordinary. And then I talk about what do we actually do, every single one of us, on a daily basis; what do we do to change the culture, to make it so that people can actually come to work and be their authentic selves, and contribute to an amazing team.

Chris: What are your thoughts on the Harvard University implicit bias test?

Lisa: I think it’s a great starting point for getting people aware of their biases. Every single human being has bias, it’s normal, it’s cultural, it doesn’t make you a bad person. But acting on those biases is the problem—we’ve got two ways of thinking about it, there’s the intentional biases, there are people who actually think that they are better than you because they are male, or because they are white or whatever; and then we have something called unintentional or unintended bias, implicit bias, Harvard implicit bias test. And these are biases that we don’t know we have, and every single human being has them. They cause you to respond to situations, to respond to people, in ways that are discriminatory. It’s so important to note that the end result is still discrimination, regardless of whether or not you intended it to be. And so the Harvard Implicit Bias Test is a great way for people to start paying attention to what their biases are, and it’s only when you pay attention to what your biases are that you can actually start to change your behavior. You can have an interaction with a person and say, “am I feeling this way about this person because of their skin color, or am I feeling this way about this person because I genuinely actually don’t like what they’re saying?” And once you start to think about that in your daily interactions, you can start to modify your behavior, and that’s what we really want. We need to change the culture.

Francis: What are some of the implicit biases that came up in the Harvard study? What are the most common ones?

Lisa: There’s lots about women. There’s a really fun one, just if you want to have a little bit of fun with Canada-US biases; there are all kinds of racial biases, there’s ageism, sexism, all of the -isms that you’ve heard of. I imagine that sexism and racism are the most insidious, the most common of those biases and the most insidious, because most people don’t actually think that they are biased.

Chris: I am going to have to argue that able-ism is worse than those.

Lisa: Oh, yes, my apologies. I would agree, absolutely agree.

Chris: I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, that was an opinion piece, though, that said that the Harvard test doesn’t scale well and it has trouble reproducing results, which is common among almost any psychological study.

Lisa: Yeah, well, so the way that the test works, is that you’re given a set of associations: pictures, essentially, and you’re asked to associate a picture with a word, or a word with a word, and you have to do it as quickly as possible without getting it wrong. So that’s how the test works, it doesn’t actually ask you what is your bias. But if you are faster at associating men with, a picture of a man, with a word that represents power or strength, then you are associating the picture of a woman with that word, then that is how the test discovers your bias. And so you can sort of get good at getting in the zone sometimes, and you can go really fast, but you can also slow down and fudge the test. I mean, it’s an easy test to fudge. And it’s certainly probably not something that would hold up in a court of law, for example, but anyone who is going there and trying to start understanding their biases and how they might be interacting with people, I think it’s really good for that.

Francis: It sounds like a really great way to start measuring something like that.

Lisa: I think so. You have to start somewhere.

Chris: Another article I read, preparing to talk to you, was in the Atlantic, and it interesting—and this might speak to European culture in general—but it said that in the Scandinavian countries, where gender equity is considered the best in the world, there also seems to be problems with women in STEM that they don’t, that women there tend to trend toward the more traditional fields that women might be seen in, education and nursing and other sorts of things, while men tend to trend towards STEM subjects. I wonder what you might think about the Scandinavian situation?

Lisa: I have seen that data, and I’m not 100% sure what the rationale for that is. That culture definitely supports women; so for example, women have really nice (and I think men too, but that could depend), parental leave policy…

Chris: Yes, it’s for men and women…

Lisa: Yeah. So there are some things that they’re doing really, really well, that I think we could sort of model our own society on, but I don’t know if anyone has looked at their biases, right? Because you can have a really good parental leave policy, but then also expect that the woman would take that policy more than the man. So I don’t know about how the rest of that culture operates, because I haven’t looked into it, so I can’t really address your question. But I think it’s a very interesting thing that we should be looking at.

Francis: I’d like to play a devil’s advocate for a minute and suggest that there could be a biological difference between men and women that could account for some of it—what I’d like to mention is that, when I grew up, I guess because of being in New York and the type of people that I grew up around, I had a very strong belief that differences between men and women were pretty much, not necessarily imposed, but they were culturally imposed maybe, and that there really wasn’t any difference between boys, girls, men and women, and it was all just sort of like role-playing that we learned, learned behavior. Then, I had a child who was a boy, and what I witnessed was that when you take a bunch of 5 year olds and put them together, you know, the boys, most of them, not all, most of them like to play a certain way and the girls like to play a certain way. And you kind of see this continuing throughout childhood. And it was at that point I realized that, you know, there was just like nothing I did to make my son amazed at trains and fire trucks and wanted to play war stuff, but he just did it. It was like something in him that behavior was instinctual or something. So, I personally think that there is some kind of like biological mediator or, in the majority of men and women, there’s something that trends them in a certain direction. I don’t know necessarily if you agree with that or not, or if you do, whether that could have something to do with why people—when they’re still pretty young and figuring out what they want to do with their lives, some go into STEM and some go into other directions.

Lisa: So, there are definitely some differences between men and women at a biochemical level. There are a couple of different body parts, there is more testosterone, on average, in men than in women, and conversely there is more estrogen and progesterone in women than in men, and our immune systems function a little bit differently. There’s some really fascinating science that’s happening with the immune system and with pain receptors. But our brains don’t function differently. It was long thought that there were genetic differences that gave rise to the male brain and the female brain, and that research has been pretty much universally debunked. When you look at children, if you look at national toy catalogs—so, I don’t know if in the US you have Toys R Us, but in Canada we’ve got Toys R Us, and Canadian Tire—they sell children’s toys. And if you look at their catalog, from about zero to two years of age, those toys are gender-neutral, they are mostly sort of blues and yellows and greens in color, they’re rattles and stuff like that, whatever. But as soon as you get older than two years of age, the toys split into girls’ toys and boys’ toys. And if you look at the catalog, you can go online and you can look at these catalogs, the toys that are marketed to girls are all about passive things, they are about physical appearance, like braiding hair. The girls that are in these images, they look a certain way, there’s lots of pink, there’s lots of princess stuff; and the boys’ toys are very blue, but they’re also, the toys are full of muscles, they’re really, really overdeveloped muscles, there are guns—boys that are shooting guns, and there’s a lot of violence in these ads that are marketed to kids that are three. And so as young as three, we are socializing our children into what they should like and shouldn’t like. You should like toys, or you shouldn’t like toys. And as soon as you get into a situation where your child is interacting with lots of other children, whether that’s primary school or whatever, then you see a massive shift. So boys who used to like playing with dolls, or liked painting their toenails or wearing skirts, all of a sudden there’s now huge social pressure to not do any of those things, and five-year-olds can be utterly brutal to one another when it comes to these gender norms. And so I think what we’re seeing, even at these very young ages, is less about biology and more about society. I mean, it starts before the baby is even born, whether the parents decide to paint the nursery bright blue or bright pink; whether the parents decide to clothe their baby in gender-neutral clothing or in things that are very gendered; whether or not they allow their boys to grow out their hair, which is typically a very female thing to do—this starts way before we even think it starts. And it has echoes throughout your entire life, and I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing a lot of young people experiencing this gender dysphoria, not knowing if they want to be more masculine or more feminine, or whether they prefer to use the pronoun “they” because they don’t want to be either of those things—we’re having a bit of a crisis, and it’s affecting our children right up until they graduate high school, they’re having these issues. So I don’t know of any really good evidence that points at biological differences for these socialized phenomena. I think it’s far more the social phenomena than it is the biological.

Chris: I’ve done a lot of work in India over the years, and there’s tremendous problems with sexism there, but at least in my field—software engineering—it’s about 50% female, which is entirely different than the US and Canada, where software engineering is dominated extraordinarily by white and Asian men. So I don’t understand why, how things are different in India, if it was actually biological. And I can’t speak to the rest of the STEM fields, either, though, I can only speak to software engineering, it’s the only one I know the data on.

Lisa: I think there’s some really good points in that. There are a lot of theories where, if you look at one dataset you can pull out things, maybe this is why men are better or whatever, but when you start to accumulate the data and try to reproduce those studies and look at other cultures, you start to see that maybe these theories don’t hold up so much, and that’s a really good example of one of those. I mean, even if you look in the US, the first software engineers were women, they weren’t men.

Chris: That’s true. And they were in the Navy.

Lisa: Yeah. There were lots in the Army, there were a lot at NASA.

Chris: They were called “calculators” at NASA.

Francis: There seems to be a huge difference, though, at least among whites and male vs. female—I guess it’s true, there’s something like, according to Scientific American in 2010, 51% in STEM were white males and 18% were white females; and then similar among Asians, where 13% were Asian male and 5% were Asian female. So pronounced.

Lisa: There was always that stereotype that Asians were good at math. I don’t know if you grew up with those stereotypes, but I certainly grew up with those stereotypes.

Chris: I had a good friend, she and I were at a bar in Las Vegas, and she’s an Asian woman, and we were talking about bias and things like that, and she says, “everyone assumes I’d know math, or Kung Fu.” She says, she was a model, paid to have her picture taken, and was not very good at math in any way, shape or form, but she said everyone always just assumed she could do math.

Lisa: So historically, there was a good reason for that—I mean, there were lots of cultural reasons, but the number system in Chinese is far simpler than it is in English, and the numbers themselves are shorter words. And I don’t know if this study has held up, someone who’s actually an expert in this area should talk about this instead of me—there was a study that was done that looked at how many words in a row you could remember, and it’s not the number of words in the row, it’s the timing it takes you to get through those words. The human brain seems to be wired so that you’ve got, I think it was like six seconds, but I can’t be certain, but it was like six seconds. Whatever number of things you can get through in sex seconds, that what you can remember later on when you’re challenged on it. And you can, just by the size of the words, you can get through more numbers when you’re speaking Chinese than you can when you’re speaking English. And so, the simpler number system, combined with the ability to remember larger numbers, combined with the societal factors that valued people who got really good grades so that they could maybe come over to North America and have a better life or make more money or whatever the reasons for coming over to North America were, certainly really provided the foundation for why North Americans thought that people of Asian descent had better math abilities. But that only works if your first language is Chinese. If you learn the number system in English, then that completely falls apart, and now that we have so many third and fourth-generation North American people of Asian descent, that stereotype doesn’t work anymore. But we cling to them for some reason—socially, we like to cling to these stereotypes.

Francis: I was thinking of maybe switching gears—right now, the percentage of grads that get funded is the lowest ever, and what I’ve seen and experienced is that the stress level of being a scientist—which was already really, really high when I started, a couple of decades ago—it’s just gotten worse. And I think a lot of people are wishing they never got into science to begin with, at this moment. I wondering if the general atmosphere of being a researcher, being a scientist right now is one that is chasing people away. I asked a friend who happened to be African-American, and he was in the MD PhD, why there are so few black men in research—and I think that number is bound to be something like 2% of researchers in America…

Lisa: Is it really that low? I would have thought it was much higher than that.

Chris: It’s about 13% in the States.

Francis: Yeah, I would have as well. Black females account for 6.5% overall, but like in science it’s 2%. Basically what he told me is that if you can get to the point where you can get a PhD, a lot of the African-American men that he knew thought, I should just get an MD, my overall quality of life will be better, ultimately. And honestly, I can’t argue with that logic.

Lisa: I absolutely hear what you’re saying. This job, being a faculty member, leading a lab, is the most stressful job I could imagine, for so many reasons—funding levels are low, competition is high. I take my work home with me every night, I am 100% a workaholic. So is my partner, who is also a scientist. So It is not a life for everyone, and I think that the harder that it gets, we are pushing people away, essentially, but we are pushing disproportionately women and racialized persons and non-able-bodied persons and indigenous persons away, because it’s already so hard, they have an even harder time because of the bias that they would have to face. And so their road to success is longer and harder than other people’s, which is already long and hard. And so I think that’s a major problem. We also are not set up as a scientific society to accommodate people who have different needs; so if you just look at parents, for example, a woman who has just given birth needs to breastfeed or pump, and there’s nowhere at a university where a woman could go to have a little bit of privacy so that she could do this in comfort, if that’s what she wanted to do. We could easily have a parent room in the department where people who have just come back to work can go for an hour over the lunch period to play with or spend quality time with a new baby, male or female—you know, caregiver could bring a baby in for an hour and they could sit and have little family time. This is a really easy change that we could make that would allow people to come back to work after a child is born; we don’t make these changes, even though they are easy. We don’t want to change our system to allow people who are different to be able to succeed on their own terms, and that I think is a major problem. We are failing in that regard.

Chris: So how did you personally navigate the “glass obstacle course” to get to the point of being faculty at a prestigious university?

Lisa: There are lots of things that you can do. You have to be tenacious and willing to work hard. Male or female, white or racialized, it is hard work to get where you need to go. Having a really great support system is crucial—it’s really hard, it’s just so much harder to do it, when you don’t have someone at your back cheering you on—and that goes for any field that you go into. And you have to be a little bit strategic about who you decide to work with, because they are the people who are going to help your career along. You need people who are gong to write you excellent reference letters, you need people who are going to give you opportunities to go and talk at a meeting, for example. And so, one of the things that I think is perfectly OK to do is to ask in an interview, what are your thoughts on equity, diversity and inclusion? And if your potential professor has never even thought about these things, or thinks it’s not a problem, then as a woman or a person of color, or whatever group you belong to, you don’t want to work for that person, because your journey is gong to be harder. You need to work for someone who is going to help you do what it is that you need to do. That’s what I did, I worked for some absolutely amazing people who were incredibly supportive, and that combined with my partner’s support, my own drive and a lot of luck, I was able to get to the University of Alberta. One of the things that I think is important to consider, and I’m happy to have people debate me on this, is—so there are people who are at the forefront of equity, diversity and inclusion thought, and these are the people who come up with words like “micro-aggression”—not just words, but the theory behind them and the meaning—micro-aggression, intersectionality, all of those kind of things. And so there it’s sort of at the forefront of EDI thought. And then there’s the rest of the human population, and when I talk to the human population about my science and my expertise, I don’t talk about the names of molecules and stuff like that, I talk to them in a way that they can understand. I talk about how I am trying to understand how bacteria sense and respond to the environment, because that is something that everyone can understand. I think it’s really important talk about EDI, to acknowledge that you can be an ally, you can be a good EDI person, without necessarily diving into the details. You don’t have to get pronouns right every time, you don’t have to be comfortable using the word “intersectionality” in daily speech. I think asking people to do that is asking them to meet you where you are, instead of meeting them where they are. And so I would really like to see people start making steps, every single person start making steps, start making little changes in their lives that gets them on the path. And those little changes will snowball into bigger changes, and that’s how we’re going to change the culture. I think demanding that someone use one of these newer terms, regardless of how great that term is and how important that term is to a marginalized group of people—because it starts to explain their experience, that’s really important—but I don’t think we should be asking them to be that savvy on this topic.

Chris: I’ve stopped attending intersectionality conferences because they always forget the accessibility for the people with disabilities.

Lisa: Oh god, yeah.

Chris: In many cases I’ve written to them months in advance, asking and even offering to help, and they just refuse..

Lisa: Yeah. I know that there are conferences now that are asking about food allergies, they ask in advance about accessibility issues and how they can help, and I think that that’s incredibly important. That’s the way that everyone should be moving, and it is ironic, and I’m so sorry you experienced this, that a group of people who are supposed to be experts on this were not inclusive. That’s just not OK.

Francis: One of the things that I’ve seen in science a lot is that, although we are supposed to be evidence-based, sort of on the cutting edge in a lot of objective—a lot of them are not necessarily very mature people, like on a social level. In academia especially you’ll see that, I think, because they don’t have the normal constraints that industry might have on what it takes to just get along in a group and function optimally. Maybe there’s some element of that as well.

Lisa: There’s definitely some of that, and my sister laughs at me all the time because I am not emotionally intelligent. I am incredibly smart and analytical and logical, and I have a really hard time managing emotions, and they’re two sides of a coin. It’s a spectrum. Some people are good at both, I guess, but when you train for so long to be a scientist, you train to be really analytical, and there’s also a power thing that happens; so once you become a professor, you have a lot of power over the trainees that work with you. That can be a problem. More educated, so you frequently know more than the other people in the room about topics, and that also goes to scientists heads a little bit. They start to think that maybe their experts outside of their area of expertise—there’s a whole thing that happens. But you’re absolutely right. I would say half of the people that I work with are not the most emotionally intelligent individuals, yes.

Francis: Maybe it would nice to discuss your work a little, in laymen’s terms.

Lisa: Yeah. We have two areas of expertise, or rather two areas of study. The first one is trying to understand how bacteria sense and respond to the environment and environmental changes. So, bacteria are literally everywhere, and we’re really interested in the ones that are on your skin and are part of what’s called your microbiome. So, all of the bacteria that live inside and on you, and they are just vitally important for humans to be healthy. And what we’re trying to do is to understand how they respond to a change in nutrients, or how they respond to a predator, because bacteria can actually be predators of one another. Viruses can show up, fungi can show up, it’s a very complex, dynamic environment and we’re trying to understand how bacteria sense that, with the hope of being able to modify it. So bacteria are incredibly important in IBD—Inflammatory Bowel Disease—in mental health, in immunity, in all kinds of things. So that’s one of the areas that we’re studying. The other area is the human immune system, and we are really interested in ways that the human immune system is different in men and women. Women obviously have a unique set of challenges, biologically, when it comes to reproduction, and the immune system plays a critical role in that. One of the major things is that you have to essentially turn the immune system down so that it doesn’t actually attack the growing baby, and so women have this particularly highly regulated immune system around pregnancy, and that changes how they get other diseases. So for example, women are ten times more likely to get autoimmune disease than men. And so we’re interested in trying to understand these differences so that we can figure out how this gives rise to disease.

Francis: The microbiome topic is really hot right now, and there’s a lot of areas, I guess, that it’s thought to be a key factor in. You mentioned depression, was it? Psychological?

Lisa: Mental health.

Francis: Mental health, can you explain that?

Lisa: Yeah. So, your gut microbiome, especially, is linked to your mental health. If you think about your nervous system, one of the largest nerves in the body wraps around your gut, the vagus nerve. And that has all sorts of communication with your brain—there’s some pretty good evidence that the composition and function of your gut bacteria can actually influence depression and other mental health disorders, and so by changing your microbiome, you might be able to change how it is that your thought processes work. It’s a fascinating area of study, and I think one that’s really, really important for us to be looking at, because I think mental health is one of the most important societal issues that we have right now.

Francis: Very much so. We had as a guest M.E. Thomas, who wrote a book about her life as a sociopath…

Lisa: Oh, cool!

Francis: ..and she’s a sociopath but she’s also extremely high functioning, does well as a professor, and is part of a community of people who are investigating what neuro-diversity really means in culture right now. What we’re doing is, we’re sort of understanding diversity in a different way, in how people’s minds function differently, and this one-size-fits-all concept for what it means to be a functioning human is really, never really made sense and it certainly doesn’t make sense now, with what we know.

Lisa: Yep. I think we should stop using the word “normal,” it doesn’t exist.

Francis: Yeah. They use “neurotypical.” That’s a little better. But yeah, I think “normal” is a pretty loaded word at this moment. A huge part of what’s gong to ultimately make this world a better place is acceptance and even celebration of diversity. Why not? You know, I live in New York City, and New York City is proof that diversity is something that can totally work. You know, because we have people from everywhere that come here, and we all get off on the fact that there is this diversity and [inaud]. That’s why people come here, because it’s not this cookie-cutter city where you only have one thing going on, and one culture. I mean, it just adds to the vibrancy, to the sort of like the ecology of it all. Diversity is good, it helps the world become a much more interesting and even sustainable place.

Lisa: I completely agree. I lived in Toronto and it was the same way, a melting pot of all different kinds of people. I wonder if some people don’t like that opening up of possibilities—for some people, knowing exactly what their prescribed path is and how they’re going to get there is a very comforting thing, and I wonder if that opening up of possibilities scares them.

Francis: Well, it’s scary until you experience it, and then you realize that those fears were unfounded, and that maybe you’re like limiting yourself with those. In science we use the term “elegance” that’s something that I’ve always loved in science, that concept of elegance in science, where you can have a result that, it’s just so simple and clear and pure, it’s something that you experience as beauty. That’s something I was wondering if you had any comments on, like, how you experience beauty in science or in the work you do to forward diversity.

Lisa: I experience beauty in science all the time. I absolutely love it, there is nothing else that I would rather do than science. It’s amazing. I don’t really see diversity so much in the science itself, but in my team, seeing people realize that things were possible that they didn’t know were possible, or working together cohesively to come up with that beauty in science, I think that is beautiful, and something that I really try to cultivate within my team. I am excited about the possibilities for the future, and what I would actually love to do would be to challenge you and your listeners to make some changes. Choose one thing that would advance Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, just one thing, and to try that out and see what they can do to try to change the culture. That’s what I would like to do.

Francis: So can I infer by that that you’re optimistic about the future?

Lisa: I am optimistic about the future. This is very much a social conversation, there are things that governments are doing to try to improve this, there are things that individuals are doing to try to improve this; if you look at the movie industry, they’re making incredible strides. We’ve got female directed, female led movies that are doing just outstandingly well at the box office. That’s been a real grass-roots, women deciding that they’re going to make things, and we can’t sit around and wait for the culture to change, we can’t sit around and wait for the people in power to empower us, we need to take that power for ourselves. And I’m incredibly hopeful for the future.

Francis: Do you have any books or anything you’d like to promote?

Lisa: I don’t. I am writing a couple of articles on what exactly scientists can do to change the culture, steps that they can take; hopefully that will be out in the next few months, but I don’t have anything at the moment.

Chris: Well, thanks so much for coming on the Making Better podcast.

Lisa: Thank you very much for having me.

Francis: Yeah, thank you, it’s been a real pleasure talking with you.

Lisa: Yeah, you too.



Making Better Episode 16: Liz Lutgendorf

Sina Bahram from episode one joins us to talk to Liz Lutgendorff, who describes herself as “always busy, a geek, punk, historian (Ph.D. in the history of secularism), Cyclist, Londoner, and a Trustee @ConwayHall. She hosts a podcast called Science Fiction Double Feature, where she interviews an author about their science fiction novel, followed by interviewing an expert about some aspect of the book, be it science, history, or anything else really. She also blogs at blogendorff. Liz can also be found on Twitter as @sillypunk.

As always, a complete transcript of this episode.

Episode 16: Liz Lucendorf Transcript

Making Better Episode 16, Liz Lutgendorff


Chris: This is Episode 16 of Making Better Podcast, featuring science fiction enthusiast and podcast host Liz Lutgendorff, with special guest co-host Sina Barahm.

Francis: And this should be a welcome change, because honestly, the science that we have right now, I wish was fiction.

Chris: I agree, it does seem like a rather science-fiction-type world out there if you look at the news or anything else.

Francis: Unless you’re looking at Trump, and then, I wouldn’t even tarnish the word “science” in any context of that man, fiction or otherwise.

Chris: And with that, let’s get on with the episode…

Chris: Liz Luckendorf, welcome to to Making Better!

Liz: Thank you for having me.

Chris: Liz, you do a podcast called “Science Fiction Double Feature,” which is about both Science Fiction and science. Can you tell us a little about it?

Liz: Way back in the day, my partner and I did a podcast called “The Pod Delusion,” and a few years ago, I just kind of missed doing podcasts. And at the time, I was reading a lot of science fiction, I’m like, well, let’s do kind of a, Pod Delusion-esque thing where I interview an author about their novel, and how interesting and fun it is, usually. And then a second person, about some aspect of that novel in real life. So if the novel focused on artificial intelligence, I’d talk to someone about artificial intelligence; if it talked about magic, I’d interview someone about the history of magic. So, it’s kind of a double feature because you have the author and the second guest.

Chris: Who are some of the authors you’ve had on?

Liz: Some of my favorites have been Anne Leckie, who wrote the Ancillary Justice books, and she’s one of my favorite sci-fi authors so I was thrilled to have her; but also Malka Older, who wrote the series called the Centenal Cycle, which is kind of futuristic democracy, I think is the way to put it, rather than actual science fiction. Carrie Patel, who did, about kind of a city underground; Christiana Ellis is the last one. I really quite enjoyed the novel, it started out as a serialized fiction, so she’d post every day, but the novel itself has been like all of those together, and it mashes both science fiction and fantasy. So one of the core elements is nanobots that get amplified by a magical amulet, which I quite enjoyed.

Chris; Which authors would you love to have on, whom you haven’t had yet?

Liz: Oh, man, all of them! So, I’m about to start a book called Gideon the Ninth, by Tasmin Muir. Everyone has mentioned this novel this year, I just have constant pre-reviews in my Twitter feed, and so I would love to have her. So I’m going to read it next, but then hopefully I’ll like it and maybe she’ll do an interview.

Chris: Terrific. Sina, why don’t you talk about some of the ones you like, and maybe we can spur a conversation.

Sina: I’m always fascinated by the differences in predictions that are true about, for example, books that came out during the 50s and 60s, you know, we were all gonna have pocket nukes and kind of the old golden-age of all of that and the predictions around that, but then when you look at the computer predictions, I mean, it’s so different, because it was pre-transistor. And so, I’ve always been fascinated by this, this sort of significant segmentation, if you will, between some of the fiction from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and then 80s and 90s, and then of course another shift with respect to the web and the internet, right? So, post-Gibson and moving into this idea that everything is going to be networked and really rapid access. For example, I’ve been going through Next Generation episode by episode recently, just something fun with dinner kind of thing, and it always bugs me so much that Data goes “Stand by, Captain, accessing…” and it’s just like, you’re retrieving like 2 kilobytes of information—we can do that on our watches now, and yet that was considered super-advanced because he was “accessing” you know, all of this knowledge. But yet, we have Wikipedia at our fingertips now, so I’m really just fascinated by that dichotomy.

Chris: I recently re-read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and the fact that the computers were all these giant vacuum-tube farms jumped out at me, because I think the transistor was invented two years after he published that book.

Sina: I don’t know why that reminded me of something, but that reminded me of a question for Liz: which is, Liz, you read the Diamond Age, Stevenson’s novel?

Liz: Yes.

Sina: I have a question for you. So this is something that always bugged me—I enjoyed the book, I like it, he gets better at writing endings as his career proceeds, which is lovely to see, but this is the question that I have: the thing that always irks me about that is, the plot revolves around this idea, so I understand why it’s there, but all of this advanced technology exists yet they haven’t figured out text-to-speech, something that us are very familiar with and use on a daily basis to access technology. And that’s always just irked me about that novel. I was wondering if there’s things like that about novels that, even though you might love them, sort of jump out at you as, oh my goodness, this one plot point…

Liz: I’m struggling to think of some now, ‘cause like I’ve mostly—my current reading habits are basically, I would like to read people who are currently writing, so they will keep writing me more novels—I’m very selfish, kind of like I will give you money rather than your estate money, because your estate is probably not going to give me any more books! Oh, there was a book I read not that long ago, and I can’t remember the title but I absolutely loved it, and it was interesting, because all of the communication in it was like old Usenet groups, and the aliens have hive minds, and they’re like these kind of weird dog-things and I absolutely loved that book, but the way that they kind of news-worked, with all these usenet groups, and it was just like such an artifact of the time. And that didn’t annoy me as much, ‘cause maybe kind of cross-stellar communication network. The thing that got me, now that I think about—again, I book I love—is Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book, and a central plot point of that is that the Dean of the History Department, because they have time travel, and the History Department at Oxford gets to regulate time travel, which again, I just love, I don’t care if it’s a terrible kind of weird conceit—but they can’t get in touch with him, because they don’t have mobile phones. This is like, 20 years in the future from now, and so that kind of thing, where there’s this key point of technology missing, and the key plot point of something happening or not happening is because the Dean is fishing in Scotland and there’s no possible way to contact him—like Scotland is so far and remote that that wouldn’t be possible.

Chris: That’s always been a problem I’ve had with The Walking Dead—I was like, you have guns, you have all this other stuff, how come you don’t have walkie-talkies? They don’t exist anywhere in The Walking Dead.

Liz: That’s very true. I only read the comics of The Walking Dead, though, I didn’t actually watch the television series because the comics were brutal enough!

Chris: I watched the first couple of seasons of the TV show, and that was it. I sort of lost interest. Francis, you’re a big Star Trek fan, do you want to speak to some of your life as a Star Trek guy?

Francis: I guess I grew up with Star Trek, and it informed me with all its moral lessons. It kind of replaced, in some ways, religion for me and gave me myths that I could sort of live by; but what I liked about it, too, is that it had that dichotomy between, say, logic and emotion and that kind of thing, and I guess they carried that on with Data, to some extent. You know, I always thought that was a really fun way to, ..a lens to view the world through. I guess one of the things that was interesting to me, too, was we had M.E.Thomas who wrote the book about being a sociopath, and if you don’t have any emotions, what governs your morality? And I guess with the Spock example, somehow he was like an extremely moral person, but it was completely not based on emotion. I thought was interesting…

Sina: ..or religion.

Francis: Yeah. Although I guess they did have their religion, they did that meditation and that sort of thing. But that’s pretty advanced stuff for our society back then, because you really couldn’t question religion too much publicly back then and get away with it, but Star Trek found a way to address a lot of these big questions.

Liz: What I quite like about Star Trek, which I feel lis missing a lot in some of the sci-fi now, or speculative fiction, is like the hopefulness of the future—there is a current trend in a lot of the books that are recommended to me, of just absolute kind of dire, post-apocalyptic wastelands. I don’t besmirch the kind of genre that they go into, I’m just not a particular fan of it, and I find it just kind of wearying on a kind of, just, consumptive level. Like, I like fiction and science fiction because it’s interesting and hopeful and has nice ideas, and offers like this vision of the future that you can kind of aspire to; and the post-apocalyptic stuff is just like, well, everything’s gonna be horrible, and the level of horribleness varies between post-apocalyptic endings. And some are really good, I do like some post-apocalyptic stuff; there is a series, the book is called Archivist Wasp* and it’s like a post-apocalyptic future, but there’s still hope in that future. And so when you think back to Star Trek, it’s just like, oh, we’ve got this amazing Federation, we’ve got impetuses to explore, and sure there’s wars and stuff, but ultimately it’s got this really great core message, which I feel is lost sometimes in the doom-laden post-apocalyptic stuff.

Sina: I am so glad you said that, because I feel very similarly about, like, dystopic sci-fi. There’s nothing wrong with being dystopic or examining and exploring, you know, post-apocalyptic, but I find some of it to just be—you know, it’s very predictable, it’s like, well, yes, our society is definitely hinged on a few key things like constant power and access to resources and such being there, and when those go away obviously you could explore some things within the human condition. But I don’t find it as difficult, right? And again, I’m not trying to besmirch that genre, like you said, but I think trying to solve the problems in, for example, post-scarcity, like Ian M Banks with the culture series, is just so much more, I feel so much more joy when I read those books, and yet I feel like they’re still struggling with really complex situations, but able to just explore it in a way that feels better to me.

Liz: Yeah. I have this tagline at the end of my podcast, which is like, remember the science fiction we read today is basically the science fiction of the future. And I think it’s that sort of thing, if all we read is kind of post-apocalyptic stuff, or like everything’s terrible—as much as I like William Gibson, you know, these very highly stratified societies based on wealth and access—oh my god! like that’s so disheartening, whereas if you read something like Becky Chambers, which is hopeful and is like, expansive and like they solve problems and complex ethical issues, but they’re done in a way that you’re left with, like, “we can work our way through these problems” rather than “all is lost.”

Chris: A few years ago I read a book called Station Eleven, it was by a Canadian woman, I can’t recall her name—

Liz: Emily St. John Mandel. Really good, I know. It’s really good as well.

Chris: I thought that was, you know, the Walking Dead without the walking dead. It was just such a great book, with this post-apocalyptic but very, very hopeful message, that you know, good humans will continue to exist and continue doing good things.

Liz: And that’s the kind of post-apocalyptic stuff I can deal with, like even if the world ends there’s still hope, whereas some of it just goes down these, like, really dark—like there is no hope, kind of way out of it, and that’s the stuff that’s always recommended to me. And I’m so—I can’t, I can’t face it!

Chris: The only problem I had with Station Eleven is she hasn’t written a sequel.

Liz: It’s true.

Chris: It ends with them, like, seeing other people off in the distance, so like it ends right where the next book should start, but there’s no next book.

Liz: When I looked for that book, ‘cause I was in Toronto, I think, we were in Canada—basically I always look for, what’s the top ten by women, and I found that. And it was in the “literary” section in Chapters, and I was so annoyed that it wasn’t in the sci-fe section. Maybe that’s why, maybe it just didn’t find an audience ‘cause it was in the wrong section.

Sina: Speaking of female authors, who are, would you say, your top four or five female authors?

Liz: Only four or five? Oh, god! And I’ll cover all the speculative fiction, because I like to kind of mix them between. But I love Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who is Mexican-Canadian, and so all of her novels are novels, but they cover different thing, so; the first one, Signal to Noise, was kind of magical realism in Mexico City, the second one was Certain Dark Things, which was about vampires, but more like Mexican vampires, so not like…she mentions kind of like our traditional western-European vampires, but the main characters were not of that variety of vampire. And the last one, which I absolutely adored, was Gods of Jade and Shadow, which is 1920s Mexico and like a kind of re-animated mind-god. Brilliant, so good! So her, for sure; as I mentioned, Malka Older, I love the Centenal series, it just explores so many interesting things about, kind of, electronic voting, about information society, about democracy, so very good. Probably V.E. Schwab, who writes more fantasy, but her Darker Shades of Magic series was really, really good; she writes for all ages, so she does sort of middle-school kind of YA and adult fiction. She also did a series called the Villains, which basically explores some villains, which is also interesting. I have recently been reading a lot of—oh, I can’t pronounce her first name, I’m gonna massacre it, but Aliette de Bodard—she has a fantasy series as well, but I’ve mostly read her short science fiction, which is—if there is a Vietnamese empire in space, and it follows different aspects of that, and some of it—and the best story I can mention is The Tea Master and Detective, which I describe as like Sherlock Holmes and Watson, if Sherlock was a Vietnamese aristocrat and Watson was a spaceship with PTSD. It’s so beautiful and vivid, there’s about four short stories, I think, or four novellas, and all of them, they just like explore a different aspect of this universe, and they’re just beautiful and elegant and interesting and explore such interesting kind of sci-fi and ethical concepts.

Sina: Have you read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga?

Liz: Yes.

Sina: I am absolutely in love with her as an author, because she I think has the ability to write in any genre, whether it’s a whodunit, whether it’s a space opera, whether it’s a police procedural on a planet or—just all of these other things, and nails it every time in my opinion, but then I love the way that she doesn’t fetishize the technology—which I admit to really enjoying, but you know I can get that from other authors. With her, the technology has like a really significant purpose for existing: for example, her incubators, which just completely turns around all of the societal implications of women carrying children. I thought that was just fascinating, not to mention I think she’s one of the only authors I respect that has a main character with significant disabilities, and does that superb amounts of justice.

Liz: I haven’t read as many of the Miles books, but I agree.

Chris: What about Margaret Atwood?

Liz: I think it’s a Canadian thing, that you’re forced to read Margaret Atwood as a child and then you just grow up hating Margaret Atwood. So I had to read so much in high school, and as a result I just dislike everything she writes, including The Handmaid’s Tale, and I don’t think I’d pick up Testaments either. I’m sure everything everyone writes about them is great, but I just can’t stand Margaret Atwood…

Francis: Can you elaborate on that, like why?

Liz: I don’t know, it’s just…I find it really hammer-over-the -head kind of torturous in that, like she’s going to make a point, she’s gonna make it a hundred times and she’s going to batter you over the head with it. I just can’t…I just can’t! I remember reading her in high school and thinking like, oooh, like I got the point on, like, page 10, can we move on? I just can’t deal with it. I like Margaret Laurence, who also writes kind of like, she’s a short story author, also from Canada, and like her stories are equally kind of hard to deal with, but just much prefer her to Margaret Atwood. Sorry Margaret Atwood fans!

Sina: I completely agree with you. I found the same to be true about things like, you know, The Fountainhead or whatever, where—you know, make your point, but if you’re going to beat me about the head with it a thousand times, like I got it the first time, maybe the second time, but completely agree.

Liz: Gilead is a terrible place!

That’s right…

Liz: There’s the patriarchy—and….

Francis: Perhaps we could dial back. You had mentioned about how some science fiction is very dystopian, and some of it is a little more positive…I was wondering if there were any sort of utopian visions for the future that you’ve read in books that seem plausible to you that you’d like to share.

Liz: I’m going to say Becky Chambers again, just because I love her and I think she doesn’t shy away from the problems that you could see in the future, but you still have humanity being helpful and like, working through problems. So, I’m thinking mostly about her second novel, which is A Closed and Common Orbit. You have AIs, but they are in ships, basically, but one gets downloaded illegally into a body kit, so she looks like a human—or it looks like a human, but I always think of “she”—it’s basically, how do you then navigate that, being actually illegal but having your own personality and all the people who are around who help her and things like that. And I just love it, it’s so hopeful, but it’s just like, the core of it, is this person is illegal by the nature of her existing and things like that. And there’s still crappy bits in the universe, but like people still overcome them, and I think that’s realistic. I don’t think utopias are necessarily realistic, but still being able to confront hard things and changing things and being hopeful about the change you can bring are really positive things to hope for. Oh man, I need to think of others…gonna have a look at things I’ve read—this is really hard off the top of my head.

Sina: In my group of friends, a lot of folks liked the first book in that series more. I—and it sounds like you did as well—really enjoyed the second one, I thought that exploration was really fun.

Liz: If you like Becky Chambers—she came out recently, really recently I think, with a novellas called To Be Taught If Fortunate, and it’s this group of explorers, basically if you think of our future now possible trajectory of catastrophic climate change, kind of diminishing rights and things like that. Basically the space program ends because they can’t afford it any more, but then there’s this big groundswell of citizen-sponsored space travel, and so they send these groups of astronauts off to explore distant planets, and they have some sort of cryo-sleep, but on their way to the stars, they adapt their bodies, they go into a torpor and they adapt their bodies to have some acclimatization to the planet. So in some times they end up with more muscle mass because it’s higher gravity, and things like that. And again, it’s not so much about the planets they find, but it’s the beauty of exploration and like the pursuits of knowledge and these sort of things, and like persisting even though the people listening may be gone and things like that. And it’s so wonderful, it’s just absolutely wonderful in terms of hopefulness and like all the great things you want to feel about science in the future.

Sina: It is definitely on my to-read list, thank you.

Liz: What else have I read about the future?

Sina: I mentioned the culture earlier—how much of Ian M Banks (sp) have you read, and what do you think of his envisioning of a post-scarcity society?

Liz: I’ve read very little. I never really read much Ian Banks, Ian M Banks. Two years ago, I was in the middle of my PhD, and I just like realized that I wasn’t reading any fiction at all, and like I really missed fiction, I needed a break from history. And so I just latched onto a list, and I read my way through it, and some of it I absolutely loathed, and some of it I really liked. But by the end of it I realized it was almost all men. And so I basically then had a year of being like, alright, I’m just gonna not read any men, or not any white men, because the list was mostly white men—apologies to all white men, no offense, but you’ve written a lot of books. And then for a year I only read women and nonwhite men, and then I basically just made it my mission to only read them. So, unfortunately, I only encountered Banks at the very end of that list, so I only read the one book that was on that list, which apparently is not the best book to read.

Sina: Right.

Liz: So I haven’t read any others. I feel like I should, I feel like I should make an exception—but we’ll see.

Chris: You were reading through the list of what the hundred greatest science fiction books of all time or something like that—which of those were your favorites?

Liz: So, I only read the ones I hadn’t read before—so I had already read loads of Asimov and some others on there. So I had read The Doomsday Book off that list, by Connie Willis, which again I absolutely love. I didn’t mind, like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, I didn’t like a lot of the classics of sci-fi, because they tended to either be a bit racist or a bit sexist. And like, there’s the debate about whether or not you should read them, and all this sort of stuff, but they may have been the best for their time, but they’re certainly not the best now, I think is my opinion on it.

Sina: Your kindness of using “a bit” instead “overflowing with” is uh, very generous.

Liz: the worst one, I will tell you the worst one—oh God, there’s three worst ones! Oh, I’ll go with the one I think is the worst, which is A Spell For Chameleon. It was like a lesson in misogyny, you know, the kind of main lesson was “don’t trust pretty women,” or just don’t trust women in general! You can only trust ugly women, because they’ll have going for them; it was just terrible on levels I cannot describe. It made me so [inaud]. A couple others did as well.

Sina: Heinlein…I mean, it was just, essentially, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen level of just, wow, this is so like the worst part of the 50s and 60s in literature form. I remember in one book, this woman is coming home from work, she’s late getting home, basically, to summarize the plot, and basically her response to her husband is, “I was raped on the way home, we had to wait for the trial and the execution,” and it was just this odd sense of, like, “rape is bad” but that’s about the most moral it gets. Right? Because everything else is just completely objectification, and so it’s just fascinating, and I have some trouble reading those books now. I think it would have been different reading them at the time—but even then, there were, especially for example in the feminist movement and such, my understanding is in the 60s and 70s there were still folks talking about these issues in response to science fiction, it’s just those voices weren’t really amplified a lot back then.

Liz: Yeah, the thing that annoys me, and I must have had like a particularly bad run at one point, where kind of rape or sexual assault just became like a plot point for the main white male character to…do something, and there was absolutely no impact, like the women’s feelings didn’t matter or didn’t matter because they were dead, or…there was no deeper meaning to it, or deeper explanation of like, you know, this is really bad and this would be quite traumatic for anyone involved or related to it. And now it’s just like, oh my god, like it was just so insensitive, on like such a huge scale that—and again, I just had this run of them, and now every time I read it in a book I’m like, well that’s really lazy writing and you should have done something more interesting with your plot.
Oh, I just found it—A Fire Upon the Deep! Oh, I loved it. So good.

Sina: [inaud] Verner Vinge?

Liz: Yes! It was just so good!

Sina: I thought that’s what you were alluding to but you made it sound like it was a more modern novel, so I was like, I wasn’t sure about, hesitating that as a guess—it’s the first book I ever read by him.

Chris: I had dinner with Verner Vinge and Greg Vanderheiden once.

Sina: Oh really?

Chris: Yeah.

Sina: What I find fascinating about stuff like A Fire Upon The Deep and things like that is, that today we are building those robotic systems and software systems that behave like these things that were explored in speculative fiction 30 years ago—you know, swarms and the idea of like peer-to-peer communication and all of the stuff we just take for granted today, they were explored as concepts, pretty well in a way, in terms of not only the good sides but what could go wrong, decades ago and I just wish more architects of our society and technology today would read more speculative fictions preceding when they invent something.

Liz: I also really quite like the idea of advanced technology discovered through basically archeology, so you have these kind of vastly superior alien races and all of these kind of pesky lower humans and the like, going like we’re going to go trip across all this super-advanced technology, and hopefully not destroy the universe by accident, which is what they almost do, and it’s just such a wonderful concept, right? Of course, like if there were these super-advanced civilizations, and they had technology that persisted, why wouldn’t we, right? Like, we are that kind of species, we’re like let’s go press all the buttons and see what happens! Contact, which I had never read before, also very much enjoyed. There is like a really, I call it really trashy vampire novel called Sunshine, not the one that the film’s based off of, not science fiction at all, but like the characters in it were so adorable that I loved them.

Sina: Who’s that by?

Liz: Robin McKinley. I disliked quite a few of the navels, but I think that, aside from like taking every kind of best list with a massive pinch of salt, is that you’re only ever going to like about 30% on whatever list that you come across. So if you don’t think you like it, you probably won’t like it, and t hat’s fine, don’t read it.

Sina: Let me toss a name at you—Octavia Butler. Thoughts?

Liz: Yeah, I haven’t read many Octavia Butler books, and again this probably comes from my reading history, like all the way up until, actually, quite recently. Again, I just read the kind of classic sci-fi, most of them white and male, so I didn’t come across Octavia Butler, and I should read more now, but again, she died, so she’s not going to write me any more books—but I recently read one, and it was great but harrowing. But essentially, it’s like these humans are brought onto an alien ship, and it’s basically, if you think about assimilation from a cultural point of view, it’s how it feels to have to, like, culturally assimilate as, like, another person. So if you think if you’re black and you’re having to assimilate into like a white culture, is the closest analogy. It’s the kind of trade-offs and all the sort of things you have to make, and it’s harrowing! It’s really distressing!

Sina: Lilith’s Brood?

Liz: It’s not Lilith’s Brood,, let me find it…I’ve read it quite recently, as I felt really bad for not reading any Octavia Butler,..

Sina: Because she and Ursula Kela-Guinn* were some of my earlier exposures to female authors, to women authors in sci-fi and fantasy.

Liz: The Dispossessed, I read that as part of a list and again was super, super good, I loved that. The other one I felt a bit weird..but I can’t remember what it’s called…Dawn! Very good but harrowing, so I recommend it. So I should totally read Kindred and all thse other ones, but I haven’t. And I haven’t read like the, was it the Broken Earth series, either, even though [inaud], so I should definitely do that. Because I have no excuse there, because she’s still writing books.

Sina: Now, fair disclosure, this is obviously going to be heavily white male-dominated, but there are a few women authors, actually several of the ones we discussed, on their—I like the list Wikipedia has of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula. That’s a reasonable filter in a way, although it’s definitely symptomatic of of its time. So again, heavily white male dominated, but you’ll get some male authors from other parts of the world, and you will definitely get some female authors in there, Lois McMaster Bujold is on there, Connie Willis is on there, I think both LeGuinn and Bulter are on there, if I’m not mistaken. So, I’ve enjoiyed that list, because it’s only a few, every few years that aligns, it seems, since the 60s. So it’s a nice collection of 30 or 40 books.

Liz: Nice. I’ll have a look.

Sina: It has that for both novels and novellas and short stories and such. I haven’t worked through short stories—I always feel weird—it sounds like you read a lot more shorts and novellas, so what are your feelings on that, because to me—I’m always scared to read a novella or a short story, because I’m afraid I’m gonna like the universe a lot, and then it’s over. And so, that’s always just a sense of, I don’t know, trepidation before reading one.

Liz: I’ve only recently started reading novellas, and what kicked it off was Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries, I don’t know if you’ve come across those…

Sina: Yep

Liz: I love Murderbot, like I always say, I would love to be murder [inaud], but I think Murderbot would be uncomfortable with that—such a good character, and so I read the first one and then rapidly consumed the others. Although, there’s going to be a full-length Murderbot, so I’m like, “Yaay!” And because of that, I picked up Aliette Bodard’s book, and because I knew Becky Chambers, I picked up that one, and then Cho, who wrote Sorceror to the Crown, which is a full-length novel she did. I’ve been doing the “read harder” challenge this year as well, because I’m an idiot and I just want to read everything all the time, and she wrote a book called The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, which qualified as my romance pick for the read harder list, and it was just delightful and funny. So, I have kind of gently made my way into novellas.

Chris: I get the audio version of Analog and Asimov’s every other month, and really enjoy that, because I find that sometimes the effect that Sina said, you know, I want more from this author—often six months later you get more in the same universe, just another short story. And if I don’t like the story, I know it’s going to end in ten minutes.

Liz: One of my favorite authors, though, is Ted Chang, and he mostly does novellas and short stories. And they’re absolutely wonderful—there’s, I think it’s a novella-like story in it, which is basically—I love the ethical implications of it, because it feels so tangible to now in that there’s these kind of limited AI creations made in the virtual world, but then part of the problem is basically platform obsolescence. So they all exist on this platform, that platform then gets bought out but they’re not supported, and there’s this hard core group of people who have nurtured these creations for so long, for like decades, and so they’re like real people, they kind of have their own emergent personalities. There’s this huge ethical thing where you’re like, oh my god! They’re just desperately trying to make sure that they persevere, and it’s just such a wonderful story and it feels so timely, it feels like we’re on the cusp of like, creating these slightly emergent personalities and like, would we just shut them up? if the platform became obsolete, like the Facebook of these creations, and then that got bought out and then wasn’t supported—Oh my god! The pain! Like they’re actual, kind of emergent beings that you would just turn off.

Sina: This totally sounds like a Black Mirror episode. That’s a very Black Mirror-esque plot. I’ll have to check that out.

Liz: It’s a bit more hopeful than Black Mirror.

Sina: Yes, that [inaud] corrected.

Liz: But I think anything is more chipper than Black Mirror.

Chris: I enjoy Black Mirror, but it leads me to the question, and we were discussing how much speculative fiction or science fiction these days is dystopic, do you think that’s informed by just modern culture being somewhat dystopic? I mean, we have Trump in America, you have Brexit in England, you have social credit in China—I mean, all over the world we seem to be getting bombarded with bad, dystopic news.

Liz: Yeah, I think it’s some of the time—I mean, you look, probably, a bit like a sci-fi historian would be able to tell you what other, previous things existed. Like I’m pretty sure when nanobots were huge, it was all grey goo and things like that, so I imagine it’s of the time and it’s hard to see the hope in the current system, but I think, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t write about the hope. I think more than ever, we should write about the hope.

Sina: Hear, hear.

Francis: How about if we discuss a little bit, examples of how societies were run with regards to, say, work, in any of these novels. Because it seems like technology’s making it much easier to get what society needs with fewer work hours, but that hasn’t translated into a general good. And I’m wondering if any sci-fi writers have grappled with that one.

Liz: I haven’t read anything like Ian M Banks, where there is definitely this alternative future. Like, it’s always kind of varieties of capitalism, I think. Where there’s the kind of like more dystopic end, where people are exploited in terms of modifying their bodies to do a job, or whatever, or just simple like the extension of digital technology wearer ones like a [crowgramer?] and variations of that, it’s mostly that, it’s mostly still capitalism.

Francis: Is it just so hard to make a well-functioning society seem interesting from, like a dramatic point of view, or is it just hard to envision?

Liz: I imagine when you’re in a system it’s hard to imagine outside of it, or maybe hard to make something like communism or that be more believable, because we’ve had such epic failures of the Soviet Union or because they seem more totalitarian and you don’t want that kind of vibe. It’s hard to say. I think the thing that you also find are these kind of space-opera empire things, which I mostly just like accept for some of them. I think it would be really sad if we ended up with a space empire, and I kind of love Star Wars. So in some ways I’m very hypocritical of this trope. But it would be really sad if we all went to space and there was a giant empire.

Francis: Star Trek, as a theme throughout all the different shows, they went to pretty great lengths to try to show what an advanced society would look like. Some of it was little bit cringe-y, maybe, but I think that’s part of the territory, perhaps. I’m just surprised there’s not more of it.

Liz: Same. I agree. The book I’m reading now, which is called Velocity Weapon, it doesn’t really articulate a different model of how the economy would work or anything like that, but there’s definitely a sense of, like, basic needs are taken care of, but there’s still the stratification of people who have wealth and power and those who don’t. So I think some of the futures are like, there is a base level of sustenance and things, but it’s not enough, there’s still the stratification and so that’s where some of the tension comes from. But yeah, I want a story like that. Maybe they think just Star Trek has done it so they don’t want to do it, or Ian M Banks has done it, but I’m sure there’s going to be, or there already is, a story that has a much more interesting way that humanity is organized.

Sina: Stross plays with some of the evolutions of economics a little bit, like in things like Acelerando, for example. But I think until you go to post-scarcity, which we just find so much less of than dystopic, let’s tear all the things down, it’s not as heavily explored; and part of it might be because it’s honestly, it tends to solve some of these fundamental problems. So perhaps constructing a plot is viewed as more difficult? I don’t know, that could be completely wrong on my part, but it seems like it’s very easy, you know, when there’s an impending asteroid or nuclear event or something, to then immediately have story threads that just spin all over the place out of that. Whereas, if you have a lot of things resolved, then the tension that would lead to a plot might be more difficult to find.

Chris: If automation really does cause 70 or 80 percent or however many people to be without work, you know, I mean Karl Marx predicted that everyone in the post-scarcity world—you know, and he predicted the automation thing, this was a late essay from him, I think it was 1869—where he discusses, you know, everyone’s going to be doing intellectual pursuits and art and music, and people, society will advance more rapidly. And even in the 50s, Buckminster Fuller wrote that if technology is used appropriately, within 20 years every man women and child in America will be living like a millionaire, and within 30 years everyone on the planet will be. And clearly those things haven’t happened.

Liz: Yeah. (laughs.)

Sina: Good talk (more laughs). It’s true though. Well, they have, right? I’ll push back on that a little bit. I would say they have, they just happened for 1% of 1% of 1% of people, right? So they have happened, it’s just that concentration of resources and access to them—he just got the error* bars wrong.

Liz: The way that certain countries operate now is fundamentally different to a hundred years ago, so a hundred years ago in the UK is so different now, and there is still massive stratification, but manufacturing is not a thing we really do anymore in the UK, at all. There are pockets of it, but if you’re gong to say our economy runs on manufacturing, that’s not going to be true, right? So it’s going to be service economy, which is very different, and it’s going to be things like digital data technology, all these sort of things, marketing, all these sort of not-manual, maybe not entirely intellectual, but certainly involves more brainpower than it does brawn, in some cases, service industry maybe not. But it has fundamentally changed, it’s just that we’re now seeing, maybe not developing the way we thought we would in that there’s like zero hours contracts and this kind of gig economy which doesn’t provide enough money. So it’s really futuristic, right? Like, oh my god, I can order food on my app, I can then order a cab on my app, I can go through the airport security with an app, so there is like loads of weird inroads into these futures, but there just not very evenly distributed. And if you then go to another country which does the majority of manufacturing, like that also looks weirdly dystopian because of how bad those countries are regulated and how bad they are for human rights. So, we kind of have like a mish mash of these futures? Depending on what country you’re in, you’re experiencing a different future.

Francis: Well, Bernie has this new slogan—“Us not me,” something like that. And I think that, you know, when society uses technology in a way that is sort of geared towards the capitalist idea of everyone for themself, a lot of potential gets wasted. The real quality of life, I think, for the majority couldn’t help but be pushed down. It’s not what it’s geared to cater to.

Liz: One of the people who I had in my PhD was, in history, was a Labor kind of theorist and journalist called J.A. Hobson. And like other secularists (cause my PhD was in history of secularism), he really disliked charity, because he felt that basically it was used by those who should have already given more wealth through taxes to basically say, “oh, look how good, look how charitable, look how wonderful I am for donating all this money”—and I think a lot of people are making the argument now that kind of large amounts of philanthropy is basically that same thing, right? Like you have Jeff Bezos, you have Buffet, you have Gates, and they have vast sums of money and they’re like, “oh, look how good we are, we’re doing a space program, and we’re solving malaria in Africa” and things like that. But how much more would we have solved if the kind of taxation system could more distribute that, in more directed ways. And like maybe we wouldn’t have SpaceX and things like that, fine. But maybe NASA would be better funded, who knows. And I always kind of look at that kind of historical perspective, because it’s just like, we still have the same problems that we did in the 19th Century, in the 20th Century, early 20th Century. We kind of moved forward and backwards. Like, everyone’s making the argument, I think, in the States right now that like, Oh my god, we’d increase the tax rate and wouldn’t even reach the taxation rates under the New Deal or the 1940s and 50s in America, which also everyone looks at as the golden age of America. And it’s like, maybe we should just tax everyone again! I think we probably have already had the tools to solve some of these problems, or at least make them less worse, but politics goes back and forth, and it’s just how can you motivate enough people to say, that’s the world we want. It feels like the US is now finally having those conversations that loads of people who already have health care systems had in the 30s. So,..

Sina: There’s also an interesting aspect of large amounts of wealth being used for, basically, for whitewashing—so you see this with the Sacklers, for example, and giving to museums and universities and things of this nature, and Laurence Lessig recently, in response to a lot of the stuff that’s going on with the MIT Media Lab and taking Epstein’s money, etc., wrote a really, I thought, very well thought-out, honest, really raw Medium post, and he goes through the different kinds of funding and you could ethically treat them. And one of assertions that he makes that I completely agree with is that, if your funding is coming from an entity which is in any way questionable, it is your responsibility to take that funding anonymously, so that you’re not contributing your universities’ brand, or museum’s ethical position to helping someone else whitewash things that they’ve done over the decade.

Liz: There’s a really interesting article, I think in the Financial Times today as well, that said something like 30%, the kind of majority stake of external investment in companies—when a US company would invest in Ireland, for example—is actually just corporations moving around money. They’re not even contributing to increasing productivity or increasing jobs or anything, it’s literally just moving money from one bank account to another. Thirty percent of the foreign direct investment, which is like a huge thing! It’s meaningless! So at that point you just like, are these instruments that we’ve developed even useful for this kind of measurement of actually investing in a country? I think like the EU’s doing quite a lot of work in trying to—everyone talks about tax avoidance and tax havens and things like that—I feel like it’s moving slowly, but maybe just not fast enough.

Sina: I tend to be very socially liberal, and things of this nature, so I completely am aligned with what you’re saying with regards to taxation, but then I’ve also had experience with these systems and just the level of corruption and sheer incompetence, like absolute terrifying incompetence, that tends to be rewarded within these systems, is what makes me very hesitant for the thing that other parts of my philosophy tell me is absolutely the right thing to do, per the examples you cited, like the New Deal and so on and so forth.

Chris: Liz mentioned NASA might be more well-funded, but does that mean that NASA would just be spending more money on the useless Orion rocket that it’s trying to build now for profoundly more money than using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy?

Liz: It’s quite interesting—I just finished reading, not that long ago, a book called Why Nations Fail, and it’s super interesting. Part of their argument—and you have to see it through the lens of like, they clearly are on board with the kind of capitalist system, but the whole thing is about capitalism and the market-driven sort of stuff forces innovation. And I think that’s quite interesting as an argument, and you kind of see it with SpaceX and NASA, but maybe that’s just because NASA’s always strapped for cash, and maybe they would be more innovative if they could. And because they’re not allowed to fail, at all, I think that’s part of the problem is that, if you’re just constantly forced to be 100% foolproof, you’re always going to be very, very risk-averse. And SpaceX is allowed to not be as risk-averse, and maybe it’s not so much the institution but how the institution has to function.

Chris: Howard Bloom is the guest on our next podcast release, which will come out later this week [note: released in September 2019] and, it’s gonna sound crazy, he’s been on Coast to Coast AM 300 times, but he’s their token liberal and real science communicator—they bring him on when they need an alternative point of view—and he was pointing out that if you actually look at the federal budget, it was all the US Congress adding money to NASA’s budget but requiring that it be spent with certain companies, like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing and the traditional military-industrial complex. It seems to be huge handouts to private companies, as opposed to SpaceX, who’s working driven by investors and whatnot.

Liz: That’s quite interesting. You look at these institutions and actually, if you look into the details, and maybe it not be the institutions but the proscriptions placed upon them.

Sina: Yeah, exactly.

Chris: Yeah, it’s NASA’s scientists would come up with something smarter, but they’re really not allowed to by the Congress.

Liz: Oh, Congress!

Francis: I think it would be a good idea to have a separate fund, if you were going to have a progressive tax on corporations and people, to insure that it doesn’t just go to the military or to paying off the debt, that sort of thing, but more specifically to reinvigorate the economy and give resources to people who are aspiring entrepreneurs and inventors, that sort of thing, and create opportunity that way. The idea of just taxing the rich and giving it to Lockheed Martin doesn’t really appeal to me.

Sina: I think you may have mentioned this book earlier—it was envisioning, you mentioned like a future democracy —that’s what made me think of it—and they have this idea of micro-democracy.

Liz: Yeah, Infomocracy, by Malka Older.

Sina: That’s the one, yes.

Chris: I read that one, based on Sina’s suggestion, so…

Sina: I really enjoyed the concepts. I thought it got a little odd, you know, just with the plot and everything was, I had a few gripes, but nothing, just personal opinion based stuff. But what was interesting to me was the—I don’t know how practical this is, but the extreme variance along the edges. So you can have something that is what we would today call white nationalist, you know, whatever, right in like a little square, and then literally meters away from that, have something completely different, and meters away from that, and that to me was really fascinating in a way that—I don’t know, I haven’t necessarily seen explored elsewhere?

Liz: I think that’s why I loved it as well. I also just love the kind of like—I like information, which was like, I think the author describes as like a cross between Google and Wikipedia, alright, like they can instantly or near-instantly verify anything that’s said, so they are the kind of repository of “the truth” almost. It’s such a good idea, and she explores it more, almost a second novel in that series is more interesting, because it looks at some of the places in the margins that are still kind of fighting against …

Sina: ..where corruption can still happen, for example.

Liz: Yeah, exactly. Again, I just really loved it, because I had never encountered such an interesting concept. You have lots of interesting ideas in science and like physics and space flight and all these sort of things, but actually to tinker with democracy, as a science fiction concept—like how great is that! And I love that you had all, everyone had to agree to it, so you had all these pockets; but also that you could have, in Mexico, you could have one centenal, but the other twenty centenals of the same party could be in Europe, or somewhere else. So, it was almost like you could have these pockets of liberalism or democracy or …white nationalism…and it could form together as a club, and then have your own sense of government, but it was just really interesting. I don’t know what else to say other than I love that book, and everyone should read it.

Sina: I’ve had this theory, I’d love to get your thoughts on it: there’s something called, I believe it’s the Overview Effect, which is when astronauts go into space and see the earth as one thing, it tends to eliminate a lot of biases around things such as, a different country is meaningless from up here, you know, it’s like we’re all one, and man is that a really small pale blue dot, to quote Carl Sagan, right? And what’s interesting to me about sci-fi, the reason I bring that up is, that elimination of geography mattering—sci-fi seems to achieve that for me, or does and has and did; and I’m wondering if that’s true for you, or if you see that sort of effect, like without the luxury and the being able to up and see the planet spinning before you, you still get that sort of mentality of, some of these artificial and arbitrary barriers just don’t matter.

Liz: Yeah, I think so. And especially, like one of my favorite things growing up was the Foundation series, again, which is like kind of massive and expansive and interesting. Still with its problems, but that kind of far-reaching effects of humanity, I guess. And also the positronic man, where you’re talking about what makes a person an person. I remember reading that quite young and being like, “whooaaa” like that’s amazing, and you can kind of, you see that now with some of the other AI books, but it was definitely one of the original ones that did that. So reading those kind of things, and encountering aliens and you encounter all these concepts which in real life come up as prejudice and all these sort of things. But you always see them from the better side of it, of like overcoming prejudice, and that being what the hero wants to accomplish. I think it really does, depending on the novels you’re reading—if you’re reading, like, horror, maybe not, but for me I totally agree that is definitely, I think that has had an impact on me.

Chris: Have you ever seen a website, going back to Infomocracy, called

Liz: I think I’ve heard of it, but no, I haven’t been to it.

Chris: They are activists who are trying to work in the US—they have no traction, so they’re not very famous—but they want to go to the Constitutional minimum number of people Congressman, which would give us approximately 30,000 Congressmen in the US, basing it on the theory that, if you only have 450 some-odd Congressmen, it’s easy to bribe 450 people, but how do you bribe 30,000 people who all live in somebody’s neighborhood, so if you’re that geographically small, everyone’s going to know their Congressman, and just be able to go over their house and tell them off if they want to.

Liz: I guess it would make it a less prestigious thing, as well. There’s at least 30,000 CEOs, do you care who a CEO is? Probably not. And so maybe it makes it more democratic in the sense that, it’s not a job you might want to have for a long time, and so you see more churn. Maybe just term limits, like the president has term limits, why doesn’t Congress and the Senate have term limits? Like, that seems to be a problem in itself, the fact that you can just become vested in your own office and…

Chris: My opinion on term limits has always been that the ballot box is the term limit, and then the voters can kick you out. And I would rather leave it to the voters. I mean, I was happy to have Ted Kennedy as my Senator for as many years as I lived in Massachusetts.

Liz: Unless your district is completely gerrymandered, and it would be..

Sina: Right. So, I live in North Carolina, even as a blind person I can tell you how messed up the map looks. Like, it is so bananas, and obviously the Supreme Court has ruled on this and they’re re-drawing the maps now, but it’s just, yeah—unless, if you’re a person of color and living in a neighborhood where all of you have been put in one district because it’s been determined that we’re gonna just call that district, we’re gonna lose that one, but then we pick up these other ten predominantly white districts that we know is gonna vote for us. You know, so, it’s a massive problem. Like, voting is not fair in this country, full stop. I used to believe that it was, and then data after data has convinced me it’s absolutely untrue.

Chris: I was just going to say, the term “gerrymandering” however, was named for a former governor of Massachusetts, Gov. Gerry, who literally, when he re-drew the Congressional map after a census, had a salamander-shaped district that ran all the way from Cape Cod to almost the center of the state, that was really narrow and had arms and legs.

Liz: But the interesting thing about democratic conventions. So we have—relatively, I’ll stress, relatively stable democracies in the UK and the USA—but technically, the institutions of that democracy haven’t seen a huge amount of change in the 150 years. They’ve both seen a lot before that, especially, like, the UK’s political system evolved quite a bit in the 18th and 19th century. But now we feel like, this is how you do democracy, and maybe that’s not entirely correct anymore. Maybe there needs to be more participation, maybe there needs to be more Senators, more Congressmen—it’s really hard to innovate once you have that system, and maybe we need to look at things like, …unfortunately, you know, countries that have experienced a lot of turmoil and tend to redraft their constitutions…you look at Thailand, right? They’ve had quite a few in recent years, military coups, but they then have the opportunity, if they manage to then swing back towards democratic norms, to draft a modern constitution. And that’s quite interesting, because maybe that’s not a bad thing, maybe redrafting your constitution isn’t bad. It would reflect the whims of the time, they needs to be consensus, and that would be really hard, but if we had a re-draw modern constitution for the United States, would the right to bear arms be in it? Probably not, because why would you? And there’s things like that, so I think you can look at it as, lots of people say, oh people are becoming lazy, people don’t pay attention to politics, and maybe what we need is less democracy not more democracy, we need more technocracy, or whatever. But I think it’s just like, we just need to innovate like we do with everything else we do, right? Maybe we just need to innovate, examine, democracy and how people are interacting—user research, talking about user-centered-design. Where are the democratic deficits, and where can we self-correct them?

Sina: One thing that comes to mind, I was reading this paper recently on virtual democratic agents, and so, the idea being that we have such a lossy-system rightnow, and basically the only entities that benefit are the ones we’ve been discussing, big business, etc., so whether it’s 430 or some odd Congressmen, you’ve got 100 Senators, etc., there’s a limited number of people; and what happens is, they are representative of a lot of other people. There’s no way this one person is going to be remotely equitably representative of even, frankly, 20 other people, much less 20,000 or in some cases, millions, right? And so the idea is, can you come up with agents that are reprsentatives of all of us, so we all have bot, if you will; it is granted the right to vote on issues, on all issues. And over time, as you grow up, as you mature, as you change your beliefs etc., you inform the bot of issues, and you inform the bot of your philosophies, and then these agents vote on your behalf. Because, you don’t have time to look at an appropriations bill on parks funding, but you might care about the parks, so you would want to set a set of criteria that would say, yeah, this is something I want to vote on. Whereas something else might be something that you don’t, and obviously for anything contentious, something that can’t have an automated decision made about it, that’s the one that the bot emails you about, or texts you about and says, listen, a vote’s going to go down in 7 minutes, you got an opinion on this? Or with more time, etc. So, I was really attracted by the idea of just eliminating these lossy humans, maybe we keep them around for coming up with the legislation and such, but removing, decoupling the impetus they have from creating the legislation and passing the legislation, almost separating those two.

Liz: That’s super interesting. That would make a great sci-fi story. I find politics really interesting, well, I find governance really interesting, less politics. And especially, you look at all the different institutions that exist across the world, like from multi-lateral institutions, and we have such a variety of them, and yet everyone seems unsatisfied with them in some way, which they’ll, the phrase that like, democracy’s the worst option except for all the rest—there’s still value in the systems we have, it’s just like, I think we’ve just stopped self-correcting, and why have we stopped self-correcting? Or at least, maybe it’s just our perception as people who are politically aware, and of an age where we have seen the past and don’t think it’s as good as now, maybe it’s all fine and it’s just our present-ism which is the problem. Or—I was talking to someone I know in Finland, and some other parts of Europe have, like, a far-right party who has a lot of power, or a lot of percentage in the parliament, but actually all the other weight against this larger, and so they probably won’t have political impact. And they have people who say, the kind of far right nationalists are going to last ten years, because it’s a demographic shift and things like that, and so maybe we’re just in one of these periods, you know, progress isn’t a straight line, it goes back and forth, and we’re just currently in a slight recession and then it will all race ahead again in ten years when everyone accepts climate change is a thing, and everyone accepts love is love, and everyone can marry whoever they want, and all these sort of things, and it’s just this kind of crunchy period of like, getting through this backlog of people who haven’t updated their bots! At all, in the last 50 years, they’re still operating on this assumption that is very outdated.

Chris: So, do you believe that the arc of history, as Martin Luther King suggested, does bend towards justice?

Liz: I think so. My PhD looked at a certain period in time, and it looks at the history of secularism. And 150 years ago, you couldn’t be an open atheist in Parliament, right? Charles Broadlaw*, who was the first open atheist—OK, slightly less than 150 years, maybe a 140—he was elected in the 1880s as an open atheist, small “r” republican. So the first thing he has to do as an MP is swear an oath to God that he’ll uphold the Queen, right? It’s a bit difficult. And so he faced tremendous opposition getting into Parliament. And then eventually he passed a law which harmonized all the kind of affirming and swearing practices in the UK, and then it wasn’t problem for the people who came after him. And progressively, over time, over the last 150 years, being an atheist isn’t being a problem any more, it’s actually fine. Growing acceptance, just like being gay, LGBTQ+, all of the things, has much faster become more of an accepted thing across more and more parts of the world. You have to look at everything objectively, and I think when you’re in a period of just, like, “oh my God, the Amazon’s on fire, oh my God everything’s terrible, oh my God Trump,” all these things, you’re necessarily going to dwell on the things that are bad because you’re already in that mentality. But there are still things, maybe not like Steven Pinker-eseque, like, everything is totally great and better than it has ever been, because I think that has its flaws as well—

Chris: Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now felt like I was being beaten over the head with ideas with which I already agreed.

Liz: I know! you have to look at statistics, and you have to look at all of the other things that are progressing, and you can identify the things that aren’t progressing as you’d like. There is, it feels like, worldwide, a stall in human rights and democracy, so it’s not huge, but it is slightly regressive, so you get more authoritarian governments and things like that. As well, like, poverty is reducing, disease is reducing, there’s generally more toleration for human rights in a greater variety of places. Doesn’t mean we have to be complacent, but I think we also have to recognize that, like, not everything is bad, we’re not heading towards a complete dystopia. And going back to the book I read, Why Nations Fail, the really interesting argument they had was that not everything is linear but contingent; so you’ll have events where one thing can happen, and one thing—well, multiple things can happen but it takes one path over another. And I think instead of looking at things as straight lines of inevitable utopian future, inevitable capitalist dystopia of like a William Gibson variety, or whatever, all of these things are contingent, and it’s going to take a huge amount of decisions over time for one future to occur over another. And they might go back and forth, they might swing one way and swing another way, and it’s more like, how do we make those important contingents swing the right way rather than the bad way? We don’t have to be angry all the time about everything, but focus attention on the important things maybe. I don’t know! I really like the argument, and it oddly made me more hopeful..(laughs)

Francis: One of the things that was coming to my mind when we were just talking is how, with capitalism and power in general, there’s very little problem with thinking globally, and organizing things globally, and I think when you see in science fiction a lot of the time, the future is usually one where there’s some sort of process resulted in a world government that is fair and works a lot of the time; but what it seems to me in the left and in progressive movements is that, it’s always very local—and they even say, think globally, act locally, that sort of thing—but it’s really hard to compete with capitalism and these other forces that are working on a global scale, and we’re all trying to figure out things in our own individual countries and…I was wondering if that might be something that changes whether we have, within the left, internationally, say like a set of goals or a set of principles that inform parties internationally.

Liz: I have no idea.

Francis: You know, I’m wondering, in science fiction, how often that is the case, that there is sort of an evolution that leads to the world functioning as one whole, and the government being a force of good and benign, and how did they get there?

Chris: I’ve seen that in science fiction, where the reason the human race ends up all organized as a species rather than a bunch of separate nations fighting amongst each other, is the result of an alien invasion or the threat thereof.

Sina: Some annihilation event, yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I think it would be horrible, but I almost want somebody to scam, like a message from some aliens saying we’re going to attack in ten years, because it would lead to some temporary unity that, even after the scam is exposed, might have enough [histories?] to hang on.

Chris: Hire some Russian hackers and get it done on Facebook!

Sina: Like, that’s the fake news campaign I could probably get behind!

Liz: There’s like three branches of that—there’s one, there is this like existential threat, either alien or increasingly, kind of, like we’re killing the planet and it’s an environmental push; and then two, it’s just this kind of gradual seep, right? We decide we need more resources, so we go and mine the asteroids, and we kind of spread out into the local system and then someone just always discovered faster-than-light travel or something, or wormholes, blah-blah-blah-blah. And so you get this kind of gradual thing, or this like massive leap in technology or everyone banding together. I said a third one—I think the third one’s just dystopia, that we just generally collapse. I don’t know, like it’s, someone’s either going to luck out on one, or it’s going to be completely different, right? We’re just going to either continue as a species, or we’re just not. And I don’t know what one would be. It would be lovely if it was more utopia-driven rather than, like, we need to scavenge asteroids to keep our planet alive, but, at this moment we’re probably betting on the asteroids keeping the planet alive.

Sina: For sure.

Chris: Well then, informed by science fiction, what do you, all three of you, think the future might be?

Sina: Liz, do you want to go first?

Liz: I’m still thinking…

Chris: Francis, do you have an idea on what the future might look like?

Francis: There could be a crystallization of a generation that comes along and then just decides, hey, we could just create our own rules. And somehow, technology gets to a point where its potential is explained to people in a way that facilitates a much grander vision than we have right now, which is kind of like everyone for themself. It could be one of these things that just unfolds, really fast and in a really big way, and becomes like a source of excitement and, I feel like, because capitalism is sort of strangleholding the potential for technology to be used for the benefit of all, that when it finally does become something that’s used for the benefit of all, the quality of life and the creative outpouring—I think it just become immense, and the standard of living could go up hugely in a very short period of time. I think that’s inevitable, because it’s just a choice, ultimately, it’s a choice that’s not been given to people, or even had them be made aware of for the most part. I mean, you have people like Buckminster Fuller, but for some reason there’s no traction there. And when that does happen and the collective goodwill and the collective creativity is connected with the technological potential that we have today, it’s just gonna be amazing. I hope I live to see at least its beginnings.

Liz: I kind of still have hope in politics, or the ability for collective action, like through countries and things to change. I think the recent example that I will pick on will be the New Zealand government; they’re a small country, they can kind of experiment with these things easier than something like the US or maybe the UK. Where they had like—was it the wellness budget? Basically, instead of focusing the outcomes of their national budget being on, like, GDP and growth and the kind of traditional economic markers, they were focusing on well-being of their populace, and so they had to re-think how do you base your entire economy, and measure it and implement programs, that focus rather on the outcome of increasing GDP on the increasing happiness and wellness of their country? And that’s really interesting, right? LIke that’s the kind of first of its kind, and with all the kind of markers of traditional capitalism being kind of undermined by capitalism itself. So like we said with the foreign direct investment basically being a sham, or like, you know, all these offshore banks and that sort of thing happening, if you start changing the parameters of what you’re focusing on as a country, then maybe that’s enough to twist the dial? To be like, allright, we’re going to focus on outcomes. So once you’ve looked at health and education and all these things, then maybe you start to find the investment for more kind of things like space flight and advancing technology. So maybe all it needs is that slight focus shift of an actual government to say, we want an outcome that’s not based on finances. And then there’s also, we have this, not just a demographic shift in the US that might benefit the Democrats, but an overall decline in population, which most of, I think, I’ve read several things which are like, at the point in time where you don’t have more people, and you actually have a declining population, that’s gonna have really weird effects on a traditional economy, right? Like, you can’t be focused on growth unless you can manifoldly increase the amount of productivity one person can have, and maybe that’s when automation takes off and things like that. But then, the pressures won’t be on employment, the pressures will be on, like, how do we actually make stuff? If there’s not enough people to make stuff and things like that. So I’m wondering if just the kind of sheer forces of economics and the shifting of how people are thinking about government, will ultimately shape the world in unintended ways or unforeseen ways that even sci-fi hasn’t speculated, because sci-fi has existed in economies of constant growth and GDP output economies and things like that. So, who knows?

Sina: I think it’s going to be really messy in the short term, but I’m still long-term optimistic. I feel like that’s an intrinsic character trait that, through biology, nurture, education, etc., I hope I never lose. And so I am very pessimistic about certain short-term things, whether it’s political, whether it is access to water, is something that’s very concerning in terms of just the percentage of the world population that will have access to clean and potable drinking water in the next decade and so forth, but zooming out and kind of looking more, longer term, I love, I really love Liz’s kind of puzzle-piece putting together of automation with declining population, that really resonated to me. And I think that things like that should hopefully lead to some emergent effects, to speak to some of Francis’ points. So, for example, when you have ubiquitous access, not only to information—which is sort of what the web has started us down the path of, and things like infomocracy explore a little bit more, but also the access to synthesize and to use that information through things like 3-D printing and personal manufacturing, then maybe technology can start to be used to reduce our reliance on systems which are perpetuating all of these things that, in this conversation, we’ve kind of all agreed are bad, or not productive for society. So that’s why I’m long-term optimistic, because I’m hoping that through my belief in just humans, as individuals, instead of humans in groups, that by increasing access to manufacturing, to personal knowledge synthesis and creation and review etc., that we would enable that generation that Francis is talking about to actually exist. But change periods are really messy and hard. Once you zoom after it, that you can see so many of the benefits, so, maybe I’m not necessarily relishing some of those change periods, but they need to happen, because the outcome is worth it.

Chris: OK. Well with that, we’ll ask Liz the same question we ask every guest we have, and that’s is there anything you’d like to promote or tell us about that you’d like our listeners to take a look at?

Liz: Just check out my podcast, that’d be lovely. But I think the thing that I really enjoyed about changing my reading habits was just how much new and interesting science fiction it brought to me. So I would recommend everyone to do a reading challenge—not like a hard one, but say read ten books. If you look at your book collection, you realize you’re mostly reading male authors, then just like read ten books by someone who you wouldn’t read, so either like a non-white author or a woman author or someone from another country or translated book or something like that, because what I have found is that it has made science fiction that much more richer. So I would recommend that, just challenge yourself to read differently, even five books, it would be great and I hope you enjoy the result.

Chris: Great! Well, with that, thank you Liz so much for coming on.

Liz: Thank you! It was really fun.

Chris: Thanks Sina, for helping us out with this episode

Sina: Always a pleasure.

Francis: Yeah, thank you both.



Making Better Episode 15: Michael Bungay Stanier



Michael is a compelling keynote speaker, combining practicality, humour, and an unprecedented degree of engagement with the audience. He’s spoken around the world in front of crowds ranging from ten to ten thousand.

En route to today—and these are essential parts of his origin story—Michael knocked himself unconscious as a labourer by hitting himself in the head with a shovel, he mastered stagecraft at law school by appearing in a skit called Synchronized Nude Male Modelling, and his first paid piece of writing was a Harlequin Romance-esque story involving a misdelivered letter … and called The Male Delivery.

Click here to watch Episode 15 on YouTube.
Click here to read a complete transcript of Episode 15.
Michael’s new book, The Advice Trap, is available for your reading pleasure.

Episode 15: Michael Bungay Stanier Transcript

Making Better Episode 15: Michael Bungay Stanier


Chris: Hi, I’m Chris Hofstader

Francis: Hi, I’m Francis DiDonato

Chris: And this is Episode 15 of Making Better podcast, featuring author and business coach Michael Bungay Spanier.

Francis: Now business coach—there’s a term that I wouldn’t normally be too excited about. because I wouldn’t really define myself as like a rabid capitalist or anything. However, I think in regard to optimizing human interaction and communication, we can actually learn a lot from business.

Chris: Yes, there’s a lot that goes on, I noticed a lot from my own career as a manager that came up in the interview, and I think Michael does an awful good job at communication in general, whether you’re using the ideas he presents in business or you’re using them just in your regular day-to-day life.

Francis: Indeed. So shall we?

Chris: Let’s get on to the interview.

Chris: Michael Bungay Stanier, welcome to Making Better!

MBS: I am delighted to be here. I just love the whole theme of the podcast, which is, how do we champion the work that we do to make this world a better place, so I’m really excited to be part of the conversation with you.

Francis: Thank you very much.

Chris: Can we start with a bit of your background? Where you grew up, and going on to be a Rhodes Scholar and, how did you end up in Canada?

MBS: I am Australian by birth, born there fifty-some years ago, fifty-two years ago or something like that, and I had an awesome childhood growing up. I mean, I grew up in Canberra, the little-known national capital of Australia, sort of in between Sydney and Melbourne there. Went to high school in Canberra, liked it there, went to university in Canberra, to the Australian National University, and there I did something called an Arts Law Degree. So Arts is a B.A. in literature, which is what I love and what I was actually OK at, and then there’s a law degree, which in Australia is an undergraduate degree. And you often do these combined degrees to kind of have a kind of richer educational experience, and make your qualifications kind of a bit more diverse. Anyway, law I was not so good at, honestly. I struggled, didn’t really get it, I wasn’t really interested in it—I finished my law degree being sued by one of my law school lecturers for defamation, which if nothing else, should have been the clue that a law career was never going to be in the cards for me. What saved me from becoming a sad and unhappy and barely adequate lawyer, was winning this Rhodes scholarship—which is fantastic, and I applied to be a Rhodes scholar because my dad is actually British. He actually grew up in Oxford, and so he went to Oxford University, and I was like, OK, that’s how I get to go to Oxford University as well, be a Rhodes Scholar. Got to Oxford, where I did a Masters degree, but really the main thing that happened at Oxford is, number one, I met my wife, Marcella; and number two, I was plucked out of that stream of becoming a lawyer. So that was great, that got me to England, meeting Marcella meant that I didn’t rush back to Australia. And I’d now spent eight years in universities, so I’m now basically both over-educated and largely useless. So, I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, what’s going on, and I got my first job, which was in the world of innovation and creativity. I actually helped invent products and invent services for companies, and that took me to England and London, and then I joined the [Change] management consultancy, helping organizations evolve and grow. That took me to Boston, and then in 2001 I moved from Boston—actually Cambridge, which I know is where you are some of the time, Chris—from Boston and Cambridge up to Toronto in 2001, and shortly after that I started my own company called Boxed Crayons, and have been going since then.

Chris: And how did that lead to what you call Business Coaching, and how did you end up where you are now?

MBS: I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the saying, “Inspiration is when your past suddenly makes sense”—because I’ve never really bought in to the idea of these people who make plans and then actually follow them through and they ended up being the thing that they decided to be 20 years earlier. That certainly wasn’t my experience, I kind of stumbled around from spot to spot. When I was a teenager, I just figured out that I was good at listening to people. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to slightly angst-y teenage friends about their complicated love lives, and as I had no love life whatsoever, I was like, “oh, I can listen to your stories, at the least.” And I remember thinking, as a kind of 16 year old, I’m good at listening to people but I don’t know what I’m doing, and I wonder if there’s a better way to listen and a better way to be helpful in these types of conversations. When I went to university, I joined a telephone crisis hotline, a kind of youth suicide hotline, and that taught me the first basics of how to be present, how to ask good questions, how to be curious and how to be supportive and helpful in a conversation. And honestly, that thread has then just carried through all my life. You know, when I worked in these consulting roles, I would often reframe what I was doing not as consulting, but as coaching. And when I moved to Toronto, I did my formal coach training, built up a coaching practice, and then discovered that actually I didn’t like coaching—it was a bit of a shock—but I kind of figured out that what I liked doing was teaching and writing and being in front of audiences, so that’s where I moved from not so much the business coaching side myself, but more, how do I teach other people to be more coach like, so that they can have better relationships, be more effective in the business that they do, and effectively just, to coin a phrase, make things better.

Chris: How would you say that business coaching differs from coaching in sports or something like that, and what’s the difference between coaching and mentoring?

MBS: Those are two good questions. So let me take one at a time. Part of the challenge with coaching in generation is that there’s about 927 definitions of it. Everybody’s heard of coaching, and context makes all the difference. So we all can conjure up an idea of what a sports coach looks like, you know, somebody with a whistle around their neck and telling people to run laps or do drills up and down the ice, depending on what country you’re in. And then there’s life coaches, which are people going, look, I’m going to help you figure out what you want to do with your life, and have a happier life. And there’s executive coaches, which are where I come in, and I support high potential people, or senior people in businesses. So you’re quite right, there’s a whole bunch of different ways of doing it. Here’s something that I think unifies all of these different types of coaches, which is effectively they’re all teachers. They’re all looking to say, let me help you figure some stuff out and actually get closer to the goals that you want to achieve. And what all coaches have, is a mix of advice and curiosity to help people move forward. And I take the stand that the more curiosity people can bring into their conversations, the better questions that they can ask, the more effective they are as teachers and the more effective they are as coaches. So it is a standard belief that most sports coaches—you don’t ask people questions, you tell them what to do, like go run around the field, or go sprint up and down the ice, or go juggle the knives or whatever it is. But what you find is that coaches who work with the very best sporting teams in the world, or the best sporting players, ‘cause you know, individual coaches such as people who coach tennis players, they don’t spend a whole lot of time telling people what to do, they spend a whole lot of time asking the questions that help people go deeper into solving their own problems. That’s the unifying piece between coaches, whatever context shows up, which is like, this mix between some advice, but the better you are, the more questions you ask. Then the second question you asked, which is, OK, coaching and mentoring, what’s the difference between the two—and there is a difference. Mentors are often people who have walked the path that you’ve walked, so if our mutual friend Chris Smart, who is the audio producer for this podcast, is going, look, I’m looking for a mentor around podcast production, you’re going to find some other experienced podcaster to go, hey, take me through how you produce this. You know, somebody who is a mentor, I mean it literally comes from the Greek story around Ulysses, and Ulysses had a mentor as a guide for one of the characters in Ulysses. A coach is somebody who doesn’t necessarily, hasn’t necessarily walked that path, but is able to still shape a good learning experience. So, for instance, with Chris Smart, technical audio producer here, I couldn’t be a mentor to him because I know very little about audio production. I could be a coach for him, though, because I know to ask good questions, and I could challenge him on what he’s attempting to achieve and how he’s thinking about marketing and where he could find ways of improving his skill. So I think there’s a difference there. In short, good mentors have experience, but the best mentors ask good questions.

Chris: I mentor an awful lot of young blind people, and as you say, if they’re interested in a career in software engineering, I’m quite able to help them. Even if they’re 16 years old today, I can help guide them along the way.

MBS: Yeah. But you’re beyond the specific mentoring around software development, is a way that you could coach them, regardless, in whether they want that path. I mean, in my past I’ve worked with people with disabilities—I’m thinking of a guy with an acquired brain injury from a car crash, and I didn’t have that experience of knowing what that was like, I didn’t have the technical expertise to understand what acquired brain injury meant and the implications of that, and I could still coach him around that. So I couldn’t mentor him, but I could still coach him.

Chris: And what to you say to skeptics who might say that a lot of this sounds like common sense?

MBS: Well, they’re right, often. What people often need is not some sort of “aha” or “here’s the answer that I just hadn’t thought of.” What people often need and benefit from in a coaching conversation is one, feeling that they’ve got somebody on their side; two, somebody who’s giving them space to figure some stuff out, and you’re actually creating some thinking time and some reflection time, to be encouraged; thirdly, somebody who’s a cheerleader, who’ll go, look, I think you can do this, this is what I see in you, this is why I believe in your. So, if you think the job of a coach is to uncover the answer that’s never been thought of before, then you’re setting yourself up for failure, because most answers have been figured out. If you’re thinking that a coach is somebody who can actually help you generate a new insight about yourself or about the situation, help you have the courage to try something new and take some first steps and experiment, to help give you the resilience to help you get through the struggles and the difficulties and go, “ah, I tried that, it didn’t work”—do I choose to take that personally, do I give up? Well then, that’s what coaching can really bring, and that just goes beyond what common sense is.

Chris: In my own experience, my fundamental management basics is, I’m not the expert here, I’m the member of the team who handles the management tasks. And I do a lot of what I call ‘deferring to the expert,’ and sometimes the expert is the most junior member of the team, they just happen to know one specific area better than the others. And often the advice I end up giving an engineer is, well go ask this other engineer, he or she has worked on something rather similar in the past. I do an awful lot of trying to get the team—in my experience, I often find two people together can be more productive than two people separately.

MBS: You totally right. I mean—so, I wrote a book four years ago called The Coaching Habit, and it’s a big champion of this kind of, look, slow down the rush to give advice, stay curious a little bit longer, ask better questions, because actually then magic can happen as part of that. In this new book that’s coming out, called The Advice Trap, I kind of take that a little bit further and I go, no really, here’s why you shouldn’t give as much advice as you want to give, and there are three reasons: the first is, and I think this is what you’re pointing to, Chris, right away—that actually, most of the time you don’t really know what the real challenge is yet. You get seduced into thinking that the first thing that somebody puts on the table is the real challenge, and quite frankly, mostly it’s their first [?], stab in the dark, or it’s an early hypothesis; but rarely is the first challenge the real challenge. But, you know, let’s just say that somehow, miraculously, that they brought this perfectly and accurately articulated challenge to the table, well then here’s the second reason why you should be skeptical about your advice—your advice isn’t nearly as good as you think it is. You’ve got all these cognitive biases telling us that, no no, my advice is pretty miraculous, pretty wonderful, but the science will tell you that it’s actually not. A lot of the time, it’s just not as good as you hoped it would be. But let’s just pretend that, not only do you have the right challenge figured out, and you’re like this is exactly what I should be working on, and you’ve also got a brilliant idea, it’s the best idea, it’s the best possible solution. The third reason why advice is overrated is that, even if you know the real challenge, even you’re the person with the best possible idea, it’s not often the best act of leadership to be the person providing the idea. If you’re the senior person, you’re just like you are in these conversations, Chris, and you’re like ‘here’s my idea,’ what that does is it sucks the oxogen out of the room, and by oxogen I mean not just enthusiasm but autonomy, and trust, self-sufficiency, competence and confidence, everything/body pays a price for you as the boss being the person who’s always providing the answer.

Chris: When I’m building a team, one of the things I do in job interviews is ask an engineering related question that I know the candidate cannot possibly know the answer to. And what I want to hear is the candidate’s steps to how they’re going to solve this problem.

MBS: It’s like show you’re working, right? It’s like, I want to see the struggle, because the struggle tells me everything, it’s far more interesting than t he fast answer you might give.

Chris: Exactly. Because nobody is going to know every algorithm off the top of their head—you can be a PhD in computer science and you’re not going to know everything, and I rarely got a PhD in computer science to apply for a job. But for me it was seeing if they’re willing to ask for help. In fact, I used to work at a company called Turning Point Software, where we were run—it’s where I learned pretty much everything I know about managing software engineers—and we were a high-end consulting company, so everyone there was very talented. So we would almost always, to break the big egos walking in the door, was assign somebody a task that was way to hard to solve on their own, and then wait for them to come out of their office to ask for help.

MBS: Exactly.

Francis: I wonder if there’s like kind of a difficulty in harnessing people’s creativity in their management potential, their excitement about work.

MBS: Yeah, it’s a powerful question. I mean, there’s been research for years from firms like Gallup and the like that say the percentage of people who feel engaged in their work is depressingly low, it’s like I think 40% or maybe as high as 50%, but I don’t think it’s that high. And if you just think for a moment and you go, boy, what would an organization be like if we could unleash the potential of the people here? So that they were engaged, and felt that they were working on stuff that mattered, and felt that they’re excited and felt empowered and supported, all of those words. If we could turn organizations into that, how would we do that? Now, I don’t know if any of you have ever worked with big organizations before, I have, and it can be a bit of a soul-crushing experience. You become a small cog in a big machine, and here the machine is driven by capitalism, so the quarterly results and are you making money and are you making a profit and shareholders are your number one stakeholder—but there was a report put out recently, there’s a statement actually from the—I think it’s called the Council of Business? It’s based in the US, it’s like all the CEOs, many of the CEOs from the Fortune 500. They put out a statement going, ‘we have to think of business as not just being driven by shareholder requirements to make a profit, we have to think of all the stakeholders that are involved.’ So, you know, Francis, I think that it’s true that there’s just, as far as I’ve known forever, organizations asking the question ‘what does it mean that we can do business well and also have a culture that allows people to thrive and be at their very best,’ and it’s difficult, because the trend is always to just keep working, get it done. We started with the industrial revolution, with factories, and now we’ve just kind of adjusted that slightly.

Francis: When I first worked in industry, and it was for a big company, I think the most shocking thing for me was the complete lack of loyalty that was implicit in working for these people, and you know, on the one hand to be like a team player and get “meets or exceeds expectations” on your reviews, you’d be expected if need be to miss your kid’s birthday party. But the minute you leave that office and get your paycheck, everything that that business owes you is done, there’s no sense that you’re in this together, building up a business and that your sacrifice has any meaning outside of that particular pay period, you know?

Chris: In the software world, I mean, the 60-hour work week is pretty standard, so it becomes your entire life. I mean, your social life becomes the people you work with, because all your friends you used to know stopped calling you because you never have time to go out.

MBS: Right. It’s an interesting balance, because—take some of the really big tech companies that we call know of, like Google. You know, I’ve gone and hung out on the Google campus a few times, it’s pretty awesome, quite frankly. You know, you’ve got amazing food, dry cleaners, sporting field, masseurs, it’s really set up to be a pretty pleasant place to work, and there’s a couple of things going on there. One is, it’s like we want our people to feel that they’re well treated and they’re well looked-after, and that’s absolutely a key part of it. The other is like, this is a really comfortable prison, we’re keeping you working 60 or 70 or 80 hours and we’re making it really easy for you to not leave the campus and not do the work. And it’s not like the people who are in Google going, ‘and I’m feeling exploited’—although I’m sure some of them are feeling that way, but there’s a lot of people who go, ‘I feel very fulfilled by this work. I work really hard, I get a lot of meaning from my work, I like working 60 hours a week because that’s actually how I get a sense of purpose and engagement in my world.’ It’s complex. You know, there’s a deal of collusion on both sides around how we work together, but it’s also, coming back to your early point, there’s a large percent of people who feel very disenfranchised by their experience of working.

Francis: And it comes also to, there’s a question of what a civilized work/life balance should be.

Chris: Google is an especially strange situation. I mean, Microsoft is much more like a pyramid, a standard management structure, whereas Google gives an awful lot of autonomy to individual teams and, because those teams have budgets and schedules, they’re often terrible at cooperating with other teams within the same Google complex. I could speak specifically to their accessibility group—they have all kids of trouble getting the gmail team to cooperate with them, because they have competing priorities.

MBS: Where I go around all of this is, kind of geeking out around philosophies of management. Because if you think to yourself, ‘well, we should be able to coordinate all of this,’ you’re just massively underestimating how hard it is to navigate a complex system. Because these things are, you know, there’s like a thousand sub-cultures, there’s a thousand micro-teams—it’s a huge, complex ecosystem where you can’t get everything to line up in a machine-like way, it’s just impossible. It’s like too complex, too messy, too human. So part of what they do is they go, look, we got the money to be able to pull this off, we set up all these things and kind of Darwinian-esque, the kind of law of the jungle that the stronger ones will rise to the top, the weaker ones will drop off, and that is an interesting thing to pursue, and of course it c an be really frustrating. Because if you’ve got somebody like you, Chris, and you’re like I’m trying to just coordinate, and there’s like six different teams doing approximately the same thing, two of which directly contradict the other two in terms of what they’re trying to achieve, how do I work with that?

Chris: What I find though, when I talk to Microsoft employees, they seem to have a better sense of purpose and what they’re supposed to be doing, whereas the Google people—it seems like it’s a thousand start-ups all sharing one campus.

MBS: That’s interesting. I mean, I don’t know enough about the specifics around that. Both of those organizations are clients of the company I started, Box of Crayons, so we’ve seen a little bit into both of those companies, but we get to see just a very, very small part, very small window into that whole organization. So what we see, I can’t tell whether that’s the whole thing, or a small thing, or just my particularly good client or my particularly bad client part of that.

Chris: Getting back to your career, you were named one of the top eight business coaches in the world—how do they measure such things?

MBS: I think they’re mostly going on good looks, because that’s the only way I can explain it. I’m a very, very good looking man. You know, I don’t know—I think you’ve got to take all of these award things with a certain pinch of salt. I know that part of the reason I was recognized is the company in which I hang out, and so I’ve been part of a group for a number of years called the Marshall Goldsmith 100, and that group has a certain amount of profile, which means that when somebody is coming up with award lists, they notice that, so that helps. You know, it helps that the last book I wrote, The Coaching Habit, has been the number one coaching book, so that helps as well. But in the end, we’re just talking about this a few days after the Oscars ceremony, it’s a bunch of humans sitting around going, ‘here’s who we’re picking’ as part of this. Am I one of the best eight coaches in the world? No, I doubt I’m even close. Am I influential in the space of coaching? Yes, I am, because of the books I’ve written and the stuff I’ve put out into the world. Am I first or third or fifth or ninth? You know, it’s anybody’s guess.

Chris: How do you at Box of Crayons measure success on a project? You know, if Microsoft hires you to do something, how at the end of the day do you know if you’ve been successful?

MBS: It’s such a good question, and one that we wrestle with and our clients wrestle with as well. Part of the goal is to try and define what success looks like with the client at the start of a project, not just at the end of the project. So we’re like, what do you care about? What measures matter to you? So as an example, with Microsoft, one of the things we did was we created an online training program for them. You know, I was the guy in front of the camera, and we co-created it over so it would run for five or six weeks, and the client had some really good success criteria. They wanted to measure three or four specific things, and to see if that behavior would change, and they wanted to get a certain number of people to complete the program. And because Andrea, who’s the client, had such clear specifications, we took a poll before the training started, effectively going ‘so how often do you ask question, and is your manager good at being coach-like,’ and then we took a poll after it had finished, and you know what? We made great progress. They wanted to get x-thousand people to finish the program, we actually got 3x of those people finishing program, so we basically crushed it at Microsoft, it was amazing. Then there are other clients we work with who we’ve done training with and we’ve put some thousands of people through the training program, but because we haven’t ever quite figured out with them what matters in terms of measurement, what we have is qualitative feedback, people saying your training’s great, and I’ve changed my behavior, but often we don’t have quantitative measures so we can say ‘and this is how much it’s worth’ to the company’s bottom line.

Chris: You have four key questions you present in Coaching Habit, can you describe those questions and how they’re used?

MBS: Sure. So, in The Coaching Habit I actually lay out seven questions, or I go here’s what you’ve got, seven good questions. The idea when I wrote this book was, how do I make coaching less weird? How do I make it more accessible for people? And part of it is to try and de-complicate it, to say look, it’s actually not this sort of mysterious, arcane ritual. If you can stay curious a little bit longer, then you’re going to be more coach-like and you’re going to be more effective as a manager, as a leader, as a human being. And how do you be curious a little bit longer? Well, you have some good questions to ask. And so when I was writing this book, I was back and forth going, OK, is it a hundred and twenty questions, is it three questions, is it something in between? And I went back and forth as I wrote different drafts, but I kind of ended up on the seven questions. So I’ll tell you a few of them, and people can google what are the seven questions from The Coaching Habit and you’ll find them easy enough, ‘cause they’re all over the internet. But I’m a particular fan of the kick-start questions, so this is a helpful way of starting any conversation, particularly kind of one-to-one, and the kick-start question is simply, “what’s on your mind?” Some people will recognize it as the Facebook question, ‘cause that’s the question Facebook asks to get people typing, so obviously, it’s got to work fairly well. But what I love about “what’s on your mind?” is it says to people, tell me what’s going on, you tell me rather than me telling you, that’s an empowering act. But don’t tell me anything and don’t tell me everything, tell me about the stuff that really matters, so that we can have a conversation about the stuff that really matters. And I’ve found the kickstart question just happens to be particularly good at opening things up, so the person talks about what matters to them, but also directing them so we get into the juicy stuff fast. Let me rattle through the list of the seven questions.

The first one is the kickstart question, which is how do you get a conversation moving? And the question is: “So what’s on your mind?” The second one is the focus question, and it carries the insight that the first challenge that people bring up is almost never the real challenge. So the question to ask here is, “So what’s the real challenge here for you?” The third question, best coaching question in the world, and that question is, “And what else?” That holds the insight that the first answer is never their only answer, and if you ask the question and then just run with the first answer, everybody’s missing a trick. Question number four, the foundation question: “What do you want?” You know, it really matters how you ask that question, because it can come across a bit kind of grumpy or clippy or kind of, whatever, but if you show up with genuine curiosity going, OK, that’s the real challenge for you, what do you want here? then that can go into really interesting places. It’s a really good question to ask yourself as well, if you’re in some form of working relationship with somebody and it’s not working quite as well as you’d like and you’ve got to try and figure stuff out, asking yourself “what do I want?” helps set you up to have the conversation, to give the feedback, whatever it might be. Number five is the strategy question—this is like about, OK, let’s make clear the choices you’re making, the opportunity cost that being involved in the choices you’ll make. So “if you’re saying yes to this, what must you say no to?” Because I’ve found that too many of us are actually pretty poor at saying no to the stuff we should say no to. Number six, the lazy question, kind of provocatively titled, which is “How can I help?” What we’re trying to do with the lazy question is to stop people feeling like they need to jump in and fix things, and ironically asking how can I help slows down the rush to jump in and help. And then the seventh and final question is the learning question, which is “What was most useful or most valuable here for you?”

Chris: There were two management related books that were really influential on my career. The first was The Mythical Man-Month and the second was out of Harvard, and it was Management By Walking Around. Are you familiar with either of those?

MBS: I know Management By Walking Around, I haven’t heard about The Mythical Man-Month. That sounds very intriguing. What’s that about?

Chris: The fundamental thesis is that nine women can’t have a baby in one month, that the solution to a scheduling problem is not throw more people at it.

MBS: I’ve heard that metaphor before, it’s perfect. What it reminds me of is a model, a way of seeing the world, which talks about the difference between simple, complicated and complex. I don’t know if you know this as a descriptor—here’s the model, simply. So simple is, as you’d guess, a simple formula. In the book I read, they said it’s like baking cake. And obviously, even if you’re Michael, you don’t know how to bake very well, you follow instructions; take the cake mix, add some water, add an egg, beat it up, put it in the oven for x number of minutes at y number of degrees, you’re going to get a cake. It might not be Cordon Blu, but it’s going to be a cake—that’s simple. Complicated is, as they say, like launching a spaceship. It’s hard, but if actually you follow all the spreadsheets in the right order and you tick off all the tick-boxes in the right order and you do all the to-dos in the right order, then you’ve got a decent chance of getting a spaceship up into orbit. That’s complicated. Complex they describe as being like a flock of birds, particularly like those kind of murmurations of starlings, you know, they kind of swirl around and change shape and—you know when birds are flying together in that kind of close flock, nobody is thinking to themselves, what’s my to-do list? or what’s my GANT chart look like for this particular flying thing? They’re operating on some core principles, and for birds it’s fly towards the center, fly as close to the other birds as possible, don’t run into the other birds. What those principles have that define the complex system, and kind of the emergence outcome that complex systems generate, is these principles that are in tension with each other. You know, there’s a tension between “fly as close to other birds as possible” and “don’t run into the other birds.” There’s a tension between “fly into the center” and “don’t run into the other birds.” It’s that tension that allows kind of a degree of autonomy and self-directedness, but within a system that is consistent. And all of this is a very long explanation to kind of react to the idea of the man month, which is it’s very easy to reduce organizational life down to this kind of mathematical formula, which is like if I just add another three people, I’ll be able to do 30% more 30% better. And just as we’re saying here, which is like, do you know what? Most organizations and most projects aren’t about complication, in other words more capacity equals more success; they’re complex and actually the thinking that needs to be done is, what’s the real challenge? What are we really working on? Who, are we using all the skills in the group? As a group, do we have a way of figuring our dysfunction? Because every group is dysfunctional. How do we process miscommunication? How do we process disappointment, how do we build resilience into this team so that it can get through the hard stuff together? And that’s where you get into the juicy conversations, but that’s not figured out by a mathematical formula.

Chris: In a complex system, it’s easy to get stuck, and you write about getting un-stuck. Can you speak to that?

MBS: That’s a broad question. You know, there’s always an interesting place to look between your own agency, your own ability to get yourself unstuck, and to look at a system and go, how is the system getting me stuck? How does the system need to change for me to get un-stuck? I personally brought up in the system where it’s like, come on Michael, step up and figure this out, you’re a big boy—if things aren’t working then it’s up to you to solve this and get it sorted. And that’s a very convenient narrative for me to have, because I feel empowered by that quite often. But I also come from the place that I am a able, white, tall over-educated middle-class man that, basically, when it comes to privilege, has been dealt all the right cards. So quite frankly, if anybody can kind of figure this out by themselves, it should be people who have a profile like mine. You got access to all the assets, not just tangible, physical ones but just those more intangible ones around sense of being centered, a sense of being connected, a sense of being in the center of things rather than on the outskirts of things. If you’re on the outskirts, and whether that’s because of a disability that you might have because of your gender or your race or whatever, I think getting stuck is often not about you at all, it’s about a system that puts you in a place to get stuck. And that’s a more complex thing to tackle, and honestly Chris, you probably know more about that than I do.

Chris: Do your techniques for business coaching work in small companies as well as they do in big ones?

MBS: Honestly, I would say that my techniques, which aren’t that sophisticated—you know, in the end it’s like, here are some good questions, ask them more often. Listen to the answer. They work pretty well in organizational life. Honestly, if you work with other human beings, this stuff works. You know, if you have spouse, ask him or her some questions. If you have kids, stay curious a little bit longer. If you have a really small company of like, you plus one other person, approaching that with a way of engaging them as human beings rather than as something else, can make all the difference. So, yeah, it boils down to it for me, I’m like, this stuff is about humans connecting with human beings, and it doesn’t really matter the context that you’re in.

Francis: Is it realistic for people nowadays, with the job market as it is, to try to figure out what their life’s passion is and expect to turn it into a career?

MBS: Yeah, that’s a really juicy question, because you see that advice all the time—just find out what your passion is, and then pursue it and turn it into money—and I don’t see that working out lots of times. So I see a couple of things happening. The first is, a lot of people go, I don’t even know what I’m passionate about. And OK, even if I do know what I’m passionate about, and it’s collecting china dolls, how does that become a career? It doesn’t help me at all. But even if you are passionate about it…so let’s go to our friend Chris Smart, who’s the producer of the podcast. He might be going, you know what, I am passionate about podcasting. I love it, I love it! But what can often happen is if you then turn your passion into a profession, it kind of loses some of the magic, because now you’re like, I’ve got to chase money, I’ve got to chase an audience, I don’t get to do the stuff that I love so much because I’ve got to do all the other stuff that’s required to turn it into a business. But then I think there’s another twist on this, which is I think that what you become passionate about often emerges from the work that you’re doing, or the life that you’re living. So honestly, 15 years ago, if somebody said to me, you’re going to become a kind of global authority and spokesperson around coaching, I’d be like ‘really? I don’t even know what coaching is. How am I gonna do that?’ And it doesn’t even sound that exciting. So to my surprise, I’m like, OK, the work has told me what I’m actually most interested in. And it’s through doing the work that you uncover your passion.

Chris: We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion on this podcast, yet all of the business coaches seem to be white men. Is there an issue with diversity in the management’s world, and is there some way we can address that?

MBS: Yes, there’s a problem with diversity in the business world. There’s a problem with diversity just amongst gender, as a starting point. You look at the number of women who are CEOs of big companies, and it’s tiny. You know, you walk down through an aircraft and you’re walking through business class, and you look around and it’s like, it’s almost all old white people, mostly men. And I’m one of those people quite often. So yes, there’s an issue around diversity, around that, not to mention an issue around kind of the whiteness, not to mention the issue around ability and disability as well. So there’s a lot of people doing a lot of great work around this, getting beyond just the stock-photo diversity. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, those stock photos that are out there which are around, you know, here’s a picture of a very happy company at work, and you’ve got somebody who kind of represents African-Americans, somebody who’s asian, somebody who’s white, somebody who’s young, somebody who’s old, somebody who’s got a visible disability of some sort—and you’re like, oh wow, you really like needing to tick all the boxes in a single photograph. And it just feels manipulative, it doesn’t feel realistic. But there are lots of people I know who are like, no, I’m being a champion for you to actually understand diversity in its more subtle forms, which is not just can we get somebody else sitting in the room that looks a bit different, to how do we bring diverse sorts of opinions, diverse approaches to a challenge, diverse ways of seeing the world and actually contribute in a way that makes our organization better.

Chris: When I was VP of engineering at Freedom Scientific, a company here in Florida, I was really interested in making my team more diverse, and I was pretty successful getting more women involved, but my applicant pool was 85-90% white men. I was able to find some really outstanding women to come work for us, but on racial issues, I only got applications from white people and asians. I didn’t get a single African American apply for a job, at a company our size we really couldn’t go out and do a whole lot of drafting.

MBS: Well, I think you see tech companies for whom this is a real challenge going, yeah, it’s not enough to address this in our recruiting process, we actually have to be investing in high schools so that a diverse pool of people are interested in tech early on, so that they follow through and then they graduate with the degrees we’re looking for, and the diversity in all sorts of ways, so that they can be hired. I mean, it’s a system issue.

Chris: You have a new book coming out at the end of this month, can you tell us about it and how it’s different from Coaching Habit?

MBS: Sure. So if The Coaching Habit is a champion for, look, here’s what you need to do to be more coach-like, take the seven questions and ask them, The Advice Trap says, hey, it’s trickier than you thought, or than I thought, to actually show up and be coach-like, to ask those seven questions. And the metaphor that runs through the book gets to how do you tame your advice monster? It’s a real way of tackling this whole idea of going, uh, you’ve got these deep habits where we just love to jump in and fix it and solve it and give advice. For your sake and for their sake and for your organization’s sake, you’ve just got to slow down the rush to give advice, and you’ve got to stay curious a little bit longer, it’s a key leadership attribute. And that’s what the book tackles, which is like what does it take for you to actually tame your advice monster.

Chris: Excellent. With all that we’ve covered, let’s move to something more general. What are your thoughts about the future, and what is it out there that makes you optimistic?

MBS: Well, I know for sure that I am lousy at predicting the future. And you know, there’s that one of those traits of humanity to feel that we’re always at the end of history, we’re like this is it, this is the culmination of the human race. And I’m like, well, it’s interesting how the human race has evolved and changed and shifted over those tens of thousands of years, and I remember reading Bill Bryson’s book many years ago called A Short History of Nearly Everything, and he said this: look, stretch out your arms from fingertip to fingertip, so you put your arms out straight and parallel. And what you’re representing in your span is the history of the earth, six or seven billion years old. And if that’s the earth, if you look at the fingernail of your pointer finger, the white bit, that kind of bit that’d clip off when you’re cutting your fingernails? That represents the entire history of humanity in the context of the age of the earth. And then of course if you go, well that represents some tens of thousands of years, where are we today in 2020 around that? You go, wow, we are a very irrelevant speck in this future. So, partly the way I think about the future is similar to that, or similar to what happens when I look up at the stars and I go, wow, there’s a billion billion billion stars up there, where it’s just a very small part of it. So hold it very lightly, enjoy your time while you’re here on earth, ‘cause you get one crack at it and you’re done. It’s an extraordinary time to be alive, because pretty much it was impossible for you to be alive at any other time in any other place. So I don’t know for sure if this makes me optimistic, but it makes me appreciative that I’m just amazingly lucky to be alive right now, and so make sure I squeeze the lemon to get the very most I can out what’s on offer.

Francis. What do you see from your work, are examples of untapped human potential that could ultimately lead to a better world?

MBS: Look, here’s my personal mission, here’s the way I put it. It’s to infect a billion people with the possibility virus. So what I mean by the possibility virus is the opportunity to say, I see the choices that I have, and I make bolder, more courageous choices. And if you track back all the stuff that I do, so much of it is around staying curious, seeing your choices, making braver choices. And I think if everybody does that, then we get a little closer to helping people tap their potential, and when we’ve got people closer to tapping their potential, we’re a little closer to living in a better world.

Chris: Other than your new book, do you have anything you’d like to promote or plug, even if it’s somebody else’s work, or something like that?

MBS: Well, for people who are interested in the book, whether or not you pick up the book and, you know, obviously it’d be great if you did but you don’t have to, but you might be interested at, because there’s a questionnaire to figure out which of three different advice monsters is kind of strongest within you. Three different personas of the advice monster, and the questionnaire just gives you a taste of which one might be loudest, most kind of vital inside you, so that’s at And then in terms of what else that I’d like to mention or promote, knowing what this podcast is about and what you stand for, I’d maybe suggest another book, which is by a friend of mine called Laura Gasner-Oating, and she’s written a book called Limitless, and I think it’s a pretty good call to arms to say, believe in yourself, believe in your potential, and start fulfilling that, because we all win when people are feeling that they’re limitless and feeling that they can step up to their potential.

Chris: Well, excellent. Thank you so much for coming on Making Better.

MBS: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.



Making Better Episode 14: Fred Schneider Lead Singer of the B52s

Selling over 20 million albums worldwide, The B-52s—Fred Schneider [vocals], Kate Pierson [vocals], Cindy Wilson [vocals] — have quietly impacted alternative music, fashion, and culture over the course of four-plus decades.

They count John Lennon, Madonna, James Murphy, and Michael Stipe among their disciples. Panic! At The Disco, Blood Orange, The Offspring, Pitbull, Roger Sanchez, and DJ Shadow have sampled classics from the band’s discography as Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy, The Simpsons, Sugarland, and more offered up covers of their own.

Fred Schneider joins our hosts on this episode to talk about everything from the B-52s writing process, to implementing positive things for the average citizens of the US, using coffee as a jumping-off point for implementing solutions that benefit everyone, healthy sex positivity, the New York music underground, and finally, upcoming new music from the B-52s.

As always, this episode is transcribed, and you can click here to read a full transcript of Episode 14.

Click here to visit the Breyting Community Roaster website, and click here to like and follow the B-52s on Facebook.

Episode 14: Fred Schneider Lead Singer B52s

Making Better Episode 14, Fred Schneider


Chris: Hi, I’m Chris Hofstader

Francis: And I’m Francis DiDonato

Chris: Welcome to Episode 14 of the Making Better Podcast, featuring our first bonafide rock star, Fred Schneider, the lead singer of the B-52s.

Francis: Fred’s such a favorite of mine, on so many levels, and I think he’s just been this really insightful mind in terms of what’s been going on in the world, how to not let it get you down to the point where you can’t party anymore.

Chris: And the B-52s have been one of my favorites acts, ever since they emerged way back in the late 70s. I saw them perform many times, and this is the first time I got to talk to Fred, so it was really fun.

Francis: Yeah. And I think their work is very light-hearted, because it is sort of party music. A lot of the times I think the genius gets lost, but it’s aged so well over time and I’m just really delighted to have him here.

Chris: Well, with that said, let’s get on to the interview.

Chris: Fred Schneider, welcome to Making Better!

Fred: Thank you, thank you. Good to be here.

Chris: Fred, this is not actually the first time you and I have met. I was one of the kids standing outside the stage door at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey when you guys headlined there over Kid Creole and the Coconuts, and it was a spectacular show. I just wanted to shake your hand as you were coming out, so that was the first time we met.

Fred: Oh, OK. Yeah, Kid Creole, they’re great.

Chris: That was a spectacular show, I mean I was, everyone was dancing all night, everyone was sweating through our clothes. I mean, both of the acts were just wonderful.

Fred: Oh good. Well, that’s the point.

Francis: You’re definitely the ultimate party band. I could think of no bands that have, the music’s aged better. I mean, you just have this place that’s so timeless, and it’s really amazing to see how you could hear the B-52s recordings from the 70s now—or the early 80s, it feels like now—I don’t know you did that trick.

Fred: Well, we never tried to sound like anybody else or follow trends, so—we were our own trend.

Chris: I wanted to ask you about your songwriting process, because the B-52s are both extremely accessible, but they’re also abstract and surreal, and I was wondering how you managed that balance.

Fred: I think we just get people going, and then they sing along, and I don’t know how deeply they go in to the lyrics, but they’re catchy! We put a lot of work into ‘em. We have dozens of songs that we worked on but never finished, so, I think the music gets people going along and we have a lot of sound-candy in our lyrics and vocals and..

Francis: You started out as a poet, correct?

Fred: Yes, the last thing I did before I dropped out of college, ‘cause I was so lazy, was do a book of poetry, but I wound up liking it and eventually, later on, parts of some of the poems were incorporated into lyrics that we did.

Francis: One of the things that really stands out in the B-52s is the surprising imagery and words and, I think, just the fun of the lyrics.

Fred: Well, we have a sense of humor but we’re serious about having a sense of humor. I mean, I’m more influenced by Dada and surrealism than camp, so…we have political references in several songs, and we mostly do the talking about political and environmental and other important social issues when we do interviews.

Chris: I remember an interview with you in Vegetarian Times about thirty-five years ago, in which you said something like you guys were “militant vegetarians”—that you would go to McDonald’s and throw things at people?

Fred: No. I don’t think I said that (laughs).

Chris: As I said, it was an article I read thirty-five years ago, so I might be mistaken.

Fred: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I’m sure we’d get thrown out for throwing McNuggets at people.

Francis: Part of the purpose of our podcast is, we’re trying to look for reasons for optimism in the world. And with all that’s going on right now, I mean, we’re in a time right now where there’s ten thousand children in detention centers in this country and, I mean, it just goes on and on and on. I mean, the level of cruelty that has been let loose with this President that we have is just—I would have thought, unthinkable…

Fred: [inaud] and the Republican Party’s in cahoots, and rich billionaire Koch Brothers, all these other horrible people funding it—it can get pretty depressing at times, but then you have all the kids who are saying, do something about climate change, you’re all going to be dead, we’re going to be suffering from this. So, once we get, impeach Dump, let’s see what happens. I’m sure the Senate’s just gonna stick their heads up their behinds and let him—give him a free pass. None of the Democrats of course, all they need is 51 votes to get rid of him, but you know, that’s not going to happen. I find that kids protesting about climate change positive…

Francis: Greta’s such a star, huh?

Fred: Oh yeah, no she’s fabulous.

Francis: Isn’t she the best?

Francis: She’s a hero for a lot of people, and rightly so. And the ones who criticize her are A-holes, so I find that very encouraging. Young people are not going to put up—and they’re fighting for banning guns and assault weapons and—things I’ve supported for as long as I can remember, so it’s good to see that they’re really getting a lot more attention.

Chris: I do find myself getting inspired by young people. I mean, I’m 59 years old and it’s inspiring that so many—you know, I live in Florida, and you know the whole Parkland kids on the gun issue are really pretty amazing.

Fred: They’re fantastic.

Francis: I think a major issue right now in the world is inclusion. And one of the things I always loved about the B-52s is that I think, in terms of supporting gay rights and bringing gay culture to the mainstream, you know you guys have been a the forefront of that, too.

Fred: Well, everyone’s invited to our party, and always has been. I mean, in the beginning, having been bullied in high school, I wasn’t about to be a standard-bearer, but bands know, my friends knew, family knew—even Elton John was in the closet. But, you know, gradually we got more comfortable with it and like, ah, what the hell, who cares.

Chris: I read that when you came out to your mom she didn’t even stop vacuuming.

Fred: Uh-huh. Good thing it was my bedroom she was vacuuming (laughs). I think that’s a great story. “I know, Freddie.” (laughs)

Francis: Is that what she said?

Fred: Uh huh.

Francis: I think my parents always suspected I was, ‘cause you know, I mean, the minute I started growing a little public hair I had pictures of Ziggy Stardust all over my bedroom.

Fred: There you go.

Francis: Still, like, I guess it’s a very sort of divisive country that we have right now in terms in terms of culture, in terms of politics. What do you see as being things that we can do to, like, heal this country, or put just more into a place where people can appreciate each other’s diversity?

Fred: Vote out Republican leaders, and implement positive things for the average citizen, which Republicans don’t do, and pull the wool over their bases eyes and hopefully they’ll realize that well, coal’s not coming back, you just lost all your manufacturing jobs, there goes your farm—when are people going to realize, whatever? You know, why should you decide what a woman does with her body, you old fart?

Francis: Exactly. One of the things I always found really kind of strange is how, you have this conservative party, and they preach conservatism, but actually a lot of them are the most decadent people on the planet.

Fred: They’re pigs.I mean, consorting with top porn stars and hookers, and wife who is not exactly a Vogue model…

Francis: That’s true. When they had the Republican convention in New York, a couple years, a few years ago, they actually had to import escorts because there weren’t enough escorts in New York to facilitate the Republican convention.

Fred: Oh, well a friend told me that whenever the Baptists come to town at the hotels, they go gangbusters with the porn..

Chris: And when the Christian right said they were going to boycott San Francisco, the people who run the Fulton Street Fetish Fair thought they’d have to close down.

Fred: Who cares. Who wants them in town? (laughter) Christian Wrong is what I call ‘em. They’re not even Christians, they don’t follow Christ’s teachings, I don’t know who—I think Satan’s got them in his back pocket, so, they sure act like it. You can’t tell ‘em anything ‘cause they’re so stupid. But, you know, there’s other things going on. People can do their own thing with their donations, and public work. I’m part of a coffee company now in Florida, and we’re opening an event space in January in DeLand, Florida, for progressive groups and charities. Our coffee, we get our coffee from Laos, where we dropped half a billion pieces of ordnance, and so part of the profits from what we do goes to remove ordnance—‘cause one of the leading causes of death in Laos is stepping on mines and things like that, and losing limbs. And the other thing is to supply anti-venom against snake bites. But the coffee’s grown organically, to certify it cost a fortune, so we can say, you know, it’s grown organically in Laos. So we do that, and men and women get equal pay. It’s a very Buddhist country. It’s called You know, young people and even people our age and younger who don’t support conservatives, really make an effort to make the country better rather than worse—though I do like what Stormy Daniels said, “make America horny again.” (laughs)

Francis: One of the things that is very clear about the B-52s is that they’re very sex-positive. But it’s in a healthy way, it’s not in that creepy Republican way, you know?

Fred: Oh no. We love—you know, let your freak flag fly, we’re not gonna judge, just be safe. We lost so many friends to AIDS that we’ve done a lot of benefits and things like that, and lent our name to things, and—just got to get the word out. Still, people need to take care of themselves. We should start putting cameras in the conservatives’ bedrooms, though I don’t think you’d see much in Mitch McConnell’s, but..

Chris: Francis and I have both lost friends to the virus as well.

Francis: It was a plague, man.

Fred: ..So many in the early 80s, yeah, it was scary. We just did, there’s a show called Pride, and we talked about a friend of ours, Tommy Rubnets(sp) who passed away, and he was about to break through his videos and art. One of his videos is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but he passed away in his early 30s and so all four of us talked about what was going on in New York when we first lived there. And it was like, all of a sudden from the disco era and sexual freedom to, what is this going on, and will I get it? It was already in people’s bodies, but no one knew it. They called it “grid”

Francis: I remember that.

Francis: Getting back to the music if possible—I heard you’re a record collector? Your record collection must be amazing.

Fred: Oh, it—it is.

Francis: Do you have any highlights you’d like to share? Some of your favorites in there?

Fred: Oh boy. Well, I’m a Motown nut, so I love my Motown. I love Work Your Speaker instrumentals from late 50s and early 60s—they call it like, ping-pong percussion. I can listen to a bunch of that, I love striptease music, I love Funk. I love electronic and avant-garde classical. When I did my radio show for Sirius, I played mostly New Wave dance mixes that I found at the thrift store around the corner from my apartment in New York, so I’m pretty all over the place. And really bad albums, like Christmas with Barbie, I play that. I used to play a lot of stuff until my ex said, “can we hear something normal?”

Francis: That’s something I can’t imagine people say to you too often, though.

Fred: No, no no. “Cause I have all these friends—I do a lot of like, Soul clubs, I’ve done several Soul clubs with, well, kids—well to me they’re kids, at my age—in their late 20s, early 30s, and I have extensive Soul records from the 60s that they’d never heard, even some of the ones I played at Soul club 40 years ago, almost, in New York that were like standard to play. So, I like to educate people and I send records all over, to my friends, especially 45s—they’re easier.

Francis: I just inherited a huge 45 collection. I just take one out at random and put it on every day.

Fred: The new record players—the bluetooth ones—the speakers are amazing. You can buy a cheap-ass record player and plug it into this little bluetooth speaker thing and get full sound like you would from big speakers. As long as it sounds good and the records are clean.

Francis: You mentioned something earlier in this interview that I can’t get out of my mind now—there’s a whole bunch of B-52 songs that never got released?

Fred: Well, they were never finished, either. If we were jamming on different things and hit a wall, we’d do the HellTyler(sp) show or the Mary Shirley morning show, and just be the celebrity guest and, with different names, and just do ridiculous things—sing ridiculous songs and do ridiculous commercials and…

Chris: Your Wikipedia page says that you’ve collaborated with a lot of other songwriters. How does that process go?

Fred: Well, right now I have a song out with Ursula One Thousand, called the Neptune Freeze, it’s on YouTube, and they’re gonna be up. And I have Hifi Shawn from the Soup Dragons, we have a song out called Truck. I’m working with Hard Group from Public Enemy on a whole album, and we have a song that’s gonna be on the soundtrack of a movie in Mexico, I sing it in English and Spanish. It’s less stressful, and of course I have the Superions, and I write all the lyrics for them. Our Christmas album’s coming out again, ‘cause the label Four screwed us over royally and gave us nothing. But we have Bat Baby and Really Scary Halloween story out, so—I’ve got a lot of stuff in the can. And it’s fun! I can do whatever I want, and there’s no stress.

ChrIs: And you live on Long Island?

Fred: Yes. I have a place in the city, too, but that’s more like a storage unit.

Francis: Who else was from Long Island? Lou Reed was from Long Island.

Fred: Lou Reed, Dee Snider lives out here, from Twisted Sister. I don’t go to those parties you see in those glossy magazines. It has to be something really special for me to go—well, especially in the summer I’m usually working, but if I am here in the summer I don’t go in town on the weekends ‘cause it’s so crazy. There’s plenty to do here. It’s becoming—like my neighborhood went from having so many neighbors and all that, I mean I didn’t know most of them, but—there are people here all year ‘round now, it’s like a bunch of rich-ass people who can afford to come out here just one month or two months or just every weekend or something, so it’s like, oh brother.

Francis: It’s great to have the country-city balance.

Fred: Well yeah, the county I live in has the most farmland left in relation to its size, so God bless Estee Lauder for buying up tons and tons of farms and turning them into conservancies and things.

Francis: So is there any contemporary music that you particularly find exciting right now?

Fred: I like the Fabulous Downey Brothers. I’m the worst for hearing things, ‘cause when I watch YouTube I watch either when they take like a, there’s a preacher and there’s video called “flaming butthole”—heh—‘cause he talks about gay people are gonna have flames coming out of their butthole (laughs). And so someone turned it into a song! And the video of this idiot speaking is crazy enough, but the song is—so, I like that and I like, just anything like that. I’m the worst for listening to new music, ‘cause if I listen to the radio I listen to NPR, or I play my own music, you know, my own music and all that. I mean, records I have and CDs I have out the wazoo…

Francis: Well back when you came to New York, I think your first show was at Max’s, right?

Fred: Yes

Francis: And there was definitely, it was an underground, you know? You pretty much had to go downtown to experience the new music back then, the punk rock, the New Wave, all that…

Fred: Oh yeah. I mean, we didn’t even have our first single out. And we played on a Monday night in December, which is like dead as a doornail. But we were excited, because a lot of our idols played there. And back then, people don’t realize, for most of the 70s and early 80s, New York went dark from 23rd Street down—well, even 34th Street down, all the way to the tip of Manhattan, the only lights were on in like, were like the East Village and the West Village. Chelsea was dead. You had to go places…

Chris: There was an article in the New Yorker a couple of years ago about how people, approximately our age group, are nostalgic for New York back it was a sewer, and that, you know, we really miss …

Fred: Forty-Second Street was just full of dirty movies and all that…at least it was interesting. I mean, I got mugged, but, you know, I think everyone did.

Francis: Yeah, it was kind of worth it, though, to have that atmosphere. I really miss the existence of an underground like that. You know, I think in some ways it was like a, it was just so much cross-pollination going on amongst artists. I guess you came out around the same time as The Cramps did, right? It was sort of like the second wave of bands that came out…

Fred: Yeah, we were more the New Wavers. We started out Punky, and actually Luxe and Ivy(sp) came to our first show, so—I think there were only 17 people at the show (laughs) and there were three bands. I think half of the people there were our friends who came up.

Francis: Is there anything you’d like to discuss that we haven’t discussed about, like say, new ventures or anything?

Fred: Well, the band is going to work on some new songs for a deluxe CD set of all our albums, so we’ll have some new material, and for some reason they’re finding live shows of ours, so who knows? That’ll be exciting—and the band is already booking a few shows for next year, so we’ll be on our way.

Francis: I was also thinking that one of the things that I really enjoyed was the basement tapes that Bob Dylan puts out occasionally, and hearing alternate takes and that sort of thing. And I think there’s a lot of bands where that would be kind of excruciating to have to listen to, but with the B-52s, I think you know if you considered even putting out some of—I know you like, jam a lot and try to develop songs and that sort of thing, I think I would really love to hear some of that. And I would love to hear some live tracks, so if you’re thinking about doing something like that, I’d totally would love it.

Fred: Well, I think we’re going to put out Killer Bees, the first thing we ever jammed on. I have a really good quality recording of it—yeah, we’ll see. It depends.

Francis: I think the B-52s have always had this amazing balance of being really, not square at all, but also promoting this light, this beauty, this peace and love kind of thing in a way that doesn’t make you nauseous. It kind of makes you want to dance, and, you know, thank you so much for doing that all these years, and the world still needs it, so keep on keepin’ on, you know?

Fred: Oh, we will. I mean, that’s our show, you know, we just want everyone to have just the best time. We’re not going to hit them over the head with a message, there’s enough depressing stuff going on. We want to be the antidote to that, we go-go dance to our drummer.

Chris: Is there anything you’d especially like to promote or plug?

Fred: Well, just check out, because we’re going to be putting out blends of coffee, and like I said, we’re going host charities and progressive groups, and we’re gonna do contests on the Buzz, which is the B-52s band site on Facebook. And we’re still goin’ the band’s still goin’

Chris: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on Making Better!

Fred: Well, thank you! Thanks for having me.

Francis: Thanks, Fred.

Fred: Sure!



Making Better Episode 13: Amber D. Miller Dean of USC Dornsife

Amber D. Miller is the 22nd dean of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. She holds the Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair and a faculty appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Click here to read her full biography and click here to read a transcript of this episode.