Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
“Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
ADAM GREENFIELD Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.
My name is Adam Greenfield and in this special episode, we’re going to get a different perspective on the things we’ve heard so far.
We asked a few MIT grad students to listen to the interviews we conducted with these great speakers, then provide feedback on what they heard.
In this episode….
REBECCA
My name’s Rebecca Taft. I’m a PhD student at the Computer Science Department here at MIT. ADAM GREENFIELD And the focus of Rebecca’s research is in databases. REBECCA So creating software for managing big data. It’s very practical, applied research so industry partners are interested in what we’re doing, which is kind of fun, and I’m hoping to go into industry when I’m done. ADAM GREENFIELD But perhaps once a researcher, always a researcher. REBECCA I think I’m ready to take a break from academia for now but we’ll see. I may miss the research after I leave. ADAM GREENFIELD In our talk with Rebecca, she brought up how each speaker she heard seemed to have goals they wanted to accomplish with their writing. She specifically pointed to things Scott Lewis referenced in his comments about his realizations while watching political debates, that while a listing of facts is an accurate view of the world, people may tune out if there’s no emotion tied to them.
SCOTT
I think that in any situation, an election or a church or a- if you’re sitting there just rambling through facts that you might find interesting in some deep part of your soul but you don’t actually communicate why they’re interesting, you’ve lost.
REBECCA You’re trying to get across this emotional message and connect with the audience and that one struck me because he gave this example of listening to Donald Trump during the campaign and realizing that this guy could probably win the whole thing, which made me realize that he’s probably right, that the emotional message was what was really effective but also it made me think, okay, for somebody who’s doing research, which is all about facts, do facts even matter? How do we use the facts to get across the emotional message in a better way than just emotion without facts? ADAM GREENFIELD Rebecca did mention that the questions she just raised weren’t completely addressed. However, perhaps there really aren’t one-size-fits-all answers to those questions. People operate in many different ways, even though the general list of emotion types remains the same. Still, if you inject some of the emotional connection you have with the facts or conclusions you are presenting, your audience just may find that same connection. Successful communication achieved. Rebecca also brought up something important that Professor Yang Shao-Horn talked about, published work and how it’s never really done. REBECCA Yeah, that was something I really liked about the first interview, was she never thinks about a research paper as a perfect work.
YANG
It is not a piece of work that is with certainty or perfection, but rather it enhances our understanding of the natural and physical world.
REBECCA
So I liked that idea. I mean, you always have the goal of publishing. That’s pretty much what a lot of academic program are based on. You try to publish papers and once you get through your first authored papers, then you can write your thesis and graduate. So in some ways the publication is the goal but at the same time I think the field itself is constantly changing and nobody would say that something written 50 years ago is necessarily going to be right. You know, publications that came after it built on that work but the actual theories that were discussed in that paper from 50 years ago have probably evolved over time. But in terms of thinking of things as constantly being a work in progress, I also did a lot of art growing up and I think that’s something that I thought about more with art. You can always keep on going back and painting over sections and making it better but at some point you have to just say it’s done.
ADAM GREENFIELD
And when it came to Jim Ruland, he and Rebecca seemed to have somewhat of a similar approach to writing. REBECCA So with the last one, Jim Ruland, he sort of said a little bit about the process, like you should start with the stuff that you most want to say, and I guess that’s- I definitely agree with that.
JIM
I think it’s a really good practice to always know what’s the thing you most want to say, make that your starting point, even if that’s in your headline. Then you’re free to meander.
REBECCA
He described this story where he started writing this book review and the introduction ended up taking up the entire word limit that he had. So I think yeah, writing the ideas that you want to get across first and then figuring out how to introduce them with the space you have left makes a lot of sense.
ADAM GREENFIELD
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is a rebroadcast of the the full, unedited interview with Yang Shao-Horn. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episodes of Yang’s interview yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Yang Shao-Horn, W.M. Keck Professor of Energy
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation.
Patrick Yurick: Can you state your name and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Yang Shao-Horn: Sure. So, my name is Yang Shao-Horn. I am a WM Keck professor of energy at MIT. I am also a professor of material science engineering and professor of mechanical engineering, and my area of expertise is in developing energy storage technologies.
P: Cool. So, we are going to start with a couple questions about audience. So, our grad students are learning about how to connect to their audience for the first time. So, the first weeks’ worth of content will be all about like, how do you connect with an audience? So, what the questions I am going to be asking you have a little bit to do with who your personal audience is for your work and how you have connected to them, if you have, or any stories like that. So, I guess, the first questions is, who is the audience for your work?
YS: Alright, I guess we can edit this portion out but, I find this question really can be discussed in several different contexts. So, it depends on what we actually are doing. So, if we are talking about teaching, our audience is really our students. I do not know whether that is what your question, sort of, is targeted towards?
P: It can be any of it. Like, any of your audience that you feel would be worth mentioning, like when you keep audience in mind during your work, who would those people be?
YS: Honestly, I do not have audience in mind when I do my work.
P: Okay.
YS: But, this is may be just a differences in the lingo. So, I think we have more of a sense of, for example, let’s say if you take context of research. So, research essentially we want to define, what is our open problem. So, what is the problem we are addressing and that is motivated by sort of certain challenges in technology, a lack of given technology for a certain need, or a sense of lack of understanding in a fundamental problem. Then we develop, essentially, our research activity targeting, either developing the technology or discovery of fundamental concept. So, that is really what we do for research. So, now if we want to give a talk and we say, “Okay, what is our audience?” If we want to give a public speech, then we want to tailor what we do so that we can communicate with the audience effectively. We tailor, for example, what the materials we will present. Or, if we talk about really our experts in our field, of course, we will tailor the presentation to the audience that we present or communicate with. Or, if we are a teaching our audience are either undergraduate students or graduate students, we will essentially tailor materials differently.
P: Right, so you are saying there could be a piece of research that is being presented completely different ways to the different kinds of audiences, right? How did you figure out how to change the material to present it to each one those audience? What are the questions that you kind of ask yourself? Let’s say you are teaching a concept versus presenting it at a talk, how do you decide what not to say and what to say?
YS: Well, I think it is largely learning by mistakes. So, through our experiences, typically, if we want to communicate effectively, we want people to be on board with what we actually are discussing and very importantly to relate our materials to something that people actually in the audience, they have some experience with. So, there are certain points where people can connect and follow. I think also it depends on whether you are talking about, for example, engineers or scientists. There are also different ways to tailor that. Where scientists are very passionate about discovery of the unknown or discovering some fundamental processes that have not been discovered or understood by scientists or by humans. Where, if you talk about engineers who are developing of technology practitioners and they are more fascinated about solving a problem, changing the world, I think it is very important that we connect with the passion of the audience, whatever they really care about. So, that would be sort of the first step, how do you motivate work that makes people really excited about hearing what you have to say. So, this is the beginning piece, how do you have an opening that can motivate people and people care? Then, the second is how do you tailor the materials? Are you talking with chemists? Are you talking with physicists or mechanical engineers? Relate what we are going to say to something that they are familiar with. That is something that, and I think most importantly is tell a good story.
P: Well, speaking of stories, was there ever a time, you mentioned mistakes and you have kind of learned through making mistakes. Was there ever a time that you remember that you made a mistake that was really pivotal to you understanding how to do what you were trying to do better?
TS: Yeah, absolutely. So, there are many examples I can give, but I think, one that is burned into my mind very deeply is that one time I was invited by the APS, American Physical Society, For some of you that know, American Physical Society meetings, are one of the largest meetings. So typically the attendees are over ten thousand, and so I was given a slot to talk about energy storage technologies. That was a few years ago, really at the onset of this energy and clean energy. It has really become part of how we think about sort of sustainable energy in the environment. So, there was a lot of interest. So, I was invited to give this very prestigious, [12:36 _______] lectures. I walk into the lecture hall. There is probably five-thousand physicists there. So, I give a talk that is focused on kinetics of reactions that is going to revolutionize how we store energy. So, there was quite a bit of chemistry involved. The national meeting for this American Physical Society, most of the physicists care about space. They are discovering stars, and they find these sort of activities extremely fascinating. They are not physicists that are in [13:19 __________________] physicists [_________]. So, during my talk, which is one hour, there is a massive exodus of physicists from this room by the time I finish, maybe there is only three-thousand physicists left. So, two-thousand departed. To add to this embarrassment is that I talked about only kinetics, meaning how fast a reaction occurs. But physicists, I should have known better, care more about thermal dynamics. So, it is really how much energy in principle we can actually hold and can develop. So, it is really in principle how much can be stored. All the questions are all about, thermal dynamics, had very little to do with the actual talk. So, that taught me that we really need to tailor the materials, you know, really what I should have done is with the minimum chemistry by looking at comparison of very different storage technologies and look at theoretical or thermodynamic energy numbers for different technologies to push for the limit. You know, in theory, what is the maximum we can store and really discuss from that particular angle instead of talking about something that I am really passionate about. So, we need both, we need to connect to the audience, but also we have be intrinsically very excited about that topic. So, it is really a combination of knowing the audience plus our own interests.
P: That is an interesting story, I mean, I wonder if you were going back and you were going to tell yourself something before you started that lecture that could have fixed it. Or, if you could have done something an hour before that might have helped you understand that the audience was more interested in thermal-dynamics, how would you have found that out? Is there a way you could have known, or how do you do it now? How did you correct that in the way that you do your presentations now?
YS: Well, I have never been invited back ever. So, that can fix some of the problems.
P: All right well not that specific lecture, but you very internalize this principle of needing to understand your audience before you start presenting to them, right? Or, at least understand where your passion is at versus what they are interested in.
YS: So, I think this is something I am learning, and I see my colleagues are so much better at it than I do. So, I think it is to think outside the box. So, very often we develop our career, and there is sort of expertise we develop and there is a peer group we interact with. That is where I think we get to the publishing piece. This is where, really the majority of, sort of the audience we will be communicating with, and we are so comfortable in that sort of sandbox. How do we talk as people that are working on very different problems? I would say, that preparation an hour before will not really fix the problem. Rather, talking with I would say on the, sort of, daily basis, talk with people who practice very different types of science or engineering would be helpful. So, this is where I think participating in meetings that cross discipline, that would be very useful.
P: That is really cool. I am very new to all of this because my expertise is in education, so I do a lot of communicating myself. But, I am more focused on delivering new pieces of knowledge to people. It is similar, right? But, I am working on it, my class is high school students and with teachers, public school teachers. But still, the principle is there, like knowing them before I starting talking to them. I mean, I have never really thought about this idea of forcing yourself to go into interdisciplinary conversations so that you can really understand.
YS: Right, so let’s talk about, you know, let’s say at MIT we have these sort of faculty dinners. If you have a conversation with a physicist or a biologist, then you actually find in our own disciplinary we find we have a lot of technical terms. If you reduce them to, let’s say one-hundred years ago, there will be actually common sense sets of disciplines or sciences. People can communicate, so this is where I think it is extremely helpful to, as we are in a more specialized society, where our experts are more specialized, how do we step back to be able to communicate with people? Let’s say people from high school or undergraduate students can really appreciate and relate.
P: Yeah, it is almost like you have to put yourself in that position of being an observer or a learner so that you can understand how your audience is going to feel, but also like learning from a field something you don’t know. It is really important because then it helps you.
YS: I think it is often, it is really, you work on really sort of difficult problems and also very specialized. But, how do we explain this difficult problem or difficult solution or this very challenging research in a very simple ways that people can really relate? So, you know, you probably have heard the saying, “The more you understand the given problem, the easier you can explain it, or the simpler you can explain it.” This is actually helpful to talk with audience, a general audience.
P: It reminds me, there is this book that was just published by comic artists who do XKCD, I do not know if you have heard of it, but it is a math comic. It is stick figures, and it is really funny jokes about math problems. But, they just published a book called Thing Explainer, where they took a nuclear missile, but they only used the most ten-thousand popular words in the English language, and those was the only words they could use to describe all the parts that went into it. They said it had to be simple enough that a third-grade student could understand what was going on, it was really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about publishing and how publishing has played a role in your career?
YS: Yeah, I think publishing is really great. So, I really enjoy publishing, and I think the number one reason is that when we write things down, we can think, at least for me, I can think more clearly and make arguments more rigorously, put work much more in context. So, this is essentially the dominant mechanism that we can communicate with other scholars. So, it is really a way to shape our thinking and also shape the area and the progress. We can actually push ourselves forward.
P: Has- I am just reading over these questions again- has publishing changed? Have your thoughts on publishing changed over the course of your career?
YS: I think over time, we become better writers and we communicate better. So, essentially I think publishing, to be able to have a simple story that you can tell, I think it is a very effective way to communicate.
P: Was there ever a time when you published something and it changed your view on how you saw publishing? Or an experience you had with publishing? I am almost thinking, I mean I just did research for my grad program, and I have not published my research yet. I was really excited to share that research, but I was really afraid to at the same time. I guess I am wondering from somebody that has done publishing a lot more than I have, does that get easier? The fear of what it is, or you might not be doing everything exactly perfectly?
YS: I do not consider a publication a perfect work. I always consider publication as a thought based on limited data and a view through a window that can create to see the natural world. It is not a piece of work that is with certainty or perfection, but rather it enhances our understanding of the natural and physical world. If we use rigorous methods and rational deduction of the facts, that is how we think about this problem, that is how we communicate with our peers. I always find it really exciting to then discuss with peers because even for the same set of observations, people can have very different interpretations because we interpret the observations based on different sets of assumptions. So, then publications is a way to lay everything out very clearly.
P: Did you learn that, I mean you work with grad students now who are having to learn this, right? Maybe they published something when they were undergrads but probably not, right? But, was there a specific instance where that clicked for you? I really like that thought that you just had about that it is a thought, that you are publishing a thought based on a limited set of information, but you need to get that thought out there. I know as a grad student myself, I struggled with that, like I struggled with it being a thought. I thought I had to present something that was really perfect, so it made me kind of afraid to publish my findings because I was like, “They’re not perfect.” But, did you go through that? Or, did you always know that it was that idea of a thought?
YS: I am such an imperfect person, so I think it is always, for me from the beginning. So, I am always comfortable with publishing. In fact, it is quite exciting to share the thoughts because then you can actually lay the assumptions out, and you can actually discuss with others. If you have something that is really incorrect and people can clearly point that out, that is how we make progress forward.
P: Do you have any advice for grad students, like from your observations of where they are at and how they are thinking about publishing or the way they are constructing their thinking around that, that you think would be important to share with them?
YS: Yeah, so this is something I work extensively on with my students. I find most of them actually are very hard workers, and they are also very good writers. I think that maybe what I find challenging for graduate students is that, how to put different pieces together so that you can tell a very, sort of, systematic and rational way of interpreting the observations, and how to prioritize some of the key observations and some are maybe secondary observations and maybe some are key conclusions, this is with more of the certainty and some of the secondary conclusions, how to present the results and the thought in a systematic way so that the key points and most important main points will come through in addition to other maybe secondary, in some essence, that are less important points. So, how to make that very clear and how to make the assumptions in support of that thought is very clear to us as well.
P: Do you have a way of, is there a reason that there are not, I am trying to re-phrase the question, but no, it is interesting because what you are saying is there are pieces of information. It is a similar concept I tell the teachers, I am like, you want to teach them the entire Civil War, but you have a kid that can only pay attention for five minutes. What is the most important thing they should know about the Civil War?” So, I am always talking about, you cannot give them everything, you can only give them some, and some people who are really interested might be interested in everything. What is the block there, do you think? When you have worked with grad students, you are saying they have a hard time prioritizing the information. Is there like a reason or a commonality or a common reason why they do not want to delineate importance to one piece of information versus the other?
YS: I do not know why. I do not know the root cause, but I know some of the solutions over years because some of the students become brilliant writers. What can help is to talk about these facts through with the students really loudly to just say, “Okay, is this really significant or how significant is this relative to the other one and how certain you are about this assumption or this thought and how would we organize it?” Then, after I would say some of these conversations that can be potentially supported by further experiments or calculations, then we will generally will come to a consensus. This is how we would present the flow of informational ideas. But, I do not know the root cause.
P: Maybe, it is just perspective, maybe it is just not, I mean what you are saying is when you say it out loud, it kind of clicks. Maybe it is just like when I know, when I have written scripts that I have had to perform for videos, I will write it the way I write. Then, I when I say it out loud I am like, “I would never say this out loud. I would never speak this way.” So, I have to go back and edit it after I say it out loud so a practical step of, say it out loud in front of people even, to see if it resonates. That is a good piece of advice because maybe it is just that perspective.
YS: Yeah, I think it is experience because when we write, not only do we having information, we also have physical intuition. So, it is how to put the pieces together. I think the more we do it, the easier because we have maybe better tone with the physical intuition.
P: I think that is it. Thank you for a great interview.
YS: I think that maybe you want to modify this audience when we speak. Part of what we do is, first, we have to discover knowledge. So, that is what we do, define the experiments so that our focus is impersonal, meaning it is science, a technology, or it is a knowledge. It is impersonal focus. Then, we want to, once we have some discovery or technology development, we need to turn our personal/interpersonal skills to communicate with others. This is where we say, okay, what is our audience? How do we effectively communicate? Do we want do a start up? Do we want to give a scientific talk? That is a different audience. Then, we need to communicate and engage with people. But then, as a scientist yourself, our first engagement is with the physical world. So, an audience could be the physical world, but I don’t know.
P: Well, I think it is important because the thing that I’m thinking about, though, I came at it…my background is in graphic design and art education.
YS: Yeah, so then that audience…
P: Audience is the first thing that you say. What I was thinking about was there has to be a level of thinking about audience in your work before you even start working on something? Because you’re trying to solve a problem, right? A problem that somebody has.
There’s an understanding that just because research has been published, that doesn’t mean it’s some kind of final answer to a question. And Professor Shao-Horn takes comfort in this, this sort of ever-changing landscape of knowledge and information.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Yang Shao-Horn, W.M. Keck Professor of Energy
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Castor Wheel Pivot” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org)
“Mind Body Mind” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
ADAM GREENFIELD Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.
My name is Adam Greenfield and in today’s episode, let’s talk about a subject that, within the scientific community, is a pretty significant aspect of written communication. Today we’re going to talk about publishing.
But we’re not going to talk about how to get published in the sense of what sort of guidelines publications are looking for. Instead we’re going to focus on how to engage your peers and readers, and also understand how writing helps you, the communicator, have a clearer, stronger grasp on your research. Not only does publishing help ensure your ideas are reviewed by your peers but it also cultivates new ideas and discussions.
All of these reasons are why our speaker in today’s show is a big fan of publishing. YANG SHAO-HORN I think publishing is really great. ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Yang Shao-Horn and she’s a W.M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT. She also teaches material science engineering and mechanical engineering and her area of expertise is in developing storage technologies. Professor Shao-Horn is no stranger to publishing, either. Just in 2016 alone, some of her publication titles include “Descriptors of Oxygen-Evolution Activity for Oxides: A Statistical Evaluation,” “Anionic Redox Processes for Electrochemical Devices,” “Optimizing Nanoparticle Perovskite for Bifunctional Oxygen Electrocatalysts,” “pH Dependence on OER Activity of Oxides: Current and Future Perspectives.”
You know,just to name a few. And these publications range from Journal of Physical Chemistry to Ceramics International. All in all, Professor Shao-Horn has been publishing knowledge and work for 20 years. Sounds like someone has a pretty decent grasp on what it takes to write for publications. YANG SHAO-HORN So, I really enjoy publishing, and I think the number one reason is that when we write things down, we can think, at least for me, I can think more clearly and make arguments more rigorously, put work much more in context. So, this is essentially the dominant mechanism that we can communicate with other scholars. We can actually push ourselves forward. ADAM GREENFIELD But, of course, publishing research is never that easy, is it? Sure, it may look easy just from the pages upon pages of listed publications on her MIT site. But even with her name on all those articles and documents and research results, that doesn’t mean she can wipe her hands clean and move on. In fact, to Professor Shao-Horn, publishing is just one step in the process of educating and learning. YANG SHAO-HORN I do not consider a publication a perfect work. I always consider publication as a thought based on limited data and a view through a window that can create to see the natural world. It is not a piece of work that is with certainty or perfection, but rather it enhances our understanding of the natural and physical world. If we use rigorous methods and rational deduction of the facts, that is how we think about this problem, that is how we communicate with our peers. I always find it really exciting to then discuss with peers because even for the same set of observations, people can have very different interpretations because we interpret the observations based on different sets of assumptions. So, then publications is a way to lay everything out very clearly. ADAM GREENFIELD So there’s an understanding that just because research has been published, that doesn’t mean it’s some kind of final answer to a question. And Professor Shao-Horn takes comfort in this, this sort of ever-changing landscape of knowledge and information. YANG SHAO-HORN
I am such an imperfect person, so I think it is always, for me from the beginning. So, I am always comfortable with publishing. In fact, it is quite exciting to share the thoughts because then you can actually lay the assumptions out, and you can actually discuss with others. If you have something that is really incorrect and people can clearly point that out, that is how we make progress forward.
ADAM GREENFIELD
And this is where Professor Shao-Horn’s publishing experience comes into play. She’s now pretty familiar with how to construct your thoughts and words on paper so that whatever you are trying to communicate is clear enough for your audience to interpret. Fortunately for her students, this has become part of her curriculum.
YANG SHAO-HORN
Yeah, so this is something I work extensively on with my students. I find most of them actually are very hard workers, and they are also very good writers. I think that maybe what I find challenging for graduate students is that, how to put different pieces together so that you can tell a very, sort of, systematic and rational way of interpreting the observations, and how to prioritize some of the key observations and some are maybe secondary observations and maybe some are key conclusions, this is with more of the certainty and some of the secondary conclusions, how to present the results and the thought in a systematic way so that the key points and most important main points will come through in addition to other maybe secondary, in some essence, that are less important points. So, how to make that very clear and how to make the assumptions in support of that thought is very clear to us as well.
ADAM GREENFIELD
And of course, like everything we hope to become proficient in, it doesn’t happen overnight. YANG SHAO-HORN I think over time, we become better writers and we communicate better. So, essentially I think publishing, to be able to have a simple story that you can tell, I think it is a very effective way to communicate.
ADAM GREENFIELD
I think one of the biggest aspects of communication is the engagement in discussion and ideas with other people, whether they’re peers, friends, or family. A lot of the time, that exchange and interaction is a more immediate form of communication.
But when it comes to publishing as the mode of communication, the transfer of concepts and research is a more drawn out process. Still, as Professor Shao-Horn pointed out, that allows you the time to focus on how you’re disseminating the work in writing so your audience will come away with a clear, concise understanding.
Then, once you’ve published your research, you’ve engaged your peers and fostered communication. And in doing so, you receive feedback and are then able to gain more knowledge and insight into your work as it evolves and grows. So publishing is not the finality of something, but more a step along the path of growth through communication.
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is a rebroadcast of the the full, unedited interview with Scott Lewis. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episodes of Scott’s interview yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Scott Lewis, CEO of San Diego’s “Voice of San Diego”
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation.
Adam Greenfield: First question.
Scott Lewis: Yes.
A: Name and occupation.
S: My name is Scott Lewis. I am the CEO and editor-in-chief of the Voice of San Diego, an online- mostly online news investigative service for San Diego. And I’m a journalist.
A: So in your hierarchy of necessities in life, from personal to professional, where does communication come into play?
S: I mean, it’s my essence, really. It’s like the thing that I mostly think about in life. You know, it’s the thing- for instance, I can’t watch a show where the plot is driven by miscommunication without crawling out of my skin, you know what I mean? The communication is everything I have… striven… strove? (laughter) It’s everything that I have really pushed myself to learn the most about and to perfect, whether it’s learning another language or in telling stories and learning how to tell stories with the perfection of a plot line and, you know, sort of kicker. All of that has sort of really driven everything in my personal life and luckily it’s been the focus of my career, as well.
A: What other languages do you speak?
S: Spanish.
A: Ok, just Spanish?
S: Yeah.
A: Have you perfected it or have you….
S: Ha. No, no. I can maintain a conversation several levels deep but I certainly don’t come off as a native speaker at some point. I can fake it for a while and then when it starts getting into more interesting subjects I obviously run out of vocabulary and, you know, it’s just not that perfect.
A: Do you find faking it works in getting your point across most of the time?
S: Faking it….
A: Well, maybe not necessarily faking it but more like sort of piecing everything together.
S: I studied in Spain for a year and a half. The second time I was there I fell in with a lot of college students from Spain and I adapted their- I adopted their accents mostly from- the group I was with was mostly from southern Spain. And I found that I was very good at mimicking the way that they spoke and, especially some of the initial phrases and such in conversations, and so I could go out, and they loved doing this with me, where I could go out to a bar and talk to girls and, my complexion and everything, I fit in very well. And so I could talk and hold a conversation for a while with a girl and they would assume I was Spanish for the first little while and then my friends loved saying, “You know this kid’s an American, not even a native Spanish speaker.” And then it would break down. Usually I would get to a point where the topics were so much more intellectual than my vocabulary could handle or something like that but I really- I did think there was some value in not always trying to translate and manage a conversation but in mimicking it, you know? It was one of my great challenges, actually, to stop pretending like I understood things to keep the conversation going and to acknowledge that I didn’t and learn from that. So that was one of my great challenges of learning, because I so enjoyed holding up the façade of being such a good Spanish speaker that that was actually a maturity thing I had to work through.
A: And you probably at some point reach- well, I guess you reach a point where you have to actually know what you’re talking about.
S [4:08]: Absolutely, yeah, and, you know, that’s the fun part of multi-cultural exchanges and experiencing a different world, is to go into somebody’s world as far as you can that’s very foreign to you. That, I think, is only made possible when you allow yourself to be vulnerable about what you don’t know and allow yourself to be willing to be taught and not have to put up a façade that you are perfect.
A: Was there a specific event or moment that led you to journalism?
S: In college I always thought I would- well, I was very directionless in all school, high school and college, and it took a few professors and experiences in college to kind of rattle me a little bit. But I never was a writer and wasn’t even that big of a reader in high school. When I came back from my first trip to Spain, I was really fired up politically and in other ways. So I read a letter to the- or, an op-ed in our school newspaper and I thought it was terrible. So I wrote a big, long response and their response to me- they published it, but their response was, “You’re so smart, why don’t you come in and write?” And I just sort of hung out until they gave me a gig writing news for the paper. It was very easy to just sort of walk into that situation and I was just hooked. It was an amazing experience. Challenging one, too, you know, to go cover the president of the university’s speech or something. That’s not a skill you just know. So I started doing it and got more and more sucked into it. I still always assumed I would go to law school or I would go to grad school of some kind, even though I never prepared myself grades-wise to succeed in that path but I just never pictured journalism as the career until I kept doing it. Then I was offered a job at- I had been freelancing for a local alt-weekly and they offered me a full-time job when I got out and I took it and that was it. That got me.
A: Ok, alright. Now, you mentioned earlier that Voice of San Diego is online and all kinds of, I guess, methods to get it out there.
S: Yeah.
A: Do you have a preferred one?
S: So, no. I, uh…. I guess the reason I hedge when I say it’s online is there’s obviously podcasts, there’s TV, there are other- social media and there are other tools that we use to engage people and so I just think of the website as one tool. Obviously I love writing and I love my own writing and I love editing and helping other people tell stories but I really love social media and I’ve grown to love podcasting, too. I think that as a storyteller I’m just- I’m overwhelmed and excited by how many different tools we have to tell stories and to, you know, kind of tell the same story sometimes with five different media. And so I think that I- I just find it to be really exciting if not a little bit overwhelming time because you have so many options and you don’t know if you’re pulling all the right levers. I still think writing, just writing a simple story, is still my preferred but I think that anyone one of them, if you required me to just be on TV or just be on podcasts or to just be on social media I’d do that, too. That’d be fun.
A: Have you found any of those to be more effective than the others?
S: No, I think they all do something special in their own way. TV, you can tell things visually in a way that you can’t in any written word. You can explain things with good sort of documentary graphic style on TV and in a format that is as powerful as it gets as far as getting across a concept. On podcasts I think that you have an intimate connection with people unlike anything else. I think it’s a- the people that listen to our podcasts seem to feel like they know us more than any other connection I have with folks. Social media is wonderful and the connection there is also really strong. Various forms of radio that I do, like sports radio and other people I talk to on the radio, that always seems to create a connection that’s very powerful, too. And then writing, though, there’s no, obviously, form that you can explain so many things and take people through such an imaginative process as just a good writing experience. So it’s not that anyone’s better. I think they just all have attributes I like to play with.
A: I want to actually keep going with the writing.
S: Yeah.
A: I want to dive into a little bit of that. So, basically, in all my years of writing, I found myself creating an outline for what I’m about to write and just spilling my guts. Or editing later; that’s another option of doing it. Do either of those sound familiar to you or do you have a different way you go about this, sort of, beginning process of writing?
S: Only on my most ambitious projects do I outline them. My process is more about- the writing actually helps me think. I often don’t know exactly how a story’s going to go until I start writing it. So my process is to do as much research and there’s just a moment in my brain where I know, ok, this is- I’ve checked a lot of my boxes, I’ve checked with people that I’ve wanted to check with, I think I’ve been fair to the sources and to the targets and the protagonist in the story, and so at this point I think it’s time to start writing. And often as I write, questions will come up or, wow, it’d be great to figure this out so I could put this here and then I’ll do some more research or call some more folks. So no, I’ve never actually outlined but I don’t really consider it spilling or stream of consciousness writing at that point. There’s still something that I- it’s all there. It just needs to be articulated. I find that the hardest part about writing is actually well before you start writing. It’s just, are you confident in the idea and the insight that you have. Once you cross that threshold, for me, it’s very fast.
A: So you don’t come at it as, this makes me uncomfortable because I don’t know much about it and I want to know about it so I’m going to write about it. Is that an angle you tend to avoid?
S: No, I wouldn’t say that. I find that there are topics that I recognize right away if somebody explained would be well received and valuable. And so I then seek it out and I think I’m in a position now where I just feel so confident about that instinct that I have that it’s never a question. It always works out. Obviously some stuff is not as good as others but I think that it’s- I think the hardest part that young writers and other writers have is trusting that their insight, that whatever they’ve- they think is interesting is actually interesting. And, you know, that’s not easy. That’s a very difficult, sort of, muscle that you have to work, is this idea of if you think something’s interesting, it will be interesting to others and you just have to work on that and you have to test it when you find that something’s just not that interesting. You know, there’s been countless topics I’ve delved into that just never generated the discussion that I thought they deserved and it’s not their fault, you know? It’s not the audience’s fault. But you still have to try and then test it and then come back and re-evaluate whether that was the right pursuit.
A: So repetition will really give you that- sort of that instinct, it can build up that instinct for you, just doing it over and over whether it’s comfortable or not.
S: Yeah, it’s a confidence. I think that confidence is not about knowing you’re good. It’s not about knowing you’re valuable. It’s about going through it even when you don’t. Do you know what I mean? It’s like you’re still pushing, you’re still going to write it, even though you don’t have the data that proves that you’re valuable or attractive or that your insight is going to work. When I think of confidence- when you public speak, for example, I found you’re never going to not be nervous about it. Maybe Bill Clinton’s not nervous about it. But most people, I think, when they get in front of a crowd are going to get nervous about it. The difference is that some of them keep going and other let it, like, really, you know, paralyze them. And it’s the same thing with writing. You’re never going to feel perfect and perfectly confident that you are in the perfect position to tell a story, but you do anyway.
A: Would you consider investigative journalism similar or different than publishing scientific research?
S [14:45]: I think it’s different in that it is much more loosely defined and evaluated and held accountable. I think, and I may not be correct, but I think that scientific and academic- mostly scientific- publishing is peer reviewed in a more systemic way and emerges as accepted in a more system way and a more formatted situation. There are steps it has to go through to become part of the consensus in a way investigative journalism doesn’t. Also, investigative journalism, its success, its impact, its influence, its value is really dependent on how much it captures attention, too, and how much it tells a good story. And so I think that there are- there’s a lower bar for storytelling with scientific publishing but a higher bar for accountability and method. So investigative journalism is about explaining why something is the way that it is or finding something out that people didn’t want you to find out and that is not a perfect- there’s not a perfect machine for doing that. There’s not a perfect template for doing that. It’s a very messy experience. And the accountability is often- the last step for that accountability is often in the head of the reporter and the editor. There’s no, like, council or vote or academy to vet- or sort of jury to decide whether you were right or wrong. Maybe there should be, you know? But the ultimate accountability with, I think, with scientific literature is that others test it and then render some sort of verdict whether it continues to float to the top of the theories of discussion. In journalism, though, it’s still rests on the integrity and the brains of the editor and writer.
A: Where does the public come into play as far as holding the journalist accountable?
S: Well that’s an interesting- I think everybody in our business has a different way of doing that, of incorporating them. The public, I think, demands to be a part of it more than it may have in the past so how that feedback comes in…. You know, we’ve done many corrections based on feedback we got through Twitter or anger or different critiques that made sense and that really is the way you hold yourself accountable. You publish a story and you grit your teeth and you see how it- you try to anticipate everything people are going to say about it, all the critiques that will come, but you can’t anticipate it all. You’d never publish if you were going through every possible thing people would say. Now, to what level- I’ve found investigative reporters and editors are some of the more stubborn people on Earth so once they publish something, getting them to reevaluate the assertions they made is a very high bar and I think it has to be because you reveal something about a politician or about a business leader and they’re not going to like it and they push back, you can’t be immediately swayed by their response, you know? You have to apply the same skepticism and investigative standards to what they say to you in response as you do when you’re publishing or producing the story. And yet you also have to be willing to listen to their point and maybe you missed something. So it’s a weird brain you have to have. You have to be extremely stubborn and yet flexible when it does matter. That’s why I think it’s a pretty difficult skill for people to master.
A: I think in scientific research, also, you’re constantly testing a theory.
S: Yeah.
A: You’re always going over it and over it and over it and trying it in different ways. Whereas with journalism, you do the research and you kinda keep going forward. You may- it seems like you may step back a little bit to gather more information but you keep going forward as opposed to going in a circle until you reached that point where you feel like your trajectory can move forward.
S: I think in a way- although the best investigative journalists and editors are ones who aren’t determined to prove a certain theory, right? Like, they in many ways do act like- or should act like- scientists in that they have a hypothesis that they test and if it keeps surviving that test then it’s a great story. However, they have to be strong enough and flexible enough to identify when that hypothesis has been proven wrong. And that’s when the really interesting discussions come aboard about, well, is there still a story and what is that story? And that’s just, again, a very difficult skill to master.
A: Do you think it’s easier for a scientist or a journalist to evaluate their… after getting feedback?
S: I don’t know. I can’t speak for the experience of a scientist. I think that they are probably- you know, they are working on a much longer cycle than journalists are, I think, and obviously some of the theories scientists are working on are sometimes decades in the making so I think that changing course or admitting that you’re wrong after twenty years of research on something is probably a little different than what we deal with. But I think it’s- I think journalists just live in a world of fluidity and stories that I’m not sure I understand where scientists are in that.
A: So one of the MIT professors that we interviewed, he was once a journalist and eventually became this cultural anthropologist, is what he calls himself. And we talked a little bit about the-
S: Who is he?
A: His name was- is Ian Condry.
S: Mm.
A: He studies now- he’s very big into Japanese anime and culture.
S: Cool.
A: He dove into that pretty- headlong into that. But he talked about the comparisons between research and journalism and even said research could be considered long-form journalism.
S: Sure.
A: Would you agree with that?
S: Oh, absolutely. I think that journalism is a- nobody has a strict, perfect, universally held definition of what journalism is. Basically, in my opinion, it’s the act of trying to figure out why things are the way they are and then communicating that. A lot of people say it’s the first draft of history, blah blah blah, all these clichés about what it is. But really, yeah, it is the initial attempt of us to understand where we’re at, what’s going on, and why. To an obvious certain extent it’s a more messy, quicker beginning version of hopefully what is the cycle of knowledge, which is then more intensely investigated more and more formally presented in a discussion after that. I think that the biggest distinction is that journalists compete in a world of entertainment, as well. I know that they hate that discussion. “Oh, we should never be in the world of entertainment.” But even more so now we have to compete with so many different inputs that people have throughout their day that we have to be compelling and interesting to stand out in that and I’m not sure that academics and scientists live in that world right now and I’m not sure that’s good. I think that they need to probably identify their lack of salience in the culture as a lack of crisis to address rather than just to lament all the time. There’s so much, like, “Wow, short attention span.” There’s just so much hand wringing and anger and resentment about the new world that we’re in but that’s not going to change. People aren’t going to put their phones down. They’re not going to suddenly get better attention spans. So how are we, people who establish truth and thought, going to compete in that world? And I embrace that challenge and I think we should all embrace it.
A: I’m actually glad you brought that up, especially the word truth, because that kinda brings me to the next subject. I want to talk more about ethics in communicating. So what role, then, since you are trying to reach the audiences through all the various different methods, what role does truth play in the Voice of San Diego’s mission?
S: Well, it’s everything. I mean, it’s- the problem is that like a point in geometry, there’s actually no point- you know, it just keeps getting smaller and smaller. Like there’s no- I don’t know if we can ever stab perfectly at truth but we have to try. So we have to build system to make sure we’re always trying to get there and always holding ourselves accountable. I think that what we’ve tried to do is be a little more- well, a lot more transparent about our algorithm and how we figure out truth and that means we are open about our ways of doing investigative journalism, ways about funding that investigative journalism, because so much of that suspicion about journalism is rooted in that, you know, where are you- what’s your agenda? And then be open about our agenda. I think one of the major problems that journalists have had is this sort of cult of objectivity that they’ve lived under for several decades now, which is that- this theory that they are merely mirrors reflecting society dispassionately with actually no bias. Which is attractive because as people would say they want to listen to people who have no stake in the game, that is just coolly analyzing a situation. But I think it’s naïve and disingenuous to say that you’re objective because I think that you, as a person living in a community with kids and houses and whatever, you are a person in this world and you have biases. Journalists will admit, even the people who will say they are the most objective people on Earth, will admit they have a bias against murder and against domestic violence and against racism and against a lot of things that they’re not- literally objective about. So I think to say we are objective is to also- they say, they are implying under that they’re- “Oh, we’re objective after we accept a bunch of facts, after we accept a bunch of values.” If they were truly objective they would hold he-said, she-said stories about whether murder is good or not. They are not- they’re not having that. They’ve accepted that. So what we’ve tried to do is gather all of the things that we’re- that we carry with us to these discussions. Things like we believe housing should be affordable in San Diego and school and quality education should be available to all and things like that that we’re going to carry with us. We also just want to be a little bit more open about where we’re coming from on a lot of stories because I think that authority- and Clay Shirkey at NYU is the one that really identified this- that authority in research and writing is now going to be derived from your transparency about how you do this and why your algorithm, not from your institution, right? It used to be that if you were just at the New York Times, you could call somebody and say, “I’m the New York Times,” and with it came an authority. It still does, but with it came an authority that was just unquestioned, that was just there. And now I think that authority, while there’s still some remaining institutional authority, the authority that we’re trying to build is more of an algorithmic authority like Shirkey identified, which is that this is how we do our jobs, this is where we’re coming from, this is how we’re funded, this is who we are, these are our- this is our agenda, and so take it or leave it. After that point, hopefully you trust us. The second thing I would identify is that the journalists that are going to survive in this culture right now are not the ones that rely on institutional authority or their name but rely on that but not only demonstrate what they find but what they’re trying to find and what they’re trying to do and that the more connections they make with people to prove that they are- or to show them what they’re trying to do, their quest that they’re going on, the more people will want to know what they find and trust them along the way. That’s literally the only answer for what I think is a major crisis in trust of the news organizations, of the news business, news media, and the culture of truth. The only way we’re going to build that is to build mass audiences of people who deeply trust you because they are part of your quest.
A: You mentioned authority, coming off as an authority on something. Is that- so that is necessary to get people to see you as an authority to be able to communicate?
S: [29:46] A vulnerable authority. I don’t think you can say, “This is the truth,” and be a hard ass about it. I think you have to be an authentic seeker and somebody they can identify as trying to work for blank principle. You know, truth or some sort of principle in local public affairs or whatever. But I think you have to- you do have to communicate authority but only after you have identified a vulnerability and a lack of knowledge that you are trying to pursue. I think at that point your authority is not so much in “I am above other people” and lecturing but “I am with you, trying to help provide a service that you’re- that you respect and support.”
A: I have a few more questions. Do you have time?
S: Yeah, sure.
A: One of Voice of San Diego’s values is, and I quote, “A well informed, well educated community ready to participate in civic affairs.”
S: Yeah.
A: So as a journalist, someone who’s tasked with communicating this information to these communities, do you feel that there’s a moral obligation with the way that you’re getting that information out to the people in your community?
S: [31:07] I don’t like the word “moral.” I think that a lot of what we deal with on a local and national level is- has to do with lack of knowledge, ignorance, and I don’t mean that as an insult. I take the challenge of ignorance on as an opportunity, as a- just a thing we have to deal with. When I look at the community, I find that- it’s very rare that people know who the mayor is or know who their city council rep is or knows how a school board election takes place. You know, who votes, how does the primary work versus the runoff, what the Port of San Diego does, what the county does. I find these are- there is vast ignorance about how those work. And I don’t mean ignorance in like “these people aren’t trying.” There are no systemic academic institutions or pathways to teach people about these things. In order for you to understand how public affairs works in San Diego, you just have to dive in. And that’s a huge, very high bar for people to have to go through. They have to- for us, as reporters, you go through it because you’re a reporter, that’s your job. But if it’s not your job, if you’re not a lobbyist or getting into public affairs or you’re not running for politics or political office or you’re not a journalist, you are not going to go through that until there’s a crisis point in your community. A lot of people go through it when a school is getting closed or when a development is getting build by their house they don’t like or whether there’s some sort of oil spill or something like that. Then they go through this crash course of trying to understand how things work. What our basic principle on that is is that we need to do whatever we can to help prepare people preemptively before the crisis hits so that they can be ready to understand how these systems work so they can participate in them. You can’t participate in the public-facing part of the Port of San Diego unless you know that the Port of San Diego exists and what it does and when it meets and who the commissioners are and what kind of decisions they make about the land that they manage and about the police force that they manage. You can’t be a part of those discussions until you understand those things. And so that’s what we mean there. Let’s do everything we can to explain that. So we sort of have two parts: we investigate and reveal things but then we also explain and help people understand things. Those are two parts of the same coin, I believe. Those things that we investigate and reveal aren’t going to be powerful unless people understand the underlying realities and facts about how those organizations and institutions and leaders actually function.
A: So it’s not a moral thing. You just want people to be on a good starting base to be able to be informed.
S: It’s an assumption that [34:11]- at the heart of it is an assumption, that I think you could challenge, that more people being better informed and participating in community affairs would produce better results. So I believe- personally I believe that as humans we are perennially dissatisfied. Like, we could look at all these stats that say there’s not as much war, there’s not as much poverty, there’s not as much challenges as humankind has dealt with throughout its history. However, we are still anxious about it. And I think at that- that instinct is good. That makes us better because we continually try to improve things. It gets a little out of hand when we overemphasize how bad things are versus how good things are. But I think that at that heart, there is a drive there. That’s the human drive, to- that’s what’s propelled us through civilization and through technology improvements and all that. And so I want to help facilitate that with a more common understanding of truth and facts and I think that- with that we have opportunities, we have growth, we have progress. So that is an assumption. That is a guiding assumption that I carry that I think you could challenge. I think you could argue with me that that’s not actually the best way to run things, maybe progress isn’t good, all those kinds of things.
A: A large portion of this podcast’s audience, or series’ audience, will be grad students in these highly detailed scientific arenas. The research papers could actually mirror dictionaries, they’re so think, you know?
S: Yeah.
A: But in journalism, you don’t- you only have a limited amount of space-
S: Yeah.
A: -or area to put it in there. Um, how do you decide what information or knowledge or facts are important enough to go into this small amount of space in order to communicate the ideas you’re trying to get across?
S: That concept is called “news sense” and it’s an art. It’s an instinct that editors, you know, adapt and evolve over time about what is news and what is not and the very feel and look and approach of a newspaper or news outlet is defined by how those editors and leaders of those institutions make those decisions and how they’ve evolved that sense, that news sense. And so, what we do here is we have those principles about the things we care about: about the environment, about local housing, about local education, and all those things. So we- first of all, it has to fit in those things so we’re not going to cover a kidnapping or whatever, unless it has a broader meaning for some of those areas. And so then we have to say, like, ok, is somebody else covering it? If so, are we going to do it better or different than they are? And then, we make other- are we able to explain why it’s important? Can the writer explain to me why it’s important? If they can, or if they are committed to it, then I go through another process of like, ok, is it a story or is it a message? So the difference is is that a story is a story about how something happened, right? It would be a character, it would be a bunch of characters, maybe a villain, a plotline, a challenge, a conflict, leading to a climax, leading to a resolution. There’s a way we’ve told stories in civilization for thousands of years and that’s a story, right? A message is something that’s- that is more common in journalism, that is the harder part but if you clarify it then you actually have a successful story. And so that is something like, “Somebody has embezzled $100,000 from a local public agency.” That sentence is a message and proving that message can take months or years or a lot of research, and the whole story should be about supplementing that and proving that message is true. But they have to be able to clarify that message or else I’m not going to let them go forward. And so that is how we do that. You have to be able to identify your message and I think that stories that are successful have one very clear message, and prove it. The ones that aren’t successful are ones that slalom through message and story and multiple messages and other things, and then you’re left not understanding the concept. When I think about academic research I think, well, there needs to be- even if it’s a 500 page book- you kinda need a message of that book to be able to- you know, that people can take away from it. The whole process of proving that message or of establishing it is something that could be exhilarating and wonderful to go through as a reader and a writer. But I think that if you aren’t able to identify the messages, at least in each chapter, then I think that you lose people and that’s where the Venn Diagram of research and journalism probably crosses and that middle part is like, we have to still communicate clearly why something’s important and what we did this for. I think that’s the process we go through. Does it fit with our areas? Is it important? Are we going to do it different and add value? And is it a message or a story?
A: It almost sounded like you were bordering on the scientific method of- you know, you’ve got your theory, or message or question, then you’ve got your research, and then you’ve got your results.
S: Yeah.
A: It almost sounds like you were heading that way with journalism but there’s a difference in- it’s just that story.
S: Yeah.
A: With a scientific paper, you’re not really telling a story.
S: I think that scientists have- look, I don’t want to put myself in their position. I don’t know what kind of challenges they deal with. But I think that it is a luxury to be able to stop at the point of proof and results and not have to continue through with audience engagement. I think that that’s a luxury that exists in the academic world that they should both appreciate and challenge because I don’t know how long that’s going to last, you know, to rely on the rest of society to prove and explain why your stuff is important. I think it’s dangerous because I think that we are entering a period of post-truth discussion where there’s- just because of the institution you’re part of is not going to be enough to establish your authority and value in society. So leaving the marketing and engagement and promotion of your work to a 3rd party or a PR person or whatever is very dangerous for anybody, whether they’re a journalist or not. I mean, journalists deal with this all the time. One of the frustrating things I have is even young journalists are often reluctant to promote their own work and to be proud of it and to share it and widely try to promote themselves on TV or whatever. I have to tell them, if you don’t do that nobody will and you’re going to lose.
A: Alright, so, I’m actually going to do something that you do with the people you interview. I’m going to play an audio clip for you but I want to kind of set it up first. So about five years back there was an NPR journalist named Brooke Gladstone and she wrote a book called “The Influencing Machine.”
S: Sure, I know Brooke.
A: You know her?
S: She’s the “On the Media”…
A: Yes, exactly.
S: I’ve met her before.
A: You have?
S: Mm hmm.
A: She seems-
S: Great voice.
A: Absolutely. I’ve listened to some interviews with her. She’s really great. Now in this book, “The Influencing Machine”- I don’t know if you’ve read that?
S: No.
A: Ok. It basically posits that the media is a reflection of society, for better or worse. In an interview with KPBS, she was asked if there was an answer to one of her questions in the book, which was why there’s so much crap in the media. I want to actually play her reply to that.
S: Sure.
Brooke Gladstone: Part of it has to do with the fact that our culture is the way it is. Part of it has to do with the fact we are wired to like narratives, to like conflict, to like visuals, where we have an almost genetic predisposition to be interested in celebrities that we can project upon, and all of this triviality is kind of baked into the business, just like it’s baked into us, and it’s a kind of vicious circle. And I don’t absolve the media of blame for being trivial, of rushing to judgment, of being full of garbage. But I also know that at the very moment when the media are just rife with crap, it’s also full of some of the best reporting we’ve ever seen. Across the board. And then, in every phase of American journalism, we have come to what a lot of people think is the brink of apocalypse. The society is coming apart! And at every phase, we’ve pulled away from that brink, if in fact we were ever there at all. There has been brilliant reporting and dreadful reporting at every single phase of our culture, throughout the invention of journalism, in fact since the invention of the written word.
A: Alright, so. Just as researchers need to communicate their work in order to get funding, you need to be able to sell what you’re doing in order to both continue that journalistic process and also make a living. Where, then, is the line drawn between entertainment and that commitment towards reporting that truth that we talked about earlier?
S: Well, I talked about it a little bit but to go a little further on that point, I… I am tired, so tired, of the hand-wringing about the debasement about our discussion, the “oh, how banal is this” and “stop being so click-baity” and blah blah blah. Like there is just a fundamental frustration and it’s couched in nostalgia, as though there was a golden period of truth in journalism and formality and everything was great now we’ve descended to this cultural pit of idiocy and I’m tired of that. Baked into it is this idea that we could somehow go back or that we…. It frees the people who make the complaints from the responsibility of dealing with it. They’re just like, “Well….” Nostalgia is really toxic in that it poisons the discussion about what to do. It’s like, “Well, we can’t do anything because everything’s so terrible and banal and not good.” And so, what I think has to be done is we have to recognize that the marketplace for ideas and writing and research has been completely democratized. There is now one voice per one person. You can now make your case as an individual. You don’t have to have access to the printing press, you don’t have to the newsroom. You are now- you have all the tools that every journalist has. In that world, we have to compete, we have to thrive. So we have to recognize that you can be as snobby as you want about entertainment you now compete with other people who are willing to do different things to be more entertaining or to be more engaging. You can’t just lament that all the time. You can’t just be upset that that’s what’s happens all the time. You can be upset about it but stop being so paralyzed by it. You know what I mean? You have to accept that that’s the world that we’re in now and so what are we gonna do? What are we gonna create that is as attractive, as engaging but has the standards but has the standards and the ethics and the integrity and the transparency build into it that we need in order to keep that cohesive discussion going? Because democracy simply doesn’t run on- we can’t run when there are disparate facts out there, when there’s disparate interpretations, disparate realities. The whole point of self-government is that we can all get together on certain shared principles and ideas and knowledge to make better decisions. We have to embrace that and we can not just stop at nostalgic concern about it.
A: So I want to talk, really quick- you mentioned bias earlier.
S: Yeah.
A: How does that- how do you- is bias a good thing in journalism or is it a bad thing, or even in communication, is bias a good thing?
S: I mean, it’s kind of like saying, is- are humans a good thing or a bad thing? Bias- I don’t quite understand obsession with it. What I think it is is a suspicion- at the heart of it, people that are concerned about bias are concerned that they are being told something in order to think something and not being told actually that that’s what’s happening. Do you know what I mean? That what they’re trying to identify is something hidden that is being- that they’re almost being poisoned with, as opposed to something transparent, that is something more acceptable. They want to be able to make up their own minds. They don’t want to be led naively through a path where they find out they were misled. But bias- we all are invested in our communities, you know. We are all- we all have homes. We have concerns, we have kids in schools, we have kids that might go to war, we have all kinds of things that make us biased as humans and I think that we need to- in order to address the concerns about bias- be more explicit about what we think it is versus what, you know, is the concern. When people- I have so many people come up to me and say that the reason they love what we do is because we’re not bias, or it’s nice to have- it’s refreshing to have somebody who’s not bias cover these things, and I always laugh. I don’t always challenge them because I’d never claim that we’re not bias. Ever. We are bias, we have a stake in this community, we’re trying to be as explicit about what that is as possible. And I think that what I have learned what they actually in many cases mean by that is that they feel like with our work they have learned things genuinely and authentically, not been, again, sort of pied-piper led somewhere, you know, where they weren’t aware of where they were going. And I think that that’s the concern we have to address and be- you know, I think that you can inoculate yourself from the concerns about bias by being as open and obvious about what you’re trying to do as possible because then they can go along on the journey with you or not. That’s the thing we have to aim for.
A: And it goes back to you saying that it’s almost impossible to be objective.
S: It is. I mean, the moment you decide to do a story you have made a subjective decision. You have said that this story is more worth than something else to cover. A truly objective coverage would be just a- thousands and thousands of pages of data reflected back to the community about what’s going on and no filter of what’s important or not. You literally lose all objectivity the moment you decide to cover something. You’ve made a subjective decision. Now look, I think you can be still objective or not partisan about particular solutions or discussions going on, and we strive for that. I think that you don’t have to take a side on everything. In fact, I don’t. We don’t take a side on the vast majority of things we cover. What we do is take a side on whether something’s a problem or not. If a school’s failing I’m not going to host a discussion about whether failing schools are good or not. But what they do to fix them is not necessarily something we’re going to take a side on. I think that you can still be- I don’t know if objective is the right word, but you can still be fair and balanced about solutions as opposed to being just completely, as Jay Rosen calls it, completely embracing a view from nowhere. Everybody has a view from somewhere, and it’s colored by their experience, their background. That’s why diversity in news rooms is so important. It’s not because you want racial justice in the world. It’s because people from other backgrounds sometimes have much more valuable perspectives on things that you might cover than you do because they come from different places. I think that we have to recognize that we’re all human.
A: Do you think someone’s background, when it comes to at least data or scientific research, do you think someone’s background can bias- can create a bias for them as far as their understanding of something goes or their dissemination of that information?
S: Oh, of course. I think that everything that makes us who we are is going to make us- you know, color our decisions for how we present things. I think that- I think we just have to be as conscious of it as possible so that we can accommodate for it and use it to our advantage, too. There are things that people see because of their background that make them more valuable as contributors to this marketplace of ideas. So they need to consciously, and with vulnerability, embrace it.
A: Ok, last question, then I’ll let you get back to your journalistic ways. Do you have any tips or lessons that you’ve learned about communication for grad students or any listeners?
S: People are always more interesting when they talk to their friends and family about what they do than when they produce it. There is a- they need to step back and be able to just explain things and why they care about them in a way that they would when they meet their friends at the bar. And I think there is a value in practicing that. I think that anybody struggling with writing needs to identify what would make them go off about it at a party, maybe with a few drinks, even, that would free them up to sort of just talk. What part of that can be captured as they write? I think that, obviously, there are very compelling writers out there and find the people that communicate the way that you think it should be done, the way that communication should work, and just dive into it. I remember listening to an interview with Judd Apatow, the director and comedian, and he described how he used to transcribe Saturday Night Live episodes because he just wanted to understand exactly what was happening because it was so brilliant in his mind. There’s something in that, in identifying what you think somebody’s doing really well, and just immersing yourself in it. Because if you’re ever stuck you can turn it and say, like, just experience it for a second and apply what you are trying to do to the same sort of approach.
A: I heard you speak at- you talked about love at this Creative Mornings thing.
S: Yeah.
A: Do you find it’s harder to communicate vocally in front of an audience than it is to communicate in writing?
S: It’s different but no, it’s not harder for me, no. It’s- I enjoy it a lot, making people laugh and telling stories and engaging them. That’s something I enjoy quite a bit. I think that people- when you publically speak, you know you have done a good job when people leave feeling like they understand something better, when you’ve taught them something. And I think that people who don’t successfully do that- I think you can look at the political campaigns we saw in 2016, that there’s three major candidates: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton. Obviously there’s a bunch more but let’s just take those three. I think that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, when they spoke, helped people understand their world in a way that they could fathom and replicate and they could leave there with messages. You know, those clear messages. Now, I don’t like the way that they did that, you know. I don’t like the realities that they laid out in some ways. But I think that- and I think that socialism on the left, for example, has a way of explaining the world that makes a lot of sense, and has for centuries, or a couple centuries now, and I think that it is a very powerful theory about why things are the way they are. So when you leave a speech where somebody’s doing it well, then they can identify who the villains are, they can identify who- you know, what the challenges are, they can identify who the victims are, and they feel better about their understanding of the world. And I think the same thing happened with Donald Trump. You can- you leave a Donald Trump speech and you feel like you understand the world better, about who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, who the victims are, and what you should do about it. I think when you left a Hillary Clinton speech, though, I don’t think- I think that the problems she laid out, she didn’t explain them as much as she just emphasized how big and gnarly they were. And it was probably a more accurate view of the world than either of them. But it’s so overwhelming and scary when you leave those- you could only make incremental progress on these big, gigantic, overwhelming problems.
A: It all sounded monotone. Like, when I listen to Obama speak, he’s got inflection, he’s got- he speaks fast sometimes, he speaks slow to emphasize points. Same with Bernie Sanders and even with Trump. But like you were saying, with Hillary Clinton, it’s just- she’s just talking.
S: Well, and more than that, I think it’s a recitation of facts and ideas, which as sentences are- could be well written and wonderful sentences. But they were just constant recitations. I think Ted Cruz would do this too when Ted Cruz spoke. I’ll never forget the Nevada caucuses, after Nevada, and I watched Donald Trump speak and then I watched Ted Cruz speak. And at that point I was like, Donald Trump’s gonna win this whole thing. I didn’t know he was going to win the final election but this nomination process because he was just into it and he was talking from the heart and he was explaining the world. And Cruz was just going fact by fact by fact by principle by fact, you know. It was just this list. And whenever you find yourself listing things I think you’re losing. When you find yourself explaining something, then you’re winning.
A: But emotion comes into play. I mean, there’s-
S: Yeah, you have to care about it.
A: Yeah, but can you do that with fact, too?
S: Sure. I think facts ostensibly, if you’re in this sphere, are what are guiding your passion. And so when you can identify the string of facts that make you feel the way you do, and then try to communicate that to people who are listening to you, I think you’ve struck the chord, you’ve hit what you want to hit. But when you find yourself just reciting things and not entirely knowing where that fits within their emotional storytelling, then you’re lost, you’re drifting, and I think so many speeches we watch- you know, I’m actually grateful that church was so boring when I was a kid, that there was so many recitations of facts and of principles, I think it facilitated my quick evolution into an atheist because it just never captures me. It never helped me understand the world and I’m glad that I didn’t have to go through the process that I had to had it been more compelling, had it been more explanatory, more passionate. You know, I think that in any situation, an election or a church or a- if you’re sitting there just rambling through facts that you might find interesting in some deep part of your soul but you don’t actually communicate why they’re interesting, you’ve lost.
A: Alright, very interesting. Well, I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Communicating something to someone shouldn’t just be a laundry list of facts. Scott Lewis used the recent political season to illustrate this point, that it’s important for the audience to leave your talk or finish reading your written communication and know what your universe looks like instead of only hearing or reading numbers or stats with no relatable context or background.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Scott Lewis, CEO of San Diego’s “Voice of San Diego”
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
“Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
ADAM GREENFIELD Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.
My name is Adam Greenfield and as communicators, sometimes it’s easy to fall into the trap of self-doubt. You begin to question not only if what you’re presenting is accurate or clear or even engaging, but also if, simply put, you’re the right person to do the job.
But in this episode, we’re going to hear how to avoid that trap of uncertainty and insecurity, how there’s no better communicator than you to communicate your research and work, and also why a list of ingredients or information is better off with a little flair than without.
Our guest in this episode has spent well over a decade as a journalist and editor, and communicates in all mediums, from television to radio to podcasts to print. Still, even with all that experience…. SCOTT LEWIS You’re never going to feel perfect and perfectly confident that you are in the perfect position to tell a story, but you do anyway. ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Scott Lewis, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Voice of San Diego… SCOTT LEWIS … an online- mostly online news investigative service for San Diego. And I’m a journalist. ADAM GREENFIELD Scott is a great guest because of those credentials. But it becomes next-level when it comes to the role communication plays in his everyday personal and professional life; it’s pretty much everything to him. SCOTT LEWIS I mean, it’s my essence, really. It’s like the thing that I mostly think about in life. ADAM GREENFIELD When it comes to Scott’s style of writing, there’s an obvious sense of audience engagement, which as we’ve heard a lot of in this series is a big piece of communication. There’s word choice and narrative and you come away feeling as if you have either the facts you need or at least all the facts that are currently available. This skill is learnable and as we’ll see, this skill can be, and probably should be, applied to a large portion of scientific writing. This may be cart before the horse stuff, though. For most of your educational career, the type of scientific writing you’ve probably encountered is, again, pretty rigid and formulaic. Trying to inject an engaging story could prove to be pretty difficult and imposing. But maybe all you need is a little well-placed confidence. SCOTT LEWIS I think that confidence is not about knowing you’re good. It’s not about knowing you’re valuable. It’s about going through it even when you don’t. Do you know what I mean? It’s like you’re still pushing, you’re still going to write it, even though you don’t have the data that proves that you’re valuable or attractive or that your insight is going to work. When I think of confidence- when you public speak, for example, I found that you’re never going to not be nervous about it. Maybe Bill Clinton’s not nervous about it. But most people, I think, when they get in front of a crowd are going to get nervous about it. The difference is that some of them keep going and others let it, like, really, you know, paralyze them. And it’s the same thing with writing. ADAM GREENFIELD And communicating something to someone shouldn’t just be a laundry list of facts. Scott used the recent political season to illustrate this point, that it’s important for the audience to leave your talk or finish reading your written communication and know what your universe looks like instead of only hearing or reading numbers or stats with no relatable context or background. SCOTT LEWIS I think you can look at the political campaigns we saw in 2016, that there’s three major candidates: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton. Obviously there’s a bunch more but let’s just take those three. I think that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, when they spoke, helped people understand their world in a way that they could fathom and replicate and they could leave there with messages. You know, those clear messages. I think when you left a Hillary Clinton speech, though, I don’t think- I think that the problems she laid out, she didn’t explain them as much as she just emphasized how big and gnarly they were. And it was probably a more accurate view of the world than either of them. But it’s so overwhelming and scary when you leave those, you could only make incremental progress on these big, gigantic, overwhelming problems. ADAM GREENFIELD I know Scott’s pointing to public speaking but whether you’re giving a talk or writing an article or paper or even grant proposals, providing an emotional connection to your research will make communicating it that much more effective. The last thing you want is to come off sounding monotone in your writing or speaking. SCOTT LEWIS Well, and more than that, I think it’s a recitation of facts and ideas, which as sentences are- could be well written and wonderful sentences. But they were just constant recitations. And whenever you find yourself listing things I think you’re losing. When you find yourself explaining something, then you’re winning. ADAM GREENFIELD But there’s still this thought that is stuck to the side of my brain, right or wrong, this idea that those that are in fields that are driven by hard data and solid fact are, perhaps, less inclined to be a creative storyteller. So then what? If that really is the case, what do researchers and scientists need to keep in mind if storytelling is not their forte but they want to engage their audience, written or otherwise? SCOTT LEWIS I think facts ostensibly, if you’re in this sphere, are what are guiding your passion. And so when you can identify the string of facts that make you feel the way you do, and then try to communicate that to people who are listening to you, I think you’ve struck the chord, you’ve hit what you want to hit. But when you find yourself just reciting things and not entirely knowing where that fits within their emotional storytelling, then you’re lost, you’re drifting. You know, I think that in any situation, an election or a church or a- if you’re sitting there just rambling through facts that you might find interesting in some deep part of your soul but you don’t actually communicate why they’re interesting, you’ve lost. ADAM GREENFIELD
No one is saying communicating to an audience is easy. It can be a pretty humbling experience. But with a little perseverance and inner strength, pushing through the anxiety will be more beneficial than not. That doesn’t mean to fake it until you make it but if you’re struggling to find confidence as a communicator, keep in mind the passion you have for the subject and use that to your communicative advantage.
And as Scott points out, having an engaging story to tell besides just a recitation of facts is important. While you may find those facts interesting, and surely they are on some level, you have to make sure the way you communicate them makes them interesting to your audience, too.
There’s an old adage when it comes to writing which aptly describes this: Show, not tell.
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Jim Ruland. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation.
Adam Greenfield: Alright, easy one. Name and occupation.
Jim Ruland: My name is Jim Ruland and I’m a writer.
A: What kind of things do you write?
J: I write a lot of different things. Professionally, I’m a copywriter, that’s my day job, I work in advertising, and I’ve been doing that for over 20 years. And I also do a number of other kinds of freelance types of writing, writing book reviews, columns, cultural columns. I also do some ghost writing, editing, I collaborate with people, help them get their stories out into the world. And, lastly, I do writing for myself, fiction and non-fiction.
A: Do you have a preference? If you could ideally write one thing what would it be?
J: That’s a great question. I think how it usually works, though, is when I’m working on a novel, working on a non-fiction project seems so much easier, where all I have to do is talk about what happened. But when I’m writing a non-fiction project and I’m in the weeds, I really miss the freedom of being able to make things up.
A: It’s nice to have that wide range of things to work on.
J: And then, also, the grass is always greener.
A: There’s a reason for that saying. There’s no reason to not search for it. Did you do any writing when you were in the Navy?
J: I did not. I was a deck seaman and I was not college educated. I went right from high school to the fleet and when you’re- when you get sent to the fleet first division, you don’t actually get the extra training that, say, someone who would- someone who’s gonna go into weapons systems is going to get basic, you know, math skills and someone going into the engineering field would get the basics of electronics and electricity. So I didn’t get any of that. “This is a paint brush, this is a chipping hammer, get to it.”
A: What’d you learn? What did you take away from all that, as far as implementing that into writing or communicating?
J: Well, I think that I learned that the people who tried to guide me as a young person were right, that they would speak in metaphors and windows of opportunity opening and shutting. On the first day of boot camp, that stopped being a metaphor. I realized that the doors had closed but they didn’t have to, I didn’t have to be where I was, that I put myself in this position. Literally, I volunteered. So when I got out of the military I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to go to college and I wanted to be successful. Whatever it was I was going to make sure I work hard and I didn’t have to go back to the military.
A: Was going back an option?
J: Oh, it was always an option but I knew that I didn’t want to, like, I didn’t want to turn wrenches.
A: That’s me right now, not wanting to go back to a corporate desk job. I quit that in August to do this and I’m struggling but I don’t want to go back. Alright, so, in all of my interviews I haven’t actually talked to anyone about written communication in a collaborate form that you do. Scientists are constantly collaborating. What is the- when you’ve spent time on your own craft, what is that like to, or what are the hurdles to communicating when you collaborate, even with ghost writing?
J: Well, there’s a lot of ways to approach it. We have this myth, I think, of the writer in the garret, you know, with a quill and the ink well, and pouring their heart and soul out onto the page and sending it off into an indifferent world. As soon as you try to put your work out there, as soon as you publish, you are collaborating. You’re going to be working with agents and editors and marketing people, your art, and the craft of whatever it is you’re working on is going to become a commodity, and that takes a team of professionals with whom you’ll be collaborating. So any kind of writing, ultimately, becomes a collaboration. For things that I’ve done, I think for ghost writing, the skills I learned in advertising were very helpful, in that you pay attention to be as succinct as possible and to always be considering your audience and to be attentive to voice because that’ll tell you how craft your piece. In terms of working with people, my first- the first kind of writing I did was punk rock zines, and that’s a fanzine, so you’re coming at it, not from a critical point of view, but you write for a fanzine to get access to get closer to the things you love and care about. And so that’s what I did, and that was my first regular audience, writing for that audience. And I still do that. I still write for punk zines, even though I don’t get out to as many shows as I used to. It’s something I’m still very passionate about. Now I write about other things other than the music itself but about being an old punk, being a dad, being a sober punk, all of these things sort of work their way in. To get back to your question about collaboration, a lot of the skills that I learned interviewing bands were a big help in terms of dealing with people one on one for co-writing assignments or ghostwriting assignments.
A: You mentioned voice earlier, getting your voice. Are there quick ways of doing that? Because these grad students are coming out with just a bunch of knowledge and data and probably haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out their voice. Are there tricks they can use to sort of figure out that quicker?
J: Well, I think being a good reader, an attentive reader, someone who is looking- reading in the field you want to participate in is always step one, always essential. And I don’t think- I say it’s step one but I don’t think it ever stops being a step you leave behind. If you want to write in a particular field you always need to know what’s current, what are people writing about, how are people doing it, what are shortcuts you can take, what are ways you can make a better impact, what are ways you can avoid redundancies. Just knowing the field will give you- as someone in the audience, will give you an appreciation for how you want to approach it.
A: Now, you’re most recent co-authorship was with Keith Morris. Was he the lead singer of Black Flag?
J: He was. He was the first singer of Black Flag. Most people when they think of Black Flag they think of Henry Rollins and I think he was the singer for the longest period of time, absolutely he was. But he was the 4th singer. It took a little while for Henry to come along.
A: I didn’t know that.
J: So Keith was there first. He was there in Hermosa Beach with Greg Ginn and other people like Raymond Pettibone was one of the original- one of many original bass players. I shouldn’t say original but one of many bass players. They went through until they found their guy, Chuck Dukowski. But yeah, that’s Keith on the first EP, the Nervous Breakdown EP, and it’s very much a South Bay LA viewpoint.
A: Were you concerned at all with the amount or type of audience that he had compared with some of the things you write with, say, the CityBeat or just some of the smaller….
J: No, I really- you know, my background in punk rock, I really felt like I had a good insight into what readers wanted. I read a lot of biographies. We’ve probably all read a memoir or a biography that was 35 pages of “when was a child” and “my education” and “my parents and their grandparents” and I knew that was not the way to go for this audience. We wanted to start on something really meaty and intense because that’s Keith, he’s an intense guy. However, I think the book- my damage, even more interesting than some of the things he said and experiences he had and things he did in punk rock and in music, was his relationship with his dad, which was just key to understanding Keith and understanding his development. So that absolutely is there but I just don’t open with it and when I get to it we get through it really fast. You know, Black Flag was a hardcore band. The songs were shorter and more intense so by design we made the chapters that way, too, so they were shorter chapters and a reader could get through two or three of them before even realizing, “Hey, I’m reading a book.”
A: I feel like that’s- I wonder if any of the hardcore Black Flag fans noticed that. Did you get any feedback on that?
J: I don’t know about whether it reads like a hardcore song, I think that’s kind of a stretch, but a lot of people commented on how reader-friendly it is and they read it in a day or two or a weekend. It was really very cool because the audience was a lot of people you wouldn’t consider readers. These are not people who read 20, 40, 50 books a year. These are people who had to wait for payday to get their money to go buy the book and then they read it. So when they did and had good things to say about it I was really proud.
A: Did you co-write that or were you a ghost writer?
J: I co-authored it so my name along Keith Morris, just smaller, as it should be. But the artwork is by Raymond Pettibone, who’s made his own change and has an amazing fine art career. But the type, it looks a little bit like a Black Flag cover, so even he had to use a microscope with my name to be there with Keith and Raymond Pettibone artwork is just fine with me.
A: So I want to ask a quick question about ghost writing. I want to know what- this is going to come out wrong so I may need to rethink or rephrase it but what added benefit does ghost writing have to communication? Because it’s not so much individual’s words, it’s someone else writing their words for them.
J: Yes and no. I would say it is their words but the syntax would be very different. Like in the example of Keith, Keith is a storyteller. If you get around that guy, he’ll tell you a story. Maybe not right after he got off stage because he’s diabetic and he’s 61 years old and might need a moment before he’s ready to clap people on the back but he’s a storyteller. But he has a very- he’s not a linear storyteller and he’s famously forgetful of dates. And he’s also not someone with a big ego in terms of his own output. He’s not really trying to mythologize Black Flag or Circle Jerks or his contributions. He usually can’t remember which song is on which album and when it came out. He’s not one of those- he’s not a historian of his own myth. Not at all. So he needs someone who can function kind of as a project manager, and I would say that’s kind of what a ghost writer does. There’s as much project management as it is writing. Because you spend a lot of time with the person, you record them, you get their words on tape, and then you go back and say, well, what did you mean by this or how did you- how did that make you feel or- and you figure out where to put the emphasis or how to construct the narrative.
A: How much back and forth was there with Keith or with anyone you ghost write with?
J: Well it really depends on the type of project. Keith was all in and I was all in, too, because he’s a legend, a huge part of the music that I grew up loving, so I was willing to spend as much time as he was willing to spend and he was willing spend a lot. So we spent dozens of sessions together in his apartment in LA just telling stories.
A: It’s weird- when I first moved out here in 2008, I would go up to Hillcrest. And I always thought it was weird to see- and his name just left my head. Judas Priest….
J: Rob Halford?
A: Rob Halford, yeah. So I saw him walking around once and thought he kinda looks familiar. So I asked someone and they were like, yeah, that’s Rob from Judas Priest. And I’m like, THE Judas Priest? He seems so- just chillin’, just walking. I wanted to ask him what his own stories were.
J: Keith’s very much like that. He walks everywhere he goes.
A: Is he recognized a lot?
J: Oh yeah. Well, he’s got dreads down to his ass so it’s inescapable, you know? People, like- even people who don’t know who he is, they know he’s somebody. But he’s really unassuming. He wears Vans and a t-shirt, a punk rock t-shirt. He’s still like- he’s kind of like a cult figure. He’s not tucked away in some Bel Air house, he’s not fabulously wealthy but everybody knows who he is.
A: You just said dreads. Do you know Ted Washington?
J: I don’t.
A: He does- he’s based out of San Diego here. He does Puna Press with- they published a book of my poetry, they have Ola Hadi, Ed Decker, Michael Klam.
J: Oh, ok. I know Michael Klam.
A: So he publishes this stuff and he does his own art and writing and he’s got, also, super long dreads so he stands out, he’s recognizable. Alright. So throughout your various assignments, how do you determine the tone and identity of the narrator?
J: Of the narrator…. Well, in a ghost writing project that’s pretty easy but that’s something you have to find. I kind of think about the mood. If it’s a fiction I think about the mood of something that I’m going after. Lately I’ve been writing a lot of darker fiction that is somewhere in the spectrum of horror and a ghost story. I’ve become enamored with ghost stories lately. And they have a very specific kind of mood. And so there’s- pay attention to the genre and something- for example, if you’re going to write a horror story, there needs to be something dark and creepy happening in the first couple pages. I mean, there’s- sometimes a horror story appearing in an anthology of fiction will let you know something bad is going to happen but the reader needs some context for all that. You just can’t take a left turn into that. So genre will play a lot to do with it and also audience. I mean, I’m not someone who thinks too much about where something might be published. I’m actually pretty terrible about that. But I always think about who the audience is in terms of the reader and that comes from my advertising background because you can’t write anything until you know who- and that’s a very retail and mercantile way of looking at it. If you’re going to sell to somebody, you need to know who you’re selling to. That’s the audience. Are they business people or are they stay at home moms? Are they weekend warriors? What kind of audience you’re trying to reach will determine how you speak to them.
A: Do you think that’s harder for scientists writing research papers or grant proposals? Because there’s not so much storytelling, there’s just reciting facts and data.
J: Right. Well, I would say, no, you’re not just reciting facts because there’s an objective. You’re reciting facts but there’s a desired outcome, and, the desired outcome, whether “give me or my university a bunch of money” or “publish these findings in your journal” or “share this information with your colleagues so that we can continue.” Whatever that desired outcome, that’s what you’re writing towards. That will inform how you open your piece and also how you close it. In advertising we call it a call to action. You always- you never write something without trying to give the reader a path for them to take or inspired them to take some kind of action, whether it’s clicking a link or picking up a phone or booking a reservation at a hotel or airline or whatever it might be. There’s always a path.
A: And there’s a goal. I spoke with a Scripps Research Institute scientist today and we were talking about how- we got into some weird, deep stuff, but we were talking about- she writes patents, trying to get patents approved. And when she writes it, she writes it for a specific audience, but then it goes to a patent lawyer who then takes that language and changes it. So it’s got to affect the- I mean, if you can’t write for- if you don’t know your audience, you have to have that someone in between, that go between. You have to have someone translate.
J: Right. That’s very common in a lot of forms of the corporate world, where someone will write something and the message will change. Like someone will decide, well, this message would sound better if it came from one of our executives and so now it has to change again because it needs to sound like it came from a person and not just your friendly corporation, whatever your corporation voice might be.
A: A template.
J: A boilerplate.
A: So, I want to talk a little bit about your editing process. How do you ensure what you leave on the page is enough to communicate clearly and not water down the subject or leave out enough to where it’s not understandable?
J: That’s a great question. I think having objectives in mind for what it is you want to communicate will help determine what to leave out. For example, in narrative storytelling, you’re always generating conflict so that your hero can overcome adversity or succumb to it and then give them an opportunity to reflect and rejuvenate and try again. But you’re always generating conflict in narrative. And so even when it’s something like a non-fiction account or even a book review, for example, you might be looking for, well, what was the book’s path to publication, if they had a really long journey, that’s a form of conflict that might be interesting to talk about. If their person is writing in field that’s very crowded yet enjoys success anyway, that’s a kind of conflict. Or if it’s something trailblazing and new, and you have to kind of convince people this is the kind of storytelling people should be paying attention to, that’s again another form. So, like, I think it’s funny, most writers would say, in life avoid conflict wherever possible. But on the page, we seek it out.
A: Yes. I would agree with that. At first I thought you were going to say you, as a writer, avoid conflict, but when I write, I’m all about conflict, especially with my poetry because that’s kind of what poetry is to me, it’s conflict of an emotional person in the world. At least that’s how I see it. But anyway. So when it comes to the amount of space you have between a news article and a book, what’s your mindset going into that article with that limited amount of time and space?
J: This was a big challenge for me when I first started writing book reviews, in that I would engage in all the necessary throat clearing, saying here’s the book, here’s the author, here’s the setup, here’s what it’s about, and then I would smack up against the word limit and realize I hadn’t really said the things that were most meaningful, that if I were to come up to you in a bookstore and you asked me to recommend this book, I hadn’t said the things that I might say to you in a 15 second conversation. And so I paid attention to that. Like, ok, I can’t be a slave to the format. What is it you really want to say? What is it you want to communicate to the people? And so I keep that in mind first. That’s always my first- I put that down first. Even before- because beginnings and endings can be tough so I start with thing I most want to say and I think that’s really helped me a lot because I’ve seen in my professional writing that I do for advertising, we don’t talk about word limits anymore. It’s all character counts. As things move online and become increasingly digitized, there’s less and less space to get your point across. Now, hopefully there will always be big, giant novels where you can spend as much time as want making your point but it’s- I think it’s a really good practice to always know what’s the thing you most want to say, make that your starting point, even if that’s in your headline. Then you’re free to meander.
A: Patrick was creating this MOOC, this How to Create a Comic MOOC. And I remember they were doing their elevator pitch on Twitter. So you had to fit it in- what that story was about in 140 characters, and I think that was a good test sometimes to really hone in on the crux, as John Hodgman likes to put it in his podcast, to really get down to the point of what you’re trying to say and then flesh it out from there.
J: Yeah, and I think, for example, if you follow comedians on Twitter, that can be a really useful tool just to study. Comedians are often responding to things and pop culture so it’s really interesting to see them use what they presume the reader will already know, it’s a springboard to what they have to say.
A: I follow a lot of comedians on Twitter. I think Twitter is best used for comedians and athletes and musicians. It’s perfect for that. Do you think a lot of it is attention span of an audience?
J: I was going to say no but the answer is yes, absolutely. One of the hats I wear is I organize a reading series and I’ve been doing that for about 13 years now. And just in that period alone I’ve seen a decline in just how long people are willing to sit in their seats. People will just get too antsy when it goes on and on and on, even ones they’re enjoying. It was a very- when I was in Europe two summers ago, it was a very vast difference in the way people consumed poetry and narrative in a performance space as opposed to here. Here it’s more like entertainment. So you got 5, 6, 7 minutes to entertain me. Otherwise, I’m turning the channel. Over there there was much more patience and there was much more willingness to sit for a longer piece, even if it wasn’t funny or moving, it was to be experienced and they were there for it. So I found that really interesting. So unfortunately yes, our attention span is getting smaller.
A: Does that make it harder for writers?
J: Oh, it’s never been easy for writers. It’s just yet another thing that- another obstacle for us to overcome.
A: And I’m sure- writers are very creative people.
J: Well, it’s really interesting to me, like, the niche that writers always have to carve out for themselves because- I mean, if you look at Twitter for example, at best 25, 35, 30% of the population uses Twitter. Everyone else doesn’t. But it’s still one of the many things that writers are competing against for readers. They’re competing against movies and television and new streaming TV and video games and now virtual reality. All these things competing for eyeballs and attention.
A: I don’t know what to make of it. I’m sort of that Will Smith character in I, Robot. Like, eesh, technology. I’m living with it, I’m dealing with it, but there’s a part of that uncanny valley that freaks me out, especially in that new Rogue One movie. Alright, um, just a couple more questions here. So your wife, Nuvia-
J: Yes.
A: -teaches science. She also spent a lot of time in the pharmaceutical field. Are you able to connect any of her scientific pursuits with your writing and how the two work together? Not yours and hers specifically but just in general the two fields?
J: With Nuvia’s passion for education and science, the third part of that trinity is art and that’s always been a part of what she does. So she actually teaches science like an art class. It’s definitely a science course but she asks her students to do a lot, to work hard, and that’s something that I think is, for me, is valuable- been a valuable takeaway in my writing and that you want to make writing easy for people to get into but you also want to give them something to do when they’re there. You don’t want to spoon feed your readers or they’ll find something else that’s more interesting and more engaging. So you want your readers to work a little bit and that’ll make it more satisfying.
A: So be creative as a communicator and speaker, or educator. Do you have any advice to outgoing MIT students about effectively communicating and engaging an audience?
J: Yes, absolutely. If you’re one of those people that says, “I’m a scientist, I’m not a writer,” I think you need to scrap that way of thinking. Writing is just like anything else, it’s a tool, it’s a craft. Some people write at a level where it’s art, where they practice it like art, but it’s something that can be learned. The desire to communicate effectively can take you to some really interesting places and put you ahead of your peers who lack the willingness to go there. Things are- as technology moves forward, what’s interesting to me is that even though we see more video in advertising and more video in our online experience, it still works. All of that stuff is written and if you can express yourself in a way that’s engaging and interesting, you’ll be ahead of the game, ahead of the competition.
A: Can creativity be learned?
J: I think so. I think that- I mean, I think we’ve all had an experience where we read a book or seen a movie, maybe it’s one in a genre that we normally wouldn’t, like, say, a science fiction story or a fantasy, and it’ll just put you in a headspace and you’ll think about, wow, I never really thought about that before. And the next thing you know you’re spending the next few hours kind of what-if’ing around the world. “What if we all drove Land Rovers instead of cars? I don’t see any traffic signals in Tattooine. What is- how would that work exactly?” And the next thing you know you’re kind of engaging in some kind of problem solving for- it’s theoretical but all implanted by a story.
A: And a lot of scientists are always testing things, so in a way I guess they kind of have to be creative in that aspect. Obviously some of our biggest discoveries were by accident.
J: Well, it’s just kind of like writing. Nobody really knows what happens when you write. All we know is that it only happens when you write. I can think about writing and I can ponder and I can plan but until I actually sit down and start doing it, none of those things are going to take shape and they always take shape in a way that’s not entirely expected.
A: That’s all I have. Do you want to add anything else? Do you have anything else to add?
J: No, no.
A: Alright, cool. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.
According to Author Jim Ruland, it’s important to have intentions and goals in mind of what you’re trying to communicate. That’s a good starting point to knowing what is extraneous information and can be left on the cutting room floor, and also what is important to the story.
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Marquetry” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org)
“The Molerat” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org)
“Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
ADAM GREENFIELD Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.
My name is Adam Greenfield and a majority of you have probably spent countless hours already writing research papers or grant proposals or other forms of communication. So it’s probably no secret that there’s nothing easy about it.
But what if I told you there are things you can do to make your written communication process not just easier, but better in its effectiveness? No, there’s no magic involved. Neither I nor today’s guest are that good. Just solid advice and a reminder that what you’re writing is more than just a list of ideas and points, and also what you should be focusing on when you’re short on space and time. Our guest is a writer who, like previous guests in this series, stresses audience engagement but in his own way that he’s honed over time. Oh, and his writing career started in the punk rock music scene. JIM RULAND And I still do that, by the way. I still write for punk zines, even though I don’t get out to as many shows as I used to. ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Jim Ruland, a San Diego based writer whose name and voice is well established in the literary scene. JIM RULAND I write a lot of different things. Professionally, I’m a copywriter, that’s my day job, I work in advertising, and I’ve been doing that for over 20 years. And I also do a number of other kinds of freelance types of writing, writing book reviews, columns, cultural columns. I also do some ghost writing, editing, I collaborate with people, help them get their stories out into the world. And, lastly, I do writing for myself, fiction and nonfiction. ADAM GREENFIELD Along with novels and short-stories, Jim’s work involves co-authoring books with Keith Morris, the well-known and outspoken singer of punk rock acts such as Black Flag and Circle Jerks, and also Scott Campbell, Jr., a controversial figure on the Alaskan crab fishing show, Deadliest Catch. Because of Jim’s experience helping others tell their story effectively and engagingly through writing, Jim also advocates for good storytelling and even pushes back some on the notion that scientific research is just listing a bunch of numbers and facts. When you write, you have a purpose behind bringing those numbers and facts to the table. JIM RULAND You’re reciting facts but there’s a desired outcome, and, the desired outcome, whether “give me or my university a bunch of money” or “publish these findings in your journal” or “share this information with your colleagues so that we can continue,” whatever that desired outcome, that’s what you’re writing towards. That will inform how you open your piece and also how you close it. In advertising we call it a call to action. You always- you never write something without trying to give the reader a path for them to take or inspired them to take some kind of action, whether it’s clicking a link or picking up a phone or booking a reservation at a hotel or airline or whatever it might be. There’s always a path. ADAM GREENFIELD Now, of course, every path has boundaries to sort of keep you on the path. Feel free to wander but beware of getting lost. At least at first. Early on in your writing you may be tempted to put all your research and data and thoughts and theories on the page. While this is not recommended for several reasons, one is sometimes you will have limited amount of space and time to communicate, such as a character count or word limit. Jim is certainly not new to that territory and in turn picked up a few bits of knowledge that have helped him along the way. JIM RULAND This was a big challenge for me when I first started writing book reviews, in that I would engage in all the necessary throat clearing, saying here’s the book, here’s the author, here’s the setup, here’s what it’s about, and then I would smack up against the word limit and realize I hadn’t really said the things that were most meaningful, that if I were to come up to you in a bookstore and you asked me to recommend this book, I hadn’t said the things that I might say to you in a 15 second conversation. And so I paid attention to that. Like, ok, I can’t be a slave to the format. What is it you really want to say? What is it you want to communicate to the people? And so I keep that in mind first.I think it’s a really good practice to always know what’s the thing you most want to say, make that your starting point, even if that’s in your headline. Then you’re free to meander. ADAM GREENFIELD Ok, I want to dive just a little deeper into this one because sometimes it can be difficult to know what should be kept and what should be cut when editing a written piece of communication. Even if you have no character count or word limit, a well-structured story is typically more effective and consumed in its entirety by the reader than a rambling tale or grocery list of items. So how does the writer make it easier for that to happen for the reader? According to Jim, have intentions and goals in mind of what you’re trying to communicate. That’s a good starting point to knowing what is extraneous information and can be left on the cutting room floor, and also what is important to the story.
Jim also provided a great example of a very effective writing tool: The hero overcoming conflict. JIM RULAND In narrative storytelling, you’re always generating conflict so that your hero can overcome adversity or succumb to it and then give them an opportunity to reflect and rejuvenate and try again. But you’re always generating conflict in narrative. And so even when it’s something like a nonfiction account or even a book review, for example, you might be looking for, well, what was the book’s path to publication, if they had a really long journey, that’s a form of conflict that might be interesting to talk about. If their person is writing in field that’s very crowded yet enjoys success anyway, that’s a kind of conflict. Or if it’s something trailblazing and new, and you have to kind of convince people this is the kind of storytelling people should be paying attention to, that’s again another form. So, like, I think it’s funny, most writers would say, in life avoid conflict wherever possible. But on the page, we seek it out. ADAM GREENFIELD Where writers may be picky or hesitant about when to be the hero, scientists are usually pretty eager to head in the direction of conflict in hopes of either resolving it or at least coming to a better understanding of it. I mean, scientists aren’t running towards burning buildings, which is definitely a highly respectable way of resolving a problem, but they are tackling some significant issues in the world, like cancerous tumors or prosthetics for children or conquering mathematical and engineering feats no one thought possible. It’s inevitable there will be conflict in the research you are writing about. In the hero narrative archetype Jim is talking about, you are the hero and the conflict is the problem you are trying to solve. However, whether you solved it or not is not the priority when it comes to writing. The bigger goal is to make sure your reader understands what the conflict is and how the hero arrived at the current state or result of the research. Jim’s pretty sure if you, the scientist, can do all that, learning to effectively communicate through writing can definitely be done and may even have an added bonus. JIM RULAND If you’re one of those people that says, “I’m a scientist, I’m not a writer,” I think you need to scrap that way of thinking. Writing is just like anything else, it’s a tool, it’s a craft. Some people write at a level where it’s art, where they practice it like art, but it’s something that can be learned. The desire to communicate effectively can take you to some really interesting places and put you ahead of your peers who lack the willingness to go there. Things are- as technology moves forward, what’s interesting to me is that even though we see more video in advertising and more video in our online experience, it still works. All of that stuff is written and if you can express yourself in a way that’s engaging and interesting, you’ll be ahead of the game, ahead of the competition. ADAM GREENFIELD
So when it comes to writing, there are tricks of the trade that you can use to ensure effective communication and keep your audience engaged.
First, remember you’re trying to get your audience to reach the same level of understanding and desire to do something with that information. As Jim put it, writing, in many instances, is a call to action.
There’s also the potential for having a limited amount of time or space to communicate everything you want your audience to know. In this case, get the most important bits of information and knowledge out first, then fill in around it.
And finally, always remember writing is a craft to be honed and mastered over time. You may feel like you’re better off with numbers or analyzing data, and to start you may very well be. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be an effective written communicator. Just as you spent years gaining the knowledge from your research, the same applies to honing your skills as a communicator.
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Eric Lander. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Erica Lander, Ph.D., President & Founding Director of the Broad Institute
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation.
Patrick Yurick: We are forming these ideas around how do, it’s not technically how do you communicate? It’s more like, what are the things you need to be thinking about. Some of the places we have identified areas where students should be thinking is, connecting to an audience. So, once of the questions that Tony had formulated that would be great from you was, can you explain the same technique that you have worked on in two different ways, one for a student or a lay audience and the other one for more of a technical audience. He said, maybe HMMs if you wanted to.
Eric Lander: I do not know that HMMs would connect.
P: It could be anything. You can choose. I am the lay audience, by the way. Or, PCR, he said. The big thing is that I kind of want to hear what you think about how you would explain it differently, depending on who you are talking to.
E: I do not think it is a question of explaining it differently depending on who you are talking to. I think it is a question in every single place, a conversation with a person, a freshman course, or meeting with the President of the United States. You are trying to understand who the listener is and what they are bringing to the conversation. Far too many people simply give some canned description and canned talk. When you are having a conversation, you are looking at the person. You are forming a mental model of what is in their head, what they are bringing to the conversation, what terms they are comfortable with. Then, you are getting continuous feedback about it. They are nodding, they are paying attention, they are falling asleep, they are bored, whatever. So, it is not entirely that you are preparing the magic thing to teach freshman. This is actually a continuous feedback. Most of the lessons are ignore jargon. Jargon does not even help in technical presentations. It sometimes is useful if you have a set of people who all share a common language. If you are sure they share that common language, use it. But, people far too often assume that they can rely on jargon to carry meaning. Simplicity. The thing that I have seen most is that the smartest people in the world and the best communicators distill things down to their essence. I watched Nobel laureate physicists talk to the Dalai Lama in northern India during a science week that the Dalai Lama had organized where this Nobel laureate, Steve Chu, I, and a few others came. You could have expected that he would be trying to impress the Dalai Lama with all sorts of fancy physical things. He started by putting up a slide and says, “Your Holiness, this is a technical thing I am going to use in my discussion. This is a rubber ducky, next slide, this is two rubber duckies.” The Dalai Lama is really smart. Steve Chu is really smart. But, he wanted to talk about discreteness in certain ways, and he was not above using rubber duckies to do it. It makes an impact. When you go to a scientific meeting and you hear talk after talk, they are so often monotone. People do not modulate their voice. They do not say things that are memorable. They are afraid to do that. They think the right way to communicate is to blandly describe the data, to go on and on about we did this, we did this, we hypothesized that, etc. If it is in a general monotone, you really lose the listener because it is really tough to follow. Stop, modulate, grab people’s attention, sound different than the next person, sound passionate about things because you are trying to form a memory. There is this crazy notion in science that you hear, “The data should speak for themselves.” The date are mute. They do not speak for themselves. You speak for the date. Science is a human activity. It is about one human convincing another human that we have a good explanation for the world. If you can’t convince somebody, both in your writing and in your speaking, that what you found makes sense, you have lost. The data can be as good as you want, but the job of a scientist is not done until they have managed to make a human connection and convince somebody. You might think, oh it’s like machine-readable mathematical proof. There are machine-readable mathematical proofs. There are proof-writing systems and proof-reading systems, but they are not the interesting thing about mathematics or the interesting thing about science. Those, you can have a machine produce a proof and another machine check the proof, and the two machines would be happy I suppose or whatever machines are. But no, that is just not what science is. Science is one human being satisfied that someone else has a good explanation for something and also, by the way, that the thing is interesting enough to care. If it is not interesting enough to care about, life is short, lives are busy, why pay attention? The job of a scientist is to communicate why something matters and what you have discovered about it. You are a teacher, you are a teacher whether you are talking to your professional colleagues. You may think those professional colleagues are all up on every detail with the literature. Trust me, they are not. You may think you have to assume everything, but no. They have really not followed all the literature. Explain it. Nobody ever minds if you slow down and make an explanation and give a solid foundation. If the train is leaving the station, let it leave slowly so that people can hop on board along the way. If the train leaves at super speed when you start a talk, people just miss the train. Also, when you are trying to explain something, have the train stop at intermediate stations, slow down so people can digest, so people can get back on. It is connecting and teaching. So, I do not think it is very different. I serve as the co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for President Obama. So, on occasions, I have to go explain things to President Obama. He is super smart. This is the one of the smartest people I have ever met. We get along well because I can take complicated things and explain them simply without in any way talking down or oversimplifying. In fact, distilling the essence of something is not over-simplification. It is getting to the heart of the matter. We have a lot of sound, go do something with it.
P: I have a couple questions coming out of that. First, I think of the way that students kind of come in and interact with communication or anything because I taught high school. It is the same way. We have mental models that we are coming into and logical patterns. Why are they making these logical fallacies that you kind of just talk to, like they are not slowing down. They are not doing these things. Is it that they think science is one thing?
E: There are a couple things. One, teaching is an art. You perfect it. If we think you can just magically be a good teacher without studying it and practicing it, we are kidding ourselves. So, the idea that you can just come in and teach and you will have these concepts of a mental model of what is in somebody else’s mind that you are constantly updating, and you are updating it based on the questions they are asking, the language they are using. You learn how to do that. You learn how to observe. I think one of the problems with students is they are still so busy in their own mind. They are grabbing onto the bits of science. They do not feel secure about those bits of science. When they prepare a talk, they are focusing on the next sentence, the next slide, the next thing, and they may not have any headspace to be focusing on their listener. So, it is a mentally taxing thing, to both know what your next point and your next slide are going to be and to be reading the faces of your audience and anticipating where they might get confused or something like that. It is work. It is practice. Do it. The best way to learn how to go give a talk at a scientific meeting is try to give a talk to a lay person. The best way to learn how to teach is teach freshman. Freshman, they are not going to cut you any slack about this. If they do not understand, they will tell you they don’t understand. The worst thing sometimes is to go give a talk to your lab mate. You should do it; it is a good thing to give a talk to your lab mate, but your lab mate is least likely to say, “I’m confused by that. What are you talking about?” So, you need people who are going to be able to look at your slides and say, “I am confused, why are all those words there? All those numbers there? All those things? How do you expect me to make sense of this slide with seven moving parts going on? Why isn’t there a title at the top that says in the simplest possible terms what the point is? Why aren’t the axis labeled in some way where I could read them without a microscope?” These are the sorts of very simple things that a lay listener, and then of course an expert listener who has learned how to teach, I try to do this in my own lab with my own students. There is an art to it. If you said, “I am going to become a sculptor overnight”, you wouldn’t believe somebody could do that. If you say, “I am going to become an airplane pilot.” No, becoming a teacher or becoming a communicator, whether it’s verbally in a class teaching or written text in a scientific journal or in some other form, it is an art that you hone again and again, you edit, you learn, you pay attention, and you look at masters. It is something where you apprentice yourself to great people who do it, just like you apprentice yourself as a scientist to your advisor, go find the best communicators and apprentice yourself to them. Listen to what they do. Pay attention and care. So often in science, we train people to do science without training them to do the other jobs that come along with being a scientist. Those jobs are to be a communicator. Those jobs are to be an educator. Those jobs are to be a lab manager, too. You can’t succeed in science without learning those other skills, and you can’t succeed unless you respect those other skills. If you think the only skill that matters is being a great scientist, you will quickly find that your lab falls apart or nobody hears what you are saying. Respect all the skills of the job.
P: I am guessing there was a time early, I mean I’m assuming, there was a time earlier in your career where you learned what you needed to work on. I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about that.
E: Yep. I was really lucky. I was a high school student in New York City, and I went to Stuyvesant High School, a specialized math and science school. I joined the math team. I loved the math team. I came an hour early on the subway and got in at 8:00 to Stuyvesant for the one-hour math team. My senior year, I was the captain of the math team. The job of the captain of the math team was to run that one hour. So, I actually taught every day for a year my senior year in high school. When I went to college, I taught at a National Science Foundation summer program in mathematics that I had taken as a student between my junior and senior years of high school. It was a fabulous NSF-funded course that was run at Hampshire College over the summer. As a teacher there, I taught six hours a day, six days a week for six weeks that summer. You could not prepare lesson plans for all that. You had to be able to wing it. So, I did that for three summers. I got, each year, more than 200 hours of teaching experience over the course of each of those three summers. It is incredibly valuable to have all that practice. What I think is too bad often, students don’t get that experience. So, by the time I actually came to teach, I had made lots of mistakes. I had learned lots of things. There is a famous observation that is quoted by a popular science writer, I am blocking out his name right now. We will not go there. Anyway, mastery, it is said that true mastery takes 10,000 hours. I think that is right. If you think you are going to get it overnight, forget it. If you want to be a master, start practicing. This is the only way to get it. I was really lucky early in my career. That is, as a high school student and as a college student, I got the chance to teach. It has stood me in such good stead. As a college student, I took a fabulous writing course from the great nonfiction writer, John McPhee, and my main extracurricular activity in college was I worked for the college newspaper, The Daily Princetonian at Princeton. I did daily journalism. The experience of a lot of teaching and a lot of writing has been invaluable for me as a scientist. When I sit down to write a paper, I have a lot of words under my belt. I have a lot of experience writing for different audiences. It helps. So, you might think that you should devote every waking hour to the lab bench. No, devote 80% of the hours to the lab bench and devote 20% of the hours to collecting these experiences with connecting.
P: Yeah, it sounds like you were putting together time towards connecting with people alongside your time researching the field that you were really studying.
E: Yeah.
P: I am thinking about a couple different things. One of the things I’m thinking about is, not every grad student is going to run a giant lab. Right?
E: Of course not.
P: Right, there is not enough suits because then there would have to be people to work in the labs. I am even wondering on a minimal level, it sounds like you did the maximum level of communications professional development for yourself that you could do in exposing yourself to teaching, talking, and managing people. What would you think at the very minimum there should be? Like, you said 80/20. Is that what you think is the minimum?
E: Yeah. I think since science doesn’t speak for itself, your job as a scientist is to speak for the science. You should devote 20% of your time to learning how to do that job well. I think that is enough of a commitment that you will learn a lot. I think if you are to try to do this with 2% of your time, you are not going to learn it. I think if you were to take 50% of your time on that, you [16:08 ]. The difference between what you can get done with 80% of the time and 100% of the time [16:13 ] is small. In fact, the discipline that you should be learning other things in addition to the specific narrow scientific area is very healthy. You should master these other things. You may not run a large lab. You may not be the master teacher, but whatever you do, whatever career you are in, however you use your science or your engineering, you will benefit from the ability to communicate verbally and to communicate in writing. Just in the most selfish sense, it will advance your own career. It will in a much less selfish sense help your listener a tremendous amount.
P: Yeah. You also mentioned a diversity of things that you did do, and I am wondering which one of those…when you think back to one of them that was pivotal. I am thinking, if you only 20% of your time economically, you went right for the teaching. Is that what you would say is maybe one of the more important experiences a grad student could force themselves into, is teaching?
E: Yeah, but real teacher. Really engaging with another human being and teaching with them, not teaching at them. Some teaching is you talk and you hope. You hope something got through. But as with any experiment, if you just set up the experiment and do it and you don’t measure the result, you haven’t learned much. The same is true for communication. If you sit there and you communicate at someone and you have no way to measure the result, well you’re not going to get any better at it, just like your science won’t get any better with that, actually, assaying the result at the end. Get yourself in situations where you can communicate and found out if the message coming through, if anybody is getting excited by it, if anybody understands it. See what questions you get. The questions will tell you a lot. You may try to communicate at somebody and then get a whole set of questions, and you realize, “Oh my God, they have no clue what I am talking about. I accomplished nothing.” Instead of getting frustrated, you should get technical. You should say what failed about that experiment? What variable needs to change?
P: Last question. Is there anything, and before you go I want you to definitely state your name and what you do here.
E: I am Eric Lander. I am the director of The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I am a geneticist and a mathematician, and I love what I do.
P: Last question. Is there anything you’re currently struggling to communicate with? Like, an idea, I mean it could be anything, but I’m wondering.
E: I am constantly struggling with how to communicate ideas. Right now, I am working on a paper, and I am working on a memo for the White House. In both of them, I have drafts and hate them. I am going back, and I am editing them. I am simplifying them. Every single time I write, I am struggling. Writing is a struggle. I hate writing. I love having written, but I hate writing because it is so much work. Most of what comes out isn’t good enough. If you want to succeed, get something down, realize why it’s not good, delete it, edit it, and keep going. You know, the things I’m proud of have gone through 40 drafts. That is what writing is. So, if you ask, am I struggling with communicating? Every minute of every day. When I am teaching, I am constantly struggling with, “Am I getting this thing across?” When I try to write a scientific paper, I am struggling with a terrible balance between a coherent narrative and needing to dive deep into certain facts along the way. How do you keep the narrative thread while getting the details in there? That is a struggle. When I am writing something for the White House, how do we get this to a simple, clear idea that will drive policy and not get just lost in a whole set of facts. Communication is a struggle, but it’s worth it. If you can actually get an idea from your head into another head, wow, that’s one of the most powerful viral forces there are.
You, the speaker, have all the data and knowledge and understanding of the subject you’re speaking about. But if you can’t convey its significance and why it’s deserving of all this attention, it lessens not just the importance of the data but the audience’s desire to care. According to Eric Lander, a scientist’s job performance involves not just data collection and interpretation but the ability to engagingly educate others.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Erica Lander, Ph.D., President & Founding Director of the Broad Institute
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Mccarthy” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License “Grand Fell” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 Train Sound Standard YouTube License https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oJAVJPX0YY
Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.
My name is Adam Greenfield and if you’ve ever been moved by a speech or by something someone said, what did it was probably how the words and ideas were conveyed to you, or the performance of the communication. There may not have been dancing or music involved but still, a performance was put on.
And as we’ll hear in this episode, that communication performance can include a lot of useful tools, like images or objects, or pacing. So if you’re not a dancer or musician, have no fear. You’re about to find out why you don’t have to be and still be able to perform and communicate effectively.
Now, in your career as a scientist, you may find yourself communicating your work to a wide range of audience types and sizes. It could be one person, it could be thousands of people, it could be the head of a company, it could be an entire high school. But what if your audience is, oh, I don’t know… the former President of the United States? ERIC LANDER I serve as the co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for President Obama. ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Eric Lander. ERIC LANDER I am the director of The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I am a geneticist and a mathematician, and I love what I do. ADAM GREENFIELD I mean, really, though. Can you blame him? Who else can claim they once had the ear of a world leader and played a direct role in groundbreaking scientific research? ERIC LANDER I watched Nobel laureate physicists talk to the Dalai Lama in northern India during a science week that the Dalai Lama had organized where this Nobel laureate, Steve Chu, I, and a few others came. You could have expected that he would be trying to impress the Dalai Lama with all sorts of fancy physical things. He started by putting up a slide and says, “Your Holiness, this is a technical thing I am going to use in my discussion. This is a rubber ducky, next slide, this is two rubber duckies.” The Dalai Lama is really smart. Steve Chu is really smart. But, he wanted to talk about discreteness in certain ways, and he was not above using rubber duckies to do it. It makes an impact. ADAM GREENFIELD This story is a great reminder that one performance piece of communication involves the use of images or objects or even audience participation. It’s one thing to speak convincingly but add in visual or non-traditional methods of communicating and the odds of your audience retaining information increases. But when you don’t have those external objects or interactions, or maybe you don’t feel comfortable with a little physical performance and audience engagement, another communication option is a vocal performance. Not necessarily singing, either, but more along the lines of using different inflections or pace. Now, Eric has sat in on a few talks and conferences, both as a guest and as an audience member, and has a pretty good sense as to what sort of vocal performance can turn a forgettable vocal stream of numbers into a story as memorable as two rubber duckies and the Dalai Lama. ERIC LANDER When you go to a scientific meeting and you hear talk after talk, they are so often monotone. People do not modulate their voice. They do not say things that are memorable. They are afraid to do that. They think the right way to communicate is to blandly describe the data, to go on and on about we did this, we did this, we hypothesized that, etc. If it is in a general monotone, you really lose the listener because it is really tough to follow. Stop, modulate, grab people’s attention, sound different than the next person, sound passionate about things because you are trying to form a memory. There is this crazy notion in science that you hear, “The data should speak for themselves.” The date are mute. They do not speak for themselves. You speak for the data. Science is a human activity. It is about one human convincing another human that we have a good explanation for the world. If you can’t convince somebody, both in your writing and in your speaking, that what you found makes sense, you have lost. ADAM GREENFIELD I just want to pause here for a brief second because I think it’s necessary to really understand what Eric is saying here. You, the speaker, have all the data and knowledge and understanding of the subject you’re speaking about. But if you can’t convey its significance and why it’s deserving of all this attention, it lessens not just the importance of the data but the audience’s desire to care. According to Eric, a scientist’s job performance involves not just data collection and interpretation but the ability to engagingly educate others. ERIC LANDER The job of a scientist is to communicate why something matters and what you have discovered about it. You are a teacher, you are a teacher whether you are talking to your professional colleagues. You may think those professional colleagues are all up on every detail with the literature. Trust me, they are not. You may think you have to assume everything, but no. They have really not followed all the literature. Explain it. Nobody ever minds if you slow down and make an explanation and give a solid foundation. If the train is leaving the station, let it leave slowly so that people can hop on board along the way. If the train leaves at super speed when you start a talk, people just miss the train. Also, when you are trying to explain something, have the train stop at intermediate stations, slow down so people can digest, so people can get back on.
ADAM GREENFIELD Once again, no acting or musician skills necessary for effective communication. All you need is a way to get your communication to stand out and engage your audience. And yes, it really can be as easy as saying it’s not as hard as you think.
Everything from images to vocal inflection and pacing is at your disposal, and as Eric’s experiences have shown, have been proven to be effective. Your audience will definitely remember the things you talked about if how you communicated makes a mark. Doesn’t have to be the performance of a lifetime but a little performance flair goes a long way in effective communication.
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is a rebroadcast of the the full, unedited interview with Sage Rosenfels. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episodes of Sage’s interview yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Sage Rosenfels, Former American Football Quarterback
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation.
Adam Greenfield: To start, then. Can you give me- or can you tell me your name and occupation?
Sage Rosenfels: My name is Sage Rosenfels. I am a retired NFL quarterback of 12 seasons, I live in Omaha, Nebraska, I am a father of three kids, so that’s one of my occupations, I guess, and I dabble in different aspects of the media, whether it be calling football games, writing articles, doing radio shows, radio interviews, all that type of stuff. So I also invest the money that I made while playing football and pay attention to all those businesses or real estate deals that are ongoing.
A: And probably pretty frightening. I mean, we hear those stories of athletes retired in any sport and all of a sudden a few years later they’re bankrupt.
S: Yeah, there is a crazy stat that’s something like, 80% of NFL players after two years removed from the NFL, I think, are either divorced, bankrupt, or something like that. And not surprising, the divorce rate’s just high in general amongst young people with a lot of money. I always say that giving young people a lot of money is not really a good stepping stone to maturity and as well- a lot of NFL players, different than maybe baseball or basketball, the majority of players, one, don’t make that much money, a lot of them are making four or five or six hundred thousand, not ten and twenty million that you sort of see amongst the premiere players. And the majority of the players only play for maybe two or three in the NFL. The average career is just over three years. So you’ve got a lot of players who make, say, a million or a million and a half dollars, and then obviously taxes and all sorts of things come out of there, and money gets to be gone fairly quickly. So it’s not a surprising stat that guys sorta do go broke fairly quickly.
A: And all it really takes in one injury to cut all that income off.
S: Yes, it’s true. The hard part about the NFL, say different than baseball, is that you- the injury aspect of the game, whether it be head injuries or knee injuries, can really shorten a career or end a career almost immediately. So you never really know, when you’re playing, when you’re gonna be done playing. It can be very nerve-wracking, sort of are living on the edge when you’re playing. But the only way to be successful and play at a high level is to play on the edge. It is very obvious when somebody isn’t, I guess, going full-go. That’s actually the best way to get injured, is to play I guess sort of passively or- to not get injured is the best way to get injured, is the best way for me to say it.
A: Ok. And I hear players- like, Terrell Suggs, for example, was playing this season with a torn bicep and just this morning Elvis Dumervil stated that he has a torn Achilles that he’s been playing through- a 60% torn Achilles. And the entire time was playing concerned that it was going to completely tear or pop or whatever it may be. That’s gotta be a frightening thing to have to deal with, I guess.
S: It is and there’s a lot of- every player by the end of the season has different injuries of some sort. It’s just such a physical and brutal game. Anytime you get grown men who are, say, a minimum 190 pounds to 350 pounds, who are trained to run as fast and be as strong as possible, you create a lot of force and the body isn’t, no matter what you do training-wise and weights and no matter what you do, it’s not set up to take that type of punishment and that kind of contact and force. So injuries are a major part of the game and it’s one of the main reasons why players don’t play very long.
A: You have a degree in Marketing from Iowa State?
S: I do, yes. Marketing at the Iowa State Business School.
A: So what did that teach you about communicating, not just your profession, but other ideas to people who may not have the same background?
S: Well, when I was trying to pick a major there was nothing that I truly wanted to do. I wasn’t one of those kids who when I was 16 or 17 just knew I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or own my own business, an entrepreneur. I thought I would probably be in the business world. I always have liked ideas, sort of the creative side. I guess I feel like I’m a little more creative rather than analytical. So I decided to go to Marketing, rather than, say, Finance or Accounting. Those did not interest me, looking at numbers all day. So I’ve always taken that view of business, sort of the big world view or how products would be marketed, what would be a good product or a good app or a good website or one of those types of things. So when I do invest in real estate or other projects, that is definitely not my specialty and I have to lean on close friends and people that I really trust. That’s their specialty.
A: So on the field, as a player, you’re dealing with communicating pretty much the entire game. You get the communication from the sideline, which is the play, and then you have to communicate that with your teammates. We’ll leave audibles and the pump fakes out of the equation for now. Can you give me an example play and what that would sound like if we were in the huddle?
S: Sure. Well, in the NFL, for one, I like to say there’s multiple languages, probably just like for a computer programmer there’s different languages and just the- English or Chinese or French or Spanish, there’s different ways to say the same thing. Well, in football there’s different ways to say the same thing. So in what they call a West Coast Offense type of offense, which is west coast language, you’d say something like, “double right zebra right three jet zebra arches,” and that would be the play. In a different type of system, one that Norv Turner, an NFL longtime offensive coach, he would say “twins right motion scat right 525 F post swing.” These are the exact same plays in two completely different languages.
A: So is there- let me see if I can figure out a way to word my question understandably.
S: Should I break down what that means?
A: I guess that’s kind of my question. That sounds complex but do these pieces have a general meaning behind them?
S: Absolutely. So generally in an NFL play you start with a formation, two players on the right and two players on the left or just start with three players on the right and one player the left. And then there’s what they call the “strength,” which is usually what the position of tight end signifies the strength of the formation. So on a play double right… double is sort of a different way of saying two, so it’s a two by two formation, right being the tight ends on the right hand side. And when I say zebra right, well, zebra is this position in the West Coast Offense where he is in what they call the slot or sort of the midway point between the outside receiver and the offensive lineman. He is the zebra player in the west coast offense. So I say double right zebra right, so I sent him in that formation to the right from the left hand side, so now he’s over on the right hand side in what we call a trips formation. So now he’s in a trips formation and we’re going to run a trips play. The next thing I said was three jet. That is a type of protection, so that is telling the offensive line, the running backs, the quarterbacks, the tight ends, really everybody, how the offensive line is going to block that play, who are they responsible for, if the Sam linebacker blitzes or the Will linebacker blitzes, who is going to block who so everyone is on the same page. And then the last thing I said was zebra arches. Zebra arches is the name of a pass pattern and that really tells all the other receivers and running backs what to do. As a quarterback, you obviously have to understand all of it. The running backs, they’re listening for the three jet and zebra arches. That’s really it. They’re not so worried about the formation as much. Offensive linemen are really just listening for three jet. That’s all they really care about, is the pass protection aspect of the plays. So everyone has their individual responsibilities and it sort of tells everyone what to do but generally almost all NFL and college offenses start with a formation, a possible motion, some sort of protection, and then the pass pattern.
A: Interesting. So how do you disguise that? If these are general concepts that even the defense might know, how do you disguise that so the defense doesn’t know what you’re going to do?
S: Yeah, so, you run the exact same formation and motion and you can really run hundreds and hundreds of plays out of that same play and formation. And that’s- teams use a lot of different formations. They’ll bunch guys together; they’ll start in an empty formation, which is just the quarterback in the backfield and motions guys around; sometimes you have three receivers on this side, sometimes you have two, and you can even put four on a side. There’s a lot of different variations and combinations you can come up with, which then attack the different possibilities you’re going to see on defense. I’ve always felt that people that are, say, engineers- and I’m sure at MIT- people would enjoy the aspect of what I always call the physics of football or the science of football. There’s definitely reasons why defensive players are positioned inside a wide receiver, outside a wide receiver, who they’re trying to funnel that player to, and those types of things. It really is a numbers game when you really break it down.
A: So you went from being a player on the field, studying playbooks in a classroom with all these complex and terminology and what seems like even a choreography to each play. And now you’re in a broadcast booth where you’ve become a communicator of all these elaborate schemes to the common audience. So how do you ensure that you’re explaining these complexities in a way that they can understand and not lose them with all this jargon?
S: Well, I don’t bring up all that jargon within the play. I do feel like, sort of, the common football fan who watches a lot of NFL or watched a lot of college football, does start to understand when somebody says a “two by two formation” or a “three by one” formation. You know, if I’m doing a replay and I say, “They’re in a three by one trips formation here,” I think most fans at this point that watch enough football do understand what that means. “Oh look, so there’s three receivers on this side and one on the other side. That trips, that makes a lot of sense.” But you do have to be careful with giving too much of sort of that type of information that’s not commonly known. You do have to talk about safeties being deep or safeties being up close to the line of scrimmage to tackle. You know, those types of things. You do have to simplify the game down but I think there is definitely a way of doing that. And it’s always a learning experience. I’m sure sometimes when I’ve called games I’ve been too complex and think sometimes I probably don’t give the fan enough credit as well. So the really, really good ones, like Chris Collinsworth, they’re great storytellers. Teaching the science of the game is a small aspect of being a color commentator. A lot of it is a storyteller about how a play developed, about how a matchup occurred, or even sometimes an off-the-field type of story that gives sort of more credibility or background to a certain highlighted player.
A: I like Jon Gruden’s analysis. He can be a little intense sometimes, but I like his play-by-play analysis, or color commentating, I should say.
S: Yeah, so Jon Gruden, he’s one of those analysts- and this goes, uh, I think most people understands this- that a lot of times people love analysts and a lot of time people hate analysts. It’s just sort of the way it goes and everyone has their own style that they like more. He likes to talk the X’s and O’s of the game. He was obviously a coach for a long time in the NFL and that was really his specialty, was always talking the language of football. So I think sometimes he likes to occasionally sprinkle in one of those plays. “Oh, we got 200 jet X slant with space. He’s gonna come out, he’s gonna look at X, he’s not gonna like it, he’s gonna reset his feet over the ball, he’s not gonna like it. He’s gonna get to his 4th read to his halfback on the wide. Perfect play, first down, Houstan Texans.” And that’s what Jon Gruden likes to do, and I think some fans do like to see, wow, this is all that’s going on in this simply play that’s just a pass to the running back.
A: And it adds a depth the game. You’re watching these people running around running into each other and from the unfamiliar eye that may look like they’re just running into each other but there’s a depth and complexity to this game that needs to be explained.
S: It’s an extremely complex game. You really can’t be dumb to play it. You can’t be dumb, at least, from a football aspect, to play it. And the longer you play it the more knowledge you’re going to have. You have to realize, this is the player’s full time job, the coach’s full time job. I mean, we were talking off the air about Marc Trestman, who was one of my former coaches. He has his law degree from the University of Miami. He’s not a dumb guy. And he’s a long-time NFL offensive coordinator. These guys spend a lot of time in the summer, in the off-season, coming up with new concepts, coming up with new plays. I mean, you’re practicing so much. It’s not like you have other things to do. This is your full-time job. You spend probably somewhere between four and six hours in meetings every single day as an NFL player. There’s a lot of information and there’s a lot of teaching and coaching that goes on. It’s definitely not a simple game. My older sister asks me, how come you don’t run trick plays all the time and how come guys always just run into the pile and they don’t run around it. It seems simple on TV but it definitely is more complex than that.
A: I had no idea Trestman had a law degree. Even John Urschel, one of the smartest men in football, took some classes at MIT this summer, these mathematical classes. And it sort of kills that jock stereotype.
S: Believe me, football players do plenty of things to live up to that stereotype, as well. I have also learned that there’s a very big difference between being smart in, say, a normal classroom, in mathematics or science or something like that, and then being smart in a sport. There are people who are brilliant and they go to MIT and Harvard and those types of places but have a hard time understanding how football and basketball really works in a lot of ways. I think it’s a different kind of creative smarts that go into athletics than, say, go into a classroom.
A: You played football in front of audiences of all sizes. Do you remember your first time in front of a large, stadium-sized, NFL audience and do you remember what you were feeling at the time?
S: Well, um… college and NFL are very similar. I mean, once you reach that level. My first college game probably had over 50-55,000 fans. I definitely remember walking down- from the locker room, you had to sort of walk down a ramp to the field and really just looking up at all the people in the stands and the crowd and just being in awe. And I’m sure my mouth was open, my jaw was dropped, and I completely almost like left the group of quarterbacks I was walking down with. I was just completely in awe of the situation. Over time you definitely get more and more used to it and you get so focused on what you’re doing, this crowd sort of becomes this thing that’s around you and it’s something you don’t really pay attention to. Believe me, we can’t hear you when you yell at us from the stands. We don’t hear any of it. We’re very focused on our job and plus, there’s usually 70-80,000 people. We’re not going to hear your complaint over their voices as well.
A: So you’re not going to hear me screaming through the television, then, I take it?
S: Definitely not gonna hear that, either. You know, as I said, you get used to it over time and you’re so focused on your job. There’s a lot of adrenaline in football. There’s a lot of games, even if I didn’t play and I was the backup quarterback, when I was done I was exhausted. There is a big-time build up before the game, even the night before. The nerves, sort of the nervous energy. When you go into the game and then you play the game, there’s so much- any time there’s violence that goes on and there’s such a fine line and playing on the edge like that, there’s an energy that sort of pushes you through pain and through injury. Obviously, you build- you have the courage to go make a crazy, dangerous play because it’s just- the adrenaline rush is what the formers players do miss. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, what type of car or house you buy, or how much golf you play. You’re never going to get that type of adrenalize rush from when you’re playing football.
A: So how do you stay calm and focused in that moment?
S: Again, I think a lot of it is just based over time and practice. Anytime you practice something hundreds and hundreds and thousands of times, you get so used to it that your body just sort of does it. It just sort of adjusts and you’ve trained your mind over the years to make certain throws or make certain reads. I think you just get so focused on what you’re doing, you’re just not worried about what’s going on around you and you’re so focused on the game plan and what the coach wants you to do in that play, that you dive into that play, you sort of forget about all the rest that’s going on.
A: That sounds like a question I had, that “in the zone” question. I’m a podcast producer and a writer at the same time and sometimes when I write I get in this zone and the next thing I know-
S: Absolutely.
A: -I’ve written pages upon pages and the sun is down and it’s dark in my apartment. In sports, that phenomenon is like when the game slows down for the player. It’s as if there’s more time for the athlete to perform. So I guess that is just a result of practice and repetition, then?
S: It is. It’s practice, repetition. I believe if you really understand the game at a high level, again, the science of the game, the speed of the game will start to slow down. If you’re one of those players that, I guess, isn’t well-schooled in all the intricacies of football, I think the game can seem really fast and chaotic and there’s a lot going on but if you’ve really mastered, sort of, the X’s and O’s of the game, what everyone’s responsibility is, the defensive responsibilities, what’s going to happen, and you can anticipate, the game does slow down much more than people realize.
A: That’s just a result of being mentally prepared? I watched a broadcasting reel of yours online and in a video clip- I think you were on the NFL network- you said if you had to start on a pro level straight out of college, you would’ve been out of the game in a year, that there’s such a drastic difference between the two levels. So I guess that is just a matter of being mentally prepared or there’s a physical aspect to this, too, as well, right?
S: Well, it- there is both and over time you physically start to- I think during that NFL films or NFL Network show that I was on, we were talking about the jump from college to NFL. We were actually talking about Johnny Manziel, of all players, and how challenging that is. Yes, the NFL game is faster. They are superior athletes who are more mature, they’re older, they’re 25 or 27 rather than 19, they’re bigger, they’re faster, they’re stronger. They’re also smarter to play at that level. So it means they’re more instinctual in those types of things. But I do feel, again, you get better coaching at the pro level, you spend more time on it so you understand the X’s and O’s of the game, the science of the game more. You also just do get used to practicing more. You know, in college you don’t practice as much as you do in the pros. You don’t have spring and summer, or what we call OTAs, these mini camps. I mean, training camp is much longer in the NFL, about five or six weeks, than a college camp. So you just spend so much more time on that you sort of get used to one, the complexity, and two, the speed of the game.
A: Are there rules preventing teams from playing- practicing all year?
S: Yeah, in the NFL they have collectively bargained, the players and the NFL, to have a certain amount- the OTAs are called Offseason Training Activities and they’re really just practice. But those days you can only spend so much time at the facility, only so much time on the practice field, so much time in the mean room. They all have that collectively bargained. If that wasn’t the case, NFL teams and head coaches, when the season’s over January 2nd or whatever, they would have players in the next day and start practicing for next year. That’s just how they are. So the players negotiate how much time is really spent- I think it helps the player from a wear and tear on the body standpoint. It is hard to do anything at that high of a level the entire year so must of winter, say, February, March, April, a lot of that time is not spent practicing but more physical training. Lifting weights, running, getting in top physical condition for the upcoming season. And then obviously through those summer times you’re doing both. You’re training physically and practicing and then again the actual training camp, which is less weight lifting and running and more just practice.
A: I want to talk a little bit about process and failure for a little bit. I’ve been a fan of football since I was a kid and over the years heard enough coaches and players in interviews say that this and really most competitive sports require an ability to move on after failure. There’s like a 24 hour rule. You have 24 hours to grieve or to celebrate then it’s on to the next game or thing or whatever it may be. Not to imply that you are a failure because I think we all fail at some point in time. Are there any process you use to remain grounded after a failure in your profession?
S: Well, you are correct. Failure is very much a part of sports. Of all sports. I mean, Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time in my opinion, he missed more shots than he made. So he failed more than he succeeded as far as shooting the basketball. In football, very early, whether it’s high school, football, or pro, coaches are always pushing “next play, next play, next play.” There’s really nothing you can do about whatever happened on the last play whether it was really good or really bad. Many times it’s bad when they’re bringing that up. “Hey, next play. Let’s move on. That was a mistake. Next play.” Because the clock is ticking. You don’t have time to sit there and mope and contemplate and worry about what happened. Obviously you have some time between games but not much. The week is so regimented that, yes, after a loss you maybe have 24 hours but the next day? Worrying about that game and feeling bad about that game or the play is not going to help you win the next one. So it’s all about how can we get better for the next game and learn from those mistakes. When you’re actually in a game or in a practice and, say, you have a bad play, again, that play is not going to have an effect in a positive way on the next play if you spend any time worrying about it. Bad play happened. What’s the next play and how can we maximize that play because that’s the great thing about football, is you can have a bad play and the next play or the next group of plays you can play perfect football and make up for that bad play. So it’s all about really playing each individual play as its own separate entity throughout the sixty minutes of a football game.
A: And when it comes to speaking in front of an audience and you make a mistake, it seems like that would be a little harder to recover because then at that point, your audience is sitting there with that one mistake and there isn’t- I mean, I guess there is another play. They can keep listening. But it seems like that’s the one difference, is that in sports there’s so much activity going on that, I guess, it doesn’t require a short attention span but in a way that could be kind of helpful. Whereas speaking in front of an audience, that maybe- is that the same, do you think?
S: I agree with you. When it’s something like, say, you’re speaking in front of 1000 people or you’re in a ballet or you’re in a play. If you fall down and have an incredibly embarrassing mistake, it’s hard to really make up from that. I think the difference is in football or, say, golf, another similar sport to football in a sense that there’s individual plays or individual shots and the last shot doesn’t necessarily need to affect the next shot. The hard part is when you’re speaking in front of a crowd or maybe doing some theater, if you make a really, really bad mistake, there’s not really much you can make up for that. So then just put on the best performance you can from then on out. People may remember that mistake or they may remember the rest of your performance as being spectacular. I think that’s the difference between that type of world and, say, athletics, as I said, sort of the next play doesn’t have to have any bearing on the previous play.
A: Now, you also teach kids about the game of football at the Sage Rosenfels Quarterback Passing Academy. So what do you tell the kids you teach about the process of preparing themselves for a game?
S: What I do is I train young kids who are just sort of learning football, from fundamentals of the game, you know, quarterbacks, wide receivers, that’s sort of my specialty, obviously. I’m not really coaching defense. We also talk about the X’s and O’s of the game and really teaching the science of football. What’s really fascinating about the sport of football different than, say, basketball, is that it’s such a uniquely positioned sport. When I say that, a college or pro football team has usually between 11 and 20, 25 coaches on the staff because each individual position is very unique and different from the rest. Wide receiver is very different than defensive line, quarterback is very different from an offensive line, as far as responsibilities work out, what they need to know, all these things. So it’s a very position specific sport. And so what’s amazing is how few people really understand all the things a quarterback needs to know to be successful. Even the dad that was a really good high school or college player that played DB that’s now coaching your son’s Pop Warner or middle school team probably doesn’t know that much about quarterbacks. That’s just the way it is. So what I try to do is give as much knowledge to what I feel is the most important position in football, the quarterback position, but as I’m teaching sort of these footwork and throwing fundamentals and these types of skills, I’m also talking about sort of the mental side of the position, being the communicator, being someone that has to do- try to things right all the time, sort of the ambassador of the team. So I try to give life lessons of the quarterback position, not just individual skill position work.
A: Do you have any examples of those life lessons?
S: Well, something just like what you’re talking about. There’s a, what we were talking about, making mistakes and coming back from those mistakes. If a kid has a bad throw during a drill it’s, “Hey, it’s a bad throw. Let’s do it right the next time. Let’s try to do it right the next time.” to, you know, as a quarterback on the team, you’re entire school is really looking at you set the tone of what they think the football team is all about. If the quarterback is a jerk, the student who doesn’t play football and maybe is just in the band or is a regular student, might think all the football players are jerks because the quarterback I feel is sort of the symbol or sets the tone for the entire football team. The Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett once used a phrase, ambassador. He said the quarterbacks are the ambassador of the football team, they have to hold themselves at a higher level, on the field and off the field, in the classroom, how you treat other students, how you treat other people, people will make judgments on your entire team based off what they feel about the quarterback.
A: Interesting. So can other personalities shine through? For example, well, I’m using the Ravens only because I’m most familiar with them. Ray Lewis was THE leader. It wasn’t Flacco, it wasn’t Kyle Boller, for sure. And I don’t say that to be disparaging, I’m sure he’s a great guy. It takes a lot of skill to throw the ball 70 yards on your knees… without any accuracy. As a quarterback, being that ambassador, does it feel weird to sort of give it up to another position player?
S: Well, I think a couple things. One, the quarterback position is- it’s hard to be timid and to be quiet and be sort of that quiet leader that just leads by example. I believe that the really good ones are always good communicators. You know, Peyton Manning loves to talk. Tom Brady likes to talk. Drew Brees likes to talk. Dan Marino loves to talk. It’s just sort of part of the position because you’re just non-stop communicating with everybody on the football team from the head coach and the coaching staff, even the general manager and the owner, the quarterback talks to them more than other players than the other players get to talk to the owner. But also, obviously, your teammates. When you’re in that huddle, when you’re calling a play, I’ve always believed you have to sell that play like it’s going to work. “I have the information, guys, and this play that I’m telling you? Twins right motion scat right 525 f post swing? It’s gonna work, it’s gonna get us the first down, it’s gonna help us win the football game.” You have to sell that. So I think over time you do learn how to be a bit of a salesman and be a bit of a vocal leader. I do feel it’s important for the quarterback to do that. Now, on certain teams like the Ravens, and they had a guy like Ray Lewis, and a lot of teams, defensive players, everyone can be a leader but rarely is it not the quarterback sort of taking charge of that situation. I think Ray Lewis was sort of exceptional in that- and the exception in that situation- where he really was the vocal leader of that football team. He really enjoyed giving those speeches and having that spotlight. It was something he, you know, was really into. And I played with a player named Junior Seau who was very, very similar. He really enjoyed those speeches and he played for so long in the NFL at such a high level that that respect was automatically given there. His speeches were very believable because he had been there and done it so many times. I always say respect is not given, it’s earned, so no matter what you say, if you don’t back it up with the way you practice and prepare and the way you handle yourself on and off the field, it really doesn’t matter what you say right before a football game if you haven’t earned the respect of your teammates and coaches and even your community.
A: Do you buy into that leader has to be a very loud, outspoken, vocal guy? I mean, they talk about Flacco being very calm and collected. Joe Cool, you know? In the huddle and in the locker room but he’s still a leader. And he gets criticized for this, too. Even his own teammates.
S: Yeah.
A: They criticize him for being TOO calm and collected. So I’m curious what you think about- if that makes a difference.
S: No, I- yeah, I don’t think the quarterback HAS to be the loud, vocal leader. I think it also helped that, with Joe Flacco early in his career, he had Ray Lewis and some other players, Terrell Suggs, who were very loud, vocal leaders. So he didn’t really have to have that role. I think more often than not, just because the way football is, people do look to the quarterback position for that vocal leadership. I don’t think you have to be loud, I don’t think you have to always be giving the speeches, I don’t think you have to have that role. But you have to be a good communicator and you have to be somebody that can, you know, caninspire the other players. I played with a player named Andre Johnson when I was playing for the Houston Texans and he just retired this season after a long NFL career. Fantastic wide receiver. And he barely said anything ever. I mean, in the weight room, in the locker room, on the game field he was very quiet. But he worked probably harder than everybody else on the football team. He was the best player on our football team. There was so much respect to the way that he did his business that he didn’t have to say very much. And when he did speak, believe me, those words had more effect on the players and coaches than anything that a quarterback that spoke every single day had to say.
A: Interesting. So I guess that silence sort of added a bit of credibility and stoicism to what he was saying when he did speak?
S: Well, it’s one of those things, “if you want to be heard, listen” type of scenario, right? Again, his credibility was based off his performance and his work ethic. He didn’t feel like he needed to be in that role to psych up his teammates. He felt like if you went on and did your business and everyone took care of their business, the team could be successful. But I think he also would say it does help to have some vocal leadership on a team or any sort of business, whether it’s a CEO or a business owner. You have to have somebody that’s communicating the information to everybody to keep everybody sort of on the same page and motivated.
A: It’s interesting to compare- just thinking about the comparisons with what a scientist does in order to present highly complex and detailed research to peers, or otherwise, and compare that with an athlete, or at least a football athlete, who has a little less than one week to prepare for a grueling physical and mental performance. Can you go through some the preparations and practices that players do in any given week between the day after a game and the day before the next game?
S: Sure. And again, this is one of those things that Norv Turner said to me one time. He was my quarterbacks- well, he was an offensive coordinator back in, I think, 2002 and 2003 in Miami- and he said, “The great thing about football is we get to take a final every Sunday for, basically, 16 weeks in a row. Most people don’t get to do that.” You work on a project, you work in a company, you never really see the results ever over the course of maybe years or you see them- or a project over the course of a few months or six months or something like that. You really do get to see your work come to fruition very, very quickly throughout a season. So, to take you through a week, a general week. Let’s say you play on Sunday and you’re not playing until the following Sunday. Monday, you come in, obviously you’re exhausted, you’re tired, you’re beat up. Win or lose, that doesn’t really matter, you come in, you get a light lift in. It’s important to work out after a game. Usually you have some sort of running or jogging type of exercise, as well. According to strength and conditioning coaches, that helps with recovery, helps you work- get the blood flowing throughout the body to help repair damaged tissue. And with that, then you also watch film. You watch the entire game. The head coach and the coordinators generally give speeches to the team and the respective sides of the ball about what happened in the ballgame, what we did well, what we did poorly. They go through each individual play. That’s a very slow process. They go through the game film with a fine-tooth comb of every player, every position, of what happened well and poorly in that ballgame. Tuesday is the collectively bargained day off for NFL players. A lot of players still do come in that day to, again, maybe get in another work out or get in the hot tub or start watching film on the upcoming opponent but there’s nothing scheduled as far as meetings or on that day, on that Tuesday. It’s also a day where players many times will go volunteer at a children’s hospital or something around the community. It’s definitely the day the community relations director grabs players and does things in the community. Wednesday is your big work day. Wednesdays and Thursdays are very similar. Wednesday you come in, let’s just say seven o’clock in the morning, grab a bite to eat, then you head to meeting from, say, around eight o’clock until, oh, about eleven o’clock. Many times three, three and a half hours, something like that. And you’re watching film of the future opponent, you’re breaking down all the plays- or I should say, installing all the plays that you’re going to run. Running plays, passing plays. “These are the protections that we like, these are the players on the other team that we’re concerned about. This Terrell Suggs pass-rushing defensive end, we’re worried about him so we’re gonna use these couple protections to help out, running backs this week are going to need to chip that player before you get out on your routes because he’s going to give us problems. He’s giving everyone problems so far this season.” You go through all this game plan stuff, go out in the field for a walk through, so you’re going to walk through some of these plays you’ve installed, come back in grab some lunch, then go out for a full two, two and a half our long practice in which you run a lot of these plays that you just installed that morning. Get through practice, come back in afterwards, obviously shower, those types of things. And you actually then go back in and watch practice. And then that’s pretty much your day. Usually you’re done at something like, say, five o’clock. Some players- I was one of those players- like to stay a little longer until a lot of times six o’clock, watch even more film on my own. Even start watching film and getting ready for Thursdays. So Thursday and Wednesday are very similar; they’re just different situations. Thursday, the plays you would install and run and practice, would be plays, say, on third down, which can get very complex in the NFL. Plays in the red zone, short yardage or goal line situations- everything in the NFL is about situations. Is it first down and ten on your own 20 or is it third down and six on the other team’s 40 yard line? Very different styles of plays and schemes that different offensive and defensive coordinators like to use in those types of situations. So that’s Thursday, very similar to Wednesday. Friday is also similar but it’s just shorter. After that practice you’re done. You actually don’t have- you do the morning meetings, then you go right out to practice at around, say, eleven o’clock or so, practice until one… it’s definitely lighter, fewer pads, if no pads at all, are worn on that practice. It’s supposed to be sort of the dress rehearsal. The ball shouldn’t hit the ground as quarterback. There should be high completion percentage rates. Obviously it’s not as physical, it’s not as dangerous in those types of practices. You’re really trying to practice perfectly, as I say, on that Friday. And then Saturday, you come in, you watch some more film and then you go out for a walk through, and you talk about the first plays you want to call in the game. After the whole week of practice, the coaches have found out, these are the plays you really, really like, they went well for us, the quarterback did well on these plays, running backs seemed to really read these plays really well. In the fifteen plays of the game, say the first quarter, these are the plays that we really, really do like. And then you might go over some unusual plays that maybe you don’t practice very often in that walk through. You’re literally just walking through these different plays. And let’s say it’s an away game. You go hop on a plane and fly to another place and have a few meetings that night at a hotel, wake up the next morning, and go play. If it’s a home game, it’s nice because you get to go home for half a day and hang out with your family before you usually go into a team hotel on Saturday night, staying over, waking up the next day, and obviously going to the stadium and getting ready for kickoff usually, say, around noon or one o’clock.
A: Wow. So the night before, if you’re at home, you still stay in a hotel?
S: Yes, absolutely. Usually, say, seven o’clock or so, there’s some sort of meetings. Again, offensive and defensive meetings, sort of last minute film watching. Sometimes a head coach will have the video directors make some sort of highlight film of maybe your last game and footage that they’ve taken within the team to make cool highlights to sort of get you excited for the next day. Then the head coach gives some sort of- probably some inspirational talk that night at the end of those meetings, say, at eight-thirty, nine o’clock. And then yeah, you stay in the hotel. They don’t really- most teams will even have a bed check at, say, ten o’clock or something to make sure everyone’s in their room. There’s a security guard usually on every floor. So there’s very small likelihood of anyone going out and trying to have a good time on a Saturday night.
A: Unlike Janikowski the night before the Super Bowl but we’ll leave that off the-
S: Well, different teams have different things that they stress and I believe the Oakland Raiders are one of those teams that probably doesn’t have, based off of their history- you know, Al Davis, the old owner, was a little more loose in what he felt was important for football players. He sort of liked the guys that were a little more wild and would go out the night before a game. It didn’t bother him so much. But most head coaches, most coaches in general, are control freaks. They really like to control the entire process. Football, one of the things about it, it’s very much- people relate it to the military for a lot of reasons because I think you have a lot of people- not only do you have sixty players on a team- you’ve got twenty coaches and you’ve training staff weight lifting staff and equipment managers and video managers- all these people. Over probably 100 people in a room, you have to have everyone very, very organized and on time and every minute throughout the week is really accounted for. It’s very, very regimented and very similar, I think, in some ways to the military.
A: You know, I heard a story recently. Ladarius Webb was talking on a podcast and he was telling the story about the first time he met Ed Reed. And it was the same year- John Harbaugh’s first year. Harbaugh came in and they were in a meeting, and I think Ed Reed may have been joking around or talking during a meeting, and Harbaugh was like, “You know, this is not a time for talking. Feel free to leave if you need to talk.” So Ed Reed just got up and walked out. And after that, Harbaugh was like, “Ok, I don’t think I can be too much of a militant with these guys.” And I think early on there was a bit of a rebellion between the veterans of the team who had been there for a while. They all kind of worked it out but you talking about coaches being very militant about things, it just reminded me of that story. I just thought it was kind of funny.
S: Yeah, well, every head coach has different philosophies and different ways they treat their players. You call one old school and you could call the other player friendly. Gary Kubiak was not a coach that believed in that military style. He sort of believed in treating everyone like men and, “Your job is to go out there and be a pro every day and act like a pro, practice, preparation, the whole thing. Just be a pro. That’s all I ask of you. I’m not asking more, I’m not asking less.” Other coaches like to have a lot of rules and be more strict and you have to wear this on the road, you have to wear a suit and tie, you have to be a certain way at all times. There’s multiple ways to do it. I don’t know if there’s one way that’s better than the other. Bill Belechick’s a very negative coach. he likes to coach from negativity and Bill Walsh, the great, old coach from the West Coast, the old coach of the San Francisco 49ers, he was very into that, sort of, California, feel-good, positivity, not yelling and screaming type of coaching. So, multiple ways to do it. I know Jimmy Johnson, the old Dallas Cowboys coach, used to say something like, “Every player’s treated differently because every player means something different to this football team.” So sometimes a player like Ed Reed, a first round ballot Hall of Famer, was given more leeway by some coaches than someone who’s just barely trying to make the football team.
A: I love Kubiak. What- the season he was the Offensive Coordinator for the Ravens was probably my favorite- one of my favorite seasons to watch. It was hard to watch him leave but I’m glad he got the opportunity that was kind of his dream job. Anyway. You mentioned Kubiak and I’m a huge fan.
S: Yeah, well, I played for Kubiak for three years in Houston. He’s probably my favorite coach I ever played for. He played in the NFL for a long time. He was John Elway’s backup for, I think, about 10 years with the Denver Broncos back in the 80s. And I think that really helped him understand what players go through and what they- the players like expectations. Like, what do you expect of me? What do I need to do to do my job? And I think that’s why he- why players like playing for him. He creates certain expectations. Ok, this is what I expect of my players and my coaches and after that you can sort of do what you want. I think- and also his style of coaching makes sense. His understand of what I call the science of the game makes a lot of sense, the way he communicates it. He’s not a yeller or a screamer but when he does raise his voice you know it’s very, very important to him. He’s not a guy who coaches through fear. He was a guy who coaches through working together and that’s probably why he was my favorite coach in my career.
A: I like that, I like that. Do you think that it’s- that coaches are better coaches if they were players at one point?
S: I believe so. I actually wrote an article recently. I haven’t sent it to- I write an article for TheScore.com every week and I haven’t sent it off to them yet. But I’m a big believer in particular quarterbacks- it really helps to have former quarterbacks be a coach. Obviously it’s the position I played and so I’m extremely biased in the sense that I think we know more about the sport than other positions but I feel like we do. We have to have a very good understanding of offensive line responsibilities, what receivers go through against the secondary players, what defenses are trying to do to offenses, their different styles. We’re constantly studying athletes. What does this athlete do well? Does he cover well? Is he more of a run stopper? What kind of routes can we beat him on? I feel like we, as quarterbacks, understand more about the all the aspects of the football team than the other positions. So I think yeah, former quarterbacks do make, usually, better coaches but not always. I mean, I don’t think Bill Belechick was- he wasn’t an NFL player and I think he’s the greatest coach of all time. So not necessarily but I do believe it definitely helps to have played the game and to go through what the players go through, mentally and physically.
A: And you can say the same about catchers in baseball. They’re considered the quarterback of the team, you know, when they’re playing because they have to call the pitches, they set the defense, and you see now that these catchers are managers now and they’re successful. Joe Girardi, for example.
S: Yeah, and Mike Scoscia. There’s been many documented stories about catchers being the best baseball managers. There’s a lot of baseball managers that were catchers. They have to understand- I mean, they do scouting reports on each individual hitter and what we should stay away from and what count we should throw what type of pitch on. That’s a very detailed- that’s very different than the center fielder that’s waiting out there for a ball to be hit to them.
A: And Curt Schilling, love him or hate him, was one of the most studious players I had ever read about He would sit there in game with an iPad or notebook and just skim every hitter he was about to face.
S: Yeah, information is very important. It is for football. It is for all sports. For golf, for baseball. The more information you have the better. But there was a common saying in football. I can’t remember exactly what it was. It was basically sometimes you would be frozen by too much information, that you would have so much running through your head, like, “Oh my god, they might do this splits” or “They might play this coverage” or “This is gonna-“ and all these negative things start popping up in your brain, if almost you have too much information sometimes. I always thought it was better to have too much information than not enough.
A: Alright. So last question and I’ll let you get on with your day. I’m sure you’re a busy guy. Do you have any tips or lessons or both as either a player or broadcaster about communication that you can share with grad students?
S: Well, I think not be scared of communicating. I think some people are concerned about not saying the right thing or possibly being wrong. You know, I have to go on the radio all the time and give my opinion about what’s going to happen in a football game and I’m sure I’m wrong all the time. I still can have an opinion about it based off the information I know and I understand. I can also change that opinion. That’s ok. You learn- you get new information, your opinion changes and I think that’s what a lot of times slows people down or intimidates people, is the possibility that they could be wrong and I think that’s- I think that should be let go and I think it’s important, if you feel strongly about what you have to say, people aren’t going to realize how important it is unless you communicate it strongly and sell it. Not in a fake way but in a genuine way that you really believe based off the information that you have acquired over the years or the project you’ve worked on, that you really feel strongly about the results that you’ve gotten.
A: That’s good advice. And being flexible, I think you mentioned that, being willing to change a mindset about something.
S: Oh, absolutely. Another reason Kubiak- Gary Kubiak, I liked so much was he also understood the NFL game was always changing. All sports- e verything is always changing. That’s one thing you can expect from game to game, year to year, in the NFL, was change. The only thing that always stayed the same was change, and always the ability to adapt, to learn more, change your opinion on how we’re going to win the next football game. Maybe it’s at halftime, you realize we can’t run the football, we thought that was going to be our way to victory today, it’s not going to happen, we’re going to have to throw it. So the ability to take in more information and possibly adapt to it.
A: I love that. “The only thing that stays the same is change.” That’s a bumper sticker right there.
S: It’s a good one.
A: It is, it is. Alright, Sage, I really appreciate you taking the time and doing this for me. I had a great time talking with you.
