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) “Upbeat” by Jon Luc Hefferman 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…
DAVE WHITTLESTON
My name is Dave Whittleston. I’m a civil and environmental engineering student in my sixth year of my PhD, so I’m studying weather and climate science. ADAM GREENFIELD In our conversation, Dave mentioned one of the big reasons he went into his particular field of climate science is because of his interest in the debate behind it and the implications of climate change when it comes to the world’s population. DAVE WHITTLESTON I wanted to spend a decent chunk of time understanding what we know and what we don’t know. I think that really gets lost and people are not willing to spend the time to understand the nuances in a lot of the research coming out. ADAM GREENFIELD And in turn, that can cause problems when trying to communicate that information to others. In the podcast there was something Scott Lewis brought up that struck a chord with Dave, and it had to do with the value of work or research getting as much attention as possible but at the same time, there can be a pitfall. DAVE WHITTLESTON I think he said something along the lines of… SCOTT LEWIS 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. DAVE WHITTLESTON And I think as maybe someone who wasn’t in science, he said that’s not- you know, “Science is this peer review process and this noble kinda thing.” That totally resonated with me. I think the value of any scientific work at the moment is in how much attention it gets and I think that puts a lot of pressure on researchers to come up with certain results. ADAM GREENFIELD Dave also brought up something Brunie Felding discussed that was playing a very important role in his graduate student path at the time of our conversation.
DAVE WHITTLESTON I’m in my sixth year of my PhD, I’m aiming to graduate in a month, you know, to defend my thesis, so I’m kind of at the end of that process. Something that I think resonated was the value of feedback….
BRUNIE FELDING But to then have somebody else to look at it in a different way and throw a question at you, it enriches you and sometimes it enhances- it kind of reinforces what you were already thinking. Or it throws you off balance for a moment and you think, whoopsie, what do I need to consider here to address this question that this person had. DAVE WHITTLESTON
….and kind of- maybe forcing you to face your own biases that I think I wish I had been made aware of at the beginning of my PhD career. I just think a lot of the time you’re not necessarily forced to face up to the weakest parts of your arguments, unless you either try to write it up and put it through peer review or you’re talking it through with somebody.
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 episode is the full, unedited interview with Leigh Hafrey. 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 Leigh Hafrey – Senior Lecturer of Communication & Ethics MIT’s Sloan School of Management
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: Could you state your name and your job title?
Leigh Hafrey: My name is Leigh Hafrey. I am a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.
P: How long have you been doing the work that you have been doing?
L: I have taught at Sloan since 1995. I started out teaching in the communication area. I still have that affiliation, but I now teach leadership and ethics, and communication factors into what I do in both of those areas, but it is less, obviously, what I teach.
P: What drew you to that line of work?
L: I guess I could go back to my earliest days, I spent a lot of time reading growing up. In fact, I have now published two books that focus on narrative, how we tell stores, why we tell stores, the fact that we can’t help telling stories, and the importance of checking ourselves as we tell those stories for integrity and accuracy, and also the implant that those stories have on the people around us, which is a significant component to leadership.
P: Interesting. Has your definition, I mean, it sounds like you have a very nuance definition of communication. Has it changed over your career? Or has it always been kind of steadfast for you?
L: I think my idea of how we communicate effectively has not changed. It has gotten more complex maybe because I realize how many different ways people tell stories. Growing up, I worked/lived in multiple cultures. I spoke, this would be relevant, I think, for a lot of our students, several different languages, French, German, some Russian, and some Romanian. Working across those cultures and the languages that go with them, I realize that A) There is no one right way to do anything, but B) Many cases, people have the same impulses, the same instincts, and frankly the same values. So, how do you negotiate the combination of difference and similarity with that? I think we all see when we work across cultures. What story do you tell to recognize that? That nuanced day-to-day experience of living in the world.
P: Very interesting. I am kind of interested in what you see. So, as I have come to understand it, the graduate PhD candidate students here at MIT are really virgin researchers or professionals in the beginning of their career. Whereas undergraduates, they might not have any experience. These people are actually doing the work, but they are trying to figure out how to have this foothold, and communication is an important part of that. What do you notice about the students that you work with at this level or at those levels that I mentioned?
L: At the graduate level, students, they come to MIT and similar institutions because they want to do in-depth research. They want to identify problems. They want to identify solutions to the problem. They are usually working in a field that has existed for some time in which other people have done serious work. So, to do what you do effectively at the graduate level, you need to, forgive me for using the phrase, but go down the rabbit hole. Right? You need to find out what’s going on, and you need to differentiate what you produce from the work that a lot of other people have done previously, sometimes on exactly the same topic. When that happens, you tend to forget, I think, reasonably that the world out there doesn’t really care about the finer points of what you are discerning. The larger public, which may actually have a serious stake in the work that you are doing, also needs to understand why you have done what you have done, why the answers that you have come up with differ from the answers other people have come up with might and might actually be more accurate. So, reaching out, feels to me fundamental. It may also feel to the individual graduate student like a waste of time because it doesn’t do the kind of defining work that you feel you need to do professionally, but if that work is to have short, near-term impact, you have to be able to say to the world, “This is why what I am doing matters.”
P: So, then communication, is it a function of the science itself or the work that you are doing?
L: It will depend. The communication about your work will depend certainly, to some extent, on the work , the content of what you are doing. Absolutely. You can’t walk away from the specifics of your project, your research. But at the same time, you need to think about how you reconcile or adjust/adapt what you are doing to the more general public discourse and what people who don’t have your detailed background will expect, what vocabulary you can use to help them understand why what you do matters. So, you are looking for alignment of your own work and the content of your work with what the world at large has on the table for discussion and the expectations that they bring to the world of science. In one of my courses, I use a play by Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, which is about Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, two Nobel winning physicists, who have a meeting during World War 2 that is all about the atomic bomb and the projects that the Nazis on one side and the Americans on the other were developing. The third character in the play, Margrethe, Bohr’s wife, plays the role of the public. She tests both physicists who are deeply involved in their work and their research and says effectively, and she does some of this just passively, but does what you are telling us make sense? Why does this matter? How does it matter? Explain to me as a stand-in for the broader public what you are doing and why what you are doing matters and how we judge it to be good or bad on moral grounds. I think it doesn’t have to be the atom bomb. It doesn’t have to be nuclear energy, but anything that serious researchers engage in, in the name of, call it pure science, they still, I think for ethical reasons, need to be aware of the way in which what they do intersects with daily life.
P: I was thinking about, as you were saying that, I have a background in comic book art, and I teach a lot of people how to make comic books. One of the things that I have come across, even I have made the mistake, my undergraduate is in graphic design and marketing, so I focused a little too much on the marketing and less on the content. It is interesting how horrible it is when you realize that you have a great marketing plan for content that doesn’t deserve it. I am kind of curious about that sentiment in the sense of like, how much do you have to keep your audience in mind as you are working, because that could be a rabbit hole in and of itself.
L: Of course. Thinking solely in terms of the relevance of what you are doing, however deep the science, can be a significant disadvantage to a researcher. We are talking about a spectrum. Earlier, I said that the content of your project, the content of the science that you are doing, matters deeply in the communication about it. To look around at the world and say, “well, people have an interest…pick your top. So, I am going to do that.” Or, “I am going to craft a marketing message that will appeal to them because it means it will be easy for me to get grants because it will put my name in lights, I will get mentioned in papers and social media.” I do not think much of that happens at a place like MIT, but the temptation exists. So, when we talk about professional communication, I would argue that you need to be mindful of the risk of, the potential for seduction, shall we say. Your name in lights, I think all of us have a little bit of that somewhere. You want to test for the motives that bring you to the work that you are do, the way you do it, and the way you transmit it. I guess too, we have two terms under consideration here. Professional communication. We have already talked a fair amount about communication. Professional matters, too. What does it mean to be a professional? I ask my classes here at Sloan, how many of you think of yourselves as professionals? Virtually, every hand goes up because we have very positive associations with the term, and we should. But, what does profession or professionalism mean? A bunch of things, including a code of conduct. So, seven ethical standards, the mindfulness that goes with that, so you know that you have a trust-based relationship with society. Those who don’t have your expertise, which is another key component to professionalism, trust you to deliver what you do well. Well means, first of all, I think about putting their, that is the patient or client, interests ahead of your own but also adhering to a set of standards that the profession has articulated in communication with the larger society. people worry about the profession’s ability to corner a market and to establish monopoly control. So, if you limit the number of people who can become doctors, theoretically, you could also make sure that you keep your salaries high. ON the plus side, I think we also see professions as corrupting for market failures. So, it is not about generating a profit. it is not about lining your pockets. It is about seeing to it that people gets services that otherwise would not be available to them. The key term here is service. You are providing a service of one kind or another. I would argue that people who work in academics who are doing serious research in the sciences but also the humanities, the arts, have some obligation to think about the relationship between what they do for their own pleasure, for the pleasure of people who do the same kind of work they do, but what responsibility they have to the larger society. I do not think you ever want to let that go away, and communication makes it possible for you to ensure that.
P: It just struck me, first, do you think this? But then, what do you think about what I am about to say, which is one of the things that we have come across, there are not a lot of scientists/professionals in STEM that are getting good communication education. A lot of the people we talked to have never gotten it when they were at school for what they were doing as engineers or as language specialists, neuro-scientists. No one taught them how to be good communicators; they had to figure it out on their own. This is starting to feel like a trend within the STEM field, and I am wondering why do you think that is?
L: Do people in STEM these days not get training in communication? I have not spent enough time in the community myself to be able to say with any accuracy. I would say, and if you think about the way we have educated ourselves over centuries now, rhetoric, grammar, and so on used to play a fundamental role in what we thought of a serious education. We look back on those times now and say how ignorant those people were to think that that would provide us with the truths and make this society or any society work. We have all of this empirical evidence for the way society, people, nature work, and that matters easily as much as the ability to turn a fine phrase. So, maybe the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of believing whatever you do in the lab will give us the truth and that’s all that matters. We have forgotten that communicating what we discover matters equally. You think about the kinds of courses people offer now and the ongoing concern/lament about the failure of writing schools of undergraduates and so on. I think we know that it matters. Certainly at Sloan, we have the courses that allow us to address the need for good writing and speaking skills, and students walk away from those courses knowing that they have learning things that will make a difference. People skills matter, and they don’t just matter in management, although the MBAs go off for the summer between their two years and discover that, indeed, those people skills make all the difference in the world. I would argue the same thing is true for the scientists on campus.
P: That is interesting because I just, you triggered this idea, I mean, the people who invented modern science or the original researchers who were trying to develop a code of communication. They couldn’t have foreseen the advent of instant communication, video, podcasts, or the ability to just talk to somebody on the phone because it was like, publishing was the #1 way to connect to people at a distance. I am wondering, from your standing, you talked a little bit about ethics…I do not know if there has been ethical guidelines that apply, I am sure there has on some level, to multimedia and different ways of communicating. How do you go about constructing ethics of professionalism when you are experimenting with new forms of communication?
L: Innovation poses a standard and regular challenge to our notions of right and wrong. We now have sites that address the question of ethics in the online world. So, if we want to talk technology alone, as you articulate new ways of communicating but also new ways of doing anything, it’s not just about communication, it’s all of this stuff that is coming out connected with science and technology, you wind up playing catch up. In other words, here is the challenge. Now, how do we manage it? One word that looms in the background, regulate. How do we regulate the uses of one kind of technology or another? How do we regulate the results? Sometimes, the unforeseen consequences of a scientific discovery that really does matter and will make a difference to the way we live our lives and yet has implications that we haven’t fully understood. The debate around pure science goes to the same point. At what point does a discovery that on the face of it represents a real gain to knowledge as we have conceived it? At what point does it have an impact that we didn’t foresee and that may have serious negative consequences for segments of the society? How do we manage that? So, the regulators are playing catch-up. The ethicists are playing catch-up, but at the same time, I think you could reasonably argue that the kinds of challenges we face today, we have faced in the past. When we decided that the Earth was not flat, and that had implications. People wrestled with the challenge and found ways of dealing. Some of it represented a true advance in knowledge and a way of seeing ourselves. We go through these cycles, Kuhn, Thomas Kuhn, with the structure of scientific revolutions, I think recognized that in the area of science specifically, you go through these cycles of developing, confirming, and then dismantling ways of seeing the world. The ethics implied in that cycle are real and something that we live with on a daily basis.
P: So, I guess my last question or so, doesn’t have to be, but one of my last questions is about what you, just going back to the students who are coming in, even your students…what is something that you notice is a trend or at least something that you feel like all students should work on? Ones that are coming in and seeking help in this kind of area. Is there anything or is it different for everybody?
L: When I look at my students in any of the courses I teach, I see a need for skills in argumentation. That is, I think we would all like to believe that there is an absolute truth out there and that, over time, we will discover it and live in bliss and an innocence for the rest of our collective lives, and that may be the reality. But, I think for the moment, we have to recognize that we differ in our perspectives on the way the world works and on the truth or falsity of any given premise. So, we need to find a way to make the case, whatever we believe the case to be, and we need to have the patience to sit down with people who, with equal good faith, come to totally different conclusions based on the same set of facts. So, our engagement in this has everything to do with communication. We have an obligation to figure out how to argue well. By argue well, I do not mean engage in deceit or manipulation of the facts but to, in good faith, do our best to take in all the facts, weigh their relative significance given where we are headed collectively, and then make the case. How do you build a good argument? Communication for leaders here at Sloan focuses on persuasion and the importance of making a strong case for your position, and I do the same in my leadership and ethics courses because communication, a good argument makes the difference there, too. People, I think, instinctively know when they are being presented with a fairly framed set of circumstances, evidence. They would believe, at least short term, the person who manages to do that well. I would argue, when we think about communication, when I talk to you, I talk at you. I think that qualifies as communication, but the reality is that it is only communication if you hear what I am saying and you have the opportunity to come back at me. It is not just feedback, it’s also your position. The conversation matters. So, you need to be able to put together a good argument. You also need to have the skill, the ability, the patience, maybe it’s wisdom to listen to the other person, hear what he or she is saying, and build it into a conversation that then moves towards consensus. Those skills matter hugely.
P: Was there ever a time where you learned some of these lessons? Where you realized something about communication that you didn’t know before?
L: I mentioned earlier that I grew up in an environment where I heard a lot of different languages and lived in a lot of different cultures. That experience to my mind shaped my perspective. When you realize that people can live happily doing the same things very differently, call it tolerance, call it inclusion, maybe that’s a better word, but once you include all those differences, how do you build, maybe it’s the global society, how do you build a global society that allows us to live in relative harmony even as we do the things we do, the way we do them differently culture by culture? So, facing that, I think I understood that building the conversation makes all the difference. I do it in the seminar room. I do it in my courses. What I see suggests that that multifaceted conversation gives people a feeling or fulfillment that they don’t otherwise have.
P: You said multifaceted, and I’m curious about what you mean by that. First, contextually, why did you grow up with all the different languages that you were learning? Were you traveling?
L: I got exposed to that world at two levels. One, both my parents were immigrants to the States. My father joined the foreign service when I was a child. So, we traveled a lot in that context. In some ways, going abroad from The United States, since both my parents had come as immigrants, the Unites States was going home. That fluidity, I think, affected the way I think about the world. One of the courses I teach here at Sloan brings in stories from a dozen different cultures, I think it is maybe ten specifically. Of course, the Sloan population fairly represents what we see at MIT as a whole. It is very international. I think at the moment, 36% are people from countries other than the US, and even a certain number of the Americans are here having grown up, been born in and grown up in other countries, are green card holders, whatever. So, we live, at least in this environment, in a world where you have a lot of different cultures and a lot of hyphenate individuals who think of themselves as belong to multiple cultures. There is a kind of cosmopolitanism to the world that we know that I find very rich and very inspiring, but it also comes with the risk that you wind up not knowing where you belong. So, managing dislocation feels to me fundamental. I don’t think anyone likes feeling like he or she is floating on the surface of things without any roots. So, how do we establish that? You want an appreciation of the common experience even as you celebrate the differences, and that is where the multifaceted quality that I just referred to comes from. There is an entity, sense of community that at the same time recognizes that people live that community experience in very different ways.
P: Do you have any last-minute tips or tricks, some memorization thing that you can do while trying to figure out how to communicate? If you don’t, that’s fine, I just figured I’d ask.
L: Fundamental to any communication in the context that I have just articulated, I think you have to be willing to listen. You have to be willing to suspend judgement short term. You have to willingly set aside your own assumptions and recognize that maybe you don’t know what is going on, that you don’t have a full understanding of the situation in which you find yourself. People, and this goes back to our central focus here on communication, people by and large will willingly open their mouths to say things. We all like to talk about ourselves, right? But, the people who adjust best to the world that we now know, given the material I teach, you will understand, I would understand, too, that the best leaders listen to what people say and listen in a way that allows them to hear, not just what is said on the surface but the implications of what is being said. Those people have the ability to imagine what lies behind the surface message. To work with that, I don’t think it is easy and I don’t know that there is any one way to get there beyond experience, but I do also think that respect for others makes it possible to practice the patience that allows you to hear what is getting said, and then you respond.
Senior Lecturer of Communication & Ethics MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Leigh Hafrey, helps us to consider how humility and a strong sense of ethics can help or hinder the communication process.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Leigh Hafrey – Senior Lecturer of Communication & Ethics MIT’s Sloan School of Management
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) “Lord Weasel” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Borough” 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 one game I remember playing a lot as a kid was the telephone game. You know the one, where you start with a line of people and the person on one end says something into the ear of the person next to them, then see if it’s the same message by the time it gets to the other end?
Well, there’s a bit of that game in the episode we’re about to hear. It’s knowing the world is full of different people and part of communicating is listening, then responsibly engaging in good faith with the new knowledge you’ve gained.
Our guest today, through his own lifetime of experiences and encounters with people all over the world, has learned that as he’s grown older, communicating effectively hasn’t gotten any easier. Instead, it’s harder. LEIGH HAFREY It has gotten more complex maybe because I realize how many different ways people tell stories. ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Leigh Hafrey, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, and he’s had his hands in the communication and ethics cookie jars for some time now. LEIGH HAFREY I have taught at Sloan since 1995. I started out teaching in the communication area. I still have that affiliation, but I now teach leadership and ethics, and communication factors into what I do in both of those areas, but it is less, obviously, what I teach.
ADAM GREENFIELD But what Leigh mentioned earlier, about how communicating has essentially become more difficult, he learned from his experiences prior to teaching at Sloan. LEIGH HAFREY Growing up, I worked/lived in multiple cultures. I spoke- this would be relevant, I think, for a lot of our students- several different languages, French, German, some Russian, and some Romanian. Working across those cultures and the languages that go with them, I realize that A) There is no one right way to do anything, but B) Many cases, people have the same impulses, the same instincts, and frankly the same values. So, how do you negotiate the combination of difference and similarity that I think we all see when we work across cultures. What story do you tell to recognize that? That nuanced day-to-day experience of living in the world. ADAM GREENFIELD This touches a bit on what other guests in this podcast series also touched on, which is an understanding that our backgrounds shape us. Because Leigh has encountered various cultures and spent time in them throughout his life, he now has a different way of looking at something. Notice how I said different, not wrong or right or better or worse. Just different. Before we move further, I think it’s important to point out that you don’t need to be a world traveler or multilinguist to be able to effectively communicate with others or even bring something credible and compelling to the conversation. Again, we all have our own lifetime’s worth of experiences and knowledge. Couple that with a willingness to accept the differences and expertise of others and everyone benefits. Yet, even with all these distinctions and variations in ideas and knowledge, Leigh starts off with maybe a little pie in the sky thinking…. LEIGH HAFREY I think we would all like to believe that there is an absolute truth out there and that, over time, we will discover it and live in bliss and an innocence for the rest of our collective lives, and that may be the reality. ADAM GREENFIELD Of course, this is also a short-lived daydream. LEIGH HAFREY I think for the moment, we have to recognize that we differ in our perspectives on the way the world works and on the truth or falsity of any given premise. So, we need to find a way to make the case, whatever we believe the case to be, and we need to have the patience to sit down with people who, with equal good faith, come to totally different conclusions based on the same set of facts. ADAM GREENFIELD When Leigh talks about making the case, he’s actually referring to argumentation skills and the need to learn how to argue well. LEIGH HAFREY By argue well, I do not mean engage in deceit or manipulation of the facts but to, in good faith, do our best to take in all the facts, weigh their relative significance given where we are headed collectively, and then make the case. It is not just feedback, it’s also your position. The conversation matters. So, you need to be able to put together a good argument. You also need to have the skill, the ability, the patience, maybe it’s wisdom to listen to the other person, hear what he or she is saying, and build it into a conversation that then moves towards consensus. ADAM GREENFIELD Also inherent in this consensus is more than just being amenable to the things others are saying but also the ability to set aside any preconceived notions. This may seem like it flies in the face of all that we’ve talked about in the series so far regarding the impossibility of coming at something without any kind of bias but it’s more about finding the balance between having your own ideas and absorbing the ideas of others. More importantly, it’s about a willingness to accept that maybe, just maybe, you really don’t have all the data or information on the subject. LEIGH HAFREY You have to willingly set aside your own assumptions and recognize that maybe you don’t know what is going on, that you don’t have a full understanding of the situation in which you find yourself. People, and this goes back to our central focus here on communication, people by and large will willingly open their mouths to say things. We all like to talk about ourselves, right? But, the people who I think adjust best to the world that we now know, given the material I teach, you will understand, I would say, too, that the best leaders listen to what people say and listen in a way that allows them to hear, not just what is said on the surface but the implications of what is being said. Those people have the ability to imagine what lies behind the surface message, to work with that. And I don’t think it is easy and I don’t know that there is any one way to get there beyond experience, but I do also think that respect for others makes it possible to practice the patience that allows you to hear what is getting said, and then you respond. ADAM GREENFIELD Leigh also points out that how we respond and communicate can depend on the content of the work at hand. While making sure the details and specifics of the research are not forgotten, there’s a responsibility to be sure the audience understands why it matters. It’s a calibration between what you are presenting and what the audience has also brought to the table, including their expectations. To illustrate this point, Leigh uses British theater. LEIGH HAFREY In one of my courses, I use a play by Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, which is about Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, two Nobel winning physicists, who have a meeting during World War 2 that is all about the atomic bomb and the projects that the Nazis on one side and the Americans on the other were developing. The third character in the play, Margrethe, Bohr’s wife, plays the role of the public. She tests both physicists who are deeply involved in their work and their research and says effectively, and she does some of this just passively, but does what you are telling us make sense? Why does this matter? How does it matter? Explain to me as a stand-in for the broader public what you are doing and why what you are doing matters and how we judge it to be good or bad on moral grounds. I think it doesn’t have to be the atom bomb. It doesn’t have to be nuclear energy, but anything that serious researchers engage in, in the name of, call it pure science, they still, I think for ethical reasons, need to be aware of the way in which what they do intersects with daily life. ADAM GREENFIELD So clearly there’s always the lure of choosing personal fulfillment over truth and knowledge in science. Leigh also acknowledges its reality. LEIGH HAFREY I do not think much of that happens at a place like MIT, but the temptation exists. So, when we talk about professional communication, I would argue that you need to be mindful of the risk of, the potential for seduction, shall we say. Your name in lights, I think all of us have a little bit of that somewhere. You want to test for the motives that bring you to the work that you do, the way you do it, and the way you transmit it. ADAM GREENFIELD Leigh also uses the word professionalism, even when teaching, when it comes to standards and ethics in your work and how you communicate it to an audience. LEIGH HAFREY I ask my classes here at Sloan, how many of you think of yourselves as professionals? Virtually, every hand goes up because we have very positive associations with the term, and we should. But, what does profession or professionalism mean? A bunch of things, including a code of conduct. So, a set of ethical standards, the mindfulness that goes with that, so you know that you have a trust-based relationship with society. Those who don’t have your expertise, which is another key component to professionalism, trust you to deliver what you do well. Well means, first of all, I think about putting their, that is the patient or client, interests ahead of your own but also adhering to a set of standards that the profession has articulated in communication with the larger society. I would argue that people who work in academics who are doing serious research in the sciences but also the humanities, the arts, have some obligation to think about the relationship between what they do for their own pleasure, for the pleasure of people who do the same kind of work they do, but what responsibility they have to the larger society. I do not think you ever want to let that go away, and communication makes it possible for you to ensure that.
ADAM GREENFIELD
One glance around and it’s clear we live in a world full of people from various backgrounds. Because of this, everyone has their own perspective borne from their own experiences and learned knowledge. And a significant portion of communicating, according to Leigh Hafrey, is not just acknowledging the existence of others but listening to what others have to say, as well.
But it doesn’t stop there. Now that you’ve listened, the next step is to engage with your audience in good faith with the new knowledge and information you’ve taken in. As a communicator, you have a responsibility to society when comes to these good faith efforts in ethical standards. No pressure or anything.
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 Dr. Brunie Felding. 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 Dr. Brunie Felding – Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research
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: Ok, so we’ll go ahead and get started. We’ll get some easy questions out of the way. First, can you give us your name and occupation?
Brunie Felding: My name is Brunie Felding and I’m an associate professor at the Scripps Research Institute. I’m a principal investigator in cancer research projects.
A: Do you go by doctor?
B: No.
A: No Dr. Felding?
B: No, you can call me Brunie.
A: Brunie? Ok, alright. I ask because when I go create the script for the show, I want to find out- I want to make sure people’s titles are correct. So I want to know if I should call you Brunie-
B: You can call me Brunie.
A: Ok.
B: I don’t know if you noticed but I have a sign at my door that says Dr. Brunie.
A: I didn’t see that.
B: I mean, I was given that once in a advocacy. You know, I was teaching- like, once a year I teach here in a project called Project Lead with people who are breast cancer survivors who want to become advocates like me. And they get a crash course, so to speak, on science because their backgrounds are very diverse. So I teach there for a week, heavy duty, you know, crash course stuff. And they gave me this nametag that says Dr. Brunie.
A: You wear that with pride, I bet.
B: Yeah! I put it on my door.
A: I don’t blame you. It’s a good title to have. My mom says there’s two kinds of kids: one that grows up to be a lawyer and one that grows up to need a lawyer. My brother’s a lawyer so she got that half and then she’s like, “If only he’ll be a doctor….” Nope. I’m going to be a writer and artist. I want to struggle. But anyway. Are there any areas of science and research communication that you feel needs some work?
B: Absolutely. I guess any type of research communication is always a process. It’s not a stagnant and fully developed faculty or trade. And that’s, I think, is the beauty in it also, is that it evolves- the different types of communications evolve with the need that we see in them and the needs that are being brought to our attention through the type of audiences that we’re addressing through types of communication that we have. And also through subjects, I would say, that we’re discussion. Because the subjects in science, they change with the technical approaches that we have to address scientific questions. That, in turn, opens new avenues for new ways of a addressing a question. Actually, new ways of finding a question. And that way, then you need to find a good way to communicate your findings to your questions, your understanding of the process and maybe the peer discussion that you have and maybe even overreaching the peer boundaries with, let’s say, now you want to discuss research findings with the public that has diverse background of any sort, possibly, so you constantly have to work on communication and trying to find ways which leads to an understanding on both sides.
A: That understanding on both sides is important. Very important. So you talked a little bit about gender gap in science with kids, I read in that article in San Diego Magazine.
B: Hang for a second.
A: Yeah, sure.
B: That question was imposed on me.
A: Oh, was it?
B: Yeah. The triggers for many of those questions were imposed on me. I would not have brought them up, you know, as my own order of preference.
A: I see. Are you willing to talk about that gender gap a little bit? Because I want- I guess my question is kind of leaning towards, is there a communication issue with kids and science and communicating with them how important science is.
B: What does communication with kids have to do with gender gap?
A: Well, there’s a- there seems to be more males than females-
B: In science you mean?
A: In science, yes. I’m just curious if there’s a reason for that and maybe part of it is because science isn’t communicated all that well when they’re kids to get them excited about science and want to pursue that as a career. So I’m just curious if maybe communication is the cause of that or poor communication or lack thereof.
B: You know, that’s an interesting question. If I go back to my own history, like how I got excited about science is, in my case, well, you know, it didn’t have anything to do with- I think it was a very personal issue and I think with everybody’s and individual’s choice or inclination as to what they get excited about, it’s probably a mixture of both. You know, how- in which way they have been primed to respond to triggers of excitement but also internal. I think in science, you must have internal drive. That is something I have learned over the years and it’s something that’s become so clear to me in so many aspects and regards every single time I talk to someone. If I meet a new graduate student- so for example, in February and March I will interview a new graduate student that have sought admission to our school of science and technology. And it’s very interesting what’s the driving motivations are, what they put down as to why they chose this direction, why they want to pursue it so relentlessly. There that thing and then as an interviewer like me, as a mentor, you have to kind of see through the brag sheet of- type of boilerplate that someone puts down and do they really mean it, right? So it comes back to your question of if you’re talking about kids or young individuals, right, how do they get primed? I think they get primed by exposure to subjects that would trigger their excitement. So for instance, if kids are allowed to, with nowadays media and access to just about any type of information, you can choose what you’re reading, you can choose what you’re listening to, you can choose what you’re watching. But if there’s a certain precedence, let’s say in your family, for instance, if the family watches TV and they watch nature shows, documentaries, something that would spark your interest in nature and science, physics, mathematics, chemistry, something, then that individual might respond to something like that, might find excitement. And also, of course, will find excitement in something that their role models seem to get excited about. So in my case, I didn’t, for instance, and I think I was a pretty blank page, so I didn’t grow up in a family that, you know, where everybody was a scientist or people didn’t have a history in this or that. But my parents had an innate curiosity and we would venture out into weekend excursions into nature nearly every single weekend, whether rain or shine or whatever. And so the exposure to nature, questions that came up in hikes, and stuff about, you know, how do things work and whatnot, was something that excited me. And then at school I was naturally drawn to biology, chemistry, and in a sense I think that was something that became then my internal drive, right, overlaid with my internal kind of motivation make-up. So I think people are different in many ways. Again, I’m seeing this from a very subjective standpoint and I’m trying to see how a kid in high school would respond to something like that and it’s probably a spectrum of how people would respond to triggers that spark their curiosity and which way they translate that into action, into decision making of, you know, do they want to pursue this as a professional career in the end and stuff like that. And if you want I can go back to my own example later on, if you like. [13:26]
A: Let’s circle back around, if we need to. I’m kind of curious if- I’m trying to think of how to word this question. You brought up getting kids out there in nature like you did and hopefully that would be a good trigger to raise questions and to kind of push them to pursue that knowledge and gain that information. Do you think today that’s harder because of maybe technology getting in the way, maybe people with their phones, they don’t look up and around. Do you think it’s harder nowadays than when you were a kid?
B: It was definitely different then. I mean, in a comical way it’s very different today because people walk around with their cell phones and don’t look up to the point where they hit a lamp post, right? It’s like, whoopsie! Suddenly a reality impact hits and then, “Oh,” and maybe then they have to go to the hospital and get stitches or something. Then they see people running around in white gowns and asking them questions about their health status, you know. Do you have insurance? Stuff like that. Suddenly they get into a whole new world, which is called reality. Now, the other part is reality, too, but it can be virtual. You can think you’re in it, poof, your batter goes dead, you’re out of it. So to what degree do you involve yourself with something? And I can’t really say how it must feel today as opposed to back in the day when I had exposure to nature or whatever triggered me. But I can tell you one thing, which is, so I like to work with young people. I have graduate students but they are, of course, pretty advanced in their development already. But I also have the privilege of something working with high school students or people who are in their beginning stages of college education, they come in here as interns, for example, over the summer. I always love to have some interns. And last year I had- I mean, last summer I had three and I tell you, they are exposed to a completely different type of triggering and information gain but the one thing which I noticed in all three of them that I had, and one was, like, a recurring student, she keeps coming back because she seems to like it and she’s also local so she can do it, the one thing that I notice in all three of them was they weren’t any different than me back then, even though they learn all kinds of things through Google, god knows what, but their questions that they had for me and- their perception of what information will I draw on to make a decision for my life, you know, for my career move or in whichever way, were exactly the same. So I felt really good, you know, connecting with them because I could connect with them. I didn’t feel like I was from a different planet, they didn’t understand me, I didn’t understand them. Quite the contrary. I was very, very happy about that, that we connected so directly and, even though I know they- and I learned from them, too, right? Because I checked in which they draw information, I taught them some ways as to how to use the resources that they have to draw the information that they needed for certain questions that I asked them to address. In a sense, coming back to your original question, which is, how does someone get primed to pursuing what they ultimately do, possibly for a living but also for life fulfillment in a way, if you will, then the questions that they had were exactly the same and the desires to find something meaningful to do were exactly the same. So I was very happy about that.
A: That’s interesting because there’s- usually over the course of time there’s that disconnect between generations and to have something like science tie it together, that’s good. I don’t meet many younger generations than me that I can connect with anymore because I don’t have much in common. My experience is, I remember a rotary phone, you know?
B: Oh yeah, I do, too.
A: But if you say, hey, do you remember rotary phone? They’re like, what’s a rotary phone? Yeah, remember the thing if you do this? And they don’t know what you’re talking about. [18:10]
B: But that’s ok. They might find it cool to get some stuff like a retro thing in their house down the road.
A: Exactly. I’d be like, well, I had it first before you did. I want to talk a little bit about writing, just one quick question about that. You’ve written books and patent requests for things that are highly technical and research specific. And that requires a specific type of audience, to have that background. Is there a certain writing style needed for writing patent requests?
B: Yeah, the patent requests, from the spectrum that you just mentioned, is very different. I have to say, with that, I had a lot of help. What I do is if I would like to throw out the idea that I would seek the opportunity to kind of file on a patent for something, I write what we call a disclosure and the disclosure is more- something like a scientific paper. It’s kind of my style where I present what I have, I make a case for the novelty of what I found in light of the literature that’s out there, the prior art, if you will. So- and I don’t necessarily look at it from that level because, you know, I’m not a lawyer and so for that type of writing you need a lawyer involved, of course. So you write up your disclosure, you make your scientific point, then you meet with a lawyer who will then translate this whole thing into a patent application. Very different from when you write a paper or when you write a grant application. That’s something that you start in your mind with your team and then you write it up and it’s your baby from start to finish. And then it gets peer reviewed, you know, with and by people who are in your field and you get feedback. You polish it or you make your stance for what you don’t want to change. Then you throw it out into the peer community, which is basically the group of people who will understand what you write, if you write it in those terms. In a grant application, you really, really work it hard to make everybody understand what you want to do and how valuable it is to want to do a certain thing. So to me the most valuable- I shouldn’t say valuable. The most important documents that I write are scientific papers and grants and they are like, start to finish, in house type of my own stuff with a team, of course, generating the data.
A: It’s interesting that a lawyer has to translate that into- is it patent language, then? Legalese?
B: Yes. It is not necessarily total legalese at that time because it still has the points that you wrote down in your disclosure but it now becomes broken down into bits and pieces that the patent literature attorneys are looking at. So the development of a patent is like a disclosure than a patent application. Then it gets reviewed by, really, patent lawyers. Their primary look is to whether or not what you propose is [indecipherable] and then all kinds of things happen that I haven’t fully wrapped my head around, right? But it becomes really a piece of document of its own nature and then hopefully it will translate into something that can be valuable for somebody else who wants to license it and take it to a clinic, for example.
A: That’s cool. I like how that- it’s like a language has been repurposed to their own language.
B: Yes.
A: That’s kind of cool. So a couple questions as far as ethics are concerned, and feel free to say, “I don’t want to answer this one” because I know we talked a little about this before. Do you feel that the science community is communicating well enough to audiences without a scientific background?
B: It depends on what type of media you are referring to. If you ask in general if the science community is doing a good enough job to inform the general public about what they do, that is a question I cannot fully answer, not because I don’t want to, but because I haven’t really studied what is out there. If you look, for example, at media that are being distributed to the general public, for example, Scientific American or something like that, it’s fantastic. If you look at documentaries on the Discovery Channel, if you look at documentaries on national public television, it’s fantastic material. And people have put, obviously, a lot of emphasis and heart into trying to communicate things to the general public. You have Alan Alda who received a prize recently for being an advocate. You know, he’s an actor. He’s a brilliant actor and he was- I think, this whole thing was trigged by him, I don’t know in which context he ended up being in the cause for the Institute for the Methodology and Distribution of Methodological Knowledge, and so he became an advocate, really, for the translation of scientific information to the general public and that, I thought, was brilliant to take on that mission. And he found it was very important and, obviously, in some of his roles back in the day when he was starring in MASH, for example. He was a medical doctor and he had to inform the audience as to what was going on, what was the problem with the patient. And so I think that probably must’ve been on his mind a lot. So how do we, as bench scientists, for example, or as individual principal investigators or as groups of investigators on a team communicate to the general public sometimes? I think, maybe, not well enough but we’re looking for opportunities and I take opportunities here within my in-house need and I- at the Scripps Research Institute, I think we put a lot of emphasis in trying to reach out as an outreach activity. Because the general public usually does not come to you and ask, “What is it that you do?” They may not even know we exist. If you go out into a study section- so for example, I serve a lot on NIH, National Institutes of Health, study sections where grants are being reviewed, stuff like that, where the scientists come together and review other people’s applications. We do this to each other as a- it’s a non-profit- it’s a service to the community, really, and you give it your best shot. You honest to god give it your best shot to review from the best of your knowledge in the field. When you go out and you expose yourself to the community, everybody knows the Scripps Research Institute. If you go out to a local community even here in San Diego and you start to talk about the Scripps Research Institute, they say, “Oh, it’s either Scripps Health or it’s the Scripps Institute of Oceanography,” they’ve heard about. Very few people have sometimes heard about us and what we do as general scientists. So one thing that was kind of interesting was when I connected- or when we connected with Erin Chambers Smith, the editor of the San Diego Magazine, we invited her and she came and she was, first of all, surprised to learn of our existence and who we were. And suddenly, while we were talking to her, she noticed, oh, she does have a connection with us because one of her kids took a drug and survived because of a drug that was developed here at Scripps. So very few people know, not necessarily that we’re developing drugs, but we are setting the stage for other development of drugs that then go to a clinic. So this was a drug that a newborn, in her case, I think, her daughter or so had taken it and wouldn’t have survived without taking it. So suddenly she knew where this thing came from and that was an eye-opening experience to her, that there’s people out there out of big pharma who are setting the stage for development of new medicine, for example. This is how it starts, right? It starts here with someone discovering something, then writing maybe a disclosure, then writing a patent, then some company, some drug pharma company gets excited in the possibility of licensing this patent because they may see an opportunity for profit in it and then they take and they develop it to clinical application. So in our case here, I think, we have the need and the desire to talk to the general public. Sometimes the way in which we find ways in communicating it may not be sufficient, I think. I think it would great to have more interaction between the general community and us and I think for the most part, we have to do the outreach because the community is apparently oblivious sometimes. So we have to be proactive. [28:02]
A: Do you think reaching out to actors, for example like Alan Alda that isn’t a scientist would be useful?
B: Yes, absolutely. I would say some people who has a public persona, anybody with a public persona, I think would be super important to come because that person could be a medium for us, for example, to express ourselves and connect with the community. It could be- because the community would know the public persona person. The public persona person would get to know us, we would be talking to each other. So then, through that interaction, a dialogue would start. I would love to do that.
A: That would be a good idea. I think there’s a corporate word for it, where you learn all different kinds of jobs within the company even though you only do that one job.
B: Yes.
A: You know them all and it makes your job easier.
B: Mm hmm.
A: So I feel like more scientists and even just the scientific community should be reaching out to other people, as well.
B: Yes.
A: Now, I want to, along those lines and we talked briefly about this earlier, unfortunately science can be kind of political. We’ve got people out there who are kind of saying things that aren’t actually accurate. They’re doing it for a personal agenda, so to speak. So I want to talk a little bit- I know doctors in the hospital sense have a Hippocratic Oath.
B: Yes.
A: Do scientists have that and if not, do you think that would be useful in keeping that- sort of the moral and ethical and factual scientific research out there and available?
B: You know, that’s a very interesting point that you bring up, Adam. My immediate inclination to this question is we don’t need it, we have it. We don’t need a Hippocratic Oath. From all I know of my many years in basic science, and I’m talking about basic science in the academia, which is non-profit science, academic science, I have not met one person where I felt like this person wasn’t fully devoted to finding, if you want to boil it down to, the truth. I mean, the truth is something that is- I don’t know if it exists or not. But you want to find a meaning in something. You want to understand something. That’s your innate curiosity. That’s your drive. You’re not out there to find something that you’re purposefully looking for. You’re purposefully looking for an answer but you’re not purposefully looking for a particular answer that will advance you as a person that would, you know, cross your ethic or where you might run into ethics problems because now you mixing your personal agenda, for example, of getting rich or getting out of a certain situation that you find difficult or something, that’s not the person you find in academia. I have not found one. I have not found one. So I think it is- we have education, we have formal education on ethics, and we can come back to that if you like, but I have to say that there’s a certain kind of person that is drawn to academic science and I watch out for that when I interview the graduate students. I get the vibes as to where they’re coming from. I get the vibes as to where the boiler- the brag sheet boilerplate type of stuff. I get the vibe of who this person is, you know, in terms of what are they driven by. At that point, they’re very young. They’re not driven by, I don’t know, profit or something. Of course everybody in the end has to think about, will I be able to make a living with what I do? And academic science traditionally has been a very difficult choice in that regard because it doesn’t provide you a lot- with a lot of personal wealth opportunities. It provides you with something else. And if people see that- and we can come back to what that is- but if people see that then they’re so drawn to it that they throw away the idea of, gosh, will I be able to make a living on it? And that might even be a healthy concept but that’s the drive. [32:50]
A: So how do you get the- how do you make sure the up and coming scientists are sticking with that, “I want this scientific answer” and not so much personal gain? I’m trying to figure out what can be done to ensure that they’re sticking with science driven work instead of emotion driven or money driven work. So how do we effectively communicate that to the grad students so they can factually communicate to society?
B: Yeah. There’s different levels in which you do that and that’s a very, very, very important task and the task lies primarily with a mentor, I think, with a mentor and with an educational program that they’re kind of being reared in, that they’re being exposed to. As a mentor, I think you have your ethical standards that you have developed over time, that you have subscribed to. Really, that’s who you are. You try to convey to your students the values that are dear to you at all levels and the ethics part is a very important one in that regard. You don’t go in and look at- well, you find if there’s an inclination in a person not to pursue the finding of information as it presents itself to you, through the glasses that you look at it, through the types of assays that you throw at it, through the readouts that you get. If you find that raw values that come out of a primary analysis like that are not being used in that way, then that’s a really, really big red flag. And how do you respond to that? You talk to that person and then you observe that person very closely. And I will not say you start now to judge but it- I found that it’s also a very important part of the job that I have as a mentor is to find if a person really wants to go in the direction that they’re seeking to go into. If I find, and I have had several examples, not because of ethical issues but of other issues I wasn’t aware of in the person itself or themselves weren’t aware of, but when I find that a person doesn’t really want to go in the direction that they have chosen to formally pursue, then I take them heart very, very sternly. I mean, not that I impose myself on them but I ask and there was one person in my group, for example, that I called in and I asked her in that case if she really knew what she wanted to do with her life after being a post-doctorate fellow and it turned out for the first time I thought I was connecting with that person really deeply and she broke down and said, I don’t really know. So I said, I want you to take a week off and walk on the beach or do something where you don’t necessarily do a lot of activity but just connect with yourself and find out what you want to do and then come back to me. And I also asked her whether or not she was stable enough to do that, to be on her own during that week, and she said yes, and I believe she was. For a while I thought she might not but she was. And after that week she came back and her face looked different and she found something and she came back to me and she said that she had really reflected on this and she felt like the career she moves that she had made so far were brilliant moves and she went from Ivy League school to Ivy League school, right? She now went to Scripps from Ivy League school and Scripps is a very prestigious place for a graduate program, as well. So she was kind of set up in this very Ivy League-oriented type of career movement. And then I asked her, what do you really want to do? And she comes to me and says, I would like to become a college teacher and not the Noble Laureate scientist. And I said, congratulations, I think you found yourself, possibly. I think you find yourself. Go do it! And I threw her out after that because she wasn’t wanting to do the post-doc. But I threw her out in a loving way, right, because I wanted her to pursue what she wanted to pursue. Later on I did a little Google search on her and she’s now a college teacher up in Oregon somewhere so she did she what she wanted to do and I hope she’s happy.
A: That’s good. So she found her moral compass, I guess. Or her ethical direction?
B: She found her own direction.
A: Her own direction, yeah.
B: And not necessarily what her Ivy League career and maybe her parents or god knows how was expecting of her. And I had to give her the kick in the butt really hard to go kind of connect with herself so…. But that’s what I’m saying, back to this ethics question that you had. If you find, and I didn’t have that- I have one example where it was a little different and that person’s no longer here. But if you find that somebody is kind of struggling with that issue, because it can be a struggle- because what comes out, let’s say, the temptation- I give you just one example, right, but it boils down to this very ethical question- what comes out of the temptation of manipulating a dataset, for example, in your favor, whatever inclination you may have. You are now manipulating something that nature apparently threw the set of analysis that you threw at it did not tell you. If you have that inclination, maybe it’s better to do something else because if you want to stay in academic science, you have to have the absolute desire to live with what you see, to try to find what you can see in the natural result, which may be negative result in your opinion at the time, right, because you had expected something else. So now you have different options. You go ahead and falsify it in your way, and that is not- if somebody wants to do that, it’s not a person who needs to pursue this career. They can pursue something else which makes them happier and maybe is better for society. It could be but not for academic science. It doesn’t belong.
A: I actually want to kind of take that and sort of run with that a little bit, if you don’t mind. I’m kinda curious about- when you said data manipulation, if you’re a scientist out there and you’re trying to get research funding-
B: Yes.
A: -how tempting is it to sort of say, look where I’m going and just sort of- I’ll use pie charts and graphs, for example. Those are easily manipulated to get a point across, a specific point across. You’re only showing a specific dataset that shows only what you want people to know. How tempting is it to do that to get funding?
B: You know, this is a very important point these days because to get funding these days has become very hard. So the possible temptation level could rise when you do that. There’s a couple of issues that you address. First of all, you have a page limit so you could not possibly put everything in. So you would not necessarily overload your peer review group with a bunch of negative data that you’ve had. You sit there and you sort out with yourself, what would I like to do if I had this pot of money available to me, what would I like to do with that pot of money based on what I know to generate valuable information for the betterment of human health, for example, in the particular field you’re studying, in my case, cancer research. What can I do with that pot of money to help a cancer patient in the field I’m studying. It’s not that I’m sitting here thinking- of course I’m thinking, how can I possibly survive- but the drive, as to how can I possible survive, comes out of starting from the top down, right? And that’s- I think that should be really your- at least that’s the way I address it. So resources are limited and finite, and your own time is limited and finite. What can- how can I best invest my own time, my own life drive, and possibly, hopefully some money that I get to execute a certain program. How can I best apply that to reach a goal, to make somebody who’s now lying in bed and has no chance of a cure, to having a better life, maybe a longer life, maybe even a cure? What can I do? And I think that’s what needs to drive you. Not necessarily, how can this pie chart best present it or something. You present your preliminary data in a sense that it makes sense that you can pursue- I mean, unless you are somebody who is, like, super well known in the field, you can throw out a new concept without necessarily showing the individual data for that because people will grant you that you can do it because you’ve done it before, right? So the majority of the mere mortals have to show preliminary data. So you have to then walk a fine line between, ok, what is my dream goal, I want to help this this person in the bed who’s dying. What is it that I have that I can do and what is it that I can do to get from what I can currently do to get to help the person who’s dying. And that often involves something that is super fulfilling, I would say. It is a challenge- I think the challenge- it depends- let’s say you have this initial temptation type of scenario going, right? So then I think my recommendation, or my personal approach, is to start from the top down. How can I help this person who is dying? And I have had scenarios- and many people have had that scenario- where they look at somebody who is in that situation and you go, like, whoops, this is what I’m here for, right? This is my goal in life, really, to help, and not as a physician but as a basic researcher that you are. So then you go from what can I do right now, right here from reaching this goal and you walk this line and in the middle you see, I cannot do this alone, I have to reach out and I have to build collaborative efforts. Then you try to find which collaborative efforts do I need. What are the procedures that I need to get from where I am to where I want to be? What is the expertise that I don’t personally have, the stack of technical approaches that I don’t have- and I have a really good example for that right now that I’m pursuing- and then I reach out, right? And I feel like this is why I’m so happy in this environment because I find most of what I need right across the street, right around within my own microenvironment. And that’s the beauty of a free academic research institute like we are. Really, that’s what I value so much here, because you have diversity, you have a lot of diversity. You find yourself, ok, I’m a cancer researcher, I have this and this and that going, I need genomix, I need proteomix, I need structural biology, I need chemistry, I have the best people in the world right around me to address those issues. I reach out to them. I’ve never had somebody close the door on me, not here. So that’s what I love and this is where I see the opportunity when the challenge comes, when I want to write a grant, and I don’t have everything to answer the question- I mean, back in the day, possibly people were sitting in their offices and philosophizing about their- the question that they were addressing. And maybe that was the best they could do sometimes because they didn’t have email, they didn’t have all these social media going on. But they could walk across the street if they had another scientist sitting there or they even traveled by train, by boat, by whatever to reach out to find other people in the world to help.
A: That must’ve been interesting, to say, I need to talk to this person, he’s in another state, it’s going to take me two days by carriage. That- and now, just get on the phone… totally different. But it’s good that- it almost sounds like your moral compass can be driven by that funding you’re trying to get. It’ll keep you in check- it almost, in a way, now that I think about it, seems like there’s sort of a dual dance going on, where it’ll- that funding will keep your moral compass in check but you need to make sure your own moral compass is already in check going into trying to get funding.
B: Yes. Oh, that’s an absolute must. You go in with your moral compass totally intact.
A: You have to.
B: You have to because there will be challenges in every which way coming at you, you know? And that is something- and this is why I was saying when you asked me about students and you probe them, you probe them really hard, because this is, not necessarily that you want to become- that you want to have every student you mentor to become an academic scientist because that’s not the reality and maybe in the future that may not be the opportunity but to set them up with your current set of values. Like if- you know, we had this at the last commencement ceremony, Dr. Schulz actually said that in- the mentoring group of people is like a family to you and I have perceived it always like that. They are kind of like your academic parents in a way and they hold you by the standards, they show you the values, they try to live the values, and guide you into the finding the values for yourself. And then, of course, there’s reality as to, do you really want to subject yourself to this? Because like you said in the beginning, there’s all kinds of things and that is basically- doesn’t necessarily apply only for academic sense but in any situation in life, I think. When you have your moral compass and your moral compass tells you a certain thing and you’re very clear on that. Then, of course, to reach a certain goal in your job or in your life, you encounter obstacles all the time, all the time. And so here’s this moral compass that goes with you and that helps you to find ways. Like I said, you look at this person in the hospital bed, you now find ways in which you connect with your peers, you collaborate this or that, instead of modifying your pie chart and saying, I want this amount of money and then I go to town with whatever. So, you know, I think you brought it up really clearly, Adam. I think the moral compass is a- yeah, it’s a guide, it’s a compass. You must have it- you must be able to read it clearly and then you basically find ways to address the questions that are being thrown at you to find ways to survive, to help the patient in the hospital bed, if you can. You try as hard as you can and you don’t violate your moral compass.
A: Yeah, moral compass. It’s gone out the window these days, it seems. Anyway. I want to talk- you brought up obstacles so I want to ask a couple more questions about process and failure, if you have time…. Ok. Have there ever been any sort of harrowing experiences in your life or even your career that taught you a lesson on how to communicate your research and work to audiences without losing them? [49:40]
B: In many different ways and also at many different levels. And I don’t want to write the levels against each other but one example is your peer group, right? You give a talk, you get answers back, you get people writing you, you get students reaching out to you who want to work in your group, and that is very gratifying and you engage in a conversation. And sometimes you engage in a discussion when everybody has the same opinion, obviously, and that is challenging and kind of enlightening and enriching in its own way because it pushes you to consider different viewpoints, right? You expose yourself when you communicate, you bring out information and you bring it out in your way. We all have perceptions. One person may look at a tree and say it’s green and another person may look at it and say it’s blue and it could be a cultural thing. And there’s nothing wrong with blue or green. You just have to realize that what you throw out is your personal viewpoint, in a sense- in the context of your scientific findings, in this case. But to then have somebody else to look at it in a different way and throw a question at you, it enriches you and sometimes it enhances- it kind of reinforces what you were already thinking. Or it throws you off balance for a moment and you think, whoopsie, what do I need to consider here to address this question that this person had. And may I give you one example?
A: Absolutely.
B: And this is at a different “ level,” if you will, and I come back to this level because it is something that has tremendously enriched me. And this is why I’m looking at the person in the hospital bed because, you know, I’m not a physician, I’m a PhD and I shouldn’t- I’m not obliged to ask how is this person in the hospital bed is doing. But that’s my mission. And so the level that I was referring to is the level of, in my case, advocacy involvement. So one time I had my first grant from the California Breast Cancer Research Foundation. I was very proud of it. I had my molecular mechanism all- I wouldn’t say all figured out, but I had it all going and I was thinking at the scientific level I have really made a discovery here. So I go to this conference where I was invited to give my results and I stand there and I give my little talk, and a person walks up to me later on and she’s a breast cancer survivor, obviously, right, because this type of conference included the scientists and the stake holders, meaning the patients and patient-related people. You know, healthcare givers and persons like that. So this person walks up to me and she has a head scarf on and I look at her and I think, whoopsie, she’s in chemotherapy, or has just come out of it or something. She doesn’t look good, she doesn’t have any hair, she doesn’t feel good, and she walks up to me and says, “You know, Brunie, what you just told us is very interesting but what does it do for me?” And suddenly I saw her and I saw the clock. I saw the clock, tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock and I thought, what can I tell this woman because her clock is not looking at infinity or possibly years. It may be looking at I don’t know what. I don’t know what the status of her health was but she could be looking at months. And I don’t know what I told her but I totally broke down completely. It was an experience that I will never forget and I flew home that night crying because I thought, what have I done now? I won this grant, I have this molecular mechanism, I was proud, standing up for it, telling everybody, and then she walks up to me and says, “what can you do for me,” and I realize I could probably not do anything on her timescale. So then I realized, whoopsie, what is my purpose in life here? You know, going back to the top down approach and it became very difficult and it has become very difficult recently for me here because a couple of people that were dear to me died of cancer recently, including one of my grad students.
A: Sorry to hear that.
B: 28 years old, in my lab, gets diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and I learned so much from that person because I mentored him all the way up to the point where he then died. Other people, and I mean it shouldn’t be my- I don’t know why I’m saying shouldn’t be. Can it be my purpose in life to help someone like that? Can it be my purpose in life to help this woman with a headscarf? In the end, I think it must because that’s really what drives me. And I think it’s also what drives me nuts because I see my limitations but then you stretch as hard as you can to reach your goal so I am stretching a lot and I’m stretching in a sense of trying to connect with collaborators to ramp up a program to really do something.
A: So that one experience you communicated almost enough for this one individual and because you couldn’t communicate more, it kind of drove you to do more.
B: Yes. She changed my life.
A: How long ago was this, if you don’t mind me asking?
B: Oh, I don’t’ know exactly but I would say 15 years, something like that, in that neighborhood. Or even longer.
A: And the science is different now since then, I would think. So if she asked now, would it have been- would have maybe been closer to an answer for her?
B: She came back to me, I mean not she as a person, but she came back to me in different people who reached out. So she keeps coming back to me. I don’t know what her personal history is, if she survived this or not, but having people come back to me and looking at- and I’m not going through this life turning my head away. I’m looking and I’m seeing them and sometimes they reach out and sometimes I reach out when I see them, you know. It becomes kind of a bi-directional type of opportunity. So yeah, and- yes, I think these days, with nowadays technology, for instance- and also, my grown experience and my realization as to what the goals are and that made a huge change, I tell you that. I mean, I cannot- I just told you it was a life change experience and that’s really what it was. So that made me think away from my- because I was so, you know, in my molecular mechanism and it could’ve- I don’t know if it could’ve determined my career going from there, like, being in that type of research all the time. And maybe it’s a danger also because you expose yourself to trying something new and it exposes yourself to reaching out a little bit beyond your own, you know, this particular expertise but then again, you have to bring in the collaborative efforts. And I think the value that we now- that I see in myself, for example, and I ask myself- actually I don’t ask myself but I was kind of asking myself or was asked by a colleague recently, who also found it very, very difficult to get finding, and he said, “Brunie, what do you think? My expertise lies in this, this, this, and that,” and I don’t think I was completely honest with him but I- my inclination was, man, think about something new. Not necessarily don’t forget what you know but look at other ways of using the information that you have and it’s a very valuable skillset and information set that you have to generate new information, it’s really groundbreaking, not so incremental and pedestrian. And I tell you one other kind of thought changing experience that I had, and it’s also a communication issue, really, which I very much value and it sort of goes along with getting a grant, if you will, at least in my case. I had this opportunity to meet this woman who then, in many phases, would turn back to me and kind of set up my moral compass and my goals but also, when I received my first NIH grant, like a RO1, which is the more sizable grant, I had little smaller grants before, but when I first received my first RO1, the NIH and the National Cancer Institute had a habit, I don’t’ know if they still have it, of bringing together the new grantees. And our program director had us all sit there in a room and a couple of people from the NIH were telling us- were giving us moral compass information, which I really liked, but what they also told us- and that is something, again, you know, you sometimes have this experience that you don’t forget, they kind of set you up to think in a new way- so what this person said to me, or to us as a group, was, ok, here’s this one paper, if I were asking you to read this paper, every one of you would come back telling me something different about this paper in the end. And naturally so because you all look at it through the glasses of your experience, through the glasses of your desire, where you want to go. So you look at it from your viewpoint and so therefore- but he put it out in a very positive way. He said, “It’s your secret weapon. It’s your secret and unique weapon.” And this is why I was telling my colleague- I don’t know if he got my drift or not but- it’s your secret weapon that you can be proud of what you know and understand but you use it in a contemporary way. Don’t get stuck in your old ways and make what you have and how you can see certain things a value that you can then communicate to other people and then they throw back stuff at you, and then you realize, ooh, I haven’t thought about that and then it becomes interesting and fun.
A: So it’s evolving.
B: Yeah. Always.
A: Ok. So how much does communicating your work and research play a role in your success as a scientist?
B: It’s an absolute must. Without communication, it’s even a logistical thing. If you just sit there and think and never tell anybody about your thoughts, you could probably do that only if you’re independently wealthy. You know, if you find pleasure in that. But if you- your success lies in trying to enrich your field, trying to survive as a person, trying to survive as a group leader to have funds, for instance, for your team to build, maintain a team, and to do the work that you like to do. The communication is an absolute must and it has to be effective and it has to be really good. That is something also that you learn with time, that I learned with time, and it is also, you know- communication is one thing, and then the way in which you communicate, then you are- funding agencies, for example, empowers on you formats in which you can communicate, and you have to learn to do that effectively within the guidelines given. And so yeah, communication is, next to actually doing the work, the most important, I think.
A: Do you think that it’s- there are other professions where it’s like that? Outside of news broadcasting or things like that, is communicate, at least in science compared to another field, do you think- do other fields have that level of importance with communication than science does? Might be difficult to answer because you’re not in those fields.
B: Well, I’m thinking and I will give you an immediate thought that came to my mind is this. So I think communication is a very important aspect in just about any profession, I would think. Even if you are, in an extreme case scenario, you are an astronaut out in a space station by yourself, right? If you lose connection with ground control, you start to wonder. You know, you go to the Major Tom type of scenario. Where are they? Where am I? What is my purpose up here? Can I communicate my findings back to them in some way? You want to communicate. That’s- because what you might find- as an individual, you might find it fulfilling to answer your question up there but if you can’t communicate them with ground control, part of your mission is not fulfilled, right? So how about other comparable professions, let’s say? In the first example that came to my mind was medicine, medical care, health care, and I think there is a really, really big gap to fill and the gap to fill is the communication with the patient. I don’t know if you have had a chance to talk to Eric Topol or to read his books. Go and look up this book. It’s called “The Patient Will Now See You.” It’s an interesting one, it’s an interesting one.
A: It comes from a different angle, doesn’t it?
B: It’s a very different angle and he takes it to the extreme but look at that just for enlightenment or provocation or whatever. What I see is, of course in a hospital, what I see- so for example, and you, I can see it from both the “outsider colleague” standpoint when collaborate with medical people and I can see it from the patient standpoint and I’m looking at totally different levels of communication- and so now the patient has become more independent and you see that in Eric Topol’s book, “The Patient Will Now See You,” because the patient can now go to Google and look up things that the medical doctor may not tell them, may not have the time to tell them.
A: Well, that’s another communication issue, though, because I can go to Google, say I’ve got a little spot on my arm, I go to Google and it’ll either tell me it’s a zit or I’m going to die. It’s so hard. The internet can’t communicate succinctly enough, sometimes, it seems, especially when it comes to medical stuff. And then you go to a doctor and you just hope they give you the information you need. So it’s- I’m afraid of going to Google and internetting medical stuff.
B: Yeah, you should not be afraid but you have to look at your limitations and your decisions based on what you see, right? And I think you as a person that is so strongly aware of communication and what it means will not really have a problem with that because you can filter. You can read the information, you can say, ok, now I have read that, it could be this, it could be that. It has enlightened you to a degree, right? So you have advanced your knowledge and the possible scenario. Can you make a decision or not now? Do you need to go have the thing cut out? Probably not. So you may want to go see your dermatologist and say, hey, do I need to have this thing cut out or not? The dermatologist has various ways of looking at that. Then you look at- and I really want to motivate to read up on Eric Topol’s- not only that book but other books and his overall drive- because he’s trying to do that, he’s trying to empower and not necessarily by making everybody sit there and read day and night and become the medical expert on their own condition but to empower every one of us, basically with devices that can help us find that out. So for example, there are now devices that are being in the development which you can take your own little skin sample, you can run your whole genome sequencing in the thing. Boom!
A: At home?
B: That’s the goal.
A: That’s the goal.
B: Yeah, even if you’re out there in your space station, you see your spot suddenly, you know you will have osteoporosis because you don’t have gravity stuff like that so you work on that, right? But Eric Topol takes it to the extreme and the extreme is the “The Patient Will See You Now” scenario, right? So one has to be careful because- but it is- it’s an exercise to read up on his viewpoints and his books and whatnot. An exercise of trying to see what the age of information technology can provide us with and how to deal with it to help us live a better life, not to become totally neurotic, which you can easily, if you read up on all these stuff that could happen to you, you may not want to get out of the house in the morning.
A: That’s what I was getting at. Because if I keep reading, I’m gonna put tape on the windows, I’m not going to go anywhere, there’s germs everywhere.
B: This is bad.
A: Yeah. The outside is scary. What- can you spell his last name?
B: Topol. T-O-P-O-L, Eric.
A: Ok, I’m going to look up this book.
B: Check him out.
A: Yeah, because I’ve been wanting to take control of my medical knowledge, because I have my own issues, my own medical issues, and I do research online and then I go to a doctor and I’m- they tell me something else and I’m like, I need to get better control of this. I need to understand it so I can-
B: You want to understand it and then based on that you may not be able to be on a doctor but then you can seek out the help you need in a more efficient way, maybe.
A: I guess my concern, then, is getting research from the internet and kind of running with the wrong information and that’s the danger. [1:09:52]
B: That is true and if you follow a little bit about the Topol mission, I just frame it like this now, right? Because it’s kind of a desire to empower people more, to use the information technology that’s existing these days and being developed for them, for us, for every one of us, to use that in a more efficient way but also cut down on costs, for example. Eric gave a talk sometime ago to a mixed audience here. Are you a local here?
A: For the last eight or nine years.
B: Yeah. If he ever gives a talk again, go, and listen to it. And he has- he’s super provocative. At this I feel provoked a lot, you know, and to my benefit. Really, to my benefit because sometimes I walk out of talks that he gives with key insights that drive me to the next step. And at some point in time, not now, but we can talk about a program that I’m planning to run and how I arrive at the checkpoints as to where is it that I wanted to run, what is that I was looking for, what is it that I was seeing, from what I was seeing where- did I find a new direction to run? Yes, I found a new direction to run. How did I then identify the goal that I have and how do I run to reach that goal. And Eric- going to one of Eric’s talks was a very provocative checkpoint to me, you know, where I suddenly realized, oh, thank you, Eric, this is where I have to run. And I’m going to actually see him- actually, I was supposed to see him today but he couldn’t because he was traveling. But I’m going to see him next week. I’m going to throw out my plan- throw out to him my plan. And- because he is a visionary, in a sense, and not only a visionary but somebody who implements stuff.
A: Is he from here?
B: He has been living here for a while.
A: Oh, he lives here?
B: Yeah, he lives here. I mean, he is part of Scripps.
A: Oh, really? He’s part of Scripps. Ok. I thought he was just a scientist in the area. I didn’t know he actually-
B: No, he’s here. And he was actually in the Cleveland Clinic. He’s a cardiologist by training and wherever he has gone he has really left his footprints in various kind of groundbreaking new ways. And communication is a super important issue in his strategy.
A: It got you to- in answered your questions and in a way, isn’t that what communication is? It’s answering questions an audience may have or filling them with information that they want or need.
B: But here’s a point that I would like to get across, too. It’s not necessarily- answering questions, yes, it’s a good thing. But being provoked to think in a different way is another very important point you take away from a communication and that’s what- Eric didn’t give me any answers, he gave me a new question that I realize- he didn’t spell out a question- but I realize, whoop, there’s a question right here. That’s where we need to make a difference because he has all this information, and there’s a void. There is definitely a void after that. So how to process all this to help people.
A: Right. We spoke with a professor who- he is a cultural anthropologist and he did journalism before this. We talked a lot about being engaged with your audience and how to do that, and he talked about shock value, and how sometimes if you do it right, and don’t do it too often, it’ll get your audience back with you.
B: Give me an example.
A: So he would be talking and he can see sometimes in the audience people fidgeting, people coughing or see the blue glow of the phone on their face, you know?
B: Yes.
A: And in a way to get them back, he would sometimes say, “You know what’s really interesting?” and people would go, oh, he’s going to say something interesting now. So there’s ways of- but he also told kind of a racy story that I won’t relay and I can’t include in this series- but it was very interesting because it got attention. And so I’m curious if that provocation should be used more often by communicators. How do you provoke them in a way that is positive, you know, as opposed to turning them away? But it sounds like Eric Topol knows what he’s doing.
B: Let me just put it this way. Eric Topol does what Eric Topol does. And how you perceive it as the audience is your thing. You know, people resonate in different ways. See how I resonated to this woman who was coming to ask me with her head scarf on? I could’ve completely closed up and thought, you know, this is not my field, or something like that. It depends who you are, how it resonates with you. I really, really believe very strongly that most things are determined by individual- responses by individual choices. I cannot emphasize that enough. Even at a grand scale, you have- for instance, you are looking for something, and I come back to this communication thing, how you spark someone’s interest. But let’s say there is a really big problem that you need to solve and you need to solve it within a short period of time. I have experienced- and I think many of us- but I have become a complete- completely convinced that it is key to find the right individuals to help you or to achieve your goal, you know, if you have your goal set. It’s not necessarily saying, oh, this individual, I don’t like them because they couldn’t help me or something. It’s not that. It’s that you just have to find somebody that is willing and capable. And willing and capable are two different things and in the case of making a true difference, the person has to be willing, otherwise it doesn’t work. I mean, you can ask somebody for a fact check, for example. You ask somebody for their advice on, let’s see, “I see this change here in this molecule. Will that translate into a certain reactivity of the molecule in the context of its functioning cell?” You go and you ask and expert on that and they give you the advice or an opinion based on their knowledge, and that’s valuable. If you are in a situation where it is critical that you must hae the right knowledge and possibly some support from this person, then you go and you ask and maybe get the valuable information but then you find this individual who behind that says, “You know, I see your point and I see your need here and I will help you to implement this. I will give you a key reagent” or “Come back to me and tell me what you found and I will help you to make sense of what you’ve seen.” Those are critical issues. And your audience that you have- I don’t know, you have, maybe 20 people, 200 people, you have a large audience- and you are trying to get a point across. So you have various- of course, now you can draw on several strategic means to engage your audience and today you see this bleu glare of the screen, right, but back in the day, and still, you could look at someone and can see whether or not you have engaged that person. You can see it in their eyes. Are they kind of spaced or something, or are they with you? You can kind of see that. And even in a 200 person audience you can look at individual people, and that’s what I do. For example, you cannot see the person in the last row but you can look at individual people. And that is one way of engaging, too. You don’t just go, like, “I’m out here somewhere.” You look at individual people. You look them in the eye and you make eye contact. That’s already an engagement right there and then they feel like, “Oh, somebody’s looking at me.”
A: “I better pay attention.”
B: That, you know, was your own thought but was also the intention and you have it. And then I have done this. In a very stupid way once in a small audience- can I give you that example?
A: Absolutely.
B: I did it in a completely stupid way but to me it was a great learning experience and it was filtered back to me by a junior colleague who as in the audience. I had a small audience, let’s say, 20 people or something like that. And I knew most of them and many of them were colleagues, right? Some of them I had worked with very closely. And I gave my little spiel there and this was years back, right? And one of my colleagues and friends has this glazed look. I see it, you know? And I make this cardinal mistake of addressing him. I did not address him by just looking at him. I called out his name, right, because I felt like this was a group of friends and I called out his name and I said, “David, are you still with me?” And he said, “Brunie, tell me something new.” There. I had it right back, right? It flew in my face. It was like I lost him because he thought it wasn’t new enough, what I was telling him. This was a level of trust that we had with each other but it hit me hard, it hit me hard. And after that I didn’t make that mistake anymore by addressing someone directly like in a school setting where you would point out a pupil and say, “Pay attention, Roger,” or something like that in a reprimanding way. It was a stupid. It was super stupid. And I set myself up for the- hahaha.
A: Don’t address the audience.
B: Don’t address the audience! And you better tell them something new. You tell them something new, is one of the key issues, right? I mean, and so then you don’t lose their attention so much and the way to communicate, you have to try and work hard on that.
A: We spoke with another MIT professor and she relayed her own story where she was giving at talk in front of 5000 people, the American Physical Society, I think it was. And she was giving this talk on kinetics, or it was chemistry based, and- but the audience thought she was there to talk about something else.
B: Oh!
A: So she went, she gave this talk, and by the time she was done, almost half of the crowd had left before she had finished. So she was like, “Ok, I need to know who my audience is. Make sure that I’m telling them something new, that they’re there to hear something I want to say. They’re there to hear what I’m talking about and I need to tell them something they don’t know.” And that engages them. So when you brought that up, it just reminded me of that, where she had the same thing. She didn’t address the audience directly but telling them something new is important.
B: But, you know, also two key things that I’m hearing from what you just told me. She was in a scenario where, obviously, there was a big meeting and there were 2000, 5000 people, something like that. If you lose half of them, you still have 2500 people, right? I mean, that’s a big success right here. Because you cannot possibly expect- that’s one thing, the expectation- you cannot possibly expect that, you go to- you give a talk at a meeting, especially if it’s a meeting that has multiple choices of talks going on simultaneously- you just live with the fact that a good portion of your audience drifted out because they find that the other talk they really wanted to hear was probably what they should be hearing right now and so you just let them go because they have another agenda in life and that’s not your thing, right? You go for your thing and you engage the 2500 that are there. But then there was another key thing that you told me. She told them something that they did not expect she would be telling them. How come? Was the title different?
A: It could’ve been. Maybe they might’ve misunderstood the, sort of, description of the talk that was out there. Another communication issue? So yeah, I don’t know. I don’t exactly what they were expecting.
B: The thing is also, you know, if you do that, if you give a talk, and I’m sure you have your own experiences in many different ways, the one thing I think you have to free yourself of is also to try and enlighten everybody in the room because they may not be there for the enlightenment at that given point in time or day or whatnot and they may looking for something else and that’s entirely their thing. Your thing is your thing and you communicate it the best you can. And if you enlighten- you know, I don’t know how many within your audience- then you have achieved a huge amount of success of yourself.
A: I moderate panels at conventions.
B: Yeah?
A: And there have times where people get up, you know, and I’m always been tempted to be like, “Don’t leave. We’re giving away free TVs.”
B: Don’t ever do that. It’s like my thing just telling David-
A: They’re going to turn around and sit down and at the end say, “Well, you’re not giving away free TVs so why am I here?”
B: Or go knock yourself out on your free TV.
A: Right, exactly. Saturday night I was up in Los Angeles- well, near Los Angeles. I do poetry readings and I was doing a poetry reading in front of maybe 20 people. And I could tell they were getting fidgety because it was sort of towards the end of the night. So I got up there and I’m not much of a performer but I was like, all the things I’m doing here I have to engage my audience, I learned this. So I got up there and I was just very physically open and sort of very- used my hands, used my feet, I was walking, body movement. And they were engaged and I could see when I got off stage they were looking at me as opposed to looking around, checking their phone. So yeah, you have to really engage that audience and try to come up with ways to keep them in front of you, so to speak.
B: Yeah, and everybody has their own style in a sense, right? And it depends on what you talk about. But usually, if you have a choice- and for the most part you have a choice of what you’re talking about. For instance, in poetry reading, you chose what you were reading and so you chose something that you felt passionate about and you let out your passion on stage. You read it with emphasis and you read it with your body language and everything. And people who resonated to that, they resonated, and you had pretty much everybody engaged so yeah. And there could be people who are taking on a completely different wavelength entirely at that moment in time so you can’t get any resonance and that’s fine.
A: Yeah. Be passionate about what you’re doing.
B: Be yourself. Yeah. And passion comes out naturally so yeah, be yourself.
A: Ok, final question. I know we’ve been here a little while. I’ve enjoyed this. Thank you for talking with me. What advice do you have for MIT grad students in regards to research communication and professional growth?
B: I would say learn to communicate effectively. Realize that communication is a very important aspect of research, of science, of discovery. It really is. And if you feel for a while you have to sit and be by yourself and mull over a certain data set or thought or concept that starts to develop a new mind and you need that time for yourself and with yourself only, do it. Give yourself that time and space. But then reach out and communicate. Expose your new ideas to feedback and be open to whatever feedback comes back and then use the feedback that you can understand and that you think can bring you forward in your research question, in your career advancement, in your personal growth. After you have made the choices of filtering the feedback, run that again by other people to see how your filtering is going and in the meantime, always work on your inner compass. Check it back, check to see if you have a clear idea as to where your inner compass is morally, ethically, with respect to others. And I think ethics includes, to a large degree, respect for yourself and respect for others and respect for information that’s out there that other people have generated in the past based on the best of their knowledge and at this point in time you just trust that they did this ethically. And enjoy the experience, enjoy the personal growth, and try to realize where you grow and own it. Own that growth. Do enjoy it. Be proud. And this is an important point. There is actually never anything stopping you in your entire career that you also watch out for people whom you can trust and seek advice from. And with that I mean not only the research community in terms of expertise for a certain scientific question but also for making choices. If you are in a crossroads situation where you have to make a choice, either this way, that way, and your moral compass or whatever, your knowledge at the time, doesn’t tell you clearly which way to go, it is very, very important to have and be able to rely on certain people whom you can ask for advice. I have such people here at Scripps and it doesn’t take long sometimes to get that advice. I had a very, very important support once in a situation that was very difficult for me to make a decision and I had, I would say, that conversation with that person whom I deeply trust, I must say, whom I really, deeply trust. I had maybe ten minutes of a conversation with that person, I would say five minutes where I laid out my problem. And here is the communication part. You have to be- when you go into a conversation like that, try to be very clear as to what you want to ask or at least that the person has a chance to read you and find what you need. Then I had another five minutes where that person gave me the advice that I needed. And that is the beauty of, and the importance also, of trying to find people whom you can trust and who can give you advice that’s so poignant that it helps you immediately. So that person gave me five minutes worth of advice and then offered to check back on me after I had implemented, or at least partly implemented. And it was super important to me to have that. So I partly implemented, did my check back with that person, that person gave me that okay, I went, boom, I’ve never regretted what I did. So, I mean, don’t feel you’re out there by yourself but check very carefully for people within your physical environment, really, if you can, or even later on, maybe it would be a distant environment, but your mentors, your academic family is a strong-knit group, usually, and you will find individuals there that you can come back with career questions or any kind of questions in your life and they are willing to help you to the best of their knowledge. I think that’s very important.
A: Alright. Great. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Dr. Brunie Felding, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research, reflects on an instance where she hadn’t considered the effects on every individual audience member when constructing her talk on cancer.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Dr. Brunie Felding – Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research
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) “Astrisx” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Inamorata” 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 the early stages of putting the podcast series together, one of the topics I was very interested in was who, if not themselves, holds scientists and researchers accountable. Was that something left up to the individual? Where does peer review come into play? And I’m not saying one is needed but is there perhaps some kind of oath?
Now, that last question may sound a little unnecessary but in the medical field, doctors are sworn to abide by the Hippocratic Oath, a specific set of moral and ethical standards when it comes to practicing medicine. So it got me thinking if scientists and researchers outside of medical practitioners had their own oath they’re expected to uphold. Online research shows there isn’t an oath established but some have been proposed without adoption. All that said, it’s extremely important to note that just because there isn’t a single, internationally recognized way of making a promise to be ethical and moral in practice and thought for researchers and scientists, it doesn’t mean institutions at any level, especially one like MIT, won’t have established guidelines for this sort of behavior. When I sat down with our guest in this episode, I asked if an oath for scientists is even needed. BRUNIE FELDING My immediate inclination to this question is we don’t need it, we have it. We don’t need a Hippocratic Oath. ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Brunie Felding… BRUNIE FELDING …and I’m an associate professor at the Scripps Research Institute. ADAM GREENFIELD Part of Brunie’s reasoning for not feeling like an oath is necessary for scientists is simply just from personal experience. BRUNIE FELDING From all I know of my many years in basic science, and I’m talking about basic science in the academia, which is non-profit science, academic science,I have not met one person where I felt like this person wasn’t fully devoted to finding, if you want to boil it down to, the truth. ADAM GREENFIELD She also was quick to point out that the truth is either as real as a two-headed unicorn or maybe we’re just going about it all wrong. BRUNIE FELDING I mean, the truth is something that is- I don’t know if it exists or not. But you want to find a meaning in something. You want to understand something. That’s your innate curiosity. That’s your drive. You’re not out there to find something that you’re purposefully looking for. ADAM GREENFIELD This is actually a pretty important statement to always keep in mind. In this and other episodes of this series, you’ll hear the guests talk about bias and how we, scientists or otherwise, may already be naturally inclined to lean a specific way. Our experiences both inside and outside of our educational careers will certainly shape who we are and the level of importance we place on things. When we effectively communicate with others, a little piece of who we are is inevitably in that story, too. This comes with some risk but the reward is definitely worth it. BRUNIE FELDING You expose yourself when you communicate, you bring out information and you bring it out in your way. We all have perceptions. One person may look at a tree and say it’s green and another person may look at it and say it’s blue and it could be a cultural thing. And there’s nothing wrong with blue or green. You just have to realize that what you throw out is your personal viewpoint, in a sense. But to then have somebody else to look at it in a different way and throw a question at you, it enriches you and sometimes it enhances- it kind of reinforces what you were already thinking. Or it throws you off balance for a moment and you think, whoopsie, what do I need to consider here to address this question that this person had. ADAM GREENFIELD I really think Brunie’s touching on something deep and introspective here. What you, the scientist or researcher, discover or learn through your work is more than just data or facts. How you interpret it potentially comes from who you are and how you’ve become who you are. This is not to say that the knowledge or concepts you derive from that data is incorrect but it’s worth acknowledging that there could be another way of interpreting what you see, and that can come from communicating it with others. And being open to this could have a lot of personal worth. You never know when you’ll encounter someone with a key to a door you didn’t know existed. BRUNIE FELDING So one time I had my first grant from the California Breast Cancer Research Foundation. I was very proud of it. I had my molecular mechanism all- I wouldn’t say all figured out, but I had it all going and I was thinking at the scientific level I have really made a discovery here. So I go to this conference where I was invited to present my results and I stand there and I give my little talk, and a person walks up to me later on and she’s a breast cancer survivor, obviously, right? So this person walks up to me and she has a head scarf on and I look at her and I think, whoopsie, she’s in chemotherapy, or has just come out of it or something. She doesn’t look good, she doesn’t have any hair, she doesn’t feel good, and she walks up to me and says, “You know, Brunie, what you just told us is very interesting but what does it do for me?” And suddenly I saw her and I saw the clock. I saw the clock, tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock and I thought, what can I tell this woman because her clock is not looking at infinity or possibly years. I don’t know what the status of her health was but she could be looking at months. And I don’t know what I told her but I totally broke down completely. It was an experience that I will never forget and I flew home that night crying because I thought, what have I done now? I won this grant, I have this molecular mechanism, I was proud, standing up for it, telling everybody, and then she walks up to me and says, “what can you do for me,” and I realize I could probably not do anything on her timescale. So then I realized, whoopsie, what is my purpose in life here? ADAM GREENFIELD Obviously not everyone will have an encounter as powerful, meaningful, and eye-opening as this. But when something like this does happen, it causes you to do a quick recalculation of just who you are, and these gut checks are good to have throughout your scientific career. Think of them like those bumpers you see in bowling lanes so your ball doesn’t go in the gutter.
And while you’re recalculating, try to keep in mind that the reason for the research is to find as close to the truth as possible, even if it conflicts with what you initially believed to be the truth.
Also, Brunie reminds us that what we believe to be the truth is typically influenced by our perceptions and backgrounds. When we communicate to others, these things tend to be exposed, for good or bad.
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 Scott Lewis. 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 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.
Scott Lewis, CEO of San Diego’s “Voice of San Diego” publication, helps us understand how bias has consequences on our audience’s ability to relate to our message – in journalism and in science.
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) “Ultima Thule” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Pxl Htra” 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/
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 when it comes to disseminating information, part of that process as an audience member is determining the credibility and accountability of the communicator. Sometimes it’s easy to spot these things; other times, not so much.
In this episode, we’re going to spend time discussing why and how the onus is on the speaker to be perfectly clear on the reasons for both the research and the communication of the research. We’ll also hear how calling yourself unbiased might not be all that true after all.
This episode’s guest’s work doesn’t go through the rigorous process a scientist’s work might go through but just because he communicates it several times a week to a growing number of audience members, that doesn’t mean his feet are held any further from the fire than a scientist’s feet. Because of this, he’s got a bit of a more immediate burden to be responsible and culpable when he communicates with the world. SCOTT LEWIS You know, we’ve done many corrections based on feedback we got through Twitter or anger or different critiques that made sense… ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Scott Lewis. SCOTT LEWIS …and that really is the way you hold yourself accountable. ADAM GREENFIELD Scott is the CEO of a non-profit investigative news source called Voice of San Diego. A lot of their work is online but they employ various mediums for reporting news, from podcasts to radio to even television. So Scott is pretty familiar with that feeling of a much more public review than just a peer-review alone might give you. SCOTT LEWIS 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. That function of people providing feedback is how you hold yourself accountable. ADAM GREENFIELD Now, this, of course, applies to journalism. When it comes to scientific research, Scott is sure to note the difference. SCOTT LEWIS 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. ADAM GREENFIELD There are some commonalities between a scientist and a researcher, though, and one of the ties is this ongoing search for an answer to a question or a problem or even, perhaps, a truth. You know, if there is such a thing as an absolute truth. SCOTT LEWIS I don’t know that we can ever stab perfectly at truth but we have to try. So we have to build systems to make sure we’re always trying to get there and 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. ADAM GREENFIELD This sort of brings us to the point where our personal experience and biases may be inescapable in our work.To Scott, even just choosing a particular subject to research and investigate comes with preconceived reasoning to do so. SCOTT LEWIS 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 everyday 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. ADAM GREENFIELD Now, Scott and Voice of San Diego as a news outlet make it pretty clear where they are coming from, what their goals are, and how and by whom they are financially supported in order to pursue knowledge and truths that are difficult to ignore. Being transparent is a great way of earning the trust of an audience. Still, Scott warns against claiming to be unbiased, how it can seem insincere or deceitful to the people you’re communicating with. SCOTT LEWIS 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 not 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 and discussions 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. ADAM GREENFIELD When it comes to the kind of service and communication he and Voice of San Diego provides, Scott has no patience for the naysayers and people who feel certain tactics in communication are borderline deceptive. SCOTT LEWIS 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 use 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 but you now compete with other people who are willing to do different things to be more entertaining or to be more engaging. So what are we gonna do? What are we gonna create that is as attractive, as engaging but has the standards and the ethics and the integrity and the transparency built into it that we need in order to keep that cohesive discussion going? We have to embrace that and we can not just stop at nostalgic concern about it.
ADAM GREENFIELD So according to Scott Lewis, as communicators, there’s a pretty high bar to meet when it comes to accountability, especially in the world of science and research. The ideas and concepts and facts and figures we send out into the world, including our own reasons for why we’re on that path, will be scrutinized for reliability, and just as they should be.
And when we meet that bar, it strengthens the audience’s trust in who we are and what we’re communicating to them. So how do we meet that bar? First things first, be clear in your intentions. Perhaps it’s a personal reason that drives your research or your research is being funded by a specific group that has the same goals as you. Either way, transparency is important.
Also, Scott reminds us that claiming to be unbiased will come off as insincere. It’s okay take a stance on a topic or discussion, and even make it engaging for others to hear and absorb, so long as you retain some ethical standards and don’t force a conclusion when the data doesn’t support it.
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 Jennifer Cherone. 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 Jennifer Cherone, Phd Candidate – MIT Burge Labratory
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: So what is your name and tell me a little bit about, you know, what brought you here and what you’ve studied and that kind of stuff.
J: So my name is Jennifer Cherone and I’m a grad student here at MIT in the department of biology. So I came here about four years ago because I was interested in pursuing my PhD to become a scientist at a biotechnology company. Before I was at UC Berkeley and while I was there I actually worked at a biotech company (?) Sciences, working on gene regulation and I…
RESTART
Jennifer Cherone: My name is Jennifer and I study biology, more particularly I study post-transcriptional gene regulation and how micro(?) act in neurons.
P: And you’ve been at MIT for how long?
J: This is my 5th year in my MIT program at MIT.
P: Are you almost finished?
J: I would like to think so but these things… um, you never really know until the end, I think.
P: Do you expect to be here for another couple years?
J: Yeah, probably another year or two. The general amount of time that it takes for a student to graduate in the biology department is about six years, I think. Yeah, so it’s kind of the long-haul.
P: So have you given many talks- I guess the question here is, do you have any struggles when it comes to communicating what you’re studying, and is so, do you have an example? And the way I would rephrase that is have you done any conference talks or what are some issues that have come up in the past?
J: I see. Yeah, I guess when I read that question I was thinking in terms of just other people asking what you study and trying to explain it to people. I haven’t given any conference talks, you know. I’ve given posters, you know, where you’re talking to people in your field and then it’s much easier to communicate, I think. I think for me the issues come when you’re trying to communicate with somebody where you don’t really know what their background is in that field. So, you know, you have to kind of assess, you know, how much do they know and also try to gauge what is their real interest level in what I’m trying to tell them. Because it can be really hard I think in any scientific field but, you know, in biology we have a very specific set of words that we use just to describe even what are the basic things to us. You know, it’s just a lot of jargon and so to get into that, to really be able to describe the detailed, sort of, field that you’re studying, it takes a lot of- it can take a lot of backpedaling and so trying to size someone up and figure out, okay, how much- you know, how in depth should I go and how much do I have to sort of explain in order to just- to even get there. And additionally, how do I phrase this so that it sounds interesting to somebody, right? Because I think that a lot of people, you know, who maybe aren’t in biology themselves, sort of their main thought process goes, you know, how is this related to diseases. And at MIT, we don’t have a lot of translational science. You know, a lot of it is what we call basic science and so, sort of describing that in a way that people can see sort of what the point of it is or how that can translate into something they know about can be a challenge, I think.
P: Do you have any, uh- when you’re talking about that, do you have any times either when you’ve noticed you’ve done something well when you’ve been explaining something? A specific example of anything? Even if you’re talking to your family back home or teaching a class or trying to explain something you’re already working on with another biologist.
J: Yeah, like how specific of a story are you looking for?
P: Whatever comes to mind. Whatever’s relevant to you. And something you actually think about that you could’ve done better. Or you did do well and you’re shocked at how that went.
J: Yeah, think this question of “Tell me what you’re studying” comes up fairly often in the graduate community here. So for example I take a lot of classes at Sloan- or I have taken some. So Sloan students, while they may have an interest in technology, they don’t necessarily know a lot of background for the fields. And so you get the question a lot of “So what do you work on?” And I think that in that interaction you can kind of gauge how you’re doing by sort of by the unspoken body language feedback that somebody’s giving you and I think that it’s very easy to pick up on a glazed over look and I think that’s kind of when you know you’re not doing something right and that has definitely happened. And then you kind of have to figure out how to recourse for that because you’re real-time speaking to them. Ok, how do I re-engage this person. And so I think that’s sort of like a big clue, that body language you’re getting back as you’re speaking to somebody.
P: And that’s happened at Sloan? Like when you’ve been talking to some of the people over there?
J: Yeah, yeah.
P: When was the first time you noticed that was happening? Was it as you first were interacting with people from Sloan or you noticed it more gradually?
J: So I worked on various team projects with people and I think, uh- I don’t want to- this might sound bad, but I think people maybe kind of lose interest, you know, like they’ll kind of initially ask you and then they’re, oh, well that’s just way over my head, I’m done with that. I don’t know if that’s a good thing to say on here.
P: No, no, I think it’s fine. I think it’s a common problem. I have it all the time. I used to be a teacher and in the morning I’d be getting coffee in the coffee room and the teacher would be, “How’s your day?” and I’d go into this, “Well, I’m trying to solve this big problem,” and they’re all, “I just wanted you to say ‘Good’ and then move on.” They didn’t want like an actual conversation and I have such a hard time reading that with teachers. With anybody, really. I think if you care about your subject you have that impulse to geek out and it’s hard to know when not to.
J: Yeah, especially when, like- I think- when you’re in a certain field, there’s the field of biology, and then there’s the sub-field of genetics, and then within that there’s the sub-field of post-transcriptional gene regulation, and within that there’s microan(?), and then a couple levels deeper is what I’m actually studying. And so to get down to that level of specificity… I can say five levels up I say post-transcriptional gene regulation and somebody still won’t know what that is and their eyes kind of glaze over and get that look. But for me, that’s not even what I’m studying and so it’s hard to get down to that real level of what I’m actually doing and what I’m interested in with people who aren’t familiar. And even within the field of biology, it can be a challenge sometimes because, like I said, there’s sort of these sub-fields and it’s definitely easier to communicate and easier to explain but there’s still so many different levels of expertise and different fields that you still have to bridge that a little bit.
P: What makes you excited to work on the things that you’re working on?
J: I think it’s really just figuring out a piece of how things work. I think originally when I got into biology I thought it was really interesting to figure out disease and how to design therapeutics and that’s sort of what first intrigued me. But once you get into it you really realize how much we don’t know about biology and that’s really the really interesting stuff. And so being able to figure out a piece of that, even if it’s just a small piece and contribute to that body of knowledge, I think is really fascinating.
P: Do you ever work about next steps? Like how you’re going to communicate with, say, sponsors or if you need to teach it all. I mean, do you have people to oversee it all right now or is it mostly your work is being overseen by others?
J: I think, as a graduate student, it’s mostly- and for me in particular- it’s mostly being overseen by others. You have your colleagues in the lab that you share what you’re doing with and people to give you feedback, and so there’s sort of that level of communication. I think, though, there’s certainly some grad students who may help train an undergrad or have somebody below them but for the most part you’re kind of the entry level person. It’s really also important as a graduate student to own your project. You know, you kind of want it to be your own work and not necessarily have too many people, though this can be different in different labs and different kinds of projects and different kinds of research.
P: And you probably have your thesis coming up, or at least you’re working on it on some level. Or your dissertation, or whatever it is.
J: Yeah, so we, definitely. So I have a long-term project that keeps chugging along, it feels like. I always say slowly but surely. You know, research takes a lot of time and a lot of commitment and a lot of motivation to keep going. And that’s why it’s important to have a biological question, or in whatever field a question that really drives you, to keep pursuing that. So hopefully there’ll be a conclusion to this eventually but we live in the process, I think.
P: I think it’s been interesting having this job because peeking into the minds of grad students at MIT, which is like- not like talking to grad students anywhere else in the world. It’s the top science school in the world and you’re not undergrads, you’re grads, and you’re being groomed to be researchers and top researchers, at that. And that seems like a lot of pressure. And then I think about how a regular dissertation is a lot of pressure and delivering that dissertation is a lot of pressure. And I wonder if it’s like a lot more pressure to do it at MIT. I’m not a student here. I have an undergrad in graphic design and I studied art education and school leadership so I have no idea how to relate to that. But is it a huge amount of pressure to do well?
J: Yeah, I think there’s always a lot of pressure to do well. I think one of the massive benefits of being somewhere like MIT is that you’re surrounded by so many smart people and so you’re constantly being challenged and constantly learning new things. But along with that I think comes a lot of pressure as well because you’re always trying to be as smart as the next person or rise up to the challenge. And that can be a little off-putting sometimes, to always feel like you’re not as smart as everyone else. And I think that happens a lot at MIT and that everyone feels that at one time or another.
P: How could you not? I watched “Captain America: Civil War” this summer and the opening scene was Tony Stark giving $100 million to every grad student- or $100,000 to every grad student, “All your projects have been fully funded!” and I’m like this is Hollywood’s interpretation of MIT. But ever since I started working here I’m dumbfounded by- I never picked it up but- MIT is synonymous with saying somebody’s smart. Like if you have a scientist working in a lab on a show, they went to MIT.
J: Yeah, it’s a lot of pressure.
P: All of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, you went to MIT. You should be able to solve ALL our problems.”
J: Yeah, it’s kind of funny that you say that because yeah, whenever somebody asks, oh, where do you go to school, and you say MIT, they’re like, oh, you’re a smart one, aren’t you?
P: So yeah, and I was just even thinking about how communication that’s gotta be something that feels like there’s a lot of pressure behind it because you do your dissertation, and then you have to leave, and then it seems like the people that are successful as graduates at MIT are people who are good at other things- I mean, they’re good at their science, obviously, but they’re also good at, say, public speaking, or networking or finding money to fund their project. Do you feel like you’re getting a lot of that education?
J: Yeah, it’s hard. I think, sort of, the idea of graduate school education and how it can be reformed is actually a pretty big topic right now. So for the most part, grad school, at least in my field, is set up to educate students to eventually go into academia. That’s really what it’s set up for. And so I think there’s a lot of shifting attention to help prepare students in other ways for alternative careers in science, you know, as positions in academia- or the number of positions in academia are decreasing, we need a place for students to go, so I think that there has been in the interest of giving opportunities for students to learn about alternative careers, you know, bringing in people who work in the industry to tell students about what they do and what it’s like. I think that along with this I think students themselves are starting to realize that things like networking, being able to talk about what you do with other people, and have that come across easily is more important. And so I think students are starting to sort of like pursue those opportunities to learn more about how to do that for themselves as they realize, you know, hey, maybe academia isn’t for me, you know, what else do I need to know how to do in order to go into this other field. Because there’s not a lot that the actual graduate school curriculum gives you to know those kinds of skills and so you kind of have to at some point figure it out for yourself, I think, and yeah, that can be challenging, having to navigate that on your own.
P: I think that’s a perfect place to talk about the podcast. Like it said in the description I gave you, we have professors and professionals talking at you. The podcast is really- we wanted to have this end segment to be something special where a grad student could really be like, this was helpful or this wasn’t helpful, and kind of hearing- what were your reactions listening to the podcast?
J: I thought it was really cool. I like thinking about things that are usually unconscious and breaking them down and thinking, “Oh, how I do this actually does have an impact and let me actually think about- try to take a step back and think about how am I communicating, what is that permitting- uh, giving to other people, what kind of impressions and are there ways that I should think about this to change the way that I’m perceived.” So I think this topic is an interesting one and I’ve listened to other podcasts before that kind of break down elements of language, like vocal fry and upspeak, and so this whole area of language and how it affects how people perceive you, I think, is really interesting to actually give thought to rather than having it just be this automatic thing that you do.
P: Just so there’s a refresher, so we had Tony Eng, David Peterson, and Ted Gibson, and Ted was the one talking about how you’re perceived by the words you choose and what kind of access or pointedness that language uses, he talked about “there” and “their.” David Peterson was talking a lot about language from different perspective, and Tony was talking a lot about connecting to different audiences with the language that you’re choosing. What stood out to you? What is something that was, like, oh, that was interesting or anything like that that you heard?
J: Yeah, I think one of the first things that they talked about language that’s not just spoken language, that being such as in a presentation, I thought was fairly interesting. That you’re speaking and you’re giving this presentation but at the same time the audience is speaking back to you and that’s actually very important for how you continue to give this presentation, even though you’re the only one speaking. It’s really, in a way, a two way conversation and I think I hadn’t really thought about that before, and how important it is to perceive your audience when you’re giving a presentation. It’s interesting to think about.
P: Totally. My anecdote to that is when I first became a teacher I thought there was a lot of pressure on me to perform and that they, the students, were judging me and it wasn’t until I taught a lot of hours that I realized they don’t care about me and if I’m lucky they’re not paying attention to me because they’re paying attention to what they’re learning. The goal is to actually to kind of get me out of that equation as quickly as possible because I’m not important to integrating the knowledge I’m giving them. Like I’m a facilitator of that knowledge but I’m not the person- like, I don’t- they shouldn’t be thinking, oh, I wonder what Patrick is thinking right now. And it’s interesting, that ego-less presenter-mode, it’s interesting because I don’t know how to get there, I wouldn’t know how to tell somebody in a public speaking mindset how to get there but that’s kind of what you’re going for, right? To get out of the way of them judging you and be really interested in what you’re saying.
J: Yeah, absolutely.
P: Were there any techniques or advice or anything of that nature that you’ve used in the past that wasn’t mentioned in the show? You mentioned upspeak and what was the other one?
J: Vocal fry.
P: Yeah, yeah.
J: I think the only other thing that I heard on language before was a podcast sort of dissecting those two. Like, what is vocal fry and what is upspeak, and how those two, they really have a negative effect on how people perceive you but when people use them they don’t even realize that they’re using them. And then there’s the whole element of male vs. female, because I think they’re both things that tend to be used by females. So upspeak would be- both of them would sort of be associated with the valley girl talk. So upspeak is kinda when you talk up and kinda phrase every sentence with a question, in a way, when it’s not. And then vocal fry is when you would sort of talk down and talk like this [uses gravelly voice].
P: Like monotone?
J: Yeah, yeah. Kind of like a monotone but a little bit like a crispy nature to your voice. And I think, basically, a lot of women who work in radio are really analyzed for this and critiqued for this and so it can be something that’s really difficult for them that they have to overcome and actually they train to basically remove these elements from their speech because they’re so preyed upon for them.
P: Yeah, my wife was a two-time debate champion and in debate, it’s interesting because it’s very related to politics and public speaking. I’d never heard of this before but she told me that they actually train the females to speak lower because unconsciously we’ve associated deeper voices with confidence and with a superiority. And it’s this totally unfair judgment because the only reason men have deeper voices is because during puberty our vocal chords swell and we don’t have a choice about it, it just happens to us. Females don’t go through that. So there’s actually coaching you can do to manipulate the audience’s latent sexism and the way they’re listening to things. Which I think is totally horrible, right? But it sounds very similar to the stuff you’re talking about and it’s interesting to me. But if you’re not aware of it, it can really hurt you, right?
J: Yeah, exactly. It’s something that you don’t even realize that you’re doing. Yeah, but I think for tips and tricks, I don’t know that I use any tricks, per se, but I think that my main things that I’m thinking about whenever I’m about to give a presentation or maybe I’m just answering a question in a class, which sometimes can be nerve-wracking when it’s a large class, I try my best just to not sound nervous. So I really think about how I’m controlling my voice. I think in my head I try to slow down my speech and I think also like you mentioned deepen my voice a little bit because that’s sort of I guess innately what I perceive as being confident. Which is interesting, now that we just had that conversation, but yeah, I think in my head I just try to get really good voice control and not speak too fast. In my mind I think I have a list of things probably in the back of my mind where these things make somebody sound nervous. And I try not to sound nervous and how that comes across, I’m not sure.
P: Have people told you you sound nervous when you talk?
J: No, I think people usually tell me that I don’t sound nervous at all so I guess it’s working but I’m very nervous inside, usually, so….
P: I get nervous when I need to talk in class or in front of large groups, especially when it’s raising your hand and asking a question or bring up a point. I think of what I’m trying to say and all of a sudden it’s blah blah blah, I over-explain, it’s a bad habit. Do you minimize ums when you’re trying to talk or stuff like that or do you even think about that?
J: I probably don’t think about ums and I probably say them too much. So maybe I should think about them more. But I think I try to think about pacing and rhythm and the words that I’m going to use. And I think maybe sometimes that’s not always the best thing, then when you start to talk it’s a little bit jumbled in your mind and you’re trying to pull out these words and these phrases that you had just been thinking about before you started talking. But yeah, I think I think more about the pacing than anything.
P: So was there anything else from the podcast that you found that was just something you’ll take away or even integrate into- I mean, you mentioned the other- about thinking about how the audience is having a conversation back with you somehow. Is there anything else?
J: I think there were two other things that I took away. The first one being the “will and testament,” which at first I thought, “What’s will and testament?” But then when he explained it I thought it was kind of a nice little play on words, that’s it’s the English word followed by the French word, and when you introduce a new word, or it could also apply to a new concept to sort of directly after say it in another way, a simpler way that your audience could understand, and using that just sort of the first couple times that you introduce a new word, whether it’s a piece of jargon or something that maybe your audience isn’t familiar with, I think is a really good technique to think about. And useful in science, especially. Another thing that I thought was interesting was the reading your audience, which is maybe something that I thought about before, how you try to size up who you’re talking to and figure out- um, adjust your language for that person. It’s interesting thinking about how you’ll speak differently to different people based on what their background knowledge is.
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) “Plant Food” by Nic Bommarito is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 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/
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……
JENNIFER CHERONE
My name is Jennifer Cherone and I’m a grad student here at MIT in the department of biology. More particularly I study post-transcriptional gene regulation and how microRNAs act in neurons. ADAM GREENFIELD
Jennifer is in the 5th year of her PhD program at MIT but so far hasn’t spoken in front of too many audiences. JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT I haven’t given any conference talks, you know. I’ve given posters, you know, where you’re talking to people in your field and then it’s much easier to communicate, I think. ADAM GREENFIELD So with varied and limited experiences in public speaking, Jennifer’s obstacles are along the path of just knowing the audience and what their level of understanding of the topic at hand is.
JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT I think for me the issues come when you’re trying to communicate with somebody where you don’t really know what their background is in that field. So, you know, you have to kind of assess, you know, how much do they know and also try to gauge what is their real interest level in what I’m trying to tell them.
Because it can be really hard I think in any scientific field but, you know, in biology we have a very specific set of words that we use just to describe even what are the basic things to us.
You know, it’s just a lot of jargon and so to get into that, to really be able to describe the detailed, sort of, field that you’re studying, it takes a lot of- it can take a lot of backpedaling and so trying to size someone up and figure out, okay, how much- you know, how in depth should I go and how much do I have to sort of explain in order to just- to even get there. ADAM GREENFIELD Alright, so we asked Jennifer to take a listen to a few guests on how language and communication interact with each other and let us know what she thinks.
JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT I thought it was really cool.
ADAM GREENFIELD
Ok, for disclaimer purposes, Jennifer was not directed to say that. We really just asked for feedback. But we’ll take compliments, too.
Now the feedback part.
JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT
I like thinking about things that are usually unconscious and breaking them down and thinking,
“Oh, how I do this actually does have an impact and let me actually think about- try to take a step back and think about how am I communicating, what is that permitting- uh, giving to other people, what kind of impressions and are there ways that I should think about this to change the way that I’m perceived.”
So I think this topic is an interesting one and I’ve listened to other podcasts before that kind of break down elements of language, like vocal fry and upspeak, and so this whole area of language and how it affects how people perceive you, I think, is really interesting to actually give thought to rather than having it just be this automatic thing that you do.
ADAM GREENFIELD Jennifer also pointed out this dance between the speaker and the audience doesn’t necessarily always need words to be effective, something Tony Eng pointed out early on. JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT Yeah, I think one of the first things that they talked about language that’s not just spoken language, that being such as in a presentation, I thought was fairly interesting.
TONY ENG
In terms of a presentation, I always think of it as a two way conversation even though i’m doing most of the talking and the medium that i’m using, i’m using words, right?
JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT
That you’re speaking and you’re giving this presentation but at the same time the audience is speaking back to you and that’s actually very important for how you continue to give this presentation, even though you’re the only one speaking.
It’s really, in a way, a two way conversation and I think I hadn’t really thought about that before, and how important it is to perceive your audience when you’re giving a presentation. It’s interesting to think about.
ADAM GREENFIELD
Fortunately, the important points David Peterson and Ted Gibson talked about didn’t go unnoticed, too.
JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT I think there were two other things that I took away. The first one being the “will and testament,” which at first I thought, “What’s will and testament?”
DAVID PETERSON
Back in the days of Norman French, you needed to use both so that everybody would understand what you were talking about, even though they meant the same thing.
JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT
But then when he explained it I thought it was kind of a nice little play on words, that’s it’s the English word followed by the French word, and when you introduce a new word, or it could also apply to a new concept to sort of directly after say it in another way, a simpler way that your audience could understand, and using that just sort of the first couple times that you introduce a new word, whether it’s a piece of jargon or something that maybe your audience isn’t familiar with, I think is a really good technique to think about. And useful in science, especially.
Another thing that I thought was interesting was the reading your audience, which is maybe something that I thought about before, how you try to size up who you’re talking to and figure out- um, adjust your language for that person.
TED GIBSON
Depending on what the common ground is enough, I understand what our common ground is, then I will describe things at a very different level, depending on what I think my audience knows.
JENNIFER: GRAD STUDENT
It’s interesting thinking about how you’ll speak differently to different people based on what their background knowledge is.
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 episode is the full, unedited interview with Tony Eng. 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 Tony Eng, Lead Instructor of Gradcommx & Senior Lecturer MIT EECS 6.UAT
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: Do you want to tell me your name and talk a little bit about the work you do here at MIT?
Tony Eng: My name is Tony Eng, and I teach engineers how to communicate here. I graduated with a degree in computer science, and when I finished, I was asked to think about creating a communication class. I thought, well that is not really my background, but I was told, “ Well, you take a semester to think about it and then come back and let us know.” So, I went around the institute and did my due diligence. I tried to figure out what was being done here at MIT. I spoke to alumni who were out in the industry and I said, “What could be done here?” I talked to recruits and so forth, and everyone said, “We need you to teach the students to communicate better.” I proposed a class that was, in the beginning, both written and oral communication, but now it focuses entirely on oral communication. It became a requirement, and so here I am. I am still running this course for undergraduates in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
P: Great. You said oral communication is almost the complete focus. Do you work with grad students as well? Or is it…
T: The grad students don’t typically take this class. They can if they wanted to, but I think, I don’t know, it just has this stigma of being an undergrad class. So, they don’t typically take it. I have had some grad students take the course because when they did their oral exams, the committee said we will pass you on condition that you take a presentation class. I have run other courses and seminars that are either for grad students or grad students who have come and participated in those.
P: You said you went around, I kind of want to unpack that. You said you went around and looked at all these different sources to get an indication on how to lead, and you first started with writing and oral. How did it change to completely oral?
T: I found that I was trying to do too much in too little time. It’s a six unit class that is like a half class here at MIT. It was too much to do in a semester to try to get them to learn how to communicate orally and in written form. Rather than doing too poorly, we should focus on oral communication. I didn’t think, I thought of the two floors, more was being done here in terms of written work and less was being done in the oral form. So, it shifted entirely to oral.
P: How much of your class that you teach that you feel is specifically geared towards electrical engineering versus what anybody could learn?
T: To be fair, most of the ideas and skills can be applied to anyone with a technical background. I just happen to be in this department and alum of this department. So, to take the course, you really need to have had some, you have to have some exposure to say a technical project or just some of the technical ideas because they provide the content for which you give your talk. So, it is not just oral communication, but a lot of it is technical oral communication, how you take the stuff you are working on and presenting it to others with a different background so that they can understand what you doing.
P: What are some of the things you notice that are pretty standard with the students who are coming into the class? Maybe assumptions that they have that you kind of have to work with and massage.
T: To be honest, a lot of the students don’t want to take the class. I think when I was an undergrad, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to take class either because it’s scary to be in front of a group of people and to sort of exposure yourself. I think the general sentiment is, you know, I’ve been talking since age two, why should I take a class on how to talk? I came to MIT to take technical courses, and I want to learn about the latest advances in this field. Why do I have to spend time doing this nontechnical class? To be fair, I think a fraction of them actually speak pretty well, but that’s not the most. The majority of them are not able to clearly articulate and communicate what it is they’re working on, what they want to work on, or just technical ideas in the field that they’re working on. Their approach to the class then is, well, I have to take this class. So, why don’t I just attend? I think for those who actually give it a chance and for those who try to put in some work, they will get something out of it because the things that we present, I think a lot of the students come back afterwards. It’s one of those things where like, in the semester you’re taking it, you’re not. You don’t really appreciate until you kind of go out into industry academia, see what some of these presentations are like, and then try to remember back to the class and here are some things we talked about. They try to apply it. Then, we often get these e-mails back that say, hey, I don’t know if you remember me, but I took your class. I had to give a talk or I had to give a pitch, and I won the competition or whatever because I tried this or that. So, I think it’s useful stuff that they don’t appreciate until later on in their careers.
P: How many students roughly would you say you’ve worked with?
T: Up until this year or last year, it was a requirement for graduation in my department, which is the largest department at MIT. So typically, in the fall semester, we had 250 students. In the spring, we had about 200 at its peak. Nowadays, it is one of two classes you can take to graduate. The other one is more focused on research, and you have to apply to get in, so only a limited pool get in. So, I guess the numbers are probably around, I would say 150 to 200 per semester.
P: Wow, and how long have you been teaching it?
T: I created the class, and that was about 10-12 years ago.
P: Wow. It just strikes me that it’s kind of a unique position to be teaching communications to engineers at like one of the top schools in the country for engineering. I’m curious about what you’ve noticed about since you started the class? What you have noticed, what has become important in what you think about communications in this field and if that’s changed it all over the course of the class?
T: So, the question is, what have I noticed over the years in terms of like students’ abilities when they come in or their outlook on communication? Or just the way that we teach it?
P: I’m thinking about how it’s such, I mean, teaching communications to engineers at MIT must come with this kind of like hefty…like the communications teaching I’m doing is kind of really important because it is setting a standard in some way for what kind of work is done in this field around communications, and I’m wondering in that particular role where you are kind of setting trends in regards to that kind of an educational practice, like have you noticed it change? Or the needs of the field change in any way?
T: I think the needs of the field, for me, haven’t been changing as quickly as the course itself. Every semester, we try to do something new. We try to do something different. Part of it makes teaching a bit more interesting. I think we also try to find ways to improve things. One of the ways I push the class, okay, you have to give a talk. Here is a bare-bones way to give it. Now, you can all do that. The real question is how do you make it better? You can just give that talk and it’ll pass, but if you are going to give a talk anyway, you might want to think about great, easy ways to make it more memorable or to get more of the audience involved and engaged. With a minimal amount of effort, you might get a big output or a big positive response to that. So, why not do that? We try to incorporate different elements, like we have a game called out, well, it’s a version of Taboo. We play this in the course. The idea is that the top word is a technical term from the field, and all the words below are technical terms that you cannot use to describe the term above. The idea is, if you’re trying to explain this to someone with a nontechnical background, you can’t use technical jargon. So, it’s how you explain it. So, we give to get him some ideas for, why don’t you first describe what it is. Or, describe an application. Where would you see it? So, capacitive touch sensing might be something on your mousepad or cell phone, right? So, you don’t have to name it. You could say that this technology is used here, so relate, try to relate to the world that your audience understands without using jargon. That’s another element that we try to bring into play. Recently, I’ve taken ideas from improv, and will use that in the course. There’s one session on improve. The idea being is that, in many ways, you know the points you want to make and the actual words that you use, that’s all improvised on the spot. That is the philosophy I try to convey. We found that it’s not really if students sit there and memorize a whole talk. It doesn’t come across as a communication. It’s like a recital, and that’s usually not as engaging to listen to. You just can’t scale that way. If you have to give a 5-minute talk, okay, maybe you can memorize it. Or, a 1-minute pitch, okay, fine. But if you have to give a 15-minute conference talk frequently or if you have to give an hour lecture, you don’t have time to sit there and memorize every single point, how you are going to say it, how you are going to stand in the room, or what gesture you are going to make. So, just understanding the key points, and then you improvise the rest.
P: Yeah, and you have to know the room. You have to be able to read the crowd, right? Those are skills that come from practice more than they come from like an algorithm of communication. It’s more like you’re up there, I just said something that didn’t land. I have to switch to other tactics.
T: Right. You have to decide on the fly what you’re going to do.
P: I had another question. I kind of wanted to hear about how, you got chosen to lead this course and to kind of do this work here, how did that come to be? Like, what’s your story? Just backing up, how did that become something that people recognized in you was a skill?
T: I sometimes make a joke of it. I say that, well, no one else really wanted to do it because I think there’s a good chance of failure. So, why would someone put themselves in these shoes and found since I was kind of a nobody, I have nothing to lose. So, they asked me. My background is that I went to MIT for undergrad in computer science and did my masters here and stayed for a PhD. Along the way, I had become involved with one of the courses here, the first year computer science class. I taught that for several years. Again, my philosophy was, if you need to do something, you might as well do it as best you can. So, in all the different iterations, I found different ways to improve it. Eventually, I was made a recitation instructor, which is typically a post held by professors. I was a grad student and teaching these things, and I noticed that attendance would drop. I thought, well, what could I do so that students would come to class, instead of requiring attendance. I thought a lot about how I would make the section and the materials relevant and how students would, I think if they felt they were learning then it was time well spent. So, folks would come to section, and people from other sections would come to my section. I got good reviews from that. The professor who ran the class, who worked for many years, was on my thesis committee. When you do your defense, you have to give a talk. So, I think that’s probably when he was exposed to the presentation that I gave. So, when I graduated, he asked me, what are your plans? I said, well, I don’t know. I may be teaching, maybe not. Maybe industry. He said,” Oh, well, we have this new requirement, and we would like someone to think about how to teach it.” So, he asked that I look into that. That’s how it came to be. So, I don’t have a background in writing or public speaking or communication. I thought it was odd that he would ask me to do this because I, like every other computer science major, thought I would go off to Silicon Valley and make a lot of money there, but it was different. I like different. I liked the challenge. I thought, well, I could also learn how to present there on my own. What I did was, I did take a couple public speaking classes, but I found them to be wanting. I wasn’t too satisfied with them. I didn’t find them concrete or interesting enough. They weren’t things I wanted to teach. So, I decided that I would look to different disciplines and see how different disciplines handle communication and maybe bring some nuggets or ideas into the course. Examples: I went off and did improv for a couple years, and there are a lot of ideas from improv that I put into the class. I went to Paris to study mime for two weeks, and fascinating, there is a lot of communication that goes on with mime work that is nonverbal. So, I take some ideas for that, and use it in the course. I took an American sign language class for a semester just to understand what you could do with your hands. What is some of the vocabulary or some of the motions you can make. I went off and did bhangra, which is Indian dance, but the moves there are very big, and I was not used to big and having hands outside of my clothes. I was very comfortable with hands and arms very close to my body and not so away from the body. So, that taught me how to communicate that way and to be okay with that way. So, various things like that. I have done acting and voice work and singing so to me, it was like doing research. I was going off and going through these experiences. I knew what I was looking for, and so I had to discover them through the experience. I would bring them into the course and try to incorporate them in some way.
P: I relate to that quite a bit because I taught art, high school art, for like five years, but getting that position had a lot to do with similar things that people recognize talent that I, I don’t really know if I knew about it, but I think in the act of teaching that is really interesting if you start to, in the act of teaching…you moved something, and I thought you were motioning to me. In the act of teaching, I think what is interesting is you start to more consciously unpack the things that you are being recognized for that you probably were not aware of. They might have just naturally occurred or they were a culmination of things you didn’t think were important. Like, I have to backwards to design this because I am going to break down the parts for my students that they need to take away from that. In a lot of ways, teaching can be even more rewarding for your own educational process in that way.
T: Totally. I was watching…in my class, the students had to give a one minute pitch. That is in video form. I had to watch a bunch of them. I was watching one student in particular and I noticed that her gesturing was very, what I call, mimey. I was trying to figure out, what would I tell that student if I were working with her to try to improve her gesturing? So, I added to my list of things to do, and in spare moments, I think about that. I came up with some ideas for what to do. I sent her an email last week and said, “Hey, this is kind of weird, but if you want, would you like to work with me like outside of class? It will not have any bearing on your grade whatsoever if you say yes or no, but I have some ideas for a series of exercises you can do, and I would want each of them recorded. And at the end of the day, if it works out well, I might ask your permission to use them in class. But she has not responded to my disappointment, but I do not know. I enjoy the whole idea of observing, and in my mind, what’s wrong. What are some practical games we can play to elicit something that seems more effective? I think that is the fun part about teaching.
P: Yeah, I think when you see a student, it is so interesting, I always used to tell my students, “The only reason I am giving you a hard time or I am pushing you in this way is because I see potential there. It is not because I think you are doing something that there is no hope for it. If there is no hope, why would I be talking to you about it?” I always see it like the Plato’s cave paintings or the shadows on the wall. When, you know, the allegory of the cave where Plato talks about people, and they can only see the shadows on the wall from a light that is behind them, casting a shadow against other people who are walking by, but they look like giant monsters in the shadows, and they are too afraid to look back. But in reality, they are not that intimidating once you turn around. I think that when we have this ignorance around a topic, and that is kind of what our role as teachers is, right? We see there is an ignorance there, and we are trying to help them shine a light on it. A lot of times in the beginning of ignorance, there can be fear or denial if anything is wrong. Anyway, that is totally off topic, but actually I want to talk to you more. I probably want to do a second interview because, once we get the ball rolling, you will have a lot of insight around some of the stumbling blocks for our communications course. I definitely want to take some cues for you, somebody who is actually teaching one here. Let me talk to you a little bit about, I think I want to skip to public speaking. Why do you think it is important to know how to publically speak in this field, or your field, or in stem, or whatever?
T: Until the world becomes totally automated and you take the human out of the picture, there is always going to be a need to communicate with other humans. Whether that is in the form of movies and entertainment or just something as mundane as taking your research and presenting it to others. So, I don’t know, maybe it’s a trite answer. I can’t imagine a world where you don’t communicate with anybody. You might think that you don’t. You might be in your own world and you aren’t communicating with anybody, but even like talking to your spouse, your kid, or your roommate, there is communication going on. So, that is the general area. But, in terms of someone who is an engineer with a technical background, frequently, you need to get your work out there, whether it’s for funding, or you are writing papers, or you just are in a company working with others and have ideas on how to approach this problem or solve the problem, and you have to explain. There is always communication going on, and you can either do it clearly or you can muddle through it and there is a lot of miscommunication and just wasted time and effort. I think it is an easy question because as long as there are humans around, you still need to publicly speak and communicate.
P: I am very interested. I watch a lot of TED Talks and listen to a lot of podcasts. I’m always fascinated with this idea that even though there are a lot of unpredictable factors, you were talking earlier about how, like, one audience, you have like two minutes to present something and ten minutes, 15 minutes. I am really interested in what the through lines are, about how to construct logic for solving that problem that is communication specific but exists in each one of those things? What is the commonality?
T: The way that I look at it or I found that it’s best to think of it as a tree. At the root of the tree is the core message you want to make. As you go down the legs of the tree, the tree expands, but it’s more like supporting points, and more supporting points of the supporting points, and more supporting points for that. Where you decide to place your talk, or what level of the tree you use, depends upon time. So, if you have globs of time, like a whole semester’s worth, then I will visit all the leaves on the tree, all the things at the bottom and cover as many of the topics that I can. If I only have one minute to talk about the class, then I will only talk about the root. That is the main idea that everything falls out of, so that is the only point I’ll make. So, fundamentally, even though there are different time constraints, I always come back to this mental tree. What is the main point I want to make? If I have more time, I’ll elaborate. If I don’t, then I won’t. The other factor is who the audience is, and that will affect what I say for each of the components that I mentioned. If it’s an audience member of like mind and like background, then it is much easier. I don’t have to worry so much about jargon and the words that I use. If it’s a different audience, it’s not so much you want to avoid jargon, and you do want to avoid jargon if they don’t understand, but you want to use jargon that they do understand. So, if you happen to be fluent in their vocabulary, then it’s much easier for them to understand your message and to use words that they are more familiar with and terms that they are familiar with. So, to summarize, there is a tree with different supporting points. Depending upon the time I have, I will use a different level of the tree. Depending upon who I’m talking to you in the description of my points, I will be careful with the vocabulary that I use.
P: That’s pretty key. I think there are tactics even for how do establish vocabulary. If you’re trying to establish, I mean, musicians do it a lot where they create a chorus. It’s something you’ve never heard. It’s something you’re trying to create with the audience. I had to be conscious of that when I was teaching art as well because, it’s like, I know too much about comic books. So, I will start being like, you know, panel 1. They are like, excuse me? What is a panel? If you don’t know the audience, they may not even stop to ask the question and might just let you talk for 15 minutes and then be like, I got nothing because like you lost me on the second word. So, one of the things I always used to do was just start by being to my students, can you stop me when you don’t know something? Because, this is no good for me if I’m just talking.
T: So, that’s the thing. A lot of my students live and breathe this stuff. They don’t realize that they have to step back and first connect with the audience. Like, where are you at? Do you even understand what I’m saying? Yeah, it’s a nuisance because you can’t go to the good stuff. But if you don’t do that, then you are going to lose them from the very start. A lot of the students aren’t aware that they live and breathe this, but others don’t. So, they have to take time to define things or to explain things.
P: That’s super interesting. I guess I’m wondering, going back to audience, how important….I was thinking about how difficult it is sometimes to know your audience. Sometimes, the audience is described, like it’s a conference for these kinds of people. Then other times, you’re being thrust into a classroom or room and you don’t know who is in the audience, but you’re being asked to talk about a particular subject, which you would assume people are interested in. How much ahead of time before talk, I guess it’s going to vary by what you’re trying to talk about, but how much ahead of time and what kind of questions would you want to ask to figure out things about your audience so you could think about that when designing your talk?
T: Whenever I’m asked to give a talk or workshop, I always ask, how long? What is the goal? Who is the audience? Who’s the audience, like who are they? Where are they from? What age group demographic? How many are there? I think, as best as I can, every workshop is sort of geared towards a specific audience and goals that there are and the goals that I have in mind. It is very custom-made. That being said, there are different stages. So, right beforehand for prep work, I figure out as much as I can about the audience. I will typically also prepare backup material, like extra examples or extra stories, if I have more time or they didn’t understand something. Then, there is right before the talk. So, I like to arrive early and meet some of audience members because they may not exactly fit the description that I was given. So, I might arrive early and chat with some people, where are you from? Why are you here? I like to sit through, if possible, things with my audience before my time. What I mean by that is, if it’s a course, I will come to an earlier session to see what is going on, to meet them, and to see how they behave. If it’s a conference talk, then I will come in for the previous talks and listen to the talks, but I will be looking at the audience and trying to understand them. I might adjust things before that. So, there is before, there is this right before, and then there’s like during. If when I’m giving the talk folks tend to focus on their own content, but I think a good presenter finds that they know the content well and should now focus on the audience and whether or not the audience is responding or understanding. You need to learn to read the audience. If the audience is not following what you’re saying, then you kind of have to decide if you’re going to abandon your script and try to recover them or not. If they’re totally lost, it’s the same thing. I think a good presenter or an effective presenter finds that they should, in fact, abandon what they had planned to do and try to recover and try to see if they can get the audience to understand or even get the attention back. It reminds me of a time when I was asked to do a workshop in Pakistan. I was told that it’s a whole bunch of students who are interested in communication. I think in part they were also excited that an MIT person was coming. I think I was told there would be like 50 to 70 people, participants. It was about an hour and a half workshop, and I thought I would design it to be interactive, which is a lot of what I like to do. I tried to account for the fact that there were 50 to 70 people, split them into groups and so forth. I also checked that they would understand English because that would be an issue. I got the go ahead for that. When I showed up, what I had not realized, Pakistani students are very different from MIT students. They are also very shy. At MIT when you asked for volunteers, yeah, there’s a bit of a silence, but people will volunteer. People don’t mind if you volunteer them. It’s very different with this group. When I asked for a volunteer, no one volunteered. When I asked a second time, no one volunteered. I didn’t want to put anyone on the spot because all of a sudden I’m thinking, it’s a different culture and I don’t know if what I’m going to do might be construed as, “He’s being rude.” I didn’t want to embarrass anybody. So, on the fly, I’m thinking, “What I prepared is not going to work.” It requires people being willing to, if not talk in front of the group, talk with each other. I decided to change up things on the fly. What I decided to do first, I ended up doing third. I moved something else earlier because I thought that activity might warm them up better. I found that I had to repeat instructions several times because even though they do speak English, I think I was taking for granted instructions that my students would understand versus instructions that they would understand because, yes, it’s still English, but I guess their terms, or idioms that I use in language very liberally, but they can mean something else. It is perfect English, but it can also mean something else. So, I would repeat, I would give examples, this is what I want to you for example so that they would see and hear. At the end of the day, I thought this is an awful workshop and even though I tried my best to realign things and I was thankful I made it interactive because as they were working, I was sitting down changing things up and writing down ideas for what I should do instead. And, at the end of the day, I mean, I survived and I think it was okay. I got really good feedback from them but that is because I think they did not know what I had planned to do and how all of that was quite different from what actually happened. So, I guess the take-home message is that I’m the only one that really knew what I had wanted to do and what didn’t work, but as long as I could still package it up into a coherent form, then it probably does not matter as much from the audience perspective because they did not know what I was going to do, but it still made sense to them. I had prepared beforehand, too, and sometimes there is so much preparation you can do, and you just have to wing it in the moment.
P: Yeah, I think what you said earlier about the tree and understanding which parts are necessary for what you’re trying to convey. This came up in our interview yesterday about, we were talking about publishing research, but the students come in and they think all of the pieces are really important. If they do not get all in, and it sounded like in that example that you just talked about, you could think on the fly because you knew which part was important to get across, and you knew which parts were flexible. Maybe that is a part of preparation that is a step too, maybe prior to going in, how flexible am I with this? I have definitely seen presentations bomb in the fields that I work in, where people are just like not responding to the audience. They are just like, I am just going to give the presentation. It is already failing, so I am just going to keep failing.
T: Deer in the headlights. I do not know what to do, so I am just going to keep plowing on.
P: Yeah, and that is no good. I mean, it is something, but it is not necessarily good for you because if you are not having fun because you are not having the audience reaction and the audiences is not having fun, why are we continuing the thing? But, yeah I was also thinking about, you talked about vocal coaching. I remember when I was first teaching ninth-grade students. I had three periods a day with ninth grade students for an hour a piece. They have about a five-minute attention span, and I’m a long-winded guy, if you have not gathered. I also had a 55% English language learner population. So, I was smiling when you were talking about explaining stuff because I had about half of my students mad because I gave three examples about what I was talking about before I moved on. And, they are like, “We got it on the first one.” You got it on the first one, but those five kids over there did not get it on the first one. But, I also studied public speakers. I just listened to Martin Luther King Jr. speak or Randy Pausch did the last lecture, which I think is an amazing presentation. I just wanted to hear the rhythm and the modulation because I was like, “These are people talking for like half an hour, and I like listening to them. How does that work?” I wonder how much that plays a role, like understanding because you said the motif even earlier and I have not heard it called that but, where did you learn that?
T: So, is the question; where did I learned how to voice modulate?
P: Or, what is the role of vocal, like understanding rhythms and the way people hear things?
T: So, this comes back to the written word and spoken word. With the written word, I have it in front of me and I can read it and I can re-read it if I didn’t understand something. The spoken word, you typically don’t have a transcript of what the person is saying. You are sitting there listening to these words that are being emitted, and don’t know what’s important to listen to. You don’t know what to pay attention to. So, the burden is on the speaker to do things to help you parse the message. If everything comes out in equal pace, at the same volume, and everything is the same, nothing is going to stick out. But certainly, if there are important points, you can emphasize that, you can speed up for things that are not so important, and you can slow down or pause for something important. So, all of these things that have to do with vocal modulation, I think basically help a listening audience parse your message better. There are tools that a speaker can use.
P: Very interesting. When I first was training to become a teacher, I met with a guy who was a professional storyteller from Rhode Island. I met him when I was in kindergarten. My mom is an art teacher, so he would stay at her house when he was doing artist residencies. I just was fascinated because, even as I got older, I would still see him perform with younger kids. They were always very simple, like Cape Verdean stories about [39:03______________] and the coyote, but like what was fascinating is that he could walk into a room, start telling the story, and everybody got dead silent.
T: Yeah, that’s so cool.
P: And, and I was like, how are you? I mean, these are kids that are like in middle school, kids who are too cool for anything. He actually talked about one time how he would go into the middle school libraries, and they paid him to speak, but he wouldn’t tell them to all get around him. He would just go in, sit down the ground, cross his legs, close his eyes, and just listen to what was happening in the room and wait for somebody to just come up and be like, hey, what are you doing? He is an African-American gentleman. He has like long dreadlocks. He is not the kind of person you usually see in a public school. He is like 6’, 3”. Yeah, you just don’t see him. He has like jewelry, he’s just very ornate because it’s all part of the story telling. How he looks, his presentation, actually helps people engage, to draw them in. It was like, you know, within a couple seconds, he would just pivot that whole thing. Everybody’s paying attention, everybody wants to hear him.
T: I’d like to study that and see what makes….
A: There is a poet in San Diego, Chris Vannoy who I met at an event recently, probably 200 people in the room. Everybody is kind of chatting in between. He gets up there and starts reciting a poem while walking through the audience. In seconds, everybody just went…
P: Like, what’s going on?
T: What are these names?
P: Len Cabral is the storyteller from Rhode Island. I can totally put you in contact with him.
T: I just want to study them and figure out what about them creates this presence.
P: He mentioned the motif. When I first started talking to him because I said to him like how do you command it? He was the one who first introduced it to me as a comparison to the chorus in music because he said, “Basically there is information that you are saying that is new to an audience, and when you are talking to kindergarten kids, their ability to memorize or hold information in their working memory is really not that much. So, you know, all the new information has to build on the previous information in such a way that it reminds them of what they just learned, but they do not have a long space of time where they can learn new information before it gets overwhelming. So, he would always have a refrain, like there was a thing he would do when he was telling a story like, “and the bunny hopped home.” That would be the refrain. That would remind them, “Oh!” And, they would all say it with him. Like, he would encourage everybody in the room to do the hand gesture and say it with him. It is actually quite a clever psychological techniques because when you combine movement, vocal, and you’re hearing everybody else say it, and churches do this all the time with everybody kneel and say this prayer at the same, and all of a sudden, you are like, “I know this part. This is not new.” It jolts your memory into having a resting spot, and then he said, then you can introduce a little bit of new information then go back to the refrain and build it.It is very similar to song construction. But, again, he is storytelling. I mean it is a bit different of an art form than providing, but I saw Randy Pausch doing it a lot. He was not doing science talk, although he did produce some information on virtual reality and that kind of stuff, but it was anecdotal a lot of what he said was anecdotal. All of this, MIT communications stuff, is very new to me because I’m realizing how little I know about the sciences, the deep sciences. I kind of understand on a surface level what the departments do, but I’m like, oh I am at one of the smartest places in the world around this and I did not pass my high school science classes.
T: Shh, is that being recorded.
A: Yeah, I am totally leaving that in.
P: But, no it is just interesting because I am realizing what I don’t know is I don’t know what an audience expects when they go to, say, a talk on engineering. What I don’t know is how much new information they are expecting you hear that they don’t already know, and how they judge that if they’re not getting it. That is something that baffling to me because I’m like, “I’m not an engineer.” Now, if I was going to, see, we don’t have an equivalent to it in the arts because when you want to learn something new in the arts, well, no one is funding anything in the arts, so like you have to go find it yourself. That’s just how it is.
